INTEL GUARD'S GUIDE TO PLAYING THE GAME*
(*Because nobody liked my pretentious heavily worded metagame guide)
THE ULTIMATE RESOURCE FOR NEW PLAYERS!
Table of Contents
Use your browser's search function (ctrl+f, etc.) to easily find the different sections!
1. Intro
1a. Why you should listen to me [WHYLIS] 
1b. Why you should trust your own instincts too [INSTOO] 
2. Basics
2a. The actual game [THEGAM] 
2b. The classes [THECLS] 
- Runner [THERUN] 
- Firebug [THEFIR] 
- Rocketman [THEROC]
- Overweight [THEOVE]
- Detonator [THEDET]
- Constructor [THECON]
- Healer [THEHEA]
- Rifleman [THERIF]
- Infiltrator [THEINF]
- Quote/Curly [THEQUE]
2c. The game-modes [GAMMOD]
2d. Lingo you should know [LINKNW] 
3. How To Stop Sucking
3a. Lag [LAGSRV] 
3b. Common mistakes and how to fix them [COMMIS]
3c. What classes you should be playing [CLSPLY]
3d. Why you shouldn't get worked up over this game [MADGAM]
3e. Basics on how to be a pro [BASPRO]
4. The Next Level
4a. Cool stuff you can do [COLSTF]
4b. Cool strategies you can use [COLSTR]
4c. Chat [SRVCHT]
5. Outro
5a. This game is not dead but it will be if you don't at least try to play it [PROGG2]
5b. Contact me [INTGRD]
Intro
WHY YOU SHOULD LISTEN TO ME
[WHYLIS]
If you are just getting into the colorful world of Gang Garrison 2 then this guide will provide you with a framework on how to become a quote unquote MLG PLAYER. Not really, but it will teach you how to become "good at the game." Becoming good at this game requires a basic grasp of fundamentals and concepts sometimes obvious, sometimes not so obvious, sometimes HOLY SHIT THIS IS OBVIOUS BUT NOBODY SEES IT. Once you master these ideas I guarantee you there will be a noticeable increase in how well you play, at least relative to how bad some players are (WITHOUT THE PROPER FUNDAMENTALS) in public matches. Being good entails that you are helping your team towards the overall objective, so that they achieve that objective, while still killing people and dying less. Being good does NOT entail going into the bro lounge and acting like a douche because you topped a scoreboard after three rounds of dirtbowl even though you were probably meatshotted countlesss times and lost the match. With this guide, hopefully the distinction becomes clear and we get some more common sense, great players in the community.
You should listen to my words because contrary to what you might think, this game is a) not dead, b) worth playing at least a couple times in your life, c) extremely fun and d) can be competitive and refreshingly skill-based. I've played the game about 4 years so I pretty much know what I'm talking about when I talk about things. It's really easy to become a "pro" at this game, because of how simple the format of the game is. Don't listen to jerks, with no posts or 5000 posts, who call newbies braindead and complain all day about how good they are in relevance to public players. The fact is they started out just as goddamn terrible as they were, and all they did was learn some basic concepts. Some of them are not even as good as they purport to be, which means once you learn this stuff you could probably very easily body them. You don't need any sort of innate talent to become pro and there is definitely no huge skill gap. The only thing you need is an open mind, the acceptance you may suck at first, and the free time.
Also this guide is a haxxy entry, throw out some support for it! The competition is actually looking pretty tough.
Why you should trust your own instincts too
[INSTOO]
Reading guides are great and all, but there is no better teacher than yourself. Stuff like the things you'll read in this guide is easily learned though a little trial and error. Practice makes perfect. It WILL become second nature over time. But to have the tools you need to know they are there. Once you know they are there, the rest is really up to you. I didn't become good reading a guide to a game like this, and neither will you. They sure as hell helped me out though.
Either way, common sense and your instincts will go a long way. They are pretty much half the battle if you want to become super mlg pro. This game isn't truly that deep enough where time should be devoted solely to researching and internalizing game theory. My one biggest piece of advice to you dewey eye newbies out there: get out there on those shitty servers and play. Lead by example and take the big risks and learn from them. Also try not to get mad at things that usually make you mad because that seriously hampers anyone who plays. If you get mad, you will probably end up sucking more, which will only make you
more mad.
Now let's get started with the guide. I'll try and provide visual aids and make the text short so you don't get bored too quickly. Shoutouts to the people who inspired me to make this guide: Haxton Sale, Lil B, May, and God. Let's learn some shit.
The Basics
The actual game[THEGAM]
Gang Garrison 2 is a 2D, sidescrolling, team-based shooter... blah blah you already know all this shit. What you don't know is the game is currently
NOT TEAM-BASED!! What? How could this game purport to be team-based yet not actually be team-based? The simple answer is because
nobody want to be part of their team. That's right, if you've played any public Gang Garrison at all, you'll see pretty much the same situation regardless of the server or player cap. It's an every man for himself free-for-all! And I don't blame these poor saps. It's a game made to be played
FOR FUN.
FOR FUN is the excuse used for almost everything that happens during pub games.
FOR FUN is the name of the game, not Gang Garrison 2. While
FOR FUN is great and all, the game has suffered accordingly. Instead of trying to create an enjoyable team-based experience, many people under the banner of
FOR FUN just do whatever the fuck they want and ruin it for everyone else. Yes, the game is made to be played
FOR FUN but no, the game is not meant to be played like a brainless douche.
There's a couple reasons for the
FOR FUN phenomona, and they are all legitimate reasons why I don't blame people for playing the way they do:
- Bad/Lack of servers
- Other bad players
- Arena/Generator/Dkoth Mode
- Bad maps
- Chat
- It's not an exciting game after awhile
Luckily, there are remedies to everything but the last one (lol.) The main point is yes, the game is
FOR FUN. But you can have fun and still be good at the game, and then you don't have to use
FOR FUN as an excuse for why you cost your team a game! This is pretty much one of the biggest steps to becoming MLG PRO at the game.
The classes
[THECLS]
You all know, or should know the drill with the classes of this game. There are 9 original/primary classes in the game, each stripped down versions of their Team Fortress 2 counterparts. They can be split up into 3 subsections:
Offense,
Support and
Defense. Each class within these subsection generally fulfills the job description they are assigned, but this game gives you a lot of breathing room when it comes to how you use a certain class. Think about how bare-bones, how basic this game and it's mechanics are. It forces improvisation! You can do tons of shit with just a few tools. That is to say, there are offensive, support and defensive applications to every class. In public games, this is important because you are oftentimes thrown into a situation where you'll have to defend with an offense or support class, or vise versa. It pays to know that there are different ways to play each class. For example, a constructor can be played offensively, and in some cases do a lot more for their team then they would do camping in one spot near the point/intel. Sometimes, playing a class differently is the key to your team's victory. Think of how many game losing backcaps could be stopped if the runner just took a moment to backtrack and stop them rather than always pressing forwards. Oh, by the way, there is a tenth class. He's from Cave Story and he does a lot of things, so I'll cover him too.
Because of this whole "do a lot with just a little" mentality you all should be adopting, it is naturally counter-intuitive to "main" a class. Now, before all the knee-jerk reactions to this, let me explain myself. I am talking mostly about public games. Everyone will have a class they excel at, and in gg2's sparse competitive environment that is excellent for teambuilding. However, in public matches, the situation and map are always changing. It does your team no good for you to constantly play detonator every round, just racking up kills on lesser players, when a detonator is not needed. You should be trying out all the classes, and putting in the time with each when necessary. It not only makes you a more well-rounded, team oriented player; it also makes you die less, because sometimes a class just does no good in a certain situation no matter how godlike you are with it. If there is a sniper on ctf_classicwell, no amount of godlike runner dancing ability will help you unless you ca get in close. It's time for you to try alternate approaches, like infiltrator (whom you can still dance with, and cuts the trouble of getting in close by half! Fucking genius.)
With Gang Garrison 2, classes can be explained thoroughly simply by listing the following: advantages (what they do good,) disadvantages (what they do bad,) teamwork (what they do to help their team,) and matchups (what they do against others.) Break it down to this bread and butter, and you'll find the classes a lot more clear cut, and you're also armed with a lot more knowledge on how they can be used. You can score a lot more points and die way less if you know what you're working with rather than just blindly feeling through the basics. I'll break it all down and provide the most important information with each class. Also you should pay a lot of attention to the teamwork section, because teamwork is the essence of pro play in Gang Garrison.
Offense
Runner
Health: 100 / DPS: 48 or 96 / M2: Double Jump
[THERUN]Advantages: The runner is by far one of the most favored classes in the game for his well-rounded, balanced stats and his ability to take on nearly every class in the game. He is fast, hits hard, and boasts great mobility with the highest run speed in the game and a double jump with his m2. The runner is usually used as an offensive blitz with one goal only: moving forward and causing trouble. He has always been a front line class, and skilled players love to use him to "dance" and pick off less skilled players in an instant with deadly precision. The runner has all the tools for zoning (attacking from a distance) and CQC ("close quarters combat," aka getting in close and making things claustrophobic as hell.) The runner has perfect offensive capabilities and serves as a good class to get acquainted with some necessary fundamentals: ammo conservation, proper aim, dancing and a host of other things.
In order to properly master the runner, with his low max health, you are forced to play smart. It enforces things like positioning: he can get to places other people can't which allows you to harass from all angles. Make good use of the double jump and remember,
runner is always one step ahead of his opponent. You can backpedal and fire and watch as opponents helplessly run into your bullets, making for good cleanup on your getaway. You can jump up to high platforms and rain pain down on hapless suckers below, allowing you to take out pesky obstacles without sacrificing the precious health you would in full confrontations.
He also boasts understated defensive capabilities. Just think: all those times people have made it out of your base with the pesky backcap can easily be stopped at the source by backtracking with runner and picking them off.
ex. 2: If this POOR, HELPLESS FAT MAN is just stuck in a spot where he cannot reach you, he is little more than bullet fodder here. Some newer players or just mindless dudes in pub games can be taken care of even from platforms within the overweight's spread. This trick is rather rudimentary, and can be foiled with some equal smarts, but one thing you should take note of is YOU DON'T HAVE TO KILL THE GUY UNDERNEATH. Runner serves a perfect harassment/softening up role so the target can be mowed down by the rest of your team.
Disadvantages: With good balance, there are stark disadvantages to the many benefits runner enjoys. His
glass cannon nature, severely gimped health, and ammo restrictions all serve as flashpoints for the constant misuse of the class. The runner as an offense class does not mean he is an invincible force of nature. Much to the contrary, people in public games are all too eager to just run straight out spawn with their mouse buttons taped down. They end up running into a crowd or biting off more than they can chew, and are in turn chewed up like yesterday's leftover. The ammo system means constantly holding down the mouse button, which is a terrible practice and fosters bad muscle memory that will affect your gameplay, means your brief rain of scattergun bullets will be reduced to a slight trickle. Not to mention half the time your wasting your shots on air, it means your already going into a confrontation at a disadvantage. Compound this with the fact that you have very low health, which means
every time you're hit the situation changes massively. Runner dies shockingly fast, and you don't want to get used to that, because experienced runners realize a lot has to be done with each life. The simple fact is while his advantages outweigh his disadvantages, the negatives he does possess serve to create a huge skill gap. Once you learn how to deal with them, you can truly say you've become skilled with the runner.
What's a problem without a solution? There are a couple of quick fixes to the Runner's problems. For the health,
just make sure to choose your battles wisely and focus on evasion. Remember the runner's main goal is to further the objective. For ammo conservation,
it really pays to just click once when you have the clear shot and spend the rest of the time reloading.
Teamwork: In regards to team responsibility, runner has clear advantages over the rest of the cast. He has a variety of perks that make him one of the best at team-oriented actions: bonuses on cap time for arena/dkoth/cp points which basically halves the amount of time needed to cap, high move speed and double jump for clean intel runs, and awesome mobility to harass generators while avoiding defenders. The biggest thing to note about runner is while it has massive offensive capabilities it provides a
perfect support and utility role that allows for the runner to aid the rest of your offensive push while still mainly focusing on getting out and achieving the objective. His double jump and speed means he is out far in front of the front lines, and good players will put an emphasis on evasion and picking battles so that they have enough health to spare to get the job done. While you shouldn't be blindly rushing,
runners have the ability to deal damage without sacrificing their entire time to the battle. So why not utilize that skill and help your team out. You can kill people and get the intel at the same time, not just do one of the two. If you want to be a true credit to team as runner, you need to learn the basics of getting in and getting out while still making it easy for your team to gain control of enemy area.
You can do the jobs of ten men if you just learn to pick your battles. You don't need to take on the heavymedic lumbering out of the base, because you can easily outrun it. But you should be taking out the autogun and constructor camping the intel.
In general, runners can usually decide a match for their team so lots of people try to play the hero and use them. You'll see like three damn runners on each team, and that becomes chaotic. These runners are sort of like lemmings though and do more harm than good. While your ultimate objective is to get the job done and complete whatever goal wins the game,
you have the capability to quickly and cleanly kill pretty much any class and should be doing that too. Firebug
Health: 120 / DPS:
(Flares are 15 + afterburn damage) / M2: Airblast (Holding m1 + m2 shoots a flare)
[THEFIR]DISCLAIMER: RIGHT NOW FIREBUG IS BAD DAMAGE OUTPUT WISE, HE VERY WELL MAY HAVE BEEN BUFFED BY THE TIME YOU NEXT READ THIS. IF THAT IS THE CASE, PLEASE NOTE THESE STRATEGIES ABSOLUTELY 100% STILL APPLY. WHAT I'VE WRITTEN HERE HAS ALWAYS BEEN STAPLE FIREBUG STRATEGY. IF HE DOES GET SOME UNGODLY BUFF, CONTACT ME AND I WILL REWRITE THIS SECTION. BUT EVERYTHING STILL APPLIES.Advantages: I don't think the firebug is very strong anymore, due to constant changes by the community and development. Yet,
he still packs a punch with his general toolkit. The flamethrower, afterburn damage and ability to shoot flares/reflect projectiles give firebug a wide variety of options. The constant buffing and nerfing, however, has left him in a curious spot where nobody knows exactly where he lies in regards to how strong a class he is. As of 2.6.3, he has been left in a very crippled state because of afterburn damage tweaks as well as nerfed flares. Despite all this,
firebug still has offensive capabilities contingent to how well he is positioned. I personally think one of the best uses for firebug in a public match is simply as a situational defense option. When you see people capping the point as a group, latch onto some friends and help disrupt the capture by spreading flames everywhere. It will at least soften up the push so it can be mopped up.
Firebug is in no state to take groups on his own but he does have value in the overall defensive effort. And by that same card, he makes another very string support role provided you have bulkier, sturdier classes in tow. It's good to have some firebug skill under your belt, so I'd advise you play him if all your favorite roles are already taken and in capable hands. Just so you have the experience in the event he gets buffed to godhood again.
Disadvantages: Firebug's current nature leaves him with little options against medic combos and bulkier classes. The flare lets evens him out against classes like overweight but the damage is negligible.
Firebug excels mostly against rocketman, where his airburst's rocket reflect capabilities allows him to counter one or multiple rocketman. In fact, that would be his main strength and the best way to be productive offensively and defensively: going firebug as a counter during one of those many pub games where people are going obnoxious with rocketman.
Keeping people honest with airblast is one of the only things the class currently excels at.ex. 3: Detailed firebug matchup guide pictured here.
Generally he can take on classes like constructor, infiltrator and runner but only if he dominates the close combat. Once an opponent gains distance his only option drops to the largely ineffective flares.
The hard reality with firebug is you have many tools but very little damage output to work with. Even with his decent move speed, his lack of range on the direct hit flamethrower (his most powerful weapon) makes it easy to outmaneuver him. Firebug is certainly not a hard class to master, but he is a very difficult class to be effective at all.
Even as a so called offensive class, at the moment he seriously fares much better in other roles. Many players still try to use the same a/d+m1, kamikaze tactics that were once so effective; but, as a blitz class, firebug is paper thin. The only real solution is to amend your playstyle, and use positioning to your advantage (ie. dropping off high ground, airblasting dangerous enemies, keeping them at least slightly honest with the flares.) Smart players are hard-pressed to let you get in close, which is crucial to the firebug's effectiveness. Getting in close is truly just a test of patience and skill,
focus on taking unpredictable moves in order to psyche out your opponent, and don't repeat yourself or you'll just keep dying.Teamwork: Working with your team as firebug is tough because your role is very easily filled by other, stronger classes (similar to Querly.) Firebugs have a couple of cool team-related perks though;
namely the airblast, which allows you to extinguish anyone on your team who happens to be on fire. He is also a great supercharge candidate in defensive situations, provided you can stick with your target.
As a supercharged firebug, you can very easily instill a lot of superficial fear even to large groups which will disperse like flies when you come at them. That's especially great on cp and koth maps. Use the larger than life fear to your advantage, and you'll find sometimes the supercharge isn't wasted even when you don't net a lot of kills. You brought your team that much more time. Firebug makes a good support class tacked on to high hp classes like rocketman and overweight.
Rocketman
Health: / DPS: 55 (25 direct, 30 splash) / M2: None
[THEROC] Advantages: Rocketman is a bulky, sturdy and tanky class that represents some of the strongest pure offense in the game. With heavy firepower and high durability, he is considerably easy to learn and to master. I'd say he's a great class to start with when it comes to learning how to be pro at this game. The rocketman has awesome mobility as well thanks to rocketjumps which allow him to cover lots of vertical space with minimal damage costs (so you can spare a jump or two to quickly get back inot the fray.) His effectiveness as a midrange class means you can control the action of the battle from a relatively safe distance. Indeed, the rocketman is the class you want when the chips are down and you want to wipe out the enemy quickly and brutally. Rocketman has all sorts of offensive applications. With a medic, he is capable of doing intel runs because of the space he can control, which means you can fight your way in, wipe out defenses and then fight your way out. Provided you learn the proper timing, once he gets someone up in the air he can airshot and quickly take them out. He can face pretty much every class, even riflemen and detonator, so his high survivability is a clear asset. He can also be used for defense in a pinch, but rocketman shouldn't ever be standing around in one spot. The primary objective is to push forward and wipe everyone out.
Though he lacks an m2, the rocket projectile is by far one of the deadliest forces in the game. You can utilize splash damage, meaning you may still damage your opponents indirectly. To use rocketman to his full potential it's important to utilize the splash damage by shooting walls and platforms that enemies are touching. The damages does affect the encounter. When you have an opponent point-blank but your aim doesn't stack up, splash damage gives you some slight grace room to take out your enemy WHEN HE'S GROUNDED. Especially against runners, or just jumpy players, predicting when they will land and shooting at the ground will definitely net you some sort of damage.
Disadvantages: The rocketman has evolved over several years of heavy balancing, back when rocketman balance was actually extremely important and a fiery topic of debate.
The current rocketman has a number of balancers that keeps his gameplay honest, despite still being one of the best and most powerful classes in the game. The most obvious is his ammo/reload system, which ensures you can't keep a steady stream of rockets going. Similar to other classes, taping down your mouse 1 button reduces you to shooting off one rocket at a time, at painstaking intervals. Rocketman is all about only clicking when you have to, so the playstyle is especially harmful and nets you plenty of deaths (especially when opponents get close.) Another disadvantage is the range of the rockets, as they are now coded to fade out after a certain distance. This means you can't find really safe distances and just spam at chokepoints because most of the time the rockets will fade before hitting paydirt. The fadeout forces you to play mid range rather than true long range, so the old "rocketspam" era is totally dead. These two restrictions severely limit how long a rocketman can sustain himself, and the only way to get around them is to learn proper range and rocket conservation. For the former, feel free to just click "host server" on the menu and test the rocket range, so you can get an idea of how far the rocket will go before it trickles off. Rocket conservation is pretty easy (just count things out in your head), but can get hairy when you are frantic and facing CQC situations. In this case, it's important to put some distance between you and your opponent (even if by rocketjump if you have the health to spare) so you can regain some sense of timing.
The rocketman is a pretty slow class, which comes with his tanky nature. So while he doesn't have a problem spacing out and destroying similar slow classes, he can have trouble being outmaneuvered by fast parties; particularly runner, firebug, quote and infiltrator. His bane is these classes getting in close and dancing them. This is due to a glaring blind spot within your sprite that is easily exploitable. It results in lots of precious missed shots. As mentioned before, trying to get some distance is advised but hard to do without taking heavy damage for your troubles. Solutions I can give you are:
- Predict where they will land and shoot there/Try to launch them upwards
- Force the battle into an enclosed space
- Go suicidal and try to rocketjump or at least shoot at the floor, causing yourself damage but hopefully smashing them as well.
Teamwork: Due to being an offense class as well as an explosives user, Rocketman has great teamwork bonuses that allow him to support and defend with his team whenever need be. Rocketman's best team function is aiding the offensive push, as he can meteor slam the defenders or opposing pushes with rockets as the runner or overweight charges in to spray their bullets. Based on the positioning of you and your team, you can act as effective cover for your team to push in under. You can jump out and clear autoguns, sacrifice yourself to wreck a pesky medic, or rocketjump around the enemy and flank them. What you are doing is taking some of the slack off the rest of your team and making their lives a little easier. Your goal is to deal lots of damage, so use that to your advantage when working with your team. While Rocketman can do plenty of damage solo; and rack up kills by going off on their own and dueling others; you may start to notice that on your own missed rockets count for a lot more. With the assistance of a good team, you have a lot more breathing room on aiming your shots and you can do lots of useful splash damage. With other classes, even with the protection of a few other players, it is very easy to die in teamfights. Yet, due to his midrange abilities, Rocketman can get the most out of them and cut a swath of destruction through his enemies while taking minimal damage and making everyone else's life way better.
Rocketman works well for team mobility, by using the splash of his rockets to launch his teammates up to places they may usually not be able to reach quickly and easily. Simply shooting at the ground in the way you would do a rocketjump as your teammate overlaps your sprite should give them a little added boost to their jump. If they jump at the right moment they will also gain the air you do as well. It's sometimes hard to do however, and you shouldn't waste too much health trying to do this because it does add up (unless its your pocket healer you are trying to launch.) In general, however he is one of the slower classes so he may require rocketjumps of his own to keep up with the rest of his team. The jumps themselves are once again, perfect for flanks, and allow you to run sick a$$ team manuevers if you like to do that sort of thing.
Defense
Overweight
Health: / DPS: 120 / M2:Detonator
Health: / DPS: Up to 90 / M2:Constructor
Health: / DPS: / M2: Support
Healer
Health: / DPS: / M2:Rifleman
Health: / DPS: / M2:Infiltrator
Health: / DPS: / M2: Lingo you should know
[LINKNW]
Here are a bunch of terms I have mentioned here or may have been mentioned around the forums. I'll include some visual aids to some of them, but most of them speak for themselves. If you ever need a dictionary to refer back to, this is the place. I'll update it a lot as new terminology arises! Also, feel free to tell me stuff that should be included in here. A lot of it is just popular in-game terminology. There's some joke-y stuff as well. One step to becoming mlg pro is to become acquainted with the game culture. This will hopefully help.

= visual aid linked
1v1 (noun): One player versus one player.
airshot (verb/noun): Involves hitting a person with a rocket while they are midair. Can be chained, in which case it will be recorded and then overlayed with Guile's theme.
b42 (noun): Don't know if theres anyone left who still refers to this, but it's good to know this was an old version of gg2 where much of the magic happened and many of the older members participated in.
jello (verb): Short for "jellonixon," a player who made infamous the runner playstyle in which you run at the intel constantly like a braindead monkey until you finally cap it. Jelloing the intel requires minimal shooting, and is very common among new runners.
pub (noun): Shorthand for "public player."
tempest bots (noun): Bots created by coder/developer Orpheon which basically ar ethe closest you'll get to Mann vs Machine.
plugin (noun): Essentially a quick, mini-mod that adds features to the game without having to download a seperate .exe
euro/EU (adjective): Generally just how we refer to any of our European playerbase.
oic (some sort of phrase): "Oh, I see."
dancing (verb): Repeatedly moving around and jumping within an enemy's sprite in order to confuse and take them out.
splash damage (noun): Indirect damage from a rocket or sticky.
spinjump (noun): An old exploit that allowd runner to gain some extra height by violently scrubbing your mousepad.
backcap (noun): When a player steals the intel/caps the point unnoticed while the opposing team is off doing whatever they're doing instead of defending.
failspy (noun): Term used by many players to describe newbie infiltrators. They are known to make various mistakes, like randomly stabbing while cloaked.
dropstab (verb/noun): Stabbing while mid-fall.
facestab (verb/noun): Exactly what it sounds like! Stabbing someone as they are running forward.
CQC (noun): Close Quarters Combat
steamroll (noun): Total, abject victory by one side. Usually the score is something like 5-0, or a very quick cp match.
grief (verb): When a player deliberately tries to aid the other side, or act like a total dick and just do whatever.
gunspin (verb): The oldest form of taunting in which you move your mouse in a circular motion, causing your gun to spin around wildly and freely.
twitch-aim (noun): A quick, lightning fast reaction in which the player shoots instantly in one direction after facing any other.
zoning (noun):
Controlling space with projectiles.
querly (noun): A composite of Quote and Curly, used to refer to both since they are on opposite sides.
How to Stop Sucking
Lag
[LAGSRV]
One of the major complaints people have about this game is "lag." People change their names, complain in chat, complain in the bro lounge, complain to me, their dogs, their mom about lag and desync. It's just a fact of the game the networking is subpar. I lag all the time, and it used to bother me a ton when I got into a server with a bunch of good players and end up getting bodied by mysterious earthquakes. So yeah, lag is a good reason why some people seem to suck. It can stem from everything; be it a bad computer or internet connection, or just your physical location.
The first hurdle in not sucking to get over is dealing with lag.The obvious first choice is changing servers. Just pay attention to that little ping counter, which iirc was finally fixed after god knows how long, and if it's in the green (or maybe the yellow) you should be fine.
Note that the connection will get more stressed as more players join the server. This is pretty much a constant with the game right now as we lack servers and the ones we do have fill up pretty fast. Usually you won't suffer that huge a connection problem with full servers if you didn't already suffer one in the first place.
If there is nowhere to turn to, it's time to pull out the coping methods.
Most lag is bearable enough you can still play. If it's computer lag, turning down the settings (particles off, windowed mode, etc) can smooth the experience for you.
GG2 is deceptively challenging to older computers, even though many people do not believe that is the case and often download this game simply because their computers are too crappy to handle other games.
Check CPU usage. Try closing all those useless background applications too. Check if there is a source to your internet problems, as the lag can be client-sided; sometimes you may find that lots of other devices are eating up your net, or your router just sucks. If the lag is determined to be server-sided, bug the shit out of the host to see if they can't remedy it. If they can't, you're pretty much stuck.
To actually play in the lag,
it's just a matter of playing lag-friendly classes. The defense and support classes; ones that don't require close combat or precision dancing or timing; are all good choices. Overweight, Constructor, Medic, revolver Infiltrator are all fine choices. Try to stay away from like Runner, Rocketman, Detonator or Rifleman. Mistakes with these classes are magnified in regular play, and lag tends to cause mistakes.
You'll find the best way to deal with lag is just to play while doing minimal work. The key is just play more defensive classes, and more defensively in general. I can't really go into depth about anymore than I already have.
The final option is to turn the game off and try again later.