tl;dr - not even trying to be arrogant but i think i lowkey might be the best team manager in the entire western scene lol, i kinda just knew instinctively to avoid or address all the pitfalls that usually kill teams

full response

There’s a pretty direct answer to this one tbh

There are several reasons why teams usually fall apart in this game, and I intentionally found ways to avoid all of them (this is the one part of HDFG i give myself full credit for I am cracked at team management I think, I may be 300xp lower than my teammates but I am definitely the reason we’re still together):

1. Player activity levels either are mismatched, or become mismatched when someone goes through a life transition
2. Different players have different levels of competitive seriousness
3. Someone sucks to team with because of mentality or scheduling
4. It feels like the team isn’t getting better, so people agree to go separate ways
5. Someone quits/loses passion for the game → the team can’t find a replacement

As for how I fixed/avoided them:

1. I was busy when I made this team and I’m still busy now. I didn’t even think I’d be able to get this good, but I just specifically formed a team with the expectation that we might only meet once or twice a week. Turns out that’s not too bad to keep up even if you get busy. Those who weren’t able to keep it up we talked to/warned and eventually let go.
2. We have always had super tough tryouts. They last like 1+ months, and we put the person through the wringer. We also screen mainly for 2 things: is this person’s mentality good, and are they able to grow from feedback effectively? We actually never really cared about how good the person was, mostly just their potential growth trajectory. Lowkey ran was pretty bad when she first joined, but by the time she quit she was definitely better than me. I think her growth story gave us confidence that we didn’t need to worry about immediate results. However, it is true that generally the best tryouts were the best players lol — that shouldn’t come as a surprise tho, cuz generally people with a good mentality who also know how to improve and up, yknow, improving and being good by the time we find them. Specific things we did in our tryouts to help pick people included:
   1. Since the tryouts are so long, we find out if they’re really okay with playing so little
   2. Because we’re busy, we schedule a lot in advance, and we find out if they’re responsible about scheduling stuff (being a mature and responsible person basically)
   3. I’ve always liked to put people through at least one scrim against a team wayyyy better than us to see how they respond to going like 0-10 in games in a scrim lol. it’s a good weed-out strategy
   4. We vod review often, so we’d see if they were engaged in listening (or better yet, contributing) to the reviews. Common red flag is arguing with us without concrete evidence from footage/getting distracted
   5. We look at whether they actually adapt based on what we told them in review
3. Mostly the same as above. Also, all of those things combined helped us judge if the person would be in it for the long haul. We also were up-front about our goals as a team from the very beginning, so people knew what to expect and signed up because they were interested, and I generally think I have delivered on what I promised.
4. We vod and set specific goals and stuff and have consistently met them. We’ve mixed up how we practice and always tried to pay attention to (1) why are we are sucking and (2) what we can do to try and directly address our issues as effectively and efficiently as possible. We’ve had stretches where all we would do is scrim for months. We’ve gone from reviewing constantly to not that often. We’ve run funky experiments in our scrims to try and learn specific skills, e.g. intentionally not using special, or trying to play in split vcs in pairs, etc. Going almost entirely solo-queue only is the latest one, and as you can see it has worked pretty well cuz we got put on the map now lol. Not everything worked, but enough of them did that we never stopped improving. I take credit for most of the ideas lol
5. Since we were looking for growth and have faith in our tryout process, we’ve always been able to be patient and trust that we’ll eventually find the right person, and we have a wider search pool than most people for potential tryouts. Also, when we have felt people slowly losing passion, we also have encouraged people to quit if they want rather than trying to force them to stay. Conversations have been awkward and hard but I think it says something that 90% of the people who left the team are still in team chat rn (tho not all of them check that often lol).

As a side note, I will say that we’ve gone through just as many roster changes as most people probably have — we have just always had at least 3 people stay so we don’t rebrand as a new team or whatever lol

The secret sauce was pretty much just that i made a team that was so straightforward to be on that there was basically never any reason to leave unless you were quitting the game entirely. at this point we can handle like month-long vacations without even blinking

Even if you were really good you could tell that the team wasn’t going to explode and that you’d be continually given things to do that would make you slowly become a better player, and i screened out all the people who were result-chasers/not in it for the long-haul. So basically, if you made it onto the team, you were clearly someone who wanted the same things we did, and once you were here, it became pretty obvious that it probably wasn’t gonna get any better than this team lol