Teamplay, how can we resurrect it?

[Tomas_of_Miles]

I think the in-game voice commands are underrated. Of course they are prone to spam, but with enough people proclaiming logical sequences of orders in conjunction with capital letter team chat orders, a few people follow. When you have a consistent looking blob of people you can expect a lot of others to join the crowd.

[Joker86]

You just need a spam control, because at the moment I don't pay any attention to this, as usually someone is only spamming "man the catapult"-shouts, and even if someone was trying to corrdinate something, the other spammers make it really difficult to distinguish his commands. The only thing I really pay attention to are the cavalry warning sounds.

Edit: lol, I wrote this without even having read your signature   

[Tomas_of_Miles]

You just need a spam control, because at the moment I don't pay any attention to this, as usually someone is only spamming "man the catapult"-shouts, and even if someone was trying to corrdinate something, the other spammers make it really difficult to distinguish his commands. The only thing I really pay attention to are the cavalry warning sounds.

Edit: lol, I wrote this without even having read your signature   

When you hear "I am building a catapult." you can be damn sure I'm serious.

[dado]

I miss when there were tactics all the time, even the more simple ones, really made for a more fun experience on the servers.

However, how it usually goes when trying to apply team-play onto battle is that one or several important players gets switched to the other team due to auto-team-balance, and slowly (but rather quickly since its per map) people trickle offline instead, who wants to play on the other side alone while your friends are having fun together. When I try to lead the Nords I almost always get balanced over to the other team, which means at least I cannot lead them.

Also having the battalion flag on you while fighting really skews up your point of view unless using first person.

If there is any way to fix auto team balance in this engine, so that banner balance is absolute unless it is the last resort to balancing the teams, then I'm 100% confident we would see an overall more tactical game on the servers, just make sure the two largest banner groups always ends up on each their team, should help ensure balance.

THIS AND THIS AND THIS !!!! i remember idea when u enter the server u can enter you "code" or "pin" (so 5 guys from same clan will enter same code and balance will keep them together) but it did not work good.. maybe devs could work more on that idea ?

[Tot.]

1. I guess not many of us remember it but there was a commander system back in the days where there was exp/gold area-based. IIRC it was a randomly picked high-level player from the team whose role was to set a flag on the ground - where he wanted his teammates to be - and their choice was either to follow the orders or to get less rewards for playing. If my memory doesn't play tricks on me there was an announcing text every round saying that "Team A is led by <player's name here>". I'd say that those were the times when there was the most teamplay, though the system itself was rather poorly designed as it forces ie. cavalry to stay so close.

2. About pubbers and their behavior: generally speaking, from what I've seen, people will follow orders and act reasonably when they see that there's an organized group of people, they tend to follow them, might be it's just the herd instinct but the outcome is the same, zerging wins battles. Forging a higher standard of teamplay surely must be done first in the communication respect, aka. implementing better voice communication. In short, Thomek, you have my sword if your intention was to set things in motion ie. by specifying a ts server where "teamplayers" can join while they're playing in general, or, better, if we would just announce say "teamplay nights" where everyone willing to play as an organized group of people would set a selected banner, get on teamspeak and play together regardless of their clan allegiance.

[SixThumbs]

http://wolverine.x-knights.com/sounds/wolv61.wav

[Gisbert_of_Thuringia]

Thomek you know that a high k/d or a high gen or whatever doesn't make a good leader?

Why should I follow a person who is just running around killing people for his epen? 
And yes it is quite easy to lead on a battleserver, just start it.

We won one map completely yesterday and the other map we won 3 times, lost 1 or 2 and won again afterwards. Just by keeping the people together and telling where to attack.

[Glyph]

Thomek you know that a high k/d or a high gen or whatever doesn't make a good leader?

Why should I follow a person who is just running around killing people for his epen? 
And yes it is quite easy to lead on a battleserver, just start it.

We won one map completely yesterday and the other map we won 3 times, lost 1 or 2 and won again afterwards. Just by keeping the people together and telling where to attack.

no, but gens and k/d make you a better leader then some random guy.

[dodnet]

no, but gens and k/d make you a better leader then some random guy.

Not necessarily.

[Thomek]

Because a round W:L ratio should bring out his teamwork abilities. And/Or leadership. Not just score..

Let's say a pikeman who likes to support, an archer, or someone kiting half the enemy team away from the action. W:L ratio doesn't care how you win rounds. And since autobalance weighs in players individual skill in the form of K:D ratio, that player will also have a fairly even W:L ratio..

[Joker86]

So no one supports the forum vote solution? 

[Thomek]

Forum vote is better than nothing

But it's also not fair. Perhaps there are less active forumers, or relatively unknown players having lots of talent for commanding. On the other hand the community is not that big so..

I think W:L ratio would be more true.. It would also inspire people with ambition to be leaders to crack the teamplay code, and really try to push the W:L in their favor.

[a_bear_irl]

the main problem with being an internet general is it makes people really mad at you and nobody really enjoys being berated/banned nonstop (see:spookisland)

[Elmokki]

If there is a commander system it needs tangible benefits tied on success. Best I can think of is additional bonus when your team wins. It could just be extra x ticks of xp and gold or if the multiplier cap was higher, double multiplier gain.

But no bonus from failing team. Automatic valor would just be sad since that way everyone would accept being a commander and just play  normally

[Joker86]

Forum vote is better than nothing

But it's also not fair. Perhaps there are less active forumers, or relatively unknown players having lots of talent for commanding. On the other hand the community is not that big so..

I think W:L ratio would be more true.. It would also inspire people with ambition to be leaders to crack the teamplay code, and really try to push the W:L in their favor.

My main character is still a relict from pre-upkeep-times, it's probably one of the worst lvl 30 builds ever, as a lot of changes (slot system, reduced max WPF, increased item difficulties) rendered this build more than useless. And due to the break I took my fighting skills are still bad, although I slowly start to be able to block more than twice in a row again. All I can use for fighting is a quarter staff. As you can imagine, my K/D is becoming worse constantly (thank god it's still positive due to past times  ), so there is no chance that when I write something anybody will think "Hey! This is a good player! Let's listen to him."

And yet my W/L is rather good. Why?

Bannerskills! 

I know the banners of all bigger clans on EU1, and whenever I see one clan dominating I change my banner and win. Sure, this is a miserable behaviour, but I tell everyone all the time what I do to piss people off, to eventually make them support any request to the developers to change this retarded system. The point is: I am sure I am not the only one doing so. Does this make me a good leader? Nope! An asshole? A bit.

Honestly, I think if you would just look at W/L ratios, you would have those top clan players as result, and I think most of them (except of Phazh, perhaps) don't give a fuck about leading the others. Being a good fighter puts a lot of people under some kind of "Pygmalion effect", creating some pressure to preserve the "name" they made themselves and thus they concentrate on killing. And what would be if you would have someone with a good W/L-ratio who is completely uninterested in leading, while the enemy team has someone really dedicated? This would be rather unfair and demotivating.

In fact the W/L-ratio is nothing else than your K/D combined with the banner you use.