Friendly fire

From Team Fortress Wiki
Revision as of 21:54, 19 July 2010 by Piemanmoo (talk | contribs) (adding info on FF bug)
Jump to: navigation, search
What the hell is your guys' problem?
The Scout

Friendly fire was an option available to servers during the Team Fortress 2 Beta. It allowed players to damage or even kill their teammates. This made setting up an ÜberCharge quicker and also benefitted Spies as it discouraged spy-checking.

Valve removed the feature upon release as it was known to cause errors within the game's code as well as harbouring potential for griefing. The low focus on accurate shooting in the game also meant that friendly fire could become an impediment if several classes attempted to co-operate with one another.

File:Friendly Fire2.png
Friendly Fire kills can still occur with Sentry Rockets

However, in normal play there are still methods whereby a player can injure theirself. Soldiers can take damage from their own rockets, Demomen can be injured by their own Sticky bombs and Grenades, and Engineers can take damage from their own Sentries. Pyros can also damage themselves with reflected projectiles.

There are a few ways to friendly fire in normal gameplay. As a Medic, you can be healing a Spy who backstabs a team-mate; and as an Engineer, your Sentry rockets can injure and even kill your teammates if the Sentry is destroyed while the rockets are in mid-flight. This is commonly used in conjuction with the Wrangler for griefing. It should be noted that Sentry bullets cannot harm teammates.

Projectile weapons such as the Rocket launcher used to be able to injure teammates if the player was killed before the projectile hit a teammate, but this was since patched. Level 3 sentry rockets were not affected by this patch.

Full friendly fire is still available as a server option but is rarely used in standard TF2 play. Even with friendly fire enabled, it is impossible to damage friendly buildings or set fire to teammates.