Week 5

Erin and Craig returned for this week’s matchup. Erin spoke in depth about what happens when a player takes time off to play another game or simply takes a break as he has experience with both of these concepts. He said your sensitivity and intuitiveness are hardest to get back which causes your confidence level to decrease which is crucial in competitive play such as that which can be found in this tournament. Confidence is important because when players are moving at light speed they need to be able to trust their ability and get their job done seamlessly or the other team will capitalize on their shortcomings. Getting these things back can take months and may never return to the level that a player had them at so it is crucial to continue practicing and tournaments help when they are often enough to keep people fresh and engaged. 

 An HOF dutifully stands on his team's flag

A capper skiing in the hills with the enemy flag

This week, we were introduced to the strategy that many teams use on a basic level. Tribes 2 is often called the “first person shooter for everyone” because there are so many positions one can play as. Capper’s are the players responsible for taking the enemy flag back to their base and are often the same people responsible for capturing the flag from the enemy in the first place. They have to be one of the faster classes with jetpacks and have to have good “skiing” skills. Skiing, similar to snow skiing, revolves around a player’s ability to pick and choose the best path to take to optimize speed given the layout of the land. Players can also be farmers who are responsible for creating and maintaining defensive structures placed to protect a team’s base. The HOF’s (heavy on flag) is a heavily armed, slow moving player that has the firepower to bring enemies down fast and the stamina to withstand small arms fire but cannot avoid enemy actions quickly so fast moving cappers stand a chance to get in and out of an enemy base if they plan their route correctly. There are many other positions relating to offense (capturing the enemy flag) and defense (guarding own flag) and present something for everyone to like. Just for example, some more positions are vehicle operator, sniper, and light defender (LD).

This week introduced us to more concepts of the game as we continue to learn about the game and players at the same time. The strategies that we learned about this week were particularly interesting as we now know this game is more than just shooting but really takes a team to be effective with everyone contributing their own unique part. Both offense and defense presented us with some exciting ideas such as the quick moving, but precise cappers or the, more than meets the eye, defenders that have to ration people (keep some protected to take the place of living players upon death) and make the most of what they do have. The organization of it all gave us something more to consider for our design as most of these teams probably don’t have dedicated systems to help with their team structures (probably just word or text documents).