Getting my arse kicked and why audience participation is not always a good thing

Last night there was another 6v6 event on Karak Norn. I always like to attend these events (if I real life doesn’t get in the way) and yesterday I was happy to ninja myself onto the PC without causing too much marital strife. In the past I’ve always entered these events with an almost completely melee group (other than healers) and have done fairly well, our win/loss ratio normally around the breaking even mark. Pretty much every event we’ve cobbled a group together at the last minute, but it’s still often had the same pool of people to select from and we managed to get my desired melee theme. Last night though the people I’ve usually gone with weren’t available and nor were the type of careers required for a melee group. Not wanting to miss the event we built a group up anyway from who was online and decided to give it a go. We knew the group wasn’t quite right and really we should have changed things, but over confidence stepped in and we just went for it.

BIG MISTAKE

We got the shit kicked out of us and ended up with a 1-6 win/loss ratio before we decided to call it a night. Ugh… this was by far the worst result I’ve ever had in an event like this. I’m not going to make excuses for this poor result, as we were outplayed by Order and the speed of some of our losses said it all. However I want to ponder on it a bit, since this was such an unprecedented arse kicking for me and losing a fight is not just about how well your opponents play, but also about other factors like how well you play, your group synergy and the environment you’re fighting in.

To be clear then, /salute to all our opponents, in each fight you outplayed us and fully deserved your wins.

Our group looked like this:
- Chosen (shield)
- Chosen (great weapon)
- Disciple of Khaine (heal specced)
- Disciple of Khaine (DPS specced)
- 2x Sorcerer (single target specced)

First off, this is no sleight on the people in my group. They were all good (or even excellent) players who don’t make a habit out of getting their arse kicked. We just didn’t play well; our assisting was sloppy, ventrilo was a muddle, changing to better targets was off and our use of crowd control was rubbish.

I respecced great weapon for this event, which was a mistake, I’ve been sword and board for ages now and I discovered I just didn’t quite know anymore where I should be and what I should be doing in a situational sense with this type of group when using a great weapon. For the last 2 fights I went back to my shield spec and did a lot better (which included the one win lol). No escaping though, I was shockingly shite for most of our fights. Oh! The shame… Meh I'm no epeen ego monkey, I'll freely admit when I played like turd :P Anyways, I don’t know if other people will think that group should work ok, but for me there was no synergy. It’s a set up that didn’t seem to know what it was trying to be and it felt very squishy. The squishy bit I’m a little surprised at, since there’s this impression of DoKs as un-killable monsters, but it was Slayer central last night and they were absolutely tearing through our DoKs. In previous groups we always went with 2 proper heal specced players and I think this was our biggest mistake in creating the group. To summarise my rambling, on top of just plain playing badly, I think we made 3 key mistakes in our “setting up phase”:

1) Overconfidence based upon past performances meant we didn’t put enough thought into setting up the group. In an event that will have some opponents in absolutely perfect “FOTM” (as people on forums like to call them) set ups, be cocky and over-confident is asking for an arse kicking. This is the root of the other 2 key mistakes.
2) The group didn’t have an overall purpose or theme; we didn’t consider synergy of careers or anything other than having 2 healers (1 ½ as it turned out), 2 tanks and 2 DPS.
3) Individuals not being clear on their role and responsibilities led to headless chicken moments. Changing to unfamiliar specs in an unfamiliar group was not my brightest moment.

Important to state again that I’m not saying had we sorted ourselves out better we would have won. Order outplayed us and judging by the score on my Casualties of WAR mod they outplayed quite a few others too, but had we got our shit together we would at least have had put up a better fight and not got steamrolled so much. A lesson in humility learnt perhaps.

There was one other thing that was a complete fucking headache. Idiots in the audience.
These events attract spectators, which is cool and normally not a problem. Spectators sit naked on their mounts and watch from a distance. Unfortunately last night the audience (from both Destruction and Order) decided it wanted to get a bit closer to the action and in some cases join in. We had people circling the fights at close range, running through the middle, adding onto fights, throwing in resses onto our opponents and all sorts of other crap from a mixture of people who weren’t all naked either. This meant that for a bunch of our fights I couldn’t tell who was in the enemy group and who was just some random bell-end trying to screw things up; in fact there was one fight where I had (by a rough count) 18 red names in tab targetable range. It also looked like Order was having similar difficulties. At another point what appeared to 2 groups worth of spectators tried to gank us, we killed them mind you, there’s a big difference between puggies and the proper Order pre-mades. In your face psycho spectators! :P

(update) for fellow Nornites, this was in Praag ;)

It was incredibly annoying though. With us realising our group just wasn’t working at all and the idiots amongst the audience making everything a headache, we decided to call it a night after just 7 proper fights.

Events like these can be great fun, but it requires more than just respect from the teams taking part. It needs those watching it to not act like total twats.