24 replies to this topic

[Dee Eight]

or experience points requirements before the larger trial mechs are allowed into quick-play matches ? Far too oten I see trial heavies and assaults piloted by folks who cleary don't know how to use them, or just AFK/disconnect, and the slot in the team could have gone to a player who actually WANTED to play the game and knew what they were doing.

[Hawk_eye]

Personally, I still hope they will add some PVE/Co-op mode (similar to WoWs) and that new players have to do a couple matches (like 10 or 15) or get a cumulative match score of, say 1000 in that co-op mode.

I understand where you´re coming from, but I´m not sure it would help a whole lot.
1. AFK just happens. I´m not convinced this is just new players - hell, _I_ have had to go AFK during a match or two (you know, the whole Real-Life thingy
2. I see about 1 disconnect every two matches and I´m pretty sure most of those are _not_ voluntary (yes, their servers are, let´s say, less than 1st class)
3. Yes, people playing without a clue _are_ kind of a problem, but then, they have to learn _somewhere_.

My short-term solution (until my above "ideal" solution can be implemented) would be to let no-one join a match until he has completed the tutorial and at least 1 (or 2?) of the challenges in the training grounds

[Khosumi]

If you are playing with fresh new players, you're probably tier 5 yourself. Now, I'm not throwing that as an insult, however, every players start at tier 5, hence why you could see them.

Second, you really cannot have a shooter game in the nature of MWO without a learning curve. That would imply everyone has auto aiming, auto torso twist, auto shooting, etc...

This sounds more like a complaint of a frustrated player more than it is a suggestion.

[MechWarrior4023212]

Everyone needs to learn sometime!

[Dee Eight]

Yes I'm tier five but that's because the game mechanics penalize you more for losses than it rewards you for wins... so even winning 44.45% of the time does me little good when saddled with players who do more damage to team mates and trees than the enemy simply because of the class of mechs they're allowed to bring to these matches for free with no time/skill invested. Trying to crawl out of the hole the rating system puts you into by how much your rating drops for a loss, is nigh impossible, spread out over several hundred games.

I may be newish to THIS particular mechwarrior platform, but I've been playing the first-person shooter mechwarrior games now for more than 20 years. It doesn't take me long to work out the flaws in a game design. When I need to worry every drop that I'll get shot in the back by someone who alpha strikes the mouse button trying to switch between screens on his computer... there's a flaw in the game design. When a win brings your tier rating up 1% but a loss drops it 3%, there's a flaw in the game design.

And when I've taken the time to customize a nice heavy mech, and get seeded into charlie lance, a new player on his first match unloads everything from his free trial king crab into my head box from mere meters away... that's big flaw in the game design.

Edited by Dee Eight, 08 February 2016 - 04:53 AM.

[Hawk_eye]

1. Over all, the PSR system tends to _improve_ your rating, because you rise more on a win than you drop on a loss. I have no clue where you got the idea that a loss moves you down 3x as much as a win moves you up.
Note: My win/loss is 0.95 and I just moved up into tier-3. If your theory would be correct, I should have dropped into tier-5 _months_ ago.

2. If, on average, there are 5 "lemons" in your team, there will _also_ be 5 lemons in the _other_ team. Over the mid/long run, it should even out. If you are still stuck at a w/l rate of 0.9, well, there might be some other reason for that

Note2: I know that my _own_ w/l-rate sucks, but I´m not the one complaining here

3. Human stupidity is _not_ a game design flaw, that´s a _human_ design flaw.

As I said, I agree that there should be more teaching/tutoring/whatever before a new player can enter a multi-player match, but what you said above is simply wrong.

[Rushin Roulette]

Antecursor Venatus, on 08 February 2016 - 06:31 AM, said:

2. If, on average, there are 5 "lemons" in your team, there will _also_ be 5 lemons in the _other_ team. Over the mid/long run, it should even out. If you are still stuck at a w/l rate of 0.9, well, there might be some other reason for that

I dont think the Matchmaker is that well programmed.
To me it seems that if there are 5 lemons in a match there will be 5 good players in a match... on which side these 10 players are going to be is completely random... just that the overall player skill is equally spread between 24 players but does not bother to equally spread the skill between the teams. I couldnt explain "some" absolute roflstomps (win or loss) any other way. Yes, sometimes the teams are equally balanced and the game gets to be a close and exciting round... but they seem to be the rare exception.

[Hawk_eye]

Correct, it will be random on which side those 10 players end up, and thus, after, say 1000 matches, you will have played 500 matches where you had more good players in your team than the other side and also 500 matches where you had more bad players than the other team.
There _will_ be streaks, where you seem to only get the lemons (yeah, happened to me too, even though sometimes _I_ am the lemon ) but then there will be streaks where you get mostly good players.
However, the thing with this is, you remember those negative streaks quite well, the positive ones, well,...

Selective perception and all that

[DirePlayer]

I got stuck in that hole, easiest way out is to build an assault that dishes out the damage. If you get 700+ damage and the team loses your PSR still goes up. Took me about 2 weeks to get from low Tier 5 to Tier 3.
I used a Direwolf B 4 x UAC10 2 x Coolshots, Radar dep and improved gyro's, Range and cooldown modules for uac10. First game did 1105 damage 7 kills and 3 assists and in tier 4 and 5 can easily average 1000 damage. Once you get to tier 3 it won't help you though they know how to stop them quick and its a whole new ball game.

[Dee Eight]

Well since I posted this morning I've won 15 games and lost 10... and my PSR hasn't gone upwards in the slightest. So that's where I get the fact the the PSR doesn't really reward more than it penalizes. I've seen more than one of those wins where it actually says my rating went down.

[Khosumi]

Dee Eight, on 09 February 2016 - 12:12 AM, said:

Well since I posted this morning I've won 15 games and lost 10... and my PSR hasn't gone upwards in the slightest. So that's where I get the fact the the PSR doesn't really reward more than it penalizes. I've seen more than one of those wins where it actually says my rating went down.

Somehow I don't believe you. Else, by your words, it'd be literally impossible to leave tier 5. It's not a matter of winning, it's a matter of being efficient in combat, say spotting, damage and assists. if you get 80 score and 100 damage in a battle, then you probably belong in tier 5.

[Dee Eight]

Well then... apparently then I must be a liar... and yes...once you get dragged down to the bottom of 5, it pretty much is impossible to get back up again. THIS was the screen at the end of my last match, which wasn't helped by my client crashing and by the time I re-connected the rest of the team was dead and there was still five of them left. I dispatched three of them in 30 seconds then got caught between two of them at 180 opposite ends, one on our cap, the other behind me on high ground

So if 4 kills, 4 KAs, 1 Solo, 1 KMDD, 390 damage, 7 components destroyed, scouting, hit & run, and saviour bonuses... don't amount to a PSR increase... then obviously the game has some design flaws you are not privy to. Or I'm a liar

http://yoda.densan.c...rior/000062.png

P.S... this forum editor sucks.

Edited by Dee Eight, 09 February 2016 - 03:32 AM.

[Hawk_eye]

You have to be aware that, after your first 25 matches, which are _massively_ over-weighted in terms of PSR, your PSR moves _extremely_ slow.
It took me about 750 matches to get from about 1/3 of Tier-4 to Tier-3 - yes, SEVEN HUNDRED FIFTY!
You will hardly see progress on your bar for just a handful of wins (you´d have to use a magnifying glass and count the pixels).

Have a look here http://mwomercs.com/...easesdecreases/ as for how PSR works (with re. to your screenshot, my guess is that you stayed _just_ below 251 match-score)

Note: I know that half your damage is counted for the match-score, not sure how much other stuff counts.

[Doctor Dinosaur]

The problem is, that in theory, even if you play good (but lose) you can climb up or at least keep your PSR. BUT (spotting) assists only count if your teammates don't suck and actually kill someone. I play light mechs, I get far more assists than kills, but for the PSR this does not count at all if my teammates suck. Therefore the penalty for a loss is pretty high (imho).
DirePlayer describes it right, you are forced to use heavies/assaults to improve your rating.
That's not how it should work. Also the matchmaker would not allow 12/12 assaults, would he?

[Dee Eight]

Ummm... I'm at over ELEVEN HUNDRED matches played now... my PSR isn't moving upwards at all. And basing a rewards system strictly around damages dealt seems like a pretty stupid way to do it, especially since we have conquer and assault games where the win doesn't have to include any kills or damage at all.

[Doctor Dinosaur]

Well, it's not STRICTLY built around it, but pretty much, yeah.

[Hawk_eye]

Dee Eight, on 09 February 2016 - 04:21 AM, said:

Ummm... I'm at over ELEVEN HUNDRED matches played now... my PSR isn't moving upwards at all. And basing a rewards system strictly around damages dealt seems like a pretty stupid way to do it, especially since we have conquer and assault games where the win doesn't have to include any kills or damage at all.

I don´t disagree with that

My advice would be to take a screeny from your mech-hangar, where your PSR is shown and then make additional screenshots every once in a while. Comparing those screenies would allow you (and/or us) to examine if there _really_ is no movement.
And if that would be the case, I´d expect there to be some kind of bug.

Hm, something just occurred to me.
Are you at the very bottom of tier-5, i.e. the "bar" at the PSR is completely empty?
If that would be the case it _could_ be that you went into the negative early on (I have no clue if this is even possible, I´m just guessing here) and created some kind of "overflow" which got you stuck.

[Dee Eight]

I was as low as the bar went, right now I'm about ten pixels of screen to the right of that.


And have been for days.

Edited by Dee Eight, 09 February 2016 - 07:41 AM.

[Hawk_eye]

Ok, then I have no clue.

Hm, can you post a couple of your stats like win/loss and average damage in your most played mechs (unfortunately, average match score doesn´t seem to be tracked, at least I was not able to find an entry)?
Not sure it would help, but hey, can´t hurt either.

On a side note:
You have 1100 games and have joined about a month ago?
That´s about 36 games per day (at 8 minutes per game on average that are almost 5 hours _every_ day!)

Seriously man, take a break

[Dee Eight]

Oh that's nothing... tens of thousands of games of mechwarrior 1-4, mechcommander, both battletech computer games, and easily hundreds of the classic cardboard battletech miniatures, where playing a LANCE vs LANCE battle was a six hour affair. Oh and the wizkids mechwarrior clix game.