Why Most Internet-Based Gaming Teams Fail

1. Leadership

Even though every person who has never managed a group of people thinks that it is a simple job – In reality, it is harder than they think. Leadership is the bastard child of perseverance, courage, management and image. Perseverance is the ability to stare at an empty team-forum and believe that soon some people will clear the silence. Laziness is one if the most obvious signs of a horrible leader. Courage is all about taking risks in order to advance as a team. A leader who is not prepared to take risky decisions is not a leader at all. Management comes very important when a team becomes larger, and forums get filled up. At this stage – Leaders can easily miss certain points and topics and therefore – handicap their decision making. Last, and most important of all is Image. The easiest way to explain image is to imagine the following situation. A player (leader) invites you to their team. Right from the start their invitation is just a 5 word sentence made up of poorly structured English (or any other language for that matter). He/she acts like a 7 year old (makes stupid judgements and comments). Probably the most important rule OF ALL in leaderships is – Do NOT try and run a team until you hit Puberty.

2. Organisation

The Forums is the primary way to communicate to other team members in almost any game. The problem is, that unlike chat rooms, forums have to be organised, in order to be a successful communication tool. A poorly moderated Forum is usually the top reason for a poorly co-ordinated team. “Shitty” forums are usually so because of 2 reasons. The first is poor participation from the management side. This means that basically, the Moderators are doing a bad job. The board is not split into appropriate forums, with some receiving too much traffic – while others very little. Old topics are still present to confuse members and newer topics are not highlighted to receive more attention. The second reason is poor participation from member side. The members are not taught to type proper English (or other language..), and you get cases of “lol i no wut u m33n” and “omg lyk he is ttl lme”. Also poor participation on the forums, and negative attitude towards the ruling power.

3. Inactivity/Time Sync

Sure, the players of a game may be good, but they are useless to each other if they live in different time zones. For example, in an aggressive game (i.e. FPS games) the object of a team is to go on a multiplayer server and fight together. If there are 20 players on a team, which all live in one country – about 16-20 will get on for the scheduled time. If out of those 20 players, 9 live on the other side of the planet – they will not be able to participate (proving them useless to the team) Inactivity is the other half to time sync. Inactive players may be experienced, but if they do not participate in most events they are pretty much totally useless to the team. If there are too many inactive players at any given moment – the situation escalates (i.e. try finding the least common multiple of 12, 13, and 14 – Yeah, you’re f***ed.)

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