Empires Summer Scrim League Game 1 - 13th June 21:00 BST/ 16:00 EDT/ 13:00 PDT

Im fine with how it worked out, even when we were getting fucked in the main, eveyrone kept communicating so it kept the teamwork up and made people not slip into "well noones trying to fix this" mentality common to pub games.

 

I honestly dont thnk city is deathtrap anymore

 

I actually think separate squad channels is a huge mistake. It's really important to teach people about microphone discipline. The fact is, I guarantee that a substantial amount of the chatter going on in those games might have been worthless, and it's important to call people out on that and teach them filter their own comms before they start mouthing off. It's also important to really make use of ingame functions such as spotting enemies, targeting stuff and just generally trusting that your teammates don't need every last thing explaining to them. It's also important for everyone on the team to really have at least an understand of what's going on elsewhere as that helps with situational awareness. In the opposite hand though, they also need to be capable of filtering out the voices they don't need to be hearing. That might sound difficult but it's honestly surprising how fast you develop that.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WgddQjpaaKE

If you actually listen to the comms in that video, virtually the only people talking regularly are the commander, the team leader and the squad leaders. Squad members honestly don't need to be talking unless they see an incoming rush or ninja or something that requires immediate attention of the team.

 

What you can do is use Teamspeak's whisper lists feature to create a whisper list for your squad. As a player, you bind a push-to-talk key for the squad you're in. When you want to talk to the squad, you use your squad key, and when you want to talk to the team, you use your normal key. This lets you keep everyone in the same channel and still have squad chat.

 

Anyone can know anything important at any given time.

Fuck squad channel.

Sincerely,

 

If I didn't use my mic at all, you really should feel bad, even if you were on the other team. Because that means I was giving absolutely zero fuck to the game.


Just a note, was EPIC server a good idea?
1: Of course, that crash at that absolutely tense moment, 72 minutes into the game.

2: Round 2 scoreboard says we had 50~55% players with 100 ping and above.

3: Throughout that entire 72 minutes I had constant lag spikes, and I believe I wasn't the only one.

 

I was constantly lagging fps wise, not network. Really shitty

 

I recall like 3 moments where i had actual giant lagspikes, but ill take that over viper microstuttering every half a second everyday.
Finally a game with no bullshit magic behind the wall deaths.

 

But that can be done in ingame chat, while in squad channels squad members can say things that the rest of the team doesn't need to hear like "drop me ammo" or "let's go onto the roof".

 

Can't you just use TS for squad chats and the in-game chat for team-wide stuff?

That sounds pretty simple to me and it gives you the necessary versatility.

 

That's what we did in Spikes team and it worked.
Squads had their squad channels in TS and I used the ingame voice. + other folks used ingame voice when needed.

It's not rocket science and it works.

 

But that's just the thing. We used both Teamspeak and the in-game voice chat. So we didn't have to worry so much about filtering out relatively irrelevant information and we could talk as much as we wanted to to our squads. There was no issue using the team-wide chat if there was an actual need, but I would peg 90% of the talking I was listening and adding to was within my squad.

Really, the only downside is dealing with two separate voice binds. I use Alt for TS and M3 for in-game, which worked pretty well in this case. It also wouldn't work so well if you used voice-activation.

 

1. As stated repeatedly, VIPER would have crashed at the exact same moment. We exceeded entity limits that were nothing to do with the server or even Empires for that matter, it was literally source engine based limits.

2. Actually, I checked in the first round and I saw at least 60% of people having sub 100 ping. A number of Americans on the east coast were actually sat under 100 as well. The fact is, for reasons I don't really understand, traffic coming to Europe is faster than traffic going away from it.

3. Well of course, you're in fucking Taiwan. Like both Paradox and Z!0000m said, lag wasn't really an issue.

EPIC server will be used to host the first few games because ;

a) I want to keep complete control until things are running a lot more smoothly, and I need direct server access for that.

b) EPIC server is probably going down at the start of July/end of June, after which all subsequent games will be on VIPER, so it makes sense to give the Euros the last chance of a low ping server before it's gone permanently.

 

Get 5 button mouse it makes this so much easier.

 

Am I the only one here who still uses FSA and FSD?

 

I used to do mwheel up for squad targets and mwheel down for spotted. That shit was so nice targetting enemies by scrolling