With the advent of PR 1.3, I decided to check out what has happened to PR now that it's standalone and there's droves of new players. The last time I played was over a year ago.
I got two of my closer friends into PR, trained them fast, gave one a medic kit and made a motorized infantry squad on the CIA server. Only 3 people out of 8 knew each other, and I'm pretty sure that there were only really one or two older players in the squad, and we were running a QRF style kind of game, hunting mobile enemy units on Kokan with the G-wagon.
I had not given any of the newbies any kind of instruction nor treated anyone differently. When taking kits, I simply asked who is new and who is a good medic, and I only got one answer for medic. No one else spoke, so I gave one of my friends the other medic.
I told the squad that we need an Automatic Rifleman and Breacher.
People picked those kits, and they seemed to be somewhat experienced, but I don't know, the AR thought he was "MG" and the breacher did not know how to pick up the hook. So I do have a hunch that they were all dead new.
I did the driving as I could not trust any of them to do any well in it due to lack of game sense, and I had some guy who had a mic on the .50 cal. Most people didn't speak.
The squad was managed with simple commands like "Get in/Get out" and "Enemy x direction, get in cover and open fire" or commands like "Follow me along the wall" or "MG open fire on that car".
The squad also commonly misinterpreted my commands as "Follow the breacher while he throws a hook over a wall that doesn't need one" but they were taking initiative so I let them, the AR followed me while our little flanking fireteam did their flanking and we did get the jump on some enemies that way. The squad had good 360 security due to me telling them to just "Get ready and clear the area" and some newbies without a mic evidently shot some guys laying in a ditch a few times, when I had walked past.
We got ambushed by a technical once and I responded with yelling out "Get out get out get out get out jeep coming from x direction open fire" and the technical, seeming to be inexperienced, drove into us and got eliminated immediately with no casualties.
Our squad, mostly due to the friend I trained to be a kickass medic, suffered one death during the hour or so, I believe, and scored 10+ kills and 4 or so vehicles destroyed along with a technical. The newbies didn't randomly respawn or take kits they shouldn't, most were riflemen, and while they all had a bad habit of clumping up and following me closely in a diamond formation, some calls of "Don't follow me around, get 360 security and space up a bit" worked and they got the idea for the next time we dismounted and hit the dirt.
It was quite tiresome to get them back IN the car, but rapid and quite loud yelling on the squad radio worked. Not mean yelling, just "Get in get in get in get in c'mon" and all of them got the point.
They held up under fire when the SL was down when we were assisting an assault, with many casualties as usual, but we got everyone of us back up and mostly unscathed. If I had not trained my friend to be a medic, who took over the leading duties while I was down, the squad would have got decimated, but that's to be expected.
After some time, we RTB'd for the 3rd time, I had to leave and I heard from a friend that once me and the medic left, the squad got completely disbanded and fell apart due to no direction.
Things I learned from this:
When dealing with new players you must speak in an authoritative manner, more so than when normally SLing, and very rapidly, repeating orders which need to be rapidly done.
Ask people who is new so you can gauge skill level. Give them easier kits and ask them what they're good with.
If they don't talk, but follow, it's fine. Command them around a lot with general, groupwide commands and once they come into contact, find where it is by asking and looking and immediately call it out to bring the noob death squad's weapons to bear.
To get them to move, you must repeat commands. I found that newbies do not understand what a single command means and due to tunnel vision you need to clutter up the squad radio a bit with the same command to hammer it in.
If they're doing something stupid, call them out on it, tell them to stop and tell them what to do. Ie: "Don't clump up that's gonna get you killed, get spacing" or "Don't move the car up, stay there and man the MG and fire when I say".
The general idea is to have a quite loud voice, making it clear who's the guy they're listening to, and then give them easy tasks all the time. A task should not have more than one layer to it.
Newbies can only deal with move, attack, defend, grouping and mounting orders. It's a good idea to play a defensive style, even with a mobile platform, dismounting infantry when under contact and moving them slowly.
Newbies aren't braindead, so they will move around a bit themselves too, but due to squad inexperience, SL should take point. They will just follow the guy in the lead, often not the SL, so if they're going in the wrong direction, simply yell at them to come back.
Newbies have subpar marksmanship so the experienced SL will also be taking quite many kills while the newbies suppress.
Newbie squads, even with a very experienced SL talking and a smart medic on the ground, will fall apart quite a bit when command goes down and it's every man to himself.
Once authority leaves the newbie's life, they run around aimlessly making bad decisions, so treat them like young women or children.
