Tw1stedMonkey, on 29 March 2014 - 08:46 PM, said:
If they were anything like you, good riddance to the elitist ******. Group dropping makes balancing for the majority of players harder. People that min/max so they can stomp PUGs and/or troll other people ruin it for everyone who just wants to play with their friends casually and I utterly hate those people and everything they represent. Games are meant to be fun, and the more people having fun in a game, the more successful that game is being.
If you want a game that's you against the world, you want a solo FPS. This isn't. Heck, I'd be happy to see a PUG-only queue...I don't think it's fair to see solo players pitted against groups.
But you can then quit whining about how the big bad 4-man touched you inappropriately with their Gauss Rifle, or that someone fired a missile over the hill thanks to his friend's NARC beacon and blew your face off. Actually, I don't think you will even then, because what you're calling "casual" isn't casual, it's "I want to believe I'm competent."- not good, mind you. Competent.
Even in a PUG-only queue, the people who work together will reduce Rambos to a thin layer of smoking debris. MWO is a team-oriented game. Not a free-for-all. Not a series of random duels where only the heart of the cards will ensure victory.
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If you want to go pro and play against other pros only, that is fine, but until they find a fair system that can't be abused, tough luck because a good majority more people play the game casually and they deserve to have fun regardless of how many people you group with. Maybe my opinions are tainted by the hatred I felt for the 8 man groups in Halo BTB that just farmed kills and refused to go for objectives until the game was about to time-out, but I refuse to stand by and allow such disgusting abuses and unsportsmanlike conduct ever again.
Know why I PUG? Because I have roomies that I can't be talking to others while I play. And because I find PUG play actually is challenging.
Let's try this again. 99%+ of the time, I solo. So take your "pro" and "unsportsmanlike" chatter and stow it with the rest of the whining I see in your posting. What you call "casual", I generally call "flaming bouts of stupid". Like it or not, when you get dropped on a map with 11 other people- even and especially when none of them are grouped, and it happens often enough- you are part of a team.
It is not fun when I see my team LEEEEROY JENKINS into the other side that had the common sense to stick together and I watch them go 0-6 in under three minutes. Or fail to understand the basics of how their weapons operate. Or take a scenic trip at 50kph through the wilds of Terra Therma while the rest of the group is getting pasted. Or "snipe" things at 700m with their medium lasers. Or randomly spray fire across every 'Mech in the opposing force while getting splattered.
It's like telling folks you came to play checkers and instead decided to do tiddly-winks with the pieces, and wondering why everyone else either 1) beat you or 2) got disgusted with what you were doing and 3) called you a bad player. Your "casual" does not mean "don't try to actually play the game"- and MWO is a team-based game. Play with your team. Don't whine that people are playing like a team, don't call it "pro players", because it isn't.
Know the tournament? I played with one 'Mech. One. A
Cataphract-2X. Yes, that paragon of meta-pro-uberness, the
Cataphract with ONE ballistic hardpoint that uses missiles.
I didn't use the ballistic HP. Two LRM15's with Artemis, 2 MPL's. *gasp* So meta. Much firepower. Missiles. Wow.
I then went out and had fun. I played with teams. I PUGed, as I normally do, the entire time. As casual as the next guy.
Top 25. Because although I was playing for fun, I played the actual game and respected the fact that I had 11 other people with me who wanted to play what was on the label, not "do whatever I pleased". We blew up PUGs. We blew up premades. Sometimes, they blew us up. But as long as we all actually played the game, it was fun. Sometimes, people even listened and learned the value of patience instead of "charge at the opponent and get ground into mush" and found it surprisingly satisfying- because frankly, MWO tends to be more satisfying when you realize that working together produced positive results that aren't "stomp or be stomped", or obviously show that "Do X = this works".
Like being on HPG Manifold in Skirmish, killing one opponent, and simply grouping up at our start point for the other side to arrive. No frustrating "they're in the roof/basement" failure (which they had gotten to first, usually an "I win" button for Manifold in PUGs). Not that we didn't want to play. We just didn't want to be stupid.
They came. We fought. We won 12-6. It was a way of using the map most of the players there had never experienced. Fun and anti-boredom was had, even by the premade on the other side (we were 12 single players) - because everyone played together. The premade had thought that it'd be the same boring PUG stomp, because PUGs are inevitable- the gung-ho go center and everyone else is sucked into the center, so you just park yourself under cover and win win win.
That's how MWO functions as a fun game. You are on a team. I don't care what you bring, as long as you bring it to play with the other 11 players on your team and you play the game you're in. Otherwise, you take fun -away- from everyone else you play with and often disappoint the other side for good measure. I apologize for stomps. I feel -bad- about stomps. Stomps represent a fundamental failure to play, and nobody has fun getting their teeth kicked through the back of their skulls. Bad players facilitate stomps, and that's why I hate bad players.
And to get back to the subject of LRMs-
Good players can deal with LRMs in a competent manner and don't scrub out. To me, that means when I hear LRM whining, I hear "I'm a BAAAAAD PLAYER! I AM WHY TEAMS FOLD LIKE A CHEAP CHAIR! DOOOO WHAT I SAY!". This isn't opinion on "good players can deal with LRMs"- it's fact. LRMs barely exist at higher ELOs where dakka reigns as it did pre-patch. Even in PUG mode, people at that level of play function in an ad-hoc teamwork that I see most closely mimiced at lower ELO play when there's....a bunch of missile carriers out there firing on things together.
Saying that anything that encourages people to play together is some kind of ancient evil that must be purged from MWO is anathema to me. The ability to handle LRMs is similar to learning not to do things like "don't stand spotlighted on the top of a hill and not expect to get shot". Getting crushed by missiles is a failure to learn, not a flaw in gameplay- the fault lies in the player making mistakes, not "OMG LURMAGEDDON OP". Players doing something in concert is not a flaw in gameplay, it is players on a team doing something team-oriented, working together- no matter if they're PUG or premade or 12-man sync drop. Team actions in a team game are a positive. They're playing checkers to the high-ELO chess, but at least they're not trying to play tiddlywinks with the pieces and regardless of skill level, they're having fun playing the game as it's designed.