122 replies to this topic

[Xetelian]

Requiemking, on 09 December 2017 - 11:54 PM, said:

Not necessarily. Brawlers can actually do very well on Canyon. They have to know what they are doing, you know, such as lurking the canyons like a minotaur and killing any Lights/ Flankers they encounter.

I'm only tier 2 and I don't watch comp games, besides tonights, because people I was playing with kept referencing it so I tuned in, so I'm not an expert, but I seriously doubt you can do very well with a brawler at all.


1. Not all the Canyons are reachable by roaming around below, you have to come up at some point to get some places and then you die.
2. Even if you could roam the entire map with a brawler build, unless you bring 8 brawlers and roam in groups of more than 2 you will run into the enemy team and get focused down.


I run brawler builds, 99% of my mechs are brawlers and I have 104 mechs, only one has ERPPCs and I have only a couple with ERLLs. I can assure you through the 10,000 games I've played that closing the distance on most maps is very difficult without taking a moderate amount of damage or even die before you get in range to fire SRMs.

Mcgral18, on 09 December 2017 - 11:27 PM, said:

If there were more maps which weren't regarded as bad....

Regarded isn't the word.
If there were more maps that weren't bad at conquest you'd see more maps get placed in the final selection.

Like Crimson...for example, which is also stupid broken for domination too.

Edited by Xetelian, 10 December 2017 - 12:26 AM.

[Xiphias]

Requiemking, on 09 December 2017 - 11:54 PM, said:

Not necessarily. Brawlers can actually do very well on Canyon. They have to know what they are doing, you know, such as lurking the canyons like a minotaur and killing any Lights/ Flankers they encounter.

Brawling becomes exponentially harder against good teams. The worse your opponent the more effective brawling is. Against a mediocre opponent you absolutely can brawl for an easy win. When you get up against better teams the focus fire and positioning improves to the point where brawling becomes less and less viable.

As someone who has brawled a lot in comp, it will work up through about MRBC Div B, once you get to Div A teams generally can counter it. Against a good team it's pretty much impossible to brawl on Canyon. The reason for this is that while you can hide in in the canyons they will obstruct your movement. If you crest the canyon you become an easy target to get focused down and killed. A good team will spread out instead of deathball making it difficult for the brawlers to engage the whole body which gives the ranged mechs time to pick off the brawlers.

In a 2/2/2/2 match on canyon a team like 228BW/EON/EMP will smash a brawl team, brawling just isn't a viable strat.

Here's an example from MRBC Div B where brawl (my team) loses against range on canyon. It does a good job of showing the challenges of brawling on canyon and why it wouldn't work against a team like EMP.

https://youtu.be/g-Bc74cKKGo?t=1h59m4s

[lazorbeamz]

Xiphias, on 10 December 2017 - 12:45 AM, said:

Brawling becomes exponentially harder against good teams. The worse your opponent the more effective brawling is. Against a mediocre opponent you absolutely can brawl for an easy win. When you get up against better teams the focus fire and positioning improves to the point where brawling becomes less and less viable.

As someone who has brawled a lot in comp, it will work up through about MRBC Div B, once you get to Div A teams generally can counter it. Against a good team it's pretty much impossible to brawl on Canyon. The reason for this is that while you can hide in in the canyons they will obstruct your movement. If you crest the canyon you become an easy target to get focused down and killed. A good team will spread out instead of deathball making it difficult for the brawlers to engage the whole body which gives the ranged mechs time to pick off the brawlers.

In a 2/2/2/2 match on canyon a team like 228BW/EON/EMP will smash a brawl team, brawling just isn't a viable strat.

Here's an example from MRBC Div B where brawl (my team) loses against range on canyon. It does a good job of showing the challenges of brawling on canyon and why it wouldn't work against a team like EMP.

https://youtu.be/g-Bc74cKKGo?t=1h59m4s

Well i got to say they need to nerf lasers like 2fold to start seeing any brawling. What looked approx equal on paper is majorly imbalanced in comp.

Edited by lazorbeamz, 10 December 2017 - 12:54 AM.

[Weeny Machine]

Asym, on 09 December 2017 - 08:28 PM, said:

OK, I'm not a "gamer" just a retired old horse soldier............what a freaking waste of time. the people that watched with me gave up after the first match and turned basketball on. Less than professional... Several forum pundits could have done better and that is not a joke; I've watched you'all play. I've seen better tactics in PUG matches.

I DO NOT ever want to hear about air strikes from this forum ever again as a bad thing because the best of our best went off the rails. You can't have two standards. And Streaks !

If this is our BEST............well, I never want to hear another "potato" comment ever again. No real tactics. No real drop deck innovation. Same old-same old. Status quo. The same maps because they are "linear" and "game-able".....no more..... Finals shouyld be on virgin maps that have NOT BEEN PLAYED..... You want to claim the best, well, lets see who can crow on a virgin map......

Sorry, so disappointed. Such a waste of time and everything they did refutes everything I've read in this forum for months..... We can't live in two unique and completely seperate worlds and survive........

Jup, actually one should sticky this thread for future reference.

The Lighthouse, on 09 December 2017 - 09:50 PM, said:

Well, that Commando pretty much cleaned the house. Now this may be the highlight.

Volumetric re-sizing for the win hahaha

Poor 35t lights, though

Edited by Bush Hopper, 10 December 2017 - 01:52 AM.

[Tarogato]

Asym, on 09 December 2017 - 08:28 PM, said:

I kinda don't understand this post.

Quote

Less than professional... Several forum pundits could have done better and that is not a joke; I've watched you'all play. I've seen better tactics in PUG matches.

Are you talking about the casters, or the teams that played?

If you put the forum pundits (whatever that term means in this context) up against any of the top three teams, I guarantee you they would get rolled in every single match. And that's even ignoring that teams like Black Watch, EON, and EmP have cohesion as a whole. Individual players and PUGs cannot make up for the team cohesion that these teams have built literally over years.

Quote

I DO NOT ever want to hear about air strikes from this forum ever again as a bad thing because the best of our best went off the rails. You can't have two standards. And Streaks !

Huh? Everybody agrees strikes are a bad thing for the game. What do you mean "off the rails"? And where are you seeing a double-standard?

Strikes get spammed because they strip armour. They're strong. Very strong. You can't compete at a high level without spamming them. What really is their purpose though? To flush out players that are poking from the same spot over and over again? To prevent stagnant pokefests? Well, even with up to 32 strikes in a match, people are still calling the finals a boring stagnant pokefest. So if it is the role of strikes to prevent this, then they've absolutely failed their job, despite being game-winningly powerful. So what really is their purpose, other than to be a low skill, damage farming, C-Bill sink?

Quote

If this is our BEST............well, I never want to hear another "potato" comment ever again. No real tactics. No real drop deck innovation. Same old-same old. Status quo.

Huh? How do you think these three teams got to the top if they don't have real tactics or innovation?

Every single player has a role. Individual mechs play at individual positions, all working together to control the map so that the enemy cannot get a cap or engagement advantage. It's actually very intricate and involved. If you brought in even one alternate player that hasn't practiced a role with the team, the whole thing could fall apart if that player leaves a gap for the enemy to exploit and leverage an advantage, it's really quite delicate.

And talk about drop deck innovation... we're seeing EmP use Mist Lynxes in a glass cannon role. Generally, it's a terrible mech. But EmP knows that as long as the enemy is wary that bigger mechs are bigger threats, the Mist Lynx, which is incredibly delicate, will be ignored, and it will be able to leverage the fact that it has possibly the highest DPS of any light mech in the game. This doesn't work if you don't have other mechs to support the MLX and be the more attractive target, and indeed when people started focusing EmP's MLXs expressly, EmP switched to Wolfhounds.

Proton in the floating UAC2 Dragon. Very rarely seen on the comp scene before now, it's pretty much a debut.

ACH with 1x cERLL for harassing? WLF with 3x ERLL? Those are builds that really haven't been seen before at all. It's new. An innovative tactic.

We also saw other mechs that are pretty rare to comp, like the Commando and Executioner. The cERPPC Warhawk is actually pretty novel as well - we're used to seeing cLPL on that mech, or MAD-IIC or SNV in its place. There's a lot of stuff going on here.

The only thing we didn't see a lot of was brawling. Which I'm glad for, because two teams just rushing at each other is pretty much always a snoozefest, imo. I like to watch the map control play out on a large scale, and long trading matches allow plenty of opportunity for tension to build and individual plays can have a much more impressive impact.

Quote

The same maps because they are "linear" and "game-able"

Actually, we always see the same two maps because they are very balanced maps. Canyon and Tourmaline are both rather strat-indifferent. You have a lot of options on them, ranging from brawl to the longest of ERLL. So they are favourites on the comp scene and get picked and played a lot. It's no surprise that all the top teams gravitate toward these two maps in the finals because they are the two maps they are most familiar with. Why practice strats for HPG if you know the other team is just going to ban HPG? Much better to spend your time preparing maps that the other team is less likely to ban, so that you don't get screwed in map selection from the get-go.

Quote

Finals shouyld be on virgin maps that have NOT BEEN PLAYED..... You want to claim the best, well, lets see who can crow on a virgin map......

Nobody wants to go into a competition without knowing the maps. If you lose, it's very easy to blame the map for being imbalanced, or for the enemy picking a better strat by sheer luck, even on a perfectly balanced map. Because you don't know what a good strat is going in. You have to research and develop strats. Otherwise the winner may as well be decided by RNG.

Quote

everything they did refutes everything I've read in this forum for months..... We can't live in two unique and completely seperate worlds and survive........

Wh.... how? I .... hwuh?

[Y E O N N E]

Brain Cancer, on 09 December 2017 - 09:36 PM, said:

The current implementation stops it from being any kind of counter whatsoever to poke-a-robot. A weapon that literally doesn't exist in the meta as an effective weapon system. A weapon that pays for it's guided capacity by being stopped by rocks and whatever other of the multiple counters that exist by simply playing the game sensibly.

FFS, we just saw someone doing a UAC/2 build in a Dragon and winning the whole thing. And a bloody Streak boat in the finals. You will never, ever see an LRM boat, or even LRMs used with a hope of success, in comp play at the level where nobody messes around. Because they're straight up underpowered, overcountered, and perform no useful function that cannot be done better by another weapon at skilled levels of play.

No weapon should be useless at the top. If they are, the weapon is improperly statted for it's job. If it has no useful job, it requires one or the developers have failed at their job- making as much of the game's gear useful for play (and at this point, the single heat sink is probably the only one that deserves uselessness).

The only weapon completely useless at the top is the LRM, as you point out. Judicious use of ATMs acquitted themselves fairly well during the tournament as show-stoppers for open charges. Streaks kill Lights.

The reason the LRM has no use is because the one party trick it has, indirect fire, cannot work if the missiles are slow. If they aren't slow, though, they become OP as f*ck. We've already seen it happen once in the way back and that was with more powerful ECM on the field. There is no in-between, either, this is a binary switch. No matter what combination of stats you use, the LRMs being great at indirect breaks the game because people discover that they can be incredibly effective from incredible distance with weapons they don't have to aim and the anti-missile system is not potent enough to stop a saturated attack. If it were, we end up right back where we started.

That is why lock-on weapons should not and cannot be good in general and should only serve specific niches. Unfortunately for your pet weapon, the BattleTech stats and description have pigeonholed it into having to behave a certain way which constrains PGI's options.

[Brain Cancer]

Yeonne Greene, on 10 December 2017 - 02:54 AM, said:

The reason the LRM has no use is because the one party trick it has, indirect fire, cannot work if the missiles are slow. If they aren't slow, though, they become OP as f*ck. We've already seen it happen once in the way back and that was with more powerful ECM on the field. There is no in-between, either, this is a binary switch. No matter what combination of stats you use, the LRMs being great at indirect breaks the game because people discover that they can be incredibly effective from incredible distance with weapons they don't have to aim and the anti-missile system is not potent enough to stop a saturated attack. If it were, we end up right back where we started.

Considering LRMs with the velocity nodes hit the same pre-nerf velocity the potatoes and you weep about, I call BS on that. The last piteous whining about lurms got them down from 175 to 160 because 175 was too darn fast. And those 10% velocity quirks. At 175, LRMs got to the incredible velocity of 192.5 instead, almost a third of the speed of an AC/20 shell!

With velocity nodes now, LRMs travel 15% faster, which is 160 + 48 = 208 velocity. ATMs hit 260.

So, given your jabber about lurmageddons- where's the apocalypse? They're more accurate than the prenerf LRMs. Surely, we should be seeing Stalkers with LRM 100 terrorizing all with their giga-launchers of doo- Oh, wait. They don't.

Because it was bad players whining about lurms. Not an actual lurmageddon or OP weapon system. Whining. As usual.

I also call BS on AMS not stopping it. It can, but nobody uses AMS because it's such a poor investment vs. a UP weapon system. And that's after AMS has actually been improved in it's ability to stop missiles, to the point where one Kit Fox can negate 30+ missiles.

As for incredibly effective at range, what the heck do you call all that ERLL fire, chopped liver? No counter. No defense. Hitscan speed. No self-inflicted spread. Can poke, burn the missile boat, and be down in cover before the countershot arrives.

Quote

That is why lock-on weapons should not and cannot be good in general and should only serve specific niches. Unfortunately for your pet weapon, the BattleTech stats and description have pigeonholed it into having to behave a certain way which constrains PGI's options.

They serve no niche at all, because they're rendered third-rate on all sides of the coin. Because players who think strapping machine guns on an Atlas is a good idea shed tears over how they got touched in the bad place by missiles, standing in the open trying not to drool on their keyboard.

[Steve Pryde]

Those duck and hide games were pretty boring but with the hitscan mechanic for lasers just as expected. And Bows3r with his Warhawk prime (minimum velocity bonus is +40% for the ppcs) is nearly hitscan aswell lol.

And the extended range for all weapons (except missile weapons, hello 270m SRMs) is doing the rest.

This video nails the tournament perfectly:

https://youtu.be/CXC54bpolHA

[C E Dwyer]

Mcgral18, on 09 December 2017 - 11:27 PM, said:

If there were more maps which weren't regarded as bad....

Champions should be to get their **** together on Any maps not just the easy mode ones.

All this does is say they're champions, in a niche game with a minimal population.

[Bandilly]

Asym, on 09 December 2017 - 08:28 PM, said:

I DO NOT ever want to hear about air strikes from this forum ever again as a bad thing because the best of our best went off the rails. You can't have two standards. And Streaks !

Eh, I don't get your point. The matches prove how absurd airstrikes are and how winning teams 'must' airstrike the other team non-stop for the entire match.

Airstrikes, as they are now, take away from the fun of my stompy robot on robot action.

[Xiphias]

Tarogato, on 10 December 2017 - 02:50 AM, said:

WLF with 3x ERLL? Those are builds that really haven't been seen before at all. It's new. An innovative tactic.

To be fair, we did take a 3xERLL Wolfhound a few times on Polar last season of MRBC. The Cheetah build was interesting though. Basically a super version of the Spider 5K. I don't think I've ever seen someone running that exact build outside of the WC.

[Asym]

Tarogato, on 10 December 2017 - 02:50 AM, said:

I kinda don't understand this post.
.........et al.
Wh.... how? I .... hwuh?

I was going to respond by point but, it was taking way too long....

I have a great amount of respect for the "pundits" of this forum. Do you know why? Because they play this game with us "average foke" and do so in a way that isn't a "gamer meta" abboration...... They get dirty, they have to form "teams of strangers" to improvise, sometimes with nothing and out-matched and still, they carry their weakest links and most importantly "make a difference" each and every match. then, write about it....even the salt.... What I saw wasn't MWO at it's best; what I saw was MWO at it's worst because what they were doing was "playing a game" not "playing the game".......and, I'll leave you to ponder that and the realities of what that means.....

Make that concept the competitive mode (the game); and, then Lad, let's talk about what MWO should be, could be and might be....

Edited by Asym, 10 December 2017 - 07:55 AM.

[Davegt27]

Asym, on 10 December 2017 - 07:52 AM, said:

I was going to respond by point but, it was taking way too long....

I have a great amount of respect for the "pundits" of this forum. Do you know why? Because they play this game with us "average foke" and do so in a way that isn't a "gamer meta" abboration...... They get dirty, they have to form "teams of strangers" to improvise, sometimes with nothing and out-matched and still, they carry their weakest links and most importantly "make a difference" each and every match. then, write about it....even the salt.... What I saw wasn't MWO at it's best; what I saw was MWO at it's worst because what they were doing was "playing a game" not "playing the game".......and, I'll leave you to ponder that and the realities of what that means.....

Make that concept the competitive mode (the game); and, then Lad, let's talk about what MWO should be, could be and might be....

yeah your supposed to just play along and not say the king has no clothes

one example is streaks--you see previously streaks where banned in competitive play
well after last year we where saying yeah comp is all good and everything but we pugs live in a
dangerous world-- a world of 12v12 and tons of streaks and we don't know which map we will get

lastly I leave one last thing that might help

Edited by Davegt27, 10 December 2017 - 08:26 AM.

[MischiefSC]

All due props to EmP, was some great matches and some surprise builds.

I admit I was hoping the 228 brawl setup on Polar would turn into something but that match just sorta fell apart.

[Revis Volek]

Cathy, on 10 December 2017 - 04:08 AM, said:

Champions should be to get their **** together on Any maps not just the easy mode ones.

All this does is say they're champions, in a niche game with a minimal population.

I find this rather peculiar...there are less professional players on every single NFL team combined then there where watching the Stream last night for our 3 team in finals. (32 teams w/ 63 players each, including 10 player practice squads) But would you say football was a niche sport that has a minimal professional population? I mean thats a pretty small number of players in the whole league that get to compete against each other on pretty much the same map (field) all the time but we dont say they are the best of the smallest subset of players in a niche competition do we?

No, we say they are Champions of the World this is how competition works. If you didn't know you had a chance with 7 of your best mech warrior team mates to knock them off their spot before Worlds even started this year. We got to play EVERYONE if we wanted just had to meet them in the Comp Queue and stick it to them. But EMP, EON, Black Watch proved to be the best of the best and that SMALL amount of players who beat ALL COMERS (from a game with way more then 2000 other opponents) and then beat the other "best" teams to prove they are in fact this.

Or we could say that the New England Patriots (or whoever) are just the best of a small group of guys who can run and throw sporty balls well but its niche at best because there isnt much completion compared to other sports populations. So World Champions* (asterisk because i said so)


PGI map the client and shoehorned us into 5 maps, maybe they should make some better TOURNAMENT CLIENT specific maps or something? I dont know what would change this thought process or give us more good options to play on. It may be kinda boring, i can see that, but like sport or game a deeper understanding make you notice the subtle things and see that every match is in fact different even if they start the same. But aside from making some better maps before next year i dont see this changing. Even if it did you always take your best mech, why not pick your best map as well if you have the chance?

Analytics exist for a reason and hardly lie if you read the numbers right. but i digress...Congrats to EMP for being the best at the game.

Edited by Revis Volek, 10 December 2017 - 08:59 AM.

[Roughneck45]

Purely from an entertainment perspective, I think there needs to be way more restrictions and rules when building the drop deck and which map is played.

We know what 2/2/2/2 and map ban will give us. We all know the builds and there are rarely any surprises. If a team tries something out of the ordinary they are usually punished for it.

I'm not saying that the mechs taken are "cruch" builds or anything like that either. Anyone who believes that is delusional. I've played with and against a lot of these guys over the years, a great mechwarrior is what brings the best out of a mech, not the other way around.

But if we want something that's better for spectators a few more rules and different types of drops would help tremendously IMO.

[Bombast]

New idea - Remove Air Strikes from the comp players. Make a new spectating system that anyone can get into. Buy a mechpack during the match, you get to place an air strike.

That'll make this interesting, one way or another.

Edited by Bombast, 10 December 2017 - 10:05 AM.

[Revis Volek]

Roughneck45, on 10 December 2017 - 10:03 AM, said:

Purely from an entertainment perspective, I think there needs to be way more restrictions and rules when building the drop deck and which map is played.

We know what 2/2/2/2 and map ban will give us. We all know the builds and there are rarely any surprises. If a team tries something out of the ordinary they are usually punished for it.

I'm not saying that the mechs taken are "cruch" builds or anything like that either. Anyone who believes that is delusional. I've played with and against a lot of these guys over the years, a great mechwarrior is what brings the best out of a mech, not the other way around.

But if we want something that's better for spectators a few more rules and different types of drops would help tremendously IMO.

They need to take a few things from the fellas over at MRBC methinks.

Edited by Revis Volek, 10 December 2017 - 10:10 AM.

[Xiphias]

Asym, on 10 December 2017 - 07:52 AM, said:

I was going to respond by point but, it was taking way too long....

I have a great amount of respect for the "pundits" of this forum. Do you know why? Because they play this game with us "average foke" and do so in a way that isn't a "gamer meta" abboration...... They get dirty, they have to form "teams of strangers" to improvise, sometimes with nothing and out-matched and still, they carry their weakest links and most importantly "make a difference" each and every match. then, write about it....even the salt.... What I saw wasn't MWO at it's best; what I saw was MWO at it's worst because what they were doing was "playing a game" not "playing the game".......and, I'll leave you to ponder that and the realities of what that means.....

Make that concept the competitive mode (the game); and, then Lad, let's talk about what MWO should be, could be and might be....

What you saw was the highest skill play in MWO. That isn't disputable. Those players can and do pug and they contribute more in those pug matches than at least 99% of players.

The problem is that you have a specific view of how you think the game should be played. That's fine, play the way that you want to. The problem is that not everyone has the same view as you and it's arrogant to think that your view of how the game is the supreme one. If you want that then go out and make your own game from scratch.

While views on what the game should be are subjective, what is not subjective is the ability to win matches. EMP can without a doubt beat any team in the game right now. They are the best. It doesn't matter what restrictions you throw on the match (only LRMs, random maps, etc.) they're still going to stomp whatever "skilled pug" team you can muster together.

Meta will always exist and the best teams will always use it to win. You're just saying, "I don't like meta so it's dumb." That's not a factual position, that's your (in my view flawed) opinion. EMP is undisputedly the best team in the current game. The fact that they don't meet your personal "standards of excellence" is irrelevant. From my viewpoint your mindset is worse than that of those who chase the meta.

You wouldn't add a casual player to a professional sports team. One group is playing to win and the other group is playing to have fun. The group that plays to win may or may not have fun doing so. In my personal experience it's actually more fun in competitive because people care more and are trying harder. The problem emerges due to the fact that the game has both casual and competitive players in it. You can't say that one mindset is better than the other (is playing sports for fun better than professional sports?), but you can say that one group of players is better than another at the game.

Your ideas of tactics is flawed and doesn't actually work against a good team trying to win. The best tactics are those that achieve the best results, not the ones that look the best on paper or are the fanciest.

I would agree to adding more restrictions to the event to make it more fun for spectators to watch (map variety, mech variety, etc). As it was set up though you can't blame players for taking the best options available to them.

[Mestari]

Asym, on 10 December 2017 - 07:52 AM, said:

in a way that isn't a "gamer meta" abboration......

The only aberration in this game are the players that insist on doing everything the hard way, and then getting salty about metagaming because their poorly thought-out bracket build lrm atlas wasn't remotely useful.