Subversive Playing

Since I last posted I've gone through several more failed GitS drafts and I've come to the realisation that while I have plenty of opinions, I don't seem to have adequate way of stringing them together in a coherent shape.
I find myself able to word my views better when it's in a conversation with another person, where the other person can pick up the social slack when I falter. So when I'm faced with a blank white screen, hungry for text and order, my opinions seem to wither into vague musings and my inner critic looks down at what I type.
In conclusion, no GitS actual yet.

And now for tonight's entertainment.

As you may or may not know, the FPS Team Fortress 2 is a class based game. Periodically the developers, Valve, release an update for one of the nine classes, offering 3 new alternative weapons/items. This time Valve are updating both the Soldier and the Demoman at once, and naturally there's a twist.

Valve has just announced that either Soldier or Demoman (but not both) will get a 4th unlock. And how is it decided who gets this rare privilege? By pitting the two classes against one another. Until the end of week (I think) every time a Demoman kills a Soldier or a Soldier kills a Demoman it is recorded and which class has the most kills, wins.

Now this makes this pretty interesting. As well as giving people a new goal to work towards it also shakes up the maps themselves as players adapt their strategies to the new class ratios. I found myself being lured back into the game having been bored with it for several months.

In theory this event should lead to plenty of Soldiers on the attack, and plenty of Demomen on the defence. In theory.

Because everyone who has a preferred class wants it to win, people are having to come up with some fairly meta strategies. One has to decide when it is worth risking your class to take down the other because the last thing you want to do is feed the opposing class kills.

I found myself foregoing playing as a Soldier because of the sheer number of enemy Demomen. Instead I was playing as another Demoman, who just didn't kill any Soldiers, as I found it was more productive to the Soldier's cause to not play the class.

And any sort of situation that generates this sort of out-of-the-box thinking is alright by me.