Success in Gaming

It's not enough in Counter-Strike to simply be the best at what you do to get where you want to go. There is so much talent in the field, that in order to truly stand out and be successful, a player needs a quality team to stand out. To become a successful gamer, you most certainly need all of the qualities mentioned in the first part of this two part series, but you also need an adequate platform to showcase your abilities. A team, or "clan" as it is called by many, requires a unique, yet familiar skill set to be successful. It requires not just one, but all five individuals to have the right attitude and level of commitment, and is in many regards the most viable way to get noticed as a player.

You may enter a LAN tournament and play extremely well, and get a small amount of notice from your competitors. But to win the event entirely, or place very well, is what will maximize your exposure as a player and aspiring successful gamer. Check out below as we come to understand what it takes for a team to be a potent force in today's competitive culture, with a few tips along the way.

What Is a Successful Team?

Before we get into just what it takes to be successful as a team, we need to understand what we mean by that in the first place. A successful team can mean many things to many people, but in this regard a successful team is one that is dedicated, stable, constantly improving, littered with talent and a reacher of goals. If a team's goal is to be the best in the Nation, and that is achieved, that is a successful team in my book. On a lower scale, if a team's ultimate goal is to place in the top five of an online league, then that, too, is a successful team in their own right. The idea is, when a team prepares for and accomplishes an objective, that is what makes them successful. How much preparation and dedication, depends on the difficulty of the goal. A team with professional CGS aspirations, for example, may never reach that plateau without the utmost dedication and preparation. Because there are many meanings to a successful team, we're only going to discuss one -- the professionally aspiring.

A Successful Team Must...

Be On Schedule if a team is going to work. If Billy works all day on Thursdays, Tommy has class on Wednesday and Jason has to babysit on Mondays, then how are the Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers ever going to get together? Talent is futile if there's no practice time available to mesh it into the team, and a team is not really a team if they don't practice in the first place.

Put The Team First. This is perhaps one of the hardest things for a team to do. With work, class, family and a healthy social live, it's difficult to convince someone that the team has to come first. Being a part of a team that is aspiring to play professionally brings along with it a level of unsaid commitment. If a player is not willing to schedule their job or classes around to make practice, or give up free time designated for relaxation, then they won't be going anywhere fast. Yes, there are some things in life that are more important than your dreams of becoming a professional player. But if a player is unable to put the team first and make sacrifices where necessary, then they need to understand they're only making things harder for themselves. To play on a professional level takes work, and time. If a player cannot commit to that, why would it be fair for them to achieve their goal, while others that work harder and sacrifice more do not?

Each member should know going in that they may have to make tough choices for the sake of the team.

Communicate Well or suffer the consequences. Communication is integral to success in any team environment, especially a game like Counter-Strike on its highest level. It may be easy during practice games to call opponent positions after you're dead, but on most LAN environments that is not allowed. Get used to calling things while you're fragging, or even better, before the fire begins.

Communicating well with a teammate in a bombsite can be the difference between success and failure in individual rounds. The player that has the presence of mind to make minute adjustments and properly inform their team is the player that is communicating well, and benefiting everyone. The player that makes the adjustment without letting anyone know, can lead to all sorts of trouble.

For example, pushing down banana in the relevant bombsite on Inferno without informing your team, can lead to hasty rotation upon your death, even wasted flashes. This can mean quick rotation immediately to the site, or rotation to banana itself, where a player wont be expecting opponents to still be there. Visualization helps everyone on the team, so anything a player can do to communicate what he sees well is an asset, no, a necessity to a team. It's not always enough to call "three cat walk." Be more descriptive if you can. Such as "three cat walk, some deagles” or "three top A, green boxes."

Compete Together whenever they can. This practically goes without saying, but for a team to reach their goal of competing in a league like the CGS, they must get used to playing together in a live environment. A lot of things differ from online to LAN play, one of those things is the speed of the game, and the level of communication needed. A player can't always hear every whisper or footstep in the game on LAN, and players that constantly complain "stop talking I'm trying to hear!" need to get over themselves, and realize there are bigger things being discussed by the team at the moment.

Trust Each Other through and through. A team that trusts one another is easy to pick out from the crowd. With trust, a team is able to perform with more confidence, and to a more immediate effect, cheat less on the defensive side of maps. It allows for more fluent communication, and most importantly keeps the morale of the entire team up.

Practice Like Pros if they expect to be pros. This one sounds basic too, but it's often overlooked. If a team wants to play professionally, they need to prepare professionally. The least amount of downtime in practice for figuring things out, the more time that is spent actually practicing. It's the strategist's job to work out as many kinks as he can before practice begins, to keep things smooth and optimize every minute.

Have All The Qualities of Part 1 of Success in Gaming. Whether it is passion, dedication, confidence or sociability, a team must be filled with players with the qualities of a successful individual in order to be a successful group.

Ten Things a Team Should Do

1. Get Organized
Easily the most important thing for a young, aspiring team to do is get organized. This means designating and sticking to a practice schedule, developing and organizing a playbook, planning for events, setting goals, maintaining cash flow and finding a way to effectively relay all of this information. While there are many different distribution methods, perhaps one of the easiest would be to utilize the web space provided by many server companies, and continually update the ftp with the schedule and other team-specific information.

2. Set Up a Team Bank

Setting up a team bank is integral to success for the very serious. It is an often overlooked necessity to many teams that will inevitably need to travel, and can be a great asset to accelerating the improvement process. A team bank can be used to pay travel expenses, assure everyone is equipped with adequate gear, maintain game server and Ventrilo services, and even pay an experienced player to come in and help coach the team. For the creative, the money can also be used to acquire top level competition to practice with on a fairly consistent basis. A team bank can go a long way for a team.

One of the easiest ways to start a team bank, is to use a free, secure system such as Paypal. An initial commitment must be made to start off the bank ($500 is a good start), and a portion of team winnings should go into the system along with any monthly contributions. Ensure that the person handling the bank is extremely reliable, and understands that no matter how large their contribution, the money put into the team bank is the teams, and is not to be used without consultation.

3. Develop a Playbook
Every team needs a playbook, but many just don't know how to go about it. Ideally, a team should have both an online and hard copy playbook (to be referenced at events). Organizing the playbook is very simple, it's filling it that is the difficult part. If you do not understand how to set up an effective playbook, stay tuned as we will be discussing the topic more in depth in the near future.

4. Practice Appropriately
This is simple. If you are looking to be a top team in the Nation, two hours of practice two days a week simply will not be enough to cut it more often than not. To play with the pros, you need to prepare like them. A good starting practice schedule would be anywhere from 4-5 days a week, with a minimum of four hours a day. It's important not to shock the team with an incredible amount of practice out of nowhere, so be sure to ease into it. Ideally, Sunday through Thursday would be the best days for practice, leaving Friday and Saturday free for enjoyment. Football season is coming up though, so you may have to change that!

Also keep in mind that SourceTV/HLTV is your friend. Practicing against great teams and losing badly can benefit you more as a team than winning can in many regards, and with a means of recording, the team can go back and watch themselves the following week and understand their strengths and weaknesses, both as individuals and as a team. Practice isn't just preparing, it's evaluating. Designating a "film night" at the beginning of the week, where players watch demos of last week's practice games or matches is a great way to find ways to improve, and figure out which strategies need refining. Ensure that you request that each team you practice plays out, to give you as many rounds in as few as demos as possible to evaluate.

5. Set Goals, Through Steps
Setting a Goal is an important part of a team, but explaining the steps needed to be taken to complete that goal is just as important. For example, if a team wanted to be the best in the nation, step one could be to establish themselves as the best in the city, and then the state, the region, spread their influence and ultimately be recognized as a national powerhouse. Providing steps gives a clear sense of progression for more difficult, longer to attain tasks.

6. Discuss The Team

At the end of every practice week, it is critical for an upstart team to discuss themselves. If you want to know where you're going, you need to know where you're at. Discussing things the team did well and poorly each week is a great way to end the week, and truly understand how you're progressing. If at the end of each week a team can ask themselves, "are we a better team today, than at the start of the week?" then they are in great shape, regardless of the answer. Answering yes means the team is improving, while answering no allows the team to change their practice routine to something that is more effective. Keep in mind that winning and losing practice scrimmages is not what is truly important. A team can lose all their practice games all week, but if they prepared appropriately and learned new things, then more often than not they can say they are a better team today, than at the start of the practice week. Improvement -- that's the key. Consistently improve, and find ways to reinforce that ideal. Improving each week means you are getting closer to your goal(s), and with consistency in practice that improvement will no doubt accelerate.

7. Plan For Events
The worst thing a team can do is just show up for a LAN event. Yes, a team can experience by throwing themselves into the fray, but yes, it's also a waste of time if a team is not fully prepared. Maximizing the time a team uses is extremely important, and preparing for one event and placing very well, is better than showing up for two and placing very poor. This leads directly to the next thing a team should look to do...

8. Dominate Early and Often
The mark of a successful team is one that comes in and dominates early and often. This means, not entering a league or an event unless you are totally prepared to win it all. It's much easier to accelerate through the ranks as a team and in the opinion of others if you show up and win. To give you an example, which team usually garners more attention: A team that has been in an main-level league for four seasons, and finally wins? Or a team that goes undefeated in its first attempt? Showing up prepared is very important to advancing as a team. When Complexity started out in the intermediate level of an online league, they didn't just go in to it to practice. They were largely prepared from the get go -- or at least it seemed as such. If a team wants to practice, do it when the time fits the schedule. Go into leagues when you're ready to dominate. While doing well in online leagues is not the goal for many teams, it is indeed a way to get noticed, and every team needs to have a buzz about them if they are to receive more attention for their performances at real tournaments.

9. Be Businesslike
When a team is together to practice in hopes of competing on a high level one day, the last thing you need are players on the team simply for the reason that they are your friend. Having great friends on the team is good thing, and becoming good friends with members of the team is a great thing. But when a member is only there because of their relationship with a player, problems are bound to arise. The best and most dedicated players should play, with exceptions for poor attitude and inconvenient residence. If a team wants to develop talent from its roots, then there is nothing wrong with that. But the dedication better be there, more so from that player than anyone else.

10. Be Humble
Whatever you do, whatever you accomplish and whoever you defeat, stay humble. It's more important to put look for ways to continually improve, than bask in the things you're already good at. A positive and humble attitude as a team, gives off the aura of professionalism to sponsors and important figures in the community. It's also the best way to continue to improve. Can you be successful without being humble? Yes, unfortunately you can. But make no mistake, there will be more options available in the future thanks in part to your goodwill, than if you're just another jerk. Understand that scrimmages are for practicing, and as someone once said, winning scrims is sort of like kissing your mom -- it's nothing to brag about. Get what you need out of the games, and get out. There's no need to get an attitude with the other players, and there's no need to respond to ludicrous remarks. It's good luck and good game, or nothing at all in my book. My outlook is, find me a player who has a bad attitude, and I'll find you a player with a good attitude who is better than them, or will be better than them very shortly. A great attitude is the sign of a great leader, and at even skill the good guys will always have that advantage. Be a good guy and represent your team properly. Respect (both given and earned) can take a team a long way in the community.