Clan r4: Rockets 4 Supper

A long drawn battle with aww led to a debriefing highlighting things we kinda knew, but never really worked on in the past.

1. TF2 and work don’t mix. We’re talking soy sauce and ice cream.
2. Our class choices, strategies, and formations are about as abundant and diverse as the amount of official TF2 maps.
3. We have communication issues.

Yes, communication issues. We’re all guilty of it, but the discussion came down to this: The less guilty we are, the more we ought to win. It’s a simple equation-

chance to win = strategy employed (this boils down to formations, movement patterns, sentry positions, classes used, role assignment) x skill of team (frequency of careless screw ups, individual class usage, team communication)

Let’s skip our limited playstyle as an issue for today. Baby steps.

Team communication is a lot bigger than we give it credit for. It doesn’t involve simple speech or shouting that a spy’s behind someone like a maniac. It’s also more than giving out key enemy positions and screaming “SAP OLEDI SAP OLEDI MOVE IN”. Team communication involves the affinity between teammates and reading their movements. Team communication goes beyond words- so i’ll list a couple of examples.

• Knowing when mouse is going to RJ up to point C so that malice can do the same
• Knowing malice is going to cover the right ramp so that mouse can cover the left
• Security in knowing that standing in front of the enemy uber-heavy combo is safe with our own uber in the bag
• Knowing when to move in with a flanking squad
• Knowing who will attack what
• Knowing where to draw or route enemy towards (i.e towards lone’s scout or towards pink’s heavy)
• Knowing which entrances are well covered and who’s back is covered by who

Amongst other things that we more often than not take for granted. It’s amongst the long list of issues we need to smooth out but what i thought was a valuable little gem brought up during the debrief was this: Every class has it’s own important role. HOWEVER, especially during defence, the medic has the unique job of carrying the team. Without the medic in that B house, the entire team is so ridiculously vulnerable- take the medic down and everyone dies for 17 seconds. He’s like the golden snitch of gravel pit. With that in mind essentially the medic should, and could, coordinate attack movements, call certain strategies, dictate classes and cover blind spots. Act like a commander if you will. Creating an organised defence or offence is much easier without a thousand and one ideas running about.

The medic has the world to carry, and he has to be comprehensive, decisive, calculating, perceptive and have a good amount of gameflow knowledge and his teammates’ abilities- all while staying ALIVE. That’s quite a bit of responsibility to bear. He also needs a team that trusts in his decisions.

There’s also the not-so-startling revelation that our gravel pit needs work, and that our strategies are about as gritty and rough around the edges as, ironically, a pit of gravel. So here, i’ll kick off contributions by offering the following links;

• http://tf2strategy.com/map-guides/gravel-pit/
• Control Point Podcast
• Game Almighty

Of course, feel free to leave any thoughts, strategies, and tidbits about the map in the comments. Or bring anything up at any time. Please. The more the merrier- we might just inadvertently stumble upon our next scrim winner.

So we’ll see what work we have to do, come Friday. Malice and mouse often reiterate that we have the skills and intuition, but poorly applied. I tend to agree. World class ingredients, sub par recipe. Enzo Ferrari, bad driver. It’s a matter of smoothing out the edges of a badly extracted diamond, but it’s all a matter of time.