Many of the Gatekeepers that have been with us a long while know that there is a method to the Zhong-Shao's madness. However, we've had a great many newcomers in the recent weeks since we started a regular company night. Let me assure everyone that there IS (in fact) a method somewhere in all this madness, and we've had experience creating and maintaining online communities. We are in this for the long haul and the Command Tower does have a plan.
However...
The truth is that we're not quite as ready for the competition just yet. We've got so many pilots, but very few times have we had the same company arrangement. People have ideas of what it will be like when they drop against a 12man, but quickly those are dashed aside as our sheer inexperience bowls us over. We're not going to grind our troops down on the millstone of blindly dropping 12's. That isn't going to work.
For the last few weeks, we have not been dropping 12's when we have our company on. Instead we have been drilling maneuvers and accuracy training in 4-man lances in the pubs and in intracompany XvX Private matches. It is imperative that all of us learn the maneuvers we will be employing. It is also imperative to train our less accurate gunners how to use their assigned fire lanes to maximize their hit ratios. The Zhong-Shao has been watching all this very closely, despite the real-world callings that have relegated his duties to brooding in the Command Tower while randomly barking at or blithely interrogating the officers.
We were not prepared during our first push as a competitive team. The good news is: we're almost there. The intra-company sorties were quite revealing last weekend. So much so, this is what you can expect on our company nights (Friday and Saturday).
- Lance Training (4 mans on Public Servers) with random lancemates.
- Intracompany sorties Private Matches with a variety of goals / training emphases. Remember, no consumables during these sorties. We are drilling formations, weapon accuracy and order discipline, not strike order.
- A series of successful drills will result in 12 man drops, but don't expect this before the 2 hour mark (12am CST).
This is just the beginning of 1st Company as a team, and we want to do it properly. Part of that is finding the players who are willing to spend some time training to get what we want, and what we want (in this first part of our long journey) is to hit a solid 50% win rate on 12 man pubs. We are much less than that, but a variety of factors contribute to that - most notably, our failure to drill properly and train our players on maps, maneuevers, formations and fire lanes. All of that will be happening this weekend.
Many players who visit our TS expect to see a powerful team setup to run 12s at any time. The fact is, that's just not true right now, but we want it to be. While we have a very active community and there are always 4man lances running, very few of those players have what it's going to take to be successful competition team.
Our stats in public servers don't really mean much. Generally speaking, we have found that the better a player regards his skill in the game, the less suited he is for our company. It takes more than a good pub KDR or win rate on your stats. It's about your gunnery accuracy and discipline, i.e. the ability to not only accept but to execute orders you are given by your commanding officer. Meaning when you are ordered forward, you will go - even if it means taking damage.
Don't worry about whether or not your CO has the right idea or not. The fact is, every commander will fail, and they will have to deal with that failure more so than the men under their command in imaginary robot vehicles. There's a reason we have a chain of command.
A good player for us is one who likes to hang out, is fairly accurate with weapons (use your hit rates for AC weapons to get an idea of your own rating) and is capable of taking orders. Rarer still are those capable of giving orders - the Command Tower is always on the lookout for exceptional officers. However, our options have been limited because of our single-minded stance that we will not drop with non-Liao.
We need a larger pool of serious players, which we in House Liao can only get by trying to recruit all Liao in MWO. All of these players will be trained in the same tactics - in this manner, there will be no questions at the beginning of the map as to what the plan is or what we're supposed to do in that moment. Everyone will already know the plan, and simply have to wait for the marks and cues from Command to execute the drill.
I'm sure a lot of you have ideas about what we could or should be doing to achieve these goals. The fact is that the Command Tower already considered all the options we have currently in the game and concluded that this training must be done in stages from the ground up. That is, a little at a time. Rest assured, if there is a feature in the game then we have considered how we can use it to our advantage during this training. We actually have meetings, you know. If you're already getting bored because there are no 12 mans, hold your horses. They are coming faster than you'd probably like.
Everyone serious about the 1st Company competitive viability should be there to game on Friday. Even if 12s are held over a few more weeks, you're getting valuable time with your company members and learning all sorts of new stuff. We need practice on all sorts of things - don't any of you dare think it will just magically come together somehow. We don't need frustration, we need cooperation. This is the foundation upon which we will build a successful competitive team.
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