I would agree with the OP's sentiment to a certain degree. Pug drops do neglect the cap system quite badly. I've been playing about 2 weeks and have lost 4 conquest games already to a single surviving spider or ecm raven vs half a team who cant keep up. My fault for dying early in my ridiculously rare light.
First some background. I only own and play lights, couple of trial dabbles in bigger mechs. I always drop solo pug, which is a really really quick queue for a light when not in the major us prime zone (with high player count comes high meta, and lights are as much a part of it as snipers and lurms). I also always drop all 3 game modes to speed the queues further. Unfortunately, i'm really new, and not a good shot at all yet. See the following as the reaction of a MWO noob who games heavily but very little FPS/twitch.
Now if it comes up as conquest I still have a decision to make. All my lights with 1 notable exception (an ac/5 ember build) are really quick, but im only gonna cap a couple of maps. As others mentioned, Alpine is worth it, but only in 1 of my 3 firestarter variants. I will often cap tourmaline and... theres one with a lake and then a long ridge of doom, fight tends to centre on this ridge and sticking your head up gets it removed..
I'll also cap that Manifold thing, the odd machine-looking place or terra therma but stay right out of the core spots unless in Ember. But when im in Ember, my best and fastest mech, I almost never cap.
For example: Capping in the generic cookie-cutter harassment ember on alpine deprives the team of what to my mind is the best striking light available (never mind the only hero light with jumpjets), I've happily isolated and murdered assaults alone on alpine, big map, wander off and the lights eat you. And on just about any map you care to mention the swathe of hvy/assault mechs dropping would definitely rather have the Ember strike for them and keep the spiders/ravens/cicadas off than be 2.5km out. If im in my vanilla firestarters im either poptarting with an ERLL because I like to do it plain and simple, or running an 8ml fs9-a and striking much like a poor ember anyway.
So sorry, even though im really quick, im probably not going to cap. Some really hot maps if I happen to be in the fs9-a with 8mls i give up and cap, i could never manage heat, not in TT, not in Mux and not here. An obvious exception is where the scores actually get to the point where it becomes the optimal path to Victory, because I do game for that, not kills. Most light pilots are a bit this way, or we'd all have earth-shakers like you and wander about wielding our current total weight just in weaponry
This is common sense, you've all seen which mechs get heavily
played. Just about every game will see an erll ecm raven or a turbo'd up spider or similar on one side or the other, and they can really ruin your day. Yet these hvy/assault pilots who I do a favour to dont thank me when I trash the incoming lights, then aggro up on wounded big mechs towards the end of the match, because I end up 'stealing their kills' rather than 'doing work' as I like to think of it. (its a prime situation for the Ember, when the other side mainly consists of half cored/banged up big boys you really really wanna be standing behind 4 MGs moving at 150 with jets for extra sexy)
TLDR
Trust the lights to play their roles. Some of the pilots will be pillocks, nothing you can do, pillocks everywhere. But hopefully they will be where you need them most, and as people have pointed out repeatedly thats often not on a cap.
Edited by Celem, 28 May 2014 - 12:25 PM.
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ShinVector, on 27 May 2014 - 07:50 PM, said:
