Viktor Drake, on 01 August 2017 - 04:29 PM, said:
My problem is that is has become a common occurrence for me. To put the tinfoil hat on for a minute it is almost like there aren't enough high tiers on so the MM takes puts a couple Tier 1s on a team of Tier 4s and 5s and pits them against an entire team of Tier 2s and 3s and expects the Tier 1s to carry the Tier 4s and 5s. Problem is it doesn't work out that way because even the best player in this game needs a team he can at least somewhat rely on.
It's really hard to tell what is going on in pug matches, sometimes.
Because teamwork is so central, it could be as simple as the T1 players have fallen into such patterns of play with their 'mechs that they feel it's unnecessary for them to shift their playstyle to fit the team. Further, from my own experience, the Tiers seem to be a bit more of an experience gauge than an actual measure of skill. It's kind of hard to tell - since I don't understand how people could play in games where they consistently lose tier rating.
I am not really trying all that hard and I keep progressing through the tiers. I just don't feel like grinding hours on end in the game to get there faster (or exploiting the match score mechanic, either).
I think a lot of the really good players have shifted over to competitive play or faction play. They're running in their own cliques, so to speak, and that leaves the pugs short of players for T1 matches.
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In any case, taking the tinfoil hat back off, all I can say is that my gameplay experience since I hit Tier 1 is pretty abysmal. I have never been on so many consistently bad teams in my entire 5+ years of game play and I can't for the life of me figure out why. Hell my overall performance has been tanking so badly I am in freefall. With over 4k matches played I went from a 1.59 K/D to a 1.52 K/D in a blink of an eye and it is still falling. I can't blame it all on bad teams, though I do seem to get more than my fair share of them since I hit Tier 1. However I think part of the issue is skill, mine to be exact. I think while I am overall a pretty good player, I also realize there are a ton of excellent players that I pale in comparison to. I think it might be a situation of transitioning from being the best player in Tier 2 to being the worse player in Tier 1 hehe. It is kind of like being a very good Basketball Player in College but not being good enough to be more than 3rd string on a Pro team. You dominated in College but now your just warming the bench.
It could be... but I somewhat doubt it.
What you're probably seeing is the fact that this game snowballs hard as balls while coming up against more skilled players in each class. By the time people get to T1, they've pretty well optimized most of their designs and are very familiar with how to play them against various classes. The lights know just how to get in behind people and blast away at their rear armor or to poke just hard enough to get people to chase a squirrel. The mediums know where they need to be to put their weapon systems into play - and against what. The heavies know when to push and when not to push.
With the low server populations compounded with a mild skill gap and the speed at which teams can effectively swing a massive tonnage advantage against you... two or three players who synergize with each other in a T1 game can pretty much guarantee a roll over a similarly structured team that takes longer to find that synergy or doesn't have it at all.
Two laser vomit players with the same mentality working in synch with each other can pretty much strip half the weapon tonnage off of an assault mech on sight. Two or three instances of that spread across assaults and heavies... and the rest of their team just has to have halfway decent gunnery skills to guarantee a roll of the opposition.
I would wager it's not necessarily that you're less skilled than the players in T1 - it's that the players in T1 are playing a slightly different game. I'm not in T1 - so, obviously, grains of salt to be taken... but I'm on my way there... and the way I play is to generally pull tonnage off of the enemy team.
Which is the first thing I notice when I get into matches where I feel the other team is exceptionally skilled - my team starts losing a lot of side torso sections. Our team may still be largely alive... but the numbers are deceptive as the enemy team is full of largely fresh 'mechs with full suites of weapons while our team is down by roughly half of their effective firepower... so the push will go heavily in favor of the opposition.