The previous version of this guide used its introductory section to detail why the guide was worth reading and reiterated its objective.

In that vein, there will be a summary of what you are expected to take from this guide, an analysis of the guide's structure and why it was chosen and a list of what tools help with making your own observations.

So here's the shortened description of this guide's objective:


I'm not sure I could make that any shorter. All I can say if you claim that you've done the above and are still losing is that you're lying go away shoo

The Mann and Machine in "Mann vs. Machine" are effectively great entities composed of repeatedly divisible parts. Mann will triumph over Machine when it is working efficiently enough to meet some arbitrary quota enacted by Machine's whims. It does this by keeping its parts in the best possible condition.

Breaking Mann into its constituents and iterating through them similarly yields a hierarchy of management, in a gradient from the most broad macro management to the most detailed micro management.

This guide will cover these especially relevant levels of that hierarchy. It will do so using separate guides which will be linked to where appropriate. The linked guides will have their most important information in bold to account for the great amount of information and text. Here is the previously mentioned hierarchy:

• Team Composition
  
  The first thing you do when you join a server is choose your class. Your team will need to negotiate with each other who will be what class and why.
  
  http://gtm.steamproxy.vip/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=174097474
  
  
• Loadout
  
  Once you've chosen your class you will spawn, but you're not done. You should take a moment to review what you have equipped in your primary, secondary and melee weapon slots if you are not familiar with them because choosing the right combination of items is the next greatest influence you have on the game after choosing your class.
  
  Since you probably want to skip to the good parts, items will be listed in order from best to worst. If you don't mind the extra reading, the reason the lists are in their order will be explained along the way.
  
  Attributes will be categorized based on expert experience, because you can simply research the actual attribute colours by viewing the items' cards if you care about Valve's impertinent opinions.
  
  http://gtm.steamproxy.vip/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=177182297
  
  
• Upgrades
  
  There are upgrades you can buy for your character themselves which are determined by the class you choose. However, most of your possible upgrades and abilities are determined by the loadout you chose.
  
  Some upgrades are excellent, some are a waste of money unless the server or moderators provide you with excessive amounts of dosh well beyond what's fair. You may lose out on upgrades because of buying canteens or respawning, too. How you spend your money is especially important, but the effects of what class and loadout you choose can sometimes eliminate the need to buy any upgrades at all.
  
  Still, don't expect to clear the harder difficulties without acquiring as many good upgrades as possible - both in terms of individual effectiveness and of combinations.
  
  
• Strategy
  
  Your strategy in some waves may determine which upgrades you should buy, but upgrades persist between waves - ultimately your strategy will depend on the upgrades you've become stuck with since you can't sell them back after wave 1 starts. It will also depend on the composition of the Machine team and the structure of the map.
  
  I'd say your "strategy" can be divided into 3 parts - how you interact with your team, how you interact with your enemy and how you interact with the terrain the lot of you are trapped in. The latter of the 3 could spawn a series of mission specific guides on its own, covering each wave in detail...

As I imagine most good teachers believe, I agree with and enact the philosophy of "teaching a man to fish rather than giving them fish", so the next section will detail the utilities I used to measure and thus improve myself.

Make the effort to learn the sort of information that will be in this guide on your own, and in particular learn HOW to learn that information, and you'll be better suited to writing an MvM guide than drooling over your keyboard reading one.

Note that these utilities are listed in the order of what I believe to be most to least useful.

• The MvM Stats plugin
  
  A server running this plugin will usually indicate this in many ways, including insistence that you use the command "!mvmstats" in the chat window to review stats.
  
  Be wary of the version being used.
  
  Quite possibly every server with this plugin, at least at the moment, is running an OUTDATED version of this plugin that discounts MANY contributions of players, skewing results in favour of poorer players.
  
  As a hint, the menu of the old version of MvM Stats will only have 3 options listed for navigating it, while the modern version has at least 6 options for navigation, including the ability to view all previous waves and the last failed wave.
  You can track progress of the plugin at its official source here[forums.alliedmods.net].
  
  
  Regardless of version, MvM Stats is the current best way to compare your performance to other players for purposes of knowing whether you have room to improve, who is holding the team back, etc. It is not, however, an omniscient god and may very well be anywhere from slightly to completely wrong.
  
  
• Other round-end stat reporting plugins
  
  There are some MvM servers which use other plugins, even ones intended for PvP servers, to report player statistics at the end of a wave. They give minimal information, as little as merely reporting kill counts, but it's better than nothing.
  
  
• Game info
  
  This option has the unfortunate limitation that it requires a friend of yours to be in the game with you. If they are, however, you can view their game info from the Steam interface to see the kill counts of all players in the current game. Again, it's better than nothing.
  
  
• Tour Counts
  
  Tour of duty badges and tour counts can be a rough guide to how skilled a player is.
  
  However, many players with incredibly high tour counts are actually very bad because they just do the same thing over and over. If you don't do exactly the same thing, which may even include carrying them, as their team mates did during their tours, they won't know how to handle the game and you will fail with them over and over.
  
  On the other hand, some players have low tour counts, but play and even win many games in Boot Camp (also known as Mann Down) and/or leave games at the end and replay completed missions in their tours to play in Mann Up for free at the cost of the tour's completion being counted. Few people do this since, of course, they're greedy and don't want to give up the loot from Mann Up just to play for free.

The above tools will help you evaluate your performance relatively, which I personally believe is more useful in the short term. In the long term, once you've been assured you're pulling the most weight for your team, you can use these more accurate measuring tools that, unfortunately, will only measure you specifically.

• Combat text
  
  Also known as "damage numbers", combat text can be enabled by setting the cvar "hud_combattext" to true (1). When using this option you will likely also want the option "hud_combattext_batching" to be set to true as well.
  
  Damage numbers will allow you to see the precise amount of damage you're dealing, and batching will combine rapidly generated numbers into a single number of their sum. You may have trouble tracking how many times you are hitting a target, but the more important information of how much damage you're doing will be much more legible.
  
  
• Custom HUD
  
  With a custom HUD (I use PVHUD[ozfortress.com]), you can do things like seeing exact enemy HP amounts. This can not only allow you to make precise kills and improve your performance as such, but also help you better test your ideas of what does and doesn't work, and know exactly how well or terribly you performed against a specific enemy.

Check back often and don't be surprised if content is mysteriously missing.

In the meantime, be sure to check out the old version of this guide, which is slightly more complete.

http://gtm.steamproxy.vip/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=138988984