Making the step from pub hero to ENSL Gather-competent
Roobubba
Who you gonna call? Join Date: 2003-01-06 Member: 11930Members, Reinforced - Shadow, WC 2013 - Shadow
Who you gonna call? Join Date: 2003-01-06 Member: 11930Members, Reinforced - Shadow, WC 2013 - Shadow
I can be devastating on pub servers sometimes. I wrote a thread a while ago about consistency, and found the responses there very useful. I come up against top clan guys on public servers and am rarely embarrassed by how I do relative to them.
BUT:
I'm not a good player when it comes to ENSL gathers. My tracking with an lmg somehow goes out of the window, although I tend to do okay with the shotgun. My skulking is so-so.
Can those of you who have successfully made the transition from pub hero to someone who is at least competent in gathers give me some tips? Maybe it's psychological... I don't know...
BUT:
I'm not a good player when it comes to ENSL gathers. My tracking with an lmg somehow goes out of the window, although I tend to do okay with the shotgun. My skulking is so-so.
Can those of you who have successfully made the transition from pub hero to someone who is at least competent in gathers give me some tips? Maybe it's psychological... I don't know...
Comments
Have you eaten? I've found if I haven't eaten enough my hand shakes and my aim says goodbye.
I'm in Aus and try to participate in the occasional gather, did one last weekend and did pretty good in my opinion (we won so I guess that counts). My ping was 250 to 300.
Be sure to get your positioning correct, this isn't simply placing yourself in a location like a turret or sitting in the right bit of the roof to hide as a skulk, it's also heavily about movement arcs and lines. If there's a skulk running side to side, instead of tracking him with your mouse, strafe side to side and make minor adjustments with your mouse.
Most importantly, keep at it and improve your teamwork skills. Early on with gathers you will get frazzled and make a wrong decision getting yourself killed and possibly losing the match. Try not to repeat these mistakes.
Also try not to wonder off. When I first started doing 6v6 i found myself alone constantly and was getting my teeth kicked. Try to stick with a buddy when you can
Hopefully some one with more experience then me will reply, i'm sure there is a lot to say on the subject.
You need to convince yourself that you can easily beat them (they're all newbz!). It is much easier to play with that attitude from my experience. Smack talk might help, too.
Low Morale makes you lose games.
I get the idea from your posts that I've seen that you tend to play a gather here and there and then go back to pubbing for a while. You have to stick with it and just keep playing.
That said if I had to make a list of the most common mistakes I see new people to gathers make:
1) Wandering off doing whatever you think is important - maybe it is important, but typically its better to do something slightly less important as a group, then to all fail and accomplish nothing.
1.1) Not reacting to what your commander wants you to do. I commanded some gathers although I prefer to play, and when I have a newer team its really common that it takes them like 30-60seconds to group up somewhere when I ask them to do so, thats a lifetime in the game
2) Engaging too soon. There are a million points in comp ns2 where you can afford to let the enemy attack your buildings a little bit longer in order to wait for reinforcements. I see new players attack soon, die and then their friends die and they lose the position anyway. This is especially prevalent on aliens.
2.1) Engage in positions which are favorable to you. In pubs if you jump around off the walls and shit you can probably kill a marine down a hallway. In gather you probably won't even make it to him. You want to wait for a good position to engage in as skulks, and you want to avoid putting yourself in those positions as marine. Parasiting heavily will help significantly in this regard.
3) Predict your enemy, move slowly or occasionally quickly. This is something that really only comes with experience, and if you don't know what you should be doing, move slowly unless your commander, teammate tells you otherwise. As a commander I always try to pair up inexperienced players with experienced ones on splits for this reason. You want to be moving slowly most of the time, when you just run around crazily the other team is going to hear you, predict your movements and easily kill you. On the other hand, if you crouch move out of a doorway you can catch a skulk sitting on the wall and frag even a much superior player. There is NO RUSH in ns2, getting up an RT 15seconds earlier only gains you 2 res, dieing and not getting up the RT loses you a ton. Once you have killed a few players, or you have seen most of their team on the other side of the map, then its time to move quickly, otherwise where do you think the other team is...they are waiting for you to mess up.
And of course theres aim and movement but most people have these skills reasonably well under control before they decide to try out gather. Although I have still seen a few people who press backwards as a marine its unusual.
I'll just end off by saying if you can get really good at understanding the game and predicting your enemy, you can succeed without being a crack shot (still need to have decent aim, tracking).
Practice - 6v6 is so different from usual pub matches. Each player is far more important and you don't want to be the weak link.
Communication - Your team should spend a few minutes working out player roles and loose strategies (you need to be somewhat flexible in order to respond to enemy tactics) before the match starts.
Positioning - I've played with you before, so i know you've got this down pretty well already. Remember the buddy system and don't travel alone.
Contacts - try to play with a group of people regularly. over time you learn each others play styles and become more in tune with each other. Look at the way Archea play alien for example. they're so in tune with each other they come in and out of combat minimizing damage to single lifeforms.
Awareness - You should have a good idea of what the enemy team are doing at all times. Not had any combat for a while? be ready for an ambush (or base rush). Just seen 3-4 enemies die in quick succesion? you've got 30-40 seconds to push the attack uncontested whilst they re-spawn and regroup. You should know when higher lifeforms/ upgraded marines are coming onto the field and a rough idea of the Tres the enemy have. You should know the enemies targets too, so you can respond (cut off those higher lifeforms as they retreat/make sure marines don't get back to fallen weapons...Remember, gorge spit can knock weapons away if you've not got bilebomb up)
Performance - Naturally having a good frame rate helps you immensely, but you also have to consider that ENSL gathers use NSL versions of the maps. You may be used to the sometimes sloppy performance you get in public games and naturally compensate with your aim. It took me a while to adjust my aiming from back in the quake days where you had to lead your targets due to ping difference and even now my skill is inconsistent depending on the performance on the server (It doesn't help that i'm using a graphics card from the dark ages). You should try to find servers running NSL maps (there are a few) so your used to the smoother performance.
Not eating, being too cold, getting in a bad frame of mind, and getting too pumped by the occasion (too much self-pressure) are the biggest culprits to me progressing at the moment I think. Had a reasonable round as marine, then a diabolical alien round (lost my lerk through bad positioning (two marines coming round a corner I hadn't anticipated, I went the wrong way - totally bad macro positioning), lost another lerk, I can't remember how, then actually managed to do quite well as fade in the final stages - boy it was frustrating though. I know my 6v6 positioning and game sense is off, and I kinda know that it's really only practice that can improve this, but all the tips above are definitely helpful. Part of the issue is I have a young baby, so I can't commit lots of time to gathers (because of the occasional need to run off to sort that out), which is just circumstance that I have to work around. I definitely play as many as I can though, and will continue to so I don't feel like I'm holding my team back.
nakickstart
This is perhaps one of the most useful pieces of advice in the game. No matter how tempted you are to sprint in and smash that skulk with your rifle, or to sprint up behind that marine running down the hallway, silence is the key to success.
I've saved very many extractors simply because I snuck up on the skulk biting it, preventing him from reacting to me in time. Likewise, I've crawled across a wall or ceiling and got just close enough to a marine to prevent him from turning around that extra bit that would have saved him.
Remember: Move slowly and silently, not only will they not be able to hear you, you'll be able to hear them better.
I played 4 gathers yesterday during the daytime in the uk, and saw about 30-35 different players in that time.
The standard of play is on a whole different level to public servers.
So on both counts you are factually incorrect, and needlessly so.
I played 4 gathers yesterday during the daytime in the uk, and saw about 30-35 different players in that time.
The standard of play is on a whole different level to public servers.
So on both counts you are factually incorrect, and needlessly so.
I'll have to mostly disagree with this. While moving slowly has its advantages in the micro-level when trying to sneak up on your opponent, the biggest problem in public servers is that people are way too slow to navigate the map and tend to stay at the first extractors they have capped, thinking that after they've capped half the map, it's all and well to just sit around and defend. And when moving from place A to B, it needs to happen as quickly as possible. Good skulks know where you are whether you sneak or not, and if you're a capable marine, you can just as well scout your surroundings when sprinting than while crouching. "Hold shift to sprint" is one of the utterances I have to mutter in almost every public game.
There is an amazing amount of rush in NS2.
With practice you'll gain experience and it'll become second nature to react properly to certain types of play.
That is nice to hear. I have not even tried gathers in quite some time because it would take hours for a game to start, or not at all. Maybe I will start joining them again.
I am in a similar situation to Roobubba but probably not even as good as him by the sounds of it. Thanks for some valuable food for thought guys.
I find that gathers run fairly consistently from 3-12 EDT which I think is 9-3CET. And by fairly consistently I mean, wait times of less then an hour, usually whenever the previous gather ends the next one fills up shortly after.
Before and after this time period they run as well, just not as constantly.
Reddit pugs are also a great introduction to competitive play and run fairly consistently in the evenings EDT, and are a bit more casual then ENSL gathers. Join the steam group for info.
heres the steam group
it doesnt have the mumble port there for some reason but its
Port: 64738
If you join the group they send out steam alerts when they are doing the pugs. It may not be super great timing for you EU guys tho.
Awesome, thanks. I think that's the default mumble port so I guess that's why they don't state it!
Hopefully I will be around for a game or two sometime on this, but just got in some trouble with the mrs partly for playing so late, so maybe not...!
just be useful / work as a team / listen to teammates especially commander. if you're worried about your performance you can play roles that don't need super high skill
it just depends on the mix of players. some gathers will have really good players and some won't.
mumble is quicker.
sometimes you want to communicate with people outside of the game.. shocker, talking to people.
How is mumble quicker?
I'd wager the ingame one has just as low of latency.
Communicating with people outside of game is a good way to annoy the other players trying to communicate about stuff happening in the game.
Well, in my case, I am without a clan because I exclusively play Aliens + Lerk. So I don't really fit into a clan setting. I imagine that's the answer you'll get from many other lone wolves. They simply only enjoy playing one side whereas a clan would expect you to split your focus.