(GotFrag) - Evening friends, I thought a nice way to kick off my new bunch of articles I have coming up in the near future would be to open up with an exclusive interview with a very special upper tier European soldier. Nathan "Regenade26" Dickson of team Imperial-Esports sat down with me recently and had a bunch to say in regards to his opinions on the American/European differences, who the top teams where on the opposite side of the pond, and many other small tidbits/balance views which some might find a bit different than what us Americans are used to. This will be first of many articles/interviews to come attempting to bridge the unfortunate gap between the European/ international and American TF2 scenes.



Right off the bat before we get into any detail I wanna open up with a bang, hit me in the mouth with the top 10 European teams from your point of view. Sock it to me right square in the kisser Mr. Dickson.

Dignitas, Crack Clan, TeamCoolerMaster, Yoyotech, 4kings/wotr boys, Cool Clan, Imperial, FakkelBrigade, IDK and Illegal. Its hard to say those last spots because it is less often they will play against each other.

How do you feel about the balance of the game, and its future?

I feel like the balance is quite good, but far from what will be needed to keep the game going for long amounts of time. I have lost a lot of teammate Soldiers to "real life", because they eventually found the game too frustrating, for the same reasons. Demomen were killing them in situations where they felt they couldn't have been more successful even if they had played better. Valve themselves said in a blog about the Sniper update before its release that this was something they not only wanted, but needed to avoid to keep players immersed in the game, and having fun. To those who don't understand what I mean, I have a way of thinking about all weapons and classes. The higher the risk of using that class, and one of its weapons, the higher the reward that should come about as a result. There are exceptions for important reasons in this game already, but most weapons follow this trend. The Scattergun for example is much better at close range, but that in turn makes you more vulnerable. You move in close, increasing the risk of you losing your life, but it will allow you to do more damage per hit. Another simple example is someone sitting in the respawn all game long. They imply no risk upon themselves, and also get nothing done usually. Exceptions could be an engy afk in spawn, with teleports set up, or a medic building his uber with a soldier. Both of these clearly have times of risk for them to be rewarding though, as ubering in spawn is pointless, and a teleport that doesn't lead somewhere useful for the point of safety is also useless.

Damn man, go on... please.

Other more pointful exceptions would be something similar to the Sniper Rifle. The Sniper is at massive risk at close range, and realistically comes out with a simple reward if skilled enough. This is made up by having very little risk at long range, with the same reward. The main problem from my point of view is the demomans sticky launcher is a weapon with very little risk the majority of the time, but has one of the highest "rewards" in the game. The sticky grenade is low risk because it will deal damage even if the projectile is not directly striking the enemy, the grenade itself still acts as a deterrent or control over position if not detonated, and can also be used to instakill enemies as they walk obliviously through a door. Compared to a rocket launcher, which always has a lower potential reward, with a larger risk (you need to hit directly for full damage, and splash will cause ~40% damage reduction). Sticky jumping itself is also much more extreme than a single rocket jump, because of the lower mass of the demo as well as higher damage of the sticky. This allows him to remain in the air above the enemy for longer, planting more stickies below than a soldier could, all the while in a position where hitting him with a projectile is extremely difficult, and hitscan weapons wont deal enough damage to kill the demoman before he kills your medic. Ultimately all these problems could be fixed by reducing the damage of the sticky, much like how Valve did many months ago. They themselves said they didn't feel that stickies were overpowered at medium range, only at close range, which is where I would disagree.