TFO had their first set of serious training matches last night. Early in the evening, Karlos 186 got a few of us together to try out the training maps he'd designed, complete with rigs for sniper, BR and grenade practice. He's still tweaking them at the moment, but hopefully he'll have them up on his File Share for the rest of us soon!

Later on, we got together again to welcome new member Emsiri to the clan and play some practice sessions using the AussieXbox.net match settings. We played two games, doing a tour of the map first. During these tours, we went over who could hear whom (due to NAT conflicts, no one could hear everybody else during the game). We wound up splitting the six of us into two three-man teams: Cerebralwarrior, Karlos 186 and Pyespace on one; Emsiri, SHIFTY224 and myself on the other. I'm going to make a note from here on in of who can hear whom; it'll be a good basis for forming teams.

The only proper game we played last night was AXB Team Oddball on Guardian, and although my guys managed to pick up the pace during the game, Team CKP came away the clear winner. I want to view the match in Theater so I can learn form Team CKP's very handy play, but I can tell you two things right now:

1. Communication is vital. No one has radar, which means the ball carrier has no way of knowing who's closing on him from where; he must rely on his teammates to tell him where to head for safety.
2. Karlos came away from that match with no ball time, but in the end he didn't need it; he left the ball to Pyespace and Cerebral, whom he trusted to know what they were doing with it, and concentrated on keeping us off their backs. It's a great example of knowing your role with the team and sticking to it.

Unfortunately we lost Pyespace after that, so we played an uneven game of AXB Team Slayer on Construct. Team EST came away the winners there, but I'd be more interested in seeing how we'd do against an even team.

Anyway, with any luck, we'll have enough folks about that we can play some full 4v4 matches next time! We'll try and let you folks know beforehand when we intend to hold a training session.