Alistair Winter, on 04 January 2016 - 01:59 PM, said:
All guided missiles are in a special state in MWO where the players demand that they should be chronically underpowered. The second LRMs become a viable option, the forums are flooded with tears! People are saying "Guided missiles require no skill". And as someone who plays LRM boats quite regularly (I have Griffins, Catapults and Awesomes with absurd amounts of LRMs) I have to say:
They're right.
Well, it's a bit of an exaggeration. It requires some skill in terms of awareness and positioning. But you basically remove aiming skills from the equation. Anyone with a healthy body can get missile locks in MWO. And if you pay for Target Decay and Artemis, it's just absurdly easy.
Untill PGI actually makes it somewhat challenging to get missile locks, the cycle will continue. We will have periods of useless missiles and we will have periods of copious QQ on the forum. LRMs and Streaks will never be considered a respectable, admirable way of winning the game, untill PGI makes it harder to get missile locks. So you actually have to have aiming skills.
I'm not ashamed to say, I'll often get 1000 dmg matches in my AWS-8R, setting up in a good position and lazily lobbing LRMs while I'm eating a taco with my left hand. It's really not that hard, if you just know where to set up shop.
TL;DR - The QQ rivers will flow untill PGI makes it harder to get missile locks and uses aiming skills to balance LRMs and Streaks, instead of only positioning. Guided missiles are the only weapons in MWO where aiming skills are irrelevant, and that's why people are so hostile towards LRM boats.
Please square your statement with the fact that "competitive" teams do not use LRMs. Otherwise, it should be "meta", and meta get to be abused the higher your tier is.