New players start here. (Living draft)

This is a working draft of things that every new player needs to know before getting into this game, or at the very least before dropping the game. If you guys have any suggestions of things to add, let me know. This is going to be a long read, but they are all useful things. This is currently disorganized because I just wrote them as I thought of them. I hope to organize it later.

Get some class
* Start with either Assault or Gunner. Many players have told me that Assault is the easiest class, and I personally believe it's overpowered. Many also claim that Gunner takes no skill to use. It's a false claim, but I definitely admit it's easy to understand what you're supposed to do with a Gunner.

* Play some rounds of Blitz until you can afford to make a custom class. The default classes are probably nothing like what you really need. You need custom classes in order to really compete in Crossfire. Once you do get in, pay attention to the endorsements of the players that kill you. You'll notice some trends going on there that will help you figure out what you really need. That said, every player is unique, and it's entirely possible for a setup that bucks the trend to be just what gets you all the way. Just avoid a juice powerup. If it does affect juice gain, it doesn't do much. Primarily it just gives you extra juice at the start, and not even that much at gold level.

* Ekanaut has been keeping a collection of guides. Each of them will be very helpful.

Play the field
* Although it's definitely good to get yourself some skills, don't forget that you'll probably need some turrets, too. The rocket should be your basic go-to turret for firepower. When the opponents put up turrets outside of the basic ring, Longshots can be useful for taking them out, though they may need hacking from your Support to do it. Finally, ShaveIce turrets put up front can be just what you need to slow down advancing enemies. Pair a 3.3 ShaveIce with a 3.3 rocket and you've got a good time going. Whatever you do, you need to have somebody defending the base at any given time. Any player can destroy any turret if they're just left alone.
* As of Spunky Cola Special update for Xbox 360, there is almost no reason to build a laser in Crossfire. A level 3 laser (1 & 2 are absolutely worthless) is $175. A rocket is about as effective at stopping bots with more armor at $150. The only benefit of the laser is the rapid fire, so in a really good situation, it can make the finishing hit on many different targets really quickly. However, the splash damage of rocket blasts can hit multiple targets, too. On Xbox 360, you can actually taunt in front of a laser (assuming you have the armor to survive) and get essentially a full bar of juice regardless of class. The Tank specifically can deploy in front of a laser to gain juice. The negatives just far outweigh the positive.

* Players are higher priority targets than bots, but absolutely do not ignore bots. Bots are necessary to take out the moneyball's shields, and then that becomes the main target. Players are simply threats, not your objective! The moneyball is your objective. Everything you do has to be either for the sake of allowing you to get their moneyball or keep yours from getting hit. Players, bots, and turrets all stand in your way. Your kill:death ratio can be an impressive one to share (mine's about 3.7 as of this writing), but all that ever matters is whether you can win. Attack players because they are threats to your objective, not because you want to score kills. Getting kills for the sake of money is acceptable too, since that money can go toward something else you really need.
Similarly, you'll need to escort your bots over at some point if you hope to win the game. Once their turrets are down, all you have to do is get rid of the other bots and any players that would destroy yours. You really can use whatever means you want, but the little pea-shooter bullet weapons are far more effective on players than they are on bots.

* Singular turrets are easily destroyed by players that know what they're doing, even if it can take some time. When your base is being destroyed, your initial reaction should instead be to remove the players that are doing this and prevent bots from getting in. Destroying bots does generate juice, and as long as they don't hit your money ball, the players won't be able to do so, either. Just make sure you're watching the lanes that have no turrets. When you do rebuild, make sure you've got the money to build with force.
* Upgrading turrets will make them invincible while being built and the health will be reset when complete. This makes for a clutch rescue method, but also means it will lose any overheal it had. If you have the money to upgrade a turret, consider holding it back until it is heavily damaged or under attack by a juiced player.

* This isn't exactly Gears of War, but cover is still very important. Learn how to use it to your advantage. If a Sniper is causing problems, try taking routes that have plenty of cover. Assassins don't need to cloak if the stage itself is shielding her from view. Ducking around a corner can save your life regardless of class.

Control yourself
* You know what all the buttons do, but the hidden R3 (press the right stick) does a melee attack. Do this on bots, and you get plenty of juice. Any class with juice is a scary thing, so if you can do it safely, bot melees will help you out immensely. Even just shooting bots will get you juice, whereas shooting players will not.

* I mentioned taunting once before. You do this by hitting right on the D-pad + A. Alone, it's rather worthless. You're stuck in place for the duration of the taunt and you're rewarded with a meager $5. That goes up 10x while your name remains in the kill feed after a kill. Taunting after a kill gets you $50, so this can be just the push you need early on. Just make absolutely sure you're safe when you taunt, or you're an easy pick for someone else. If you taunt and it ends while you're juiced, you get a whopping $100! That's more relevant for Blitz than Crossfire, though.

* It can be a while for new players to catch on to the fact that they can make their own bots. If you look around your bots' spawn entrances, you'll find a little green symbol. It costs $100 and you get a bot that's specific to your class. Each one of them has their uses, though Scrambler is just about the most useless. Even with the Spunky Cola Special update giving them 2 Scramblers, it's still like you're getting half a player to help you maybe get a kill.

We need to talk
* Get some friends and a mic. There is nothing more effective than a team of communicative players that knows each other. If you get people into your lobby and party before hitting "quick match," you should reliably stay together in all your games, and that's really going to help you improve. Groups of players will get together to beat the random, unassociated players all the time. This is called "pubstomping."
9a: When pubstomping, it's common for the winning team to start spawncamping. You can either figure out how to beat this (either class-specific or leave in larger numbers so one is more likely to live), prevent yourself from getting into that position, or just not play the game. It's really that simple.

* Don't try to take on everything yourself. This is a team game, let your teammates know when there's something to address, especially if you're not doing so well at it. For example, if half the other team is camping in the left tunnel of LaseRazor, make sure your entire team knows about it. Some people can pin them down while others work on getting rid of them. Also, team coordination can work with more offensive strategies, such as hacking enemy turrets. It's a technique that's very unlikely to work alone. The odds jump much more when you've got another Support to keep you alive and a Gunner to destroy anyone that would try hitting you. Of course there's also the basic [insertname/classhere] got me in [location]. Snipers and Assassins make excellent scouts, because they have the easiest time examining the field without exposing themselves.

Staying Alive
* No class is invincible, not even a Tank. One of the reasons I was such a failure as a Tank initially is that I overestimated my breaking point. It's ok to be sacrificial if you have to for the sake of a game-swinging play, like destroying a 3.3 rocket or getting the Annihilator at just the right time. For the most part though, you need to keep yourself alive so that you can be effective and retain any juice you've gained.

* Never underestimate the value of surprise. There are well-known choke points throughout every map that most players know. The most direct attack is not always the most effective; it can actually be the least effective against someone who's watching over it (and you). If there's a Sniper/Assault watching over a jump pad with a trap/bomb, don't just run into it. Curve your jump so you don't hit the trap or take a different path entirely. Once you can surprise a player who's intently watching one point, he will usually be yours for the taking.
* The same can be said for approaching a group of players. You will need to simultaneously a) have a plan to out as many players as possible, b) plan how to escape upon failure, and c) approach with stealth, even as a hefty Gunner or Tank. Confronting them head-on should not be your strategy unless all potential routes are closed.

Exactly.

Dude wtf?

It took me hours of mnc, getting spawn killed, trash-talked and run over before I became the shotgun-wielding death machine I am today.

Why help out the noobs? They need to suffer. They need to overcome adversity. They need to pile their bodies like cord wood in front of my mighty firebase. They need to be forged in the fires of rage that only a good Steel Peel spawn killing can fuel.

Only through this process of being torn down can they be rebuilt into worty mnc pros. If they cannot weater the storm, they need to be washed away to play games for the weak like Black Ops. Only those who endure, adapt, and persevere will remain. I will be proud to team up with any of them.

Good tips though, really

Are you me?

Lol, I share your pain.

I've been trying to really get into this game for a few days now. I've gone through multiple threads based on this game looking and reading for any kind of strategy or tips to improve my play but nothing seems to really ground what I'm seeing versus what I'm reading.

The constant theme I've been seeing lately is one side always dominates and teams are never balanced. That's to say that one side always has multiple players earning double digit kills while the other side's only double digit figure is either just their death tallies or both death and assists. The end result is always the same, regardless of how long the "my" team was winning, the other team would simply juice up, burst down any and all defenses and win outright.

To make matters worse, the game doesn't seem to hold a balance regardless of what class I run or what class ends up murking me. Half the time I'm begging for some sort of balance to help me out because things aren't working the way they should be (ie. being right on-top of an enemy, from behind, and hitting the grapple button multiple times - seeing said multiple entries of my button press run my character through the proper animation of attempting to grapple the opponent, but nothing happening as a result: but on the reverse end, opponents can, have, and constantly grapple me from larger distances that shouldn't work, nor have they worked for me).

Before anyone tries to tell me that it's only my connection that's hindering my play ability, I've played plenty of online multiplayer games on this connection, and still do, and never have I been subjected to as bad, or worse, "lag" issues than I've witnessed in this game. It just seems to always be the case of me trying to do the rational thing to win out in a situation only for the game trip me up and have me fail - even if the roles of the same scenario are reversed.

I'm really trying to get into this game's multiplayer but it seems the only thing I can enjoy is the singleplayer, a mode that can, has, and will probably remain stale to me after having already beat several of its modes.

Is there just something I'm completely missing? Are teams really supposed to be this unbalanced (ie. one team gets all of the higher ranked players who've obviously been playing this game for a very long time versus a team of lower ranked players who look like they rarely have invested any time into it)?

Thus far the only class I've done seemingly well with (as in break even with in K/D ratio) is the Sniper, but I can only really work that class on one map effectively. Every other game, and every other map seems to be a lottery for me, and nothing I've read even helps to address most of the issues that have plagued me and left me absolutely hating this MP experience.

I'm glad you were able to express your frustrations so precisely. I'll attempt to address them, but since I have to use my Wii to do this right now, it probably won't meet my usual standards.

First, you are indeed experiencing issues of lag, which is due to the strictly peer-to-peer status of this game. Uber couldn't get dedicated servers, which I'm sure your other games have. The lag level is almost entirely dependant on the host's connection.

As for your balance issue, yeah this game really is one side's domination over the other. The positive feedback (slippery slope) is nuts here. In most cases, the game is effectively over once one side controls the other base. It definitely will take time to get skilled here, but there's a wealth of information available.

For saintofsins. Hang in there. I got my *** kicked plenty before I found the class that works for me, and then got proficient with.

This game is a blast. Im not the greatest player, but if you want to friend me and hook up for a few matches, I can guarantee at least one player on your team that plays to win and is familiar with the game.

As far as the lag problems, they suck. I have laggy matches from time to time. All u can do is search for a different match.

Its an awesome game, and well worth the effort to become competitive.

I've made a spot to look up guides for individual classes, but I'll be honest, I haven't really examined most of them myself. I'm open to suggestions as to who has the best guide for each class. No self-nominations, please. I'm interested in hearing from people who found said guides helpful to their development.

Good guide nominees:

Assault: SHStiger
Assassin: BoltAktion // Rev Rabies
Gunner: lDeadeye
Tank: Im Hudson (somewhat outdated, but about 95% of the guide is still applicable, even after both patches)

I can't judge for a Support guide, as I knew the class prior to other forumgoers writing their own Support guides. I did learn a bit from Greg's/SHOW YOUR HEART's though, but his is outdated from both patches. I would have nominated his way back when, when most of the tips were applicable.

Also, there are no "up-to-date" Sniper guides, so I did not nominate one. >_>

• Edit: @SAINTofSINS: Lag has been present since day one of the game, and whether or not it is your connection or host's is something you just can't change, sadly. Well, maybe if Uber implements dedicated servers, but I doubt it.
  
  That being said, I'd like to know something - do you play this game by yourself, or in a party with friends? I do a bit of both myself, and I've found that playing with friends makes the quality and experience of this game, as well as practically every other multiplayer-based game, a lot more fun and interesting. It's no fun talking to teammates without mics, but if you're partied up with friends, then you've got nothing to worry about. You have people to back you up on the battlefield, which can really help you out in a tight situation.

Haha, just yesterday I was playing and was like "ugh, this Organous guy keeps wrecking me", and sure enough, you're on the forums. Awesome. Love the game, love this forum.

Anyway, very solid advice. I know that I don't utilize turrets or ejectors nearly enough. Maybe adding common class endorsements would be good too, but that could be covered by the other guides.

I think my issue with this game goes well beyond lag. I've played and throughly enjoyed every second of Bioshock 2's multiplayer, which had no dedicated server if I remember correctly, and never once felt cheated on an action being completed but never actually obtained like in this game.

Here, I constantly feel more than just cheated, I feel down right disgusted with which the games seems to randomly choose a winner of an outcome well before it's even begun. I can't remember the number of times my grapple or dash would "miss" despite being well within colonoscopy range only for opponents who are within mailing distance to not only successfully gain their grapple or dash attack but kill me with it despite my health bar showing I should be able to fight back or survive the tale should I run. The times that I do get my grapple or dash and it doesn't instantly kill them more often than not I'll be killed by that very opponent long before I can completely exit the animation.

To make matters worse, despite changing up my game style to focus more on bots and building support turrets (from Lazer Blazers to Rockits to even Shevalce(?)) to keeping focus on maintaining the middle and keeping the Annihilator for my team's use, and still I'm not seeing any kind of improvement simply because, and this is regardless of class or endorsements mind you, I'm killed within half a second of an enemy spotting me. Gunner's absolutely light me up in what I imagine isn't even a quarter of their ammo, Assaults shred me even after I've unloaded a full clip into them, Firebases absolutely annihilate me even through what seems like my cover - and that's probably 9 out of every 10 games I play. The 1 game out of those 10 actually allow me to feel like I'm making some kind of progress, but again it's at a bear minimum where I'm only getting as many kills as I am deaths.

To make matters worse, despite getting turrets or Firebases when I'm running Support, it always feels like I'm simply deploying decor for the arena. I can't count the number of times I've deployed Firebases, hacked them with my 3 skill Hack, and watched them neander about as multiple enemies come parading around it without getting so much as a glance from the mini-gunner. Same with turrets I launch - just last night I had both turrets watching over the Moneyball under my control (both Rockit) and the second I'm ganked from behind by an Assassin, the turrets look in the Assassin's direction, don't fire, leaving the culprit to run free without Smoke-Jumping or even Cloaking upon their escape.

This goes beyond frustrating, because it seems the game works on a totally different set of rules for me and nothing I've done seems to change the results - not even good teammates. Just 10 minutes ago I played a game with higher ranked players all on my team and still the outcome was a loss despite pressing hard on the opponents and breaking their Moneyball to within 25% health.

I can't avoid dying 10+ times a game, and I can't avoid being constantly placed on a losing squadron. This game should be fun, but it seems more like a headache - and I really, really, REALLY want to enjoy this game, but at this rate all I want to do is snap the hard drive it's on simply because it isn't on a physical disc.

All I really want is to feel like this game does indeed have balance. So far I feel like balance is not only a myth, it was a disgusting tale told to keep morons like me from fleeing from a direct challenge.

Drop a line or two about why you shouldn't push like an idiot.

Surviving is more important than hunting that one guy for great justice.

Stay alive, most important advice; exceptions apply.

This is a well said post.
I feel lucky now, to have started playing when the game first came out. There were no absolute dominations in most of the games I played back then. Thinking back, I actually remember having intense games that came down to the wire, or games where teams were basically even and the winner came down to who made a final push for the last Annihilator before Overtime, or who managed to get a level 3 Rock-it up. I, and many others, got to have the experience that I think Uber meant everyone to have. I feel that I have learned how to take a pounding like one can in MNC these days because I know the true nature of this game. And sometimes, I even get one of those games that reminds of how things used to be. I feel bad that you have to experience this game the way you have been and I wish it could change. You can't change the lag related issues with this game. I think you have to fight through it and try to have fun with it, because let me tell you, this is one of the best MP experiences I have had. If you can't, then I just feel even worse because I think you would have fallen in love with this game during it's first few months.

http://uberent.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=16&t=5684

This is A Patch of Blue's view on how the game has changed, and I tend to agree with most of what he said.

Don't quit on MNC.

I've been on the internet long enough to know that making any suggestions, regardless of how polite, will result in pure on dickery - thus I prefer to just stay quiet about my teammates play to avoid any yelling matches. Besides, I've yelled enough these past few days in private that I'd prefer to not actually vent out on another soul who is as bad or worse a player than I am.

Oddly enough, though, since I've started playing a bit more aggressively to push for the middle, I've noticed my kills are finally starting to get up. Before most of my deaths were in large part to me hanging back in hopes of turrets providing protection as well as newly spawned teammates - the game seems to have lightened up on the lag issue, though I haven't touched a single thing with my connection. There's still the odd moment where things don't work out, but at least it's not every time I hit a button like it was before.

Seems my last post kind of helped me out in some weird way because at least now I can break even on K/D and I'm starting to see more evenly squared matches, though one team will still be slammed with higher ranked, experienced players and their competitive tactics I've never seen before.

Better yet, I'm even living long enough to actually pull in juice and make mad dashes to either kill off their Moneyball or defense turrets to open things up.

Haven't read that link yet, will in a bit. Just finished up a few games and since my last vent on the game things have taken a bit of a turn for the better - not sure if maybe the timing of my play is what led me to finding more evenly matched games or if I'm actually turning the corner I was looking for days ago, but whatever the case is I'm not ready to put this game away just yet.

Hopefully the next few outings will be just as intense as I prefer that to either just slaughtering or being slaughtered.

And thankfully now it feels like using turrets and the Firebase have purpose, where as before I'd see them sit idle and do absolutely nothing. I honestly don't know what it is, but I'm starting to see what others found so appealing in this game, finally.

Thanks for all of the responses.

Regarding the opening post,

suggesting some class to begin with based on the assumption it is easier than other classes will lead to subpar results and an influx of said classes should players heed your advice.

Playing any class but assassin is manageable even as beginner; provided you do read up a bit on it if you're that new. Reading up on stuff as beginner is not a bonus but a requirement, you're about to play people who have done it most likely so not doing is being at a disadvantage. Anyone who doesn't read up is ill-intended when it comes to Crossfire.

Having more than 2 of the same class on one team gets boring, really quick.

I propose that you link to actual good guides for classes -pay attention to SXD24- which are valid given the current metagame and patch state. He already linked some but they are not necessarily up to date.

I will update my post to include some links which helped me form a good view about classes.

Disclaimer: I can't quite comment on the XBOX since I play PC; Scathis said the numbers aren't necessarily the same

It will help new players if you expand upon the following topics:

• 
  zoning
  laning
  proper assessment of what a class usually does on which map
  matchups
  what to do when pushing the offense
  why spawnkilling is nothing bad (despite it being a scary method for new players)
  fighting on your terms.

While it may overlap with most of the to be linked guides it would still serve as primer for some people who - for reasons unbeknownst to me - do not follow links. May even include the guides in a consistent style in this part; given the permission of the authors.

Anything that heightens the game for a generic player really, do not be afraid to make it some sort of MNC bible, provided you actually aim for such a thing.

Just stood up, could well be I do not even make sense.

Since the link's probably going to be in my signature for a while, I put up some updates. Most of it is put at the end, but I also put up a bit about turret strategy.

gtfo. If it ends up getting bumped, I'll feel obligated to have to edit it.