43 replies to this topic

[Alexander of Macedon]

ScrubLord1, on 26 August 2017 - 03:10 AM, said:

Here's the underlying problem. Most pug teams don't know how to maintain cap control.

And please specify this is for Quickplay Conquest only. Prioritizing kills over caps in Faction Conquest is basically setting up your team to lose.

This is precisely the problem. When you get down to 3v2 or whatever and the enemy team has 4 caps with 600 points, it's too ******* late.

[Paigan]

Conquest, at least in (solo) Quickplay, has a simple rule:

First kill, then cap.
There is usually more than enough time to cap everything back once the enemies are neutralized.

The other way around, focussing on capping and putting the fight at a secondary priority, splits the team too much, gets everyone killed and then the enemy happily caps and wins before the time runs out.

So like 99% of the times, conquest is just skirmish with a little side quest.
The 1% cases where early focussing on caps and some gambling with the last mech really comes through can plain and simply be ignored.

Sadly, a lot of players (again: at least in solo Quickplay) don't get how it works.
It's a good example why there CANNOT be more complex modes: even 99% skirmish with 1% side quests is to complex to grasp for the average MWO player.

Edited by Paigan, 26 August 2017 - 03:59 AM.

[Savage Wolf]

The leave QP to the average MWO player that cannot grasp the concept of objectives and make a bucket for the rest of us where we can then make the game modes work with a focus on said objectives. Then everyone should be happy.

It was meant to be FW, but we all know how bad that turned out.

[Mcgral18]

Savage Wolf, on 25 August 2017 - 11:34 PM, said:

And that's the problem. Any good objective game mode requires you to do both, all the time. Like Conquest does in FW.

No, in MWO objectives force movement

That's their purpose
To prevent camping one location (of which Strikes are also strong at)


Conquest does this the best, because you cannot effectively hold 3 locations against a strong push, unless there's poor map design (think ERLL based team just shooting 3 caps from one location, making it impossible to cap)

[Savage Wolf]

Mcgral18, on 26 August 2017 - 08:14 AM, said:

No, in MWO objectives force movement

That's their purpose
To prevent camping one location (of which Strikes are also strong at)

Conquest does this the best, because you cannot effectively hold 3 locations against a strong push, unless there's poor map design (think ERLL based team just shooting 3 caps from one location, making it impossible to cap)

Movement is also good. Definately. However take for instance Incursion. Delivering fuel cells back and forth does include a lot of movement, but a lot of it is in safety behind your team. It's the most boring job since you are more or less out of the action for a while.

Again conquest is good because it's movement, but to places on the map where the enemy also wants to go. You are not safe, you are still likely to end in combat.

[qS Sachiel]

Savage Wolf, on 26 August 2017 - 10:50 AM, said:

Movement is also good. Definately. However take for instance Incursion. Delivering fuel cells back and forth does include a lot of movement, but a lot of it is in safety behind your team. It's the most boring job since you are more or less out of the action for a while.

Again conquest is good because it's movement, but to places on the map where the enemy also wants to go. You are not safe, you are still likely to end in combat.

Take a stormcrow, PB or other even a COM and go hunt the node runners.
Makes for a fun mix up of regular play.

[Prototelis]

Counterpoint:

Taking caps early on will sometimes force the enemy to split, making clean up really easy.

[InfinityBall]

CraneArmy, on 25 August 2017 - 10:45 PM, said:

I'll add. I dont even think caps matter until a team breaks 350-400 points.

Yikes, you're bad at math

Anyway, yes, go get the first caps, then feel free to fight, and the lights can break off to cap if the situation warrants it. I've virtually never seen a sub-97 mech try to lumber off out of combat to cap when it wasn't essential

Edited by InfinityBall, 26 August 2017 - 09:02 PM.

[Kin3ticX]

Savage Wolf, on 26 August 2017 - 04:04 AM, said:

The leave QP to the average MWO player that cannot grasp the concept of objectives and make a bucket for the rest of us where we can then make the game modes work with a focus on said objectives. Then everyone should be happy.

It was meant to be FW, but we all know how bad that turned out.

Its not that people cant grasp objectives, its simply the case that its impossible to take the meat grinder out of mwo. All modes are fundamentally skirmish and all roles are damage roles. Trying to roleplay as a stock infotek raven-3l for example is going to be a waste of a light.

[Dee Eight]

On the two largest maps, Polar and Grim Plexus... capping is the primary concern all the time. The maps are just too large to regain a tickets (conquest points) deficit even if you wipe the enemy team in a theta fight zone, if the enemy actually got all the other caps and built up a couple hundred tickets lead... you're not going to recover from that even if you have four pirates banes left intact to run for the caps. Each conquest point awards the controller 1 point per second... so four points = 4 per second. If Team A all dies but gets to oh, 500 tickets and controls epsilon, kappa, gamma and sigma and Team B has 6 mechs left consisting of 1 light, 2 mediums, 1 heavy and 2 assaults... and only 300 tickets... even if they split in opposite directions from near theta...they MIGHT get to kappa and epsilon in 60 seconds. By which time team A will have earned another 240 tickets...

[Savage Wolf]

qS Sachiel, on 26 August 2017 - 07:24 PM, said:

Take a stormcrow, PB or other even a COM and go hunt the node runners.
Makes for a fun mix up of regular play.

A stormcrow is way too slow for that. But maybe a light hunting a light. But that just means two mechs less in the fight.

[Savage Wolf]

Kin3ticX, on 26 August 2017 - 09:25 PM, said:

Its not that people cant grasp objectives, its simply the case that its impossible to take the meat grinder out of mwo. All modes are fundamentally skirmish and all roles are damage roles. Trying to roleplay as a stock infotek raven-3l for example is going to be a waste of a light.

I agree. The reward and scoring system is mostly to blame for this. It highly encourages playing everything as skirmish and even teaches that you don't have to win. As long as you have good damage and kills, you are still rewarded and you still go up in rank even if you lost your team the match by ignoring the objective.

[Y E O N N E]

Savage Wolf, on 27 August 2017 - 12:11 AM, said:

I agree. The reward and scoring system is mostly to blame for this. It highly encourages playing everything as skirmish and even teaches that you don't have to win. As long as you have good damage and kills, you are still rewarded and you still go up in rank even if you lost your team the match by ignoring the objective.

It has literally nothing to do with the scoring. It has everything to do with the fact that it's easier to cap with less enemies on the field, and it's easier to make there be less enemies if you have more guns focusing fire than they do.

As long as this game is a single-life, slo-mo version of Counter-Strike, killing the OpFor will always be priority No. 1.

[meteorol]

Savage Wolf, on 27 August 2017 - 12:11 AM, said:

I agree. The reward and scoring system is mostly to blame for this. It highly encourages playing everything as skirmish and even teaches that you don't have to win. As long as you have good damage and kills, you are still rewarded and you still go up in rank even if you lost your team the match by ignoring the objective.

It actually isn't. People like winning. Focusing kills over caps wins conquest matches in QP. In 9 of 10 matches, ignoring the objective wins the match, which is a direct result of MWO not having respawns in QP.

I don't know of a single game that actually has a conquest mode without respawns beside MWO. I'm not exactly sure which game is to be credited for making conquest a popular gamemode in PVP multiplayer games (Battlefield 1942 maybe?) but all of them have respawns.

You know where caps actually matter in MWO? In faction play. Why? Because there are a limited number of respawns, and the vast majority of teams won't be able to kill 48 enemy mechs before the tickets run out if they ignore all caps. Objectives being irrelevant and all gamemodes being skirmish is a direct result of MWO not using respawns. Whether that is a good thing or not is not for debate here, but reality is that we will never have anything but skirmish in QP as long as PGI sticks to no respawns.

Edited by meteorol, 27 August 2017 - 01:02 AM.

[Savage Wolf]

meteorol, on 27 August 2017 - 01:01 AM, said:

It actually isn't. People like winning. Focusing kills over caps wins conquest matches in QP. In 9 of 10 matches, ignoring the objective wins the match, which is a direct result of MWO not having respawns in QP.

I don't know of a single game that actually has a conquest mode without respawns beside MWO. I'm not exactly sure which game is to be credited for making conquest a popular gamemode in PVP multiplayer games (Battlefield 1942 maybe?) but all of them have respawns.

You know where caps actually matter in MWO? In faction play. Why? Because there are a limited number of respawns, and the vast majority of teams won't be able to kill 48 enemy mechs before the tickets run out if they ignore all caps. Objectives being irrelevant and all gamemodes being skirmish is a direct result of MWO not using respawns. Whether that is a good thing or not is not for debate here, but reality is that we will never have anything but skirmish in QP as long as PGI sticks to no respawns.

I know because I was talking about an objective play queue where the objectives actually matter. Which currently is FW.

But even then the scoring and rewards system is part of the problem. I've seen way too many teams throw away victory when it could be gained through the objectives only to see the team turn around and return to the meat grinder. People refusing to cap in any game modes. And I've also seen this in FW. Not to mention that it also encourages farming.

So if we truly want objective play in MWO we need to both fix the game modes but also the scoring and rewards system to actually focus on winning and the game modes focused on winning through objectives.

There are so many systems in MWO geared towards skirmish and they are all part of the problem.

[Tier5 Kerensky]

A dead light says: "lol assult capping".


I really dislike conquest, because so little, and the right mechs, pay attention to the caps. Of course it makes sense for them, as the game rewards individual performance aka damage so much over winning.

I'm no expert but I really don't like the mode.

[CraneArmy]

Lykaon, on 26 August 2017 - 01:40 AM, said:

This is assuming that the end result of the battle is your team has more than one or two badly mauled mechs left and you're only concern may be a solo enemy light mech.

But if the opposition takes caps and your team ignores caps and you do not convincingly win the attrition fight with enough mechs to uncap and retake the enemy caps you lost the game dispite winning the fight.

Since an effective murderball does not leave it's assault mechs trailing behind to be picked off a team has more than enough time to cap two points and regroup with the assault lance (as long as charlie lance doesn't go full potato and decide to split and cap).

From second one of a conquest match Charlie lance should be moving towards the most likely point of enemy contact. Bravo Lance should be forming up with Charlie ASAP and Alpha lance ( the fast lance) has capped and reformed with the assault lance well before the assaults have reached the point of contact.

And there is the added possibility that your opposition will waste resources uncapping your starting two cap points, diverting mech resources from the fight and further enforcing a numbers advantage.

It is always worth while to hold two cap points in conquest as long as you deployed your mech resources intelligently to get them.

if you are crippled to this extreme after going into a 12v11 or potentially much stronger power play. you are loosing because your opponents are better pilots.

If we look at your hypothetical and the blue team goes into this same fight with the same enemy 11v11 instead of 12v11, blue team still gets crushed and looses anyway. I could add that "it is fine" if lights take back caps early in the game (ie: before 14:15ish), because qp moves slow, teams are uncoordinated so it doesnt really matter... but it doesnt help you win, its for c-bills.

All the other scenarios you pointed out only matter, at all, if the game comes down to a cap loss which I have only ever seen if teams ignore caps beyond 450 (350 is playing conservative, its very possible to win by starting to decap as late as 650 or later depending on the scenario and the map)

We could spend days laying out stipulations, scenarios and situations where you can carve out an alternative win condition here and there, each for a very narrow contingency. Almost NONE of which will help the average player to win a majority of his/her matches. We could go into comp mode specific, fw specific, map specific, we can talk about mind games bleh....
I'm not interested about every edge case. Its not relevant to why teams loose conquest in 19 out of 20 games,
19 out of 20 conquest games are decided by who gets +2 kills first
if you cant do that with a numbers advantage, it is because the other team played the engagement MUCH better than you.
In conquest games that are not decided by who gets the first +2 kills first the vast majority of them are decided by who played the cap game better AFTER the first team hit 350 tickets.

To reiterate, the simple rule for anyone in pugs:
get 2 kills up before 350 tickets
secondary:
when the first team hits 350 tickets 1 or 2 lights can think about about normalizing ticket bleed and must start their first decap before 450 tickets.

The games that arnt decided within these win conditions are all "what if?"s, we could spend forever enumerating the edge cases for that 1 in 200 game when one of them might matter, or we could just remember 2 rules and win because we are better pilots than the red team.

tl;dr - most conquest games are decided by who plays the skirmish better. and teams that win the skirmish but loose the game almost always loose because they are greedy, didnt take the initiative or lost track of the ticket count

[Thorqemada]

I remember the 8 vs 8 days when i often wandered off to cap nodes in my Anti-Light Medium CN9-A.
I had many 1 on 1 and 1 on 2 fights and the hitreg was almost as bad on my Mech as it was on the Light Mechs so fiights taking up minutes of Combat Action.

Sometimes i met Mediums or Heavys and i liked these fights also - most times being able to come out on top and cap was a pretty good insurance if the main fight got lost.

Ofc PGI nerfed that at one point - i mean weapons as well as capping bcs SSRM got nerfed and became less a threat to Lights and capping got nerfed in the way it took insane minutes to grab one node and conquest became Skirmish 1.2...(Assault being Skirmish 1.1).

Much later they reduced capping times and conquest became somewhat better but with 12 vs 12 and small maps it most often still is Skirmish 1.2.1...

On a few of the big maps capping indead counts...

But at least conquest breaks up a deadlock situation as it forces movement at some point in a static game...

I like conquest still the best!

Edited by Thorqemada, 27 August 2017 - 09:21 AM.

[Quicksilver Aberration]

Yeonne Greene, on 27 August 2017 - 12:55 AM, said:

As long as this game is a single-life, slo-mo version of Counter-Strike, killing the OpFor will always be priority No. 1.

That isn't quite true, but any game mode that didn't make killing the OpFor priority 1 would be pretty crappy and induce much rage about how you aren't able to shoot stompy robots. I just wish more people were accepting of that.

[Y E O N N E]

Quicksilver Kalasa, on 27 August 2017 - 12:34 PM, said:

That isn't quite true, but any game mode that didn't make killing the OpFor priority 1 would be pretty crappy and induce much rage about how you aren't able to shoot stompy robots. I just wish more people were accepting of that.

Okay, they could make win-conditions that can be obtained faster and more easily than killing the enemy, but as you say...that would be crappy.