482 replies to this topic

[LordKnightFandragon]

Gas Guzzler, on 03 May 2016 - 11:34 AM, said:

Dude, you don't get it. I'm not sure if you ever will.

The strategy and thinking has to be done together with the team. You can't just flank willy nilly and expect other solo players do respond correctly.

Clearly trying to explain things to you is a waste of time.

No, I understand things perfectly fine. But I find sticking with the pack through the same ol nascar blob boring as all ****. Mechs should be durable enough to handle themselves should someone decide to branch off and do a flanking move. It shouldnt be absolute unadulterated death if you do anything but stick with the nascar blob.

I have played games and even made a Men of War mod where I pretty much made it like MWO, 100% accuracy and real fast TTK, it absolutely destroyed the flavor of the game. It made doing anything but being the defender all but impossible. You move, you died. I have since then reduced accuracy on all my guns and made it with more CoF and randomness, it still punishes stupid movement plenty well. You run across open fields with infantry against machineguns, you are almost assured to be dead. You sit your medium tank out of cover against AT, it will die. My mod has moderately fast TTK, as Men of War does, but its ALOT more fun to have some degree of CoF, randomness and not instant death if you move out of cover.

Men of War is fantastic in that you can direct control 1 man around and really wreck havoc. Mechwarrior should be that to a factor of 5, since were in a huge *** battlemech. An assault should be plenty tanky enough that you see one showing up on your flank should really cause some hell. But in this game, you see an assault show up on your flank, you turn, fire 2 bursts and down it goes....

Super fast TTK does not make a game more fun or tactical, it makes it less so, since doing almost anything results in a very quick death.

This game has doubled armor and then quirked armor and STILL mechs die in 2 1/2 seconds. I understand everything perfectly. I understand team work fine, but teamwork should be for cover, supporting fire, not out of sheer and absolute neccessity to hopefully you get into cover before the enemy alpha melts you.......

This game people blob because if thye dont, they die. They nascar b/c there are no options except for it. You cant break off into teams of 2 or 3 and hunt around the field, having small skirmishes all over the map, moving to help a buddy finish up a skirmish on another part of the map...naw, its blob so you dont get melted by the enemy lolphas.

[Sjorpha]

LordKnightFandragon, on 03 May 2016 - 02:04 PM, said:

No, I understand things perfectly fine. But I find sticking with the pack through the same ol nascar blob boring as all ****. Mechs should be durable enough to handle themselves should someone decide to branch off and do a flanking move. It shouldnt be absolute unadulterated death if you do anything but stick with the nascar blob.

Your problem is that this premise isn't true. There is a lot of successful flanking being done in this game, even 1 mech flankings actually, there is also a lot other working strategies than nascar and deathball.

But guess what, a successful flank requires coordination with your team so that your timing is correct with what they are doing. Non nascar/blob strategies require coordination and sometimes active leadership.

You choose to access that content or you don't, the units are there waiting for you.

Nope uncoordinated solo "flanking" without being extremely good will never work, because it shouldn't work. It won't work with high TTK and it won't work with low TTK, but it DOES already work as soon as you enter the realm of cooperation.

Imagine your solo flank with higher TTK, you're up against multiple mechs and since they focus and you don't the increase in TTK is divided by number of enemies. Meanwhile there will be no "wreaking havoc" because their durability is increased just as much as yours and there is no focus fire to diminish it. Your glorious flank will last a little while longer but your chances of it being useful is even lower.

It's actually easier to flank with low TTK, because low TTK means to can kill someone before being focused down so there is one less enemy to do it. High TTK would completely remove the chance to assassinate someone with your flank so you'd always be focused by everyone including your first victim.

Think.

Edited by Sjorpha, 03 May 2016 - 02:19 PM.

[Targetloc]

Gas Guzzler, on 03 May 2016 - 12:01 PM, said:

Opinions can't be wrong though..

And yeah, I get not having time for anything but solo play, that's cool. But everyone always says there's no depth, and yeah in the solo queue its hard to have depth, because there is no team synergy and many times people aren't willing to work together.

I was spectating an Atlas who decided to primary a Centurion instead of the Dakka Dire standing right next to it, I called to focus the Dire, and he didn't so I said it again, and his response was "Don't tell me what to do!". It's like, come on man. Talk about thinking.. if people can't deduce that the Dire is the greater threat and should be focused down first... that's like rudimentary level thinking.

I don't get how "Power Draw" is going to add depth to the solo queue. Honestly, for a single player PvE type thing, I would LOVE to have all the sim mechanics you could think of. That would be awesome. But this game is a team based PvP. There is a multitude of depth based on the team play aspect alone that you aren't tapping into by sticking to the solo queue.

Honestly, you don't need a huge time commitment to play in a group. If you don't want to find a team to join to drop with the same people all the time, you can drop with us whenever you feel like.

Thinking about it, it kind of suggests the solo player queue should simply be smaller matches (4v4 or 6v6) so your personal contribution means more (and you have a better chance of winning even if you lose the pug lottery).

That would certainly solve the TTK and 'steamrolling' issues a lot of solo players have.

Leave 8v8 and 12v12 to the group/faction queues.

[Deathlike]

Sjorpha, on 03 May 2016 - 01:26 PM, said:

Actually, increasing time to kill is not a good thing for newbies/baddies in terms of them being able to perform better.

The opposite is true, the more you increase TTK the larger the gaps between skilled and unskilled players will be, and the harder the baddies will be stomped.

It's unintuitive, but it's simple math. The better a player is the better he focuses fire and avoids damage, that means that a better player will get exponentially more out of the increased durability than a bad player will, and with teamwork this effect is multiplied.

So let's say the durability is doubled, a good player who now has an effective TTK (under fire) of let's say 60 seconds will increase that to 120 seconds. A bad player who dies in 10 seconds will now dies in 20 seconds.

Congratulations, you just gave the good player a full minute more of killing time under fire and the newbie 10 seconds more in which to feel slightly less instagibbed. Where the good player could previously solo 2 poor players he will now be able to solo 3 or more.

High TTK is not a friend of bad play, that's an illusion. More time in which to make bad decisions won't make them less bad and you'll only lose harder because in that same time the good players make two good decisions for every extra bad one you now had time for.

For every extra mistake you can now afford to make the good player can now afford three or more, and you will no longer have a chance to capitalize and get the odd kill against him because now he can take those hits and come back at you with all the skill advantage and weapons intact.

I like high TTK, but that also means liking very harsh effects of skill gaps and very strong snowballing effect and accepting stomps being a part of the game. Those are the true effects of high TTK.

QFT.

Adjusting TTK to be higher actually amplifies a good player's effectiveness (kinda like quirks, except that's not really a great solution to apply to everything).

[Mister Blastman]

Sjorpha, on 03 May 2016 - 01:26 PM, said:

High TTK is not a friend of bad play, that's an illusion. More time in which to make bad decisions won't make them less bad and you'll only lose harder because in that same time the good players make two good decisions for every extra bad one you now had time for.

For every extra mistake you can now afford to make the good player can now afford three or more, and you will no longer have a chance to capitalize and get the odd kill against him because now he can take those hits and come back at you with all the skill advantage and weapons intact.

Good. The bads need to be punished so they stop screwing up PUG drops. Punish them all!

[Davers]

To sum up this thread

The 250ish players in MRBC are having incredibly strategic matches in a healthy and robust meta.

Everyone else in QP is having crap games because we can't coordinate what mechs we drop in and we don't talk enough to even come close to the teamwork necessary to have similar quality matched.

[Deathlike]

Davers, on 03 May 2016 - 03:31 PM, said:

To sum up this thread

The 250ish players in MRBC are having incredibly strategic matches in a healthy and robust meta.

Everyone else in QP is having crap games because we can't coordinate what mechs we drop in and we don't talk enough to even come close to the teamwork necessary to have similar quality matched.

Welcome to MWO.

[Wintersdark]

Deathlike, on 03 May 2016 - 03:04 PM, said:

QFT.

Adjusting TTK to be higher actually amplifies a good player's effectiveness (kinda like quirks, except that's not really a great solution to apply to everything).

Which is why I'm always pushing for longer TTK. With less instagibs (not saying instagibs aren't due to screwups more often than not, good players have more of an opportunity to be good, and bad players will just be bad for longer. HOWEVER! For a bad player who wants to be good, longer TTK gives him more opportunity to learn per match, as mistakes tend to be more survivable, and there's less "Oh. Well, dead again!" early in the match.

It definitely benefits stronger players most, though, no doubt. I'm OK with that.

Davers, on 03 May 2016 - 03:31 PM, said:

To sum up this thread

The 250ish players in MRBC are having incredibly strategic matches in a healthy and robust meta.

Everyone else in QP is having crap games because we can't coordinate what mechs we drop in and we don't talk enough to even come close to the teamwork necessary to have similar quality matched.

Well, at least that's how it's always been and likely will always be, so there's no sudden surprises =\

[pwnface]

Wintersdark, on 03 May 2016 - 03:41 PM, said:

Which is why I'm always pushing for longer TTK. With less instagibs (not saying instagibs aren't due to screwups more often than not, good players have more of an opportunity to be good, and bad players will just be bad for longer. HOWEVER! For a bad player who wants to be good, longer TTK gives him more opportunity to learn per match, as mistakes tend to be more survivable, and there's less "Oh. Well, dead again!" early in the match.

It definitely benefits stronger players most, though, no doubt. I'm OK with that.

I think the same bad players are going to survive slightly longer standing in the open but also have a much harder time killing anything since their damage will be pitiful and mostly off target.

The way I see it, in the chaos of a match anyone can land a "lucky punch" so to speak and maybe finish off a damaged mech. If you make everyone's "punches" a lot weaker, it'll be even more difficult for bad players to do anything remotely meaningful. I don't know, maybe I'm wrong though and we should just let people take damage for a few minutes in a row so they feel like they are in a big stompy armored robot.

[Ultimax]

Bishop Steiner, on 03 May 2016 - 11:08 AM, said:

or have lives and jobs, other interests and aren't interested in devoting their time to Competitive Play.

But of course it's easier to simply denigrate people who view games as a casual hobby, since they don't cling to your worldview, I suppose?

Just like its easy to make false assumptions, toss strawman attacks.


I work 50 hours a week, 2 hours round rip of commute.

Wife, 3 kids - who I take out on weekends (kiddie soccer, social events, crayola factory, zoo, etc).


You don't need to be a basement dwelling no-lifer playing every day for hours and hours a night to play organized play, maybe if you want to be T1 and have your team be a contender vs. Emp, SJR, HoL.

There are other division levels, there are other tournaments.


If I can find time for it, so can a lot of people, the hardest parts are:

1) Finding a team you gel with.
2) Setting a goal that makes sense for your time and ability level
3) Maintaining a stable of mechs to be ready for whatever the match might call. Trust me, I don't actually want to have mastered Ice Ferrets - but it was needed.



If its not an interest, that's of course personal preference. But lives and jobs?

Yeah I got that, still manage to make practices and tournament/league matches.

Mister Blastman, on 03 May 2016 - 02:04 PM, said:

Everything suffers from hitreg issues. It is more noticeable, however, in high-heat, low volume weapons like PPCs because you get less shots before you have to stop firing.

That's what the UACs are for on that build, lets you putout threatening DPS when you need to and when the PPCs have you running hot.

Sjorpha, on 03 May 2016 - 02:13 PM, said:

Your problem is that this premise isn't true. There is a lot of successful flanking being done in this game, even 1 mech flankings actually, there is also a lot other working strategies than nascar and deathball.

But guess what, a successful flank requires coordination with your team so that your timing is correct with what they are doing. Non nascar/blob strategies require coordination and sometimes active leadership.

You choose to access that content or you don't, the units are there waiting for you.

Nope uncoordinated solo "flanking" without being extremely good will never work, because it shouldn't work. It won't work with high TTK and it won't work with low TTK, but it DOES already work as soon as you enter the realm of cooperation.

Imagine your solo flank with higher TTK, you're up against multiple mechs and since they focus and you don't the increase in TTK is divided by number of enemies. Meanwhile there will be no "wreaking havoc" because their durability is increased just as much as yours and there is no focus fire to diminish it. Your glorious flank will last a little while longer but your chances of it being useful is even lower.

It's actually easier to flank with low TTK, because low TTK means to can kill someone before being focused down so there is one less enemy to do it. High TTK would completely remove the chance to assassinate someone with your flank so you'd always be focused by everyone including your first victim.

Think.

Seriously.


So many misconception about what much longer TTK would bring.

Here's some reality:

1) Top tier players who seem hard to kill now will basically seem invincible to put down.
2) There will be less thinking, not more. Making mistakes won't be punishing, you don't need to think nearly as much about positioning.

Edited by Ultimax, 03 May 2016 - 03:50 PM.

[Mister Blastman]

Ultimax, on 03 May 2016 - 03:47 PM, said:

That's what the UACs are for on that build, lets you putout threatening DPS when you need to and when the PPCs have you running hot.

Until they start jamming far more than the 15% would have you allow to believe they do...

Mine love to jam on the first shot.


The best part? I don't have to care, because I don't have to play this game when pitiful crap never gets fixed or addressed and we're told "Our opinion doesn't matter" by developers.

[Ultimax]

Mister Blastman, on 03 May 2016 - 03:50 PM, said:

Until they start jamming far more than the 15% would have you allow to believe they do...

Excuses, excuses.

What happened to complaining that the game is too easy?

Can't handle some UACs and PPCs.

[Mister Blastman]

Ultimax, on 03 May 2016 - 03:51 PM, said:

Excuses, excuses.

What happened to complaining that the game is too easy?

Can't handle some UACs and PPCs.

Nope, I suck at them and am the worst player in the game. I know nothing about ppcs, uacs, jump sniping and the like.

I'm a peasant with a stinky opinion that is better off ignored beneath the sullen crown.

[MischiefSC]

Gas Guzzler, on 01 May 2016 - 11:17 PM, said:

Hm, well Russ mentioned that it would "affect perception of hit detection", which doesn't sound like a cooldown penalty to me. Sounds more like weapons are just going to magically do less damage when you fire too many of them together.

When you say effectiveness over time, do you mean you don't like how for example a Black Knight, can alpha for 58 damage, wait the ~3 second cooldown, and alpha again? After that, it can't alpha anymore and has to go sit and cool off, or just fire its LPLs. Where as say a 4 AC5 Black Widow can just keep up its DPS the whole time without having to worry about heat. I swear, the times that I end up killing mechs exceedingly quickly are with mechs like that.

Except the BK will do 116 damage to you over 3 seconds and you'll have done 60 to him, maybe 40 before he kills you. If he has to duck back and cool after that it's fine because he traded 116 pts for 40 and a kill.

That's the issue. "Then he has to cool down after he kills you by doing 3x the damage in the same timeframe" isn't a balancing factor. Not really.

[Deathlike]

Wintersdark, on 03 May 2016 - 03:41 PM, said:

Which is why I'm always pushing for longer TTK. With less instagibs (not saying instagibs aren't due to screwups more often than not, good players have more of an opportunity to be good, and bad players will just be bad for longer. HOWEVER! For a bad player who wants to be good, longer TTK gives him more opportunity to learn per match, as mistakes tend to be more survivable, and there's less "Oh. Well, dead again!" early in the match.

It definitely benefits stronger players most, though, no doubt. I'm OK with that.

I just want to put it in different terms.

I don't think we've ever experienced a time where it is possible to be that "OP mech" (or player) that required more than at least a double team to take down.

If we raise TTK too high, then the proliferation of the "mech rambo" can be realized at the comp level. This is not what anyone would want (except people who wants ramboing to be a thing in the game).

As an example, the BK before the recent nerf probably made already good players still good, but now their TTK is probably a bit more sane than they were before. You don't want a super tank that is literally better than the next level tonnage counterparts (one could argue than the BK is better than the current series of 80-tonners, but that's besides the point).


A player's skill (and intelligence) is directly correlated to their TTK as some modifier that we can't really put in a number (we could use an arbitrary system, but that's not really the discussion). A bad player will have a "personally bad" TTK... like you give them an mech that works fine in an XL engine (let's say a Black Knight), but their inability to torso twist literally reduces their TTK as they will get cored or side cored pretty easily.

As a player gets better, their TTK dramatically increases (far more than quirks) and while you could handicap them (like giving them a Mist Lynx), their TTK would still be better than the average player in the same mech (or a better Light for that matter).

The greatest TTK magnification in this game is literally the player... whether they make good decisions or bad. Some bad decisions won't always be punished (not enough skilled players to punish them), but really bad decisions (like shutting down in the open) usually gets one's TTK murdered. Obviously the "best decisions" involve the target being put down efficiently as possible (which isn't always skill related and depends on the situation of course).


That's why when it comes to "a thinking man's game", the player that makes better decisions (ideally with optimal mechs/builds or optimal execution with their mech) tends to be the one that lives to shoot another mech.


This is why working together is far more OP than trying to do everything yourself (which kinda only works when the rest of the team doesn't want to work together).

[Quicksilver Aberration]

Davers, on 03 May 2016 - 03:31 PM, said:

Everyone else in QP is having crap games because we can't coordinate what mechs we drop in and we don't talk enough to even come close to the teamwork necessary to have similar quality matched.

That is pretty much how all games end up isn't it though?

[pwnface]

MischiefSC, on 03 May 2016 - 04:06 PM, said:

Except the BK will do 116 damage to you over 3 seconds and you'll have done 60 to him, maybe 40 before he kills you. If he has to duck back and cool after that it's fine because he traded 116 pts for 40 and a kill.

That's the issue. "Then he has to cool down after he kills you by doing 3x the damage in the same timeframe" isn't a balancing factor. Not really.

That is assuming the BK does kill you in 2 alphas. If you use cover or torso twisting to mitigate some of the damage and can position yourself to take away his cover it is possible to win by sheer sustained DPS. Obviously the BK has an advantage here in a 1v1 situation, however there are plenty of situations where a dakka mech can outperform a BK.

Let's say an enemy team is running an aggressive brawl deck and is running right at your firing line. A dakka mech like the Black Widow or JM6-DD is typically going to out perform a BK in that situation.

[Quicksilver Aberration]

MischiefSC, on 03 May 2016 - 04:06 PM, said:

Except the BK will do 116 damage to you over 3 seconds and you'll have done 60 to him, maybe 40 before he kills you. If he has to duck back and cool after that it's fine because he traded 116 pts for 40 and a kill.

With dakka, the idea is to never be trading alone, or make it so that the BK doesn't have cover to cool off behind. That and an aggressive push (which is common in both comp and group queue) doesn't allow you time to cool off, so that sustained DPS comes in handy really fast.

Edited by Quicksilver Kalasa, 03 May 2016 - 04:16 PM.

[pwnface]

Different builds have different situational advantages, the Black Knight or any other laser vomit build just happens to encompass more situations than most.

[MischiefSC]

Quicksilver Kalasa, on 03 May 2016 - 04:15 PM, said:

With dakka, the idea is to never be trading alone, or make it so that the BK doesn't have cover to cool off behind. That and an aggressive push (which is common in both comp and group queue) doesn't allow you time to cool off, so that sustained DPS comes in handy really fast.

Yep. And in an 8v8 MRBC match that's usually how it works.

For the remaining 99.998% of matches played it's a bit more one-sided. We played some matches with 5lpl Banshees vs dakka Maulers. It was very one sided.

What you really need is to make the BK do about 60 pts over that same 3 seconds and have heat Be the balance for lower weight and no ammo.

The problem we have right now is high repeatable alphas that are sufficient to make DoT irrelevant in most situations.

Even in an 8man in most circumstances on most maps the high alpha pp setup will win out, especially with energy boats generally being faster (lighter weapons and synergy with big XLs for DHS, stick and move > staredown) and thus better able to control positioning and initiative.

If a match is on a cold or neutral map you're going to bring the death star laservomit focus fire. You'll bring some dakka to hot maps but likely still some lasers.

Not saying everything needs to be identical but 116 pts over 3 seconds and 3 shots vs 40-60 pts over 3 seconds over 2-3 shots is easy math. The BK can shoot/twist/shoot and even when fading to cool can LPL for another 11-22 pts. The ballistic only wins if he's got a buddy - which would be true for the laservomit build.

See what I mean? There's nothing like a balance there. Again, not wanting cut and paste performance but it needs some more parity.