Coaching
| “ | In other games, admitting that you’d like some help playing the game is tantamount to announcing that you’d like to hear all the new horrible insults the kids are using today. Not here.
— Coaching publicity blurb
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Coaching is a game feature added in the March 18, 2011 Patch for the Team Fortress 2 Beta and in the April 14, 2011 Patch for everyone to use. It allows players to be able to call on others for help with certain objectives, or to provide advice and feedback on a person's abilities and gameplay.
A player can volunteer to become a "coach" through use of the loudspeaker icon in the main menu. "Students" may place requests for a coach through the whistle icon. After a matching process and authorization by both players, the coach is automatically connected to the student's server.
Contents
Commands
The coach is given access to various commands to be used in educating the student. Note that all of the resulting markers and sounds are only visible and audible to both the coach and the student.
- Pressing primary fire while aiming at an area, object or enemy will select it for attack. A trumpet will sound, an arrow will point over the designated target, and a HUD display will appear, guiding the student to attack.
- Pressing secondary fire will mark a target for defense. This is accompanied by a drum sound, the arrow will appear, and the HUD will direct the student to defend.
- Pressing the primary weapon button will issue the order Go Here. A silver whistle sound will play.
- Pressing the secondary weapon button will issue the order Look Here. The sound of a human whistling will play.
Should the attack or defend order be assigned to a moving target, the arrow and HUD will track them in 3D space, ensuring both coach and student are aware of the target at all times.
View
The viewpoint of the coach functions similarly to the spectator. They have the choice of a first person, third person or free camera perspective. During free camera, the student is outlined to the coach with a glow similar to the Payload carts and the Intelligence. The color of the glow serves as a visual indicator of the student's health; green indicates the student is healthy, whereas red indicates they are near death. The movement of the free camera is restricted to within 30 arbitrary distance units of the student. The distance is displayed on the coach's HUD.
Update history
- Added in-game Coaching system
- Fix issue where player loses student status, which prevented them from kicking a coach
- Rate limit coach commands to once per second
- Do not show coaching annotations if they are attached to an object that is NOT the same team as the student, unless the object is in view.
- Fix glow around former students
- Notify coach when their student has died
- The coach is now tethered to the student, so that they cannot get too far
- Added the distance to student in coach GUI
- Coach now has the same PVS as the student
- When the student respawns, the coach warps back to student
- Added an option to "like" coach by pressing F9.
- The coach can no longer see stealthed Spies or see through the disguise of Spies on the opposite team of their student
- The coach can no longer see the classes of enemy players in the scoreboard
- Fixed various exploits and bugs
April 14, 2011 Patch (Hatless Update)
- Coaching was added to the game.
- Fixed the kicking of coaches for being idle as soon as they stop coaching
- Fixed a coaching exploit
Bugs
- Although coaches cannot see certain buildings unseen by the student or members of their team, they can still see the teleporter particle effects, indicating its location.
- Coach commands will still be given when the coach is using the main menu or loadout screens.
- When the student alters their loadout or class, the coach will be warped back to them.
- Joining a team after coaching a player will sometimes result in the player still seeing the former student's outline.
- The game does not distinguish between coaching requests sent from inside an inaccessible LAN game, and requests sent from players on public TF2 servers. This means that often a coach will respond to a coaching request, and then the connection will time out after 5-10 seconds (because the student's local LAN server is not accessible to outsiders). Steam should first attempt to connect to the student's server itself, to ensure that it will be accessible for the coach.
- The coach/student attributes are reset at the end of each map. That means that whenever the map changes on a server, the coach is no longer able to talk directly to the student, or guide them with instructions. Instead, the coach becomes a regular player. This connection should persist between maps, and in-game notifications should also advise the pair that they will be able to resume teaching on the next map.
- The coaching system should have a built-in 'coaching history' so that if the connection is lost by one of the players, the system enables them to easily find each other again via the coaching system, and resume where they left off.
- Currently communication between student and coach is audible/visible to all players on the server. A system should be implemented so that coaches and students can communicate directly and exclusively.
- The coaching system has no way of determining the suitability of a student-coach pairing. This is especially evident in Europe where language barriers are often an issue.
- Students are not informed when a coach fails to join a server and, although the coach box appears on their screen, they are not explicitly told that a coach has connected.
- Coaches are not informed when a student leaves the server.
- Alerts do not always appear when in the main menu. Often alerts will only appear once a server is joined, leading coaches to have to sign up as coaches, then launch into a server before invitations can be viewed and accepted.
- Once a coach has accepted an invitation to join a student's game as their coach, the coach is removed from the list of coaches. While this makes sense from a back-end design point-of-view, when coupled with the frequent inability of a coach to join a server due to firewall problems, server capacity problems, slot-reservation problems, etc., forcing coaches to relist themselves once a connection attempt to the student's game has failed vastly increases the tedium associated with finding a student.
Gallery
Button pressed to call for a coach.
The Alert seen when a friend asks to be coached
- Coach HUD.png
The coaching HUD
"Attack This" note from players viewpoint
"Defend This" note from players viewpoint
"Go here" note from Players viewpoint
"Look here" note from Players viewpoint
A Glitch where the former trainer can still see the outline when playing normally
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