Normally, the focus at the Fort is on honour, sportsmanship, and fair play in public games. Teatime’s been gracious enough to offer me a guest spot here to express my opinions on such matters if I should ever come up with something that I thought was worth taking the time to write about. Well, I came up with something, but I first must stress that this has nothing to do with public games. What I want to discuss is honour, sportsmanship, and fair play in clan matches. I’ve been dragging a discussion through the message boards about this, and I think it’s time I put my thoughts together in one place, where it might even get the ears of a few more of the clan members this really should be directed towards. Let’s start by defining a few terms:
Chasing: also known as backtracking to our European friends. I define the act of chasing as the point at which a player, who’s position in the game is that of an offensive player, actively chasing down enemy offensive players. The point at which the offensive player stops acting on behalf of his offensive teammates to cap the flag, and starts acting on behalf of his defensive teammates to prevent the other team’s offense from capping the flag, or more specifically, when an offensive player is running towards his own base, attacking an enemy offensive player, especially while the enemy flag remains inside the enemy base.
Turtling: otherwise known as going all D or heavy D. Any time a team decides to only provide a token offense, or no offense, in order to prevent the other team from capping the flag, whether it be for the remainder of a match, or simply every time their flag moves. Heavy D does not mean they’re using all heavy classes on defense, but rather that a much larger percentage of their team is dedicated to defense than is normal. Generally, in a 9vs9 match, this would be 7+ defenders (4 or 5 would be normal, 6 would be a little excessive, though may not always be out of the ordinary, as a 3 person offense can still be quite effective on many maps). The idea is that, once a team has gotten a lead (no matter how slight), they no longer need to try to cap the flag, so they simply stop dedicating players to making such attempts, and dedicate as many people as possible to the role of preventing the other team from doing so.
When I started playing in TFC’s clan scene, I was quite impressed with what I saw. Every game seemed to be fairly straight up, no chasing, no respawn camping, no heavy or all D moves, not even clans going with all or mostly soldiers. Everyone seemed to be playing the game to have fun, and most people seemed to be enjoying it. Maybe I was just lucky in that these were the only types of games I saw for a while, or maybe this was the experience that was shared by most clan members at the time. The TFC clan community was relatively young, and it seemed to have taken the best things from the TF clan community and left the crap behind.
Somewhere along the way, though, it became more important to win the game. Maybe people weren’t having fun if they didn’t win every match, or maybe they decided that it wasn’t worth it to go out there and play the game if they didn’t do everything they could to win the game. When I step forward and say that I don’t feel that turtling and chasing are things that should be done in matches, people invariably step forward and say something along the lines of ’anything that can be done in the game, short of cheating, is fair game’. Sounds to me like someone’s missing the point. ’Fair game’ is not about what’s possible within the construct of the game. Just because the game doesn’t explicitly stop you from doing it, doesn’t mean that you should. When everyone leaves the server at the end of the nite, those ’gg’s should be meant by all. So, I have a question for all of you out there playing matches every week:
Does the win feel as good when you go all D and/or chase the enemy offense to their deaths as it does when you play a straight up game, pitting your O against their D, and vice versa, throughout the match, and come up with it at the end of a close, hard-fought match?
Shouldn’t there be a little more to the game than winning a match? Is it that important to break the records set by clans of TFC’s past? Will playing like this give you CE’s 23-0 reign of the OGL, their 16-0 reign of the IGL, KiN’s 36-0 streak in the Top10 Tourney, their 19-0 reign of the STA Gold? Or to bring it to the present, is it so important to break SD’s 14 game reign of the Top10 Tourney, or PF’s 14 game streak in the STA Gold that these tactics are the ones you would employ in order to do it? I can tell you right now, because I was there (and you can feel free to ask SD yourself), that these are not the tactics that were employed to break that particular streak by SD (and of course it helped that the map was Scrummage, which isn’t a CTF map anyway). I can also say with some certainty that such tactics had no part in breaking CE’s streak in the IGL or KiN’s streak in the STA Gold, because, again, I was there for both.
The question of whether or not your clan should turtle up or chase shouldn’t be one of whether or not it’s within the realms of what the game allows. It should instead be a question of whether or not it’s something that is honourable, fair, and in the spirit of good sportsmanship. It would be fairly interesting to see someone hold their head up high and say with pride that their clan chases and turtles, but I’d have to question where they got the idea that that is something of which to be proud.
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