I desperately want to get into the crate in BLU spawn.
On vigil, it is tradition for good luck to take the whole team and hide in the box when discussing the strategies for the half. On eruption… This is impossible, effectively making pushing that much harder. More importantly however… I wanna go in the box.
For those that don’t know, this is the box on eruption:
You’ll notice, it is the same box prop as vigil with one major exception; I can’t go in it… and I wanna go in the box.
My proposal is simple, let me go in the box. This can be done in multiple ways, removing the clipping on the rail line in the box, removing the rail line, or making the box slightly larger. I personally prefer the first option but any of them will work if I end up in the box.
Now, some people may have arguments against this, allow me to quickly address them.
Maps need their own identity and shouldn’t be reusing things other maps are known for.
This is a valid point however I would like to argue that having some form of joke, gag or other morale boosting activity is needed within a competitive game or really any video game in general. Would TF2 be as popular today without its silly moments? I don’t think so. Team Fortress 2 is a game that takes itself in a way nobody would consider seriously, and the community tends to follow that tone. Highlander and competitive are often considered more serious than your standard casual play but often people do not remember the big moments of top-level plays, they remember the little moments they had with their friends. One of those moments is gathering the whole team together in vigil BLU spawn and talking about the game. It’s also worth noting that I wanna go in the box.
Having the rails in the box allows the map to better fit its theme and atmosphere.
I fully agree with this one, I do not want the rails removed from the box. That is my least favorite of the options listed above, however, I would like it’s clipping removed… because I wanna go in the box.
but upward and swiftwater don’t have boxes the BLU team can go into!
Well upward last is historically awful to push and swiftwater has the longest map times out of any of the payload maps in competitive. I wonder why those are both true… However, I don’t want to trash other competitive maps, I’d rather build the maps better. Let’s add a box to BLU spawn on both of those maps too. This shouldn’t be too difficult. Even easier since Upward already has the Refresh versions so a new update wouldn’t be a surprise. Alternatively, one of these two maps is likely to be swapped out next season anyway, add the box to the other map. The reasoning behind adding it to other maps is quite simple; I wanna go in the box.
In season 9 I made and played for a team called Clip Art. We were terrible, just the worst team in the challenger at the time. (There was one other team we had competing for that title, but they died in the middle of the upward week match, so we won in the end.) The last week of the season we played steel, as is tradition. We had only won a single game so far that entire season and it was because the other team died in the middle of the match and players left the game before it was over. The other team was guaranteed playoffs at this point and our pyro couldn’t even play that weekend anyway. I reached out to him and asked if we could ring a friend of ours and he said, “you could literally ring all of KND and I wouldn’t care.” Anyway, we lost, pretty handedly, they even off classed the entire time. Luckily before this happened, me and most of my team gathered on A, stood on one of the barrels, and I shot it. We all fell into the barrel and just… sat there… waiting… The round started, players rushed our way, and we traded entirely. We lost everyone that was in the barrel, but I was laughing so extremely hard the entire time. This is one of my most treasured moments within tf2 and since they have removed those barrels from the map within the refresh versions. The players from that team have mostly moved on with their lives, only a few have played competitively since then. I will never be able to relive this moment now that the barrel is gone. This stupid little moment within an utter defeat is the thing I remember most fondly within my years of playing the game and it is completely lost to time. The box on vigil and hopefully soon the box on eruption is such a small little thing, but it’s a small little thing that the team does together… and that’s the most important part. It’s also important that I wanna to go in the box.
Gaming is not a solo experience. While often you are playing alone, the entire experience is not contained. Your life, your beliefs, your friends, the events that have shaped you, they all play a role in that experience. A simple game can mean wildly different things to you as someone with an entirely different life. The box itself is not inherently a social thing, it’s the actions of those who noticed the detail of the box that turned it into something special. While my want to go into the box may appear simple, it’s the want for that social connection with those I have chosen to dedicate an entire season’s worth of tf2 to that matters most. I don’t just wanna go in the box… I wanna go in the box… with my team.