347 replies to this topic

[A banana in the tailpipe]

So tonight I was introduced to 12s, and holy hell every match was wait wait wait wait wait RUSHHHHHOMG EVERYONE DIES.

Now I have a clear definition what the cancer is eating away at the heart of this game and why it's failing. While I have the utmost respect for my opponents, it's the players who exploit the worst aspects that are killing this game.

GG PGI.

L2P will never fix this issue. The game was tailored around this kind of playstyle, and being exposed to the genuine ulgy truths has totaly turned me off to ever bothering with it.

Edited by Egomane, 10 May 2014 - 02:07 AM.

[KharnZor]

Strange, all my 12 mans and other private matches have all been brilliant. Hard fought every single one of them.

[A banana in the tailpipe]

KharnZor, on 09 May 2014 - 09:48 PM, said:

Strange, all my 12 mans and other private matches have all been brilliant. Hard fought every single one of them.

Na these were public, and just like the real public... fugly as hell. Been gaming 30+ years and when I see something as unbalanced as this it's a clear indicator the ship is going nowhere but down to davey jones. I even said good bye to the clan and uninstalled. There is no hope where MWO is going with the kind of maps and playstyle it advocates. Just a few crusty die-hard fans who will exploit it till it turns to dust.

Best of luck to you PGI, you need it.

[KharnZor]

Ok. I dont agree with you but ok.

[Kyle Wright]

Well the issue is you were in a public formed 12-man probably going up against top tier teams with min/max builds and months and months of experience. It happens man, just gotta find that right group.

[xhrit]

lockwoodx, on 09 May 2014 - 09:36 PM, said:

Now I have a clear definition what the cancer is eating away at the heart of this game and why it's failing. While I have the utmost respect for my opponents, it's the players who exploit the worst aspects that are killing this game.

You play to win, or you play to lose.

Quote

Everyone begins as a scrub---it takes time to learn the game to get to a point where you know what you're doing. There is the mistaken notion, though, that by merely continuing to play or "learn" the game, that one can become a top player. In reality, the "scrub" has many more mental obstacles to overcome than anything actually going on during the game. The scrub has lost the game even before it starts. He's lost the game before he's chosen his character. He's lost the game even before the decision of which game is to be played has been made. His problem? He does not play to win.

The scrub would take great issue with this statement for he usually believes that he is playing to win, but he is bound up by an intricate construct of fictitious rules that prevent him from ever truly competing. These made-up rules vary from game to game, of course, but their character remains constant. In Street Fighter, for example, the scrub labels a wide variety of tactics and situations "cheap." So-called "cheapness" is truly the mantra of the scrub. Performing a throw on someone often called cheap. A throw is a special kind of move that grabs an opponent and damages him, even when the opponent is defending against all other kinds of attacks. The entire purpose of the throw is to be able to damage an opponent who sits and blocks and doesn't attack. As far as the game is concerned, throwing is an integral part of the design--it's meant to be there--yet the scrub has constructed his own set of principles in his mind that state he should be totally impervious to all attacks while blocking. The scrub thinks of blocking as a kind of magic shield which will protect him indefinitely. Why? Exploring the reasoning is futile since the notion is ridiculous from the start.

You're not going to see a classic scrub throw his opponent 5 times in a row. But why not? What if doing so is strategically the sequence of moves that optimize his chances of winning? Here we've encountered our first clash: the scrub is only willing to play to win within his own made-up mental set of rules. These rules can be staggeringly arbitrary. If you beat a scrub by throwing projectile attacks at him, keeping your distance and preventing him from getting near you...that's cheap. If you throw him repeatedly, that's cheap, too. We've covered that one. If you sit in block for 50 seconds doing no moves, that's cheap. Nearly anything you do that ends up making you win is a prime candidate for being called cheap.

Doing one move or sequence over and over and over is another great way to get called cheap. This goes right to the heart of the matter: why can the scrub not defeat something so obvious and telegraphed as a single move done over and over? Is he such a poor player that he can't counter that move? And if the move is, for whatever reason, extremely difficult to counter, then wouldn't I be a fool for not using that move? The first step in becoming a top player is the realization that playing to win means doing whatever most increases your chances of winning. The game knows no rules of "honor" or of "cheapness." The game only knows winning and losing.

A common call of the scrub is to cry that the kind of play in which ones tries to win at all costs is "boring" or "not fun." Let's consider two groups of players: a group of good players and a group of scrubs. The scrubs will play "for fun" and not explore the extremities of the game. They won't find the most effective tactics and abuse them mercilessly. The good players will. The good players will find incredibly overpowering tactics and patterns. As they play the game more, they'll be forced to find counters to those tactics. The vast majority of tactics that at first appear unbeatable end up having counters, though they are often quite esoteric and difficult to discover. The counter tactic prevents the first player from doing the tactic, but the first player can then use a counter to the counter. The second player is now afraid to use his counter and he's again vulnerable to the original overpowering tactic. (See my article on Yomi layer 3 for much more on that.)

Notice that the good players are reaching higher and higher levels of play. They found the "cheap stuff" and abused it. They know how to stop the cheap stuff. They know how to stop the other guy from stopping it so they can keep doing it. And as is quite common in competitive games, many new tactics will later be discovered that make the original cheap tactic look wholesome and fair. Often in fighting games, one character will have something so good it's unfair. Fine, let him have that. As time goes on, it will be discovered that other characters have even more powerful and unfair tactics. Each player will attempt to steer the game in the direction of his own advantages, much how grandmaster chess players attempt to steer opponents into situations in which their opponents are weak.

Let's return to the group of scrubs. They don't know the first thing about all the depth I've been talking about. Their argument is basically that ignorantly mashing buttons with little regard to actual strategy is more "fun." Superficially, their argument does at least look true, since often their games will be more "wet and wild" than games between the experts, which are usually more controlled and refined. But any close examination will reveal that the experts are having a great deal of fun on a higher level than the scrub can even imagine. Throwing together some circus act of a win isn't nearly as satisfying as reading your opponent's mind to such a degree that you can counter his ever move, even his every counter.

Can you imagine what will happen when the two groups of players meet? The experts will absolutely destroy the scrubs with any number of tactics they've either never seen, or never been truly forced to counter. This is because the scrubs have not been playing the same game. The experts were playing the actual game while the scrubs were playing their own homemade variant with restricting, unwritten rules.

http://www.sirlin.ne...win-part-1.html

Edited by xhrit, 09 May 2014 - 10:08 PM.

[Mcgral18]

Well, I didn't count 48 plumes of red smoke, so I found 12 mans to be fun enough this evening.

Only one memory allocation error, no teamkills on my part.


The only way to fix the stale meta, on the other hand, is to fix weapon balance. Why should you get close, when the short range weapons are in almost every case a worse choice than the long range weapons? I would love to take out a 22 tube SHD, but quite simply it can't compete. The closest thing to a brawling build I've made semi effective is my WubShee, and that's a joke build with 23 DHS.

If weapons had slightly more even footing, you'd see more diversity in the 12 mans, but since there is a considerably more optimal loadout, it's being used. Simple as that. Blame the failed weapon balance, which can and will be exploited; or rather the bad weapons simply won't be used.

[Flaming oblivion]

Sad thing is hes right. The win at all costs mentality the minority hold spoils the fun for the majority , Meaning the majority just leave , Meaning pgi loses income as well as the largest chunk of its player base the smaller the player base gets the worse balance gets with the matchmaker, So the casuals leave due to the win at all costs spoiling their fun so they lose, The game closes because most of the casuals left due to win at all costs minority, the few casuals still left leave due to bad balance , And the win at all costs group ultimately lose. because they suffer the ultimate loss all that winning , those stats mean nothing cause the games lost to cyber oblivion.

[kapusta11]

I like sniping. The fact that PGI is unable to give some real benefits for getting close will not make me feel shameful about my prefered playstyle.

[Jun Watarase]

lockwoodx, on 09 May 2014 - 09:36 PM, said:

So tonight I was introduced to 12s, and holy hell every match was wait wait wait wait wait RUSHHHHHOMG EVERYONE DIES.

Now I have a clear definition what the cancer is eating away at the heart of this game and why it's failing. While I have the utmost respect for my opponents, it's the players who exploit the worst aspects that are killing this game.

GG PGI.

L2P will never fix this issue. The game was tailored around this kind of playstyle, and being exposed to the genuine ulgy truths has totaly turned me off to ever bothering with it.

You should try playing conquest, its very different. The mechs are much more spread out, speed and mobility are much more important and the camping rarely happens (unless one team is ********, then they lose). There are a few bad mechs that always turn into camp fests though. Crimson Strait is a good example, its always a massive camp fest between kappa and epsilon, and the team that starts in the NE can easily hold three cap points and just camp to win via points.

Assault and skirmish has few to no incentives to spread out or move, so they always degenerate into this massive deathball campfest at the most tactically advantageous positions on the map. Alpine is the most god awful map to play those modes on, because the camping just gets ridiculous on that map.

[Jun Watarase]

xhrit, on 09 May 2014 - 10:07 PM, said:

You play to win, or you play to lose.




http://www.sirlin.ne...win-part-1.html

And here i was wondering when someone would try to quote sirlin's playing to win again.

Sirlin's playing to win only applies to competitive games. MWO is not a competitive game by any stretch of the imagination. On the first page itself it even says the only winning move is not to play (when you encounter a poorly designed game).

Picture chess, except that each player can choose whatever pieces he wants to start with. So everyone brings nothing but queens because it is the most powerful piece. Thats what meta builds in MWO are like.

I still find that much of the stuff he wrote about is badly flawed though. For example he talks about exploiting bugs to win...and that its perfectly ok. Then he goes on to define an arbitrary limit to it, beyond which the bug makes competition "unfair". The problem is thats all defined by the players involved (or the tournament organizers). The irony is that if he showed up to a street fighter tournament and started using a bug which he thinks is OK but actually is banned, he would call the tournament organizers scrubs and go off to play his own version of street fighter with his own made up rules. Meanwhile everyone else would be playing the version they are fine with. Whos the scrub now?

When someone exploits a bug and its considered "ok", thats only because a lot of people who exploit the same bug agree and support him so that they, as a whole, can continue exploiting the bug. If they didnt have that level of support, they wouldnt be taken seriously at all. While Sirlin talks a lot about how playing to win at all costs can make competition deeper or whatever, the truth is, most competitive players do it simply to win, nothing more than that. They could care less if a bug allows the game to be "deeper", they just want to use it to maximize their chances of winning.

I'm reminded of when i used to play the Natural Selection mod for Half Life one...there was a bug that gave the jetpack infinite fuel if you had a high FPS. Some players on my local servers exploited the hell out of it...rendering them near unkillable unless you had a particular counter available. Their excuse was largely : Well the devs didnt tell ME it was a bug, so i wont believe it is one till they contact me about it. They didnt care that the bug was only possible if you were playing with high system specs to generate the high FPS needed to activate the bug, or its impact on game balance, or the fact that people were using it to drag matches on for 30+ minutes. It didnt bother them at all that the Jetpack was clearly designed not to have infinite fuel because most players had normal specs and couldnt get the bug to work for them. And their defence was basically to get the dev team to contact them personally like they are some super VIP to confirm that this is a bug. Which of course was never going to happen (the devs have better things to do) and they knew it.

Sirlin's playing to win wasn't written then (as far as i know anyway) but if it had been...and if those players had known about it, they would probably have declared themselves to be the "pros" and everyone else to be scrubs. Most players would have regarded them as nothing more than exploiters however. Who was playing the "game with made up rules"? Well if majority wins...

His point seems to be that you should improve yourself no matter how OP a tactic or strategy is, because someone else will inevitably devise a counter and force you to rethink your strategy and improve your game. That by itself is OK, but IMHO the moment you start exploiting bugs, you are doing things the game was never intended for and creating your OWN home made version of the game with your own made up rules that say "this bug is ok because i use it". It doesnt matter if its allowed in a tournament, its still a bug, and you are still playing a custom version of the game.

The other problem with it is that he thinks if something is so OP that its unbeatable, then the game sucks and you should just forget about it. Fair enough, but there are still plenty of people who would enjoy the game if played normally, without the OP strategy or whatever.

Poker is a fun game...if you draw random cards instead of starting every round with double aces. Its still perfectly possible to beat someone who starts with double aces without doing the same, but at that point the game becomes a joke. We could say the game sucks and to forget about it...or we could play it normally, with random draws. Oh sure, we would be scrubs playing our own scrub game...but the funny thing is, our version is going to be played by most people, while your "pros only" version got discarded as a joke game. And we are not going to care about you pointing fingers at us and calling us scrubs, because we are having fun with our own game.

The survivors examples he uses though, is spot on. Its a tournament. Theres prize money involved. At that point, pretty much anything goes.

But the key point is, it was a tournament. There was prize money involved. These two things are not the same for casual play. In the MWO context you could play to win every time. But what purpose would it serve? You are not winning a tournament. You are not winning any prizes. You are not even improving your game (unless someone wants to claim that sync dropping in meta builds makes you a skilled player).

You want to win a PGI tournament with prizes by bringing 12 people in meta builds? Okay sure, knock yourself out. You at least can say that you wanted the prize or the fame. When you do the same thing in the public queue, you are basically doing it to pad your ego, grind c-bills/xp or to get enjoyment out of griefing other players. You are not improving your game by sync dropping in 4 man teams of meta builds against randoms, no more than a martial artist improves his skills by beating up some kids with a couple of his buddies.

We know for a fact that there are things you can do in MWO that render the game a joke. Sirlin would simply not play it upon discovering it. The griefers however, have decided to keep playing it and to keep abusing everything they can. At that point, they can't claim they are playing to win anymore. They are just playing to grief. The rest of us have decided to play the game normally...which results in a rather fun game. While it may be our own home made rules, we are still having fun at nobody else's expense. And we would rather not play it with you (the griefers).

I think what many people fail to consider is the degree of unfairness here. Theres a big difference between using something effective, and using something so ridiculously OP that the only way to counter is to use something equally OP. It is not correct to say that meta builds are just the most effective builds or a OP strategy is just the most effective.

Simple example : Imagine if small lasers were basically gatling lasers with 1000 meters range and could one shot an Atlas and never generated heat. Now compare to all the other weapons with fairly normal stats. The difference is huge. You cant just say that its the most effective weapon so theres nothing wrong with using it. Simply by using it, you have effectively ruined the match by turning it into a joke. You had the choice to not use it and play a normal match, but you chose to use it anyway. You even had the choice to not play the game at all. You dont drop with uber gatling lasers and then say "oh im just playing to win! im a pro and you guys are all scrubs!". You are not a pro, you are a griefer. The real pros look at it and say "this is stupid, im not touching the game till they fix this" or they play it for fun without the uber laser.

Whats particularly special about MWO is that much of the game is determined before the match even starts, with mech loadouts. So its quite easy to end up facing something OP but having no counter available because you didnt build for it specifically. And thats not your fault. You could build to counter something OP, but would get wrecked by something else equally OP that you cant counter with your current loadout. Unlike most games, you cant change strategies or equipment or anything else ingame so you are stuck with what you have. Unless you are dropping in a 12 man competitive match, you cant specifically build to counter everything. OP strategies and builds are therefore far more problematic....because you cant come up with a counter on the fly.

Take for example the closed beta Dragon. Back when knockdown was in, the Dragon was bugged and could easily knockdown an Atlas. Worse, you could easily chain stun another mech so that they never got the chance to shoot back and would slowly get shot to pieces. This made the game a joke when abused, since it became a contest to see who could have the most dragons knock over the most enemy mechs. One could argue it was just a strategy...but its a strategy that you cant counter without taking very specific loadouts (for example another dragon or a mech that can outrun a dragon forever). At that point it becomes unfair. It has absolutely nothing to do with playing to win or improving your game. People were just using it to grief other players and to maximize their chances of winning. If it was a tournament, it wouldnt have been THAT bad...because the other team would know about it and could choose to build against it. But against randoms? They wont stand a chance. And even then the game would have been reduced to a complete joke of dragons ramming into each other.

Which brings me to my next point : Anything outside of a 12 man private match is obviously not a competitive environment. We are talking about random people with random mechs, equipment, funds and skill. I dont think i need to go in detail here since its pretty self explanatory. The public queue is a casual environment. In a casual environment, you are expected to adhere to certain standards of behaviour as determined by the community (in addition to the COC). You do not dress up as {Godwin's Law} at the New Year's Eve festival and go around telling everyone how much you love to persecute jews then spend the night arguing that you didn't break any laws and that they should just "deal with it". Griefers dont seem to get this, or dont care at all. I think theres a mental condition for this...Autism? Aspergers?

This wouldnt be a problem at all if you could choose whom to play with, but you cant. That is a competitive feature, and it does not work in casual environments. Griefers exploit this...because they know that if if not for this feature, they would be stuck with each other and newbies who didnt know better.

Take a real life example. Mr Griefer attempts to go to his local game store and play battletech, the board game. He brings the most OP stuff he can and plays in the most OP way possible. Hes a model play2win player...he would probably do well in a no holds barred tournament. But its a casual environment, people there dont want to play this way, and hes soon left with nobody to play with, and blaming the scrubs while reassuring himself of how "pro" he is. He failed to adhere to standards of expected behaviour and paid the price for it. Sadly, we cant do that here in MWO. So we have people rigging matches (literally rigging them) by sync dropping in meta builds. Their opponents simply cannot compete, because the only solution is to sync drop in meta builds as well. End result is pointless curb stomping, players quitting MWO and griefers padding their win ratios.

And because of that, we have a small group of players griefing others by ruining every match they go into. And they literally are the cancer killing MWO.

[Turist0AT]

I agree with you OP. My 12 man experience went something like this. Careful careful, there they are! behind the rigde...pop hit pop hit pop hit pop pop pop pop.. and were dead.

It scarred me and left 0 respect for 12 man.

[YueFei]

The onus is not on the players to tip-toe around broken game mechanics. It's the job of the game's designers to fix stuff like that. If they don't fix it to your liking, you complain about it until they fix it, or you just stop playing. It's that simple.

There's plenty of mechanics in the game that I don't like, and I complain about them, but I get a decent amount of enjoyment out of the game, and we'll see how it goes. I certainly don't complain about the *players* who are utilizing those mechanics, though. They have every right to do so. If a game mechanic is problematic, complaints (and nerd rage, I guess) needs to be directed at the game's developers, not at other players. That's just misguided anger.

In fact, the best way to get broken mechanics fixed is probably to abuse it to crush the game's developers on the occasions where those guys feel like trying to play their own game.

The key to a balanced game is to make sure that every tactic/strategy/build always has a counter to it *besides* simply utilizing the same tactic/build/strategy and just trying to execute it better.

[Jun Watarase]

Quote

The onus is not on the players to tip-toe around broken game mechanics. It's the job of the game's designers to fix stuff like that. If they don't fix it to your liking, you complain about it until they fix it, or you just stop playing. It's that simple.

Thats just attempting to re-direct blame from yourself. In reality it takes two to tango. Theres also the very real issue that it takes time to fix stuff.

Lets say there was something i could do to instant kill the entire enemy team. Be it a bug or a overpowered weapon. I could use it till it gets fixed...or i could choose not to. The moment i chose, of my own free will to use it, i am liable for it. I do not get to claim that i am innocent and its not my fault the issue existed in the first place.

If your door lock was faulty and i took advantage of that to go into your house and steal everything you have...are you going to blame me or whatever caused your lock to be faulty? I can tell you that the law would definately hold me liable.

[Ryoken]

xhrit, on 09 May 2014 - 10:07 PM, said:

You play to win, or you play to lose.

http://www.sirlin.ne...win-part-1.html

This is why games should be balanced with the competitive players in mind.

They know how which mech and weapon is put to best use. While the scrub/pug has no idea what he is doing even when piloting a fully skilled meta build.

This is why the scrub/pug can get a shock when he experiences how mechs can be used by skilled coordinated players.

Because PGI made the big mistake to cater the pugs/scrubs and balanced the game mechanics around those players that did not fully understand the game or do not even have a glimpse about it, they made some mech/weapon-combinations so powerfull that it just takes seconds of coordinated gameplay to take one down.

Edited by Ryoken, 10 May 2014 - 01:48 AM.

[_____]

This game needs an anti-poptart map in the rotation. Think MW4 factory where the walls are higher than any mech can jump and flat otherwise. If the idea is to have balance, PGI obviously tried and failed to balance the AC/PPC/JJ combo.

Edited by BlackhawkSC, 10 May 2014 - 01:49 AM.

[Jun Watarase]

Ryoken, on 10 May 2014 - 01:42 AM, said:

This is why games should be balanced with the competitive players in mind.

They know how which mech and weapon is put to best use. While the scrub/pug has no idea what he is doing even when piloting a fully skilled meta build.

This is why the scrub/pug can get a shock when he experiences how mechs can be used by skilled coordinated players.

Because PGI made the big mistake to cater the pugs/scrubs and balanced the game mechanics around those players that did not fully understand the game or do not even have a glimpse about it, they made some mech/weapon-combinations so powerfull that it just takes seconds of coordinated gameplay to take one down.

What game mechanics do you think should have been put in that would have prevented the current meta builds?

[Ursh]

Ryoken, on 10 May 2014 - 01:42 AM, said:

This is why games should be balanced with the competitive players in mind.

They know how which mech and weapon is put to best use. While the scrub/pug has no idea what he is doing even when piloting a fully skilled meta build.

This is why the scrub/pug can get a shock when he experiences how mechs can be used by skilled coordinated players.

Because PGI made the big mistake to cater the pugs/scrubs and balanced the game mechanics around those players that did not fully understand the game or do not even have a glimpse about it, they made some mech/weapon-combinations so powerfull that it just takes seconds of coordinated gameplay to take one down.

How is it balanced for scrubs, when the insta-convergence high alpha pinpoint build is the meta? It seems balanced for the pros.

[Elkfire]

This is all I hear from you guys who are going on about how "scrubs" are ruining your game and such.

Edited by Elkfire, 10 May 2014 - 02:34 AM.

[Eglar]

Jun Watarase, on 10 May 2014 - 12:45 AM, said:

Sirlin's playing to win only applies to competitive games. MWO is not a competitive game by any stretch of the imagination. On the first page itself it even says the only winning move is not to play (when you encounter a poorly designed game).

I feel that this is how you want to see MWO. But how is a online multiplayer game where players kill each other not Competitive? The essence of a competitive game is to have an activity both sides want to be best at and you are done.

Jun Watarase, on 10 May 2014 - 12:45 AM, said:

Picture chess, except that each player can choose whatever pieces he wants to start with. So everyone brings nothing but queens because it is the most powerful piece. Thats what meta builds in MWO are like.

If you ever lost to an experienced sniper 4-man lance and then just dropped with your own brawler 4-men lance to run down those snipers next match? You'd know what Sirlin means by saying "As they play the game more, they'll be forced to find counters to those tactics. The vast majority of tactics that at first appear unbeatable end up having counters, though they are often quite esoteric and difficult to discover."

Jun Watarase, on 10 May 2014 - 12:45 AM, said:

For example he talks about exploiting bugs to win...and that its perfectly ok

What Sirlin defines as a gray-zone is in my opinion correct. Whether the game-makers (not me, not you but PGI) defines it as an exploit or working-as-intended is part of their job. Let me just throw two widely known sample ingame-mechanics at you:

- Ability to see and identify enemy mechs at the beginning of a match - if your PC allows you to enter the match fast enough.

- Ability to slowly climb up any Hill with just one jump-jet.

Those are game mechanics that most players would find "unnatural" but are however part of the game and have not been classified as bugs by PGI.

Jun Watarase, on 10 May 2014 - 12:45 AM, said:

Which brings me to my next point : Anything outside of a 12 man private match is obviously not a competitive environment. We are talking about random people with random mechs, equipment, funds and skill. I dont think i need to go in detail here since its pretty self explanatory. The public queue is a casual environment. In a casual environment, you are expected to adhere to certain standards of behaviour as determined by the community (in addition to the COC). You do not dress up as {Godwin's Law} at the New Year's Eve festival and go around telling everyone how much you love to persecute jews then spend the night arguing that you didn't break any laws and that they should just "deal with it". Griefers dont seem to get this, or dont care at all. I think theres a mental condition for this...Autism? Aspergers?

Which makes you miss the point of "Playing to win" mentality. People don't grief, if they want to bring maximum contribution towards to game-goal and win. If you want to pick your opponents and set your own rules instead facing all the facettes of gameplay, there's private matches.