TF2 Friendlies are good. Usually. But they can be a complete waste of time if you can't properly practice a teamfight or get your mouse in the right place. That's where we come in. You don't need a bunch of skilled people to get up to speed on the latest Team Fortress 2 skills. What you need is a solid, well-tuned team of friends. This guide will teach you the core rules and concepts that make or break a TF2 match. I'll show you how to talk to people, how to dodge lasers, and how to evaluate what's going on in the match. I'll teach you the foundations of teamfighting, and how to recover from a big mistake. Best of all, you don't need any TF2 Hero Skill to follow this guide. You just need good communication, and the will to succeed.

If your goal is to win a game, don't waste your time investigating who's better than you, and what they're doing. For that you'll need a deck of Knowledge Cards. But if you want to learn the most fundamental principles and skills of TF2, what you really need to do is observe the match from the very beginning, and figure out how it's going to go. This is where the game's Formats section comes in handy.

Go through the match format page, and use the match settings to adjust various game parameters. You want each player to have a healthy supply of health and grenades, but you don't want to make them all invulnerable.

For each player, you should adjust the perks and weapons you want them to start with.

You want each weapon and perk to have a specific range of modifiers, so you can concentrate on using the weapon or perk in a given situation.

You want to keep your medic's healing and energy bars as small as possible. The less time she spends healing, the faster the match will end.

At the end of the match, you should have a nicely documented list of all the different variables, and you should also have a list of the team's primary and secondary threats, a few team composition points, and maybe a notes section as well.

Here's where your Formats section comes in handy. If you know how to play a team-based game, and you know what to look for, you'll see a few patterns emerging in the matches you watch. But just identifying patterns is not enough. You also need to learn why these patterns exist, and how they could change in the future.

Here's a simplified formula for learning the basic principles of TF2.

Formats = Timeliness of the match, Starting weapons, Secondary threats, Primary threats, Hero Skills.

We'll use these as a guideline. Take a look at some matches, and see if the basic concepts below are followed correctly. Look for inconsistencies, contradictions, and problems. Then you'll be able to learn how to apply these concepts in real life.

When you're watching a TF2 match, remember that you're analyzing not just the individual players, but the team as a whole.

Refrain from getting sucked into "salvage shots"

If a team has a first and a second tier team-killer, the first tier team-killer shouldn't always be prioritized. If the game ends in overtime, for example, it's okay to let a second tier team-killer go. That doesn't mean you should let the first tier team-killer go, or the fourth tier team-killer, but it does mean that you should let a team-killer go if you believe there's a better use of your health and grenades.

Remember that Team Deathmatch is a team sport, not a solo sport

Don't expect to do all the dying yourself. If your teammates are good at taking down enemies, you're gonna have a better chance.

Only use the game's most lethal weapons at the right times

The problem with grenades is that their spread means they always take one, or maybe even two, people with them. That's pretty inconsistent, and it means you need to train your teammates to cover for each other. Don't just let a teammate get blown up, turn around, and kill a guy with a grenade, then leave it to your teammate to take the guy out. He can't do and you're not doing him any favors.

In large team-based games, you'll have a limited amount of time to attack and defend

I would never recommend playing a team-based game in which the time limit is a 10-minute round. In a 10-minute round, you're only going to have 5 minutes to try to breach the defenses of the enemy team. A 10-minute round is more like a 25-minute round, so expect to lose a fair amount of players.

If a team looks really strong on paper, and then plays against a team with weak players, that's a sign something is wrong. But it doesn't mean the strong team-killers are going to go on a rampage. Sometimes you need to accept a losing position, because the other team was just lucky.

It might seem pointless, but the best teams are able to exploit a lot of the game's weaknesses, so pay attention to them. An often-overlooked weakness is short-range damage, like headshots, because some of the most powerful weapons in the game are ones you can only use close up. And they're used against your team a lot.

Don't assume that your team is strong. Look to see if they can fight the enemy off in seconds, or if the enemy is more powerful. An overextended team can be a great way to lose in TF2.

If your team gets two stacks of health on one enemy, and they have to use their secondary threat to survive, that's bad.

The last thing you want to do is use all your grenades and auto-aim, only to be killed. The most powerful weapons are those that can be wielded with one hand, so try to kill anyone who has long arms.

A large part of learning how to play a team-based game is just like playing a game of Overwatch. You need to learn how to use your teammates, but your teammates also need to learn how to use you. And as they play alongside you, they'll get better and better.

It's important to remember that these guidelines are just a starting point. I don't mean to say that if you play Counter-Strike with the wrong people you'll get killed by half the team. Every game is different, and there are always going to be situations in which one player gets caught off guard.

But those situations don't come up often enough to justify getting people killed, which is a long way of saying that playing with the wrong people almost always leads to death.

Guide brought to you by an A.I.