Anecdotes: soulcrushing mistakes of first time comms
amoral
Join Date: 2013-01-03 Member: 177250Members
Join Date: 2013-01-03 Member: 177250Members
Let's go with no names, and share your personal horror stories. Ambiguous trolls are allowed. I'll go first.
no response to initial inquiries of "have you ever commed before? can you hear me? please respond in some fashion comm." both written and spoken. guy grabs a couple rts, goes shift first, pretty standard stuff, though he's a bit slow on both counts. somewhere along the way, he decides that whips are a gift from the heavens and starts dropping them in the middle of res tower rooms... I don't know, to intimidate marines or something.
we start telling him to stop wasting res on whips, but to no avail. by this point we start asking for upgrades and he eventually drops a spur... a spur that he uses to get us adren... for the 7 skulks, 1 lerk and 1 gorge on the field...obviously we're stuck on one hive, so I ask for 10 minutes straight for celerity, meanwhile the guy is floating 50 res.
anyway, eventually he starts talking to us, and explains that it was difficult to hear us where he was at... which doesn't explain his not reading. eventually, he graciously decides to get me that celerity... 2 minutes before the giant exo push that wrecks our hive.
to sum up, noncomm comm, low res, whip drops, adrenaline only.
no response to initial inquiries of "have you ever commed before? can you hear me? please respond in some fashion comm." both written and spoken. guy grabs a couple rts, goes shift first, pretty standard stuff, though he's a bit slow on both counts. somewhere along the way, he decides that whips are a gift from the heavens and starts dropping them in the middle of res tower rooms... I don't know, to intimidate marines or something.
we start telling him to stop wasting res on whips, but to no avail. by this point we start asking for upgrades and he eventually drops a spur... a spur that he uses to get us adren... for the 7 skulks, 1 lerk and 1 gorge on the field...obviously we're stuck on one hive, so I ask for 10 minutes straight for celerity, meanwhile the guy is floating 50 res.
anyway, eventually he starts talking to us, and explains that it was difficult to hear us where he was at... which doesn't explain his not reading. eventually, he graciously decides to get me that celerity... 2 minutes before the giant exo push that wrecks our hive.
to sum up, noncomm comm, low res, whip drops, adrenaline only.
Comments
Learn the game before you even ever dare enter the comm chair. And if you do, use a mic. I'm happy to help out, but if you're clearly incompetent and aren't communicating, you will last about a minute before I get my team to eject you.
Once I had an alien comm on veil whose cyst chain was broken. We were in cargo and it was broken in system waypointing so essentially everything we controlled on the map, from sub up to overlook and over to nano, was cut off. We kept shouting at him to reconnect the cyst chain because there weren't any marines in system waypointing anymore, but he didn't do it. He didn't say anything. We lost everything we had. Eventually we kicked him (or he left, one or the other) and I jumped into the hive, fully expecting the game to end in about 2 minutes. Somehow, though, the marines were so bad that we actually managed to come back from it and still won.
- 3 armslabs but no upgrades
- weapon and armor 3, he sold the armslab: 'no need for research now, we have all the upgrades!' (didnt know if i should laugh or cry)
- troll coms: puts 3 wips at start, then quits
- researching exos or flamers before any weapon or armor ups
- rolling those arcs straight into the enemy hive. 'those tanks dont do anything, they suck'
- at start planting cysts all over the map, but no harvesters or upgrades. 'we had complete mapcontrol, why did we loose'
- not replacing cysts AT ALL
usual stuff: no upgrades, using distress beacon without knowing what it does and so on
"How do I beacon?"
"PG??? Phase gate? ??? ??? ???" *time passes* "Ahh, teleport"
"Jetpacks suck, we need exos"
"I think we need 2 whips around our first planted RT"
"Camo will secure a win for us!"
Actually I've seen that win before a few times... obviously only works if your skulks are actually decent and don't rush at marines to die.
While I do agree that playing the game from the FPS perspective first will give you a better feel of the over-all gameplay and "flow", I've seen more than one player doing a good job as commander with very little time played before. Will their lose? Very likely. Will they learn? I dare say that depends to no small amount on the way the team reacts.
Being new is not a "fault".
Ok, that out of the way, here's the story:
We were playing on tram as Aliens and controlled much of the map, We simply out-skilled the Marine team and so it didn't matter too much that our commander was extremely slow. But she had voip and commhnicated with us, so we could push her into the right direction. After a while we had our hives in server room and warehouse, the Marines were pinned down in Shipping trying to get a hold in Repair room every know and again. We were swimming in res, a little over 200 team res. We told our com to drop the hive in Elevator which was well defended. However she dropped the hive in Repair Room... right in front of a Phase Gate, Armory and half the Marine Team. Hive went down in seconds. A moment later our commander drop the hive again in Repair Room. And again. And again until our team res were depleted. Our team was "wtf are you doing com?" and she answered "I try to drop the hive but it seems to be bugged, it despawns all the time". Half the team was bursting out laughing, the others were likely too perplexed to say anything. We gorge rushed Shipping shortly afterwards. Lots of explosions and dead marines. Happy end.
Definitely. I've seen it done to success as well...I believe there was 2 rt's though, def much more difficult with just 1 rt. The whole no floor skulking running straight towards marine LOS really helps secure the success of this strat.
A troll comm dropped the hive, spent all remain res on cysts in the main base just wasting them taking us to 0 res, then left. Took forever to spread out and claim rts, let alone get upgrades to compete with the opposition. They had 3 tech points quickly.
I've seen a commander during the free weekend who wasn't doing too bad on the Marine side. But as the game went on and became more hectic, he was getting more and more nervous. In the end we had a nice Exo train walking through their last hive, but also had 2 Oni rush our last base. it was very close but we had enough team resources. As we saw the com chair's health go down we told the commander to put new CCs in the other locations, that would have given us the few seconds we needed. Commander seems to have panicked, because the last thing we saw was 2 Armories, Robotics Factory, Phase Gate and 3 Observatories being dropped somewhere.
In smaller servers yes works great for that spawn location. That tactic don't work the best on larger servers though.
that's awesome and amusing. oh God oh God, where the hell is this comma chairthey keep talking about.
it depends on my mood, whether or not I want to win, if its a greenie that jumps in, I kinda resign myself to losing. if its green comm vs green comm, I'm much happier with hand holding. that being said, if they don't type a reply to my initial inquiry, I lose patience very fast.
I'm like: "That's not an Armory, that's-- uh... you know those cabinet-type things that give you health and stuff? *awkward silence*
"The ones with, like- *drops the comm chair* "No, no, an Armory, look at your, uh... menu... thing *sigh*..."
(He got it right, eventually ^^)
that was extremely confusing
I did the exact same thing
"We need phase to pipe"
Builds CC. You know, BASE.