Team VoD Review for ca_expat

# Team VoD Review for ca_expat ### 2021-01-18 03:00 AEST VoDs used: Scrims vs various S+/X teams All modes, random maps jlo: Splatlings + Explo Sapphire: Jr + Tri Nouveau Buko: Kshot + Zap X-: Glooga Deco + H3D/Cherry Yoshi: Sploosh 7 + Remix ## Goals * Address defensive weaknesses * Create a feedback loop * Improvement in Clams * Deal with Chargers * Improve tournament nerves ## What you should do * **Individual Stuff** * Play faster * Practice movement and sub-strafing in the range/recon * Pick a variety of weapons and practice: * Shooting just enough shots to deal 100 damage and swimming * Flicking once with slosher/roller and swimming * Shoot once, reposition, shoot for 100 damage * Painting in a cone in front of you, swimming forwards/to the side and repeating * Try these things at different ranges from point blank (even with long-range weapons) to max range to get a feel for how quickly you should be turning your controller/using sticks * Keep pushing yourself a little harder each time until you're comfortable playing as fast as your weapons allow * Check enemy options * Not looking to cast a wide net when looking for information; we're instead going through a checklist * If there are three main ways to reach some key part of the map (e.g. clam basket), we quickly look at each of those three options to see if the enemy is using them * Helps to keep enemy actions in context too * Avoid role tunnelling * Just because you're an anchor or support doesn't mean you play passively; if you're a slayer, doesn't mean you have to play aggro * Only thing that matters is winning the game with the tools your weapon provides * Long range in aggressive positions is *very* potent and oppressive * Short range weapons have the mobility to quickly get on top of flanks and clean up after * Build your specials * Specials are supposed to make both teams want to avoid stalemates * If the enemy doesn't do anything, you will get specials and overwhelm them; same goes for you * Get specials before they do and push quickly, or if they have weak specials, let them blow their resources and counterpush * If you're alive for 20 seconds, especially at the start of the game, you should have your special; if you're intentionally picking a weapon for its special, that's closer to 10-15 seconds (depending on cost/turf output) * Know where you're wanting to put your specials in advance and work your way to those positions while building your meter * Time your specials based on when their effects kick in; don't just all click your right sticks at the same time * Pregame checklists * If you want to build a habit or commit something to memory, use a pregame checklist * Every game, you go over this checklist and make sure you do whatever you've told yourself you want to do * Trying to build sub strafing habit? "I am going to sub strafe every 5 seconds even if I don't actually need to" * Trying to remember which direction your map is oriented so you can mapwatch using ray/explosher/other things? "I am going to open the map at the start of the game and make sure I know which direction the enemy base is" * Trying to work on a positional flowchart? "When we get mid control, I will work toward the enemy snipe" and so on * Check your list again after the game and see if you did what you wanted to do * It's OK to forget; this is for building habits after all, the whole point is that you are trying to do something that doesn't already come naturally * Press X * About 3 seconds into the game, you should open your map and check where the enemy team is going * When you're dead, your map should be open 100% of the time * Key is to look for changes in turf over time; don't just flick the map open for a moment, sit and let your eyes unfocus a bit so you can take in how the turf is changing * Tells you where the enemy is *and* where they're going * Flicking the map open is just to confirm things, rather than to gather info (e.g. "is there turf on the left flank?") * Avoid AoE damage e.g. ballers, splashdown * Either focus the baller down or leave it alone * If you don't need to eat a shockwave from a bomb, baller, etc then don't; clear all the way out so that you don't get 1shot * HP management in general is an issue; make sure you're healing when you disengage * 1 second of no damage to start healing, 100hp per second in squid form/12.5hp per second in kid form * Being mobile when you get hit means the 1 second starts immediately; if you get hit when you're standing still and your feet get painted, the 1 second cooldown is delayed and you take a lot longer to heal * **Team Stuff** * Your objective is always control. The in-game objective is just context for what you're trying to control. * "Control" is denying the enemy team the use of a certain part of the map * Subtle thing here: you don't have to be using that part of the map yourself, you just want to prevent the enemy team from using it * The in-game objective (zone, tower, rainmaker, clams) tells you things like "where is the enemy team likely to be looking?", "what parts of the map do we need control over?", and so on * The objective is therefore a **secondary** focus; in other words, it's the underlying reason why you're doing the things you're doing * Example: you don't control the zone on walleye by painting the zone, you control the zone by taking the left side because it gives you better access to the zone and key enemy positions * Example: you don't push the tower by having four people all stand on it, you push the tower by controlling the main spots that the enemy wants to use to defend * Learn your toolkit * What are your options? * Start with your weapon kit (main, sub, special); should I press ZR, R, or RS to address this situation? * As you learn more ways to manipulate the game (such as rotations, positioning, and so on), add them to your toolkit * Example: "can I make this guy come out of hiding by walking to the left as though I'm trying to flank?" * "if I move to the left with this power clam, they'll want to move to match my rotations, so the right side will be weaker for my team" * A quick tip: walking way is a tool, as is doing nothing * Apply your toolkit * Given your options, what can you do to change the game? * "There's a charger watching this alleyway. I have a suction, missiles, and a splattershot. I want the right side of the map. How can I make this happen?" * Hold the line * Team tends to get stretched along the map vertically i.e. there will be people in both ends of the map * Need to position so that you can help your team * We want to avoid dying, yes, but we also need to help our teammates to avoid dying too * Anchor and support need to be covering the team, not playing passively * Consolidate your control: ttek steals some part of the map, jr hops in and secures it * Plan your game * Decide in advance how you are going to try to push, regardless of the situation * e.g. Shellendorf: we're always going to push glass * Don't try to be correct; this is to build your toolkit * Walleye left side is the common strat, but let's play the right side and see what happens when we try to retake from the alley * "oh so if we push the right side, they end up being able to just leave one guy sharking there the whole game and he gets a quad kill every time we do anything" * Reacting to comms * Seeing a lot of evidence that people are listening to comms * Also seeing that the majority of these reactions are "... uhh idk what to do about that" and over-rotations * Comms are for organising the team and sharing vital information, rather than for telling people trivial locations * Team Comps & Roles * Matchup advantage (i.e. mid range or some kind of AoE/indirect damage) => Control by pushing/attrition * You can out-fight most weapons, so you can be more overt with your play * Enemy ttek can't just run at you as long as you're on your toes, he'll overextend trying to catch you * Not running into enemy team, instead gradually gaining ground * Identify critical locations for the objective and focus your play there * Best kit to assist with fights in the central parts of the map; put yourself in arm's reach of your team (and make sure they're staying within arm's reach of you) * Speed and close range power => Control by stealing * Mobility + fast kills = you can steal territory and then catch people before they realise what's going on * Not running into enemy team, not necessarily flanking, just being where enemy isn't * Identify weak parts of enemy setup and steal the map from them * Highest priority on parts of the map that directly influence the objective, e.g. tower flanks, RM paths, CB goal/main clam spots * Anchors => Disrupt enemy attempts at control * Means you have to play forward * Enemy trying to push with attrition? Outrange them * Identify enemy attrition attempts and match rotations * Brute force with specials * Fastest way to push if enemy team is not vulnerable to rotation baiting/stealing territory * Specials are a "go signal"; the usual rules of engagement no longer apply because everyone's now going in with more firepower and turf output than usual * jlo * Explo seems like your best weapon in these games * Tracking unseen enemy players is pretty good * Also helps to make your actions a bit faster; bit of a tunnelling issue on hydra, etc * Baller is for emergencies; paint the zone with your main weapon though! * Don't forget to hold charge with naut * Add it to your checklist * Ink management is the hardest part of naut, so need to know when not to hold charge too * Target acquisition needs work though; looks like you're watching stuff in the distance but tunnelling on it for long periods and losing periphery * Not an exaggeration to say that this is one of the defining characteristics of a low X/S+ player * Sapphire * Look for the high ground * Tendency to get stuck on low ground and then losing track of the game as a result * If you can't see anything, press X * Add spots to your checklist ahead of time; bring up the maps on sendou.ink or whatever and pick spots while you're in weapon select * Paint and run * Practice moving up, painting with about 4-5 shots, and running away * Helps to bait enemy responses (to see if they're actually there), while also keeping you fairly safe (because you're moving too quickly for them to hit you) * Also helps to get you more active in gaining turf control for your team * Watch Burstie and note how quickly he paints and moves * Faster faster faster * Hold the left trigger if you need to; lots of walking before swimming * You're playing slippery weapons; as long as you make sure you keep yourself mobile, you can put yourself in danger without actually getting hit * Good bombs when fighting people * When you do see someone, your bomb placement is good; lots of nice kills where you throw a bomb and run away * Fight close, not at max range * Shooter shots are harder to hit the further away you are from your target; getting on top of people and then circle-strafing them is often the play when you want to be sure of a kill * May be worth giving yourself a challenge to only get kills at point blank by running circles around people, especially chargers and slow-firing weapons (not rollers and other spread damage weapons for obvious reasons) * Throw bombs at things with purpose, they aren't for turfing * Bombs push lurking tteks away from the part of the map you want to paint * They're really strong but individually, quality > quantity * If everyone throws good bombs, that's how you get your critical mass * X- * Mid-range means overtly pushing and pulling the enemy team around, even if you're flanking * If you can push them away with turf output and a splash wall, that's cool for "front door" retakes * If you get behind them and force the enemy team to run back towards you to deal with you, you open up space for your team * Good at getting behind the enemy team; just need to survive a bit longer while you're at it * In these situations, your own survival is your top priority; the very moment you die, the enemy team all turns back around onto your team (if they're following up) and that is not ideal * Cherry works quite well in these situations because of the wall + turf output making it hard for the enemy to catch you * Make sure you know your own exit strategy before you engage and start leaning toward it when the enemy sees you * Likewise, put your wall down so that it covers your exit rather than covering the enemy approach * Glooga meanwhile needs a baller available before you can really make these kinds of plays * Luckily it's pretty cheap, so maybe run some special saver so that you need less turf to rebuild it if you get killed * Splash wall lets you bait the enemy into showing themselves * While you're painting for special, use your wall and mid-range turfing to get the enemy team to throw things at you * Figure out where the enemy team is, and make sure your team knows where they're weak * You're good at getting behind people, but you should complement that by being able to absorb aggro from the front too on maps where flanking isn't an option * Swim forwards while using bubbles * Keeps them clustered up so it's easier to do lots of damage to them with bombs and the like * If you're going to pick cherry, tell your team to be ready to bomb your bubbles for you * Couple things on weapon choice * Glooga isn't hard because it takes skill, it's hard because everything about it is a mess; range, damage, kits, roll distance, timings, turf, builds, *everything* is a mess * most mid-range weapons both have more range and also don't need to roll to hit things; they also have bombs, more turf, better build options... * typically glooga deco ends up being a qrsj weapon because it'll end up fishing for entry picks using walls and half the time it'll roll in and instantly die to a bomb on its wall * Cherry h3 is the same; weapon needs mpu, spu, shredder, can't really fit all of it in---and then you have no bomb for your bubbles on top of that * As said before, cherry does work decently for messing with enemy rotations, problem is more that it's just really awkward and there are potentially better options (foil squeezer comes to mind) * H3D is fine, just remember that you want to be painting for armour in such a way that you're close to a relevant part of the map when you hit RS * Your ability to hit shots is not something you have full control over * Sometimes, especially on defence, you will be forced to take shots that are not ideal and this is where even expert H3/Glooga players can be opened up * Hard weapons are not just challenging to learn, they're also easy to exploit * Also warps your view of the fundamentals of the game; too tempting to blame yourself for having bad aim when the problem was your timing or positioning or something to that effect * Understandable if the satisfaction is what you play the game for, just don't be misled by community sentiment about these kinds of weapons and what it actually means to pick "high skill" weapons * Yoshi * Sploosh is a defensive weapon * All of your fights are basically traps that the enemy team falls into * Did they get too close or forget about you and let you walk up? Instakill * Did they keep their distance? Run deeper into the map and try again * You can't ever really run straight at the enemy * Easy on the bombs when you're past enemy lines * If you're behind them, undermine the objective directly and run away; be obnoxious, but stay alive * Throwing bombs at people gives them advance warning; easier to just close the gap and shoot them, or go steal the objective * Hammers: reset and re-ambush * Jumpflick, 2-3 stamps (for paint), hide, repeat * Threat of hammer is just as powerful as actually chasing people ## Goal-Specific Feedback * Defence * Go 4 up and build specials from further back than you might expect * Let the enemy team try to push ahead and pick them off when they overextend; don't die stopping the tower at 80, let them get 80 for free and use that time to get your team back together * Play a bit further back relative to the objective; you're meeting the pushing players, not the objective itself * Deal with the escorts and the objective is easy * Feedback Loop * You can only start a feedback loop with a conscious decision * You need to know the short-term goal in order to evaluate your actions * Longer-term goals aren't good enough, one sure-fire way to get your anxiety going ("I know we need points but I have no idea how to actually make that happen") * "I'm doing this thing because [reasons]" * The more specific and immediate your reasoning is, the better your feedback loop will be * "left path good" is not exactly specific or immediate * "Enemy team fully committed to the right side, so the left should be open for long enough that if we rush through here now, we'll get really deep into the enemy base. They'll have to jump back to defend, so they're all going to beeline from spawn to the RM as it's coming in, so I'll ambush them when they do" is *very* specific and if anything goes wrong, it's really easy to figure out what happened that was outside your expectations * Typically these chains of logic are easy to step through * "they went too deep on right" -> "they can't get back to the objective by swimming to it" -> "they have to do something other than swim" -> "only thing they can do is jump back" -> "only place they can come from is spawn" -> "they'll be desperate to stop the push so they'll likely rush out" -> "free kills" * All of these steps will kind of click into place as you get better, so don't be intimidated; the point I'm making here is that this is a self-reinforcing process * Decision-making process: expectation -> observation -> comprehension -> decision -> action * Not all of these steps will take place when someone takes an action * Majority of players play reactively, i.e. only the "observation" and "action" steps (they see something and act immediately in response to it) * "I see ttek on the left side, so I'm going to go shoot him" * You are basically unconscious when you play like this * Comprehension step is to recognise what your observation implies * "I see ttek on the left side, which means they don't have anyone guarding the right side" * This is the first point at which you're processing information; you might not know how to evaluate that information yet, but at least there's something to work with * Decision step is to recognise which options are available to you and act upon one of those options in the context of what's going on in the game * "I see ttek on the left side; I could go deal with him while he's focusing on my teammate, or I could get into their base on the right side" * This is where you take multiple pieces of information and use them to evaluate your options and, in so doing, decide what you're going to do * Expectation step streamlines this process by knowing ahead of time which decision you're going to take and then looking for the exact piece of information you need to know which option you're going to take * "I want to get over to the right side, but I don't know where the ttek is. If I see him on the left, I'm going to head straight over to the right side of their base" * This particular step is the key to making fast decisions; you do all the thinking ahead of time and then there's one "go signal" where everything falls into place * Feedback loops cannot come from pure reactionary play i.e. observation -> action, because there's no thought process there and therefore nothing to actually start the feedback loop * This is what's happening when you die and then think "wait why did I do that" * This is at its worst when you are acting on a single observation, for example "the zone is in the middle of the map and I must paint it", or "I am the anchor so I will always be at the back" for the entire game; this short-circuits our feedback loop and prevents us from seeing the game as it is * Exception is when you're experimenting with an idea * "In this game, we are going to always push left" is an experiment, where we're trying to understand what happens when we do certain things; we're playing with the idea, rather than taking it for granted * If you don't know whether something is a good idea, experiment and try it out! * Toolkit, again * The toolkit stuff mentioned in the first section is key here too * The more familiar you are with your options, the easier it is to quickly consider which ones are applicable to the situation at hand * Clams * Pregame questions: * "Where are we going to open the basket from?" * "Where do we want to collect clams from?" * "Where can the enemy attack from?" * Don't throw your life away just to throw clams in; control the basket, control the area around it, deny the enemy team the ability to defend in the first place * Steady scoring keeps the basket open and forces the enemy to run in to stop you from scoring; this means that they *have* to come to you once the basket's open, and they'll be easy kills * Look to control the enemy basket before you make a power clam, then pool clams under the basket while watching for enemy respawns * Once the basket is open, have **one person** go back for more clams if the map allows it * Some maps don't let you get more clams very easily (e.g. Manta, Albacore); on these maps, you will tend to break the basket and dump all your clams at once, then retreat back to mid to rebuild your clam stock * Other maps (e.g. Mako, Reef) are the opposite and it's really easy to get more clams quickly while also camping the area between the enemy spawn and the basket * Chargers * Key is to visualise their line of sight * Anywhere they can see, they can shoot; stay out of their line of sight and they can't shoot you * It's like the opposite of that scene in the Lion King * Look for the charger, recognise where their range ends and where their blind spots are, and play in those blind spots while otherwise trying to ignore them * If you *do* ignore them, make sure you disengage every couple seconds to make sure they don't sneak up on you * When fighting the charger directly, make their shots as hard as possible and don't stop moving * Fight them by taking 1-2 shots and swimming, rather than standing there and shooting * Nerves * Need something unshakeable to keep you steady * "we're better" is very much shakeable * "We're going to play the strat we prepared because that's our best shot at winning" is much better * If you lose, you've already decided to put full confidence in what you're doing * This isn't blind faith, it's more that you know your strat is, say, an 80% shot and sometimes it won't work, but it's still what you're going with * Objective facts---"we put a lot of work into our preparation", "we like playing this way and it's the way we want to win"---are your main source of confidence. Anything that is relative, such as "we're better" is going to fall apart against better teams * Worth noting: you don't need to be better than someone to beat them * Other sources of nerves: underlying anxieties * "I know this strategy won't work but I can't put my finger on why" is a common one * Mid-set is probably not the time to bring this up, however; try to bring it up as soon as you can so that the team can weigh in * Can help to not think about things in terms of winning or losing i.e. judgementalism, instead think only about what you're going to do next