Experiences with communicating and leading with sayteam

(Smokeskin) #1

I have seen many complain about lack of VOIP as standard and nobody communicating as a result. As a PC gamer in Europe, I must say that other titles I’ve played that supported VOIP, it is rare that anyone used it, and when it was it was mostly used for whining or harassing rather than tactical communication. Maybe the US and/or consoles are different, but I don’t care for VOIP.

Anyway, after playing Brink for a few weeks I have made a .cfg with sayteam binds, and I have had decent results using it. A piece of paper with my comms keys drawn up with a note on each is vital for learning the setup.

Buffing: When I run out of spawn with an engineer and don’t get buffed, I hit my weapon buff please bind. It mostly works, people even turn around to buff. Some players change behavior after a few messages, actively looking around for buff targets when spawning afterwards. I think many players just go into solo mode mentally - but start communicating and they change outlook, helping the team becomes top of mind.

Pushing: when we fail to break a choke, I tell people to gather up and prepare to attack in a push together, and ready flashbangs. I then have a push now! Throw flashbangs! It often works. The effect sometimes persists, where teammates seem to become aware of team member positions and gather up before pushes afterwards (the player icons on HUD is probably a great help here).

Flanking: I have binds asking for flanks, taking high ground (like parts of sec tower) or attacking from below (like first part of reactor). It almost always work as at least few players will respond. Surprisingly, it seems to work best when the flanking route is difficult or only a few players are teamwork oriented, as I’ve seen the entire team flank, which greatly reduces its efficiency as you don’t get a crossfire going. I need to modify my binds to adress this issue.

Objective awareness: I have a bind asking to go for the objective and bypass fights, and one warning of incoming to objective, defend it. Both seem to increase focus on objectives and reduce the amount of playing seeking kills for kills’ sake. Again there’s often a clear top of mind effect.

Politeness: I wouldn’t say I didn’t communicate before. But it was too often after getting frustrated and it was along the lines of “stop plying tdm noobs falkn them!!” (misspelling intentional). This had very little effect. Of course I communicate more readily with binds, and maybe this is why they work better. But I suspect that the less hostile tone in my binds make people more receptive.

Has anyone else tried communicating over chat and had success with it? I strongly recommend that you try this.

(SockDog) #2

My experience of this dates back to Q3, before stuff like VOIP and Vsays made it less efficient. Very telling that we again need to resort to using it to communicate with our team mates in a game released in 2011.

(Smokeskin) #3

In my experience, on pubs VOIP is hardly ever used and if it is almost exclusively used for whining, harassing, moaning, playing music, or something else that makes me look for the mute player function. Granted I’m in Europe where most of us would have to speak in English rather than our native tongue and we’re probably on average more shy than Americans. In the US it might be different.

But anyways, lets not go on about the VOIP standard off. I was hoping for a thread about how to communicate and promote teamwork in Brink as it is.

(SockDog) #4

I think VOIP really needs an instigator which then breeds and encourages others. This is why it’s so sad that the opportunity to do exactly that is pretty much coded out of the game. And dicks will be dicks, if it’s not VOIP it’ll be text, I guess it just matters what affects you most. Anyway, yes lets not divert further. :slight_smile:

Some scripts and binds are very useful. Normally it’s the first thing I code in a custom config file. Does Brink have location and cursor options? Those were great in Q3 and (IIRC) CoD as you could let people know where you were.

(DarkangelUK) #5

Randomly jumping on random servers with random people generally results in little to no voip usage, that’s why I prefer to find a decent server with decent players on it and regularly play on that server. Usually over time people get used to each other, they start to come out of their shells and gradually more and more people communicate using voip. I found the OCB server on ETQW to be pretty active with VOIP, not played enough on their Brink server to see about there yet.

The situational context chat binds in Q3 OSP were pretty handy. I can’t remember exactly what they were, but putting something like #F, #P and #W in the chat gave info at that time. So if you had a scuffle with someone and you died, you could have “bind x #F is weak” and #F displayed the name of the last person that gave you damage. Or if you were near a weapon pickup, you could have “bind x #W is available at #P”, #W would be the closest weapon to you and #P was where you were on the map.

Another chat function I liked was RtCW’s directional chat, where you could set a bind, and the only person that saw it was the player you were directly looking at.

So many innovative chat functions from older games that seem to have been forgotten about when developing new games… it’s quite sad really.

(SockDog) #6

Forgotten because we got VSays and VOIP… :confused: Grumpiness aside I do wonder just how much work it would be to enable a lot of this legacy stuff. Do developers really save that much time by dumping all this? I can’t imagine it would be more than a few hours of coding to get the core of this down if not all of it.

(kosh) #7

I really would like to use VOIP but 90% of ppl just wont hear me and 90% of ppl wont talk because of 90% that wont hear them (i hope that make some sense lol )

(Smokeskin) #8

We get it, other games had clever stuff. We can have every thread about that, or we can be more constructive and look at what we can do with Brink.

I have gone on random pubs and had success with sayteam. You can get people to cooperate with that. Work with what you have :slight_smile:

(iezza) #9

so 0.781 people out of 100 will hear you, nice.