Blame game and stacking

[Bungiewedgie]

Disclaimer: I am very familiar with my own shortcomings regarding this game. I have a bad situational awareness in game. I find the UI confusing and hard to use still. I am not a very good pilot and I crash sometimes to asteroids and stations. I struggle to find the correct keybindings for things. I do not know how to use the chat properly and I can only routinely find 2 voice chat lines. I have lots of faults but I am trying to work on them.

Just the other day I got into a discussion about Newbies, stacking and commanders blaming their teams on the in-game chat. It was not really the correct time or place for it. So I decided to continue it here. The discussion started when a game had ended rather quickly due to a OP con failing to plant and soon after that a failed defense against a bomber. The commander decided to blame the noobies for the loss and "politely advised" them never to play again on the same team.

There was this a bit hyperbolic thing I said that does have a important bit of truth in it. You cant really change other people. Not at least in the time-frame of a few matches. So once the teams and settings are set, the only thing that you can influence that has the power to change the outcome of the game is your own behavior. This is especially important to realize when you are in a leadership position where this can have the greatest effect. In any team versus team setting you must take into account three things and act accordingly. Your team and resources - your enemy and their resources - the environment. Now you may be thrown into a situation where you are the underdog, but since this is a game you are not obligated to take on such challenges if you do not want to face them. If you want the challenge then you must plan and act according to the trinity of: enemy - friend - environment. If the odds are stacked against you and you lose, take some pride in the fact that you tried you best and learn from your mistakes. But above all own it. Own that you took the risk and could not achieve what you were trying to do.

Now I know from experience that this can be a hard thing to do. It takes a lot of time to learn this way of thought and you can still stray from the road once in awhile when the going gets tough. For some it is even impossible to not blame others. But in this case I believe it is to do with the environment. It would appear that the culture of this community is somewhat non accepting of failure. Failure is treated with disdain and to get ahead of this some comms chose to play the blame game. I think its a knee-jerk reaction to losing. I can only imagine that some players must also routinely play the blame game with their commanders. Its a nice self feeding circle of blame and hate.

So how to change that? Earlier I said that comms should accept defeat and learn from it. However you can, with time, also change others. Organisational learning is very important and fun thing that can keep a game and the community interesting. But trying to change others is very dangerous when done wrong, especially in a setting where players are at a premium. You can teach people by critiquing them (non-constructive and constructive), positive reinforcement and showing example. The low effort way of non-constructive criticism is very hurtful to the community since very few are willing to keep playing a game where you are constantly told you are doing it wrong and are not helping. This is also damaging to the community because it does not create positive encounters between players that could then deepen to positive relationships among the very small player base. More negative relationships mean overall a more negative community and that can also drive some people away.

Constructive criticism is better since it is more effective, but it is still inferior at building relationships and can also drive people away if it is done constantly. Positive reinforcement and showing example are the best. They are effective, they can create positive relationships and are enjoyable. So if a person chooses to participate in organisational learning, non-constructive criticism should be eradicated, constructive criticism should be used alongside positive reinforcement and showing an example. Failing to do so is damaging to the community. The problem is that most people doing these things are not aware that what they are doing is harmful to the game community they love or at least spend a lot of their time with.

I also wanted to talk about stacking. Its really weird. Maybe 30% of the time, the teams are stacked and the team with the least player is also the team with the newbies. In this situation, if I want to play I have to noob stack since the experienced team also has more players. And if I am joining after the match has started, as soon as I join some experienced fella jumps in to the other, more experienced team.

-Bummeri

[cashto]

QUOTE (Bungiewedgie @ Jan 8 2018, 12:49 PM) The commander decided to blame the noobies for the loss and "politely advised" them never to play again on the same team.

I was there for this. I think there were five people on the team and three of them, effectively, were zeroes. The commander probably didn't realize just how noobish his team was. Yes, he should have policed his team better, but also, there was nothing wrong with him telling you to be more aware of the issue so as to avoid it again in the future without anybody having to police anybody else.

Yes, stack can get pretty bad, especially when no one wants to comm and you end up with an experienced vet vs a permavoob who no one in their right mind wants to fly for. Still, everyone should do what they can to avoid it, and whether you are a newbie or a vet, sometimes that means you have to sit out and wait for a spot to open up on the other team.

Thanks for your patience.

[zombywoof]

QUOTE (Bungiewedgie @ Jan 8 2018, 12:49 PM) I do not know how to use the chat properly and I can only routinely find 2 voice chat lines. I have lots of faults but I am trying to work on them.

Chat 101:

Press enter. Type a line. Press enter.

Oh, there's another thing. Sometimes you might be chatting on all-chat. This is pretty easy to fix. First hit the enter key, then just hit "tab" until the little thing displays your team name. It'll probably be once or twice.

Voice chats? Don't worry about 'em. I mean, learn them eventually, but meh.

QUOTE So how to change that? Earlier I said that comms should accept defeat and learn from it.[/quote]
Mein gott.

You've... you've cracked the code! Just accept the defeat and learn from it! Why didn't anyone think of that before? Why, in 17 years, did no one figure out this one key piece of the puzzles?!

You have no $#@!ing idea what it means to command in this game. You have no idea what it's like to sit there for ten minutes after stepping up to command only to have half the game complain that you're too good and the other half complain that you're not good enough. You have no idea what it's like to sit there and be forced to ignore the people you like and want to have fly for you because some idiot has GC and will just flush any time you get a halfway decent player. You have no idea what it's like to then realize that, $#@! me, I could've killed five miners in the time it took this game to launch but noooooo, no one will command so I've got to sit in this seat and wait while everyone else hustles around to find that exact perfect match to command against me.

Then when they do? Oh my LORD! "I don't want to fly TF." "Dregh on high money is terrible." "You can't go belters against Giga." "IC exp sucks and they're not worth playing." "Rix is op, no one can beat rix don't play rix." "Why don't you go TF on .75 starting money since TF is good on low money." The array of just @#(! advice you get from people as the bitch and moan about every single possible faction and techpath combination you could go. And this is excluding the asinine "STACK" comments that invariably comes up whenever TenForward decides he's not good enough to overcome the massive, frightening power of three 0s and "antistacks" by joining Casho, Sara, and SumV. Or Tigerfish so much as looks at a game funny. Or any other <insert voob here> who really has no idea how to even play this game thinks they've got the scouting juuuuuuust so on who's good and who's not.

Now after 15 minutes of dealing with incessant whining we might get to launch a game. Never mind that all my good pilots just launched scouts and all my newbies launched ints. Never mind that these ints go in haphazard directions very determinedly not following scouts. I can make do with that. The best pilots I know launch scouts to start pugs because scouts are awesome ships. But then you ask a pilot who's been around the block and is wearing a tag to do something simple like, "Plant my outpost, I'm out of base." What am I out of base doing? Defending my miners because randomvoob@opposingcomm decided he just *had* to go rix and Ryu decided he and his buddies just had to have the fun of doing your prototypical rix rush. Thank god I picked a lt int faction because now I can just barely save my miner. `yp. Now let's get back to base and... MY OP HAS BEEN IDLE FOR FIVE MINUTES. Why? Because I didn't see rocks in the sector because the idiot scouts decided counter2 and retroboost were just such important, earth-shattering pickups against rix that they durdled instead of getting the forward aleph. But when that guy got into the sector and was told "hey, $pilotname, plant my op I'm out of base defending miners" his first reaction was to stare befuddeldly at the chat as if the language switched to $#@!ing ancient egyptian. His second reaction is, of course, to see that there's an enemy scout in the sector and immediately panic and run home to protect the tech. So now my op is getting attacked, and $pilotname is nowhere to be found, and when asked why he didn't plant my op he gives some @#(! excuse like "who, me?" No, the other guy in the sector.

Whatever, we've lost an op but the TP made it in. Now some old skool vet joins my team and things are looking up, right? WRONG! I'm immediately berated for how we have terrible map position and my miners aren't mining. OldSkool Vet carefully sends my miners to the single most obvious location ever. I order them back because ryu and djole are sitting there just waiting for those things to come through. I'm called an idiot and I say "they're rix and waiting" and I'm called an idiot again. Miners go through. Miners predictably die.

It's ok though because I still have one miner and just got a techbase out. I'm going to defend this one miner myself, and that's fine. OldSkool Vet has ragequit now because I'm so $#@!ing stupid for letting those miners that he ordered into the sector I told him not to send them to die. I tell the rest of the team, "their miners are in Ahto." The rest of the team quickly goes "ok I'll go probe to see if I can find their miners" and checks every $#@!ing sector on the map twice before FINALLY poking their head into Ahto to find out that, SURPRISE! The miners JUST finished mining there! Fortunately three of my players who have a combined forty years of experience between them have it stuck in their head that NOW is the perfect time to strike! So they carefully boost 2 sectors to Ahto only to find that, yeah, you guessed it, the sector is empty. At this point my economy is trashed and my opponent has freemined despite the ingenious play of having all four miners in the same sector, so interceptors come up for the enemy.

Sighing to myself, I manage to regroup the team ever so slightly and take a little map. I tell the team *again* where the miners are, (this time they're in Raiko, you know, the sector we saw them go into, which is really silly because after Raiko they're going to have to walk through a sector to get anywhere to mine, but hey that's not MY problem), and *again* they quickly triple check Ahto. Seemingly shocked that a sector with no helium isn't being mined, I sigh and say "screw it." We've got a techbase, two miners, and by some $#@!ing miracle a bit of map position. I mine out an outpost midlow just as the enemy pushes a con in there. "Attack Constructor" comes the voicechat of some squadded idiot. "NEGATIVE!" I voicechat repeatedly. "We just mined this sector out let them have it. Hit their miners instead that are just behind the op con." "Attack Constructor" "I need help! "Attack Constructor." So out comes the pile of voobs who fly to the damn constructor and shoot at it for a minute as it lines up. None of them can stand the shame of a scratched paint job though, so none of them ram the damn con which promptly builds, followed by shouts of "wow that was close." Being the nice person I am, my eyes roll out of their sockets in disdain but not a peep towards the fragile egos of these idiots who just let a con build. Like ok, technically, I wanted you to let them build that con, but if you're going to disregard my orders to hit that con, you could at least kill the $#@!ing thing.

At this point we have mini1 ints and they have mini1 ints... and bbrs. Because the first thing voobcom does when they make a DM sector that has no helium in it is... to bomb it? It's at this point I'm thinking that if I had a bunch of Phoenix attack drones we'd probably just crush this game into dust. This bomber purchase obviously represents a major coup for us: they just spent 10k and put five nans on a bomb run! Let's go kill some miners! The idiot from before who demanded we attack the constructor (but not ram it! That would be unfair) now spams "defend base" like it's going out of style. I tell him if he countermands my orders again that I'll boot him. "I'm not countermanding your orders," he insists, "just giving information." In a moment of weakness I take pity on the brain-addled fool and let him keep confusing the @#(! out of my team as he spams voice chats that are literally the direct opposite of things I'm asking the team to do.

Meanwhile, ReturningVet just joined the game and walked my miners into an enemy outpost. Predictably, all of the miners die. ReturningVet asks why I'm so stupid. I ask why the $#@! he moved my miners. He says I should be glad I have a vet as good as him running my economy. I say please don't in the future. He says "$#@! you" and ragequits.

Through some miracle of pinching pennies and having voobs on my team who prefer to pick up cashboxes than do literally anything else I have the counter 2, gat2, dis2, dumbfire2, seeker2, util2, sniper1, hunter2, killer1, quickfire2, retroboost hvy ints every int whore dreams of. I mean, the mini2 that was 2k away from the int pilot as he was going... well I'm not entirely sure where he was going, but that mini2 is obviously not helpful when you're flying expansion, so $#@! that noise. But good god damn if he didn't see a SEISMIC on the opposite side of a sector two alephs away from our expansion! Hold on guys, I'm deseperate to get some tech. What, pick up nan2? $#@! that can't you see I'm on a mission?! The enemy now just barely gets up their hvy ints and I send a quick PM to Terran, who's flying for them, to the effect of "really? You guys just got hvy ints NOW?!" Terran replies "ugh flying for this guy sucks so much." But saying it to his face? That's rude. And if you try to give him advice to get better? "SHUT THE $#@! UP IMMA DO IT MY WAY."

Well eventually Ryu gets bored of just hunting miners and decides to mine for the idiot commander and Terran argues for thirty minutes about whether they should get stealth bbrs or figbees and HTTs (at this point it's important to remind you that they're rix). Thanks to Ryu's mining and my team's penchant for being in whatever sector the enemy's miners aren't, the enemy commander manages to get both HTTs, a sup, and SBs. The game ends, and my team loses.

But you see, here's why this @#(! gets me (and other commanders) riled up: it doesn't stop there. Remember ReturningVet and OldSkool Vet? Now's the time where they start talking trash about my commanding. Because, you see, when they suicided my miners it was because I clearly had no idea what to do with them. To top it off, VoobComm on the other side is now jacking off in chat about how great he is because he took down the mighty P1! What a @#(!ty commander that P1 is! VoobComm is so weak! Meanwhile RandomVet immediately chimes in and goes "well it's only because PCore sux anyways and rix is super op and unbeatable and my ultimate waifu forever well except for belters which is also my ultimate op waifu well except for dregh which is my ultimate ultimate waifu and you can't beat giga in small games and basically everything is op but especially rix and that's why pcore sucks and we should go to weedcore where rix is the same but starts with three gat figs because that's the appropriate nerf for rix, to give them more guns." Other randomvet goes "oh I agree, on WeedCore ints turn 9999% faster and can go 800 meters per second and turn on a dime," and first RandomVet goes "yeah it's not like in DN where every squadgame was just IC exp vs IC exp over and over, now that was a diverse and exciting metagame!"

So since RandomVets 1 and 2 are so pro you'd think they'd step up to take me on in the next game, right? WRONG! As soon as SumVeritas joins my team both RandomVets, OldSkool Vet, and ReturningVet complain about the stack while also, in an astounding feat of mental flexibility worthy of Cirque du soleil, simultaneously complain how everyone today sucks and is awful and terribad and oh my god how bad are they today. The only reason any of these old, returning, or random vets ever lose games is because everything is sooooooo broken in PCore. Anyways it's time for them to go eat lunch/go to work/go to the gym/go to sleep/any other excuse, so they click afk leaving me to stare at a random voob whining about how the stack is too unfair.

At this point I go play EU4 and try to get the Burgundian Inheritance as Brandenburg, find that every avenue of expansion has either allied with Bohemia, Hungary, Poland, or Denmark, tab back in, and it's RandomVoob v RandomVoob with OldSkool Vet, ReturningVet, and both Randomvets spread relatively evenly, their naps/work/meals/gymsessions apparently having lasted all of three minutes. I consider joining the game, but before I even press the button I can hear the endless stack complaints coming, think better of it, and browse facebook instead.

So if you want to know why your advice of "oh just accept the loss and learn from it" is such a pile of horse@#(!, it's this:

For me (and many others), commanding a 30 minute game is an hour-and-a-half of hard work surrounded by being bitched at endlessly from all fronts for people who insist on flying GT figs even after you've bought hvy ints.


QUOTE I also wanted to talk about stacking. Its really weird. Maybe 30% of the time, the teams are stacked and the team with the least player is also the team with the newbies. In this situation, if I want to play I have to noob stack since the experienced team also has more players. And if I am joining after the match has started, as soon as I join some experienced fella jumps in to the other, more experienced team.[/quote]
Yeah it's because we're sick of flying with people who insist on flying GT figs when we have hvy ints. Ain't nothing wrong with a challenge here or there, but when team A has enh figs against team B's mini3 rix hvies, eh. Imma grab a rix hvy or play something else. Learn to resign games when they're over.

QUOTE -Bummeri[/quote]
If you take nothing else from my post, please don't sign your forum posts. You have a signature you can set up in your profile.

[zombywoof]

It also doesn't help when people complain about stack because SumV and I have the gall to get on discord and coordinate our targets. Like holy @#(! we've uncovered the super secret ultra tech of two players working together. It's soooo unfair and beyond the talent level of anyone in this game.

[TheDevil]

Bravo!

But I have to say - I have rarely seen everything you mentioned happening all in one game, you must have seen some terrible game lol

[SumVeritas]

That could've been written in a fanfic type of theme. But it was a great read nonetheless, thanks P1.

[qqmwoarplox]

I advised you 3/4 newbies to try not to fly together on the same team because it makes for bad team balance, what is the issue?


I also let you know that it is you and (I think Ten4) who were to blame for the fact that my opening con died because had you been a better player you would've been at the right place to save it, again what's the problem with me letting you know you have $#@!ed up? this is how you learn after all.


And yeah sometimes I'm not up to follow through an entire game where the teams are REALLY to my disadvantage, god knows most of the time the teams I get are a bit less stronger than the opposition.

[qqmwoarplox]

also can someone tldr me p1's really long book

[Bungiewedgie]

QUOTE (cashto @ Jan 9 2018, 07:04 AM) I was there for this. I think there were five people on the team and three of them, effectively, were zeroes. The commander probably didn't realize just how noobish his team was. Yes, he should have policed his team better, but also, there was nothing wrong with him telling you to be more aware of the issue so as to avoid it again in the future without anybody having to police anybody else.

OK so the issue I was mainly getting at was the commander starting the blame game. To this it would have been a valid response from the noobs to shift the blame on the vets for stacking the other team since the opposing team was filled according to the way I explained in my previous post:
QUOTE Maybe 30% of the time, the teams are stacked and the team with the least player is also the team with the newbies. In this situation, if I want to play I have to noob stack since the experienced team also has more players. And if I am joining after the match has started, as soon as I join some experienced fella jumps in to the other, more experienced team.[/quote]

And then we can have this kind of response from the vets:

QUOTE (phoenix1)It also doesn't help when people complain about stack because SumV and I have the gall to get on discord and coordinate our targets. Like holy @#(! we've uncovered the super secret ultra tech of two players working together. It's soooo unfair and beyond the talent level of anyone in this game.

And it would go on and on like the aforementioned cycle of blame and hate. And as always the situation is not black and white and people can have valid points but the blame game does not benefit anyone beyond the armor it provides to any fault of their own. The biggest loser in these is the community as a whole. The great thing in games is that you can get pleasure even out of your biggest nemesis in game. You can always shoot him. This leads to even your nemesis having value to you.

[qqmwoarplox]

Reply to my post and make your point clearer please I'm not a native English speaker and since I am the commander you are talking about we should have a dialogue here between me and you