Exactly (Destiny)

by Miguel Chavez, Wednesday, June 10, 2015, 20:25 (3693 days ago) @ Claude Errera

I had a game last week where I actually whined about this. I nearly took off to play solo, because it felt so wrong.

Normally, I'm fine with the mix of strategery and gossip that happens when a group of DBOers (or really, anyone who isn't super-competitive) gets together to play. That night, though, NONE of the conversation was about the game, and I learned something pretty important about my playstyle - my situational awareness drops dramatically when I'm playing with teammates. I do okay keeping track of the enemy when I'm playing alone, and I listen well when teammates are calling out positions or supers or sneaky control-point-stealers or whatever... but when I'm playing with friends who are NOT calling things out, I die to crossfire MUCH more often. After two horrible games of this (we won both of them; nobody was affected except me) I said I was leaving, because I simply couldn't switch my mind to single-player mode when I had teammates that were talking to me. They agreed to move the conversation to a more game-based one... and the problem went away. (We continued to win... but my contribution went from 6-15 to 15-10 or whatever.)

It was clearly MY problem - but I'd never realized before how much I let my playstyle change when I'm playing with friends vs alone. (I think partly it's my inability to filter out talk when I'm trying to concentrate - it's a big part of why I don't hang out on IRC channels any more, either. ;) )

What a bunch of assholes.