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Author: concrete
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There are many articles on this site and presumably others explaining different theories and strategies about maps. But you can have the best plan in the world and it won't do you a bit of good if you can't stick to it. Here's some of the really vital things to consider in relation to playing your position.
Assigning
You can't very well play a position unless you know what it is, and the more your job is tuned toward your style of play the better you will be at it. Certainly one of the most important points to competing is to always have a game plan. If everyone knows what they are supposed to do going into the match, it will make things run much more smoothly.
There are 2 main ways to approach coming up with a strategy for your team on each individual map. First, you could simply analyze the layout and try to find the positions that -- all things being equal -- would probably give the best advantage. Then, you pick who plays which area based on the individuals' strengths and weaknesses. Another route to take is to form your overall team strategy around individual characteristics. If someone is particularly good at playing a certain area on a map, you could simply start with him there and work off that. Either way, the idea is to have your players in a position that takes advantage of their strong points.
Some things to consider when dealing out assignments are weapon preferences, style of play, and even powerup preferences. Sometimes you'll even have people who can hold multiple positions on a map, and if you're the type of team that has different lineups often, then it's just that much easier to assign.
Discipline
This is one of the biggest hurdles for newer clans to overcome. The natural tendancy is usually to run around semi-aimlessly killing as much of the other team as possible, except for when the powerup is about to spawn, at which time you run toward it. Often times players will be holding their position fine, but then get killed once, spawn killed once, maybe killed again en route to their post, and next thing you know they've lost all focus and are running around across the map with goo just shooting whoever they see. This is just asking for defeat.
Focus and patience are the key ingredients to holding your position effectively. Patience comes into play mostly on the more defensive styled maps such as asbestos, as an impatient player is prone to leaving his area to find some action, only to return and find that 1 or 2 of the other team has stolen it away, along with precious control of whatever powerup or advantage it may yield. The bottom line is that frag counts, and sometimes even net efficiency, do not always reflect a player's contribution to the game. If your assignment is to keep some weapons and armor out of the other team's hands while your teammates do the killing, then so be it. You may not get the highest scores, but if you do your part then your team will win and that's what ultimately counts.
Focus is more of an issue on smaller or more offensive styled maps, such as deck17. While there may be tons of action going on around you, a good player must keep focused on his task. As I mentioned this tends to be an issue especially when players have been thrown off their rhythm by a few deaths or just major damage being dealt. A good player will bounce back and do what they have to do to get back in their comfort zone (OMG CROSS-REFERENCE!!).
Adapting
One of the trickiest things to learn is how to adapt both as a team and an individual. If your game plan simply isn't working, due to either the other team's strategy or some skill imbalance somewhere, it is important to be able to adapt effectively. Of course, the hardest part about this is managing to change strategy midmatch without swirling into utter chaos. This is why it is good to have a backup plan ready for maps. If nothing else, simply designate a sort of "base camp" to fall back to and reorganize if need be. There's no easy way to get proficient at this; practicing often with your teammates will help, but even then it's tricky. Hopefully if you plan ahead and stick to your assignments, you won't have to worry about changing them in the midst of a game.
Well there you have it. Coordination and how well a team works its strategy is vital, and a key factor to success. Overall I'd say that the best thing to do for both practicing current strategies and testing out new ones is simply to scrim and practice as much as possible. But of course, you already knew that ;).
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