A very common pitfall in low level 6v6 teams, is people tending to wander off alone, mostly blamed on lack of teamwork, naturally derived from the fact they don’t know their roles on the battlefield as well as they should.
People write giant guides about all sorts of things that are supposed to help one improve, but really there’s only one basic principle you must understand. Indeed, TF2 is not a massively complex game :)
Stop seeing the game as an FPS. Rather, look at it as if it were a strategy game. After all, you don’t win by top fragging – you win by capturing control points (in most cases anyway). To be more precise, you win by controlling ground. Area control!
“But if I kill everyone we can go wherever we want!”
Correct, and while being able to go wherever you want is how you win, you don’t necessarily have to kill anyone in order to achieve this. Hence, area control is more important than fragging. That’s not to say you should never kill anyone – in fact, very often you need to get kills in order to advance, but just don’t forget it’s not the main goal in the game.
Now then, with that thought firmly printed in the back of our heads, how do you do this? Well that’s where stuff gets a tiny little bit more difficult. In an FPS, you click on people and you win. In a strategy game, you can do millions of different things and all of them might be viable ways to gain victory.
Area control is about gaining ground whilst making sure your opponent isn’t given an opportunity to do the same. You have 6 people at your disposal, each with different assets. Think top-down 3rd person view here. Where do you place your assets?
That is what 6v6 (and TF2 in general) is about.