A lot of the games that I truelly enjoy are team-based games.  The problem with team-based games is that your victory stands or falls with your teammates ability to work as a team. Those of you that play teambased games regularly onlne know that there are far more worse teams/servers out there than there are good teams, or as we call them: Noobies.

Now being a noobie is not necessarily a bad thing. After all, everytime you start a new game, it in a certain way means that you are a newbie at that game. Try  playing a game-genre you normally don't play, for example turn-based games. (As this is the genre that appeals to the least amount of people) And you will truelly feel what a newbie feels like.

The problem in team-based games is that everybody wants to be the star. For example Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory. This is a teambased games of axis vs allies set in WW2. You have several classes and people don't understand that you need to PLAY YOUR ROLE. As  a medic, you shouldn't be at the frontline, because by default, the soldier is better at that. He has better health and more ammo. But everybody wants that killing spree, or most kills, or best accuracy at the ened of the round. But what people don't understand is that the soldier that got the highest killrate was the one that has a medic backing him up. As a covert ops you either infiltrate the enemy and sabotage to cause mayhem or snipe them from a distance. Most covert ops I have seen, try to go toe to toe with a soldier. Who do you think wins most of the times?

World of Warcraft has the same problem. I have seen many a dungeon screwed up because of lame teams or pug's as they are called in World of Warcraft. Pug's are Pick Up Groups whcih you assemble out of random people and you really never know what you are gonna get. My last pug was awesome, we cleared UBRS (Upper Blackrock Spire) in less than an hour. But there has been worse. For example, being in UBRS  for 3 hours and still not killing Drakkisath, UBRS' last boss. And taht was my 3rd run for the day and not having killed Drakkisath on none of those runs. In general runs by our guild are better organised and better coordinated because our guild has our own teamspeak channel to cover tactics and such. If you make too many mistakes, you are simply substituted by a fellow guildie. But in Pug's when somebody drops out of the group, in general it means the run is over, because it's so hard to get a group together.  A warrior or warriors is/are at the frontline, getting monsters on his ass and keeping them there while rogues attack from the back, healers & ranged attackers (wether by physical or magical means) keep their distance and fire away with their means of attack. Rogues only go forward in stealth to incapacitate some of the monsters while the group takes the rest out.

So much for playing your role. The problem now is that the roles can be different. A fully upgraded medic in Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory can easily be at the frontline because of the increased health, the ability to heal yourself and the adrenaline shot upgrade. But that still means his most powerfulll ability is to ressurect and heal fellow squadmates. But he can hold his own pretty much

In World of Warcraft it is nearly impossible to get into a group for an instance/dungeon as a shadow-specced priest. A shadow priest has swapped most of his healing abilities for damage dealing. People in general deny shadow priests acces to the group, because the general consensus is that the priest is a healing class. The same goes for feral or balance specced druid. Resoration druids find a group much faster. But a shadow priest is as versatile as a holy priest, as this movie proves

If you play a class/role that is different than the cookiecutter/stereotyped classes, be sure to play them to perfection in order to shut people up. (which they won't) This is why I like roleplaying servers in WoW, the pace is slower, but the people are in general more open-minded because of all the conversations and interactions that take place (in general) you get your point across better

In short, determine your role beforehand and play it as best you can. It may mean that you won't be the best damage dealer, or the best player statistically, or be at the frontline, but you will know that the team made it through because your role in the group was played to perfection. We all can't be heroes, famous, lead-singers in the band, but you can be your best self. (Had to throw a little philosphy in there, you know me :P)

If there is one thing that is hard to do, it is to keep every individual in any group of people happy with your product.

There aren't many companies that can do that, but two of em spring to mind. That's right, Blizzard & Microsoft.

But the thing is, their end-products aren't necessarily of their own making. In my opinion, both aforementioned companies are extremely good at looking at their competition, looking at their target group and what they want to create, take the competitors priduct and polish it up untill the point it comes out looking like a completely new product, and thus make a product that can please enormous amounts of people with completely different tastes.

So basically they are good at looking at other products of similar design, polishing them up, brining in new, exciting and functional aspects and then releasing them to the public in a  big fanfare of marketing campaigns.And it works too.

Take Blizzard for example. They started off diablo by trying to make your run of the mill turn-based rpg. After playing around with it, making it realtime they decided to stick with that concept and lo and behold a new genre was born. The action-rpg aka clickfest. Take Warcraft 3, the big thing in there was what? Heroes and rpg influences. New? Nope, done before in Warlords Battlecry. Just executed so brilliantly, making it so much fun. World of Warcraft is a prime example of Blizzard not forgetting that games are supposed to be fun. Slim to none downtime after fights, action all the way.

Same goes for Microsoft. Basically Xboxlive is a central gameserver browser with a neat friendslist and filtering options. They took a concept that has existed for years on pc's, but was different for each game/software. It is just now with xfire that I found the perfect gamecompanion. just a year before xfire hit the net, Microsoft standardised and campaigned their xboxlive to great succes. We won't even start with the windows and messenger comaprison because those are just polished (and better) versions of the competitors counterpart, Apple & ICQ.

Basically by watching their competitors ad improving on their mistakes, both companies are really succesful.And ofcourse never forgetting what their user-base wants.

And in reagrds to games, Blizzards nails it everytime: Games need to be FUN.