Let’s Get Serious...

This past week, my Marvel Strike Force alliance—only one of whom I’d ever actually spoken with (and that was because he’s a friend of mine, who invited me to join)—decided to stop playing casually, and make an actual effort to win an Alliance War.

By way of explanation: Alliance Wars are a way for alliances (the MSF equivalent of guilds) to battle one another in virtual S.H.I.E.L.D. helicarriers. You set up your defenses, go through matchmaking, and then you and your opponent get to attack each other’s helicarriers, room by room. At the end, everyone in your alliance gets something, and you get more if you win…and even more if you win a lot.

Up until this past week, we’ve not really spoken to each other about strategies. As soon as we qualified for Alliance War, a bunch of us poked at the defensive setups, but we didn’t have any real plan, even on a personal level. Nobody told us where to set up, or how. Mostly it was just “Well, let’s try this, and see what happens.”

And we did okay. We won more than we lost, but that was far more because we had a couple of diligent players than because we were offering a coordinated attack or defense plan. In fact, the first time anyone piped up at all, it was to say “Hey, guys? Can we not lose this War, please?”

That was when I realized that it wasn’t that they weren’t just not talking strategy to me (because I was a low-level newbie or something)—they weren’t talking strategy at all.

So I started throwing out ideas and observations. And we scraped out a win. And then we started talking bigger picture strategies…and we won the next Alliance War by a much wider margin.

We had taken the first step from “casual players” to “hardcore players”—and for me, that’s unfamiliar territory.

I just don’t like being competitive, because (to paraphrase an old George Carlin joke) everyone less competitive than me starts becoming a “filthy casual,” and everyone more competitive starts becoming an “aggressive killjoy.” Once you start thinking in those terms, you’re never happy with your opponents (or even your teammates).

There’s nothing wrong with being a hardcore player, mind you—any more than there’s anything wrong with being a casual player. There’s usually only a problem if you get a mix of both in the same team—when you want to play casually, for example, while the other members of your team want to play to win, or vice versa. Someone is always let down by their teammates. (You run across the same dilemma when you have roleplayers and min-maxers in the same RPG group; each one is ruining the other's fun.)

But once you decide you want to win the game, then you have to start taking the game seriously…and that means adopting the mentality of a hardcore player.

Once we started communicating, I quickly realized that some of them were clinging to old advice they’d been given when they first started playing, or tactics that worked in separate game modes but weren’t necessarily suited to War mode, or just not realizing how the game mechanics worked—things I had figured out by trial and error, but hadn’t ever discussed with my alliance.

Turns out we were all basically casual players, and that’s why no one was really talking…let alone talking strategy.

And maybe that’s the dividing line between “casual” and “hardcore”: being willing to communicate with your teammates, to make plans and share resources or information.

Or maybe that’s just “basic tactics”—the midpoint between the two styles of play—and the truth about competitive play is that most casual players haven’t yet recognized that their tactics might suit their play style, but don’t necessarily lend themselves to winning as much as they could (or even just as much as their teammates might prefer).

It was actually startling to me to see how much of a difference just talking to each other made…which I suppose is a great metaphor for life in general: “basic tactics for social interaction.” We still had people who weren’t listening (or responding), or people who latched onto something that was said hours previously and didn’t notice that the situation had changed.

But we also had plenty of people asking where they could pitch in, how much time they needed before they could rejoin the battle, and whether or not they had the resources to bolster our defenses.

We stopped being a bunch of casual players, and became…well, maybe not a hardcore team, exactly, but at least a functional one. Just having someone who had a plan ended up being a huge help (which is, again, a great metaphor for life in a work environment), particularly when that person was keeping tabs on developing situations, calling out where the opponents’ defenses were weak, and pointing out where our own defenses were weak—and also explaining what we could do about it.

As I write this, we’re a little over an hour away from our next Alliance War, and the players are starting to chat together and ask where they’re needed. Some of them are still a little confused, but we’re working through the confusion together, instead of just as a bunch of individuals guessing what they need to do.

And maybe we’ll win again. Maybe not. The fact that I’m okay with it, as long as everyone has fun, tells me I haven’t yet transmogrified into “aggressive killjoy”…and that suits me just fine.