107 replies to this topic

[Kilo 40]

ECM is a crutch for bad players

[Kilo 40]

ztac, on 05 July 2014 - 04:24 AM, said:

cover only works on some maps and only in certain parts of those maps.

100% wrong. cover works on every single map. period.

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a lot of people that actually want to play for fun will generally not carry LRM but more direct fire weapons as actually seeing and shooting targets is a lot more fun (for most people) than never seeing their target and just sending salvo after salvo of missiles at them.

wait....are you seriously suggesting that the players using ac/ppc weapons are running them..."for fun"? are you high?

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I have explained in a lot of other LRM related posts why the counters are not as good as people think they are, and you can allways rely on the MM to give one team LRM heaven and the other team LRM hell !

I stopped using AMS when I got my clan mechs. I also haven't bought the radar deprivation module.

so no counters to LRMs other than cover and paying attention. want to guess how often I die to LRMs? VERY rarely. and when I do, it's 100% my fault.

once you learn that it's your fault when you get killed and not some "op" weapon, and you'll become a much better player.

[El Bandito]

ztac, on 05 July 2014 - 04:24 AM, said:

Love all the flaming from the pro LRM crowd. Guess you didn't even read what the OP said and just went off on one from the title! The counters only work if you have them, cover only works on some maps and only in certain parts of those maps. This is part of the problem , also you say his team had LRM capable mechs, but a lot of people that actually want to play for fun will generally not carry LRM but more direct fire weapons as actually seeing and shooting targets is a lot more fun (for most people) than never seeing their target and just sending salvo after salvo of missiles at them. I have explained in a lot of other LRM related posts why the counters are not as good as people think they are, and you can allways rely on the MM to give one team LRM heaven and the other team LRM hell !

What you are sprouting is just an excuse. Get better. MM is always borked, don't blame that on the LRMs.

[Arcturious]

Yes we had a 5D, but as far as I know he wasn't running ECM. Spectated him near the end and no ECM so either it got shot off or he had it on counter instead of disrupt.

Also read what I'm saying. Heim and the like could get the easy damage in because in this situation, the team is unable to return fire due to having to be forced to find cover. Or having to not face the enemy because as everyone knows, LRM core you out with NARC.

So yes, with over half your team facing away running for cover and not able to return fire, it doesn't matter what the enemy does as the win is already secured.

[Lootee]

Wow Heimdelight carried team 1 in a Lurm CTF-3D.

It has lots of missile slots right?

I'm guessing a couple Narcs landed, a few Lurms flew over the ridge and hit a couple mechs. Then Heimdelight and his 4 man premade wrecked your whole team with PP direct fire weapons. Amirite?

He did a turdload of damage. It's more likely he worked over your team and the LRMs stole the last hit. Heimdelight plays rather aggressively. If your whole team was hunkered down in a group like you claimed, you'd have butchered him easily.

Premades with high Elo players score high damage easily whether there are LRMs on the field or not. They also have a tendency to run off with their 4 man lance and be the head of the spear, at least in the PUG queue. I noticed the 'lords' did this a lot too. If your team has more seasoned players than newbies in champion mechs and you can take out the high Elo maverick lance your team will most likely win. I've seen it from both sides, high Elo comp meta players go out front by themselves, PUGs in the other 2 lances don't back them up. The other team isn't as bad as they hoped, they get slaughtered and then spend the rest of the match berating their team.

If those pics prove anything it's that the matchmaker still sucks.

Edited by PanchoTortilla, 05 July 2014 - 07:42 AM.

[Lykaon]

El Bandito, on 05 July 2014 - 03:11 AM, said:

What needs fixing is not the NARC, neither LRMs. It is ECM, first and foremost. Then we can talk about the previous two.

In all honesty LRMs are so deeply entrenched with information warfare mechanics the entire interrelated system needs a balance pass.

This all when sour when ECM was introduced before the purpose for ECM was even half baked.

ECM based on the source materiel (table top battletech lvl one rules) countered the effects of BAP,NARC,Artemis and C3 networks.

And what did we have when ECM was added in?

BAP that was rarely used if used at all because it was under developed and essentially lacking in any active probing ability.

NARC that was performing so sub par nearly no one used it because it was a waste of space/tonnage.Almost never used with premades and next to exstinct in solo use.

TAG was still in it's basic iteration and had yet to have it's range exstended to the current 750m.Still TAG was occationaly used by premades and almost never used by solos.

Artemis was released at the same time as ECM and was also yet to see any real in use development attention.

C3 networks? we don't have them in MWo.Some would argue that our sensor data sharing equates to a c3 but,not really.Our sensor sharing ability is pretty much exactally what you would get from a double blind table top game if you have ever played that game style on table top.

Command consoles? paper weights for two + years no function beyond crit and tonnage soakers at ECM release time.

So ECM was given an overly generous set of features in addition to what it was suppose to do to compensate for not really being needed to do what ECM was meant to do, counter support electronics.

Some time passes and ECM is a hot topic so additional counters to ECM are put in place,and those counters are comicly the very same items ECM was suppose to be a counter for.

So now we have LRMs that are either OFF or really ON with NARC countering ECM we have the counter to LRMs being simultaniously countered by NARC and LRMs enhanced by NARC.

This system is based on extremes of weapon performance. totally useless or super powered.

This is the failing of using a system of hard counters instead of a system of soft counters and enhancments. Serioulsy whoever thought that the counter to the LRM counter should also be an LRM enhancment was not thinking of the overall effects.

[Spheroid]

Nothing about that screenshot leads me to believe it was unavoidable loss. Who were their missile boats exactly? I see no Stalker-H, no Battemaster-S or Catapaults.

Bring AMS next time.

[El Bandito]

Spheroid, on 05 July 2014 - 08:25 AM, said:

Bring AMS next time.

Quote for ******* truth. Even if you are a good player, always bring AMS to a pug match. Your teammates' armor will thank you for that.

The other side brought at least 4 tons worth of equipment + LRMs to make it work. Why can't you spare a little tonnage to help out your team?

Edited by El Bandito, 05 July 2014 - 08:58 AM.

[Sean von Steinike]

ztac, on 05 July 2014 - 04:24 AM, said:

The counters only work if you have them, cover only works on some maps and only in certain parts of those maps. This is part of the problem , also you say his team had LRM capable mechs, but a lot of people that actually want to play for fun will generally not carry LRM but more direct fire weapons as actually seeing and shooting targets is a lot more fun (for most people) than never seeing their target and just sending salvo after salvo of missiles at them.

People don't carry LRMs because they suck.

[Arcturious]

Spheroid, on 05 July 2014 - 08:25 AM, said:

Nothing about that screenshot leads me to believe it was unavoidable loss. Who were their missile boats exactly? I see no Stalker-H, no Battemaster-S or Catapaults.

Bring AMS next time.

I believe the two mechs with 3 kills each - the D-DC and the Timberwolf were running LRM's.

It also shows how the LRM's must have been on the team the whole time to get all the kill steals. A constant stream of LRM's will get a kill even if people like Heim did all the softening up.

Further proving the point that it was the constant stream of LRM's that were the issue, as obviously the people under attack couldn't do anything about the situation and were left to just run and die. Big damage numbers are meaningless, the only attack that matters is the one that actual kills the enemy.

Edited by Arcturious, 06 July 2014 - 01:28 PM.

[Tyman4]

OP try running a mech that carries narc, Raven Kitfox etc. It is actually pretty difficult to get it to work. The narc gets shot down by AMS. It's a dumbfire slow moving rocket (think slow SRM). Short range, ~500m.

Then even if you do narc someone
1) you have to have a teammate with missles (more likely with clan mechs because of lighter lrms)
2) the narced mech must not hide in friendly ECM (that blocks the narc signal)

Honestly, it takes quite a series of good/bad coincidences for Narc to really work. Alot of drops I've done with narc, I can only use it to ID enemy mechs for a while because no one on the team has any missles. If it does work the enemy is in trouble High Risk High Reward equipment Narc.

Tyman

[Mizore]

Arcturious, on 06 July 2014 - 01:28 PM, said:

Big damage numbers are meaningless, the only attack that matters is the one that actual kills the enemy.

Yeah right, you don't need all the tons of damage your team does to open up the enemy mechs... the only thing that is important are the last few points of damage!
So even a Locust-1V could kill a whole team of heavies and assaults with MG dakka dakka (MGs are totally op!!! Nerf plx!!!), because the enemy mechs don't have any armor... oh wait!

Honestly, you're talking big big bullshit!
~1000 pinpoint damage by a poptart is totally ok, but ~800 and ~400 LRM damage that is spread all over the mech is extremely overpowered?
Not to mention that the mech that propably NARCed all the targets did only a little more than ~100 damage...

Try to play a scout mech with NARC by yourself and then I'm sure we'd never ever hear a complaint from you again that NARC + LRM is op!
Maybe in 1/10 games, NARC is really usefull... yes, that's sooooooo op!!!

Edited by Mizore, 06 July 2014 - 02:12 PM.

[TheAtomiser]

If you're noticing it's a trend then start piloting ECM and duel AMS mechs more often. /thread.

[Wolfways]

Mizore, on 06 July 2014 - 02:10 PM, said:

Try to play a scout mech with NARC by yourself and then I'm sure we'd never ever hear a complaint from you again that NARC + LRM is op!
Maybe in 1/10 games, NARC is really usefull... yes, that's sooooooo op!!!

Last time i played my RVN-3L it took 8 shots (and lots of incoming damage) to get a NARC past the enemy AMS...and then i found out there was 1 mech on my team with LRM's

[Karamarka]

Kilo 40, on 05 July 2014 - 04:31 AM, said:

ECM is a crutch for bad players

If your team doesn't have it your at a loss no matter how good you are - remember half your teammates are new players or whatever so they need it even if you dont. I've never seen 1 player do more than 1500dmg so no matter how pro you are you need your team.

[Edustaja]

Getting narc'd and lurmed to death is once in a hundred games occurrence so I hardly think it needs a nerf.

[Armament]

Does not need a nerf, in fact, LRMs need a buff. They're pretty crappy. If you get killed by LRMs that often, learn to use cover. Even when NARC'd it isn't hard at all to find cover. Twist your mech to spread the damage as well while moving.

[Yokaiko]

Arcturious, on 05 July 2014 - 01:54 AM, said:

Games like this are becoming far too common. Not only was one team without ECM. The other team had a NARC, and LRM boats.

It was GG within the first minute, as soon as I saw the NARC and some LRM I knew it didn't matter. By landing on caustic we were pretty much dead before it even started.

Sure, I got NARC'ed. I even knew I got NARC'ed, I retreated into D2. It is the largest drop off on the map within range. The wall next to me is literally 3-4 times my height.

I was still getting LRM coming in, right over the ridge from C3 and killed me. Even going into cover, with a NARC is certain death. You have to be underneath something, or have a SIGNIFICANT height advantage over the LRM boat and cover that extends to 4-5 times your own mechs height. Anything less than a tunnel or bridge etc just flat out doesn't cut it.

God forbid you are in a slower mech. I wouldn't have even made it to cover to extend my life for that few seconds I got. I would have just died outright. Once a NARC hits you and you see the LRM come in, you may as well just quit out of the match and move on rather than waste your time.

Nearly every match for the last few weeks has been exactly the same. One team gets NARC and LRM boats, instant win. I don't believe I've ever been on a team that has won when the other team has even just 2 LRM boats plus NARC. It is seriously creating a toxic environment in the game right now. As evidenced by the number of threads about it on the forum. Surely PGI sees it and surely they must be going to make some changes. I hope so anyway.

On Wednesday night, I broke down and ran an LRM boat and won the only match I launched in it, myself alone got 4 kills and hundreds of damage because I was on a team that had NARC. I haven't been able to make myself run LRM's again before or since as it is such a clearly broken system it feels too much like abuse right now.

I just can't believe nothing has been hot fixed for this yet. They knew this, it's not a new issue. NARC used to have checks and balances built in to stop this, after damage it would fall off and it wouldn't go through ECM. Yes at the time it needed a buff to try and get people to run it. However just like everything else in the game it doesn't exist in isolation. The game has changed so NARC or LRM need to change again to adjust.

Right now, it does everything in one. Improves target speed, improves clustering, probably even unintentionally improves trajectory thanks to poor coding, goes through ECM and doesn't fall off.

It's yet another example of PGI making multiple changes to a system instead of trying just one at a time. Perhaps increase the damage before it falls off. Perhaps make it only go through ECM for a few seconds before it burns out thanks to needing to boost the signal. Perhaps reduce the clustering and target bonuses if it lasts so long.

Whatever happens, it needs to happen soon as nearly every game is ending with the team that has the luck to land with NARC and LRM is almost guaranteed to win. It's that simple. I challenge PGI to post the stats to prove otherwise. The team with more LRM and more NARC than the other I'm betting will statistically win more often than the team with less LRM and NARC's. No matter the skill or Elo ranges on either side.

I can't believe I'm statistically that unlucky to be seeing this in every second match. On my stream, I have had people comment to me the same thing. I know it's not just me. I see far too many matches that have outcomes determined by these broken systems for it to be otherwise.

Well over 10k matches played since closed beta. I know I'm not the best player in the game, but I'm decent. It doesn't take the best player in the game to know a broken system when they see one.

If everyone would quit herding to the side of the ******* crater and waiting to die you wouldn't have these issues.

[Armament]

Yokaiko, on 06 July 2014 - 03:38 PM, said:

If everyone would quit herding to the side of the ******* crater and waiting to die you wouldn't have these issues.

Agreed, they'll just sit and slowly die to LRMs instead of taking action. Which is why I don't PUG anymore. c:

[Devlin Pierce]

The match maker should try and make sure each team has ECM.