Communication 101

No, this isn't the bullshit class you had to take your freshman year of college. I went through that, it sucked. Moving on...

Anyway, Pavilion and Phoenix tagged teamed a little doubles action last night (in Halo of course). The first couple games went great, we were both playing well. We were clearly outplaying, outwitting, outlasting .... wait I think that's taken. Let's just say we were winning, handedly. We played a bunch of games in this fashion.

But then we hit a rut. Now, this is highly subjective because it was getting late and admittedly we were both tired. Then our winning streak dropped off. We tied a couple games, lost one, won one. So on and so one. So again I tried to figure out what went wrong.

My conclusion on this, which may be exactly different from what Pavilion came up with, is that we just stopped talking. Not in the sense that we didn't say anything, but that we quit telling each other where we were, what we were doing, what we should do. In the games we won, I remember us clearly pursuing some form of strategy. Rush rockets, win them, hold the bottom room. Something like that. In the last games we didn't do that, we were disjointed and didn't play as a team because of it. That's my fault as much as anyone's, but I needed to point it out. When playing a team game, you must communicate with you team. Let them know what you are doing, what the team needs to do, etc. Remember knowledge is power.

Now here is the problem. You want to communicate more, and you try but it just isn't working. There is a lot of things that you must know about the game before you can become a good communicator. First, if you turn your mic on to trash talk or just to say stupid shit this is not for you. Go watch the videos we posted on the around the page and be happy. But if you want to make yourself a better team player this is a good idea.

1. Learn where the power weapons and power ups spawn on each map and the quickest ways to get them.

2. Learn the call outs for the most played maps. Call outs are a nickname that is given to a specific location on each map. You can find some of the basic call outs in the mlg forums, here. Learn these, it won't take too long and it will help immensely when playing with someone else that knows them.

and finally...

3. Playing through the map will give you a good idea of the key combat points are. Get your team to these locations and you will find yourself winning more games.

Use these tools and you will be a player that everyone wants to play with. Plus you will win more games and have more fun. That's what the game is all about!