Discussion about the cap mechanic itself aside, I much prefer Assault and conquest to skirmish and always have.
Skirmish is what we had in the very beginning of closed Beta. The same "run and hide" mentality that people complain about today is the reason it was replaced by today`s assault. And for a week or so everyone was happy when that happened.
Then sometime later conquest was introduced. Shortly after, the cap whining on assault as we know it today started. This was, what, 2011-2012 IIRC?
Eventually skirmish was reintroduced a bit more than a year later , and turrets were intorduced to assault to further differentiate it. Cap times overall were lengthened to the point where a heavy mech could not realisticly cap without a module and still get into the fight on conquest . That´s how hard the overall capwhining was, so hard that in the process of appeasing a few excessively vocal few it literally invalidated the gameplay design of another unrelated mode for I think 3 -4 months or so.... Despite the cap points being moved closer together on many maps, most notably Alpine, also predominatly as a direct result of the low-engine-low brain-high alpha crowd that "can´t get anywhere fast enough to make a difference" that was now in their Deathball heaven called Skirmish.
Then the turrets were suddenly too hard (and admittedly, they did cheat pretty hard), turning assault into skirmish with a smaller area of operations because the base could only realistically be taken with a full lance or more. Just like the whiners wanted... But THEY were all now tied um in their Hulk Smash Mech skirmish matches and couldn´t have been happier... except for their new boogeyman, the one assault removed, the "run and hide last mech".
So, eventually turrets were removed from assault again, who knows how many weeks if not months of dev time wasted, just becasue we have a lot of entitled players that shout and flame harder than they think. And as a direct result, here we sit today, having the exact same discussions we had 3 years ago, and the game has barely moved forward...
And most of the whiners STILL haven´t learned how to either not move away in the first place and defend, or simply return to base to do the same. Which is why they continue to whine instead of getting good.
Now they say "it´s becasue we have to play modes that aren´t skirmish". And THAT is complete ********, becasue many were still whining even while we still had mode selection.
Ironically, all assault as it stands today (and in its original implementation) does is expose just how tactically inept most players are, and most people don´t like having their own stupidity flashed in front of their eyes on a regular basis... the smart ones stop doing stupid things while the (generally more vocal) stupid ones try to complain until it´s easy enough that even they can understand it... which is why we have skirmish at all, and why we´ve come full circle on assault.
I would actually propose leaving assault as it is, and making the "rework" into a new game mode altogether.... for example a melange between CW and current assault..... an actual base with some amount of reinforcement and maybe a turret or 2, maybe say 3 structures, one of which must be destroyed while the other 2 are "bonus targets"... but the defenders must actively leave the enclosure if they want to scout or rush, and once they do it´s open.
Solves the "standing in a square" argument from people with no imagination of abstract concepts.
Solves the "boohoo, fast lights and me need 5 minutes to turn around because only bought 200 engine" from people that don´t understand that the time to return is the same as the time you needed to get where you are (if it was one of those fabled instant cap rushes that suppposedly happen 30 seconds into every match).
Unfortunately, most of the other problems (with any game mode) can´t be solved by the devs, simply because their roots generally lie in ingorance and /or a false sense of entitlement and /or illusions of grandeur and /or utter user incompetence.
The problem is that this constant dumbing down of the game to the point where an infant can be competitive on an iPad is the slow death of teh Battletech and simulation aspects that many of os came here for in the first place.
TL;DR :MW:O has already gone from "The Thinking Man´s Shooter" to "The Drinking Man´s Shooter", I´m not really much a fan of making it even more "The Whining Man´s B***h" than it already is....
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MechWarrior849305, on 03 March 2016 - 11:39 PM, said:
I've just... LOLed. To have scouts... for what? To cap enemy base instead? Yeah, what a twist 
