You and Whose Army

Elvenbane · Last edited by Elvenbane on Thu Jul 02, 2009 2:55 am; edited 10 times in total

What is a Competent Player?
Most of you, whether or not you know it, fall into a category that I like to call "Competent Players". To me a competent player is someone who understands their class, what abilities to use and when. In addition they know how to play their class properly, ie. Holy Priests heal like priests, using a combination of direct heals and HoTs rather than trying to play like pallies and relying only on direct heals.

Then, there are the Great Raiders. Believe it or not there is really only one major difference between a Competent Player and a Great Raider. It's situational awareness. A great raider has the ability to watch part or all of an encounter at the same time as performing their other duties.

How does this make them better than Competent Players?
It's pretty simple really. By monitoring a larger portion of the encounter you can react to events before they happen. The easiest example I can give of this is the one I gave Liz tonight:

Taralash · Posted: Mon Jun 30, 2008 4:31 am Post subject:

It's that easy folks. Learn it and apply it to your game and we will pwn harder, faster and longer than before.

Ecnailla · Joined: 03 Aug 2006 Posts: 3622 Location: TX

Get used to maxing your camera distance and SPINNING it around constantly. This has helped me so much. Especially if you are a ranged dps class you should learn to do you job without having to constantly look at your target. When doing 5 mans practice and see if you can spin your camera to look behind you for most of the fight, just glancing back to check positions and such.

Also try to move using your "q" and "e" keys more. This keeps you facing your target while repositioning. This helps on fights like VR - move away from the orb coming at you, but make sure you don't move right into another one. It's not real life, you arn't going to trip over something if you don't look where you are going!

Think about the advantages this would give you in say... i don't know, the Vashj fight. If you have your camera maxed you will see everything that spawns in your area and you greatly reduce the risk you will miss a core. Spinning you camera means you can keep tabs on where the strider is so you don't miss your dots and where you healer is in case you need to toss the core to them.

The more you know about the fights and your job in them, the less you brain has to focus on that. When you can do a fight without even thinking about it, it totally frees you up to watch what is going on and adapt.

Also, if you are a clicker, try to fix this. You can't spin your camera if you are using your mouse to cast spells. It's not a hard rule, but try, as a rule of thumb, to use your mouse hand to move and your keyboard hand to cast all spells. There are some spells you only use once a fight or so, I click them, but your core spells shouldn't be cast via mouse. Some players even move wasd to esdf to make 1-5 easier to reach instead of just 1-4. I never could get used to it and can easily reach up to 6 without moving my hand, so it's all about your play style. Just work to improve it - don't say "well, I'm just not as young/as much of a gamer/as good as so and so" and just be satisfied with your current style.

Improving your skill not only helps us all move forward and do better in the game - it really really does make it more enjoyable.

[edit:Elvenbane]paragraphs[/edit]

Elvenbane · Posted: Mon Jun 30, 2008 7:13 am Post subject:

Good point, added information about camera follow
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Lealla · Posted: Mon Jun 30, 2008 7:33 am Post subject:

Honestly, as nice as it would be to have everyone on the same level competence-wise, I'd be happy to get 25 members of this guild to attend a raid. Nobody is getting kicked out of a raid spot, but if you aren't there to participate, we either have to get somebody else or not go at all. RL stuff happens, but we need more core raiders to be able to absorb these absences.

Vashj probably would have died last week if we'd had 1 more player. Think about it.

Edit: I guess this is kind of off-topic, so feel free to nuke it if ya want, EB.
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Guenever · Joined: 30 Jun 2007 Posts: 446 Location: Tejas

Very nice conclusion EB. Summarize argument, restate thesis, use spell check... someone has taught you well. Very Happy

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Heartwood · Posted: Mon Jun 30, 2008 12:28 pm Post subject:

Part of my educational background is an Hons. BA in Cognitive Psychology, which has a lot of application to gaming: how players perceive, process, and react to in-game information.

Reading and talking about encounters is important. We all have a finite amount of cognitive resources (how much information we can pay attention to at a given time). Information or behaviour that you have gone through multiple times requires less cognitive resources. Remember when you first started WoW and had to look at the icons on your screen, figure out which icons where for which spells, recall how they were used, check your fingering position for the right hot key, and then perform the action? By now most of you are automatically hitting keys without much thought and performing the in-game actions that you need to without a lot of required concentration. So too with boss fights.

If you've read the various phases and components of a fight and watched a video of it (especially if more than once), then your brain will not be as tied up in trying to interpret all of the new information it sees for your first encounters and trying to sort out what is relevant from what is not relevant. The more you run through the same encounters, or the game in general, the less of your cognitive resources need to be spent on lower-level details and can be devoted to higher-level details (what Elven is referring to as situational awareness).

I play with my camera zoomed out at about max distance. I don't need to know which players are which (generally), what colour their armor is, what their casting animation looks like, etc. What I do need to know is where are our raid members, where are the mobs, how are they generally interacting, and where are the environmental hazards. For tanking, those are the irrelevant and relevant factors respectively that make for situational awareness.

-Heart
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Gnomerman · Joined: 15 Feb 2008 Posts: 1801 Location: LaPlata MD

very nice post, and if anyone needs any help with anything, feel free to bother me, in game or out. Btw, fps is teh pwnage
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There is more to life than pew pew you know, like staying out of the fire so you can live to pew pew another day

Taralash · Posted: Tue Jul 01, 2008 3:07 pm Post subject:

Download the Unreal Tournament demo. Play it for a few hours and you'll be good

Ahlyzabeth · Joined: 06 Jun 2006 Posts: 1458

What about Counterstrike?
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Taralash · Posted: Wed Jul 02, 2008 12:11 am Post subject:

Ahlyzabeth · Joined: 06 Jun 2006 Posts: 1458

Why not?
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zephar · Joined: 05 Sep 2006 Posts: 1337

U DARE HATE ON COUNTERSTRIKE
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Gnomerman · Joined: 15 Feb 2008 Posts: 1801 Location: LaPlata MD

counterstrike is the best multiplayer fps ever... end of story
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There is more to life than pew pew you know, like staying out of the fire so you can live to pew pew another day