111 replies to this topic

[Cy Mitchell]

Brain Cancer, on 28 March 2018 - 06:38 AM, said:

Or, you know we could have more maps like Oasis, where there's no real "lap" to go round.

That map does actually funnel players. What saves it is the multiple levels on the approaches. It is good but you do not want every map to consist of a factory type environment. The upcoming urban map may be similar to that with multiple levels. However, on natural occurring landscape type maps, it is much harder to give players freedom of movement and still build a map that will eliminate nascar. You have to do something like Canyon. Impassable mountains and rivers can be used but if you over do it then you end up with LoL maps.

If NASCAR is such a problem for players then the easiest answer is for the players to stop doing it.

[Asym]

The extreme weight and slow speed assault mechs were introduced for Solaris... and, for the whales that always buy everything and I bet they were tweeting Russ's account till it cause his phone battery to explode...

OK, there they are. Woo-hoo. Now what? Play Solaris and forget the rest. Teams that still play will play FP and GQ till the cows come home, even if there are only a small handful of teams left...there's no where else to go it seems........right now.....and that, will change.

Have whatever fun you can.... And, when it stops being fun, retire and play another game or series of games... Come back and visit and maybe. something like Solaris will cause you to play more often. You never know in games: sometimes genius and sometimes Darwinian. There are a lot of really great games out there !

[MechWarrior5152251]

Take an assault with a faster engine. If you can get up to 70kph you should be able to stay with the pack of heavies. Or, go in the same direction your team is going on a parallel course. If they go after you they will have their backs to your team, though most teams are not smart enough to take those back shots so it only works half the time.

[Brain Cancer]

Rampage, on 28 March 2018 - 06:58 AM, said:

That map does actually funnel players. What saves it is the multiple levels on the approaches. It is good but you do not want every map to consist of a factory type environment. The upcoming urban map may be similar to that with multiple levels. However, on natural occurring landscape type maps, it is much harder to give players freedom of movement and still build a map that will eliminate nascar. You have to do something like Canyon. Impassable mountains and rivers can be used but if you over do it then you end up with LoL maps.

If NASCAR is such a problem for players then the easiest answer is for the players to stop doing it.

Exactly. You can't just mindlessly loop because there's too many points along each approach where opponents will have ample opportunity to chew up your ranks without having to either form up directly in your approach or run the entire loop to attack your slowboats. Therefore, it's not a real NASCAR loop and as a strategy, it's generally setting sail for fail on Oasis.

The NASCAR breaker is making sure there's not really any reasonable approaches that can be easily circled around without giving opponents ample opportunites to punish it. Even Canyon can end up looping, but the up-and-down with firing lanes all over the place again hoses NASCAR. By comparison, Caustic has plenty of cover and a very unattractive center option (because no cover and extra hot) that funnel people into Ye Old Circle Race. Even a few spots where the caldera sides couldn't be easily lapped around without jump jets would have probably broken things up.

[Nightbird]

Don't blame devs for lack of team play when devs created GQ & FP for team play. When you play SQ, water is wet.

[Sorbic]

I often play a 58kph AC20 Urbie. The Nascar thing can be painful if it's a map where the lights start way back from where the route the rest of the team will take. Like mining colony... This is often largely mitigated by even a single player slowing down the enemy advance/laying suppressing fire.

When I play a support/light mech I try to cover the rear and buy fatties some breathing room. If you're playing a lighter mech and see no one is doing this then step up and slow the enemy advance. Otherwise you're playing for your stats and not a win.

[D00MSLAYER]

From my limited experience (50h), sniping and suiciding assaults are a much bigger problem.

[Johnny Z]

Use the comm wheel help call if nothing else. Flanking will always be a thing.

[Bulletsponge0]

Verilligo, on 28 March 2018 - 05:47 AM, said:

As someone that has taken a liking to driving fast mediums like the Ice Ferret... we would also like to ask the team not to NASCAR so heavily. When WE do a flanking maneuver, it's to take attention off the REAL firepower of the team by backstabbing and forcing the enemy to become more timid. When things start looking pear-shaped, we can get out of the line of fire and back to the main force, provided we don't go too deep for the amount of speed that we have. It's an absolutely terrible feeling to try and help you guys split the enemy team, only to look back and see how many heavies we've squirreled from our OWN team because they think 81 kph is fast enough to flank like we do.

It's not. Don't follow the Ice Ferret into Death Valley.

So much this.

I couldn't even begin to count how many pug drops I've been in where the lights run off to scout/flank/turn the enemy around and the assaults and slow heavies try to follow them. When they do they, they are simply getting themselves out of position to fight and putting themselves into really bad positions. Let the lights go do their thing, assaults and slow heavies should stick together so they can mass their firepower together against the enemy.

[Nema Nabojiv]

D00MSLAYER, on 28 March 2018 - 07:57 AM, said:

From my limited experience (50h), sniping and suiciding assaults are a much bigger problem.

An assault who's not looking at minimap and not moving with the team is basically suiciding himself out of his own free will.

[FireStoat]

The slowest assault I play is a KGC 0000 with a 340 LFE, armed with LBX 10 x2, med laser x4, MRM 40 that has a tweaked speed of 59 kph. Annihilators are fun but too situational with the random group I drop with and the maps I get. The KGC is always pretty reliable for me. For Clan I'm a big fan of the MAD IIC for its top speed as well.

None of this really matters though. HBS Battletech is out late April and my vacation from the Nascar life will begin. I'm really curious as to what will happen to MWO with the event of that game dropping and 1v1 / 2v2 Solaris being added.

[Eisenhorne]

Bulletsponge0, on 28 March 2018 - 08:12 AM, said:

So much this.

I couldn't even begin to count how many pug drops I've been in where the lights run off to scout/flank/turn the enemy around and the assaults and slow heavies try to follow them. When they do they, they are simply getting themselves out of position to fight and putting themselves into really bad positions. Let the lights go do their thing, assaults and slow heavies should stick together so they can mass their firepower together against the enemy.

Nema Nabojiv, on 28 March 2018 - 08:12 AM, said:

An assault who's not looking at minimap and not moving with the team is basically suiciding himself out of his own free will.

These are contradictory bits of information that make it basically impossible to play an assault mech with most pugs. The lights will do light things like flanking. The mediums think they're fast enough to keep up, so they go too. The heavies see half the team moving, so they go too. The assaults are then in trouble, because they cannot move fast enough to hope to keep up, so they either try to run and keep up and die, or attempt to stand and hold their ground while the enemy rushes them in their own nascar. If I'm playing an Annihilator or something, I can SOMETIMES hold out long enough for my nascar to hit the enemy and actually help me, but if I'm in something without that level of firepower and armor, I'm usually just gonna die after doing ~400 damage while being rushed by 3-4 guys. I just don't play assaults in QP anymore unless i'm doing group QP with at least 2-3 guys I trust to not leave me to die.

[Baba_Yaga]

Darth Hotz, on 28 March 2018 - 03:33 AM, said:

Tell them what to do.

Tell them right at the start to stay near by, to link up at a certain waypoint or whatever the basic plan is.

The absence of command is what makes people run into the big nothing like lemmings. Every time I dare to give some commands, the reaction is surprisingly good and the match goes way better. One just has to start communicating.

POTATOES STILL DON'T LISTEN.....

[Dashen]

I understand most of the points made by people who posted here.

There is one thing that i do not understand, and that is why players do not understand, or better, do not care about how the game works.

How can you win a game if you let your assaults die? both teams cannot nascar at the same time, most of the times one team gets the other first, and the other team instead of turning massively around just keep pushing into empty spaces(because the enemy has already moved out of dodge).

How can players not notice where the enemy is, why run into empty spaces, i feel like people simply don't care about anything because the alternative would be implying that people cannot grasp basic concept, and i highly doubt the latter.

There is no actual way to get nascared if you hold a firing line, they nascar left? you turn left, and so on, it's not THAT hard of a game, how can people ACCEPT a LOSS instead of trying to actually WIN ?.

Overall it's exactly THIS behaviour that is ruining the game, it's exactly thinking that nascar is THE way to play and everything else is not THE way, maps are what they are, but i remember FULL well that even hpg manifold both teams used to hold their side and push only after they had critical mass advantage.

How can people find this enjoyable? do you enjoy losing every time the same way? losing can be fun if the game was fun itself, like lots of brawling, good fights and such.

[Brain Cancer]

Dashen, on 28 March 2018 - 08:26 AM, said:

How can people find this enjoyable? do you enjoy losing every time the same way? losing can be fun if the game was fun itself, like lots of brawling, good fights and such.

This actually tells you how incredibly tunnel-visioned many players are.

They will literally do the same thing, over and over again, not realizing it's why they lose horribly- because horrible as their tactics are, they win once in a while because a smarter player either takes advantage of them doing so and uses them as meat shields to carry, or the other team is actually even worse than bad, they're just fodder carried up the tiers by the abominable PSR system.

[Nema Nabojiv]

Dashen, on 28 March 2018 - 08:26 AM, said:

both teams cannot nascar at the same time

Except that is EXACTLY what happens. The team which does it with more cohesion and more aggression wins.

What an assault can do to increase cohesion and aggression? Keep up with the team. How? By either moving fast or predicting where the team will nascar (spoiler: right) and moving there first without distracting on early trades.

[Eisenhorne]

Nema Nabojiv, on 28 March 2018 - 08:49 AM, said:

Except that is EXACTLY what happens. The team which does it with more cohesion and more aggression wins.

What an assault can do to increase cohesion and aggression? Keep up with the team. How? By either moving fast or predicting where the team will nascar (spoiler: right) and moving there first without distracting on early trades.

The assault player can also say to hell with that and become a tunnel warrior.

[Spheroid]

Don't bring slow junk.

Battlemaster = high engine cap
Victor = high engine cap
Marauder IIC = high engine cap
Cyclops = high engine cap

All assaults, all lethal.

Edited by Spheroid, 28 March 2018 - 09:19 AM.

[DaZur]

Typically I'm a follower and not a leader in regards to match play... That said, like you I've become a little jaded with the pure absence of tactical play.

However now, unless someone pipes up with in the 1st 10 seconds, I'll send a light or two to Nascar (in the open) to feign nascar and I tell the rest of the team to hunker down in a point of advantage.

It's funny as hell to watch the red teams lights and mediums crumble and panic when they stumble into 80% of the opposing team.

[Grus]

Darth Hotz, on 28 March 2018 - 03:33 AM, said:

Tell them what to do.

Tell them right at the start to stay near by, to link up at a certain waypoint or whatever the basic plan is.

The absence of command is what makes people run into the big nothing like lemmings. Every time I dare to give some commands, the reaction is surprisingly good and the match goes way better. One just has to start communicating.

yeah that dosnt work with a bunch of rando-commandos. i mean if i win the pug lotto and get like (for example HHoD/228/07/EVIL) on my team they don't need any herding and share intel well. "hey they are massing for a push on X side" they will re-enforce and have fast movers flank around while we pin them in place. let-alone the fact that they are good shots tends to help. random cats that purposely drop in mechs just to get enough match score to win a loot bag, no matter how convincing you try to be over VOIP, are there for only one thing. After that the win isn't important. They just YOLO right into the mob and die so they can just do it again in another mech.

This is why we should not have lowered the bar to 150. 225 ok but not so low. if it was REALLY hard to get that 250 that's a good thing. it makes you have to ACTUALLY PLAY TO WIN! not just derp in and go to another match. If it was SO hard to complete the requirement to get the completed event then fine, lower the amount of loot bags required to complete, not lower the MS. getting that 250 may be rare for a lot of players here but if they just reduced the amount of time you would have to complete that requirement i think that would be better than what we have now.

Will the "good" players complete this quicker? sure, and i dont think thats a problem.