Review

One of the most important ways for a competitive gamer to improve at a game is by not playing it. That might sound counter intuitive, but it’s the truth for a majority of successful esports athletes. When a player isn’t practicing, they should be reviewing themselves or their team so they can figure out their strengths and weaknesses. To do this, players participate in VOD reviews with coaches and fellow competitors. Sometimes, teams will undergo a group VOD review so players and coaches can freely give and receive feedback. While VOD review shouldn’t be the primary team activity in practice time, all teams should conduct VOD review as a team at least once every two weeks. Team VOD reviews help foster stronger team bonds and solve problems quicker than individual review.

General VOD Review Overview

So, before we get into the specifics of team vs individual VOD review, let’s make sure everyone knows some proper VOD review procedure. When you VOD review, make sure you take detailed notes. Taking notes will help you remember feedback and give you a chance to organize your thoughts. When you take notes, make sure you include these elements:

• Timestamps: When taking a note, always start with the timestamp. Timestamps help you revisit notes with context, which is crucial in learning from your gameplay.

• Brief Description of the Action: You don’t need an essay, just write down what happened in the moment you’re highlighting.

• The Analysis, or the Feedback: Describing what happens is important, but the most important part of any VOD review note is the feedback. The “what and why” of review, feedback should be direct and concise.

Now that you know how to take good notes, let’s go over some basic VOD review protocols. When watching replays of action or noteworthy moments, give those moments a few watches. The first time you watch, just observe what’s happening and take mental notes of things you notice. Then, go back and watch it again, only this time take written notes. After that, you and your team will share notes and go through the moment together. If you have the same notes as someone else, there’s no need to repeat it, but if you have a point you want to make that’s related but not the same as what someone else said, feel free to jump in.

If people are talking about you or giving you notes, try your best to refrain from talking until they are done. You might find yourself getting defensive through justifying yourself, or else you might want to explain yourself. Don’t do this, though. It’s a natural reaction to getting called out, but you won’t be able to truly accept the feedback if you can’t listen to the people giving it to you without interrupting. Write down things people say about you in your notes and try to work with those giving you feedback to make it easy for everyone to improve and move on.

So, now that everyone knows the basic elements of notes, let’s go over some differences in self review vs team review.

Self Review

When you’re reviewing for yourself, try to get a partner to review with. As a general rule of thumb, it’s always better to have two people watch something, as opposed to one. The benefits of having multiple people looking at the same footage is that you get more opinions, and points-of-view you might not have considered by yourself. If you watch with too many people, however, it’s easy to get distracted or else lose your train of thought when everyone is commenting. We recommend doing VOD review with 1-2 other people for an optimal reviewing environment.

When looking at your own gameplay, make sure you have a goal in mind for what you want to start building on. Your goals should be less about mechanical execution and more about your decision making. Take notes of mechanical misplays you notice, don’t ignore them, but you want to use VOD review to expand your awareness and game sense.

In terms of which games make for good self review, try to avoid games where you were the best or worst player in the lobby (in team games, at least). There’s not much to be learned from watching yourself be better than other players. Focus on games where you had some good and some bad moments. Highlight the moments where you do well and explain why those things are good, and then do the same thing for the moments where you play poorly.

If you have players that don’t improve for long periods of time, or else become stagnant in their growth, try to encourage them to work harder on their VOD review. Players are never really “done” developing; they merely go through a continuous cycle of growth. Some ways you can challenge stagnant players include, but are not limited to: calling them out for their stagnation during a team VOD review session, talking to them personally, and showing them examples of things you’d like them to consider.

Team Review

When it comes to reviewing for the team, you need to approach the game from a different point of view than if you were reviewing yourself. Try to think of the team as a singular entity, like a giant fighting robot made up of several smaller robots combined. For players, don’t just look at what you and your teammates are doing individually; instead, examine what everyone is doing in the team context.

For example, don’t focus on one individual player as a separate entity from the others. If one person is having a bad game, the team should be working to help get them back in the game or to cover for them. After all, if everyone is looking out for themselves, who is looking out for the team?

Your team should have a goal in mind for team review, but it should be an overall goal rather than a goal that only includes a limited number of the players involved. Take notes on mechanical misplays and poor decision making at the individual level, but everything that gets talked about at length should be about the team context.

Make sure a coach or player takes notes on the team reviews and posts them somewhere accessible to all team members after the review is over. It is often helpful for players to have coaches’ notes easily accessible during their personal practice time, so coaches should try to make their notes as clear and accessible as possible. Refer to your team in notes by the gamertag or player name, whatever they are called in the team communication, and refer to the opponent by their position/character. That way it’s clear who you’re referring to; as long as you make sure to say “our X” or “their X” you’ll be fine.

If your team gets into a lengthy tangent, try to make sure you keep the conversation moving. That said, if there are issues that get brought up in public, make sure you resolve them as soon as they get brought up (if appropriate/possible). Players can feel anxious and vulnerable when they are giving or receiving feedback to or from their peers. If you let a critique or highlighted problem go unaddressed, it can fester or manifest into a bigger problem down the road. Get into the habit of fixing things as soon as they become an apparent problem, and your players will take the initiative to do the same, resulting in more free-flowing communication and less long-term issues.