Last night marked the first time I've played in a full 5v5 ranked team match. We had a moderate amount of success (3 wins, 2 losses) but importantly it was a lot of fun. Even the losses were more enjoyable than a regular game with puggers and I think it's for one primary reason... Communication.
The game by default is played with a mouse and keys strictly on the left side of the keyboard. You can change the key bindings but the basic keys for your abilities are always Q-W-E-R. This makes it a lot easier to play different champions because while the buttons will do different things it's always the same button that does something. (DotA used to use the first letter of ability names for the button press. It made things very annoying. I remember downloading a keyboard modifying program where you told it which hero you were playing and it would remap your QWER keys on the keyboard to whatever WC3 thought the keys were supposed to be.) This is great for playing the game but not so great for chatting with your teammates. In order to start chatting you need to hit enter (a key which is nowhere near either of your hands), type out your message (during which time any key presses go to chat instead of to the game so you can't use any abilities), and then hit enter again. It's better than not saying anything at all but each time you do it you're giving up an edge in game-play. It's frustrating to call out missing players with in-game chat since I often end up missing a creep kill while I do it.
Using a voice chat program (Skype/Ventrilo) removes this problem. I can call out a missing enemy while still using my mouse to click on creeps in order to get the killing blow on them. I can ask for help while actually fighting an enemy hero. I can also hear a response from my teammates on if they're coming or not without having to shift my vision focus to the small chat window in the corner of the screen! It's very useful!
I was thinking about it a little today and I think Robb and I have the most success when we play together (2 of us and 3 random people against 5 random people) and he's mid while I'm jungling. And the reason I think it works out so well is communication. I can ask him if showing up to gank will help while still killing neutral monsters in the jungle. If he says no I can continue getting gold and experience from the monsters. If he says yes I can head over and we can properly plan when to engage without losing focus on killing monsters or obviously running away to chat. I often find when I'm jungling with a full pug team that I have to walk up to a lane and wait around in the hopes it makes sense to gank. I have to stop and wait and chat with the guy there to set up an attack. And if it doesn't work out (he wasn't paying attention, the opponent was ready for some reason, my teammate was wounded and couldn't commit fully to the attack or had no mana) I lose a lot of leveling time. If the ganks work out we win, otherwise I become useless, and I don't really have the ability to know which is going to happen because I don't know how my teammates are going to react and can't ask them about it properly.
Last night, for example, I was playing top and was getting brutalized early by my opponent. I couldn't really get hits in on the enemy creeps without taking a lot of damage. All I had to do was mention that in voice chat and the jungler asked if ganking would help. I said yes and then on his way up he was able to talk about coordinating the attack. He got there, I jumped in just as he did, and we blew up the enemy Mordekaiser. I went back to heal, he covered the lane getting the experience, and things stabilized for me since I was able to buy some items with the assist gold without the enemy outleveling me when I went back. With a pugger jungler I would have had to run away from the creeps to ask for help (losing gold for sure and maybe experience) and then hope he responds in time and that I can guess his timing. (If I go too soon I die, if I go too late the enemy gets away easily.)
Also it's really hard to continually make jokes about which key is bound to CV in a pug since you won't keep playing with the same support game after game...
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