How to manage and develop a team.
MRBC Discord has added a "Ask the Pro" Chanel, as away for up and coming players and teams to ask for help with anything MWO related.
Q: Geg asked -
Can any of the Div-A /B teams share some advice on how to manage and develop a team. For example, what type of activities do you use during practice? How often do you review tape as a team? How do you handle recruitment? This is less about looking for some secret sauce, more looking for best practices in managing an esport team?
Advice from [-D5-] Odins Steed:
I'm a pretty strong believer in that scrims with other teams are always the best practice. If there is some skill I want people to practice I still want to do it in a live environment where things aren't scripted rather than some drill. Internal scrims are okay as well, but can quickly create this kind of isolated meta that doesn't prepare people for the real thing.
Active recruitment is difficult. In most Div A teams it's just about who you know and people wanting to join you. VETO however presented a unique challenge in that I didn't have great connections in AP at the time, it has a rather small pool of players and we weren't an established team. After I exhausted my friends and friends of friends it involved a lot of cold pitching people I didn't have any relationship with. I started with people I knew by reputation but had to get creative pretty quickly.
This lead to the creation of a spreadsheet of AP players that displayed their leaderboard stats and any information I knew about them (particularly, what their last known comp team/season/region was). The primary source were rosters of competitive teams who had played AP before in any season. A lot of it was word of mouth with me talking to a lot of aquaintances from the region about who might make the cut and just generally who was playing in AP.
With that list I then refined it down to interesting candidates and their likely values as pick ups and approached them(edited)
When I took over recruitment for D5 I approached in the same way, but I had a lot more connections to draw on and much more of it was about networking and talking to my team mates about who they knew
Though D5 was also looking for a slightly different type of player too. We wanted to build a roster large enough to run internal 8v8s for the WC, so while we kept looking for driven talent to maybe play as a starter we were also looking for casual but talented bench who'd be okay helping us practice.
Once we'd made contact in VETO I then invited them to the discord, gave them access to our "open" (as in, open to friends and candidates) practice channel and asked them to come play some practices first
For some it was an immediate click while others it took a few practices before I was sure.
I wanted to make sure people fit and that it's be as drama free as possible. For the most part I think I got it right.
D5 was also mostly the same but was much less structured about how we invited people to scrims due to their lesser use of discord.
Advice from [PHL] Arend :
I second that, best way to improve is to scrim other teams, if possible better ones, after scrims do a debriefing, what worked, what not!
During Scrims let somebody spectate, to see where failures where made, if possible record scrims, just be aware that its proper etiquette to ask the other teams if spectating is ok!
Recruitment is a tricky one, you should look for People at a similar Skill Level of your Team and work to improve the whole Team!
Not worth it, to add an ass hole to your team just because he is good and also not worth to add a potato just because he is a nice guy!
Advice from Val
While I probably qualify for a tag, i was going to stick to simply moderating this channel to avoid conflicts of interest. That said, there is still only a small handful of people who can comment here, so in the interest of giving another point of view, i will comment on this.
Just for reference, I was the main drop planner, and 1 of 2 drop callers for Isengrim this season (Hopefully 2nd div A NA). I have also been invested in their leadership group for quite some time. While Odin was the driving force behind Veto, i worked closely with him in the previous season when we were formed and won div A AP. I will try to avoid repeating what other people have stated even if I agree.
Q: what type of activities do you use during practice?
For Isengrim, this changes between off and on season. When MRBC is not running, the limited practices we squeeze in are focused on specific things. For example, realising when you are a primary focus target, and rotating away as soon as possible. Or, getting guys to use Q to identify rotating focus targets in a brawl, any maps we are having trouble with in particular etc.
Once the season is running, the focus shifts to learning and rehearsing very specific strategies and mechs for our matches. There is 1-2 practices a week, plus the game. One of those practices is a scrim against another team. For opponents we feel need more attention, we squeeze in a second scrim. If we are only able or want 1 scrim during the week, we try to get get a video "live review" session in with the whole team at https://visor.gg/visor/dashboard . If that isn't possible, we do it with a couple of the leadership while recording, post it to youtube, and people watch it within 24 hours of it being posted.
Q: How often do you review tape as a team?
As mentioned above, about once a week during the season, ideally with the whole team. As a drop planner though, i spend at least 10 hours a week reviewing tape on our next opponent to better prepare the team for what we will likely face in the match.
Q: How do you handle recruitment?
With difficulty. Others have really covered this one, but Isen is in an even trickier position than most other div A teams, for a variety of reasons.
Lastly, I'm not sure you will find any best practices for esports in here from teams or individuals. Most have had to learn the hard way, and no one is really paid in this game. But hopefully this gives you another perspective, and you can take what works for your team.
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