N0MAD, on 19 January 2016 - 02:17 AM, said:
I liked your post, fair enough.
How much advantage do you think a Practised group all communicating has over a group of random players/teams half of them communicating and never having played together even if equally skilled individually, has?
No advantage, little or alot?
That's a very interesting question, but it has several answers because the effect of unit coordination is different at different skill levels and range of skills across the team.
The following is me speculating freely of course, no science, but I think it's reasonable.
Example 1: All players on both teams pretty good.
There is some natural coordination that comes with simply being a decent CW player, it can be chalked down to an absence of basic mistakes. A good player will stick with the team without being told to, he will not poke alone and take bad trades, not rambo by himself through the gate, he will regroup rather than reinforce and obviously not do the most silly newbie things like shoot LRMs below 180m and so on.
A good player will also (usually) have some different mechs to pick that suits the map. And obviously talking to your team on top of that is part of being good at the game as well, so there will be a baseline of active coordination too (group dup, lets go in now and so on.)
In this example the importance of a unit is less than it's sometimes hyped up to, the unit may or may not be doing serious coordination at the time but assuming they do the main advantage will be calling targets and having a selected commander. It will most likely be a win, but probably not a stomp. Unit small to medium advantage depending on full tryhard mode or not.
Example 2: All players on both teams are bad.
Everyone will make basic mistakes and it will be playing like ****, but the unit will stay in a group while the pugs spread out and that alone will win them the match handily. Probably a stomp, but not a spawncamp level stomp. Unit fairly big advantage.
Example 3: Both teams have a big skill variation but equal skill total.
The bad players in the unit will listen to their good leaders and avoid basic mistakes, the bad pugs will likely ignore the good pugs and go die horribly instead of grouping up. This will be a convincing stomp, but the good pugs can have the highest scores in the whole match from carrying. Unit huge advantage.
Example 3 is the most likely scenario of course, along with the other two common possibilities good team vs. mixed pugs or mostly bad pugs which are the complete farming spawncamp level stomps.
Also worth noting that newbie pugs often listen more to the leader of a small group than to a single good solo player, therefore a small/medium group of good players + pugs can sometimes act as a mixed skill 12man and beat an average skill 12man. My personal solution to the CW stomps would be to strongly encourage units to drop more in small groups so there are less pure pug teams.
Edited by Sjorpha, 19 January 2016 - 04:45 AM.