334 replies to this topic

[Danjo San]

LordNothing, on 18 May 2016 - 10:34 PM, said:

the problem is simple, people dont attack enough. you can see 4 drops waiting for enemy players on defense queues, and not a one in the attack queues. if you are waiting 50 minutes for a defense game on an inactive planet, you deserve it. find the contents of your scrotum, get on faction chat and tell people to attack, then queue up there.

and go figure most of the players refusing to attack are pugs, but what do units do? they attack. so when pugs queue up to defend, its like the chick culling line at the poultry plant, because your buttocks is about to get dropped into a meat grinder. but if you attack, then you stand a solid chance at a fair fight.

Yep too many dumb players out there defending a planet that has 0 Sectors conquered. Useless waste of time

[Danjo San]

slide, on 25 May 2016 - 09:54 PM, said:

Thanks needed a memory jog.

Sure McCarron acted autonomously to defeat a known threat but that is very different from him running around carving out his own little fiefdom. Max Liao would have had him executed most gruesomely had McCarron tried that.

Williard Phule was trying to use lore to justify mercs doing their own thing, which is true to a point, but no merc in lore has had the influence on a faction that a few of the bigger name units have on MWO.

The fact is MS have an effect on factions whether they win or even drop. Case in point, even though ARMD is a Merc unit we typically stay with Davion as we have lots of friends here. Last week our contract bonus was 0%. This week now that MS and JGx have come back to Davion our bonus is -20%. Before they have dropped a match they have already had an impact on my whole unit, to the tune of 50K per match (more with PT/heroes). How does that affect the desire of people in Davion to even queue up. Let alone affect the ability to get a match (seeing as 12 mans jump the queue). Does all of Marik and Liao suddenly take a week off like Steiner did last week just because MS is in town. Where ever a unit the size of MS goes it has an effect, whether they play or not. Is that the units fault, not directly but all actions have consequences.

This issue is not the same with large loyalist units as the population will stabilize around (and opposite) them which means you won't have the wild fluctuations in population that we get now.

The solution is not necessarily limiting a units size, as size does not equal activity, but perhaps limiting the number of teams a unit can drop simultaneously. House units can drop 3 teams max whilst mercs can only drop 1 (example only). But what ever they do PGI have got to stop counting people on unit rosters as active in CW, because the numbers are so wildly scewed that I doubt you can even come up with a number that is even close to being right.

I believe the only way to overcime this is a hard unit cap, loyalist and mercs alike. With a hard cap irregulars and inactives are likely removed from units and large companies wont bias balance. My suggestionbis cap at 48 players. Thats close to a american football team roster and leaves enough headroom for irregulars

[LordNothing]

so yea yesterday i played defence only, this resulted in 6 stomps and me returning to quick play for the evening.
today i said what the hell, queued up in the only attack lane for my faction. in 5 games (i wanted to play 6 but ceasefire) i got 2 victories and 3 losses, with fairly close scores. i was encountering units, but i figure that was because i was fighting the jags, and they dont attack, i know (my previous contract was with them), its probibly why they only own a few planets.

[slide]

Danjo San, on 25 May 2016 - 10:44 PM, said:

I believe the only way to overcime this is a hard unit cap, loyalist and mercs alike. With a hard cap irregulars and inactives are likely removed from units and large companies wont bias balance. My suggestionbis cap at 48 players. Thats close to a american football team roster and leaves enough headroom for irregulars

The difference is that there are more things to do in MWO than just play football. I have at least 12 players in my unit that do nothing else but train for the World Championships. Do I kick them because they don't play CW yet are probably more active than the other 80 people combined?

Give me a sub unit that I can dedicate specifically for CW players and I am with you. Until then no.

[Danjo San]

slide, on 25 May 2016 - 11:05 PM, said:

The difference is that there are more things to do in MWO than just play football. I have at least 12 players in my unit that do nothing else but train for the World Championships. Do I kick them because they don't play CW yet are probably more active than the other 80 people combined?

Give me a sub unit that I can dedicate specifically for CW players and I am with you. Until then no.

Yeah, sub divisions... it is not like you could organize multiple units on one Teamspeak server as part of a large group, the only difference being multiple tags, my gosh, that would be proposturous.

[vocifer]

Danjo San, on 25 May 2016 - 11:20 PM, said:

Yeah, sub divisions... it is not like you could organize multiple units on one Teamspeak server as part of a large group, the only difference being multiple tags, my gosh, that would be proposturous.

So if I want to skip a week of Davion contract and play QP instead, should I drop out of the unit and join the QP-dedicated then?
And week after when we get another clan contract, should I drop out of the QP unit and join CW one so I can participate in tagging planets?

[VoodooLou Kerensky]

If I am not mistaken this sort of thing is the achilles tendon of BattleTech/MechWarrior Planetary Conquest Leagues from the beginning. Its just moved to inside the game instead of outside of it like the Leagues. Either a unit figures a way to play the system via the League rules or they become a juggernaut by absorbing the units they beat off the map and win by being able to field more people across all time zones. Either the map gets reset (and how the Units got their starting points Im not sure of but there are plenty of Players here that ran those Leagues.
And yes Ive been in units that played a Ladders system (and by quantity over quality drops, resoundingly took that Ladders 1st Championship [and a lot less drops afterwards the OpFor wised up to my Ploy]) and a few that became Juggernauts. And not every planet/system (3110 of them remember) was exactly the same as the last because the game allowed for changes to be made to the planetary effects (as well as allowing the inclusion of player made maps that leagues would adopt to add further changes to drops to defeat ennui aka Shampoo,Rinse,Repeat CW/FP we have now) to give the drops variety. And planets didnt change hands daily, most took a week to set up drop times between attackers and defenders, and you couldnt be in an attack drop and be a defender of a held planet so unit size and alliances and merc hiring comes into play. Theres none of that now

[slide]

Danjo San, on 25 May 2016 - 11:20 PM, said:

Yeah, sub divisions... it is not like you could organize multiple units on one Teamspeak server as part of a large group, the only difference being multiple tags, my gosh, that would be proposturous.

Sarcasm not with standing, some people actually like to represent their unit and have a tag next to their name, even if they don't play CW.

I have been told, point blank that if restrict tags to CW players only, then people will leave the unit completely. That would take my unit from 95 to about 5. I would also bet money that a lot of those will quit MWO all together. I think you and PGI both fail to realize that that unit membership and the friendships made in them keep people playing this game far longer than they would otherwise do. Units build communities and encourage participation.

The limits you propose will in fact make units non-functional and will actually accelerate the decline of this game. They will also achieve precisely none of the affects you seem to think they will. Why?, because the good players will carry on doing what they are doing now, but the players who are being carried will get kicked out of their units, have a horrible experience pugging or trying to form another unit and quit, leaving even less players in the pool.

Don't confuse me with someone who supports MS. I don't. I neither enjoy playing against them nor with them. I personally think they have done more harm to the player base than any other top level unit, but that has come mostly from their attitude towards pug stomps, not from the size of their unit (bad attitude plus lots of players just accentuates the issue). Holding together 300+ people is actually something to be respected, but that is as far as my respect goes.

What PGI needs to do has been documented time and time again and I won't reiterate it here. But limiting units to the sizes you suggest will change exactly nothing, except how quickly this game (mode) dies.

[MischiefSC]

There is no actual negative to big units.

None.

People play with who they want how they want.

Adding perks that are unit tag related is bad.

Nobody says CWI is ruining FW or HHOD. Both are huge units. Same with TCAF.

The problem is other mechanics around mercs, tags, queue designs, fronts, rewards and how factions work.

Unit size is irrelevant.

[N0MAD]

MischiefSC, on 26 May 2016 - 05:44 PM, said:

There is no actual negative to big units.

None.

People play with who they want how they want.

Adding perks that are unit tag related is bad.

Nobody says CWI is ruining FW or HHOD. Both are huge units. Same with TCAF.

The problem is other mechanics around mercs, tags, queue designs, fronts, rewards and how factions work.

Unit size is irrelevant.

In reality you are 100% correct there should be no negatives to big units..in MWO there could be, because the population of the game mode is so low, and a big unit can be a large % of that player base which leads to stacking of populations into a single entity that dominates. With the required population this doesnt happen, the game mode has no where near that required population. In its present form CW wont collect the required, and to fundamentally change it will take time and talent///experience//resource, all those are in short supply imo...
Me i say scrap it, really, give the 3rd party leagues some tools ( chat loby +game loby) plus perhaps some web sever assistance and see if they cant bring back the core MW population.

[MischiefSC]

TThere are bigger units than MS.

The problem with MS is they play FW as it is, not as we want it to be and they have winning down to a science, based on the inherent flaws in FW which highlights them.

[KahnWongFuChung]

HAHAHAHA 54 minutes now I know why I play WarThunder I can get a match in like 2 min tops.

[Clownwarlord]

A lot of small units and solo players have abandoned FW. not because of wait time but because of them not playing FW you see higher wait times. Sorry to some big units out there but no more cannon fodder for you

[Daidachi]

slide, on 26 May 2016 - 04:51 PM, said:

I have been told, point blank that if restrict tags to CW players only, then people will leave the unit completely. That would take my unit from 95 to about 5. I would also bet money that a lot of those will quit MWO all together. I think you and PGI both fail to realize that that unit membership and the friendships made in them keep people playing this game far longer than they would otherwise do. Units build communities and encourage participation.

The limits you propose will in fact make units non-functional and will actually accelerate the decline of this game. They will also achieve precisely none of the affects you seem to think they will. Why?, because the good players will carry on doing what they are doing now, but the players who are being carried will get kicked out of their units, have a horrible experience pugging or trying to form another unit and quit, leaving even less players in the pool.

QFT.

I have said it before and I'll say it again - the social aspect to games is what keeps them going long after the content fails to excite. The social aspect is just as much a drawcard to players as the game itself.

If you get a player excited and interested in a game, they will talk to their friends about it. While their friends may not be as excited as them, they will probably give it a go because their friends are playing.

World of Warcraft didn't become wildly successful because it had innovative graphics and cutting edge design (lol). It became a juggernaut because it hit on a successful formula and then gave players tools to have fun - guild chat and pm's that were time stamped, friends lists that showed when people were last online (zomg revolutionary...in 2004 /sarcasm), and the ability to create mods freely which encouraged an active and engaged playerbase.

How many memories of games do you have as a player where the recollection is all about the game and the game alone, compared to playing the game and the involvement of the people around you - whether that's at a lan or on teamspeak?

[Danjo San]

slide, on 26 May 2016 - 04:51 PM, said:

Sarcasm not with standing, some people actually like to represent their unit and have a tag next to their name, even if they don't play CW.

I have been told, point blank that if restrict tags to CW players only, then people will leave the unit completely. That would take my unit from 95 to about 5. I would also bet money that a lot of those will quit MWO all together. I think you and PGI both fail to realize that that unit membership and the friendships made in them keep people playing this game far longer than they would otherwise do. Units build communities and encourage participation.

The limits you propose will in fact make units non-functional and will actually accelerate the decline of this game. They will also achieve precisely none of the affects you seem to think they will. Why?, because the good players will carry on doing what they are doing now, but the players who are being carried will get kicked out of their units, have a horrible experience pugging or trying to form another unit and quit, leaving even less players in the pool.

Don't confuse me with someone who supports MS. I don't. I neither enjoy playing against them nor with them. I personally think they have done more harm to the player base than any other top level unit, but that has come mostly from their attitude towards pug stomps, not from the size of their unit (bad attitude plus lots of players just accentuates the issue). Holding together 300+ people is actually something to be respected, but that is as far as my respect goes.

What PGI needs to do has been documented time and time again and I won't reiterate it here. But limiting units to the sizes you suggest will change exactly nothing, except how quickly this game (mode) dies.

Once upon a time in MWO, long before group queues and unit tags, people would build communities, give them names and sync drop. Then Pgi added the group queue, you'd now who your enemy was even without a tag next to their name... the large communities managed to be together representing their community without a tag. Now take Ms and Ms-R everybody knows they are both representing Mercstar Alliance. People would also know if they were flying a Tag that said Ms-S or Ms-T or Ms-xy or whatever.

[iLLcapitan]

Danjo San, on 26 May 2016 - 11:32 PM, said:

Once upon a time in MWO, long before group queues and unit tags, people would build communities, give them names and sync drop. Then Pgi added the group queue, you'd now who your enemy was even without a tag next to their name... the large communities managed to be together representing their community without a tag. Now take Ms and Ms-R everybody knows they are both representing Mercstar Alliance. People would also know if they were flying a Tag that said Ms-S or Ms-T or Ms-xy or whatever.

And what exactly would it change?
You keep on going at hard unit cap, but I fail to see the benefit.

MS is an institution in this game and from what I've got they worked hard to get there.
They educate people, tie them to the game and are in general good guys.

Narrow minded calls for nerfing big units, because of a perceived 'imbalance' won't do the game any good.
So you force big units to break up, half the players leave because they have been bereft of their community - loose/loose.

[Danjo San]

iLLcapitan, on 26 May 2016 - 11:57 PM, said:

And what exactly would it change?
You keep on going at hard unit cap, but I fail to see the benefit.

MS is an institution in this game and from what I've got they worked hard to get there.
They educate people, tie them to the game and are in general good guys.

Narrow minded calls for nerfing big units, because of a perceived 'imbalance' won't do the game any good.
So you force big units to break up, half the players leave because they have been bereft of their community - loose/loose.

you still seem to mistake community with unit, as long as "narrow minded" views cloud and block that insight it is completely impossible to talk sense into that. I have stated my opinion on benefits of smaller units, and subdivisions in several threads and multiple times in this one.
People wont leave a organised community and their friends just because they have different tags to identify them by. We share our Teamspeak with another unit. they are mercs, when we are in the same faction we drop together, when we are IS we defend together... We are not subdivions but seperate units, nevertheless we still manage to organise together and have a community based on friendship.
If now People chose to leave your community because of a hard unit cap, or to rephrase, because they can't be your friends anymore, they never were your friends and your community apparently had nothing to offer to hold them aside from a stupid tag...
Now big units have subdivisions, seperate drop leaders, seperate Setups. I know TCAF does so and MS also has seperate Subdivions with seperate recruitment application possibilities and requirements (as seen on their homepage).
Now there are subdivisions already in place and just because they share the same tag, or even seperate as MS and MS-R does not by any chance mean that just because you are in one subdivision magically excludes you from being friends with players of another subdivision ... or even speaking to them, or organizing as a whole... ohmygosh.

And to imbalance ... the large population of mercs is creating the imbalance, large units do their fair share of that. There are more mercs out there than loyalists, when factors like the latest clan mech bias choices to where mercs go, chances for clusters that imbalce rise. put it however you want large units take a large portion of players there, regardless if the unit is active only during one timezone or during all three cycles, regardless if only half of the team plays CW...
It's simple math. Fewer Merc Units - higher chance for cluster! more merc units - higher chance of equal distribution.

The game needs equal distribution to ensure the highest possible fun for the entire playerbase.

[Contrex]

Smaller units + entry system for factions would clear many problems we have atm.

There was not a single argument till now, not to reduce the unit sice for fw gaming.

One was:
"We are a community". - Great and you stay one. You still have a TS Server - Forum and so on. You dont share the same unitchat anymore. So u get a working fw system for the unit chat. Seems fair

Next:
"I want the Tag." Seriously.... you would sacrifice a working fw system for a unit tag? Get MS - 1 MS -2 what ever.... you are still the same.

Third:
"You just wanna hurt MS..." - MS is just an example. I give a **** about MS. I would even reduce the sice of my unit. Its way too big as well.

That had been all the arguments called so far. Actualy its not a single one which is somekind of a fact .... its all emotionally.
But you must be kidding if you realy say: I play together with 300 other guys and i know each of them.
I bet every player in a big unit, knows 50 max. And is playing together with about 20 regularly. I am 100% sure u have never recogniced at least 50% of your unit. So whats the reason to say that big. Tags on planet. ? Thats carving as well. Just try to think whats the best for the game, not whats the best for your unit.

Most of the big units are just purpose communities. See the greater purpose. And stop talking emotionaly

[DarklightCA]

Contrex, on 27 May 2016 - 06:59 AM, said:

Smaller units + entry system for factions would clear many problems we have atm.

There was not a single argument till now, not to reduce the unit sice for fw gaming.

One was:
"We are a community". - Great and you stay one. You still have a TS Server - Forum and so on. You dont share the same unitchat anymore. So u get a working fw system for the unit chat. Seems fair

Next:
"I want the Tag." Seriously.... you would sacrifice a working fw system for a unit tag? Get MS - 1 MS -2 what ever.... you are still the same.

Third:
"You just wanna hurt MS..." - MS is just an example. I give a **** about MS. I would even reduce the sice of my unit. Its way too big as well.

That had been all the arguments called so far. Actualy its not a single one which is somekind of a fact .... its all emotionally.
But you must be kidding if you realy say: I play together with 300 other guys and i know each of them.
I bet every player in a big unit, knows 50 max. And is playing together with about 20 regularly. I am 100% sure u have never recogniced at least 50% of your unit. So whats the reason to say that big. Tags on planet. ? Thats carving as well. Just try to think whats the best for the game, not whats the best for your unit.

Most of the big units are just purpose communities. See the greater purpose. And stop talking emotionaly

Definition of community. "a feeling of fellowship with others, as a result of sharing common attitudes, interests, and goals". Players joined a unit because it had the same goals they had for the game and the players in it had the same attitudes and interests towards the game.

They aren't a community simply because they had a teamspeak, they are a community because they formed one when they joined those units. Forcing players out of those units isn't going to maintain a community simply because they have a teamspeak.

You want to destroy that for what exactly? Because MS is very large and have created a inbalance in the game. They did not create a inbalance because they were simply large. There are much larger units than MS that nobody really cares about because they don't accomplish anything with their large amount of players. They create a inbalance because they are not a regular unit, they are a bunch of units formed together under the same tag competing for planets under that tag.

In the leaderboards you can see that inbalance but you know what else you can see? Every OTHER unit competing against each other. I see units who actively group together, put effort into winning their games regardless if they are a large unit or a small unit on the top of the leaderboards. I see small units keeping pace with larger units, even surpassing them. What you are suggesting is to throw every other unit under the bus for the sake of trying to balance one unit. To me that is not a acceptable idea.

There are so many things wrong with this gamemode and a lot of them have nothing to do with units, large units or even merc units no matter how much you want them to be the boogeyman or scapegoat of this failed gamemode.

Edited by DarklightCA, 27 May 2016 - 09:23 AM.

[Contrex]

DarklightCA, on 27 May 2016 - 09:19 AM, said:

Definition of community. "a feeling of fellowship with others, as a result of sharing common attitudes, interests, and goals". Players joined a unit because it had the same goals they had for the game and the players in it had the same attitudes and interests towards the game.

They aren't a community simply because they had a teamspeak, they are a community because they formed one when they joined those units. Forcing players out of those units isn't going to maintain a community simply because they have a teamspeak.

You want to destroy that for what exactly? Because MS is very large and have created a inbalance in the game. They did not create a inbalance because they were simply large. There are much larger units than MS that nobody really cares about because they don't accomplish anything with their large amount of players. They create a inbalance because they are not a regular unit, they are a bunch of units formed together under the same tag competing for planets under that tag.

In the leaderboards you can see that inbalance but you know what else you can see? Every OTHER unit competing against each other. I see units who actively group together, put effort into winning their games regardless if they are a large unit or a small unit on the top of the leaderboards. I see small units keeping pace with larger units, even surpassing them. What you are suggesting is to throw every other unit under the bus for the sake of trying to balance one unit. To me that is not a acceptable idea.

There are so many things wrong with this gamemode and a lot of them have nothing to do with units, large units or even merc units no matter how much you want them to be the boogeyman or scapegoat of this failed gamemode.

Does a community need the same gametag?`Had been in plenty communities without a gametag.



And why the hell do you think i talk about MS? The only problem of MS is that they are OGEN rusher, and they will stay that even after a unitsice cap, but thats another discussion and has nothing to do with unitsice.

Its just simple math. Many small units combined with a factionjoin penalty just split up more easy and will look for empty factions. The community of MS for example was only founded to get planet tags. In our teamforum there is still a post by some MS members who ask to join them. "We would stay the same as we are, just get more planets - Thats it". Thats exactly what i would love to split. That has not mutch to do with a well led community. It has only one specific goal. To get planets. They give a **** about each other. How could they, they are way too big to know each other

And just ask yourself. Do you even know half the people in a unit as big as Swol? No chance. So there are no personal reasons. And EVERY healhty community will stay a community, if there is a tag or not.

Edited by Contrex, 27 May 2016 - 11:42 AM.