xXBagheeraXx, on 24 September 2015 - 09:36 AM, said:
Why is it team after team sees an enemy push and runs AWAY from it? What are your thoughts? What do you hope to accomplish by giving your enemy your rear armor? Especially when you have a very advantageous position to defend from like a nice hill top bristling with Laser barfing mechs?
He'res what happens kids. The mechs that are too slow (usually your big gun assaults) cannot keep up with you when half the team decides "SCREW YOU GUYS, I'm GOING HOME!!!"
They get left behind and get swarmed....
you lose your primary damage soakers and damage dealers...good start...
then the guys who didn't notice you running leaving trails of coolant behind you die next. Thats usually guys like me, guys who are focusing on doing damage to the mechs moving up into position, not noticing you all are fleeing...
By the time you realize whats going on, you are down 4-5 mechs, including your bigger damage dealers, or mechs too slow to keep up. Once a deathball like that gets momentum going it can and will chase you down and wipe the floor with whats left of your team. Doubly so if there are lots of dakka mixed in with LRMS and ECM...by then its too late to to try to form a firing line, you've lost your big mechs and your slower fire support/lrm mechs and are left to face a wall of pissed off angry and more importantly FRESH assault mechs with your lightweight mediums and heavies that where fast enough to flee originally...Good luck with that.
TL;DR
Stand and fight...the hell are you in a mech for if you arent going to face the enemy?
I think what you're talking about has been going on before under the old Elo system. I've been seeing this for ages: some games the team is gun shy, especially if the other team is aggressive, and has a flanking element that harries the cowering blob's rear. When that happens the game is over. The timid team gets confused and disorganized, starts getting picked off and yelling at each other and once the score is 4+ for the Red Doritos, the game ending push comes.
I think what's changed is new blood has moved into different tiers and the old paradigm is changing because of that.
Case in point: I believe PGI took out Elo and let the MM pair up whoever was around and then collected data until the Sept. 22nd patch when they put PSR (which is a modified Elo system) back in. During that time, I was suddenly seeing really good players in my games that I hadn't seen since before Elo. Game play went bonkers, I'd see packs of highly skilled lights and mediums glom together and tear everything up. I watched obvious noobs doing noob things and blowing holes in friendly back armor. I watched those same noobs collapse firing lines into columns, or otherwise close off an active fire-lane instead of repositioning so both could shoot the same enemy. I watched so many other stupid instances of FF and breathtakingly lacking battlefield awareness.
On top of all that, with the Elo removed, the MM was clumping goods with goods and bads with bads. And I could tell some players, who probably thought they were really clever, sync dropping the public queue. Making the odds of being on a lopsided team even worse. It became rare to see an even game, 75% of my matches I tracked ended in 12-3 or worse ROFTLstomps.
It was horrible, so bad, I skipped the Territorial Challenge. I just couldn't find the fun trying to get 300 or 400 match points when I knew I'd be on a team full if idiots.
Then the Sept. 22 patch hit, PSR opened its doors, and the past two nights of games, at least for me, went back to the Elo era. I had many more even score games, still streaky, but that's the norm for my average play, but it was familiar.
But not quite the same, I see many new names I've not seen before and FF is still a serious problem in my Tier (Tier 3).
But teams being timid and/or confused... that's been a thing for a long while.
3
