I hope PGI uses this event as an opportunity to sift an interesting, relatively tightly controlled data set.
I consider myself realistically only average at best in my unit, so even after narrowing the MWO population to just the Urbie owners who had spare time this weekend, I'm
completely prepared to believe there are easily 19/13/35 mechwarriors better than me. However, considering the restriction to a 30-ton platform with limited engine and many fewer than 8 energy hardpoints (coughcougheffingeffstartercoughcough), and considering how well a number of my matches seemed to go, the very top scores are pretty surprising*. PGI might put a little time into figuring out how exactly they did that; can they determine what contributions maps, patterns of movement, loadouts, variations in aiming precision, etc., made to the results? They could learn something useful regarding exploits, reward structure, or map and/or mech balancing (unsurprising that the variants scored in proportion to their energy hardpoints; coughcougheffingeffstartercoughcough).
* - Given that 10 survived wins, each with 12 assists and 900 damage, still only nets you a total score of 2000, a score of 3000 is kinda mind-boggling. I suppose it must be riding on solo kills, which begs the question: should the score formula really put such a high value on riding particular enemy mechs down for single-handed kills? Isn't that sorta the opposite of the kind of fire coordination that helps your team win?
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usually high dps builds use an XL-engine so I personally would give more points for surviving the match to help out the standard engine lovers and make dps builds' life little harder.
Yeah, even if half your matches lead to pathetic scores after quickly losing a side torso, only the best ones get counted. So you need to maximize your peak scores to stay on top of the leaderboard, and that means XL is pretty much a must.
Rather than more rewards for survival, though, I'd like to see rewards for damage taken, and for total time spent targeted by or maybe just in sight of the enemy... because survival may be less valuable to your team than risking death by soaking damage or occupying the enemy's attention.