Posted 22 September 2013 - 09:41 AM
ELO is designed to give you a 50% win rate. obviously, that means you will lose the other 50%. It does this in theory by putting you on teams and in matches that either you have some slight advantage in skill or tonnage, or a disadvantage of the same to affect the outcome. If you win the disadvantaged match, you will gain higher ELO, and then the disadvantage will either grow or your opponents will get tougher.
What time you play has a mega effect on who you get put with if your ELO is in the mid/upper mid range. As your ELO goes into a high-mid or upper tier, if the player availability is lower, you will get used to balance out a low ELO player to balance a match. For instance, I play in a sort of "after primetime" time bracket during the week. Most of the players are older and IMO their awareness appears higher, and there is just simply a different team dynamic then the other situation: when I played saturday morning at 9am. All the little boys and girls were on, complete with inane trash talk with cuss words, nerd rage explosions, finger pointing, etc. IMO, at that time, the player base ranks have been swelled with the little kids that are taking a break from CoD. They play the same. Nobody works together, nobody is aware on the field, and what I hate the most: the CoD mindset of positioning.
I will explain: first, you maneuver around the map, not in a straight line really, sort of meandering. If you could move faster you would take lots of wierd routes along the edge, etc. If you pilot a light mech, you do do this. Then, it is important to find the enemy. When you do see the enemy, you dont move to an area to intercept them in an advantage with your team, you move into some other place of percieved solo advantage to take a shot at an unaware foe. If return fire is given, you escape, and I mean escape a long ways. Getting hit by one ML from 400M is enough to send you scurrying back behind your "friends".
What happens is, in the end, a player like myself wil see some team mates engaged with the foe. If it is a landslide where my team mate is simply outgunned, i will chat "fall back" or some such and decide on a flank route. If it is even, I will move to engage to assist. if it is a landslide for our side, i will still move, but I will be on the lookout for another enemy to intercept, or if I know where the bulk of the enemy is, I might try to stay with whoever is the bigger section of our team to react to enemy movements, or even team movements so we dont get overwhelmed. When you play with the older pug crowd, this usually meshes with everyone and the fights are closer. When you play on Saturday morning cartoon crowd games, this does not mesh. What happens is, you see your team mates engaged, and when you move to assist, they are already in the full on scurry away and hide mode from one 400M ML hit. Even if they have a numbers advantage, even if that advantage is made bigger by my arrival, it doesnt matter.
So then what happens is, you have no team work, you have the assault mechs getting left high and dry, you have what should be an advantaged victorious battle suddenly dissipate into an advantage for the enemy, and it just snowballs into a significant loss. Runing away over and over just gets the kids shot up without the enemy taking dmg, and eventually it hits critical mass and the team evaporates and you lose like 4-12. In these games, my personal numbers may take some hits as you end up getting focused down more often, but my KD ratio isnt horribly knocked down, because I can usually take someone or 2 out anyway. But you end up taking big money hits, because you get no assists, you end up getting taken out in a rediculous way, futility it feels like because your team simply wont capitalize on any advantage.
i would say a built in team speak might help with this, but for the cartoon crowd, man, i can only imagine what it would sound like given what ends up in the chat window. This is also part of the hate on 4 mans, it really isnt that big a deal that a 4 man has dropped on the enemy side. It becomes one, when your team is a bunch of Saturday morning cartoon kids playing "sneaky CoD style" because what tiny bit of team work you can muster out of your team is completely overwhelmed by a simple 4 man that knows how to cover for each other and wont simply escape 500M away when they take a hit from an out of range LL. They will be the ones shooting the kids in the back.
honestly, i wish there was a subscription plan for MWO, and a matchmaker for the subs. It would prevent trial people from getting put into veteran matches, it would keep the 9 year olds playing the game "cause mom said it's ok cause it's free" from being in vet matches. Not all of the juveniles, mom ad dad have a big wallet and a loose leash somtimes, but it would deffinatly help. Put the pre-made team stuff as part of the sub plan. make 2 tiers of sub plan. Cheap plan that opens premade teams, whatever, and higher tier plan that gives out goodies once a month. Maybe that makes me sound like a jerk, but really it would benefit everyone if the chaotic CoD battlefield kids were all lumped together, because their style of play wouldnt instantly create a mega advantage for the enemy, because the enemy would be the same way.
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