5 replies to this topic

[Kvaneal]

Have not logged in for the last year. Enjoyed quite a few matches the last couple of days. Sharing a few thoughts and have a couple questions.

CW: are groups finding reasonable drop times? By reasonable I would ask for <10 min. I have been in 4 CW matches and have sat in queue from between 15-25 minutes each time. And by groups I mean those pilots meeting on faction TS channels. Clearly solo CW is not going to work for me.

Stock Mech Mondays: that was once a thing set up by some players. Is that still happening?

New mechs: Only assault I have really ever enjoyed is the Stalker, are any of the newer assault mechs must haves?

Observations -
CW format seemed ill conceived, still seems that way. 4x too many open planets IMO.
Mechbay UI functions better than it ever did a year or two ago.
Some of the maps got amazing updates. Really surprised to see no new maps.
Seeing FAR fewer discos and fails to load than before. Now I see one every other drop. A year ago it was common to have a couple on each team.
5,000,200 Cbills just for doing the tutorial! (was there more and I missed it?) Tutorial was also useful, something I have not encountered with other similar games.
Ping times and lost packet situation greatly improved. Bolded because the biggest reason I quit was because of this.
Queue times are about the same, but I found the queue numbers interesting. The %s don't seem to make much difference. I dropped a few heavies with less than 10 second wait, while several others were 2+ minute wait. The interesting part were the %s themselves. It was <10 lights, @10 meds, 40% heavies, 40% assaults. Now the only one near 40% was heavies. Maybe this reflects better class balance?
Finally: this great new mini game! Am I the only one that tries to see how high they can get their map selection screen multipliers? On Tuesday the best I managed to get was x7. Yesterday I got to x11. Fun stuff.

Cheers.

Edited by Kvaneal, 06 January 2016 - 07:43 AM.

[RockmachinE]

The game has improved a lot over the course of last year. I'm glad you're positively surprised with this. I dig the voting mini game a lot. Some people complain, but honestly the map selection seems more random now then it ever was.

There's several things you can do in the minigame. Also be a little careful, as usual per this community a good portion of the people think "gaming" the voting system is bad, they QQ about it a lot.

Some people are going to hate this, but whatever. If you chose not to have fun with something its your own damn fault.

Anyhow, If you are a fast loader, and one of the fist voters, you can set a "seed" vote. For some reason people tend to follow suit. So if you play on really low settings, or have really fast loading times, the first vote will very often define which map people will vote for.

If 2 maps are say both at 30%, in the last second if you deselect and reselect your vote that map will win. Correct me if I'm wrong on this one, but I think if there's a tie the map that got the last vote wins. (the tie breaker should be which map has more authentic votes without multipliers, but whatever).

I've only managed to get my multiplier to 11x as well. Maybe 12. I think, I'm not sure, 12x is a hard cap. So you can't get an uber multi for a sure fire vote, even though 12 is a lot.

A general tactic of mine is as follows. If none of the maps in the 4 map selection are maps I like, I will wait and deliberately vote a losing map to increase my multiplier. Same thing if its mostly maps I like, no reason to spend the vote I like the map anyways. I will wait when I get the following scenario. If a map I HATE is winning versus a map I love, I spend the multi on it. I really really loathe some maps, so basically this is the time I usually end up spending it. I think of it as a fair trade, I don't get to vote for several matches, but when I get something I really want or hate I get to influence that match.


Also be prepared for last second Trolla-Thermas. People love to do that, what they don't realize is that some actually enjoy it. I take TT over frozen tu*d, vbog or river city any day. I hate those maps.

Edited by Louis Brofist, 06 January 2016 - 08:29 AM.

[BarHaid]

There is a Stock Mech event going on this Sunday!

http://mwomercs.com/.../page__st__1680

[General Taskeen]

Negative on SMM, its unfortunately a shadow of its formerself, but its no fault of the community. PGI ensured that it would be shunted into the dustbin for this game due to questionable design problems, to the atrocious UI, terrible private lobby implementation, and overall ensuring players have to jump through tons of hoops to play in that way (MWO has no ease of use options like an in-game loadout save list, or 'change to stock' tools).

Also, the private lobby in this game is nothing like DOTA2 (or hell like games from the last decade), for instance, where you can just make a custom lobby for free and have the general population of the game automatically join it in that game, if they are looking for the type of game you setup.

[TLBFestus]

I always wanted to try Stock Mech Mondays but because I'd have to manually switch my mechs over to stock, then take the time to rebuild them after i just never got into it. Sure be nice if PGI allowed us to save mech loadouts or even let us have access to the stock loadout once we mastered 3 variants. Anything to make finding and using a stock load out easier. I'd even consider paying for premium time for access to these features.

Quote

Some of the maps got amazing updates. Really surprised to see no new maps

Careful with that comment, others will strongly disagree as they still insist that maps with a different time of day are actually different maps.

The updated maps are quite a bit different from the originals, larger and more complex, and they run a day/night cycle so depending on when you hit those maps the lighting will vary.

PGI did create several new CW maps, but many of us don't play that mode so I've never seen them. Not a great loss to myself personally because i simply do not like the design of those CW maps anyhow, with their choke points and limited options.

As for regular maps they are slowly "updating" several of the old maps, but taking the originals out of rotation once completed. That's a shame because while they weren't perfect, they are different enough that I would have been tempted to leave them in the rotation to increase the map variety. for the most part they are too small for 12v12 but they worked well enough. I actually prefer the old caustic to the new one.

[Kvaneal]

will certainly check this out. kept a stalker and a blackjack stock just because these things were happening but gave up on the lag issues before ever getting involved.

thanks for the feedback, friends.