Week 4 - White Pass CQ 6 Jul - 12 Jul - vs =DAC=Crusaders

[SloDaz]

I also felt that it took a while to get my eye in.... i was monitoring my kd and for the first 10 min it was negative - i was all over the place. Then i started settling in and getting it right. Finding places to flank, changed my kit, working on being a spawn point, working with my team, listening to where the enemy was and focusing my fire - and ending up with a positive kd. Only thing was that because i was getting hammered all the time, i tended to stay away and fight from the distance. It was only Voetsek's shouting that got me anywhere near the flag.

In the first game we lost our spawn point 3 times and ended up back at our base. I dont think we have a tactic for taking back the flags. I mean do we form a massive group and head straight for the flag, do we split up, do we go for the back flags????

Would it help if we had a warm up session just before the game, we could book the Grrr server 30 min before the game and then make sure we only play matches at 20:30.... We could split into two squads and play for one flag...

Skoups can you send me the final points scored so that i can enter them into the match server

[Paul]

KDR is not the most important thing in clannies. If I remember correctly they didn't have great KDR's at the end of the rounds either but it was because they held the flags that they won.

Flags win matches, simple as that, especially with the ticket bleed being increased since the last patch

[pmurgs]

Only thing was that because i was getting hammered all the time, i tended to stay away and fight from the distance. It was only Voetsek's shouting that got me anywhere near the flag.

Only problem with this is, your not bleeding tickets because you die, but you are bleeding tickets because they hold the flag. Fine balance that I think we need to work on... not rushing in too quickly, but once we have the upper hand, we all need to be on the flag pronto.

Once we do kill off their squad protecting a flag and take the flag back, we quickly need to move ahead to intercept the enemy before they have spawned and managed to run back to the combat area. Basically... we need to have a plan, of what to do, when we secure our objectives. A plan that keeps each squad close together, so revives can happen and so that we can intercept the enemy when they come back, and we are in a position of strength that also gives us a good view of the field. We need to work on this being done as a team with the squad leader calling us to move to that position.

[Megageth]

I enjoyed myself. True we could have won but it was a good competitive match and we can learn from this one.
I enjoy competitive games, even if we dont win.

USEFUL RANT

The opening moves worked ok. Where we went wrong, and Murgs commented on this on TS after the game, was setting up defense of B.
After capping we all stood in the open right next to the flag. What we need to do is push on just past the flag and find a nice camping spot looking at where they will be coming from.
We also lost shape at some points and often I noticed that I was the only one at one side of B with noone to revive me. These urban maps where medic whoring works well require us to play in proximity of each other.

Composure. In past games where we were getting throttled I have lost my rag and started running around like a turkey. With 200+ tickets in a round, we can lose all the flags and still pull it back. Key is to get large squads in good positions to attack flags and that means taking a bit of time to gather together. When we are without flags EVERYONE needs to slow down, wait for an SL to come up with a plan and move QUICKLY to get into position. Do not panic. If you are not sure what to do at any point of the match, assess. What we did in BF2 which could be useful was not to spawn straight away but rather to tell the SL you are waiting to spawn. SL can say "Spawn at B to defend" or "Spawn medic on me" etc.

One point that did urk me greatly about last nights game is an issue that players dont seem to learn. I saw players standing just outside the capping zone of B shooting at enemies when we didnt have B. I had to say "Get on the flag" many times and I heard Jonny singing the same song. These are basics, much like aiming before you shoot so I am baffled that we as a team are still struggling with this.

We are a team that plays based on availability. We do not have 8 players who can guarantee availability for 2 pracs and 1 match every week. Most of us are work and have families so realistically this is not possible. We will always have to rotate and work with different people. We will always be a work in progress. Lets be patient and get the basics right.

[Skouperd]

First things first, if you are easily offended , stop reading NOW.

Debrief
I am not a person that likes to mince words; I tend to say it as I see it. This has caused me a lot of kak in the past, but you know what, shit happens. Looking at yesterday’s game, I am going to post something on each player, both the positives and the negatives. I have never been interested in popularity contests or any other stuff like that, so I am really expecting (hoping actually) for some harsh truths back at me because that is the only way I will improve my personal game as well. See these comments in the same light, there are ment to asses how we can all improve our individual games as well as our team game.

Starting off with myself: I was the dedicated APC driver as well as the commander. As the dedicated APC driver, I found that the APC got destroyed 5 times in the first round, and 6 times in the second, that is just unacceptable. This especially sucks on this map, because that removes the APC for 182 seconds out of the game. Granted, while I was waiting on the APC to spawn, I did go infantry and did act as a save spawn point. Analyzing why the APC was destroyed, I found that it was every time it was because it advanced too far forward without the support of infantry. Granted, moving forward did result in capping the flag once or twice and did allow the rest of the team to move in closer, but still losing the APC for 3 minutes is unacceptable especially given the fact that we’ve battled to defend the “B” flag with just infantry. My two main jobs in the match were to ensure that we never lose our closest flag, and though the enemy did attempt it on numerous times, we never lost our flag for more than a couple of seconds due to having the right resources at the right time on that flag. My second job was to ensure a win, and from that regard, an EPIC FAIL. My personal communication on TS I thought was ok, I think everybody knew exactly when the APC will spawn. That intel resulted in j0nny stealing their APC on 2 occasions, but unfortunately, I think he was the only person actually listening to that intel. If you know that the enemy will bring armor to the party in 30 seconds, why then did we had so few engineers focusing on taking out that APC? Now, this is my own personal assessment on my own game play, please, you have not read the comments yet, and I am not fooling around with some of them, so please give me honest comments on my game as well.

Megageth. Mega was the assigned squad leader in the absence of Shadey who pulled out early the day. Actually, Mega would never even have played in the match if it wasn’t for some pretty late withdrawals. There was a very good reason on why Mega was the squad leader and why people should have listened to him. Mega had an awesome killing spree with the most kills by far in both teams. As squad leader, it was Mega’s role to keep the squad in check, and that is not something that happened at all. People was rushing in pairs attacking the “B” flag, instead of moving as a single force. People were standing all over the show, not knowing what to do. Obviously, Mega knew exactly what to do given his personal play, but that knowledge did not translate back into a squad formation. In Mega’s defense, the amount of chatter happening on TS in the game deafened any orders and commands that Mega could have issued. Overall, as a warrior Mega did exceptionally well, as a soldier, not so well. (A warrior is an individual; a soldier is part of a team). A tip Mega, increase the volume of your MIC so that people can hear what you are saying. Or be hard arse and tell your squad to keep quiet.

Shadey, even though she did not play the game, she did participate in the practice on Wednesday and was indeed the squad leader involved with final team selection. Pulling out, making space for Paul is a noble cause, but a short sighted one. Paul may be a better ground pounder than you, but the infantry squad needed leadership. Good individual players doesn’t win matches, good teamwork does. A good leader should not drop a squad like that.

J0nny, did not participate in the practice session, did not know the building names and as a result had a kak KDR. However, j0nny was one of the few people that listened during the game to his orders and he followed them without arguing about it. Especially listening when the enemy APC will spawn, making sure you are getting in the right position, or getting some decent cover, and even better, sneaking around to steal it! J0nny’s personal communication was exceptional, short, to the point and relevant intelligence as and when it was needed. He even told Paul to shut the fuck up. We appreciate that real life will always have to come first and practise sessions will not always be possible, but we definately need to try.

Paul, geezus dude! Go to your nearest computer shop and buy another mic. They cost about R30, and if you are really desperate I will actually sponsor you one, but for phuck sakes, stop using your current mic. Your voice comes through all distorted on our side. Ok, onto Pauls’ game. Paul made some extremely valid observations during the game, for instance, the infantry squad rushing in manno-o-manno and just getting slaughtered. A voice of reason to some extend, however Paul, repeating this every 5 seconds, while Mega who is the squad leader was trying to regroup the squad, DOES NOT HELP the situation. Between you and Voetsek, you two were basically drowning everybody’ else and issuing orders left right and centre. Yes, your observations was correct, yes, your assessment of the situation was correct, yes, even your orders was correct, but you were not the squad leader, Mega was. Mega needed to make the calls, not you. By you giving orders, Mega trying to give orders, Voetsek giving orders, no wonder the rest of the infantry squad was running around like headless chickens.

Voetsek, an awesome player, somebody that is able to assess the situation of the whole map, somebody that can read other people’s play with limited communication and somebody that is not scared to make a decision in the heat of battle and able to provide logical reasons for that decision after the game. Voetsek’s play resulted in about an even KDR each round. However voetsek, you too were giving a lot of orders, and yes those orders might have been the right ones, but like Paul, your orders, was just causing a lot of kak for everybody else because they did not know who’s orders to follow. As SloDaz said, he moved when you said so, he should have moved when MEGA said so. The biggest problem right now is because we have so many exceptional individual players, all leaders in their own right, it is sometimes difficult to sit back, and just follow somebody’ elses orders. It is important that the squad leader and the commander can trust that his orders will be followed, even though you may not agree with those orders, please follow them to your best ability because that is the difference between individual play and team work. We have exceptional individual players, but crap team players.

Murgs, a very silent player, reaching the highest rank the game offers (once again, congrats on that Murgs). By far the person with the most experience combined with a very cool head in battle, Murgs was exceptionally quiet on TS. Talking only when he shared very valid intel, (3 in the American Longhouse), (4 people moving towards the UAV). Murgs, your communication in the game was spot on, well done. On a performance level, I don’t think you had your best ever personal game yesterday, but you were definitely one of the solid players. The only time when I caught you slightly off guard was when you and Slodaz moved almost level with the Bus Condo / UAV house. Slightly to far forward, but once you were made aware of it, you and Daz both started moving back into the infantry line. Good solid play from you Murgs.

Slodaz, the dedicated spanner monkey who failed to reverse the APC, aah, those memorable moments in the game. Overall, you were very quiet in the game on TS which is a good thing given that we’ve asked nicely that we reduce chatter half time. Slodaz focused on the job at hand and solved the problems. Slodaz was also one of the few people that listened to when certain things was called out, spawning as engineer when needed. You did make me exceptionally nervous in the beginning of the game when you’ve said that your line was dropping a couple of minutes before the time…memories of our first game, playing with just 7 players popped back into my head. That ain’t exactly the stuff we need to hear when we were scrambling for players in any event and having people like Shadey and Lep sitting out on the side lines. Also, before the game, you were shooting the heavy machine gun as if it was going out of fashion, now it may give you an extreme adrenalin rush to shoot at the clouds, but geez, the noise!

Fly, I must sincerely apologise because you were one of the only guys in the team that I don’t have a lot to say about. You did not have a great KDR, but I think you did manage to revive a lot which makes up for it. You were very quiet on TS, and from what I’ve observed, did exactly what you needed to do. I am really sorry if you do feel left out now.

Generic Comments:
Despite what Paul is saying that it is flags that win games and not kills, I am not sure I agree 100% with that statement as it stands. I’ve been analyzing the kills / deaths for the last two games (i.e. after the patch) and the points we lost with is more or less the same as the delta KD between the two teams. You can make the assumption that both sides revive each other in equal rates (i.e. every 3 kills 2 gets revived or something), and both sides will hold the flags about the same amount of time, which leaves the difference to kills. In statistical terms, the correlation between the KD and the tickets produced a correlation coefficient in excess of 0.7 which makes KD statistical significant in predicting the winning team. As Murgs said, it is a very fine balance between keeping the flags a sufficient amount of time, and killing a sufficient amount of enemies.

After the game Voetsek made a comment that armor should be going to people that specialize in armour, well I did the analysis before getting into the armor, here is the armor usage for the Danglers as at the beginning of the week:

Name: Skouperd Hours Used: 32.35 Kills: 1324 Kills / game: 1.53 % of time: 20.62%
Name: pmurgs Hours Used: 17.78 Kills: 1202 Kills / game: 0.56 % of time: 04.19%
Name: L3pr3c4un Hours Used: 20.42 Kills: 1073 Kills / game: 1.21 % of time: 12.77%
Name: Megageth Hours Used: 18.25 Kills: 1029 Kills / game: 0.74 % of time: 07.06%
Name: [grrr] Paul Hours Used: 17.51 Kills: 905 Kills / game: 1.08 % of time: 10.74%
Name: [grrr]j0nny Hours Used: 12.35 Kills: 745 Kills / game: 0.62 % of time: 05.50%
Name: Voetsek Hours Used: 12.82 Kills: 620 Kills / game: 0.68 % of time: 07.78%
Name: NiteShade Hours Used: 10.73 Kills: 428 Kills / game: 0.42 % of time: 05.91%
Name: [grrr]Onyx Hours Used: 11.82 Kills: 402 Kills / game: 0.39 % of time: 06.38%
Name: [grrr]Fly Hours Used: 6.62 Kills: 349 Kills / game: 0.44 % of time: 04.75%
Name: SloDaz Hours Used: 7.60 Kills: 348 Kills / game: 0.48 % of time: 05.84%
Name: grav1ty Hours Used: 6.05 Kills: 307 Kills / game: 0.88 % of time: 09.43%
Name: Dragonne Hours Used: 6.24 Kills: 302 Kills / game: 0.46 % of time: 05.54%
Name: [grrr]leelo Hours Used: 4.66 Kills: 277 Kills / game: 0.25 % of time: 02.22%
Name: Phatso Hours Used: 2.73 Kills: 210 Kills / game: 0.69 % of time: 05.22%
Name: Baseline Hours Used: 3.41 Kills: 111 Kills / game: 1.35 % of time: 22.68%
Name: Icenflame Hours Used: 2.44 Kills: 84 Kills / game: 0.17 % of time: 03.10%
Name: Jackal-GI Hours Used: 2.00 Kills: 65 Kills / game: 0.21 % of time: 03.54%
Name: Cr0n0s Hours Used: 1.44 Kills: 64 Kills / game: 0.37 % of time: 05.06%

% of time refers to the amount of time spend in armour divided by the total amount of time you've played BC2. So on certain stats there might have been better APC drivers especially when looking at kills per minute, but in my view, that relates to an aggressive driver that pushes his nose into the middle of a fight and thus resulting in the quick destruction of the tank / apc. In general though, I think I can hold my own in amour.

When j0nny stoled the APC, I've asked him to give it to Voetsek, now the reason why I did that despite j0nny proberbly belonging in the APC more than Voetsek, was simply because Voetsek at that stage was an engineer and j0nny was recon. It did not make sense for him to be driving an APC. The second time, when j0nny managed to steal the APC, our APC was down and I took it, again j0nny was recon or medic and it did not make sense. I was extremely aggressive with that APC because I knew exactly how long it would have taken before our APC spawns again.

[Paul]

You know what Skoup you can take your advice and shove it!


Nah I am just joking. I think this is good, we have all made generic observations in the past but I think everyone doesn't think they are guilty of it. Now I know my personal weakness's (I didn't know my MIC was that bad ) I can fix them.

Now for my comment on you. (Rubs hands in glee)

You have clearly displayed that you have no trouble with mincing words by the above post but you didn't bring this across in game. Maybe it was mine and Mikey's chatter in game but I had no idea that the APC was getting destroyed because it was pushing forawrd too much.

Once you realised this, you should have said in no uncertain tersm "I am not bringing the APC forward, I am staying at the back"
Similarly you should have said (like j0nny) "Paul and Mikey shut up we can't hear anything else"

You are the defacto commander so sometimes you need to scream at us. I know we shouldn't have to be treated like children but there is a time. We have thick skin, we can take it and will thank you if we win.

[pmurgs]

My thoughts on Skoup's rant (please be even more critical skoups, as long as you keep putting up the warnings about being harsh).

Stealing the enemy APC... I think we need to assign one or two players, who will try for this, if and when suitable. I personally ignore you Skouperd when you say the enemy APC is about to spawn, as I'm not planning on going to steal it. We can't have all 8 players deciding to make their way over to steal it.

Fighting with armor. I know keeping the APC alive is a good thing, but there is another fine line here to find. The armor needs to be useful.
When it spawns and you drive it in, if the enemy is all medics since they havent faced armor for 3 minutes, the APC can go "Ta da! Run! Hide you cowards, I'm big and nasty and you can't hurt me!". This disrupts the enemys momentum and forces them to get behind stuff, thereby seriously reducing their tactical visibility and what they can shoot at. Of course then they will soon spawn engineer, then its time for our armor to do it's best to duck and cover, so their engineers waste time trying to hit it. This is the point that our infantry should find it easier to make progress against their infantry.
But back to my point... armor must be useful even if it dies some of the time, compared to having it alive but not being much use. Armor greatly assists the infantry in doing their job if both work together.

Teamspeak... yes, too much dumb chatter. It would help me follow orders better, if only Skoups and the two squad leaders ever issued orders. Pauls mic is fine for me though, it's just his voice thats the problem

Medic's... reviving was pretty good, but could be better imo. Couple times I was left to rot with a medic a couple meters from me who was not shooting at anything. But overall, reviving was good.

Personally, I think we need to think long and hard about finding a good counter to the all medic squad. During the match I kept finding myself facing two or three or four enemies shooting at me as soon as I started shooting at one of them. Because they just kept reviving each other, it was hard to kill the enemy as there often were a bunch of them together, since reviving is so quick. If we can't find a workable anti-medic squad tactic, then maybe we should adopt the tactic as our primary tactic. I'm even willing to hang up my toob if this is the case and put on one of those stupid red hats and go practise on the public servers.

[Paul]

Murgs has a good point (not about my voice, it is beautiful). We need specialist in each area. For example when we played BF2 clannies, Mikey was our resident C4 guy. If we every captured their base, he automatically knew to spawn as Spec ops and blow their toys.

Similarly we need specialist in BC2, so that if a call is made for a specific action then that person knows it is their job and the rest of us can carry on.

Some specialist roles
- Armour Stealing grease monkey
- Non PJ wearing Ninja
- Spanner Monkeys (if the call is made for engineers they spawn)
- Medical whores (Lazuraus life breathers)

[Megageth]

Given our rotational team, I think everyone should practice with Medic and Engineer kits. They are as with BF2, the most useful.
Medics should always kit with the tracer dart, you have enough bullets in the LMG not to have to use the pistol.

I use the following as Medic:
MG36 (Comes with red dot scope)
Tracer
Fast sprint (move quickly between flags)
Magnesium bullets
Alternative Fire

I have seen a lot of good players using the T88 LMG seemingly with the personal armour perk. Also quite powerful.

PS Good comments there Skoups, what I would like to say is that it is impossible for 1 man to control the whereabouts of 3-7 others who are squad hopping and wandering off by themselves as well as stay alive and shoot at the red guys. What I have tried to instill in previous comments is that everyone needs to think about what is happening and where they need to be. That aspect during last nights game was not good. I had a few instances where I waited for 2 to spawn on me, said "lets go up the ridge to attack B" and found myself alone because the others wandered off. By the end of the game I was turning around every few seconds to make sure my squad was following me.

If we are being honest and critical then I will say this: There are only 2 players in our entire clan whose squad discipline I have complete confidence in. Its not a question of skill, its a question of self-discipline. Thats not to say I dont enjoy squadding with everyone but some make my job as SL very easy.

[Paul]

Well I went out now and bought a headset/mic combo thingie. It isn't top of the range but it should be an improvement over my previous set.

So I have already improved on one of my points, what about the rest of you noobs?