The same goes with raiding of course, which is the reason Vent is often required.

The same goes with Arenas, silence is deadly.

Even PuG 5 mans benefit from communication. Sure you don’t need it so much these days, but it never hurts.

In an ideal world when you enter a BG you are in a premade using vent. Maybe you have the WoW BG voice option on, so at least you can quickly hear, maybe even respond to peoples observations.

Most BGs aren’t ideal of course. More likely than not you are there solo, playing for the team, but without communication you probably feel like an island.

Who likes to chat?

It might surprise you to know I talk a lot. In RL, in blog posts, in guild chat, trade chat, Vent and even (most importantly for this post) in BGs.

No?

I don’t think most people are like me. I’m not sure why, maybe they are afraid to stick their heads out. Maybe the don’t talk much in RL either.

In BGs I think they are less likely to talk, rather fume in silence at the lack of support, the lack of direction.

So today I’m going to share a proven winning strategy for BGs, one that works in any BG, for anyone, for everyone. It will help to turn a rout into a victory and a victory into domination.

The strategy is...

Communication.

Lots of it!

Communicate when:

• There are incomings to your node
• There are incomings to other nodes
• When your node is clear
• When you see someone idle that could go somewhere else
• When it’s time to push
• When it’s time to retreat
• When your happy
• When your sad
• When you are about to win
• When you are about to lose
• To thank people for helping
• To thank people for communicating

As I say, I communicate a lot and I started to notice a few things.

Not talking.

As a general rule, if I wasn’t talking and neither was anyone else – we lost.

Those days I came home from work exhausted from meetings, those days when I would pick Odin up from childcare and he would pop Heroism and talk non-stop for the next 2 hours, those days are the days I often find myself silent for the first BG or two.

Unless someone was talking, you could bet your mortgage that we would lose.  Even Strand of the Ancients, which most people now seem to understand, would be a miserable defeat.  We’d take ten minutes to not capture the relic, the Horde would take 2 unopposed minutes.

However, if someone was talking, once someone broke the ice, even if I didn’t feel like it, I was soon talking.

Popping Heroism on the vocal chords

If there was some good talking going on, it breed more talking, people paid attention to chat and there was a good chance of victory.

One of many examples (of me not shutting up in a BG) was in an AB a while back.  I have seen this repeated time after time.

The first few minutes was just Gnomer chat.. there wasn’t a strat, people just went to their favorite conflict point.

I went to LM (my favorite conflict point).

As soon as I got there I called out the numbers (4 inc LM), once it was clear I called LM clear, then I’ve got LM, push farm.

from then on, I called everything.

3 Inc BS, 1 inc LM, LM clear – thanks for the help, Looks like 1 at Farm, Farm lost etc…

What I noticed then was that others were calling their positions, the numbers, the dangers, the opportunities.

Not only that, but people were reading.

Not only were they reading , but people were responding.

Not only were they reading & responding, but they were expecting, relying on the chat feedback.

At one point I headed to Farm to help out, it was in trouble, I called it, we cleared it, I called that too. Then it was in trouble again… then the penny dropped.

You see we cleared Farm, but I slipped up.. I forgot to mention it was clear! (Shame, Gnomer, Shame!)

So someone ASKED!

Gnome, how’s Farm?

People weren’t just reading chat, or just responding to chat, they were relying on chat to help form their decisions.

• Where do I attack?
• Where do I defend?
• Which base should I just stay at and protect?

People love to talk and listen

It all became clear then.  People love to talk, they love to listen.  They love to be useful – which means having the right data to make the right decision.  People love the news, and how it effects them.  People will respond to a call to arms once they are aware of it and constructive chat will get everyone’s attention in the end.

So next time you head to a BG prepare yourself to talk.

I use a chat tab addon called Prat.  One of the things I love about it is that it remembers your last used chat channel.  So as soon as I enter a BG I type:

/bg Hey everyone, let’s kick their butts!

I do this cause I want to kick their butts, but also so my BG chat channel is primed and ready.

As I race to the 1st node, I type out *space* at *intended node*. eg: *space* at LM. I then hit the Home key, which takes me back to the space and as I approach the node I quickly type in the quantity where the space is, hit enter and it’s KILLING TIME!

If I die, I quickly type in how many are left. (3 still at LM)

If we win the node, I will call it as clear LM Clear

If I decide to hold the node I /say I’ve got this, you guys push on (I say this in /SAY as it’s really only important to those in my area)

Then, the next thing I do is prepare an incoming message eg: *space* inc LM.  That way, as soon as I see the inc, I can shoot of a message and get down to defending.

An important thing to remember is that you can scroll back through your old messages, you you only need to create these messages once, then reuse them. In my case I just have to press Enter & UP/DOWN arrow to scroll through them. Quick, efficient information to your team.

Engage your team mates before you engage the enemy

Give it a go.  It wont work every BG, but you will find those BGs were useful communication is flowing are the ones with the wins or the near wins.  They will be the good -> great BG encounters, where even if you lose, you know you worked as a team.

Remember that even if the game appears to be lost 1/2 way through, good communications can still win it (this happened big time over the weekend).  Just because the opposition takes an early lead, just because 1/3 of them are from the same server, doesn’t make them a premade – they may have just gotten lucky!

This is the perfect opportunity to use your superior communications against their brute force… what was that saying.. the Quill is mightier than the sword?

Gnomer and Out!

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.

http://gnomeaggedon.net/2010/06/18/inc-lm-4-lm-clear-good-job-folks-great-teamwork/

Vent drives me a little bit insane, or at least it did.

When I was playing with my mates every Friday it was an essential means of communication. Often we would forget to type out the instructions to the couple of pugs that were running with us.

It wasn’t all sunshine and light though. Sure it was a bunch of long term mates (30 odd years for one mate as an example), but the difference between meeting in a pub and meeting over headphones is you can walk away from your annoyance-of-the-moment in the pub.

So it’s been a little while now since we have been together and we rarely get on vent together any more.

More desolate than Desolace

Likewise 99% of my instances and BGs have been with complete strangers, what little communication that occurs is via the text chat.

I am remembering again how desolate party chat can be. You really appreciate when you join a party that includes mates and these is some gentle ribbing going on, some crap talk beyond “pull this, sheep that”.

Desperate Messages

Then there are the times when you are desperately trying to get a message across.

Watch out… Pat!

Who is Pat?

Dear Mage, may I perchance be supplied with a fraction of you mana bars worth of liquid refeshment?

Of course some times you in up in a parochism over some foolish action. You find yourself banging your head on the desk, screaming your lungs out…

…but in the party chat void, no one can hear you scream…

Sometimes it really is like Get Smart and the cone of silence. You quickly type out a short, momentarily important, message then spend the next 5 minute trying to explain in more detail. (BGs… I’m looking at you!)

When your mid battle or in the Zerg in a battleground, typing a message out is like trying to sing the national anthem with a mouth stuffed full of potato chips. Bloody impossible (in my case I don’t actual know the national anthem, it’s got something about skirts and seeds… I think, or is it the one with the jumbuck and the swagman… Dirty old bugger.. maybe not)

Healing in tune

I think I am feeling it all the more right now. I haven’t found my healing song.

When Gnomeaggedon is out partying it’s in tune with My Pal and Firestarter. There is a rhythm to the pulses of fire and the roaring explosions.

I kinda feel like I need to be playing a bit of Enya while I play Squidly but I am struggling to keep my eyes open anyway, I don’t want to be jolted back from a deep Enya induced coma by a wipe.

There is no rhythm to healing, nothing to tap my feet to, nothing to nod my head to, wave my arms about in the air manically.

It’s all silence and meditation.

• How do you cope with the cone of silence that is party chat?
• Do you have a soundtrack to play by?

Gnomer and Out!

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.

http://gnomeaggedon.net/2009/10/14/the-cone-of-silence-party-chat/

Sound familiar, how about:
“You are dead”… “Murmur draws energy from the air”

or
Z: “You coming?”
H: “Yeah I am right behind you!”
Z: “No your not…”

The common denominator… LAG!
No, this isn’t a QQ post….

I know many people live with Lag, it’s just some people are “blessed” with more than their fair share of it.

Living in Australia, my friends and I are extremely “blessed”.

I can live with it, or often die with it. I would be surprised if Blizzard are going to set up Oceanic located servers in this lifecycle stage of WoW, so I don’t have much choice. In fact with Mods like Quartz and a few tweaks to the windows networking settings I hardly notice. I have never experienced a relatively lag free WoW, so I don’t know what I am missing.

However it is there, and sometimes it is more apparent than other times.

Lagging? But you are sitting right next to me!

Recently I was at a LAN, and 6 out of our (then) 8 toons were present in the same room. Now the mind does funny things, and I had this background through that lag was going to be reduced – wrong of course. It has nothing to do with the proximity of the client PCs to each other, it’s all about the proximity of the server to the clients.

Anyway, these were some of my observations.

Flame Wreath (etc)
This was pretty consistent across the board. We were all getting the message from the server at about the same time… I just wish it was at the time the server was intending us to know… but I will come back to this.

Movement (and I guess therefore everything)
You are moving, you know you are moving, but your buddies don’t necessarily. This comes back to my sample conversation that I began this post with.

Two PC’s, sitting next to each other on the same table. One guy (let’s call him H) says to another guy (let’s call him Z)
H: “I am putting my toon on follow”
Z: “No worries”
… moments pass…
Z: “Hey H, did you put yout toon on follow?”
H: “Yep”
Z: “Why aren’t you following?”
H: “I am right behind you!”
Z: “Ohh you have caught up”
H: “on my screen I am right with you”
Z: “Ohh no your not, ohh here you come”
… and so on…

So two clients, sitting right next to each other, yet the toons are moving in their own time warp.

Communication.
Now something unexpected I noticed.

We generally use TeamSpeak (TS) (as we already have a server and don’t want to pay for a Ventrilo Server). Remember 6/8 are in the room, so we can hear the comments as they are said.

2 odd seconds later, we hear the echo in our headphones, and more importantly, the other 2/8 hear the panicked call for “FLAME WREATH. DON’T MOVE” 2 seconds late.

Bizarre, and leads to these sort of communications (adding D who is remote, and G (local) – that’s me!)
Z (local): “FLAME WREATH. DON’T MOVE”
… 2 seconds later…
D (remote): “FLAME WREATH. DON’T MOVE”
Z (via TS): “FLAME WREATH. DON’T MOVE”

… or…
Z (local): “Watch out for Fred!”
D (remote): “Watch out for Fred!”
G (local): “Z just said that”
Z (via TS): “Watch out for Fred!”
G (via TS): “Z just said that”

So I guess my points are:

1. If D moves during Flame Wreath even though you just called out over TS (or Vent), don’t assume D didn’t get the message, assume instead (got to start with a base assumption) that the message was just lurching around the internether for moment longer than you believed.
2. When you yell out “HAELZ on me”, you can pretty much guarantee that your request is going to be heard 1-2 seconds after you made it.. by which time:
   a) The heal is already on the way – maybe you already got it.
   b) You are already dead and are just distracting the healer from a still living, but hurting toon.

Note: this applies to other things as well. From a Mage perspective Counterspell & sheep etc. I sure appreciate a hint that my sheep broke, or something needs to be interrupted, but….

1. I either already know, or
2. My lag means it’s already too late.

Human Lag.
Don’t forget to add human reaction time into the mix.

WoW Lag + Human Lag + Comms lag = Too late

An example of where lag makes life difficult.
Murmur.
Murmur knocked us around for a long time. It didn’t effect me so much, I just stood outside the circle and blasted away.

But our Melee had a hell of a time. Whenever “Murmur draws energy from the air” our melee would find out 2 seconds later (and then get told about it 2 seconds later on TS).
Nett result = Dead Melee

Of course this was followed by (real time) torrents of abuse for moving running out. Why is abuse real time and warnings lagged? Well I am sure it is algged too, but it just doesn’t feel that way.

Anyway, I guess the point of this post is just to highlight lag both on a game and comms level. Don’t assume that because you have instant reflexes that others are slow – they may be just as fast as you, but lagging.

Tools for lag mitigation.
Quartz.
Sure you don’t NEED it for spell “queuing” any more, but it still helps in a laggy world.

Windows network settings
Some people recommend pointing to another provider to speed things up (or convince Blizzard and your PC that you are located in the USA and things have sped up).

I am a little wary of sending my comms via someone else, so i will just stick with these tips from the WoW forums
Howto: Reduce your Latency

Gnomer & Out!

I am not going to write much, just point you in the right direction.

There is a great mod called AlarBGHelper.  If provides different windows based on the battleground, with 1 click comms.

Left/Right/Centre mouse clicking on buttons will provide different information (incoming, base clear etc)
You can indicate how long to a win, or who the flag carrier is, or where they are exiting etc.

I wont write any more about the mod, go to WowInterface, download it, Try It, Love it.

Some Screenies:

Gnomer and Out!

So I am going to start this off today with a couple of tips, and finish up tomorrow on a mod that I find useful for knocking out BG warnings etc on the fly (for those times when you already have 9 fingers on the keyboard, and you only have one more to issue the warning).

I guess my fundamental thought is, if you are loosing, and not doing any communication yourself, then for all intents and purposes you are the reason the team is loosing… I know this is harsh, and a massive generalization, but if you communicate often and early, the risk of a loss is greatly diminished.

OK, some communication tips.

At the spawning point type in:

• /BG Hi, what’s the plan?

If you get no answer , whisper to the raid leader to give you the leadership, or at least raid assist.

Then, type out some simple instructions – anything.  Saying Zerg the Enemy base is better than saying nothing, but here’s some simple ones (You don’t have to macro them, just save them to a text file on your desktop to alt-tab and copy & paste into chat)

Arathi Basin:
If nothing else this 1st line will do.

• GRP1: LM, GRP2: GM, GRP3: BS. Last toon out the gate capture ST.

Other stuff worth stating in AB:

• Hold Flags until capped.  1 toon remains behind – the rest to next flag.
• Only fight at flags – avoid all other combat.
• Call incs early – backup will come.

Warsong Gulch.

• Grp1: You are flag carriers – get it!
• Grp2: You are defence group – keep it!
• Call FC position, ping minimap to guide team.

EoTS.

• Grp1: DR, Grp2: FRR, Grp3: MT & BeT
• Ignore flag – Flag is for noobs.
• Take 4 bases then hold Horde at spawn point.

Alterac valley.
Too involved for me to bother with… sorry

Note: you don’t have to be BG leader to issue the commands – it just helps as it is harder to miss/ignore commands in the middle of your screen.

Communication continued.
Don’t stop talking when the gates open.  Call incs etc… People will remain silent until they have a good example – YOU!  They will start watching chat, they will know it is valuable (not just QQ’ing), and they will call incs because they see it is effective.

Random tips:
All BG’s.

• Ping the minimap to get focus for the team.
• Kill all enemy healers, protect all friendly healers.
• If you can heal… HAEL!

WSG:

• If you are in a FG when you die, don’t release immediately.  Wait until you can see where the flag is going and call it out (you have less to worry about than those still alive).
• If you can’t stop the enemy flag carrier, at least harry or slow them down until help arrives – you did ping the minimap didn’t you?

AB:

• Mages – Cast featherfall, mount up and jump down to BS or GM.

AV:

• Take the mines.  In a battle of attrition you getting reinforcements when the enemy doesn’t = Win.

Gnomer and Out!