Summary, my advice is to: - learn to work as a team
- try not to be a LURM boat
- get Radar Deprivation as soon as you can
- watch Twitch.com streams of good players to learn how good Mech pilots play
Background
There are many shades of potatoes, but they all start at tier 5 in the Mechwarrior Universe. I just got out of the lowest potato bin and had to geek out on it a bit. This is a bit of general geekery on how I approached getting out of the 5th tier. Potatoes are the fodder that sacrifice their armor and lives every day so meta-tryhards can accelerate up the top tier charts rapidly. This post is about how to understand the stats that matter in the ‘tier’ system on Mechwarrior Online. I got so sick of getting destroyed in the pick up groups that I started to wonder how I could possibly do better. I am a massive stats nerd, so I decided to start taking detailed stats on my performance to see what exactly I was doing wrong.
My educated guess is that scale of ‘PILOT SKILL RATING’ above is 200 wide. My conjecture is that the total pilot rating system scale is somewhere between 1000 and 1500 units, and those units are broken down into 5 tiers. This means that each tier is 200-250 ‘Pilot Skill Ratings’ wide. To go up in scale, ‘Pilot rating green’ (green up icon) needs to be won more than ‘Pilot rating reds’ (red down icons). A rating of equal yellow means that your skill rating stays the same. What do I mean by this? At the end of a Mechwarrior game you are rated on your pilot rating. I equated the 3 states of this as +1, 0, and -1, and started keeping track of all the other stats I could write down in a reasonable time after a game was over. I have gotten faster at it, and color coded the cells to spot trends, but it looks something like this these days:
Stats & Methods of Measurements
I am working on my 500th game record now as I write this, and I broke the 5th tier at around my 487th game. This quantity of data provides a good amount of stats to start understanding what exactly gives you that +1, 0 or -1. I estimate that I probably missed 10-15 games over the course of this stat taking.
‘Game’ in this table was recorded as a 1 if we won, and a 0 if we lost. I found that the number one thing that matters is winning games. How can I state that with surety? I ran the correlation coefficients between the pilot rating and every stat and found that winning the game had the highest correlation coefficient. Having a 0.90 correlation between pilot rating and Game win means that winning games is what matters for my set of stats, and my game style during the period of time these stats were taken. To obtain the correlation between two sets of data you do the following in excel: =CORREL(Data1, Data2) This produces a number from 0… 1 that represents how correlated two sets of data are. As you can see from the above set of data, winning matters more than any other stat. If I want to get better, I have to win games.
You can see my trend in February of this year going into March, I was straight out sucking, and my pilot rating was plummeting. I was basically loosing more than I was winning, so my pilot rating was plummeting. Much of this was due to levelling up new mechs, and trying to figure out how to become better. I don’t play all the time so I looked at pilot rating by date and by game # to make sure I was steadily improving.
One thing I learned was that if you buy a brand new mech in the mech-store under the old system, my pilot rating would always take a dive until I start getting some of the more core skills like Radar Deprivation. Now because of the conversion and the ability to jump-start a new mech using banked in-game currency, I don’t experience a huge dip in pilot rating when I first get a new robot. This is a very interesting side effect of the new skill tree and the ability to rapidly put SP into a mech through XP, CBILLS or GXP. I find that for a non-ecm mech, levelling up to obtain some level of Radar Deprivation is the most important thing a Mechwarrior can do to improve their winning abilities.
Observations and Suggestions
There are a couple other phenomenon I have noticed that are related to group-play. As a tier 5 player solo-dropping into the Quick-Play queue, there are players learning what the game is about, and generally not able to coordinate as a group.
Teamwork
People don’t really understand that this game is about team-work, or they are shy, don’t have a proper microphone setup or come from an FPS background where teamwork is vastly different. Mechwarrior is a different beast. The team-work in the game is facilitated through the in-game VOIP system where you push a button to talk to other players on your team. You can also chat via text, or use the command wheel where simple commands are broadcast to the team. A well-coordinated team uses all of these tools to communicate and coordinate with each other to win games. A big problem for lower skilled, tier 5 players is that to get better and win more games, you must really be a part of a group and work together. When you group up with other people, even other people that are tier 5, the matchmaking system pairs you up with a completely different pool of players than you fight when you are solo-dropping. This is my experience in the game and it has been told to me by other players.
VOIP
Most well-coordinated teams use 3rd party VOIP solutions like Discord or Team-Speak to communicate within their team. This means that a squad of elite Mechwarriors is usually communicating in real-time in these 3rd party systems. When any group of 2-12 create a group in Mechwarrior, they then have the rest of their ranks filled out to form a 12-man team. When in group play, I have found that other group players will fill out your queues. This has a side effect of having many of these players communicating outside of the core VOIP system. This leads to much of the information that is needed to coordinate with the group to be shared outside of the MWO VOIP/TEXT/Command system when you are playing with the higher-level players. I think this phenomenon will continue, and there should be a way to allow for 3rd party integration into the VOIP system so that if a group wants to use Discord or Team-Speak to do comms, they can also jack in their feeds to the MWO system, or the MWO system could use a 3rd party service in general for comms. Whole communities are organically forming on these servers, and if you go to any of the top Twitch streamers, they tend to have their own Discord channels where fans, MechWarrior’s and devs all are communicating even when the game is not playing. Sometimes it just takes engagement of one players within the groups to use the MWO VOIP system and start dialogue. “Greetings Mechwarriors”, “Hows it going tonight”. In the beginning of the game, when everyone is waiting for each other to connect then hit the placebo READY button, I have found that time is so important to engage each other and create the vibe of the game. Usually if there is no-one willing to say hello, greetings, o7, or engage with each other, I can tell we are either dealing with people who are not paying attention to VOIP, have VOIP muted, or are on comms outside of the MWO VOIP. All the players need to engage with each other, hopefully make a bit of a plan, and attempt to perform team-work. If there are no comms in some fashion, 8/10 times you are going to just loose. Statistically, this means you are loosing pilot ranks, and you are going to continuously get worse and worse games.
LURMS
Games at the higher levels are completely different than games in a tier 4/5 solo queue. The weapons used, tactics employed and level of players are way different for a tier 1,2,3 vs. a tier 4/5. One of the biggest phenomenon’s is Long Range Missiles, or LRM’s, the dreaded “Lurm’s” and the dreaded “Lurm Boats”. There is an almost comedic bent to the hatred of Long Range Missiles in this game. The level of disdain that is put forth towards people who sit back behind their team-mates and lob 40-80 missiles at a time towards an enemy is legend. The problem is that the technique is so effective for lower tiered Mechwarriors, and you can stay alive long enough to get some satisfaction; so there is a positive feedback loop. Here’s the situation, you’re a new Mechwarrior and you get the snot kicked out of you every time you have walked around any of the maps. You are starting to understand cover and staying behind it, but you don’t understand the radar very well. You don’t understand the radar defeat aspects of the game, and you really want to damage some mechs while trekking across large swaths of snow-laden fields. You sit back behind your crew who is perpetually going to the right around the map (NASCAR Style), and lob Long Range Missiles from behind your team at every single target that anyone has the courtesy to hit R to give you a lock. Many times, this is an assault mech and everyone is begging you to take your armor up front and share in the exchange of armor game. In your mind, you are doing SOMETHING besides absorbing PPC/Gauss rounds to help better players win games. It feels better to be hitting armor, even if on the other end it is just an endless stream of toxic ‘I hate this game’ LURM rain. You are taking the largest meat shield and moving it to the back of the line where you are super susceptible to attack by lights wielding 6 small pulse lasers, 30 alpha, (thanks @TheB33F ++ snarky honor comment), shooting you in the a$$ 3 times, killing you with that 90 points of laser damage, and running off. When you are on the receiving end of raining LURMS, and you are losing armor all over your body and you know it took almost NO skill to strip your armor, an experienced player can get super frustrated. Anyone can understand that. Good Mechwarriors have figured out how to huddle around ECM mechs and level up the skill tree to obtain Radar Deprivation and Seismic Sensors. Close to within 200 meters of a LURM boat and destroy it, because even though it may have an 80 alpha strike at range and it can hit you from behind cover, it can’t hurt you if you are close to it, or it can’t see you on radar. The moral of that part of this story is that experienced players generally hate LURM boats and LURM boats are easy to defeat. To defeat them, use ECM or get radar dep and close to within 200m and kill them. LURM boats can be very useful for suppression fire when used in a coordinated fashion, especially when combined with a front-line light mech running NARC, and they are able to communicate. This reinforces that teamwork is what this game is about. Tactics that emphasize teamwork will win this game. Even LURMs can work if proper tactics are employed.
PILOT RANKING
Some comments on how I measured the Pilot Ranking. LowerTierMeasurement.PNG
I basically started by creating an arbitrary scale that went up and down every time I either gained or lost a level. I then started screen capturing the pilot rating section of my screen. You can see my measurement lines in these images. With this scale I started creating ratios of proposed pilot rating vs. the actual image scale. So to obtain pilot rating per inch (or per pixel): = [(Rating2-Rating1) / (Pixel2-Pixel1)] I used rulers in photoshop and had each of levels of my image on different layers in my photoshop document so I could take image measurements. I had taken these images on different computers, and had to scale each to overlay each other. There was error in this part of the measurement. There was another source of error where I date-stamped the images and on each of those dates, I had a range of pilot ratings. After a while I started to get better at creating a more uniform image for the measurement, taken at the exact same screen resolution. I also got better at picking a specific data point and putting that into the measurement so my scale got more accurate. This led me to believe that the scale was between 200-250. (233 is what excel tells me right now as an average). So that is the reality, the total scale is between 5*(200 to 250) so 1000 to 1250 as a total scale for the tiers assuming the entire pilot rating system is linear across the different tiers. From this I found out that I basically have to play 5 games to permanently go up one pilot tier rating, and I basically gain a pilot rating per day over the course of my career. My advice to new players is to learn to work as a team, try not to be a LURM boat, get Radar Deprivation as soon as you can and watch Twitch streams of good players to learn how good Mech pilots are doing it.
Other interesting stats from a tier 5 potato. Here was my map stats:
Interesting Game stats for game type: Game Type Game Stat Incursion 9% Escort 6% Assault 25% Domination 24% Skirmish 37%
It’s very obvious what is the most popular game types, and how the new modes of Incursion and Escort have generally not excited people. I think that is sad, as pretty much everyone treats every game like Skirmish, and calls the game modes ‘Mini-games’, especially the higher tiered lance commanders who show public disdain for these game modes.
o7
treggon (MWO) / tregtronics (twitch)
PDF Link of original text of this (I have edited online since)
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Atomic Hamster, on 29 May 2017 - 06:36 AM, said:
