79 replies to this topic

[Kjudoon]

I dunno how to do a poll here, but the topic seems valid as a discussion too.

Over the last two weeks since the Fauxpocalypse over LRQQMs has begun, I've been hearing from more than a couple sources players are not locking targets because they hate missile boats. I'd heard it rumored, but I've started to notice it actually being done when spectating in matches. It isn't that it surprised me as much as saddened me that players are actually doing this.

LRMs are THE premier team play weapon. They are best when used with a team supporting the brawlers or scouts. The fact that they are finally becoming functional with the speed tweak and NARC buffs countering the broken ECM mechanics should be somthing everyone is happy with. LRMs keep poptarts down so brawlers get cover fire. They cull out bad players in big slow mechs that would have been a problem for brawlers. Lights now have to play much smarter to be successful and gives them an added option when spotting. The game becomes a more strategic and cohesive whole as it SHOULD be.

So... Y U no hit R?

1. I think LRMs should be removed from the game and so I will not help support them.
2. Kill stealing jerks always wreck my Cbill/XP amounts
3. They're cowards and I want to force them to play my way
4. Teamwork is OP and what do I care about other people? This is a solo game and you're just AIs to me.
5. Wut? Targetting gives me away to the enemy!
6. What is this targeting you speak of? I can see the enemy and my crosshairs, I need nothing more.

[Bartholomew bartholomew]

And most of those people get killed for not knowing where to shoot on a weakened mech and thusly lose an easy kill.

[InRev]

Because I remapped it to Q!

[Kjudoon]

InRev, on 30 March 2014 - 10:20 AM, said:

Because I remapped it to Q!

Fair enough...

Y U no hit Q?

[PhoenixFire55]

Maybe because I'm circling my target and I don't want to die from the rain of 'friendly' 'supportive' LRMs hitting me in the back?

[TheCaptainJZ]

It's hard to know if someone you are spectating is deliberately not hitting R because they want the kill or not. Some players are bad at using it because they get too wrapped up in the fight. Some are bad at it because they aren't used to the concept in other games they play a lot perhaps. Others just fail to rely on it because they primarily use directed fire weapons. Maybe they have learned long ago not to count on it with the overpoweredness of ECM. Who knows.

[Kjudoon]

TheCaptainJZ, on 30 March 2014 - 10:26 AM, said:

It's hard to know if someone you are spectating is deliberately not hitting R because they want the kill or not. Some players are bad at using it because they get too wrapped up in the fight. Some are bad at it because they aren't used to the concept in other games they play a lot perhaps. Others just fail to rely on it because they primarily use directed fire weapons. Maybe they have learned long ago not to count on it with the overpoweredness of ECM. Who knows.

This is very true. I know guys who get tunnel vision really bad when they focus down on a mech. Even if they did hit R, they wouldn't pay attention to it. I know I have a hard enough time watching the paper doll, but at least I do hit R 90% of the time because I want LRMs raining on my enemy to make him essplode and die.

[Duncan Aravain]

Tunnel vision is rampant in MWO. I've spectated in many a mech and watched in their minimap as an enemy mech slowly approaches from the side or rear and, even though there was 15+seconds of prior detection, catches the spectated pilot completely off guard. Heck, I even had a pilot on our side complain because he didn't realize that he was the last pilot up (guess the minimap or large red number was too confusing) and we should have warned him. Pushing the R button must fall in the same category, or at least 50% of pilots must have removed it from their keyboards.

[TheCaptainJZ]

Yeah, i obsessively hit R but not everyone does

[Barkem Squirrel]

I will back up theCaptain JZ, he does hit R and I know he has had spotting assists from me.

In spectating, (I have been running locusts a bit lately) I have noticed some people never hit R. I can not remember how many damage mechs I have run up to in the cats, or Jager A and poped a side torso that was yellow or orange with one or two ML's and maybe some MG's on the Jager. After running out of LRMs on Griffins, wolverines and shadowhawks it is the same thing. Go forward and find the weak points on the remaining mechs and exploit them, and with out hitting R that can not happen.

The one problem I have from time to time is hitting "T" and that messing things up going into chat.

Pheinoxfire55 does have a good point. A light circling a larger mech and does not want to die to friendly fire. I will add to that, the atlas in a death charge firing AC 20 SRM 6 and ML's at a target and getting nailed in the back by LRMs. Both get back to checking your LRM fire. If the target is over 220m from you fire, since the missiles will arc up higher, but below that fire to the sides when a friendly is charging. You can see that happening if you are close to the front firing LRMs.

Hitting R allows for spectators to inform team members where to hit the remaining mechs. Jager LT rear, cat red CT, Spider RL. Just little things like this are helpful. I was 1 v 5 last weekend on canyon, and ended the game as a tie 1 v1 against an atlas, that no one really hit and I fired all my LRMs and only had 2 ML's when this started. He had only 2 ML's in the CT at the end, and I killed a Jager, misery and baited the spider and 4X raven into turret LRM and ML range. That was a great game. I was in a Griffin, but people were telling me what location to hit from others hitting R. That was the reason I survived.

[loopala]

i tend to bring ssrms or lrms, so i lock. as for tunnel vision i have it for the chat window. watching the mini map and paper doll i just don't look there. also as a current cplt pilot i find the paper doll and mini map essential to picking my targets. now with alrm i prefer to have LOS but i will take no LOS locks, TAG and NARC get priority as do big slow assaults. i tend to drop with only 5 tons of lrm ammo with twin 15s so i pick my targets carefully. as i pug i tend to get left hanging so i need enough back up weapons to at least scare off the lights.

i love when i see the little blue triangle turning and turning with no red triangles. come to play cavalry and here it is a lone light fighting 3 or 4 heavies. guess who they come after once they see me?? now when i am surrounded by red guys i an spaming the "R" key so any body who wants to help does not get ambushed. about 1/2 the time it works really well as more then one light comes to my rescue, that is if we are not getting steam rolled.

all in all there is no draw back to the "R" key, well maybe this

PhoenixFire55, on 30 March 2014 - 10:24 AM, said:

Maybe because I'm circling my target and I don't want to die from the rain of 'friendly' 'supportive' LRMs hitting me in the back?

[Bront]

If I notice other pilots not targeting, I'll kindly remind them in chat. Quite often they'll do it, occasionally they wont.

I'm a habitual targeter, honestly from back in playing Wing Commander.

[CMetz]

I simply think that it tends to be "just another button" that no one wants to take the time to hit. For one, I use throttle decay due to my play style. It can be a pain in the tail to hit R. My solution for this? I have a 7 button mouse. I mapped a button to target lock and there we go. Now my lock on button sits right below my scroll wheel. Protip for people that use Razer mice (I use Corsair, but have used and abused a razer mouse)- Try mapping targeting to your scroll wheel. I had it set up so that if I scrolled up it targeted. (assign keystroke R to scroll up function)

[Buckminster]

Because no one ever said what it really does? I ran into a player that was running in a trial stalker, and he thought that the TAG was what you needed to use to acquire the target. All of the benefits of targeting aren't really obvious, and someone yelling "hit R please" at the beginning of the match doesn't really do much to change that.

Although another point - someone mentioned that WoT doesn't require targeting. So anyone coming over from WoT won't even think to do it.

[xengk]

Mostly because Im lagging so bad (280~350ping) I don't even know who Im targeting.
Betty would say I have targeted an enemy but the mech info does not appear on the HUD.

[rolly]

Conversely, as an LRM boater, I find it annoying when a light spams the R key and just cycles through all the mechs he/she sees really fast then runs away. That doesn't seem to help me either because the spotting doesn't take effect. Has anyone else seen this happen?

[Mercer Skye]

I just chalk it up to 'FPS Syndrome.' A lot of people I talk to when solo pugging have come over from some flavor of FPS, and supposedly even that Hawken game is more FPS than giant stompy robot.

Where in, everything is Scan fire, and there is no realism whatsoever about where the shots are coming from. See it constantly in spectator mode; The Atlas that keeps firing his LPLs into the rock wall in front of him, and people following their targets instead of leading them.

Though I doubt everyone that fails to target up is afflicted with this tragic psychological disorder. For those that aren't, it's just pure laziness, or the desire to be 'top dog' on the score sheet. Hard to get the highest matchscore if you're working with your team, and all that.

And, I can reckon a very tiny set of players are trying not to get their rear armor skinned off by friendly LRMs because they insist on hugging their target, and there is no conceivable reason for them to learn how to brawl at that 100m 'sweet spot' like a sane person.

Regardless of their reasoning, I'm a firm believer that 95% of the time, there is just no good reason to not lock your target. At least until they revisit how this lazy 'integrated C3 that weighs nothing' system works.

@Rolly; Take that with a grain of salt. It's semi-accepted practice to spam a field of enemies while buzzing a flank in order to give your friendlies approaching the fight a very vague idea of where the enemy is and how spread out they are.

Sadly, I can agree when I feel like LRM barging, it feels like everyone in a scout mech is trying it out for the first time, and just doesn't feel like dogging that last target lock and just flying away. I know I try my hardest to give them the benefit of the doubt, but it's hard some days.

Edited by Mercer Skye, 30 March 2014 - 09:08 PM.

[No Guts No Glory]

rolly, on 30 March 2014 - 08:58 PM, said:

Conversely, as an LRM boater, I find it annoying when a light spams the R key and just cycles through all the mechs he/she sees really fast then runs away. That doesn't seem to help me either because the spotting doesn't take effect. Has anyone else seen this happen?

They do it as a, " Hey, they're over here guys!" Not really to spot for anyone.

PhoenixFire55, on 30 March 2014 - 10:24 AM, said:

Maybe because I'm circling my target and I don't want to die from the rain of 'friendly' 'supportive' LRMs hitting me in the back?

That only ever happens if you're face hugging though.

Edited by No Guts No Glory, 30 March 2014 - 09:08 PM.

[Basskicker]

No Guts No Glory, on 30 March 2014 - 09:06 PM, said:

They do it as a, " Hey, they're over here guys!" Not really to spot for anyone. That only ever happens if you're face hugging though

Spot on. It allows the light mech to keep moving and to communicate to his team without having to stop and slam on the keyboard. Actually pretty clever when you look at it this way.

As for the face hugging. I've found that this is a pretty good tactic against the 3E or other torso weapon only mechs. Mainly because if a light is standing directly at the feet of a banshee, the banshee cannot use it's weapons against the light. I got caught alone on alpine in my 3E against an oxide and all he had to do was keep his mech under mine and there wasn't a damn thing I could do about it while he streaked my 95ton mech apart with his 35 ton mech with 6 tons of weapons... Not one of my finer moments, but it showed me the glaring weakness in the banshee.

Edited by Basskicker, 30 March 2014 - 10:50 PM.

[Magna Canus]

Targeting your enemy is essential when you want to be effective on the field. It allows you to find your enemies weak spots and concentrate on those to take your opponent down as quickly as possible.

What I have noticed sometimes, especially during US "prime-time", is that when you target an "easy kill" half your team comes charging over, LRMs or not, to get that kill. It's like fat burger for a starving hobo. During US prime-time I have actually seen people purposely block my lane of fire and risk their back armor to get that kill as well. I wish you could get the achievement "Seriously" multiple times. I can't count how many times I have done top damage and gotten not a single kill because my team tends to only come out of the wood-works when they smell an easy kill, otherwise they are hiding behind terrain.

Fortunately I usually play during European prime-time where the "me me me" factor is significantly reduced.

So, the main reasons people don't use targeting, in order of how common in my view are; Lack of prior experience with targeting and can't be bothered to ask/read/etc., frustration with selfish/opportunistic team members looking to safely profit from your work, "tunnel-vision" in a fight, fear of LRM FF.

All of the above make working with a team even more important. At least team mates will let off when you say "I got this", or will let off of a neutered enemy to help you with a bigger threat, etc.

When PUGing I still use targeting though because despite how frustrating you PUG can act sometimes, targeting still makes you a more effective pilot which helps the team in general.