Just to throw in my two cents:
Often I hear arguments like "if you want teamplay, join a clan", or similar.
Well, I don't have regular times for playing at all, but if I play it's usually at night, and my brother in the next room wants to sleep, so there is no way I can talk to anyone over teamspak.
And finally, there is not a single clan I see regularly enough on a server to see it's worth joining it to have teamplay most of the time.
Yet, when I connect to the server, I do the following things:
- I check which players are in which team, so I know which classes are represented by good players, and also some special things. If Torben plays cavalry, I know I have to be especially cautious after spawning, because he loves rushing to the enemy spawn and stabbing unaware or afk players.
- I check the map, whether I know it or not. If I don't know it I try to get an overview about it, to know about all the crucial locations like bottlenecks or elevated defensive positions.
- I look what my team does, and where the majority of all players run to. I run that way, too, because I believe there is relative safety in numbers. Usually I pick a good clan player with shield or a two hander to follow him and support him with my pike. In most cases they notice this and in return defend me from infantry that tries to get an easy pikeman kill.
- If the enemy team has a lot of cav I try to cover the flanks and to "shut" the access to my team at crucial "bottlenecks" for cavalry, e.g. a gap in the fence in our flank or a street between two houses or something like that.
- If things go bad, and someone decides to suggest a (resonable) tactic via chat, I confirm that I am going to follow it, to show the others that they wouldn't be alone if they followed it, too. If noone suggests one I do it myself, and I also say why (because from there our archers can shoot into their back) and I try to motivate people (if archers climbed the round tower they could make a lot of easy frags).
- After the main fight is over and I somehow managed to have survived, I don't look for surviving enemies, I look for teammates. Because this is much more important.
Now I am a pure public player, I don't play strat at all, and I don't belong to any clan nor have I ever. And still you can teamplay with me, in many cases you don't even have to say something, I simply know what's to do.
In general I don't feel like anybody special, if anything my friends and family say that I tend to underestimate myself. But how comes I've got the feeling almost noone else does the things I do? Did I understand the game wrong? Do I have some weird understanding of fun? Am I simply more intelligent that the others? (Are they stupid, Dezilagel?
)
I think the game does little to support random players to do the same things like I do, although they make sense without a doubt. They don't even go against the idea of improving your skills by fighting. It's not like I would suggest to finish an Elder Scroll game just with speechcraft and the "calm creature"-spell, I am no pacifist, all I want to do is to improve the conditions under which I have to fight people.
So what am I supposed to do? I am fully conscious about some basic elements of the game others seem to be not, like NOT to charge over a great plain when the enemy team has the cav superiority. It's just a pain in the ass for me to watch this. I suffer if I see how my team fucks up things royally, without any need, as they could have put their brain on and made it much better.
But it's not only they are too lazy to think about such basic mechanics, they are unwilling to do so, they actively refuse it! It's because the game causes the impression it would be only about reflexes and muscle memory, and nothing else. Teamplay is "boring".
If the game had a few features implemented to support teamplay, players would see how it is "meant to be played", at least if this means they get the most rewards for doing so. It would be a great improvement for players like me, who can't be in a clan but still want random players being able to participate in teamplay. Unless you want to admit I am some kind of super intelligent genius you have to agree that those things are common sense, and you can expect from everyone to learn those and to be aware of them. Because once aware, you simply can't do anything that goes against those rules any more, otherwise you would feel incredibly stupid. (Most of the time, unless you are in the mood to fool around).
This post is longer than needed for this topic, because I plan to quote it every time someone gives the great advice to join a clan if I want some tactics and teamplay.
