A reasoned analysis of strategic play styles

A forthright post by a long-time player who embraces rather than shuns new players.

By Spongematt on August 31, 2009 6:44:50 PM from

-Noobs suck.

We all know it. We hate playing with them and semi-hate playing against them. That being said, as a community we should be embracing bad players and showing them the ropes. Yelling and bitching at new players will only serve to keep our pitifully small community ever smaller and less relevant.

This isn't difficult to grasp. The more noobs get serious attention and advice, the less noobs there will be. The less noobs there are, the better and more challenging our games will will be. The better the games get, the longer the game will be supported by a great community and therefore more modders and general development and evolution.

-Rage-quitters suck even more.

However much you may dislike noobs, you have to agree that rage-quitters are a far worse scourge. Like it or not we were all noobs at one point or another, but there is absolutely no excuse for poor sportsmanship. I know this is the internet, and shity attitudes are par for the course, but just try and restrain yourselves. This is a game.

-You can still have a great game with BOTH of these present on your team.

Please see the provided link for the game I am referring to. In this game I played on a team with an admitted noob (Taylor1), another noob in denial(-Dexter0), and a quitter(Starchy). I'm not calling Starchy out as a Rage-quitter because he didn't ditch us until he was sure we were going to lose. That is just plain quitting, not raging.

That being clarified, allow me to elaborate on the match. It ended with the following stats.

Spongematt lvl 20: 8 kills, 1 death

-Dexter0 lvl 14: 1 kill, 9 deaths

Starchy lvl 20: 8 kills, 1 death

Taylor1 lvl 16: 1 kill, 24 deaths.

That's right, we still won with a bad feeder no our team. He died 4 times in the first 2 minutes folks. And despite my pleading, he continued to play sloppy and ignore my advice about the importance of HP stacking and TP scrolls for a ROOK. Whatever, I wasn't about to quit. Dexter, bless his soul, was very enthusiastic and we couldn't have won without him, but he also played very sloppy. Starchy was awesome right up until he quit. Had he stayed for another 5 minutes he would have seen the victory. As you can see, not one player in this game has a positive win ratio except for myself. So I'm not going to stand here and tell you that I'm awesome. But I will tell you that this game ROCKED. It came down to the wire and we(Dexter and myself) pulled off a victory with 2 AIs. Dexter has a great attitude and now he can only get better. Taylor and Starchy, unfortunately, didn't see how we pulled it out of our asses and will therefore never know how we did it. So in case you are reading this now I will tell you.

-FLAG LOCKS!!!!!!!!!1

Oh My God flag locks are the single most important item in the game ever. EVER. Despite being FAR behind in kills and warscore the ENTIRE game, -Dexter0 and I(Spongematt) contained our depression and kept our eyes on the end-game. We sacrificed our lives to maintain lock dominance on the portal flags, once both teams had Giants with maxed creep upgrades. This was a 64 minute game with at least 60,000 gold spent per player. We spent every last penny on locks and teleports. I kept the base portals locked against intruders and teleported out to lock side portals AS SOON AS THEY EXPIRED from the previous lock. It only takes 2 players doing this constantly to completely dominate every portal on the map(Zikaraut) that matters. Dex followed a creep wave into the enemy base and locked down a base portal FTW. This game was so close it was retarded, and yes I realize it was another team full of noobs that we played against. It didn't make the victory any less satisfying. Because despite being outmatched in every metric possible I still had fun, and played my ass off for the win. Even though I wanted to Rage the very second I realized Taylor1 was a supernoob. So please keep that in mind, even though the game looked hopelessly silly after the first 5 minutes, I decided to stick it out and was rewarded with a GREAT game.

-Stay thirsty my friends.

0 Karma | 9 Replies

grats

... is this a real post or a joke post, I can't tell.

At least the title is better than "logical facts."

I like it when you play with noobs and still win, though I hate it when they totally ignore your advice, which usually leads to me calling them names after a while, as I wouldn't mind if they ragequitted coz the AI would be better... (Can't believe I said that).

We had a game last night I think, there was a noob rook on the enemy team who died quite a lot, but was pretty good at portalling out. We finished, then had a rematch and we messed with the teams to balance them out a bit, and we got him on our team. We gave him a bit of advice, and watched over him, and well he did a pretty good job that time and didn't die much.

I still think flag locks are too powerful, nothing more painful then a team perma locking your base portals non-stop with no chance to get them back. I've had come backs against a team who were several levels up and had pushed us back to our citadel, with the only defense left been the fortress right infront of it. I got back to base after taking a portal flag on left of map (leviathan map). I picked up catapults and giants as we had just gotten the warscore for them and I couldn't buy anything from artifact shop. I ran up the left side and managed to snipe a fleeing QoT who had ran out of mana to spam shield. Well our giants finished off the few towers they had left after my reg killed many towers early on, and I capped the flag and locked it as the enemies retreated. On the other side of the map to my surprise our TB had made it up the right side and capped/locked that one. We then proceeded to smash their base and keep it all perma locked. We won easily after that. We played against a tower eating rook with boulder/slam, QoT shield spammer with the debuffing AoE attacks and a very pro Oak who had been invincible most of the game.

In the end the only way we one which we should of lost anyway was due to lame portal caps. It was good strategy to get the NPC upgrades at the time, but still portal chain locking is pretty lame in my books.

Good post. I had a decent game last weekend where I held off the other team with 3 AIs for a good 20 minutes after we started losing and my other 3 teammates dropped. If one other person had stayed, we probably could have won...

As the quitter, let me just say it was really hard to leave that match, but real-world duties had to win out. I will normally stay until the bitter end and try to learn a little something on the way.

I'm a recent convert from the demo, playing probably my 3rd match ever with Oak. Spongematt was calling out plays left and right like some kind of immortal football coach. That was probably the best match I've ever been a part of, and I'm sorry I had to leave. It's players like that who are willing to advise the noobs and tolerate the quitters that will really help maintain and grow a good community.

I could feel the tide of battle turning but I just could not stay. Glad you managed to still pull it off. Sorry!

Dear Starchy,

Well I'm glad you've read this post and now know we won. We could not have pulled it off without you, that is until you left. I was really surprised when you did, so I guess it makes sense that you HAD to leave for real-life reasons. Anyway you rock as OAK especially for a new player. Look for my games, they are usually the US 4v4 Free Beer! custom games. Also, don't sweat the quit, sometimes we just have to leave, just next time tell us first.

Spongematt also gives out free beer. So thats cool, too.

Huh? Where's the reasoned analysis of strategic play styles?

The Forums Are Now Closed!

The content will remain as a historical reference, thank you.

A reasoned analysis of strategic play styles

A forthright post by a long-time player who embraces rather than shuns new players.