71 replies to this topic

[I Come In Peace]

Everyone enjoys different elements of MWO and plays for different reasons.

However, I think a majority of us are MWO PUGs to excel, specifically to have a good damage output for mechs designed for damage.

In this manner, I believe the game has failed and have stopped playing as a result.

Principle - A good pilot making good decisions in a good mech built to achieve good damage should have a good game as far as damage, maybe 4 out of 5 games. The 1 bad game out of 5 comes more from plain old bad luck or a team that did not fully gel.

The ratio is about 4 out of 5. It depends on several factors like what server, what time of day, whether you had been drinking, etc. But the ratio that at least I would be happy with is ~around~ 4 out of 5.

Good damage will also be hard to agree with, but for builds specifically designed for damage, 300 for lights (who are designed less for damage and more for scouting, flanking, back damage), 400 for mediums, 500 for heavy's and maybe 600 for assaults.

Why I think the game fails the principle is a perfect storm of issues in 3 areas of the game:
- Nascar - Someone that has played more or analyzed MWO more can explain why Nascar occurs better than me. The fact is, the amount of Nascar in PUG causes failure of the principle. Either you are too slow, you took your eyes off the map for a few seconds, or you are the problem and you are trying to kill enemies that are too slow or forgetting to move with their team. In any case, if you want to keep your damage up, you actually need to contribute to the issue by moving farther ahead of your slower teammates and take advantage of the free damage against the enemy's back.

- PIRs - lightest, fastest, tanky, heatless mechs in the game. If I am in a medium, it goes through my back armor in ~3 seconds. No chance. You see half the time a PIR gets 3-5 kills in a game. While I would not call it OP, because it has its share of bad games as well, its good games definitely contribute to MWO failing the principle.

- LRMs - I may be subjective because I do not use LRMs. And I am okay with their ability. The issue is Map Picker + Polar Highlands = LRMrs using their weighted votes to have Polar Highlands chosen where they are OP. The issue with that is that brawlish types are severely handicapped in this map. Perhaps not in all modes but most of them. Trading brawls are where a lot of the fun and skill in MWO resides. LRMrs also share armor less, are less likely to be assertive and in general not play any tactics or strategies. MM adding a large ratio of LRMrs on one team causes failure of the principle.

How might I fix MWO?
- Nascar - Will leave it up to analysts much more experienced than I am to figure out how to stop nascars. Perhaps more underlying structure for assaults? Perhaps have a turret consumable or a free UAV for assaults to help them slow a rush and get some damage in?
- PIRs - Maybe machine guns should do almost no damage unless a mech is opened up, and even then the damage should be limited.
- LRMs - Remove the Map Picker or fix Polar HIghlands to have more hiding places to protect against LRMrs. Adjust MM to account for weapon types like LRMs.

Would love to hear constructive feedback. And maybe you have other areas where MWO fails the principle. Perhaps synch dropping? Hopefully you understand the intent here which is to help what I think makes MWO less enjoyable to play so people (like myself) looking to excel will want to play MWO again.

Edited by I Come In Peace, 21 July 2018 - 02:57 AM.

[Ralatar]

None of the above would matter if we had a performance based MM. It's all in place, we have match score average's for each weight class we have. With monitoring and tweaking as needed it would allow for like skilled players to be matched up based on their performance in the weight class they are dropping in. Been brought up before after the failed ELO using win/loss as a measure. A number of us have been asking since around 2013-14. Would mean that if you perform at a tier 2 lv in lights but a tier 3 in Assaults then you would use the respective ranking when you drop. Would think that 4 tiers would work and keep the time to match players down and still give a much better experience than we currently have.

[Quandoo]

PIR are easy to kill, i kill them with heavy gauss very often I would still say Cheetah with ECM is way stronger if played right.

Maybe the pilots skill is in question? Stay close to a rock, turn your back to it and laugh at the PIR for beeing stupid. Or don't get yourself in a situation where it can circle around you. Or use Streaks. Or don't go stray or sit behind. Or don't accept 8 back armor to be the proper way to go all the time - it's a trade off and when a PIR hits you, it was a bad decision. So, either up your back armor or change your play style.

What you are asking for is the ultimate all round mech which works in every setup.

But yes, QP is frustrating as hell. 5 games lost in row with very bad teammates, tons of trial mechs while I did 700-900dmg myself. The rest had ~100-300, few 400-600. This are situations where I serioulsy consider to quit this game, it's just frustrating to see such a broken matchmaker. Come on, trial mechs and rookies against players who spent over 1000 hours in this game? Rly?

They are favoring new players in all manners but those are propably not the volks who will buy all those mechpacks.

Edited by Quandoo, 21 July 2018 - 03:56 AM.

[Bud Crue]

I agree with much of what you say regarding NASCAR, PIRs, and LRMs, but perhaps not entirely with your initial assertion of the game having "failed".

In re NASCAR, people have complained about this forever, and as long as PGI gives us maps based around a large central geographic feature, that is the way those maps are going to be played. There is an obvious solution (to be obvious: new and better maps). PGI has shown that they are unwilling or unable to provide it.

In re PIRs: if it wasn't PIRs causing problems it would be something else.
As long as PGI provides select mechs, with many hard points (PIR), or select high hard points (Kodiak, MCII) or other features that allow a specific chassis or variant to do things that no other mechs can even come close to doing in terms of performance, than such mechs are going to be problematic.

Doesn't matter if they are appropriate via lore or any other justification. These problem mechs are exacerbated by PGI's direct encouragement of their use (and even abuse) via game mechanisms such as the skills tree (which encourages boating, etc.), poor PSR and MM (which allows and even encourages established players to find a meta and abuse it en mass to the detriment of new players (note that I did not say anything about skill here), single value roles (do damage, it's what counts more than anything, be you in a PIR or a poor Spider 5V or a MCII-B. See also LRMs discussion below). Add PGI's propensity for trying to control the supposed problem mechs by nerfing not just their weapons, but also nerfing EVERY mech's weapons, and the problematic nature of such problem mechs is exacerbated rather than controlled; and worse, large swaths of not problematic mechs and builds are made less fun to the point of irrelevancy.

Solution? Mine would be to go back to the bad ole days of using quirks, be they positive or negative to address variant specific issues, or make variant specific changes to the skill tree to provide a similar mechanism (ammo nodes or perhaps even a large swath of the firepower tree is not accessible by the PIR-1 (would need an off set somewhere else to make it "fair"), as one possible example. Perhaps something as crude as a mild but negative performance modifier which increases proportionally as one boats more over a certain number of the same weapon for those mechs (variants) that are truly an issue (I don't mean the sort of dramatic negative modifier like GH, but rather something that allows a mech to carry say 12 MG but makes it a bit more difficult to perform well in it than say a mech with 10MGs, and even more so than 8MGs, down to whatever is the base line of performance). If such implicitly negative modifiers are unpalatable, then rather than universally nerf weapons to address over performance in the way PGI has done in the last year, then perhaps universally buff all the under performers (i don't give a **** about low ttk anymore, I just want to have fun (i.e.shot stuff with my stuff). There are lots of things PGI could do here, they are just unwilling or unable.

LRMs. I am still not seeing or feeling the recently asserted horror of LRMs. Regardless, as to your issue, I agree that they are situational (as you imply via your mention of Polar, etc.). I consider LRMs to be in fact thee most situational weapon in the game (though SSRMs are close behind) wherein only on select maps, and even then really only in mass, are they problematic. If they have, or are, a problem it is that they allow not just new players, but also those who refuse to actually try to play the game (idiots and the provocatively unskilled who seem to enjoy playing this "thinking man's shooter" by hiding at the periphery of the fight (or even the map), to perform reasonably well in accordance with PGI's "damage is what really counts" performance and rewards schema. The result: a weapon that can be abused by idiots is going to be even more abused by those who know what they are doing. I may not be seeing this yet in my game play but apparently others are. Not a surprise, because in this system, it is inevitable. And of course the consequence in a few months will be...Yup: nerfs.

Solution? As already implied above I would change performance criteria. In this case, I would jack up spread when firing without LOS or employ some other mechanic that makes getting your own locks paramount to high performance.

Anyway. I tried to address your issues, and not get "toxic". While I am not sure I agree with what you characterize as the failing of the game, I do agree with some of the issues you raise. But, alas, these issues are not going away, because I honestly don't think PGI sees them, or perhaps simply doesn't care about them. They seem more than happy to just keep the mechanics where they are, and keep on applying broad nerfs address perceived over performance and while they are at it reduce the viability of entire classes of weapons and the mechs that use them. Given that history and presumed future (see most recent PTS and its stated goals) there are no other "solutions".

Edited by Bud Crue, 21 July 2018 - 04:26 AM.

[Mech Ranger]

dude
what u need r
1 learning how to read the mini map a lot to know where ur team r and where ur enemy r
it's sounds simple, but too many people never do that
2 play more to gain a little experience about every map to help u realizing u gonna in dangerous so that u can run away before things get ugly
3 do not afk or dc when u in slow mech

if u done those 3 well, u will hardly get caught even in assaults, unless in ending phase～

Edited by Mech Ranger, 21 July 2018 - 05:08 AM.

[Dragonporn]

I Come In Peace, on 21 July 2018 - 02:37 AM, said:

Good damage will also be hard to agree with, but for builds specifically designed for damage, 300 for lights (who are designed less for damage and more for scouting, flanking, back damage), 400 for mediums, 500 for heavy's and maybe 600 for assaults.

It's more complex than that. Doing "good" in a match has lots of factors to take into account. Simple damage and kill metrics don't cut it. Even match score doesn't because it relies too heavily on above. It's not such a rare case of people scoring biggest damage are usually those using teammates as meatshields, and avoiding frontal combat as much as possible. Same thing with kills, was it a mop up kill? Stolen? Was it a stick you just murdered? Was there a point? Sometimes teammates with lowest damage and even those who die early are those who really made victory happen, as they made distraction, drew whole lance away, been spotting and calling out very effectively, etc, etc. So there are no any possible metrics to navigate how good someone's performance was. Pure numbers don't mean jack, statpadding is possible and not very hard.

Ralatar, on 21 July 2018 - 03:40 AM, said:

None of the above would matter if we had a performance based MM. It's all in place, we have match score average's for each weight class we have. With monitoring and tweaking as needed it would allow for like skilled players to be matched up based on their performance in the weight class they are dropping in. Been brought up before after the failed ELO using win/loss as a measure. A number of us have been asking since around 2013-14. Would mean that if you perform at a tier 2 lv in lights but a tier 3 in Assaults then you would use the respective ranking when you drop. Would think that 4 tiers would work and keep the time to match players down and still give a much better experience than we currently have.

Yeah, and wait in a queue for hours on...

Edited by Dragonporn, 21 July 2018 - 04:51 AM.

[Asym]

And, there's about ten other categories that cause MWO to fail expectations...

Winning 80% of the time is a greatly excessive expectation in a game that involves 23 other people, each with a unique mech build, played on maps that can and do favor certain weapons systems and rascally different pilot skill levels.

50/50 is even a stretch. Low population is the over riding causation. You have extremes in skill in low populations: the very new and the very skilled. Everybody else has left the game.....

Sorry, reality sucks and all that are left are the very few new, the occasional event players for nostalgia reasons and the long time veterans that refuse to give up on a mature game that isn't evolving towards positive change.....

[IIXxXII]

LRMs are easy to fix. If you're an assault with tonnage to spare, mount laser AMS. If it overheats turn it off -- there's an option to do this listed in key bindings. An Atlas DC with an AC20 and SRM-6's can conceivably shoot down 200-400 missiles which could easily turn the tide in a match.

Piranhas also easy to fix. Boat SSRM's in a stormcrow or something that is fast and can serve in an anti light mech role. Piranhas and other light mechs will normally avoid you.

NASCAR happens due to the huge advantage shooting someone's paper thin rear armor gives them. Being in the 6 o'clock position is the kill position. Maybe similar to dogfights when planes fought on a line of sight basis. Everyone wants the 6 o'clock position and everyone is simultaneously trying to avoid having others get that position on them, which leads to mad scrambling. The lack of discipline/communication/coordination leads to poor tactics where slower moving assault mechs are needlessly sacrificed to gain a few seconds of time that are pointless as they lend no advantage.

The best way to end NASCAR could be to vote for maps that don't 100% support it. Canyon Network is difficult to NASCAR in (aside from the center portion) due to ravines.

It would be cool if it were possible to drop mines on the ground behind you to deter enemies NASCAR'ing in certain directions.

Maps could be designed in the shape of a U rather than an 0.

Et al.

[Appogee]

NASCAR happens because teams are trying to flank, get firing positions on each other, and attack each others' weak tail, where the scared hidey LRM boats are.

It's a legitimate stategy.

In a genuine team, the drop caller can decide to turn and face, or strategically lose the guys at the rear. But in a PUG match, either the PUGs will be hiding behind their favourite building until the enemy flanks and kills them, or they are mindlessly running away until they get killed.

The only solution for NASCAR in QP is to take a a Mech that can keep up, and keep watching the minimap to ensure you don't get isolated. I have no problem with this.

[I Come In Peace]

Thanks for making my first post a success. It is a success because I have obviously attracted some intelligent and thoughtful posters to discuss this topic. And I tried to change the clickbait title after posting but looks like it can't be changed.

Re: weight-based MM, guessing that a players skills transcends weight most of the time and this approach would have less returns envisioned. However, if this adjustment is easy, then why not try it out? I would love to have PGI experiment with rules and configurations to be the norm. It is like trying to find a perfect recipe - almost never just falls in your lap.

On PIRs ease to kill, what happens is every several matches you get a PIR or PIR pilot imbalance coupled with a few unaware players and this creates an uneven game especially if the game runs long since PIRs take out the damaged mechs. I personally hate when I am damaged and the other team is and we would have an otherwise healthy and fun-ladden brawl to the end only to be cut short with a PIR running around and throwing a few seconds-worth of MG ammo my way and then other's way.

The other thing is strat-wise, all mechs on your team cannot be watching their back all the time. You have to move, you have to focus on the enemy in front of you. In short PIR pilots take advantage of the chaos that comes standard in PUG.

I think PGI tried to reduce LRM ability some with Solaris City, increase it some with the recent heat reductions, cater to new players with the LRMs and old ones with PIRs (they do require skill to play IMO). Point is they are trying to mix up who is elevated. One constant though is new mechs for paying players have an edge, at least after they get through the initial leveling. They need to make money, so that is not going to change, and IMO the edge is not horrendous except for some exceptions like PIRs.

Re: people always complaining about one mech or another. I agree, mostly. PIRs for example were pre-empted by Lynx's with lots of MGs. You could tell the Lynx's MG build was on the verge of failing the principle. I also agree that Cheetahs may be better on average than PIRs, but the difference here is PIRs can cause lopsided games. Maybe describe these cases as people gaming the game to excel and my concern is PGI attracts this behavior.

Re: damage. My damage goal has an implication that you are good and attempt to shoot at critcial areas of enemy mechs. What this means is a high damage is not the goal. If you have the correct goal in mind, I do feel that damage is a pretty adequate way of grading your match. It is not perfect of course and you have to be honest with yourself when you, for example, soaked some damage up from a DCd mech. Kills are a worse goal than damage IMO but it definitely factors into a good way to grade your match. Yes, very arbitrary to grade a match, but have to go on something.

And 4 out of 5 matches with good damages does not implicate I have to win those matches.

IIXxXII and Bad Crue, like your ideas and hope PGI is listening (except for thinking PUGs will take SSRMs just for PIRs)

Edited by I Come In Peace, 21 July 2018 - 06:02 AM.

[DarkFhoenix]

Quote

In this manner, I believe the game has failed and have stopped playing as a result[

If i stopped playing a game for whatever reason , I would not spend one second , reading posts or making threads in that games forum . You must have spent at least an hour or two making this thread .

Excuse me if i dont believe you .

Edited by DarkFhoenix, 21 July 2018 - 06:04 AM.

[I Come In Peace]

It is a grandioso plan to stir up a revolution in the MWO players and that results in changes to the game that will make me want to play again. JJ. More like, I am innocently wondering if others are similarly disenchanted.

Edited by I Come In Peace, 21 July 2018 - 06:06 AM.

[Daggett]

Here are some points from my experience:
Your principle does apply to me, on average i have about 4 out of 5 games with what i consider good damage when i run optimized mechs.

I guess the problem is more where the threshold should be for your principle to apply. It seems to be that only the top 2% of the population will have your desired quota of good damage matches while you expect it to apply for a broader range of players.

I guess that's the reason why i think i have my share of good games because i'm currently in said top 2% bracket. It usually takes a really bad team that get's overwhelmed quickly for me to be unable to break 600 damage in optimized builds.

BTW: 600 is my personal threshold what i consider a good damage match regardless of mech class. You will rarely see me running lights that are not capable of hitting 600+ dmg in 4 out of 5 matches.

Regarding your points that make MWO fail your principle:

Nascar
While i agree that nascar is quite frustrating for a lot of players and especially those running slow mechs, i don't think it is that big of a deal for the top 2% players. Personally i don't run assaults much, i prefer flexibility in my positioning. But when i watch streams of top 1% players they often run slow assaults like Annihilators and still dish out 800+ damage in nascar situations.

In my opinion the trick is to cut corners which is possible in most nascar maps like HPG or Caustic. In HPG i take the top when i'm falling behind while on caustic i would run through the center of the volcano.

You can do this because if you are slow then you probably have armor and firepower. You can intimidate a few mechs contesting your shortcuts with your raw firepower long enough to make it back to your team. Sure, you may lose 10-30% of your armor in the process but that's better than getting overrun when not using the shortcuts. And as a really good player you will hurt them at least as much as they hurt you so your loss of armor is usually not in vain.

So for me nascaring has two main problems:

• Players in mechs running less than 100kph trying to follow the lights which leads to nascar and assaults left behind. Only mechs faster than 100kph should go for the slow opposing mechs, the rest should support their assaults.
  
• Players in slow mechs not realizing that nascar is happening and/or that are too afraid to cut corners.

Both is quite bad but since it's often in the player's hands not a big argument against your principle. In my experience nascar does not prevent top players from doing 600+ dmg.

Piranha:
First it's not tanky and not the fastest either. They usually only get me when they manage to swarm me which usually only happens when the match is lost anyway and i'm one of the last targets alive. In a fair duel, i bet only the best Piranha pilots will stand a chance against my favorite builds, probably even if they get 1-2 secs in my back until i react.

BTW: Most Piranhas don't get 2-3 kills because they kmdd or solo their targets, but more because their constant stream of MG-bullets makes last-hitting very easy.
I think they are very strong in the hands of top 2% pilots but too squishy for the majority. If they regularly kill you while you are in a medium try rethinking your positioning and equip seismic. For example i'm usually near the frontline and therefore not an interesting target for backstabbing attempts.

BTW: In the right hands Piranhas are probably the easiest lights to farm a consistent 600+ damage. So they quite support your principle for those that are running them well.

Lurms:
While very annoying on polar (which is only one map) personally i don't think they are hampering my ability to deal good damage much. As long as you can avoid getting narced and someone shoots down enemy UAVs you should be fine even on Polar if you manage to convince your team that pushing is the best weapon to defeat an LRM-superiority.

TLDR:
The problem is not necessarily Nascar, PIRs or LRMs but rather that the threshold where your definition of 'good' (your principle) begins is higher than you expect it to be. So i think the real question is if it's good as it is or if this threshold should be lowered. Or maybe the real underlying problem is that on T1 the skill gap is much wider than in any other tier which has the potential to create matches that are not rewarding enough for the majority of T1 players?

Edited by Daggett, 21 July 2018 - 06:49 AM.

[El Bandito]

I Come In Peace, on 21 July 2018 - 02:37 AM, said:

I think a majority of us are MWO PUGs to excel, specifically to have a good damage output for mechs designed for damage.

In this manner, I believe the game has failed and have stopped playing as a result.

Principle - A good pilot making good decisions in a good mech built to achieve good damage should have a good game as far as damage, maybe 4 out of 5 games. The 1 bad game out of 5 comes more from plain old bad luck or a team that did not fully gel.

The ratio is about 4 out of 5. It depends on several factors like what server, what time of day, whether you had been drinking, etc. But the ratio that at least I would be happy with is ~around~ 4 out of 5.

I have good damage matches every 4 games out of 5, in good mechs, without issue. Perhaps OP is simply not as good as he thinks?

All of your stated problems can be mitigated in QP, as others have written above.

Edited by El Bandito, 21 July 2018 - 06:22 AM.

[Daggett]

Dragonporn, on 21 July 2018 - 04:51 AM, said:

It's more complex than that. Doing "good" in a match has lots of factors to take into account. Simple damage and kill metrics don't cut it. Even match score doesn't because it relies too heavily on above. It's not such a rare case of people scoring biggest damage are usually those using teammates as meatshields, and avoiding frontal combat as much as possible. Same thing with kills, was it a mop up kill? Stolen? Was it a stick you just murdered? Was there a point? Sometimes teammates with lowest damage and even those who die early are those who really made victory happen, as they made distraction, drew whole lance away, been spotting and calling out very effectively, etc, etc. So there are no any possible metrics to navigate how good someone's performance was. Pure numbers don't mean jack, statpadding is possible and not very hard.

I agree that damage/kills/matchscore are not everything and that you can have a big influence just by drop-calling or by causing distraction.
However someone has to deal damage and take out enemies to win the game so those metrics are still the most important ones. The best distraction and calling is useless if no one shoots at the distracted/called targets.

I take it this way: I assume that someone who dealt high damage did good enough and contributed to the match even when it was spread-damage like from LRMs since it may have allowed me to kill or cripple something with less effort. All damage is good damage and helps winning.

However what we should avoid is to judge others when they did low damage since as you mentioned they may have contributed otherwise.

Edited by Daggett, 21 July 2018 - 06:45 AM.

[MischiefSC]

Nascar happens because walking straight into a firing line sucks and 90% of pugs dont understand where to set up for trades or didn't bring trade mechs, so they are looking to change position.

NASCAR isn't bad, splitting up is bad and not communicating is bad. If you say "hey let's move to grid X" and help everyone move together you'll have way more success. Also move TOWARD assaults. Also people in very slow assaults will get left behind because anyone who expects their whole team to slow down to 48 KPH is an idiot. If you're in a slow assault you need to figure your own **** out and quit demanding your team babysit you.

Edited by MischiefSC, 21 July 2018 - 06:58 AM.

[MrMadguy]

So, you just agree with me, that this game needs "No Lights, No LRMs" mode?

What I don't agree with you - is map problem. "No NASCAR" maps - are usually maps with open center, that promote another terrible gameplay - boring snipefests. NASCAR problem isn't caused by maps themselves. It's caused by violation of simple rule - "Follow Assaults - not Lights". Lights try to backstab enemies, play suicide squirrels, etc., and some noobish players follow them, instead of supporting their main forces - Assaults and Heavies. Another cause of NASCAR tactics - balance problems. Offence >> Defence in this game in most cases, that is simply wrong. I.e. team, that just pushes hard - usually wins. That's why teams usually try to perform deathball push, that causes NASCAR effect very often on certain maps. Solution - to bring offensive abilities in line with defensive ones.

[Chados]

I think that folks ought to be careful about judging how good a player is based solely on damage scores. A LRM80 assault spudding it up while everyone else is going down on the front line will often have 600+ damage scores. But where the rubber hits the road, the team loses because they were outnumbered at the point of attack. Judging by cumulative match score is going to put LRM80 spuds in the top tier for awhile. The top tier people will hate that. I run in a lot of top tier QP matches. The salt is real when you mostly run with people way better than you thanks to being stuck in T2.

It’s problematic to judge all pilots by the standard of the top pilots or mechs in the game. There’s too much of that going on and too much hollering about balancing-by-spud being a bad thing, and too much push to facilitate as much tryharding as possible. Forum warriors judge the performance of all by the standard of the top 20% of pilots in the game, and I blame the introduction of public leaderboards and tier rankings-and the consequent tier shaming for that. Jarl’s List is, in my opinion, a facilitator of toxic behavior in the forum population. Players’ opinions routinely are devalued and invalidated because they don’t have top 20% cumulative rankings. Well, not all players are Proton, or even El Bandito. A high percentage are somewhere toward the middle of the spudliness curve. I’m a French fry. I admit it-I’m certainly not Isengrim or 228 or EmP material, and I never will be. I’m Jane Average. I’m literally married to Joe the Plumber. When I die, “she was average” probably will be engraved on my tombstone. Sometimes I pull off 1000 point damage scores. Sometimes I get waxed with zero...literally, zero. Ducking around a corner in a Locust right into dual heavy gauss rifles aimed by a 27 year old Twitch streamer who plays the game sixteen hours a day while mining Bitcoin, fueled by Red Bull and rage, will do that to you. Most of the time I’m somewhere in the middle. I also have over 7500 drops in MWO across all four weight classes and started back in the ELO days, and I’m middle aged, with slower reflexes, poorer eyesight, and a computer that was state of the art in 2016 but not so much today. My cumulative KDR is 0.75 and I’m at the high end of Tier 2. When PSR dropped, I had a KDR of 0.17 and was so far down T5 that the bar had no color in it. I got better but at this point I’m about as good as I’m ever going to be. So, I suggest that there are a lot more players resembling me than resembling Proton out there, and those things do not mean that I don’t know something about how the game works, especially for the average player.

For recent releases consider Flea vs. PIR-1. Not all mechs are created equal, and in the 20-25 ton class you’re going to have standouts who slay in every match but that’s not going to be the rule. In most Flea variants, a 250 damage score is a decent match. In a Deathstrike, not so much. When I started I heard the rule that 100 points damage per weight class (lights 100, assaults 400) is a good rule of thumb for damage effectiveness. When I see you all yelling that 500+ damage scores are mediocre, I’m left shaking my head. On what planet is that mediocre? On Planet Tryhard, maybe that’s mediocre. If the pilot is running a direct fire mech-even a Deathstrike-and on the end of game screen I see a 500 point damage score and two kills, in my view that pilot definitely carried his or her weight. If the pilot is in a featherweight, more so. If it’s a PIR-1 and he’s in four digits, that’s an amazing performance and means he or she is very comfortable in that platform and happened to be up against pilots with more average skills. I’ve been in a Flea that got gauss-rifle one-shotted from 750 meters away between buildings, when I was moving at 137 kph and couldn’t have been visible for more than a split second. I also didn’t have full radar deprivation yet, so I probably was lit up the entire time and he was tracking me and could see where I was running. Or he was using an aimbot. You be the judge.

In my view, balancing has to revolve around the majority of players. The middle of the curve. And you are never going to have all mechs being equal. Too many older mechs got bypassed in the power creep, and 30-35 ton lights were ruined by the resizing. A Jenner is nearly as big as a Cicada, which is five tons heavier. And a Cicada is nearly as big as a Bushwacker. That doesn’t make a lot of sense. How to fix it? Quirks. Negative or positive. It’s the only realistic way. Balance has to be by individual mech, not weapon systems. The current way is nerfing entire weapon systems and that isn’t going to work over the long run. That’s why I question the latest test server. It punishes Clan players. Right now people want to punish Piranha pilots because of the efficacy of massed machine guns. But you’ll invalidate the entire Piranha line, and every light mech dependent on ballistics, if you do that by nerfing all MGs. And the metrics used need to revolve around the middle of the curve, not the ends.

Edited by Chados, 21 July 2018 - 07:03 AM.

[UlricKessler]

MWO the "Thinking man's shooter".

I remember when Mechwarrior was a mech combat simulator. Supposedly MWO was going to be one of those, but PGI threw that concept along with the old MW/BT fan community out the window as we were no longer the target audience after they'd got the game up and running (and a lot of founder's pack purchases - granted I wasn't able to get one at that time or I would've). Problem is that MW is a simulator, and taking a simulator and trying to make it into a shooter there's going to be problems which will continue to spill over into the features of the shooter they are trying to force the game to be.

What I'm trying to get at is that they took a concept that was complex, but functioned well enough. PGI then decided to make changes to and/or ignore features already proven to work well from the original MW games and not take into account how this would radically shift the game mechanics which had kept the game fairly balanced. Sure there were exploits, cheesebuilds, etc., but they didn't break the gameplay so badly as can happen in matches with MWO.

- bring back the old style of aiming cross-hair
- make individual lrms loose their lock occasionally and miss
- bring back the MW3 heat penalties which were likewise from the tabletop (overheating mechs would move slower, turn slower, etc.)

I like some of the ideas posted here, but sadly I doubt PGI is willing to listen to any of us. MWO is what you get when a game from an established IP is made by posers for a quick buck.

Edited by UlricKessler, 21 July 2018 - 07:23 AM.

[Mystere]

I Come In Peace, on 21 July 2018 - 06:04 AM, said:

It is a grandioso plan to stir up a revolution in the MWO players and that results in changes to the game that will make me want to play again. JJ. More like, I am innocently wondering if others are similarly disenchanted.

Revolution? You're 5 years too late.