Thread: Situational Awareness

Yeah, ok, I'm late to the game. Blame Thanksgiving. But yes, this should be made into an article; shoi gave you the link to the forum for submitting it. Pictures of what you're talking about would go over well, or even videos. Add in others' suggestions and credit them somewhere within the article. I've been hoping someone would do a situational-awareness article for any of the games for awhile, and this is an excellent example.

So, after everyone's kind words, I do fully intend to turn this into an article when I can... unfortunately, my life is being eaten by exams right now, so it might be some time before I can give it a proper write-up. I'll see if I can knock a rough draft together at work this afternoon, though, just to get the form on paper.

If anyone has great screenshots or videos (videos I think are a much better format for this sort of discussion) handy that they wouldn't mind parting with, I'd love to see them. I've been taking demos, and I have some excellent examples of what not to do - From last night's FNF, there's a hilarious demo of me, as a pyro, dropping down from the balcony, landing on an enemy medic's head, and not noticing for a good five seconds - but no great examples of doing it right.

Lastly, for the people who offered their thoughts, can I have permission to quote or reference you?

feel free

Another huge item on situational awarness is being aware of who is on the point and how far you are from it, how many times do I see the final cap point taken while I am watching helplessly dead as three or four friendlies run around not even shooting at the lone enemy taking it the point, completely fixated on where the enemy should be coming from.

Cheese hires Cleric to cast Raise Thread.

(Okay, so maybe I've been waiting to make that joke since I joined these forums. I'm really a good person otherwise, I swear.)

So, I said I was going to turn this into an article, and fully intended to. Unfortunately, that was during my exam period, and Kierkegaard and Malory were eating my soul. Now, though, I've finally finished exams (and sobered up from the aftermath of being finished exams), and so I have some time to devote to this project. I'm at work now, which means I've had plenty of time to start knocking together a rough draft, which I'll stick in the article section of the site as soon as it's a little more coherent.

As I've been writing this, however, I've realized that this topic is really much larger than I had first thought. It varies from what was in my post (The player's thoughts at a ground-level view), to much larger strategic overviews, and also to other neat topics like the class balance of the ideal team. Even just to include all the excellent advice people gave in the 20 or so posts of this thread would make for an article of a length more normally reserved for sagas.

So my question is this: should I condense it back down to what I had originally envisioned, and lose a lot of good stuff but maintain brevity, or should I embrace the expansion and attempt a series? This would probably begin with a discussion of team composition, as I think that's the most fundamental thing guiding strategy.

Thoughts?

Honestly, that's up to you. I'm always in favor of more articles, personally, but then it's sort of my job to be.

I suppose my question to you is: are you sure, if you tackle a series, that your interest will be held to keep writing? Or are you going to realize the magnitude of it halfway through writing the second or third installment, and maybe finish that one and then flee? I ask not to judge you (I'd have to judge half the people who've written articles, myself included) but to make sure you realize the scope of what you could be taking on.

Additionally, as a general rule, we like to see articles that range between 500-2000 words. Much less and you don't really have enough to hold a reader's interest; much more and even with images you turn into a wall of text that very few people have the attention span for.

Does that help? Do you have more questions? Feel free to PM me as well; sadly I'm not on xfire much at the moment, being at the parents' for holidays.

Adsartha, you obviously have a very valid point about stopping in the middle of a series. However, should I commit to doing such a thing, I am confident in my willingness to complete it; stating your intention to do something and not going through with it to the best of your ability is something I don't hold in terribly high regard. Besides, essays on video games are a lot more fun to write than essays on dead philosophers.

Nevertheless, despite my ambitions, I think Ooze is probably right; a more limited article to begin with makes a lot more sense. So, in my (hilariously authorized by my boss) writings over the last hour, I have effected something of a compromise.

What I've written is an article, not on situational awareness as originally planned, but on team composition - a subject that I feel any discussion of tactical awareness must have a solid foundation in. This works (I hope) as a standalone article, but can retroactively become the first part of a series should I feel the urge to continue and should the reaction to the first be positive. I have posted a draft in the article section, and would love everyone's input.

Ah, but playing video games is more fun than either of the possible essays, and there lies my problem as an editor.

Frankly, if you wanted to write a bunch of standalone articles and later point people to them as a loosely-linked series, that would also make a great deal of sense.

Sending Arreo to take a look for gameplay sense, especially since he plays the heavy a lot, and you wanted opinions about that (there's also a recent article on heavies from Burn, if you wanted to take a look through it). I'll take a look through after that.