Revision of Team IPX Practice Sessions from Wed, 16/04/2008 - 23:15

First and foremost I commend Shadow on this move, I think this will really help us.
My only problem is that I finish class at 7.30 on Tuesday nights and will be lucky to be back by 8. I can, however, say that I will be on, just a little late.
So I am putting myself down for a yes and hope that my being late on occasion wont create too much of an issue.

Not that I’m speaking on behalf of everyone (but I am so deal with it ;-). You let us know along time ago about the clash so what ever time it is that you can make it is good, love having you along even if it’s a bit latter.

I’m for wherever possible filling our own private booked server as opposed to pubbing it. Especially when we have another team lined up to play (like we do Sunday).

For the guys interested in stats… think of it this way – when we actually play an organised clan on the pubs we get nailed…. not good for the old k/d ratio (I know mine suffered pretty heavily from Tuesdays prac).

I like playing against another team though. Until we have at least 10-12 people at the Prac, it’s hard to do much meaningful by ourselves.

I have to say I agree with you on this aspect of the practice session. The rest of the original post I“m 100% behind, but as I noted earlier I think our own dedicated server (booked at this stage) is a much bigger benefit. In there we can either play against each other practicing certain things (we have done this in the past, even with as few as 3 on 3 and it really does help) or play against whichever team we can organise for the week.

Agree with C especially. We can’t try and commandeer one of the public servers and expect to have as much control over it as we would need to practice effectively. That annoys us, and as you say the other players get annoyed at us for stacking the server they’re trying to play on. I got no issue with us doing this when we play informally throughout the rest of the week, but not during prac.

My last point ties in with something I think Panda said earlier today (and I’m too lazy to find the link for – I bet it’s about 2 comments above this one). You can’t expect to turn up for the prac every week and try and use that as your only way of getting better at playing. A mixture of playing on the pubs, structured practice, and scrims against good teams is the only way I see us really improving. Each helps in different ways. I’d suggest keeping the prac as the structured practice + scrims against other teams depending on their availability, and our numbers for the week – and always have it in a private server.

There’s the entire rest of the week to find a chance to pub, and there’s usually someone on from our team, or more than one person willing to have a game with you. Friday and Sunday nights tend to have at least a few players on regularly. Remember, everyone that was recruited to IPX was picked up from pub servers, so you guys must like to do that every now and then apart from Tuesdays (Founders and Panda excluded of course as we weren’t recruited – we all met in Svalbard while ice fishing for Polar Bears).

A) This is the kind of suggestion we need in our lonely old prac sessions in a dedicated server (preferably made on IRC well in advance, before ppl start shooting each other). Can you think of any other core skills we need to work on (besides “all of them”) and more importantly exercises to practice them. Preferably fun exercises — there is only one real reason we play the game after all. We could then dedicate 20 mins or half an hour to them.

Mini-games to practice basic skills that I can think of:
* Grenade wars: One player in an Icarus (in a limited area) and the rest have to try bring him down with grenades only, whilst dodging stroybombs. Running out of grenades means you lose.
* One-on-one: Choose a big area to use as an arena and use only soldiers with assault rifles only, play a winner-stays-on or knockout comp.
* Tank-versus-tormentor: Same thing, but in tank and tormentor
* Death star run: Warm up on canyon… two fliers… Fuzz and Shad know what I mean

B) I don’t agree as much here. As we say in software, security-by-obscurity never works. The secret is to have better strategies and the skills to implement them. Our strategies and skills will get better the more we exercise them. If we work on “surprise” as our main method of winning then we win one scrim, max.

C) Yeah, I haven’t had any complaints yet personally, as we don’t really dominate when we stack like a lot of clans might. But as a matter of classiness, it is poor form. We should try and get more practice scrims, and this’ll stop happening.

D) I’m sure you can see my mistakes perfectly well whilst you’re on my team :) Especially if I drop a vampire on you.

If we can get good numbers then it certainly makes sense to book a server. If we can’t do the numbers on our own a prac scrim is always good too.

I like you idea’s LT – a few more of them and we would have a whole training regiment going ;-)

I’ll expand probably on my points more later but I thought I’d just add to what luck said about that quick opportunity we had to scrim with some other clanners.

The best area for us to find people to quickly scrim with us would be on mirc, specifically irc://irc.ausirc.com/et:qw

So maybe if we did book servers on certain Tuesdays (we could probably quickly load one up straight away through gamecreate, thats how it was done with luck and I) and then went into a few quake wars mirc channels invited a few people and then prac’d that way? Scrims I’m finding out are probably the best way to put our strats (from the strat book and general conversions) into action.