A Surprising Game
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Join Date: 2003-11-26 Member: 23600Members
Join Date: 2003-11-26 Member: 23600Members
<div class="IPBDescription">Or, how to not be hated as a newbie comm</div>We're all familiar with pub games where everyone stands around at the beginning waiting for a competent commander to step up to the chair. In my experience, this situation inevitably leads to marine defeat. Often you'll have a newbie jump in the chair, drop IPs and armory, and either get out again, or stay in and have the rest of the team hurl obscenities at him until the aliens eat everyone.
Tonight, that didn't happen.
The map was ns_caged. A guy named despair jumped in the chair after it was apparent we didn't have anyone who really wanted to be comm. He explained he wasn't very good at it (and it showed, a little: he dropped the armory in the back corner of the room with the chair, for example) but he listened when we asked for buildings and supported the team very well. We took double res, held it until a phase gate was put up, and moved on to generator hive, and locked it down. Much of the team spread out to take resource towers and we ended up with plenty of cash to continue. In the midst of this, though, we switched commanders: Foxtrot_Uniform took over.
In my experience, that spells disaster for the team: it takes a few minutes for a commander to get oriented when taking over from someone else, or it's done when the team is thrown on the defensive and things are too late to salvage. This time, it worked well. We went on to siege sewer hive and eventually ventilation. We held most of the RTs on the map early and kept their res flow minimal.
To me, the interesting question is how this happened, given that this game followed the pattern of failure i've seen in the past -- newbie comm starting a little late, comm switching in the middle -- but went on to such success. I think the key is that both of our commanders used the voice comm a lot to tell us what was going on, what he was planning, and responding to our requests. Even when the response is "I'm busy doing (whatever)" or "No, i don't have the res for medpacks", it's a lot better than silence. despair apologized a couple times for mistakes, but nobody got upset at him: <i>because we knew he was paying attention to the team</i>.
Moral of the story? Talk to your marines, commander. They need to know you care.
Tonight, that didn't happen.
The map was ns_caged. A guy named despair jumped in the chair after it was apparent we didn't have anyone who really wanted to be comm. He explained he wasn't very good at it (and it showed, a little: he dropped the armory in the back corner of the room with the chair, for example) but he listened when we asked for buildings and supported the team very well. We took double res, held it until a phase gate was put up, and moved on to generator hive, and locked it down. Much of the team spread out to take resource towers and we ended up with plenty of cash to continue. In the midst of this, though, we switched commanders: Foxtrot_Uniform took over.
In my experience, that spells disaster for the team: it takes a few minutes for a commander to get oriented when taking over from someone else, or it's done when the team is thrown on the defensive and things are too late to salvage. This time, it worked well. We went on to siege sewer hive and eventually ventilation. We held most of the RTs on the map early and kept their res flow minimal.
To me, the interesting question is how this happened, given that this game followed the pattern of failure i've seen in the past -- newbie comm starting a little late, comm switching in the middle -- but went on to such success. I think the key is that both of our commanders used the voice comm a lot to tell us what was going on, what he was planning, and responding to our requests. Even when the response is "I'm busy doing (whatever)" or "No, i don't have the res for medpacks", it's a lot better than silence. despair apologized a couple times for mistakes, but nobody got upset at him: <i>because we knew he was paying attention to the team</i>.
Moral of the story? Talk to your marines, commander. They need to know you care.
Comments
And please guys...don´t flame evry noob commander. we all have to try comming a first time before we become good at it.
By and large it makes you popular. Your soldiers feel involved and committed to the cause and know why what they're doing is important. And as has been said, they know that you listen and consider almost all their requests.