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Haswell

It's (Almost) Never About Teamwork

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For the purpose of this discussion, I shall define "teamwork" as situations where multiple players are required to perform some action in the game in order to complete objectives, and that said objectives will be failed or require more time to complete if the players fail to perform their actions. Note that the objectives do include tasks outside of matches, and might not be shared across different players.

With that said, let's break down the illusion of teamwork being important in AW, and explore how the game mostly revolves around selfish play.


Why Teamwork Doesn't Matter

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An example of the illusion held by average players.

Imagine you receive a task to obtain 10 Blue Star medals, whereby you will be rewarded by completing the task. The requirement for Blue Star medals is to earn the most XP out of all players in a winning PvE match, so not only do you have to perform well enough to win the match, but you also have to perform better than other players in the match. At some point, your performance become heads and shoulders above all the other players to the point where you can secure victory and top XP by yourself very reliably, regardless of how the other players perform.

Is there teamwork involved in this task, in that other players need to help you to get Blue Stars? Arguably not, if you can win matches by yourself and outperform other players. The only actions required from the other players is that they perform worse than you do, such as inflict less damage or gain less kills/assists.

Would the task to obtain 10 Blue Star medals be easier if other players are not present to compete against you? Most definitely, assuming your performance alone is sufficient to win matches. If the performance of other players cease to become a determining factor in being victorious, then their presence becomes only an obstacle for you to overcome, to outperform them in order to secure top XP in matches. In other words, there is barely any teamwork involved in the task, the lack of teamwork in fact makes it easier for you to complete your objective.

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You'd actually need to obtain 30 Blue Star medals, 10 for each mission set in the Battle Path.

There are many instances in the game where teamwork is not only unnecessary, but even actively discouraged if some objectives require you to perform better than other players. Take the Battle Path repeatable missions of racking up damage and kills/assists and XP for example, in order to complete them as quickly as possible you will want to perform very well in matches. At the same time, you would also want other players to perform as poorly as possible in order to leave more damage and kills/assists for you. Completing the objectives do not require teamwork or the presence of other players at all.

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Examples of possible repeatable missions in Battle Paths.

Even officially promoted events and contests will often discourage teamwork, since the goals of such contests will usually be to outperform other players. It can be further argued that the game simply doesn't promote teamwork at all, and actively discourages teamwork at higher skill levels.

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The only "teamwork" involved here would be other players refusing to deal any damage in order to leave more for the competitor.

 

Teamwork By Coercion

For there to be instances of good teamwork, there must also be instances of poor teamwork. This not the same as unnecessary teamwork as described above nor about poor execution of teamwork, but rather about poor concepts and implementations of situations where teamwork is forced upon players. Specifically, situations where you are explicitly required to rely on the actions of other players in order to complete objectives.

Assist damage has a notorious reputation for its criteria of relying on other players to damage your desired targets. The better your own performance in dealing damage by yourself, the less potential assist damage you can rack up due to you own performance depriving other players opportunities to deal assist damage for you. In order to accumulate assist damage effectively, you must intentionally limit your own performance in ways that force other players to deal damage. For a better explanation, please consult the assist damage guide located here: https://armoredlabs.net/index.php?/topic/78-how-assist-damage-works-or-doesnt-work/

 

Assist damage demonstrates poor teamwork in that aside from preparing specific targets for other players to shoot at (by spotting, detracking, designating), you are at the mercy of other players to deal assist damage for you. Even with careful positioning of the targets so that they present their vulnerable aspects to other players, the rate and quantities of assist damage you accumulate is limited by the performance of other players, therefore intentionally handicapping your own damage dealing becomes essential as you play a waiting game to see how long it takes for others to damage your targets. In this instance, teamwork is forced upon you and other players, and not necessarily in a good implementation.

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This mission is the nightmare of many players, especially good players.

Assist crediting (as opposed to kills) also falls under this category due to the reliance on other players to secure kills for you, and thereby crediting you with assists instead of kills. This is commonly not too problematic as there is only one task in the game requiring assists only, the Support Fire medal. Other players will also likely be inclined to shoot at targets, therefore the limiting factor would rarely be on other players, as opposed to personal performance.

The Teamwork medal has a simple requirement of no players are allowed to be destroyed even once in a PvE match. On paper that seems easy, but in practice it requires decent performance on your part as well as relying on other players to also be proficient. The game itself on the other hand do not properly emphasize the downsides of being destroyed and respawning, and sometimes even actively encourage the practice of intentionally respawning through ammo resupplying and advantageous respawn locations. This commonly lead to players simply not caring about being destroyed, thus the Teamwork medal can on occasions become frustratingly difficult to obtain if not all players in a match are proficient enough to not get destroyed, or if they don't care at all. It's not so much about actual teamwork in that players must perform some sort of action in support of each other, but rather a general issue with lack of skill and experience of players. Ironically there is another method to obtain Teamwork medals, but one that can be counterintuitive to the general notion of teamwork.

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Arguably the worst PvE medal to efficiently obtain.

 

Teamwork and Personal Performance

As was said at the beginning, the definition of teamwork here is that multiple players in a match must actively contribute to an objective. On the other hand, if one player performs overwhelmingly and carry the other players to a common objective (ie. victory), but at the expense of other players not being required to anything at all (thus getting low rewards), can this still be considered teamwork from the perspectives of the other players?

Returning to the earlier example of Blue Star medals, it hardly qualifies as teamwork if the presence of other players become irrelevant to the desired objectives. This can either be due to other players not having the necessary skill and experience to compete, or certain vehicles in the game massively overperforming compared to others (ie. XM247 York, Terminator series). Therefore this lack of teamwork may not be due to a lack of effort on the other players' part, but rather one player or few players performing so well that others have no opportunities to contribute. In an ironic twist, players would have to perform worse in order for actual teamwork to be present.

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"Teamwork".

The Teamwork medal fall under the same problem: players can either perform equally well and avoid being destroyed in the match, or the players who want the medal specifically can perform overwhelmingly well and prevent others from being destroyed by virtue of removing all threats fast enough. The latter method in essence disregards teamwork altogether in favor of personal performance, much to the irony of the Teamwork medal.

 

Lastly... Actual Teamwork in AW

There are few cases in AW where teamwork is actually required, either explicitly or implicitly. A lot of the PvP and Special Operations content will belong to these two categories owing to their general difficulty, making it improbable for single or few players to overwhelmingly carry others to the desired objectives, assuming said objectives do not have selfish requirements (ie. individual damage) that discourage teamwork. Examples of these include various Special Operations achievements, and Heroic Special Operations.

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Peacemaker is a test of how well players can survive under fire and stress, while defending multiple locations on the map, without destroying enemies.

 

In short, the best way to promote teamwork is to have objectives that are sufficiently difficult and require all players involved to perform with some level of skillfulness.

If you've made it this far, thank you for reading my overly long essay.

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Great post, always enjoyable to read this kind of opinion. Nonetheless, would like to point one thing:

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 "In short, the best way to promote teamwork is to have objectives that are sufficiently difficult and require all players involved to perform with some level of skillfulness."


This kind of "teamwork objectives" can not be implemented, unfortunately. Such would require a Skill-based matchmaker and dynamic objective requirements. If a team in PvE has 4 below average players and 1 unicum, how would the game decide how easy or hard to make these objectives? Make them for the below average and the unicum will steal all the damage, like shown above with york, and if you make them for the unicum, the below average will struggle to catch up, possibly failing the mission. True teamwork is only possible when the objectives match an equally skilled team that knows their limits.

Our current teamwork should be correctly named to "Selfish Teamwork", like the teamwork present in damage contests. I have participated in this kind of contests for a few years already, and usually with good success rates, and I can tell that, from my point of view,  the only teamwork I have to do is to keep my friendlies alive, so they are the ones getting shot by the AI, regardless of their tank class, enabling me to "steal" as much damage as possible without getting killed or damaged. This tactic can be also used in missions and events, like battle path missions, to maximize damage and experience gained.

Similar logic could easily be used in PvP and Glops. Using the statpadders/tryhard platoons as an example. One single unicum platoon can change the battle result somewhat reliably  because of their coordinated actions, preventing their own team from losing the game. This platoon is comparable to the York, "stealing" all damage and kills from the team, preventing others from playing as an actual team. As I wrote above, adding an equally capable platoon would greatly prevent this, as now both platoons are forced to play along the random players to prevent the other platoon from dominating.

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1 hour ago, Sebastian_Grimm said:


This kind of "teamwork objectives" can not be implemented, unfortunately. Such would require a Skill-based matchmaker and dynamic objective requirements. If a team in PvE has 4 below average players and 1 unicum, how would the game decide how easy or hard to make these objectives? Make them for the below average and the unicum will steal all the damage, like shown above with york, and if you make them for the unicum, the below average will struggle to catch up, possibly failing the mission. True teamwork is only possible when the objectives match an equally skilled team that knows their limits.

Players can fall into three categories here: too good for teamwork; not good enough for teamwork, and; just good enough for teamwork. It's a delicate balancing act to maintain difficulties that won't result in a massive skill gap, unfortunately I don't feel AW has done a good job in that regard.


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On 8/30/2021 at 12:38 PM, Haswell said:

Players can fall into three categories here: too good for teamwork; not good enough for teamwork, and; just good enough for teamwork. It's a delicate balancing act to maintain difficulties that won't result in a massive skill gap, unfortunately I don't feel AW has done a good job in that regard.

This comment here basically sums up why in certain games people want a "skill based" match making system.

Even then you have situations where a teammate has a vehicle that they suck in and just doesn't click, they could fall into the "not good enough" or "just good enough" categories.  Then you could have someone on the other end that falls in the later two categories just hit it off with a tank and be classed as "too good".  The combinations of these can go on and on.

There was also something said a long time ago that amounted to some players will dial it up to 10 and play at their best all the time and start to become the "serious" ones because they feel they have to as their team mates either aren't willing to try and just do the minimum to finish up a mission or they just aren't good.


 

"If you were not birthed with claws or fangs, store bought will do just fine."

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There is a lot of wonkiness in the back end when it comes to players being destroyed, and whether or not that counts for various things.  For example, for a long time you only registered a "death" in a game if you were dead at the end of the match - if you died and respawned using the FRBK your death wasn't recorded in your stats.  (This was fixed before they introduced the pay-to-respawn mechanic.)  There have also been achievements in the past that require you to "survive" which are completed as long as your tank is still alive at the end of the match.  It doesn't matter if that's your 3rd spawn or not - as long as your tank is alive at the end, you count as surviving.

Sadly, that wonkiness doesn't apply to the Teamwork medal.  If it did, that would make that contract significantly easier to complete.

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