585 replies to this topic

[Master Maniac]

If it were possible to do so (it isn't), if the devs were to subtract the amount of damage and kills achieved through the use of artillery/airstrikes from players' total scores, I would guarantee that most people on the top five would disappear from the leaderboard entirely. This is sad.

I saw a *lot* of arty spam throughout the entire event as a cheap, skill-free way to rack up damage and, potentially, kills. It's shameful behavior, especially among those piloting lighter, faster mechs. The new "thing" is to sprint in among your enemy and drop a "frag grenade" at your own feet, dealing massive, undeserved damage. Why the devs did not consider this behavior is beyond me.

Artillery is a lazy weapon for lazy players. It is hopelessly broken and bad for the game. Full stop. It is the Mechwarrior Online equivalent of a CoD scorestreak, and *needs* to either be removed or drastically altered, and immediately. That it has existed for so much time in its miserable state is shameful. Way, way, WAY too many mechs using arty as a means to finish off their opponent when they've lost a brawl. That is *not* acceptable.

To start with, they could consider making arty take 10 full seconds to arrive to target. Not only does this make more sense than the ridiculously fast bombardments we're seeing now from a pure quasi-realism standpoint, it also requires the spotter to actually *work* a little, and no longer guarantees damage against assault mechs, which it currently does. To compensate, the stupid red smoke effect should be removed, and replaced with Betty announcing that an "Artillery Strike (is) Inbound."

Edited by Master Maniac, 04 March 2014 - 07:33 AM.

[Koniks]

Master Maniac, on 04 March 2014 - 07:28 AM, said:

If it were possible to do so (it isn't), if the devs were to subtract the amount of damage and kills achieved through the use of artillery/airstrikes from players' total scores, I would guarantee that most people on the top five would disappear from the leaderboard entirely. This is sad.

I saw a *lot* of arty spam throughout the entire event as a cheap, skill-free way to rack up damage and, potentially, kills. It's shameful behavior, especially among those piloting lighter, faster mechs. The new "thing" is to sprint in among your enemy and drop a "frag grenade" at your own feet, dealing massive, undeserved damage. Why the devs did not consider this behavior is beyond me.

Artillery is a lazy weapon for lazy players. It is hopelessly broken and bad for the game. Full stop. It is the Mechwarrior Online equivalent of a CoD scorestreak, and *needs* to either be removed or drastically altered, and immediately. That it has existed for so much time in its miserable state is shameful. Way, way, WAY too many mechs using arty as a means to finish off their opponent when they've lost a brawl. That is *not* acceptable.

To start with, they could consider making arty take 10 full seconds to arrive to target. Not only does this make more sense than the ridiculously fast bombardments we're seeing now from a pure quasi-realism standpoint, it also requires the spotter to actually *work* a little, and no longer guarantees damage against assault mechs, which it currently does. To compensate, the stupid red smoke effect should be removed, and replaced with Betty announcing that an "Artillery Strike (is) Inbound."

The best anti-artillery/airstrike strategy is to spread out so far on Tourmaline that a company can walk between 2 mechs.

That was probably the most fun game I participated in all weekend. Congrats on the win, MM.

[RickySpanish]

Master Maniac, on 04 March 2014 - 07:28 AM, said:

...To compensate, the stupid red smoke effect should be removed, and replaced with Betty announcing that an "Artillery Strike (is) Inbound."

I reckon the smoke effect should be visible only to team members, so that they can gtfo of the way and so they can tell if a team mate is bombing friendlies.

Honestly I didn't see too many people being ****** up by strikes that didn't deserve it, if you're an assault in LOS of something and not moving you sort of deserve to get your head armour chunked. Similarly, if you're legged then you're about to die no matter what, at least being striked is a spectacular way to go. You can run into the enemy team as a light to drop that frag grenade at your feet, but you're also risking getting blown away by streaks and well aimed ballistics.

[AlmightyAeng]

I wonder what would happen if there was a radio button for each mech class/tournament weight chassis, and clicking "opt-in" meant that your next 10 matches, period, were how the tournament was scored.

[Master Maniac]

RickySpanish, on 04 March 2014 - 08:12 AM, said:

I reckon the smoke effect should be visible only to team members, so that they can gtfo of the way and so they can tell if a team mate is bombing friendlies.

Honestly I didn't see too many people being ****** up by strikes that didn't deserve it, if you're an assault in LOS of something and not moving you sort of deserve to get your head armour chunked. Similarly, if you're legged then you're about to die no matter what, at least being striked is a spectacular way to go. You can run into the enemy team as a light to drop that frag grenade at your feet, but you're also risking getting blown away by streaks and well aimed ballistics.

I see what you're saying - a stationary, camping team does deserve to get flushed out by artillery. There's no question about that. That's part of what it should be for. The problem is that with a four second impact time, it's pretty much impossible for an assault mech to clear the blast zone.

There's nothing wrong with remaining stationary in cover from time to time. This isn't an arena shooter like Quake - positioning and territory are important aspects of the game and the franchise, and have been since MechCommander. There's a difference between firing from cover and just camping in a big cluster, doing nothing but firing support weapons. Mechs should not be required to move at full speed all the time. If an assault mech is ever stationary, it takes a good two seconds to get up to moving speed, or more. This makes it so that they are guaranteed to get hit by a strike, no mater what they do. In fact, they'll probably still get hit if they were moving at anything below 60kph to begin with.

EDIT 10 best is the only fair, competitive way to grade player's personal performance. Period. Full stop. It's too easy to get screwed by outside factors to limit the competition to 10 straight matches. If this is to be done, then there needs to be a dedicated solo-only launch mode separate from the others and dedicated to the tournament. It's supposed to be a measure of a player's skill level - pure and simple - and not subject to "luck of the drop." Unless you suggest we get some one-on-one deathmatch up in here.

Edited by Master Maniac, 04 March 2014 - 08:40 AM.

[Redshift2k5]

Ghost Badger, on 04 March 2014 - 08:34 AM, said:

I wonder what would happen if there was a radio button for each mech class/tournament weight chassis, and clicking "opt-in" meant that your next 10 matches, period, were how the tournament was scored.

And if one of my children suddenly break something during a match, or my client crashes, or my ping jumps to 12000, too bad, right?

[Mister Blastman]

Master Maniac, on 03 March 2014 - 05:09 PM, said:

It was a bit painful at the end. My wife was giving me score marks I had to beat after every matches. It got ridiculous.

"You need to get at least 4 kills, touch 8 people (that's everyone else), and get about 700-800 damage, stay alive, and win."

That sentence is going to echo in my head when I sleep.

You have an awesome wife, dude. Mine won't even touch a computer--and video games are an allergy of hers.

[jper4]

they just need some sort of upper cap so people can feel they could have a chance. best 10 of however many you can get in rewards the ones who have th most time to play. if suddenly it's limited to best 10 of 40 or 50 matches it's a big enough sample that those bad streaks won't kill your score for good but big enough that you can get a decent amount of "above average" matches in. and those who don;t have a lot of time to play can figure "well it's only 40/50 matches- that means i won;t be competing against the people who played 20+ hours and have 10+ times the matches under their belt than i will be able to."

plus as a side bonus after your 40/50 matches are done you can hop onto another chassis since your score on the first mech is already locked in. i had thought about jumping into the hunchy/blackjack category but was hanging around close enough in kintaros the first couple days (stopped saturday afternoon for good) that i ended up staying with them the whole time (finished playing saturday in 33rd (was 14th friday night post stats fix when i went to bed), ended up 78th overall. but if there was an upper cap i could have finished up my kintaro allotment without fearing i could be missing out on that great game if i keep going and used some of my other mediums for a bit.

[Master Maniac]

Tanar, on 04 March 2014 - 09:27 AM, said:

they just need some sort of upper cap so people can feel they could have a chance. best 10 of however many you can get in rewards the ones who have th most time to play. if suddenly it's limited to best 10 of 40 or 50 matches it's a big enough sample that those bad streaks won't kill your score for good but big enough that you can get a decent amount of "above average" matches in. and those who don;t have a lot of time to play can figure "well it's only 40/50 matches- that means i won;t be competing against the people who played 20+ hours and have 10+ times the matches under their belt than i will be able to."

plus as a side bonus after your 40/50 matches are done you can hop onto another chassis since your score on the first mech is already locked in. i had thought about jumping into the hunchy/blackjack category but was hanging around close enough in kintaros the first couple days (stopped saturday afternoon for good) that i ended up staying with them the whole time (finished playing saturday in 33rd (was 14th friday night post stats fix when i went to bed), ended up 78th overall. but if there was an upper cap i could have finished up my kintaro allotment without fearing i could be missing out on that great game if i keep going and used some of my other mediums for a bit.

I know this sounds cruel, but it's not about gold stars for everyone. It's about determining the best of the best. Everybody *does* have a chance - everyone. If you can beat the best, then you can beat the best. If you can't, then you can't. Sorry to sound callous, but that's how it does and *should* work.

I think that the perception of the nature of competition has degraded in recent years.

Mister Blastman, on 04 March 2014 - 09:26 AM, said:

You have an awesome wife, dude. Mine won't even touch a computer--and video games are an allergy of hers.

I'm pretty lucky, yep. Even better is that she can hold her own in a mech with aplomb.

Edited by Master Maniac, 04 March 2014 - 09:34 AM.

[jper4]

Master Maniac, on 04 March 2014 - 09:32 AM, said:

I know this sounds cruel, but it's not about gold stars for everyone. It's about determining the best of the best. Everybody *does* have a chance - everyone. If you can beat the best, then you can beat the best. If you can't, then you can't. Sorry to sound callous, but that's how it does and *should* work.

I think that the perception of the nature of competition has degraded in recent years.

it's about getting people to participate not handing out "gold stars". how many people have posted that they didn;t bother opting in because they knew they wouldn;t be able to put the time in to compete properly as the tourney stands now? you still have to have the 10 best games out of everyone's 10 best matches, just now you wouldn;t have as many "do-over" matches to make up for the inevitable bad matches.

if anything an upper cap forces the best of the best to BE the best quickly and not just be able to shrug it off and say "oh well 7 bad matches in a row, i have another 12 hours of playing before the tourney ends to make up for it." to me that would make things MORE competitive not less.

[Jman5]

If I were to design a tournament, one thing I would do is create a separate Tournament Queue for people who opted in and then disable Elo. That way everyone is playing at the same level and you would get a more skill-based result.

With regards to stats used, I'm honestly unsure what would be best. Perhaps instead of just a binomial kill or no kill, assist or no assist point system we could make the reward proportional to how much you actually contributed to that kill/assist. Your experience reward is based on what percentage of the damage you personally did to that mech that you killed or assisted. So for example if I did 90% of the damage to an enemy and another guy did 1%, I will get 90% of the max assist experience and he would get 1% of the experience.

This would prevent people from simply tagging enemies for assists or coming in at the last moment and kill stealing.

Edited by Jman5, 04 March 2014 - 09:45 AM.

[Master Maniac]

Look, it's "best of 10 matches." If all you can put in is 10 matches, then fine. The criteria is *based* on just 10 matches. It doesn't matter if you play 10 or 100 - if your skill level enables you to break the point totals of other players, then that's great. You have the same "chance" to win as anyone else, based on your ability to crank out an excellent score.

Someone can play 1,000 matches over the weekend, and if they're not good enough they won't take the board. On the flip side, a remarkably good player can drop 10 to 20 times and take the top spot, owing only to their dedication and ability.

Best of 10 is the best way to ensure the contest is as much about personal skill as possible, barring the occasional drop with a horrible team, or against a team of focused and dedicated players who are grouped and competitive. When the matchmaker is refined to an appropriate point, then it would be nice to see some Solaris-style competitions, or one-on-one duels, or ladder-style tournaments. These would be excellent. But for now, best 10 is the way to go. And heck, it's not a bad template for the occasional competition in the future, either.

Did I fight hard to win? You bet. I thought of practically nothing but Mechwarrior all weekend long, and was constantly trying to beat my wife's score marks for the better part of a whole day. It was grueling and difficult, but I finally put in enough effort to overcome my minimal score and edge out my competition. That's what a competition should be about: effort and skill, not the sheer, stupid luck of having the best of 10 matches. That is absurd, given the random nature of drops at this point.

The idea of an "upper cap" is childish and pedantic. That's like telling competitive runners that they can only sprint so fast, and no faster so that their opponents can catch up. The "upper limit" is already there: make 12 kills all by yourself. There's your upper cap. Anything else is silly.

And to address Jman:

Tagging enemies for assists and what you call "kill stealing" all require skill and a measure of risk. It was much more difficult for me to aim for 8 assists than it was for me to focus on getting 4 kills. It requires players to be aggressive and mobile, and encourages people to play actively. Kill stealing does not exist - save for those infuriating times when you're engaging an enemy, you've practically brought him to the edge of death all on your own, and then LRMs rain down and finish off your target. *That's* kill stealing.

Edited by Master Maniac, 04 March 2014 - 10:04 AM.

[R3qUi3M]

I get waxed by artilery every second or third game in a heavy mech. Medium not so often. Light mech - almost never. I dont play assaults at all. I just could not stand how ******** it would be to die because somebody planted idiotic smoke 20cm behind me. And even if i notice it i would be doomed. and The problem is not beeing stationary or non stationary but manouverability of your mech. Besides if you play sniper with zoom (any sniper mech build) most likely you will recieve 50% dmg from arti/air in your mech durin the game. It seems that sniper builds will become useless due to artilery ;/

I wonder how many of you, during a fire exchange on the fire line, look behind you every 2 seconds just to see if there is a smoke 15cm behind your ass?

I mean the only effective counter is to be non stop moving at full speed - you cannot stand still EVER! Also if you break for example just to backpedal - boom! - you made miskate and airstrike got you (wasnt moving fast enough). Doesnt matter that there are not tactical positions to obtain and moving will only weaken your position... No! You just have to keep moving no matter what and constantly look around you not at the enemy (except when you fire your airstrike at the enemy). Generaly speaking - lets all take arti/air and just fix biggest engines ever on our ECM LL ravens.

I mean... Is this so difficult to make a bloody voice warning from Betty that would say: "WARNING! AIR/ARTILERYSTRIKE!"???????? Doesnt matter where! I just want to know if somebody used it! Thats it!

Not to mention the bug where for example on Terra Therma you can plant an airstrike right down in center lava just to see guys up top recieve massive damage! Same with Crimson strait (even better with seismic).

How in the world would anybody notice a smoke underground bellow them?!

Edited by R3qUi3M, 04 March 2014 - 10:34 AM.

[WVAnonymous]

Master Maniac, on 04 March 2014 - 10:02 AM, said:

...

Someone can play 1,000 matches over the weekend, and if they're not good enough they won't take the board. On the flip side, a remarkably good player can drop 10 to 20 times and take the top spot, owing only to their dedication and ability.

...

True statement. I didn't play 1,000 matches but in 8 hours of playing basically nothing but a Griffin 3M my ten best matches were 500 points short of getting me in the Griffin top 10. Dedication ≢ Ability

This is my failing, not a failing of the system. I enjoyed the heck out of the tournament (and wish my wife would keep score, too).

[Kyynele]

R3qUi3M, on 04 March 2014 - 10:14 AM, said:

I mean... Is this so difficult to make a bloody voice warning from Betty that would say: "WARNING! AIR/ARTILERYSTRIKE!"???????? Doesnt matter where! I just want to know if somebody used it! Thats it!

This I agree with fully.

Also, I would prefer to hear whenever a team member of mine uses a strike too, I lost count on the times when I took a completely unnecessary PPC-alpha in the face while placing the perfect strike that I couldn't actually place at all because someone else just used theirs.

[Deathlike]

Jman5, on 04 March 2014 - 09:44 AM, said:

If I were to design a tournament, one thing I would do is create a separate Tournament Queue for people who opted in and then disable Elo. That way everyone is playing at the same level and you would get a more skill-based result.

I could agree to that.

Quote

With regards to stats used, I'm honestly unsure what would be best. Perhaps instead of just a binomial kill or no kill, assist or no assist point system we could make the reward proportional to how much you actually contributed to that kill/assist. Your experience reward is based on what percentage of the damage you personally did to that mech that you killed or assisted. So for example if I did 90% of the damage to an enemy and another guy did 1%, I will get 90% of the max assist experience and he would get 1% of the experience.

This would prevent people from simply tagging enemies for assists or coming in at the last moment and kill stealing.

The only thing that affects this greatly is arty+airstrikes, allowing you to claim a greater % even if you don't make the killing blow. Otherwise, it sounds good in theory... outside of that very important exception.

[R3qUi3M]

Kyynele, on 04 March 2014 - 10:42 AM, said:

I lost count on the times when I took a completely unnecessary PPC-alpha in the face while placing the perfect strike that I couldn't actually place at all because someone else just used theirs.

Same!

[Xeno Phalcon]

Redshift2k5, on 04 March 2014 - 08:51 AM, said:

And if one of my children suddenly break something during a match, or my client crashes, or my ping jumps to 12000, too bad, right?

Or your net dies, or you go to work, or family comes over to visit and otherwise interrupts your 12 hour session!? THE HORROR!!

[Master Maniac]

WVAnonymous, on 04 March 2014 - 10:41 AM, said:

True statement. I didn't play 1,000 matches but in 8 hours of playing basically nothing but a Griffin 3M my ten best matches were 500 points short of getting me in the Griffin top 10. Dedication ≢ Ability

This is my failing, not a failing of the system. I enjoyed the heck out of the tournament (and wish my wife would keep score, too).

If I tried to roll a Griffin, I'd place dead last. That thing looks like a really, really hard mech to use.

[Eglar]

Well at things are right now you couldn't call it a tournament because you are fighting not against each other so basically one could see it as a leaderboard Challenge. It's free and you may chose not to opt in.
As for balancing and fairness to player who don't have enough time to participate or whatsoever. I was not going to say this because I did pretty well but..

The result of the tournament is a mixture of both skill and dedication. Everyone who made it up there invested at least a handfull hours playing.

The duration of the tournament (2 days) made sure that you had to go on even if you were already on top. So if you can't bring the dedication don't opt in but don't whine in the aftermath. If you brought enough dedication but lacked the luck/skills to get up, I hope you had fun and train and perform better next time.

p.s. When is the Winners Announcement and when do I get my MC? lol

Edited by Eglar, 04 March 2014 - 11:07 AM.