TF2: Spy Psychology - How to Master Spy

[Music] I [Music] the Power Trip of getting good at the weakest class in the game can be immense so you want to get good at spy the French deception man that stabs people and steals identities but the process of doing so is a particularly perilous journey in fact spies is considered to have the highest base skill requirement of all the classes in order to play effectively but it's not just playing a ton of spy and trying to brute course results there's ways you can go about learning the class in order to get better but what in particular makes spy so [Music] hard like I said spy is widely considered the hardest class in the game he is a light class meaning he is only 125 Health the lowest that any class has without Health altering unlocks of course each of the light classes have ways of dealing with their low Health Scout has a speed sniper stands far away and the engineer has a sentry gun but the spy Spy uses stealth your ability to be sneaky and evade enemies is the only thing keeping you alive and there's so many factors you need to consider just to get a backstab where are the enemies where are they firing where should I cloak where is the ammo where is they spawn are they paranoid can anyone see or hear my Deco is my disguise realistic or the person on disguise they see me did I just bum that guy is my disguise glitch can they see with postor war Hax why is this guy still behind their spawn not to mention how you have to be able to trick and deceive enemy players and different players may have different levels of awareness for spy tactics so you have to have a deep understanding of how other players are likely to play and what they're capable of you need to know how the mechanics of not only your class works but the mechanics of all the others so that you know what they can do playing spy can drive you nuts and don't just take it from me I cope using an immense amount of apathy please God don't play Spy for 100 days straight man it it does things to you every time they throw a jar at me I add it to my collection how do I cope with playing spy ha answer is I don't every time I fail a trickstab as spy I consider ending my own life you can understand why spy is such a daunting class for new players and it's okay to not be good at the class you have to start somewhere and that somewhere involves dying over and over and over and over and over and [Music] over yeah dying over and over again isn't fun especially as much as you a spy but those failures are how you learn like it or not but each death isn't necessarily some massive failure you can just respawn and try again you should always try to figure out how you died and what could have been done about it if you try to dismiss it every death as not your fault then of course you're not going to get any better you aren't learning anything when you die you should immediately try to think about how you died the more you do this the more conditioned to it you'll become and the better you'll get at it no matter how good you get at spy you'll still die somewhat frequently you don't just become this perfect entity that ascends to a higher plane of existence the things you learn from these deaths may only apply to that one particular game or it could teach you lessons that carry with you for a long time like the trauma izing events of what I did on February 27th 1997 sure you can binge the Spy psychology series and gain an absorb a m of knowledge directly into your cranium but I'm not some saint of spy gameplay one of the best teachers is just getting beat up and game repeatedly that experience will teach you how to deal with the problems that come up speaking of experience another very good way of gaining that experience is to not play by I am being completely serious you know how having to account for the actions and abilities of other classes is one of the things that makes spy so difficult to play well that becomes significantly easier to do when you yourself are able to play those classes effectively if you're still relatively new to TF2 here is my priority list of classes that I reckon are the best for new players this list is not a set in stone rule so definitely try experimenting with them and see which of the other classes you gravitate to more but you should at least learn to play most if not all of them at a base level in fact in my early days of TF2 I was actually half spy main half NG Main I'd often play Spy on offense and eny on defense this made me a better spy faster and significantly reduced the mental torture I would have gone through had I played only Spy fun fact most of my audience don't even mean spy my time as an engineer taught me a lot about how to combat them as spy and vice versa especially since those two classes are known for being in constant conflict with each other you don't just understand what those classes can do but you understand how they play and the countermeasures they can use against spies this very much plays into the paranoia episode we have to get into the enemy's head to try and figure out what they're going to do or disguises where if you know how certain classes behave you can act like them the main point of this all is how you learn through experience and knowing how to use it you get that experience most through your deaths and learning the other classes and while spy is very much about getting into other people's heads you should also learn to look [Music] Within [Music] seeing within your own psyche isn't something everyone is good at but it's also another step to figuring out what's going right and what's going wrong so I encourage you to at least try in games like tf2 it's very easy to get stuck on autopilot and forget to play adaptively you keep doing the same thing over and over again out of habit this is known as being stuck in a spy Loop AKA a ter I just made up you keep taking the same flank you keep picking up the same emmo boxes you keep using the same disguise you keep decloaking in the same spot and you keep using the same Escape path now this isn't necessarily bad sometimes it's good to develop a looping path when you're playing spy that gets you kills it can work in your favor when done right the issue arises when you get stuck in a spy Loop you keep doing the Motions of the loop but it's not working you keep dying right before or right after getting kills it can be easy to become frustrated as to why isn't working and yet you you continue to engage in the loop trying to prove force it it worked before why isn't it working now this is why it's important to be able to realize when you get stuck in a spy Loop and subsequently break it it can be as simple as changing the path you take but it keeps you playing adaptively and thinking it can also help out significantly with enemy paranoia as your habits are constantly in flux another technique to seeing inside your own psyche is to record your own gameplay and commentate over it live with your own thought processes in the moment regardless of what the quality is hey guys it's me today I'm going to be playing spy from Team vress 2 you just need to be able to document your gameplay and live thought somehow OBS is my personal recommendation for free screen recording software you can then go back and analyze what you're thinking so that it will show me your motivation it allows you to see in post what went wrong and how but also what went right it's much easier to think about this stuff when you're not in the overwhelming stress of an actual game it's good to try and stay calm and collected as much as you can and trying to avoid going [Music] insane a big part of getting good at spy is keeping your sanity in check most notably your anger when you get angry you don't think straight and it begins to have a negative impact on your performance and considering how spy dies so much that is much easier said than done it's very important to keep a go head when you don't think rationally you begin to act on impulse more and more and what's worse is that the negative performance you have from being angry can just make you more Angry which is known as a negative feedback loop AKA a term I didn't make up this time it's why yet again it's so important to be able to recognize the cause of your deaths it allows you to learn and adapt from them rather than letting your emotions take over and like sure sometimes it really really was these are actually Hiers you have been deceived random crits disguised glitch cheaters all your internet dying at the worst possible moment what what but those kinds of deaths usually aren't that common and you need to try your best to take accountability for your deaths people keep appearing in places I don't expect well be wary of it people keep turning around at the last second maybe they heard you or weren't preoccupied enough to not turn I keep getting hit while invisible maybe change your path this pyro keeps chasing me down with his flamethrower spot is a gun think about what you could have done and account for it even the most experienced spies can have really silly deaths well I've had lots of comments from people telling me that the Spy psychology Series has had a massively positive effect on their gameplay I've had some who get frustrated that my videos aren't helping but watching my videos isn't just a cheat to getting good at spy I don't just do all the thinking and improving for you you need to be able to reflect on your own performance like how I reflect on the dmma of whether cucumbers are a vegetable or fruit people are different they may have different learning processes or different factors in their life that makes keeping cool harder but here's some general tips that may help you avoid getting angry one when you do get caught or noticed as spy you should expect to die there and then but still attempt the Escape anyway this is a really interesting psychological trick where if you do end up dying you're not disappointed but if you escape then it ends up being a nice surprise two unbind the Tab Key it stops you from looking at your kill death ratio because noticing you're gaining a negative ratio can often tilt you and just make that ratio worse if you can't see it then you don't know how many times you died the scoreboard at the end of casual games still tells you how well you did but it doesn't show depths it's worth let you of point to be a good SP it's you're disrupting three don't take yourself too seriously you're playing a video game have some fun fun with it and learn to laugh at yourself when you die in a funny way it can turn unexpected deaths from being frustrating to entertaining four play other classes if spy isn't working out for you this round or you have too many just play a different class it'll be less stressful and give you time to re-evaluate and five stop playing if you start getting really tilted sometimes it's best for you to just log off and take a break there are lots of things that can affect your mood and it may even be things outside of the game that are affecting your emotions as said many times spy is hard improving at the class can take a considerable amount of mental strain but no matter how many times you get beat down you always eventually get back up and at some point you will send that pain right [Music] back we [Music] oh

Channel: Jontohil2

Views: 119,322

Keywords: tf2, teamfortress, fps, game, gaming, spy, psychology, spy psychology, fun, funny, meme, team fortress 2, jonto, jontohil2, gameplay, pro, guide, how, how to play spy, how to get good at spy, good, spy tutorial, tutorial, tf2 tutorial, for beginners, beginner, beginners, help, sfm, disguise, trick, disguises work, fool, smart, cloak, invis, invisible, paranoia, paranoid, mind games, loadout, knives, revolver, gun spy, master, mastery, master spy, how to master, improve, martincitopants, elmaxo, hintshot, shork, skymin

Id: PWtTwUb8Dq8

Length: 12min 44sec (764 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 26 2024