If you haven’t seen the film ‘Hoosiers’ starring Gene Hackman, I cannot recommend it enough. Before we start today, watch this clip. Watch the entire clip, it will do you good. If you can’t do that, feel free to leave the page right now. Don’t come back until you learn to keep your mouth shut and listen.
The map was Valparaiso, Rush.
In this round, our team was on Defense.
I initially do what I usually do on this map when I’m alone: I grabbed some mines, and laid them everywhere. Also, had XM8-C and the tracer gun. The enemy team ran in to some of my mines, but not before taking the first objective. As I was still alive, I picked off a few stragglers, and Jacked their tank at the area on the map marked “A” I immediately drove it backwards into our spawn and pulled it behind the concrete barriers, then repaired it. (I drove backwards so that I’d have more armor vs. their engineers, and I could waste them as they spawned.)
I parked that sucker right next to an M-Com station and cleared all of the trees out of the way. I kept the entire right flank covered. The enemy came up through the lighthouse area, and took B, then shortly thereafter, they destroyed A with C4. Again, I retreated to our new base, hoping to keep them at bay.
At the next spawn, I parked a bit further back so that I could see both M-Com stations, and proceeded to do the same thing. Again, the enemy proved too much for our resources, so again, I retreated with my trusty tank.
Finally, after around 25 kills, the enemy destroyed my tank as I tried in vain to repair it (B on the map.) I turned around, killed the nearby Recon guy, and retreated back into the second story of the right hand M-Com station, and again, cleared away the trees.
Ultimately, the enemy came up our flank and spawned 2 squads in our base, and raped us until we died.
Some people would think that I did extremely well in this round. I say that this is the prime example why teamwork is more important than personal stats.
“I carried you scrubs”
Whether you’re talking about Battlefield, Basketball or League of Legends having one superstar on your team will only take you so far if everyone else crumbles.
The super carry style of play is only reliable in non-objective based games like Call of Duty or Halo. The sole criteria for winning a game is that your game score the most kills. If you have a heavy hitter on your team in these situations, then odds are your ‘team’ is going to end up with the most frags and win the match no matter how poorly you perform.
When you apply the ‘most kills’ philosophy to more complex games like Dota or Battlefield this strategy will certainly win you some games but only if the enemy team is inexperienced. Anyone who’s played for a while understands that if one person on the team is carrying the team – then all you have to do to defeat that team is to eliminate that single element from the equation.
There’s a popular strategy in League of Legends, for example, called ‘protect the ADC’. This play style revolves around building up one player, the ‘attack damage carry’ and then protecting her so she can kill the enemy team over and over. The theory is that if you have one champion who is further ahead in levels and items than everyone on the other team, then they will always win fights. In most one on one battles that would hold true. However, LoL is a team sport and many of the characters in the game have stun, root, silence and debuff abilities that make it relatively simple for a coordinated team to take down a single threat without much trouble.
This is probably the pinnacle of the ‘one man army’. It became popular enough that professional teams have employed it to relative success. In these situations, the ‘objective’ of the game shifts from collecting objectives to stopping your opponent. The only problem is that – all things being equal, if you have 4 people trying to protect one person, then by nature, your team is down a player. Sure, that player is powerful, but all it takes is one of the five people who have prioritized his death to accomplish the goal, and the rest of the team is now fighting a 4v5 and they are typically under-powered since all of the kills/items/experience go to the ADC.
The bottom line is that while you certainly do need to be good at fragging your enemy, in an objective based game, you need to coordinate with your team in order to win.