Hi guys, please take the time to read the essay-rant below.
So this week fucking sucked. Every single one of us played fucking awfully and we deserved to lose to a bunch of frankly terrible teams. We were completely unprepared and had no idea what we were doing or how to win. Honestly it was pretty embarrassing for everyone involved. It's not good enough and it's changing, starting now.
I'm not having another week where Wayne and I are on Mumble every evening desperately trying to scrape four people together so we can scrim. There are going to be two official practices each week, on Tuesdays and Thursdays from 7:30 PM BST until we get bored (probably between 9 and 10). You're all welcome to come onto Mumble other days to try some impromptu scrims, but those two are the proper practice times. There will of course be pre-game practices on Sundays and Mondays as well, but if we aren't ready by then, there's not much point in bothering.
Everyone is expected to make the effort to show up, on time, to at least one of these two practices every week, preferably both. We're going to start each practice with discussing strategies for the week's map and work out ideas for things like grabbing techniques, how to get resets, powerup control, etc. I expect everyone, including the new players, to contribute to these discussions with their own ideas. I don't want to be telling you guys what to do the whole time. This means that it would be great if you guys took a little time to prepare for these practices. You can do this by watching recordings of previous games played on the map (if you guys think it would help, I can find some videos for you guys to watch and post them on the team sub). You might want to try setting up a private group on a test server and trying out boosts and things on the map on your own. Maybe even just play some pubs on the map and work out some ideas. I don't think this kind of thing would take more than an hour per week to do. More importantly, when I say 'any thoughts?' after a game, I would love it if everyone had something to say.
I want everyone to come to practice ready to have some contribution to strategy discussion so everyone is involved and both the majors and minors teams can improve together. It's important that everyone tries to show up on time so they don't miss this part of practice, it's too much hassle to start again every time someone shows up.
Team lineups will be chosen entirely on what happens in practice. If you can't make it to either practice in a week, you won't be playing that week. I will happily replace majors players with minors if the minors players show up and contribute more during the week. If we have a week like this one again, with virtually no practice before the games, I will forfeit the matches instead of enduring the humiliation of playing in or watching a 6-1 or 8-1 defeat in a half. If people aren't turning up at all multiple weeks in a row, they're just getting dropped.
I'm going to try and get some free agents to make up the numbers in our team so we shouldn't have quite such bad attendance issues in the future. Hopefully this should introduce some competition for playing time and everyone will have to fight for their place on the team.
Honestly, if we can all commit 4 or 5 hours a week to preparing for ELTP, taking the time to think about strategy and how to improve ourselves and each other, if we can show up to the majority of practices on time and ready to play, if we can play like we actually want to be good and win games, we would easily fucking destroy every single majors and minors team in ELTP, because virtually nobody else tryhards like that, and we already have the talent. A bad player that tries hard will generally do better than a good player that doesn't, and none of us are bad players. If we can't commit this (relatively small) amount of time and effort, every week will be like this one until the end of the season.
We didn't put in any effort outside of the games this week, and we all got rekt. Last week, we did put in the time and effort and we got some good results. It seems pretty obvious what we need to do if we want to win this league, which I'm completely confident we can do, in both majors and minors.
We're in tryhard mode now, guys, and I want you all to tryhard with me.
Any thoughts?