Marmon Rzohr, on 03 September 2013 - 05:08 AM, said:
The point of my post wasn't adress the logic of your arguments (hence the "you're right in the OP" part right at the start of my post).
How dare you throw my own condescending remark right back at me, sir!
Marmon Rzohr, on 03 September 2013 - 05:08 AM, said:
1)
You are suggesting that people play safe and look out first for themselves. This is good. More games would be intense and more losses prevented if players took better care of their own Mechs. However, this becomes a problem when several players do this in unison. This is especially problematic if all the better or more experienced players on a team do this (also those are the ones who are likely to read the forums in detail finding this post). If it's one guy in a Highlander using his other assaults as a shield to take potshots at people, that may be good for everyone. However if 5 out of 6 of a teams assault pilots decide to do this at the same time, it can lead to chaos.
I would say that it's very close to the
Prisoner's dilemma. The major difference, of course, is that there are more variables. But I think it's similar in that, while the best scenario for everyone is cooperation, the game tends to reward selfish players. And being selfish is quite rational in both cases, although obviously not very admirable.
If all the assault pilots on a team (and by the way, lol at having half the team as assault mechs without further comment) decide to be timid, it's not necessarily a bad thing. It means they will always be passive, never using Sun Tzu's philosophy of exploiting an enemy's weakness. However, it doesn't mean that they will automatically lose, because as soon as the enemy attacks, probably focusing on one or two of them, they should all be using that window of opportunity to defend themselves. Unless the enemy is attacking in a superior position with good timing, there's a chance that the fight will be even or even in their advantage. The timid team should always be in a position to feed off any action going on, which means they should stay close to each other. If they carry this tactic out to perfection, any advantage the enemy team has by seizing the initiative should be minimal.
Marmon Rzohr, on 03 September 2013 - 05:08 AM, said:
Example: Terra Therma. If everyone goes for the center and nobody either goes on a flanking mission or makes a risky push into the middle so more people can fire, you're likely to lose. We all know the situation where several people are trying to maneouver to use each other as cover.
So, when faced by such a situation, often your only chance of securing a win is to play boldly. So, my suggestion is: yes, go first, make something happen, but do so carefully and intelligently, not by taking shots to the face. Distract, flank, cap, follow friendlies into a breach, save your allies if you can. In short: put in effort. The slightest push in the right place can topple the enemy.
As a counter point to that, I'll give you another example:
I was playing on Forest Colony with a friend of mine two nights ago, both of us in heavy mechs. Both teams were spread out, but we had 3 teammates relatively close to us, near the cave. So I suggest a cave rush, and we have 5 guys standing next to the cave entrance, not wanting to be the first guy. I get impatient, so I go first. The cave is empty, but on the other side there's one light mech and one medium mech, and God knows what else.
Our group of 5 mechs all stop, and no one pushes forward. My buddy takes the lead with his triple Ultra Jagermech, and I follow him, guns blazing, so we drive the enemy back. As the two of us exit the cave, there's plenty of room for our 3 teammates to follow. But they are timid, and being smart, it's better for them to see if we run into trouble than to join us in the front. Again, everyone stops.
At this point, I'm getting annoyed that they're still hiding in the cave, while me and my friend are exposed, so I use team chat and tell them to get going. They eventually do, and me and my friend follow them. As it happened, fortune favoured the bold, and our group of 5 heavy mechs inflicted serious damage against the poorly positioned enemy, perhaps being the reason we won the match.
It wasn't really smart though. We just took a chance. We could also have run into a full lance of assault mechs with SRMs and Ultras, and died very quickly. We didn't exploit the enemy's weakness so much as stumble upon it. And the same is often the case in MWO, especially on Terra Therma, because 1) It's hard and dangerous to scout on certain maps and very few fast mechs actually devote themselves to scouting and 2) Even when some people do scout ahead, they can't quickly and reliably communicate their observations to the whole team in a PUG match. So, in effect, a lot of the "bold maneuvers" end up being a calculated guess, and not very Sun Tzu at all.
I'm sure we agree, but I just wanted to clarify this.
Marmon Rzohr, on 03 September 2013 - 05:08 AM, said:
- Winning the the best way to earn better stats, more C-Bills and Exp. If your team dies you usually follow soon. High damage/high kill games in which you win are much more common than those in which you lose. This is because that advantage that allows you to advance and blast away safely is usually because your team is already winning. So it is logical to be as useful as possible to creating this opening and snowballing the match. Also decisive wins make for shorter games. And winning is the only way to advance in ELO.
Well, the ELO thing is a rather good argument, if you enjoy playing against skilled opponents. As for profit in winning vs losing, that depends on a number of factors and I think the only way to be certain that you're getting the maximum profit from your strategy (e.g. selfish timidity vs prudent timidity or however you want to label it) is to look at statistics. When you're just forming an opinion without careful study, it's easy to be biased.
Case in point: I made a thread a while back, which was going to be about how I always get the top score on my team, yet I consistently get matched up with noobs and end up with a 1.00 W/L ratio. So I played 20 matches and took 20 screenshots of the results, and it turns out, upon closer study, that I actually won the overwhelming majority of those matches, without remembering it. Only as I was writing the OP, did I realize I was winning a lot more than losing. But I remembered the losses far better than the wins, because I was biased. Similarly, you may remember your glorious victories more than your pyrrhic victories, which would also lead to bias.
Alas, I'm too lazy to gather statistics any more.
Marmon Rzohr, on 03 September 2013 - 05:08 AM, said:
P.S. Example for the LOLz: I was once carried by a pair of brilliant Hunch 4Ps with 9 Flamers each, who charged the enemy snipers. If they hadn't been in such glorious berserker mode and if most of the team hadn't followed behind them and engaged aggresively, we wouldn't have had such a crushing and fast win. (This had to be mentioned for the comic effect
)
Heh, glorious. Did they survive the match?
Cybertek, on 03 September 2013 - 11:00 AM, said:
Being timid is not a great tactic, in the end you up being the last person alive facing a bunch of mechs if your team got rolled.
No, I already explained this. You should never wait for the match to be almost over, whether you're winning or losing. As soon as the first mechs (enemies or teammates, doesn't matter) take significant damage, you should use that opening to attack. That is the safest, most selfish approach, leading to the most profit, because of how the game works. For better or for worse.
Cybertek, on 03 September 2013 - 11:00 AM, said:
In the end I don't care if the team wins or looses the XP points are the same.(Maybe that should change).
With the way matchmaking works, it's almost a good thing that it doesn't matter if you win or lose, because while it's hard to get a win if your teammates are a bunch of new and careless players, it's always possible to at least do 400+ damage and get some kills to earn a nice paycheck.
If matchmaking was better, I think a win should definitely pay a lot more than a loss, to ensure that people are cooperating.
Tesunie, on 03 September 2013 - 11:49 AM, said:
PS: You earn 300 xp for a win, and I believe 75-100 xp for a loss. That's still a difference and is not the same.
I've already adressed the point about rewards from wins vs losses, but here's something else to consider:
It's weird that the XP bonus is so much greater for winning vs losing, while the C-bill rewards revolve more around personal accomplishments rather than team accomplishments. It seems to me that it should be the other way around.
In most games, if you're given a mission (e.g. destroy this weapons factory) then the most important thing is whether you accomplish it, not how you accomplish it. Especially if you're a mercenary. If you can't do the job, then your employer won't really care how many killshots you got.
Furthermore, I would say that a soldier who has been on the losing side of a battle has probably gained as much experience, if not more, than a soldier who has been part of a quick and easy victory (steam roll). In terms of experience, it's not so much the victory or defeat-aspect that matters.
Void Angel, on 04 September 2013 - 01:19 AM, said:
The problem with doing that is that it encourages others to do it when they see you doing it.
You're only 1 of 12 players on the team. I don't know about you, but I tend not to notice what everyone on my team is doing, so while my behavior may influence those in immediate proximity, it's not likely to influence the whole team, unless I'm leading everyone through a cave rush. If the team is spread out across several hundred meters, my behaviour is not likely to spread like wildfire. After all, do you abandon your playing style when you see someone else being a bit too cautious? Probably not. Nor do I abandon my playing style when I see someone being a bit too aggressive.
Cybertek, on 03 September 2013 - 11:00 AM, said:
As I said in other places, you never want to be blindly aggressive - recklessness is the courage of the fool, after all. But I'd shy away from telling people to deliberately hang their teammates out to dry, because it's likely to encourage more bad matches than it solves.
And let's not exaggerate the impact of this thread. There's hundreds of thousands of players, and this thread has probably not been read by even a hundred players