Have you ever thought why this is the case?
The ugly truth is that the majority of playes indeed have little interest to join a premade all the time and rather play solo quite often.
This has several different reasons, be it that you just want to fill the remaining 20minutes until an appointment or that your connection is too bad for simultaneous voip and gaming (a friend of mine has this problem quite often).
And no one of us has the right to question any of those motives and telling them to 'just team up'.
So it's totally natural that PGI needs to cater the pugs. They are driving the game. Loose them and you loose your game, it's simple as that.
Of cause that does not mean that premades should not be catered too and i agree that PGI can do a lot more here like giving drop options for teams between 4 and 11 players.
Oh and as mentioned by others, this game's team-building would greatly improve with a global chat.
I can't understand the design decision to hide all chatting in a small 'social'-button.
A good online-game fully integrates it's social features. This means all chats and group-options are always visible unless a player hides them.
This is most important: When using those social features, don't block the rest of the game. It hurts to see that i have to close the chat in order to use the mechlab again. We need to chat without pressing extra buttons so we can do it while navigating the mechlab.
I guess you are doing pugs some injustice here. Those games are not always 'random and meaningless'. Pugs can indeed prove that they play team oriented too, sometimes way better than some premades. What i'm missing here are simply two things:
First:
In theory pugs can self-coordinate really well without saying a single word and without giving any order. It's all a matter of common sense and practice.
There are very basic rules which can lead a team to victory without any plan/strategy.
Some examples:
- Don't scout in your heavy mech, stay always near a group so you don't get steamrolled.
- Don't attack the whole enemy team in your light when they are not distracted by the rest of your team yet or your team can easily close the gap to help.
- When one guy charges in, follow him immediately.
- Unless it's a leeroy jenkins who does this without giving the rest of his team a chance to catch up.
- Only follow charging lights when they are clearly distracting the enemy in front of you to make your push easier.
- Staying together is good, but surrounding the enemy is better. Look out for spots to attack from a different angle but without getting isolated from your mates.
- Avoid chokepoints in large groups. When you see your deathball approching a chokepoint, try to split off. You will be surprised how many will follow you. Lead them to a good flanking position.
- When you see some mates flanking and distracting the enemy, PUSH!
- When flanking, wait for a good opportunity instead of doing a suicide flank with no effect.
- Attack the easy to hit guys first
- Unless they are already disarmed. Don't shoot that weaponless guy to get a kill when there is a target with working weapons around.
- When there are several easy to hit targets, choose the one where others are already firing on.
- Don't overvalue focus fire if the focused target is hard to hit for you and you have the opportunity to easily hit another target.
- Don't chase lights all over the map, even when piloting a light by yourself. He will always try to lure you into a trap.
- The same applies to retreating heavily damaged mechs. Don't get lured around that corner where the whole enemy team is waiting just to get the kill.
The list is endless but each point is so simple and logical that everyone can do it right if he wants to.
And by avoiding those faults a team can work like a machine without saying a single word. The battlegrid is a great tool for speechless organizing.
Second:
As good as self-coordination can work in theory, it sadly fails too often in practice, mostly because of having too much inexperienced players who need to focus on other things like aiming and movement leaving no time for some important details.
So some sorts of planning and advice would greatly help to improve teamplay in pugs so the inexperienced guys get hints on what they can do to contribute.
But currently MWO lacks the tools to do this efficiently.
The chat is way too slow to coordinte a team or even warn them from an enemy you stumbled into.
In the heat of battle you have other things to do than typing. And additionally others are often too distracted to even realize that someone has written something.
What we need are functions to quickly report several things to the team.
In this regard MWO can learn a lot from WOT and LOL.
Those games realized that it is not smart to force the player to open a seperate map window which totally disables them to control their character.
They have the entire map always present instead of MWO's 'partial map' approach.
When i played MWO the first time one of my first questions was: How can i zoom out the battlegrid to show me the whole map. The answer to open a new window to do so was kinda disappointing.
So, when having the entire map always visible, it is a child's play to add a WOT-like 'pinging' function to it.
Single clicking will tell every team-mate that there is something at this location. To expand this i would map a menu to choose a specific 'Ping-type' to the right mouse button. This way you can specify with two clicks if you want to flank via this position, if you spotted an enemy there or if players on this location are too exposed and should get in cover.
When no one takes the position of a lance/company commander, let everyone be able to give orders this way. A team does not need a commander, it only needs good tactical advices at the right time regardless from who.
Together with some predefined chat messages like 'i need help', 'back to base' or 'charge now!' (which of cause should set a ping at the talking player's position), this game can get MUCH more tactical even in pug games with relatively little effort. And without the need of voice comms (which would likely only be filled with useless chatter and flaming).
In the meantime until we get those features, please highlight/ping the player who has typed something in chat (with sound). It helps a lot to know that:
- someone typed something (currently i have a hard time to realize new messages during fighting)
- the position of the spotter. So he just needs to write 'enemy w. ecm spotted' instead of opening the BG, looking up the coordinates and type them. This takes AGES. By knowing the spotter's position it's not hard to imagine the general direction of the spotted enemy. And that's more than enough, because the exact coordinates are quickly invalid and not much worth without knowing the direction the enemy is moving.
- The position of the guy who needs help
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Agent 0 Fortune, on 08 March 2014 - 03:37 PM, said:
, shot the breeze, talked old war stories from MW2, etc. In other words we've found some kindred spirits we enjoy hanging out with while we shoot the shit outta some stompy robots. To make any other assumptions or assertions about me and the guys like me (who are probably more than you think) is simply false.
