The Problem

Learning a Team Composition/Strategy

Creating/Changing a Team Composition/Strategy

Created By : Unknown ~ A blog about various video games Article Team Practice was published by Unknown on Thursday, 20 June 2013. There are currently 1comments: for the article Team Practice Articlewas published byon. There are currentlyfor the article

There seems to be a common misconception about how easy it is for a team to train. It isn't just scrimmaging, watching replay of said scrimmage and then correcting the mistakes in the teams play. That may work, however there are far more efficient ways of getting better as a team. Scrimmaging is just a means to an end, the platform on which you decide what you practice. By itself scrimmaging is nothing but inefficient(it will still get the job done, but very poorly) and it promotes bad habits, this has a lot to do with the infrastructure of the scene you currently play on. Its why I believe Korea will always be ahead of every other scene, simply because their infrastructure is so good. Note I will not be explaining Koreas infrastructure, mainly because I don't know it but I'll be explaining what I believe to be at least a basic infrastructure.Communication is a key component to getting the most out of a team and should be developed before anything else. You can't create a team and just end up with structured communication, its obviously something created. Your team doesn't just end up explaining their lane situation in an ordered fashion at specific times in game naturually. You get together as a group and set clear and concise rules for communication. Saying "You need to communicated your situation more to us at X point in the game" is vague, and is not going to get the results needed. "When we lane swap, every 20 seconds say outloud your tower HP." is much better, and will display much better results. Don't leave it up to the person to decide how they are going to communicate, as a team set out rules on how you will communicate. When there is a communication error it makes it much easier to fix, as you know what you didn't do and what you must do to fix it.After the terms have been made, you scrim. You don't scrim in this situation to win those games or get better at the game itself. Any mistakes other than miscommunication ones should be effectively ignored, there should be no emotional energy spent on anything but miscommunication. By doing this you're putting a mental focus on miscommunication, building a barrier in which you must cross to trend into other parts of the game. Its like a coach telling a team their not touching any of the equipment until they do X. X is now whats in the way of you and what you actually came here to do. If you focus on other mistakes, the importance of miscommunication in your mind is undermined and it will be corrected much later(or not even properly, the team may let little miscommunications slide) even if you were to correct more miscommunication mistakes this way. If you can't fix your communication, you're much better off finding a team in which you can.Later on com practice can be used as warm-ups and can be used as a punishment by a coach for getting lazy with communication. Now, you may be thinking that getting lazy with communication can be warranted in some situations but it never is and should always be corrected. You have team A and team B, Team A is much more experienced than Team B. Team A practices a team comp which needs their top laner to 2v1, so the top laner does but team Bs bot lane decides to freeze instead of push. Team A agreed that their top laner would say the turret health out loud every 10 seconds after the 2:15 mark. Since they don't push to the turret, the top laner decides he doesn't have to do this until they do. Now the rest of Team A doesn't know whats going on in that lane anymore and they've built their game around that knowledge because its the base that they use. Its a constant in every game and it may hinder their gameplay without it, no matter how useless the information may seem. The information isn't actually useless because if the top laner says his turret health is 2500 every ten seconds he is effectively telling everyone they are freezing the lane.So the team has mastered communication and they can finally move on to the fun stuff; team compositions. At this point you should realize that time ingame you don't account for is black space, just like the fog of war when you don't have vision. Its simply an unknown, something you leave up to chance. If you want the best chance of winning, for every team comp you have you should at least have a general outline for every minute describing what each team member should be doing. It sounds like a lot to remember, but each individual player only has to remember their roles. You should know at what times you are vulnerable and play to accommodate that, doing things like giving up dragon(by not warding/ignoring it) and leaving it up to the enemy team to take what you leave them. Your main concern when learning a team comp should never concern the enemy team or your interaction with them, the main point of this practice is to perfect your side of it. An example of this is if your team decides to run Blaze's early wave strategy. You would practice rotating your players properly, wave clearing mid and having your top lane last hit. If the enemy mid laner is playing badly in mid, you wouldn't capitalize off of it and kill him multiple times then roam. Thats not apart of the plan, you would simply enable his mistakes and continue as planned. Why? Because its what you're putting an emphasis on, learning the team comp. If your team solely wanted to practice that they would go into a game, execute it, surrender and then move on to the next game. You're not interested in winning or stomping the other team in lane. You simply want to get your execution on the strategy down, and that's what you practice.You don't need to practice against teams your level for most things. If you do not need an enemy response to practice it, then the calibur of the enemy team doesn't matter. Things like going for early dragons, counterjungling, etc don't NEED a response from an enemy team.This is the last step in the infrastructure, and its very complicated. I don't know how this phase goes really, but I'll just touch on the obvious because this step is needed to wrap up the blog. This is where all the analyst data and theorycrafting comes into play. The theorycrafter and analyst use data to make strats and then the team uses the strat in a scrim against an opponent their level. The enemy response goes back to the data analyst and theorycrafter and they use it to make the composition stronger.That pretty much sums up my blog on team practice. While it may not be the best infrastructure, its better than just jumping into team queue with your team and hoping for the best. At least this way you can log your progress more easily and fix what needs to be fixed.