Exploring topics outside your usual stomping grounds is a good practice to start. It lets you learn more about the world and the various approaches of people in very different situations, which you can then apply to the things you actually know or care about. In line with that train of thought I’ve been working my way through How Music Works by David Byrne and one particular line stood out to me:
“These lurches and hesitations are internalized through performance, and after a while everyone knows when they’ll happen. The performers don’t have to think about them, and at some point that becomes part of the band’s sound. Those agreed-upon imperfections are what give a performance character, and eventually the listener recognizes that it’s the very thing that makes a band or singer distinctive.”
David Byrne, How Music Works, 46.
He’s talking about how music isn’t as precise as it may first seem. Taking a live performance and trying to adjust it to be perfectly in time and “proper” takes all life out of the performance just as much as being too wild does. But what’s so striking about this line is how well it applies to Siege. The similarities between competitive teams and bands are pretty apparent, the way you have to balance roles, egos, and talent or everything falls apart. But if you think of Siege as a game that can be played on a spectrum of tactical chess to CoD with extra steps, similar to playing music perfectly in time or entirely off beat, this quote gets really interesting. It offers insight into how we identify traits of teams and why those traits exist in the first place.
What’s key to note is that the implication that neither extreme of the spectrum is ideal, neither the perfectly technical nor completely free music is actually good. There needs to be a balance of the two to find success, much like teams need to have a mix of team based tactics and individual freedom to consistently win. Too much of either and you’re screwed. Being too wild and refusing to follow the meta gets you blown out of the server incredibly fast, much like eUnited in the 2020 NAL. They played a fast and loose style in the middle of the utility dump meta. It was too much. Alphama, your hard support, is on entry and Amaru and Ying are practically staple attacking operators. It raised massive questions regarding the quality of players like Forrest, Yeti, Gryxr, and Callout. Being so unique by trying to fly in the face of the meta resulted in a faceplant that massively impacted these players careers.
On the flipside, a team that’s too tactics heavy also fails because the team structure is too rigid to adapt on the fly. Flipsid3 Tactics (pun fully intended) falls into this category, as does late stage NA Rogue. Flipsid3 (Or SK) was always tactics heavy, to the point where they tried bringing in CSGO level executes to Siege. But if you know this team’s history, they’ve always been hovering around that 2nd-4th best team in the region. That tactical structure that enabled their consistent play was the very reason they weren’t able to overtake teams like EG or Rogue.
Speaking of, towards the end of its life the NA Rogue team became so tactically rigid that players weren’t even supposed to peek and initiate fights on their own. Taken to this extreme, players would run away in full view of opponents just to not be peeking. What should have been a philosophy meant to enable the team became the shackles that hindered their play. An effort to be tactically perfect killed an otherwise star studded lineup. Names like Ecl9pse, Shuttle, Slashug, and VertcL are legendary.
So if the two extremes are no good, how are you supposed to make a team? You have to find a balance. Just like a band finding that sweet spot between playing in time and playing around with the beat, teams have to find their golden ratio of tactics to individualism. DarkZero is still a tactics oriented team. Astralis has inspirations of that wild eUnited team, but now that wild side has been reigned in by Forrest and Callout who have since grown. Both teams are top squads, but they had to find those agreed upon imperfections that defined the team and run with them. Try to be perfect and you risk falling apart. Be too loose and there’s no structure to find consistency with. The real question becomes how much of each teams choose to have, and this inevitably results in decisions that are imperfect. The tactics might have flaws or the team doesn’t take initiative outside of the strat, but it’s a result of prioritizing strategy or freedom and making decisions based around that.