Most of us have done it.  All of us have had it done to us.  Your team is getting creamed, you run out of the spawn, BAM -- you're on fire, or you've been stickied to pieces, or you're face to face with an L3 sentry.  Is this 'cheating'?

The 'cheating' argument:
- it makes a bad situation worse for an already losing team.
- it's no fun for the guys on the receiving end.
- I just ran out the door, I wasn't expecting to get attacked already!  Let me play the game!

The 'not cheating' argument:
- you wouldn't be getting spawn camped if you knew how to prevent it.
- you could stop the spawn camp if you knew what you were doing.
- just because i'm spawncamping you now doesn't mean you couldn't come back and win.
- you should be on your guard AT ALL TIMES, not just when you've reached the frontline.

To me it's not cheating at all.  You got yourself into that situation, and you could get yourself out.  Also, you're at your SPAWN -- this is fighting from a position of great strength.  You control when the door opens, you have infinite ammo/health right next to you, you can change to any class you want.  If you can't kill me with all those advantages, isn't it obvious you deserve to lose?

So what does everyone think?  Spawn camping A-OK or no?

This has been done to death, and the general agreement seems to be, if your team is doing so poorly you are getting spawn camped, it's your fault.

However, on public play the environment is meant to be fun and not too competitive, so it's generally frowned upon, since it really isn't fun to wait 15 seconds to respawn only to get killed because nobody on your team knows how to communicate.

I'm inclined to think that most of the activites that players involve themselves in with TF2 are hardly ethical, be it stabbing others in the back, braining them with a wrench, blowing them up, or building machines do do such things for you.  Spawncamping is never popular, people will bitch about it, but no, it's not really against the rules.  I bitch about spawn camping in the same way I bitch about the existance of spies.

:>

I camped Gman's sisters spawn.

Who is this Gman everyone refers to, he's not as cool as GMan.

I spy the spy that's a lie!

I think spawn camping's fine unless it's with a sentry. 

I think sentry's are the easiest thing to take out at spawn.

Demo+Stickies = No Sentry.

It's definitely fine in matches/scrims/competitive games. It's still fine in pubs, but it's kinda bad manners.