16 replies to this topic

[WarringRose]

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I just had one of the most bizarre experiences in my admittedly short MWO experience. The setting: HPG Manifold, the game type: conquest. A Lance of allied assaults went to the resource point nearest their spawn and capped it before moving to the front. I noticed our assaults were way behind (heavies, mediums and lights were already at the front and had made contact) and told the assaults that our team needed them up front. They insulted me a bit and said that "the lance that stays together wins together". The enemy team had no such strategy, their assaults went straight to the front where they proceeded to push us without any opposition. By the time our assaults finally got into position we were an entire lance down. We lost the game and I mentioned the assaults had let our team down, they insulted me more and defended their falling behind to cap a point. Just wanted to share this, seemed like such a bizarre experience. It was like watching a football team defending their strategy of having their entire front line in the parking lot outside the stadium during a game. Maybe I was not as diplomatic as I could have been, but they argued with and insulted me so much... I just feel like it was a whole bad scene all around. What can I do in these circumstances?

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[Tarl Cabot]

WarringRose, on 10 November 2017 - 01:37 PM, said:

I just had one of the most bizarre experiences in my admittedly short MWO experience. The setting: HPG Manifold, the game type: conquest. A Lance of allied assaults went to the resource point nearest their spawn and capped it before moving to the front. I noticed our assaults were way behind (heavies, mediums and lights were already at the front and had made contact) and told the assaults that our team needed them up front. They insulted me a bit and said that "the lance that stays together wins together". The enemy team had no such strategy, their assaults went straight to the front where they proceeded to push us without any opposition. By the time our assaults finally got into position we were an entire lance down.

We lost the game and I mentioned the assaults had let our team down, they insulted me more and defended their falling behind to cap a point. Just wanted to share this, seemed like such a bizarre experience. It was like watching a football team defending their strategy of having their entire front line in the parking lot outside the stadium during a game. Maybe I was not as diplomatic as I could have been, but they argued with and insulted me so much... I just feel like it was a whole bad scene all around. What can I do in these circumstances?

Lets remove the special coding there, as it is difficult to read. And you did not note HOW the a lance of mechs were lost..

On that map and mode, there is no real wrong or right way to work things. That the assault team was passing the conquest point as they were heading for the gate exit from their LZ to cap that point because the silly fast lights/meds simply headed for the middle of the map, then it would have not taken long for the assaults to cap and move forward.

The team there could have "kited" instead of holding the ground but what likely happened is a part but not all of the team NASCAR'D, leaving the slower heavies behind or those who were not watching the minimap. Generally though assaults should be in the middle of the pack with the rest of the game providing screening cover. Now if the other 2 lances had done a tactical retreat the assault lance may have been able to come up on their rear instead of nascar'd leaving a portion of the team behind instead of providing cover fire, it might have turned out differently.

Again, the above may not be match how your match had evolved but that is generally what I see happen on that map, either as that team or the opponent.

Edited by Tarl Cabot, 10 November 2017 - 04:42 PM.

[Damnedtroll]

Leaving half the tonnage behind to get mauled by all the tonnage of the enemy is the standard recipe for disaster on a lot of quickplay game...

Better to stay with your assault, in conquest one or two very fast light can go wild alone for capping behind enemy line and help spreading the enemy but no more. Support the slow mech with ecm and ams, they will support you with armor and firepower.

Edited by Damnedtroll, 10 November 2017 - 04:59 PM.

[Ruccus]

While there are 'right' and 'wrong' things that players do in a MWO match, I generally find that doing the wrong thing as a team tends to work out better than doing the right thing alone.

[Koniving]

Capping or not, assault mechs cannot keep up with the faster mechs. It is up to the faster mechs to decide to either stay back with assaults for the line to push all at once, or to risk going off to capture points before reuniting to engage the enemy. A direct engagement should be avoided, initially, until at least 3 points are captured or you would lose regardless of how the fight turns out while the tickets, well, tick away.

This said I was in a match recently where me and a lance of lights rushed a lone assault mech... We obliterated him but in turn we found a number of other heavies and assaults bearing down on us. I issued the order to pull out. Two followed me, one did not. We swung around and tried to pick him up, again issuing the order to pull out and tried to give a distraction so he could run. He failed to do so. We made two more attempts and a fifth order to pull out due to superior odds. A moment later he died and said we abandoned him.

Sometimes players just don't go with the flow and are too eager to engage the enemy and just can't see when it is time to stop fighting.

Now this doesn't entitle anyone to insult anyone else, and after 2 mechs are on a point there's no additional benefit to having another mech there.

I do advise not being too eager to rush into battle as any mech. Set up the engagement as best as you can, don't just engage because you can. The assaults should have at least tried to get to the front line, but they are not required to rush to a bad front line as they can simply change where the front line is. If you find yourself in an identical situation, get the faster mechs to rush back to the assault mechs wherever they may be. Bring the fight to your allied assaults.

Edited by Koniving, 10 November 2017 - 06:15 PM.

[mistlynx4life]

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What can I do in these circumstances?

First, always stay positive in the comms. Pointing out negativity rarely works as well as it should - not a lot of pilots are open to constructive criticism in the middle of a loss, regardless of the reason. If you really feel like something needs to be said, preface with "I won't whine about it but I think we were too split up (or whatever)". You've already stated your business and if others want to argue, they can - but you've already said you aren't going to do that so you don't have to respond. Let their folly fill the comms as much as they like while you just rest easy knowing it'll be over soon. Second, if people really start to harass you just tell them you love them. If they continue, type it in All-Chat so both teams can see it. Tell them you're already in a relationship but are flattered. Screenshot it and post in on Facebook. Whatever you have to do to keep from giving in to the salt yourself. If they're just trying to be pushy jerks, they'll shut up or disconnect. If not, you might all have a chuckle and the tension gets lifted a bit.

Unless you're a gal - that may backfire. There are some real pieces of trash in this F2P game, hence first point of just letting it go. You don't want stalkers.

[The Basilisk]

WarringRose, on 10 November 2017 - 01:37 PM, said:

I just had one of the most bizarre experiences in my admittedly short MWO experience. The setting: HPG Manifold, the game type: conquest. A Lance of allied assaults went to the resource point nearest their spawn and capped it before moving to the front. I noticed our assaults were way behind (heavies, mediums and lights were already at the front and had made contact) and told the assaults that our team needed them up front. They insulted me a bit and said that "the lance that stays together wins together". The enemy team had no such strategy, their assaults went straight to the front where they proceeded to push us without any opposition. By the time our assaults finally got into position we were an entire lance down. We lost the game and I mentioned the assaults had let our team down, they insulted me more and defended their falling behind to cap a point. Just wanted to share this, seemed like such a bizarre experience. It was like watching a football team defending their strategy of having their entire front line in the parking lot outside the stadium during a game. Maybe I was not as diplomatic as I could have been, but they argued with and insulted me so much... I just feel like it was a whole bad scene all around. What can I do in these circumstances?

There is one basic rule:
Follow the friggin Atlas.

It's not run ahead or distribute all over the map or who charges first wins.

Even if it is conquest there are maybe two maps where you realy have to get caps first and then kill the enemy.
All other maps are too smal to make any difference. That is why you deathball up and kill the enemy instead of squirrel around like crazy.

And if your Assaults want to take a hike...well they are the assaults, you follow, if you don't it's your fault.

[Blindbeard the Pirate]

mistlynx4life, on 10 November 2017 - 09:24 PM, said:

Unless you're a gal - that may backfire. There are some real pieces of trash in this F2P game, hence first point of just letting it go. You don't want stalkers.

Telling people you love them still totally works, it's just sarcastic as **** and doesn't actually work to diffuse anything. It changes the topic to lots of boys shouting "GIRL GIRL HOLY **** AHH GIRL" half of the time, which after a while just feels sort of neutral but it's still sort of gross. The amount of friend requests and the level of absurd commentary you get just for having a relatively high pitched voice, even if you basically sound like a nasally bird half of the time. Letting things go, or just taking nothing seriously, totally the best advice!

With that said, I play every weight class and an enormous variety of mechs. Most of the time it's worthwhile to just support the assaults when they're doing something absurd like that, unless you're in a light. Insulting them won't really do anything, they need to learn those lessons on their own, and if there's one thing most guys hate it's being called on their crap. Yes, they should have been up with the team, but the team often times straight up disregards assaults and their lower speeds and so they're a million miles behind in the early game, and the assaults are left without any support.

The most valuable thing you can learn to do in a team-based game is adjust to the flow of the game. What I usually see happen on maps with a centralized hill like some locations in polar highlands, HPG, etc, is basically that the faster mediums and heavies will like straight up nascar around the hill. The assaults will either have to choose to fortify an existing location without their team's support and pick off as many of the remaining mechs as possible, or get left behind, keep walking, and eventually die in the order of lowest speed. The games where people don't do that, and either let the assaults utilize their armour, or cover for them and try to keep their weapons firing for as long as possible tend to be the most successful.

Although, that sort of implies that the assaults weren't doing something silly like trying to jumpjet up to the top of manifold or standing out in the middle of the abyss getting shot from multiple angles and the center platform. In those cases, well, y'can't really do anything. They're going to corpse it, and supporting them would be equally suicidal.

[Burning2nd]

what YOU can do is learn how to pilot A light mech and actually be someone on your team,

having all your faith in your weight that spawns in charlie lance is a bad idea...

You assume that those are your most valuable players, you are wrong... you should have just told them to shell some armor b4 they die,

and i dont accept the term NASCAR .... what your really saying when you cry about people moving and shooting is you can hit **** with out stopping

Edited by Burning2nd, 11 November 2017 - 01:16 AM.

[Blindbeard the Pirate]

Burning2nd, on 11 November 2017 - 01:16 AM, said:

what YOU can do is learn how to pilot A light mech and actually be someone on your team,

If this is in reference to me and the 'unless you're in a light' comment, I'll totally have you know that my favourite lights wear paper machete for armour and I actively override kill myself in every game. It'll teach those nasty middling weight classes to pretend I exist! Heck yeah! Zero damage! Explosions! Why would you even pilot a mech when you could just be an elemental, or be the pilot dropping the airstrike? It's nonsense I say.

If this is in reference to the game WarringRose played, I don't think they explicitly named their weight class, and being needlessly hostile seems a little ridiculous, but to each their own. Looking them up, they mostly play mediums and heavies. If we filter your current leaderboard statistics this season to just lights, you've played 92 games at 0.55 kdr with a 0.92 win loss ratio. The player of the game in question has double those statistics, although we don't know their tier. "Who are you to say that?" is a fallacious argument, but sometimes it has merit, because just saying learn to play doesn't accomplish anything for someone who's wondering what went wrong with their drop.

All I'm getting at is, if you've been the annihilator, king crap, atlas, mauler, super nova, dire whale, etc, you've probably felt it more than enough times. Being dead because your team is by majority running 80-94kph while you move 46.7 feels pretty ****** when the majority of the time it's an ultra-common line of sight your team, if they were playing well, could have suppressed and would actively have done more damage for doing so. You can't shoot through walls on an assault, and you can't kill **** when you're dead because your greatest aspects emphasize your armour and firepower, not your speed.

It's not about putting your faith in them as players, it's about not needlessly sacrificing your distraction as another player attempting to do the most damage they can. Even tier 1 has a lot of really middling players, people who are straight up playing ineffective builds, and players who just didn't notice a shift in the front line of combat. But in the example, it sounds like they got to the middle, pushed around, and the assaults either hadn't made it quite yet or were a small unit doing something absurd. Coms could have been better utilized, and both parties need to work on aspects of positive teamwork. I, personally, find it to be better to assume that four assaults aren't all made out of potato with glass for bones but it does actively happen sometimes.

[Burning2nd]

why dont you go back to season 6-9... when i gave a fk lol

i dont play anymore to play.. ive got what i need

[Daggett]

As others said it's the assaults who lead the way. Even if they do something stupid, you support them doing so. You can of cause communicate with 'em and politely suggest a different approach. But if they don't comply you have to deal with that and make the best out of it.

So when a lance thinks it's a good idea to engage without assault-support it's their own fault. It would have been much better to cap the point where the assaults were going to and then attack with 'em together.

In my eyes the assaults in your team did everything right (except insulting you of cause). Its not smart to ignore a cap right in front of them when no one else is going for it. It would have been a different story if they try to cap a remote point, but in your case i would have done the same as them.

Edited by Daggett, 11 November 2017 - 05:23 PM.

[mistlynx4life]

I'll simply add that the number one strategy for winning Conquest is kills, except when it's caps. Someone will shout at you before you lose which one it was supposed to be. I typically don't recommend my Charlie Lance bother capping what's close to them either because I don't want them to stop moving - get right out there (especially on Manifold where the parking lot analogy really fits) and let Lights do the capping.

[Insanity09]

Lately, I've been thinking about the oft repeated statement "if your team keeps losing, maybe you are the problem". For obvious reasons.

And I have to say... while that might be true, it certainly isn't always the case.

There are plenty of times, honestly, when the team as a whole chooses to do something stupid. You can't truly be held individually responsible for that, though you are, ofc, part of the team.

Mob rule and group-think don't always get you where you want to go. You can try to cajole or order people into doing something smarter, but it is often a losing battle, just like the matches with those teams.

Spoiler

The scenarios below are based on things I've seen all too regularly. I've been on the giving and receiving end of most of these. They aren't meant to be exact cases.

I've certainly had matches, too many, where I turn the wrong corner or crest the wrong hill and get insta-gibbed, or nearly so. I willingly admit sometimes I fail to carry my weight. Not typically, thank goodness.
However...

I've seen teams walk straight along a very open area of a map, getting sniped and lrm'd the whole way, and not trying to move out of the danger zone.

Teams sometimes get this idea that hiding is the best plan, they bottle themselves up until the strikes start falling all over them. Even when they start taking fire, they often seem to just want to curl up even further. (follow the assaults, okay, and when they stop moving for no reason?)

An enemy push (or direction & location of movement?) is announced, sometimes a uav gets popped to show where it is happening. The intel gets completely ignored and without some response to the push, it succeeds overwhelmingly.
The really bad ones are where half the team runs off, and a few folks try and counter the push. Ugh. One or the other can work, but not both at once. (I admit that when I'm hearing the push report, I often try to position to meet it well, and in focusing heavily on that, I fail to notice how much of my team has bugged out. My bad?)

More recently, despite protests from several team members that they had short range brawly builds, vocal people insisted on wandering around on the exposed top of rubellite. Most shrugged, and as advice above suggested, went along with the team.
Result: team gets shot from long range, mostly without being able to respond, loses badly. I've seen/heard similar on other maps.

Quick mechs/scouts ranging far get jumped by a sizable fraction of the enemy team (2-3 mechs more than the scouts). The rest of the team with the ambushed scouts has a numerical advantage where the bulk of their forces are... but instead of being able to use that, they die so fast the scouts are still alive and practically alone. (I always find that baffling.)

[Mercworks]

Assault mechs don't cap. A second that they're spending on the cap point is a second of DPS you're losing and a second of armor that some light or medium is taking damage they can't afford. If the Assaults do something stupid like wandering off, then the team has to follow them or they'll get wrecked by the enemy assaults.

[Daggett]

Mercworks, on 01 December 2017 - 07:12 AM, said:

Assault mechs don't cap. A second that they're spending on the cap point is a second of DPS you're losing and a second of armor that some light or medium is taking damage they can't afford. If the Assaults do something stupid like wandering off, then the team has to follow them or they'll get wrecked by the enemy assaults.

While i agree in general there are exceptions. It happens often enough that a team wins the fight but loses the cap race. To prevent that it can make sense to sacrify a few seconds of potential DPS if -and only if- there is a cap on their way and no one else is going for it. Of cause this should not happen, but you know.. pugs...

Lights have the speed to take care of themselves and are often not in range of an assaults armor anyway while mediums and heavies should simply not engage and take damage why the assaults are still advancing. On most maps it's not gamebreaking if the assault lance needs a few seconds more, it sometimes only changes the area where the fighting will happen. The really important thing however is that everyone supports the assaults and that no assault wanders off alone to do something stupid like taking a detour to cap a remote point.

Edited by Daggett, 01 December 2017 - 08:03 AM.

[arcana75]

WarringRose, on 10 November 2017 - 01:37 PM, said:

I just had one of the most bizarre experiences in my admittedly short MWO experience. The setting: HPG Manifold, the game type: conquest. A Lance of allied assaults went to the resource point nearest their spawn and capped it before moving to the front. I noticed our assaults were way behind (heavies, mediums and lights were already at the front and had made contact) and told the assaults that our team needed them up front. They insulted me a bit and said that "the lance that stays together wins together". The enemy team had no such strategy, their assaults went straight to the front where they proceeded to push us without any opposition. By the time our assaults finally got into position we were an entire lance down. We lost the game and I mentioned the assaults had let our team down, they insulted me more and defended their falling behind to cap a point. Just wanted to share this, seemed like such a bizarre experience. It was like watching a football team defending their strategy of having their entire front line in the parking lot outside the stadium during a game. Maybe I was not as diplomatic as I could have been, but they argued with and insulted me so much... I just feel like it was a whole bad scene all around. What can I do in these circumstances?

So... the assault lance went to cap, perhaps it was nearest to them compared to the rest of the team. And while the assault lance was pre-occupied, the other 8 in the team went ahead into the fray and got crushed by 12 opponents.

The mistake was the 8 players not following the assault lance or waiting for the assault lance to be ready for the fight. You do not go into the fight when your muscle isn't ready.

And another thing, when your assaults start charging (or whatever you call a 50kph charge), bloody follow them. And I don't mean follow them by hiding behind them, but be their 3rd arm, an extension of firepower. An assault mech is the spiked shieldman with a sword, you are the spearman beside him and abit behind. And if you're a heavy mech, once in a while shuffle forward to take some damage so that the assault can save some armour and tank more, doing the back and forth shuffle as you engage enemies.

Sure, sometimes assaults go YOLO, but you still follow them. Sure you might go down with them, but it'll bound to be a fun brawl.