There still is far too little hype for this match or for server smashes in general. They are the biggest (semi-)competitive events in online gaming and a huge amount of fun to play and watch.
Well, there is literally nothing about this in in the official forums. And you never hear about it ingame, so thats not really a suprise^^
Is there at TL-like website for PS2? How do people find this stuff?
There are lots of websites for planetside, e.g. planetside-universe.com, but those are far from what TL is for e.g. SC2 or the competitive community in general.
Also, there is a reddit post about it now with a poll on who wins.
Voting for #TeamMiller is voting for TeamLiquid! Vote Miller! :p
God, I'm more nervous than when I first asked out a girl for a date. The biggest force I've lead yet was 48 players, now I'm leading 240 players, and every mistake I make will be pointed out in plenty of post-match discussions and on stream. Miller also requires this game to be a victory, so I can't allow it to be the third loss in a row, especially not before the MergerSmash two weeks later.
Well, at least Miller has the better logo artists than Woodman, so we at least win in the style category, even if the logo Miller voted for isn't what I would have preferred.
Bit late for it now ofc but you could look to Eve for how to manage large engagement. Tho ofc the games are very different I think there are a lot of similarities in the logistics and management of large engagements.
I'm not sure I ever want to repeat that experience. It's so exhausting and stressful and I'm not sure I'm built for that.
Luckily I was blessed with great platoons that did a great job and sometimes resecured bases I thought lost and took bases I thought untakeable. My command squad that consisted basically of 11 infiltrators definitely pulled their weight as well, ghostcapping, counter-ghostcapping, counter-counter-ghostcapping, backcapping, detecting, pre-capping, ... they made it a lot easier and I think they have to be made a staple of any server smash in the future.
I'm watching the recording now and this is amazing to watch! I can't imagine what the coordination required to pull off this kind of game. I wonder if they'd make this more of a regular thing.
Also Morfildur, I feel like its that exact stress and exhaustion that this entire thing is meant for. Where your actions, although tiny in comparison to the whole map, is for the benefit of the whole team. It's like a true full scale war. This is like, what BF4 was trying to capture.
We're there generals that controlled and dictated what to do for the whole army? Or did individual platoons/groups do their own things?
On July 21 2014 17:47 [Agony]x90 wrote: I'm watching the recording now and this is amazing to watch! I can't imagine what the coordination required to pull off this kind of game. I wonder if they'd make this more of a regular thing.
Also Morfildur, I feel like its that exact stress and exhaustion that this entire thing is meant for. Where your actions, although tiny in comparison to the whole map, is for the benefit of the whole team. It's like a true full scale war. This is like, what BF4 was trying to capture.
We're there generals that controlled and dictated what to do for the whole army? Or did individual platoons/groups do their own things?
Morfildur was not stressed because of his "tiny actions", he was stressed because he was commanding one of the servers (miller) forces :D
imo the game is pretty well optimsed to manage forces of up to 48 players (one platoon consisting of 4x12 people) because the platoon- and squadleaders can just set waypoints, also the ingame voicechat has squad and platoon functions witch complement teamspeak quite well.
On July 21 2014 17:47 [Agony]x90 wrote: I'm watching the recording now and this is amazing to watch! I can't imagine what the coordination required to pull off this kind of game. I wonder if they'd make this more of a regular thing.
Also Morfildur, I feel like its that exact stress and exhaustion that this entire thing is meant for. Where your actions, although tiny in comparison to the whole map, is for the benefit of the whole team. It's like a true full scale war. This is like, what BF4 was trying to capture.
We're there generals that controlled and dictated what to do for the whole army? Or did individual platoons/groups do their own things?
Morfildur was not stressed because of his "tiny actions", he was stressed because he was commanding one of the servers (miller) forces :D
Well, THAT certainly killed two birds with one stone :D. That is indeed amazing! I too would love to hear about how that works. Partitioning troops, resources, and attention to specific groups. Making sacrifices, taking gambles, and so on. Also, I wonder how well he knows his platoons. Does he know which ones perform the best and are most likely to take points? Does he send the better players to take on harder objectives and jam pack bodies in other locations?
Also, I haven't played PS2 in a long while, but how does one get into one of these?
Morfildur can say more about this than me if he wants to, but the basic setup is that each participating outfit provides one squad (12ppl) of one platoon, so you have 4 outfits per platoon. One of the outfits also provides the platoon leader. I can say that the platoon my outfit participated in was lead by my outfit leader and they were assigned to the central area of the map most of the time. From what I heard the course of action for the bases covered by them was up to the platoon leader to decide. And as you could without a doubt see they were doing quite well as they even went into the Amp station after they had secured all their regions. So while nobody "did their own thing", there was no insane level of micro management either.
And yes, you can safely assume that certain outfits get harder tasks assigned than others or get sent to help others out, because they can get stuff done others can't. And you know which outfits belong to that category as force commander.
As well as training and meetings before the serversmash events you gain an understanding and appreciation of what the different outfits and platoon leaders on your server are capable of due to working with or against them during normal play.
I planned on writing a blog on this, but since I'm not sure I'll get around to it I might as well write a small summary here:
We had 240 players assigned to the match in coordination with Woodman who brought the same amount. Out of those 240 players, 48 were assigned to air under an air commander ([ABTF]GigaClutch) who coordinated the whole air force. One squad was assigned to be a mixed force of infiltrators and general spec ops under command of Kogoros that basically went around on the map capping behind enemy lines, killing ghostcappers, gathering intel, blowing up Sunderers, sabotaging terminals and all that stuff without me giving them any orders.
The remaining 180 players were assigned into platoons of 2 squads each apart from one platoon that had 3 squads and each platoon had a platoon leader that dealt with assigning troops inside the platoon, but in general the platoon operated as one group. That means I had a total of 7 platoons to command and I was giving orders directly to the platoon leads. The platoon leaders had absolute command in their platoon and decided how to approach the objectives I gave them. I decided to go with 2-squad platoons because it allows for more flexibility when moving forces, which proved invaluable on Hossin with it's many connections.
Apart from air and spec ops, each squad was provided by one outfit or in one case by 2 outfits that joined together for that event because they didn't have the individual numbers. In total, around 20-25 outfits provided players for the event.
You can hear me commanding in Justicias Video since as Server Representative he was in command chat to listen for issues he would have to forward to the admins.
Communication was set up so that I was talking to all PLs in a Teamspeak whisper list while all PLs were talking in the same list and also had a whisper list set up to talk to the SLs in their platoon.
The planning for the event involved 2 meetings, the first one to get the outfit signups, decide on a force commander and figure out who gets to play and the second one to talk about the strategy I prepared for that meeting and make sure everyone knows what to do in the opening, what my game plan is, etc.
Then there were several training sessions done by each outfit so they'd get the essential opening right. The opening doesn't necessarily win the game, but just like a build order in Starcraft, it can give you the initiative or flat out lose you the game if you mess it up, so before the match I went through each platoons plans to make sure they have all the steps and pitfalls covered.
During the match it was just me staring at the map and base populations and shift forces around until we won, which sounds easy and it technically isn't hard for anyone who played Starcraft a lot, but the hard part was staying focused for 2 hours and knowing that if you lose every single one of your marines and siege tanks will write a formal complaint about you f**king up and you can't just queue another ladder game and cheese it for a quick victory to escape it.
As for some outfits getting harder tasks than others, that was indeed something I kept in mind during assigning orders, but it was more about response times rather than actual combat skill. For some outfits I knew they could get to the other side of the map in 2 minutes even if the players weren't top tier, so I moved them around more freely. For other outfits I knew they were fairly good individually but moved slower, so I tried to keep them in the same area rather than using them for quicker redeploys. I won't go into too much detail about which outfits I put into which category, but I can say that some high tier outfits disappointed me during the match while some low level outfits surprised me a lot, so in the end it doesn't matter how "MLG" an outfit is, server smash is a whole different picture and you can't judge an outfit without seeing them perform in one.
On July 21 2014 21:06 Morfildur wrote: As for some outfits getting harder tasks than others, that was indeed something I kept in mind during assigning orders, but it was more about response times rather than actual combat skill. For some outfits I knew they could get to the other side of the map in 2 minutes even if the players weren't top tier, so I moved them around more freely. For other outfits I knew they were fairly good individually but moved slower, so I tried to keep them in the same area rather than using them for quicker redeploys. I won't go into too much detail about which outfits I put into which category, but I can say that some high tier outfits disappointed me during the match while some low level outfits surprised me a lot, so in the end it doesn't matter how "MLG" an outfit is, server smash is a whole different picture and you can't judge an outfit without seeing them perform in one.
thats something that even shows in open platoons.
the faster people redeploy and get were you want them the more effective the platoon is. in big number fights getting bodys were you want them asap matters way more than how good the individual players shoot (if they are able to point the right side toward the enemy of course :D )
Morfildur I heard that our guys were never ever running out of ressources; they could basically redeploy and pull MAXes whenever they wanted to. Did you know about this beforehand and did it influence your strategy?
On July 21 2014 22:23 Khalum wrote: Morfildur I heard that our guys were never ever running out of ressources; they could basically redeploy and pull MAXes whenever they wanted to. Did you know about this beforehand and did it influence your strategy?
We had no real battle experience with the new resource system apart from very small scale training sessions, so we didn't know that resources would be abundant. I can't tell whether it influenced the platoon level strategy, but on the force commander level I basically never told the platoons to pull vehicles, MAXes or anything, I was just concerned with getting the right amount of bodies to the right place and left it to the platoon leaders to get the right tools for the job. Being 3km away from battle basically made me the worst person to make such decisions so I intentionally didn't influence platoons in that matter and so didn't get any feedback for it either. I was a little surprised that people had time to pull anything at all considering that they often spent less than 1-2 minutes at a base before moving to the next.
I basically didn't know about the resource situation until the closing interview when people talked about it.
That said, the resource changes did definitely influence my strategy since my first draft relied on cutting the enemy off resources, which the change made impossible. That means I had to scrap that plan and switched to a plan where I basically ignored resources completely and went for a pure numbers game.
I watched Justicia's FPVOD and uber-amazed by his skills. He plays so good. I have 2 Q's for Morfildur. 1 - What is the general interest on participating smashes? I mean what is you estimate on how many total people applied for it for each server?I am trying to understand if I can play the next or the other in the future. 2 - Are you the guy with the thick German accent?
On July 22 2014 00:17 Laserist wrote: I watched Justicia's FPVOD and uber-amazed by his skills. He plays so good. I have 2 Q's for Morfildur. 1 - What is the general interest on participating smashes? I mean what is you estimate on how many total people applied for it for each server?I am trying to understand if I can play the next or the other in the future. 2 - Are you the guy with the thick German accent?
Yes, I'm the guy with the thick german accent giving orders basically non-stop.
The general interest varies a lot, especially with past successes. Usually there are around 25-30 outfits that sign up with a squad but after a loss it's slightly less and after a win it's more. For last Saturdays match we had ~20 outfits sign up and it was pretty hard getting support for it because the two harsh losses - we basically got warpgated by Cobalt - demotivated people. For the merger smash we had a meeting on Sunday and we had 41 outfits sign up and, apart from 2 of them which could only field half a squad, all with at least one squad. It's a high profile match and I think the success in the last server smash contributed to people being more motivated, so it's not surprising to get such a high amount of outfits. We're trying to get Woodman to field 480 players so more than just half of our outfits can participate, but since they lost all their matches they'll probably have trouble fielding even 240. After the merges, it will probably be pretty hard to get a spot since server smashes will always be around 240 players since that is a good number that keeps the fights organized while maintaining the large scale. Miller does make a random rotation, so chances are that you can get a spot if you are in an outfit that wants to participate. For a lone player there are usually only 12 slots in one public squad, so the chance to get in that way is pretty low.
I'm kinda happy that I chose a strategy for the last match where it looked like they were winning at the start even though they followed my plan to the letter and lost because of it. I see a lot of "We did great in the first hour" posts on their subreddit, so it at least keeps them more motivated to send more people for the next match rather than demotivating them completely.
EPT
