Ranger Squad

posted by RSshruew on Jan 9

Well, after back…to back … to back … to back … championships across two leagues, Ranger Squad has decided not to do another season in COD4. After nearly 2 years of nightly scrims and weekly matches, enough might be enough. Throw in the seeming death of COD as a PC platform and it’s time to move on.

This streak of success is unprecedented in the 6+ years RS has been around and I hope everyone appreciates that success.  It’s also the first time we put so much work in preparing for so long.  So, I’d like to thank all members of of RS present and past for making this all work.  Setting up nightly scrims (Bo, and GenG early on) is a pain.  Walking through maps in gory detail trying to find every firing angle from every position to lay out the spread is time consuming.  But, it all paid off.

For those curious why this run was so successful, I can point to a few specific factors that were different from other times in RS’s past:

1. Keep the core team small.  If you’re picking a 8 person roster from a pool of 25, not everyone is going to be prepared.  The downside is you are often scrambling to make the minimum to play a match!
2. Corollary to the above  on keeping the team small.  Have a team.  RS doesn’t recruit for skill nor do we have an open door.  It’s hard to explain it any further than to say – you have to fit in.  We’ve told more highly skilled players to take a hike than people who couldn’t hit the side of a barn.
3. Work.  Intra-squad scrims are good for fleshing things out, but playing other teams are essential to see different plays.

Obviously, we couldn’t have scrimmed every night without the help of other teams in the tactical gaming community.  So, thanks to everyone who played us and helped us get our act together.  I can’t even begin to count the weeks where our first couple of scrims we got it handed to us only to make us better come actual match play.

Right now RS is looking forward to the release of the latest Battlefield game, Bad Company 2.  The Medal of Honor relaunch might be interesting.  All we know is that our cuises will demand we find something to play.