An effective counter to spawn camping

team-fortress-2

Occasionally when playing TF2, the other team pushes us all the way back to spawn and camps there. I am fairly experienced with the game, and have a mic to help coordinate with my team. Is there an effective counter-strategy to push them back when dealing with the small bottleneck of the spawn doors?

Best Answer

Spawn-camping is one of the riskier strategies a team can employ - you are fighting the enemy team outside a one-way door which only they can open, and behind which is an infinite supply of health and ammo that only they can access. It only works if the team being spawn-camped is so uncoordinated that they would be losing badly anyways even if not being camped. The team inside spawn actually has the advantage of being right next to their resupply cabinets - they can change classes and loadouts and refill ammo and health at will.

Breaking even a serious spawn camp merely requires some coordination. Running out one at a time is not going to work - they will have time to repair their sentries and reset their sticky traps in the time it takes you to respawn. Have a medic (preferably two or three - they probably have at least one medic) build uber (normal uber) on some scouts / soldiers / demomen who can inflict self-damage to speed up the process. Deploy the ubers on some heavies right out of the gate and clear any sticky traps and other immediate threats that may be present. Have the demomen and soldiers follow behind to destroy sentry nests and teleporters. Once you do that there should be no more spawn-camp. Kill as many enemy players as you can and go for the objective to make up for any lost time.

If you are playing on a public server and your team is uncoordinated enough to get spawn-camped, it is probably game over. There is very little you can do alone, unless you are a very good spy (but remember, even if you walk out cloaked, they can see the door open). If you feel up to it, try coordinating / organizing your team a bit via chat (text or voice). Nobody likes being spawn-camped so odds are if someone takes charge people will follow.

One last note - most maps have more than one spawn exit (typically 3). If they aren't camping all exits simultaneously you can just sneak out and let the campers waste their time.