Sandpit, on 24 November 2013 - 12:10 PM, said:
That's pretty much what he's saying to do....
"Broken" "OP" and "Useless" are 3 of the most common words used here. If those posts were factually correct you would see nothing, and I mena absolutely nothing, but ballistic poptarts and lrm mechs on the field. You definitely wouldn't see anyone win a match in anything but those. Do you see what we're getting at?
Maybe I misunderstood the OT. If so, I apologize for going on a very long wall o text tirade when I pretty much agree with the OT. I actually wrote yet another wall of text post asserting that everyone should build and learn to run any mech they think is "OP-Broken" before they start the forum QQ circuit. It was jettisoned (probably for my liberal use of the term "lunchbox" to describe people who don't know what they're doing yet on the battlefield) but my point is that I wholly endorse the idea that players should understand a potentially broken system intimately before they start complaining. "It kills me a lot" or "look at this graph I made" is not enough to equal broken.
I thought the idea of the OT was that if you think something in the game is OP broken you should run it exclusively. You should boat the hell out of it. What's more (and here's where my problem is) you should be convincing everyone you can to run and boat it as well. The theory being that the devs will see the imbalance more clearly if we exaggerate the problem on the battlefield.
Hey, I'm all for communal action (power to the proles and allodat) but my problem is that invariably you will come across too many people who don't want to run your suggested build, no matter how many dps charts you show them, and the OT's plan will fail. At that point there are many who will cross the line between a suggestion and actively imposing their opinions on other players. This includes everything from verbal bullying in chat & forums ("Your build sucks!") to unit leaders enforcing "Run this mech or get out" rules, all the way to players TKing their own teammates for fielding "non-optimized" mechs in the PUGs.
I was trying to point out a bit of a conundrum at play, I think. For the OT's idea of communal action to work, at some point you are going to have to cross that line. And once you cross that line, you are more of a problem for the health of this game than whatever it is you set out to fix.