Much work to get the meat out...

... is how I see QW:ET. I've been playing for about two weeks (?) now and only just beginning to get the hang of things. The strategy is quite deep but teamwork is so hard to come by. Hopefully that will change later today.

They are implementing a VOIP fire team chat channel. This will basically allow fireteams to communicate with each member without having to resort to TeamSpeak or Ventrilo. I'm hoping that it will foster more teamwork and a willingness to actually join a fireteam in the first place. I have yet to be invited to a fireteam or have someone accept my invitiation to join mine.

I remember when BF2142 was released and the integrated voice chat was really quite good. People started using it, tentatively at first, but later with much enthusiasm. You still had problems with people, mostly pre-pubescent boys of 13 or 14, swearing like sailors into their mics but for the most part it the problems weren't as widespread as, say, xbox live. I've vowed to never plug my headset into my xbox after seeing and hearing some of the r-tards (LOL I used r-tard in a sentance) screeching into their mics. Uh uh. Not gonna do it.

Anyways, I'm interested in seeing what happens tonight with the new VOIP solution in place. Will people embrace it or will it just become another useless feature tacked onto a very good game after release?

I must rescind, and rescind I shall

I gave it the old college try and came out with a better understanding.

The learning curve, in my opinion, is still insanely huge and if I didn't have as much experience in online FPS I would probably not be doing as well as I did tonight.

A lightbulb sort of went off during one of the rounds tonight. I picked up the engineer kit and took off towards a choke point I knew was going to get some action. I set up an anti-vehicle artillery that could cover the road and then moved towards the my team's first defense location, a generator surrounded by a few 2 story buildings.

Once there I planted tripwire mines in the alley ways the enemy would probably come through on their way to assault our generator. One in each of three alleyways. I took up a defensive position in one of the buildings on the other side of the area, waiting.

Needless to say I didn't need to wait very long before getting my first notifications that my traps had been placed decently. 3 tripwires, 4 dead Strogg! But they were still coming, hot and heavy. Eventually, due to some really poor team play, they had us all waiting on the re-spawn timer only to spawn 250M away where we would need to run back.

On the return trip we got notified that the enemy had managed to plant high explosives on our generator. Being an engineer I could get in there an defuse the bomb but needed the help of my team to cover me while I did that. The 4 or 5 members of my team moving towards the area with me moved in and used some decent tactics to clear out the enemy. I took the initiative, ran in under fire and defused the bomb.

Very cool scenario, don't you think? Now this is the interesting thing: since we were defending on that map, had the enemy pushed us back and succeeded in destroying our generator, we would have lost our foothold on the area for the rest of the round! No chance to get it back only an attempt to keep the enemy from digging in at the location we had just lost. Very cool gameplay.

Very different than BF2142 in that when you lose a control point in BF, you just gather your squad together and try to get it back with bullets and blood. Not in this game. If the point is gone, it's gone. You fall back to your next position and try to hold them off again, hopefully with more success.

So... I would like to say that it's done a 180 on me but I'm still not totally convinced. I'm just glad that I was able to have an 'a-ha!' moment before deciding that I'm too much of a lamer to be playing this one.

More will follow, good or bad.