Posted 28 March 2015 - 09:59 AM
You guys can't have it both ways. When things are going well for clans (and they have been for almost the entirety of CW), you told us things like: "clan players are just naturally more skilled." So, when I have tried to bring up mech composition in unrestricted league play, I get shot down because "that's not community warfare!" Now that you're struggling it's a mech balance issue?
The biggest issues with community warfare are:
1. Player population disparity
2. Exploits and abuses in the game modes.
When you have a player population difference it's so much harder to fight off another faction even if you win 90% of your matches. You can mitigate it to an extent with abusive rushes, and excellent faction-organization, but only so much. There is also the very real problem of the game type being dictated by the team with more people in the queue. I don't really know how to solve this.
The other problem is the game design themselves.
Generator rushing for example should not be nearly as easy as it is. It's insanely unfair for the defenders. Think about it, you have to blind-counter the enemy's wave 1 because you have no idea if they are going to light-rush you or bring their big guns. If you guess wrong, you have a terrible wave 1 and potentially straight up lose. Even if you bring the right mechs, you have an almost certain chance of losing all your generators. I dunno, maybe it's easier with clan streak 6 storm crows, but it's pretty hard for IS and all but impossible for a non-12 man.
Compounding the problem is terrain design. I need to make a detailed post about all that is wrong with the terrain, but bases are weirdly designed so that they often favor the attackers. It makes no sense to have the only entrance to a generator conveniently facing your attacking army. Or to have cliffs/terrain that block defenders IN instead of blocking attackers OUT.
Then we have spawn camping. If you're a game designer and you're trying to create good back and forth action, the last thing you want is to allow teams to camp respawns. That just leads to one sided stomps. Is the team that lets themselves get spawn camped going to lose anyway? Usually, but not always and you just compound the slaughter by taking out all fresh reinforcements. Lots of ways to improve this. Better respawn selection, temporary shield to give people time to find cover, or a more aggressive drop ship that sticks around long enough for you to find cover.
These are the problems as I see it with community warfare. IS is not OP, unless you're going to tell me that nearly every single competitive team and player in this game is a clueless noob. Because with the primary exception of lights, they all bring clan mechs to competitive games.
As far as player population differences, I think you should be a little patient. A lot of contracts are ending today and tomorrow so your fortunes could very well be reversed by the end of the weekend. I know ours is coming up Sunday and we'll be fighting for Clans for the next two weeks.
One final point I would like to point out that despite the complaining, Wolf almost took a planet off Kurita. It came down to one counter-attack win at the very last moment.