Competitive - Season 3 - Teams

[Chaosphere]

As some of you may have noticed, the admins and 1 or 2 other players have been grouping up in TeamSpeak and game to do competitive this season, and only going into Quick Play when grouped with others.

We talked a lot last season about Comp, and tried a few things to get the community more involved in it - and by the end loads of us were playing comp, which is great! Personally it is my favourite way to play the game, and that draw of pushing for a higher rank is one of the things that keeps me coming back. We admins spoke amongst ourselves in Season 2 of possibly trying to form an 'organised' team of like-minded, experienced players that work well together to do exactly this.

So going into Season 3, we set the goal of pushing to Diamond (3,000 SR) as a group. With most of us (currently) around Platinum (2,500+), we felt that with practice and by working consistently as a team, developing our comms, teamwork, plays and strats, we had a real chance of pushing the rank up. We have started working on this now, as I have said above, and want to continue.

This isn't just as simple as grouping up with mates you have played with once or twice before. The games get tough as nails as you get closer to Diamond. Team play is key - it has to be organised, with not just communication but cohesion between players - you have to KNOW how your teammates play, what niche they best fit, and how you as a whole group can best synergise together to out-play the enemy 6 stack. The key to this is the same group of players, grouping up together repeatedly to learn and develop these skills as a group, working on plays and strats, and building this kind of cohesion necessary for winning games higher up in the rankings. This takes time, and isn't done after just a few games.

This level of complexity and strategy to Overwatch is, in my opinion, one of its defining and best features. The potential it has to be such a in-depth and team-focussed game is undoubtedly what keeps me addicted. You only have to watch some of the ESL Play to see what the game can be at its highest levels. Tbh, its pretty epic stuff.

So why am I posting this? Really just to explain why you may see us in a locked off TS channel (which is to minimise interruptions during the games, that really require absolute focus and clear comms between players), and ONLY playing comp in this certain group. Going into comp outside of this group with these rankings will only end badly - not necessarily because of lack of skill or experience, but lack of that cohesion I talked about above - you simply can't put a team of players who HAVEN'T played consistently together and developed this team synergy against an enemy team that HAS, and hope for a good outcome - you're walking into a slaughter

The thing that in my mind made this sort of grouping possible, was the update to quick play. Quick Play is now done with the Competitive Rule-set - only without the ranking, and without this level of team-play described above (in most cases) as enemies tend to be random teams of players that haven't played together before. This means that we don't have to stick to only Comp to get the sort of Overwatch we as a community seem to want to play the most. It means we can play Ranked Comp as a pre-made group, as I have outlined above, and go into Quick Play both for practice as a team, and to allow us to all group up outside of this Ranked pre-made.

So what does this mean? If you see us online, in a group like this, and want to come play Overwatch with us - that's great! This will not change! Drop us a message in-game (if we don't reply we are likely too focused on the match, drop us another!) and when the Comp is done, we'll back out and make sure we get you into a group for some games.

This is really important to stress, we DO NOT want to make anyone feel left out of the game - if you want to play Overwatch, and admins or really anyone from the community are online, the priority should be grouping up to make sure we can all game together, with no one left behind. This is particularly true of Wednesday night, our Official Night, where we will absolutely focus on getting ALL of the dMw Overwatchers together for a night of fun group gaming.

I think one last thing to add is that if YOU feel you want to do something similar, set up a comp team and try to push up the ranks - post about it here, and speak to one of the admins! We will do everything we can to help you get into a group to work with. The main problem we have found is getting everyone together at the same time. We use a WhatsApp Group for this purpose, but you could arrange a regular night / time, or organise it by PMs. Either way if you want to give this a go and want our help, we will see what we can do

As always, any questions, please drop me a PM, or hit me on on TeamSpeak.