1579 replies to this topic

[N3tRunn3r]

There has been a lot of "Server Performance Loss" since this 4-weeks-test.

Unplayable for me.

[Anomalocaris]

Alreech, on 03 May 2020 - 10:41 AM, said:

[/size][/left]

With more players in Group Queue you will find more and faster matches and even better balanced ones (due more players to use for balancing).

You can still go Solo even with Groups in your team: just do your thing.

[redacted]

One more time:

1. If I play solo with a skilled group in the match, my contribution won't matter, or not nearly as much as it would in a match of 24 solos. Read Brauer's posts.

2. I play to win. In the current meta in order to have your best shot at winning you must group up with other good players. Otherwise you're handicapping yourself before you even start. Unarguable. Look at the all the screenshot posts, twitch streams, etc. If you're a solo and a good team drops opposite you things won't go well.

3. People obviously wanted to play solo. They were asking for it back in 2013 and when it was created that's where lots of people went. Again, it's what they wanted and when PGI gave it to them they flocked to it. If you don't have solo mode you will push lots of people out - me included.

4. I rarely had to wait more than 60-90 seconds for a match on the NA server in solo queue. That's hardly too long a time to wait. I don't need quicker matchmaking in return for sticking me with 4mans in solo.

Nothing about mixing groups with solos makes the game better for me. Everything about it, even with a perfect matchmaker, makes it worse for me as a solo

Edited by Ilyahweh, 05 May 2020 - 11:23 AM.

[Larsh]

Brauer, on 03 May 2020 - 11:22 AM, said:

I just went through my screenshots from dropping with a group. Our average match is about 12-4 in our favor, but I think that can actually overstate how close some of the matches were. As a 3-4 person team it doesn't really matter so much if friendlies not in the group go down, what matters more is if players in the group get killed. Some of the 12-8 matches we still had almost all of, if not all of, our group alive.

Just making sure I'm reading it right. Your conclusion is that it is more detrimental if you lose someone from your pre-made group instead of losing a PUG from your team?

[Brauer]

Larsh, on 03 May 2020 - 11:50 AM, said:

Just making sure I'm reading it right. Your conclusion is that it is more detrimental if you lose someone from your pre-made group instead of losing a PUG from your team?

Yes, sorry if that was unclear. I wouldn't necessarily call it a close match if it was 12-8 and we still had all 4 of our grouped up players with mechs in decent shape.

[DemonRaziel]

Hey Anomalocaris, I see you're one of the more vocal posters against the queue merge, so I think you're one of the more qualified prolific posters to answer the question below:

If you were to pick the 3 or even 5 main points against the merge, what would you pick? Please be as detailed as possible (i.e. not "Pre-mades have an advantage", but "Pre-mades have a clear advantage because...[XZY] they can do X that a PUG can't".

Guys sharing the same sentiment as Anomalocaris, as well as those on the other side of the barricade, please respond as well, with your main points against and/or in favor. Acual arguments is what we need, instead of black and white vision and ad hominems against anyone who doesn't share the same sentiment, is what we need.

[Larsh]

Brauer, on 03 May 2020 - 11:52 AM, said:

Yes, sorry if that was unclear. I wouldn't necessarily call it a close match if it was 12-8 and we still had all 4 of our grouped up players with mechs in decent shape.

Hey np! Just making sure I'm just getting the jist.

But, yea I can see what you mean by a match isn't "close" if your team of 3 or 4 is still pretty fresh. But, better be fresh with a lot of damage, instead of fresh and did nothing haha.

Since everyone has a differentiating view of what a close match is, what is your defining traits of a close, and fair match in the end?

Edited by Larsh, 03 May 2020 - 12:03 PM.

[Zoolder]

Phoolan Devi, on 03 May 2020 - 05:36 AM, said:

Faction Warfare is always there.

True. A lot of us a pretty new still so we don't have a ton of mechs though, some of us only own clan and some only own IS cause people just bought what they liked back when group QM worked lmao.

[Grumpy Old Man]

DemonRaziel, on 03 May 2020 - 11:56 AM, said:

If you were to pick the 3 or even 5 main points against the merge, what would you pick?

I am still undecided on whether I like this change or not. I feel like I have had both better games as well as some REALLY REALLY bad games.

If I had to pick points against the merge, this would be them.

1) It has been proven time and again, there is no tonnage matching between teams. This gives one team a huge advantage in both Hitpoints and Firepower.
2) The fact that I am playing against either Cadets or 99.9%ers quite more often than I would expect. Ideally, I would like to play with and against people at my level of skill for the most part, with the odd match against either type of outlier when population is really low.
3) Playing with/against a group while not having a group on the opposing side. Groups tend to synergise their Mechs and as such have an advantage vs. those people that essentially had to roll the dice on getting a map / game mode combo for them. The biggest example of this would be 1 Narcer and 3 Lurmboats.

I do not have an issue with group size, actually. I have run into several 4 Person groups that really dragged down the average for the team they were on. And I do not have an issue with restricting the tonnage that 4 Person uses. If my three concerns above are taken care off, then the situation where either of the two creates any issues should be a really rare occurance. And I would absolutely be fine with living in this new merged universe.

[Einherier96]

Larsh, on 03 May 2020 - 12:02 PM, said:

Hey np! Just making sure I'm just getting the jist.

But, yea I can see what you mean by a match isn't "close" if your team of 3 or 4 is still pretty fresh. But, better be fresh with a lot of damage, instead of fresh and did nothing haha.

Since everyone has a differentiating view of what a close match is, what is your defining traits of a close, and fair match in the end?

For me the bigger question is if a close game means that it was balanced. And to that i argue not it is not equal. a game can be totally balanced, but can go totally onesided because the tactic of one game turned out way better then the other, or because someone turned the corner at the wrong moment and got toally slacked in seconds. Also in my opinion, tryint to deduct if a game was balanced from the killcount is naive and non productive. if the enemy is in tethers like he just headdived into a chainsaw, then it was close, even if its 12/3.

DemonRaziel, on 03 May 2020 - 11:56 AM, said:

Hey Anomalocaris, I see you're one of the more vocal posters against the queue merge, so I think you're one of the more qualified prolific posters to answer the question below:

If you were to pick the 3 or even 5 main points against the merge, what would you pick? Please be as detailed as possible (i.e. not "Pre-mades have an advantage", but "Pre-mades have a clear advantage because...[XZY] they can do X that a PUG can't".

Guys sharing the same sentiment as Anomalocaris, as well as those on the other side of the barricade, please respond as well, with your main points against and/or in favor. Acual arguments is what we need, instead of black and white vision and ad hominems against anyone who doesn't share the same sentiment, is what we need.

Since i am from the fence side that is pro merge, here are my 5cents:
-better acessibility for people who either wanna play the game with friends or more casually and are unable to fill a full group of 8 or 12 players (or have an uneven number)
-promotion of more teamwork thanks to promotion of having more premades, may it be to have more viable support builds (a tag laser or stealth narc/spot build is finaly somewhat viable in qp if you can at least coordinate your mechs/playstyle with your premades), or to promote teamplay in general, it is way easier to get your team to use tactics if you have a core of players aka the premade at which people orientate upon. even if you have solo players, most people tend to flock near other players, so even if nobody else listens in the game, some will still unconsciously flock towards the premade thus enabling or reinforcing their strategy/working as a team. its a matter of using your team and forcing them to play as one even if they don't wanna do it.

-more player influx, i hope it can lead to an influx of new players who have previously turned away from the game because of the queue issues, or on players coming back who got frustrated of not being able to properly play with their friends. And thus getting the numbers up.

-getting rid of the tiers. the lower tiers are either the toxic or bad lower percentages of the playerbase, or people who cannot teach each other a single thing. of course pgi needs to take precautions against seal clubbing and roflstomping if it becomes a thing, but I see the advantages as more desirable then the risks are dangerous. i mean, the worst that can happen is that we loose a part of the allready abysmall playerbase faster.

I also wanna say something about

Anomalocaris, on 03 May 2020 - 11:50 AM, said:

I'm not sure it's possible to be this dense and still use a computer, but that would mean you're actually trying to be a pedantic ***clown.

One more time:

1. If I play solo with a skilled group in the match, my contribution won't matter, or not nearly as much as it would in a match of 24 solos. Read Brauer's posts.

2. I play to win. In the current meta in order to have your best shot at winning you must group up with other good players. Otherwise you're handicapping yourself before you even start. Unarguable. Look at the all the screenshot posts, twitch streams, etc. If you're a solo and a good team drops opposite you things won't go well.

3. People obviously wanted to play solo. They were asking for it back in 2013 and when it was created that's where lots of people went. Again, it's what they wanted and when PGI gave it to them they flocked to it. If you don't have solo mode you will push lots of people out - me included.

4. I rarely had to wait more than 60-90 seconds for a match on the NA server in solo queue. That's hardly too long a time to wait. I don't need quicker matchmaking in return for sticking me with 4mans in solo.

Get that through your head. Nothing about mixing groups with solos makes the game better for me. Everything about it, even with a perfect matchmaker, makes it worse for me as a solo

honestly? i would take the risk of loosing you and people like you anyday for the chance of gaining more people back. It it ain't 2013 anymore, the comminty changed and shrank, and lets be honest, mwo is struggeling to keep the playerbase, and they shouldn't cater to the people who stayed only, but instead should look why a player left and b why there is no influx of new players

edited to get rid of the stupid smiley that got automatically input when using a) c)

Edited by Einherier96, 03 May 2020 - 12:27 PM.

[Paradoxbound]

Best thing that gas happened to quick play, almost completely killed mindless NASCARs.

[LordBraxton]

Just chiming in to say I reinstalled this game and am trying it again cause I can play with my friends finally.

[Redacted]

[Einherier96]

LordBraxton, on 03 May 2020 - 12:34 PM, said:

Just chiming in to say I reinstalled this game and am trying it again cause I can play with my friends finally.
[Redacted]

I mean the way you worded it is mean, but i have to admit i thought the same. we all have a friendslist ingame, we all will propably be able to get along with other players, if premade groups destroy you, build your own with others

Edited by GM Patience, 04 May 2020 - 03:30 PM.

[Brauer]

LordBraxton, on 03 May 2020 - 12:34 PM, said:

Just chiming in to say I reinstalled this game and am trying it again cause I can play with my friends finally.
[Redacted]

I'm against this change, I've been dropping with friends. I mean it's nice to see my WLR, KDR, and (surprisingly) my average match score jump up so much, but it also is imo not a healthy change for the game itself.

I'm sure my average match score, and especially my KDR will come down eventually, but groups are OP right now.

[Brauer]

Einherier96, on 03 May 2020 - 11:48 AM, said:

Allright, while i agree with some of your points, i heavily disagree with the conclusion you arrive at.

I will skip your first point, since that ties in with something that I wanna speak about at the end.

Not sure what your second point is about, correct me if i am wrong, but it seems like to synch drop with several groups, to which I agree that that is an issue, but you can either prohibit it, or going forward, is pgi's job to give an incentive for these players to either drop in another game mode as a full 8 or 12 player group (for example make a special group for 12vs12 or 8vs8 premade groups.

This ties a bit into my third point. While you say that one team will pull the rest of the 12 player team no matter what, i heavily disagree. While it is true that a 4 player premade team has more advantages then a shuffled toegher solo player team, it is still perfectly feasonable for the solo team/teams to take the premade group out, may it be through sheer luck, or through better organization. if the randoms are able to pile more players onto the premade, or evade them and take out the rest of their team first to win through sheer numbers. Also, lets stop talking about it like every group from now on will be 4 players, that is not the truth, and a 2 player or 3 player group will have less impact then a 4 man squad if they cannot achieve coordination with their team.

But I wanna directly tie into where i most disagree with you.Teams have an advantage because they can fine tune their mechs to suit each other better. true, absolutely.But solo playing should not be the way to go for a teamgame in the first place. And i think we should look at the community and ask ourselves why so many decide to drop solo instead of forming groups with people they got along with in the rounds before and form premade groups for quickplay. i honestly have never seen the friendlist option so rarely used in a game like in mwo. And mwo is unnatural in the percentage of people who are solo dropping, which in my opinion comes to following factors:
-one is simply. some people simply dislike playing in a team or premade. weird but for game build around being a team, but okay, thats fine, and you will find people like these in any game. as long as they pull their weight, its perfectly fine.
-seconldy are those players that are playing the game too casually to go into units or into coordinated big teams. I would fall into such a categorie. Or to say it like someone did a few posts before. I am not commited enough to mwo to play this game in a big group, to be tied to specific times where everybody is online cause the playerbase is so abysmall.
-thirdly, and the amount of players you are the most easily able to pull back into the game: people who play this game with their friends, or rather would be if the game wouldn't force you to either synch drop, or to wait an eternity and a half to play as exactly that, a group of friends. Most players who will join mwo, fresh meat to say, will be pulled in by their friends, will propably play this game casually, because no matter what the hardcore community of a game says, the casuals as the bigger part of the community by far for a healthy game. And those people will simply not play a game that promotes them to either not be able to play with their friends half the time, or to wait for hours for a match. you will not gain any more players with that, you will just let mwo die more quickly cause the influx of new players will dry up even faster.

What mwo can do with the mixed queue is to promote grouping in smaller drops, finaly ending the reign of the abysmall community that is left and that is full of either solo drops or full teams drops, pull back people who didn't play the game with their friends cause the game was simply not accessible for either their group size or their approach to the game, promote more tactical gameplay, and also stop the toxic and starving atmosphere of the game, that the community created.

What do you think is a better atmospehere for newbies/players who are not so great? a communcating, active team, where they can slowly learn which map positions are good or bad because they get called out, or the silent matches we had in the last years, where you die because of reasons (may it be bad build, bad positioning, or a combination of both), where you die,and will never know why, because everyone sits silently in front of their screen (at best, at worse the toxic part of the community sits at t5 and t4). Whoever survives the silent matches as a newbie atm is propably too thickheaded to take on advice anyways (if you will even find people who are willing to give it at the lower tiers), or will inform themelfes, choose a a premade group to drop with, and will fall out of the matchmaker. This game needs casuals, it needs more acessibility to get every single player it can. atm we have at least at steam around 100-200 more players on average then before. And if we have more players, pgi can actually get a working solution if it turns out that certain high skilled players are a problem, atm the pool is simply too small, and if you keep things as they are, the game will simply shrink even faster.

Which is also why i endorse it that they lifted the tier restrictions. First of all, it is better for accessibility, once again. i honestly don't wanna do a ****** smurf account just to play with my friends who play this game more casually and rarer then i do. its annoying. And it also gives newbies the ability to meet more experienced players who might be willing to talk to them and teach them a thing or two. and yes i know, this community sucks anyways yada yada, and i admit that it is pretty utopian to hope that the community will turn around, welcome newbies, explain **** to them and all that stuff but honestly, will you still piss in the pool cause everybody does it anyway, or are you willing to not do it cause it might make a change? The matchmaker change that pgi does is an opportunity for mwo to open itself up for an audience that approaches games more casually, to bolster up its numbers, get away from the nascar deathmatch meta, and maybe breath in some life back into mwo. and for that i am willing to take the frustration of playing with people who have no clue how to play the game, how to play their mech (or to build him), because i will have that anyways, and the possible positive change far outweighs the negatives for me personally. because honestly, i just came back into the game because i can now finaly play reliable with my friends in this game, and if they revert it back when the test stops, i will be out again. the community itself is not such a community atm that could keep me hooked onto the game like other games have.

edited some spelling errors, any more you can keep, as usual, treat yourself to one cookie per mistake you found.

My second point is about the fact that you can form a group with 4 90th percentile or higher players. That automatically makes your team stronger than most sides in QP. It's not about sync dropping with other groups or with solo players, you don't need to do that to stack a team.

Re: 2 or 3 man groups. I've dropped in groups of that size too. I lost one match out of maybe 8. 2 or 3 player groups are still very strong. A 3 person group is actually a nice sweet spot right now because of the tonnage available.

Re: a 12 player team of random players beating a strong group: Sure it's possible. But it is not likely. The whole point of my post is that the deck is immediately stacked against solo players. You are arguing that something that happens maybe 10% of the time, generously speaking, offsets the result 90% of the time. I think that's a pretty weak argument against the impact on the solo experience.

Quote

And mwo is unnatural in the percentage of people who are solo dropping, which in my opinion comes to following factors:
-one is simply. some people simply dislike playing in a team or premade. weird but for game build around being a team, but okay, thats fine, and you will find people like these in any game. as long as they pull their weight, its perfectly fine.
-seconldy are those players that are playing the game too casually to go into units or into coordinated big teams. I would fall into such a categorie. Or to say it like someone did a few posts before. I am not commited enough to mwo to play this game in a big group, to be tied to specific times where everybody is online cause the playerbase is so abysmall.
-thirdly, and the amount of players you are the most easily able to pull back into the game: people who play this game with their friends, or rather would be if the game wouldn't force you to either synch drop, or to wait an eternity and a half to play as exactly that, a group of friends. Most players who will join mwo, fresh meat to say, will be pulled in by their friends, will propably play this game casually, because no matter what the hardcore community of a game says, the casuals as the bigger part of the community by far for a healthy game. And those people will simply not play a game that promotes them to either not be able to play with their friends half the time, or to wait for hours for a match. you will not gain any more players with that, you will just let mwo die more quickly cause the influx of new players will dry up even faster.

So basically you think the game should switch to catering more to groups of people even though the group play modes (Faction Warfare, Group queue, and Competitive Queue) have lower populations than the casual solo queue? That doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me. And before anyone jumps in to say we don't know the real population of old group queue or faction warfare, you can extrapolate from the much longer wait times that FW and GQ were less populated modes than QP.

Quote

What mwo can do with the mixed queue is to promote grouping in smaller drops, finaly ending the reign of the abysmall community that is left and that is full of either solo drops or full teams drops, pull back people who didn't play the game with their friends cause the game was simply not accessible for either their group size or their approach to the game, promote more tactical gameplay, and also stop the toxic and starving atmosphere of the game, that the community created.

How is smashing group queue and solo queue together going to achieve any of this? It has not in my experience promoted more tactical gameplay by in large. I've seen the same old timid play that we had in solo queue. The difference now is that when I group up with some friends we can set our own agenda and smash the other team whether or not the other 8-9 players on our team play along (unless another strong group is put on the other side, which has happened like three times iirc). The primary change in the meta, in my opinion, is that groups > solos and strong groups > everyone.

Quote

What do you think is a better atmospehere for newbies/players who are not so great? a communcating, active team, where they can slowly learn which map positions are good or bad because they get called out, or the silent matches we had in the last years, where you die because of reasons (may it be bad build, bad positioning, or a combination of both), where you die,and will never know why, because everyone sits silently in front of their screen (at best, at worse the toxic part of the community sits at t5 and t4). Whoever survives the silent matches as a newbie atm is propably too thickheaded to take on advice anyways (if you will even find people who are willing to give it at the lower tiers), or will inform themelfes, choose a a premade group to drop with, and will fall out of the matchmaker. This game needs casuals, it needs more acessibility to get every single player it can. atm we have at least at steam around 100-200 more players on average then before. And if we have more players, pgi can actually get a working solution if it turns out that certain high skilled players are a problem, atm the pool is simply too small, and if you keep things as they are, the game will simply shrink even faster.

I don't think the current atmosphere is particularly good for new players. There hasn't been a ton of communication outside of groups in my experience. I do know that a lot of very knowledgeable and skilled players have offered numerous resources to players of all skill levels including meta tier lists, mech building guides, game mechanic explanations, FW guides, etc..

What do you think is a better atmosphere for a casual player? One where when they solo drop they get smashed because they're matched up against anyone in the game immediately (including 4 mans of top players), or one where they start in lower tier matches and can slowly improve and build their stable of mechs? If anything the current set up is less new player friendly.

There is far too much to explain to a player about this game's mechanics to cover it during a QP match. There are community resources to help new players including the MWO Comp discord, these forums, Grimmechs, and many others. Those discussions need to go far beyond the 4-8 minutes someone has in QP.

But whatever, it's fun to play with my friends outside of FW. We'll see how long until people get sick of stomps.

Edited by Brauer, 03 May 2020 - 01:00 PM.

[Brauer]

Einherier96, on 03 May 2020 - 12:25 PM, said:

For me the bigger question is if a close game means that it was balanced. And to that i argue not it is not equal. a game can be totally balanced, but can go totally onesided because the tactic of one game turned out way better then the other, or because someone turned the corner at the wrong moment and got toally slacked in seconds. Also in my opinion, tryint to deduct if a game was balanced from the killcount is naive and non productive. if the enemy is in tethers like he just headdived into a chainsaw, then it was close, even if its 12/3.

You are focusing on outliers rather than the majority of cases again. If groups are consistently putting up 12-4 wins they are stomping their way through the queue.

Quote

-promotion of more teamwork thanks to promotion of having more premades, may it be to have more viable support builds (a tag laser or stealth narc/spot build is finaly somewhat viable in qp if you can at least coordinate your mechs/playstyle with your premades),

Where's the evidence of this more tactical gameplay?

BTW, bringing a tag or narc on the off chance that your team brings lock-ons is no more viable now than in the past. What is more viable is a 3-4 man team bringing a NARC mech and boating lock-ons. Those are very very different things.

If you really want to tag and narc for teammates, okay that's fine. But that really doesn't require that much tactical thinking (and I'm saying that as someone who has developed lrm strats for comp, and run big lrm decks in FW). The thought that goes into planning a trading deck or a brawl push, at least at a somewhat high level, is in my opinion more extensive and more challenging. To get a lrm deck to work most of the time you just need a NARCer who can stay alive and players who know enough to seek different angles when the enemy is in cover.

Quote

or to promote teamplay in general, it is way easier to get your team to use tactics if you have a core of players aka the premade at which people orientate upon. even if you have solo players, most people tend to flock near other players, so even if nobody else listens in the game, some will still unconsciously flock towards the premade thus enabling or reinforcing their strategy/working as a team. its a matter of using your team and forcing them to play as one even if they don't wanna do it.

I have not found QP groups to be any better at working together. That's because 1) a 3-4 man group doesn't need their team to do much, and 2) we still have the same timid playerbase that doesn't like to engage the enemy or listen to calls.

Quote

-getting rid of the tiers. the lower tiers are either the toxic or bad lower percentages of the playerbase, or people who cannot teach each other a single thing. of course pgi needs to take precautions against seal clubbing and roflstomping if it becomes a thing, but I see the advantages as more desirable then the risks are dangerous. i mean, the worst that can happen is that we loose a part of the allready abysmall playerbase faster.

Ok, so we've gotten rid of tiers basically, so they've spread all of those toxic and perma-bad players that you're talking about to all levels of the game now. Think about that for a minute.

[Fleeb the Mad]

Back in Ye Olde Days when PGI would release more player data, it was revealed that only about 5% of MWO's player base played in group queue and about 20% of that (or 1% of the player pop) played in groups larger than 5.

This change probably means less to the average player than many of you think. If those numbers still hold even remotely true, that means that in any given set of 4 games, only one of them is going to have a group of 4 people. Assuming everyone who groups is grouping in a full lance. Even if every single group was made of tournament-winning champion types, it's not lining the solo queue up to be the stomp fest it seems.

The reality is that your average group is just that. Average. People who just want to play together who have a mixed bag of skill levels. The number of folks who care enough to play competitively, excluding low performing players and using complimenting mechs for specific group tactics is and always was a minority.

Stomps with stacked teams will happen, but it's not like that wasn't a daily reality in the group queue in every one of its forms since the game's inception. I suspect many of the arguments here understate just how hard mode group/faction play was to random casual people who just wanted to play with their friends. Those sorts are also rather dramatically underrepresented in forum posters.

I'll probably test the waters again, personally, since all I ever wanted out of MWO was to casually shoot robots with a few buddies.

[Einherier96]

Brauer, on 03 May 2020 - 12:58 PM, said:

My second point is about the fact that you can form a group with 4 90th percentile or higher players. That automatically makes your team stronger than most sides in QP. It's not about sync dropping with other groups or with solo players, you don't need to do that to stack a team.

Re: 2 or 3 man groups. I've dropped in groups of that size too. I lost one match out of maybe 8. 2 or 3 player groups are still very strong. A 3 person group is actually a nice sweet spot right now because of the tonnage available.

Re: a 12 player team of random players beating a strong group: Sure it's possible. But it is not likely. The whole point of my post is that the deck is immediately stacked against solo players. You are arguing that something that happens maybe 10% of the time, generously speaking, offsets the result 90% of the time. I think that's a pretty weak argument against the impact on the solo experience.



So basically you think the game should switch to catering more to groups of people even though the group play modes (Faction Warfare, Group queue, and Competitive Queue) have lower populations than the casual solo queue? That doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me. And before anyone jumps in to say we don't know the real population of old group queue or faction warfare, you can extrapolate from the much longer wait times that FW and GQ were less populated modes than QP.




How is smashing group queue and solo queue together going to achieve any of this? It has not in my experience promoted more tactical gameplay by in large. I've seen the same old timid play that we had in solo queue. The difference now is that when I group up with some friends we can set our own agenda and smash the other team whether or not the other 8-9 players on our team play along (unless another strong group is put on the other side, which has happened like three times iirc). The primary change in the meta, in my opinion, is that groups > solos and strong groups > everyone.



I don't think the current atmosphere is particularly good for new players. There hasn't been a ton of communication outside of groups in my experience. I do know that a lot of very knowledgeable and skilled players have offered numerous resources to players of all skill levels including meta tier lists, mech building guides, game mechanic explanations, FW guides, etc..

What do you think is a better atmosphere for a casual player? One where when they solo drop they get smashed because they're matched up against anyone in the game immediately (including 4 mans of top players), or one where they start in lower tier matches and can slowly improve and build their stable of mechs? If anything the current set up is less new player friendly.

There is far too much to explain to a player about this game's mechanics to cover it during a QP match. There are community resources to help new players including the MWO Comp discord, these forums, Grimmechs, and many others. Those discussions need to go far beyond the 4-8 minutes someone has in QP.

But whatever, it's fun to play with my friends outside of FW. We'll see how long until people get sick of stomps.

Don't take it the wrong way, but you seem to be stuck in the mindset bubble of a ''progamer'' (that is not meant negatively). Your Whole argumentation reminds me a bit of to take famous example, ninjas you need to play to win, and to win only. No, people mostly play to have fun. Casuals play to have fun, people play with their friends to have fun. they don't need stupid tier lists, cause they don't give a ****, they wanna have fun blasting each other. and that is fine.

To the whole 90 percent player problem. We allready have that problem. If 90percentile players wanna seal club, they allready have ways, its called synch dropping and smurfing. And lets be real here, almost everyone in every game that plays ranked or plays for stats owns a smurf account to test thing. so atm, newbies are either stuck with other newbies, or smurfs, both sides of the extreme and nothing in between. if we open up matchmaking for them, they will have a far broader, variied experience.

Also two other points: what do the 90 percentile want in sq anyways? Normaly they should either be so competitive minded, that they search for opponents who are equal to them in ranked mode, join the competitive faction play (more to that later), or they wanna seal club, in which case, as pointed out above, smurf accounts are the way to go, since they know the meta, know all the tricks in the book. if they wanna do sealclubbing, they will do sealclubbing anyways. it is pgi's job to monitor that, maybe if we can later afford that (since lets be honest, the community pool is small, the community pool for the top 10% to get a match is even smaller when you take into consideration timezones and real life difference on gaming time), to make a whole new matchmaker, that is not reliant on something as stupid as, like other people offered here as a solution, reliant on kdr (since that would introduce the problem of the tank elo that for example moba games have, an issue where supports are falling out of the elo since its too difficult to determan their worth).
Lets go shortly over your other argument. yes, groups should reign superior over solos, period. thats what teamplay, strategy, everything is for. to make up for your maybe individidual bad performance to take down an individually superior opponent. thats even what fire support mechs are for. if i continue your logic, mwo should be a 1v1 direct fire only battle, because someone that has a teammate with a fire support build randomly shooting at the same target as him is superior then one or two pure solo people who don't have that. that is an ingame advantage that is fair, cause everyone ca have that. you get stomped by groups? grab some more solos, and make a makeshift group ffs, it ain't that difficult. IF people even care. Cause guess what. most casuals don't care if they loose or win, they wanna have fun with the game, and those people are many, and mwo lost nearly all of them.

Now to dismantle your argument about how solo queues are more prominent in mwo then the group queues, and how to pull that into correlation with new players, returning casuals etc. Lets start with Ranked first. Lets be real here. Ranked is neither attractive for newbies, nor for casuals. And the percentile playerbase that is interested in ranked is, with such a small playerbase as mwo has, even smaller, so it is simply easier to solo drop. it is the same as the next one, the group queue. its a downward spiral, started by the community that won't stop. group queue is dead. thats why everyone in the community synch drops, and every newbie gets told to synch drop. the community keeps the downspiral going, by saying it is dead, and beating it with a stick at the same time they open their mouth to utter the sentence. and pgi won't be able to fix it. its so broken, the best is to abandon it and start new and fresh like they are trying atm. IF, big if, if the community should grow back to a reasonable size, you can easily reintroduce the group queue feature and then most people will propably use it again since its not dead anymore and you should better synch drop with your friends.
Allright, last one: Faction Play. Faction Play is not attractive for newbies nor casuals either. For newbies for obvious reasons, you need at least 4 mechs of the same faction, in a certain weight limit, and if you don't know what you are doing, you get **** on heavily, and you have 4 mechs which means that you have to endure being beaten to a pulp 4 times longer then in a normal QP. Also, pgi themselfes label it for ''advanced and coordinated'' players. Nothing a newbie with two braincells would put their finger on. And honestly? it ain't attractive to all casuals either. some people like fw, but some simply don't. Some people don't wanna spend half an hour with 4 mechs blasting over bigger distances, some people wanna have fun in shorter greater bursts, aka QP. and that would be fine if quickplay group wasn't dead and burried by the community.

Also sorry, but new players that get busted by a group of 4 players, will propably have stumbled into 4 randoms as well since they messed up their positioning. and as pointed out above, having either other newbies or rockhard smurf accounts in your matchmaking range would make everyone quit, cause you will either reign over your other newbies, have fun with them, or get totally and suddenly nuked together with everyone else cause a wild smurfer appeared and used the ehem you all i am the pro attack.

All in all, and yes I know this is assumptious, but I think you should try to get out of your bubble. it is perfectly fine to play a game with the goal to win it, but you are appearently unable to understand that most people play games for the fun of the game itself, less for the winning, and the problems with the stomps are either not as big as you make them out to be, are allready happening because there are way to circumenvent mm tier restriction, or will ease up if the matchmaker would have more players to work with.
Also sorry but your whole strong group will stomp everyone else sounds more like an excuse made to look good because you protect the weak and bad players, because they will get stomped anyways, since you can literally die your way upwards through the tiers if you would be the lucky cow that doesn't meet any smuf accounts in his lifetime.

[Nearly Dead]

If PGI wants to shut down the servers, combining group and solo is working as intended. I would say I am playing half what I did before and enjoying it less. I went from spending time on Grimmechs and Smurfy and the PGI store/mechlab looking at mechs to add to build a drop deck to shopping on Steam for online games that look interesting.

[Brauer]

Einherier96, on 03 May 2020 - 01:41 PM, said:

Don't take it the wrong way, but you seem to be stuck in the mindset bubble of a ''progamer'' (that is not meant negatively). Your Whole argumentation reminds me a bit of to take famous example, ninjas you need to play to win, and to win only. No, people mostly play to have fun. Casuals play to have fun, people play with their friends to have fun. they don't need stupid tier lists, cause they don't give a ****, they wanna have fun blasting each other. and that is fine.

Winning is fun.
Competing is fun.
Improving as a player is fun.
I do play for fun. All this "people who try to win aren't playing for fun" stuff is nonsense.

Also I feel obligated to point out that you have now claimed both that this change will "promote more tactical gameplay" and that "they don't need stupid tier lists, cause they don't give a ___, they wanna have fun blasting each other." So which is it? Do people want to think things through and execute a gameplan, or do they want to run around mindlessly smashing mechs together?

Quote

To the whole 90 percent player problem. We allready have that problem. If 90percentile players wanna seal club, they allready have ways, its called synch dropping and smurfing. And lets be real here, almost everyone in every game that plays ranked or plays for stats owns a smurf account to test thing. so atm, newbies are either stuck with other newbies, or smurfs, both sides of the extreme and nothing in between. if we open up matchmaking for them, they will have a far broader, variied experience.

Testing with a smurf account is not useful because testing against T4s and T5s gives garbage data. I don't know that many people that have smurf accounts. Most alts were from the days when it was harder to switch factions for FW.

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Also two other points: what do the 90 percentile want in sq anyways?

Uhhh they play the game? Just have some low-key drops? It seems to me you don't know a whole lot about comp in this game. There are often competitions going on, but there isn't a persistent competitive mode on all the time. The game doesn't have the population for that.

Quote

Lets go shortly over your other argument. yes, groups should reign superior over solos, period. thats what teamplay, strategy, everything is for. to make up for your maybe individidual bad performance to take down an individually superior opponent.

Notice that I didn't say that there shouldn't be teamwork, I said that groups are overpowered and that there should be a separate queue for grouped up players. I know what teamwork is and how effective it is. I've been practicing it lately in the new GQ/SQ, and I've used it in every other mode this game has offered. The new queue isn't magically creating more teamwork, all it's doing is making it so that dropping solo puts you at a disadvantage, and dropping in a group makes it possible to stack the deck and basically stomp everyone out there.

Quote

Now to dismantle your argument about how solo queues are more prominent in mwo then the group queues, and how to pull that into correlation with new players, returning casuals etc. Lets start with Ranked first. Lets be real here. Ranked is neither attractive for newbies, nor for casuals. And the percentile playerbase that is interested in ranked is, with such a small playerbase as mwo has, even smaller, so it is simply easier to solo drop. it is the same as the next one, the group queue. its a downward spiral, started by the community that won't stop. group queue is dead. thats why everyone in the community synch drops, and every newbie gets told to synch drop. the community keeps the downspiral going, by saying it is dead, and beating it with a stick at the same time they open their mouth to utter the sentence. and pgi won't be able to fix it. its so broken, the best is to abandon it and start new and fresh like they are trying atm. IF, big if, if the community should grow back to a reasonable size, you can easily reintroduce the group queue feature and then most people will propably use it again since its not dead anymore and you should better synch drop with your friends.
Allright, last one: Faction Play. Faction Play is not attractive for newbies nor casuals either. For newbies for obvious reasons, you need at least 4 mechs of the same faction, in a certain weight limit, and if you don't know what you are doing, you get **** on heavily, and you have 4 mechs which means that you have to endure being beaten to a pulp 4 times longer then in a normal QP. Also, pgi themselfes label it for ''advanced and coordinated'' players. Nothing a newbie with two braincells would put their finger on. And honestly? it ain't attractive to all casuals either. some people like fw, but some simply don't. Some people don't wanna spend half an hour with 4 mechs blasting over bigger distances, some people wanna have fun in shorter greater bursts, aka QP. and that would be fine if quickplay group wasn't dead and burried by the community.

This doesn't strike me as particularly coherent. GroupQ and FW (the most team-based modes) are the least popular, soooo solo should be combined with group? It would seem to me that rather than pushing features from the less popular modes into the most played mode they should instead either find ways to make group queue and FW more attractive (8v8 GQ and changes to the loyalty system seemed to be good starts) or add content to quick play. Instead, PGI have implemented a highly polarizing new system which incorporates many of the flaws you identified in FW and GQ. You say FW is bad for new players because they get wrecked, well guess what, new players will get wrecked even harder in the current quick play queue than in the old. I guess that's an improvement in your eyes???

Quote

All in all, and yes I know this is assumptious, but I think you should try to get out of your bubble. it is perfectly fine to play a game with the goal to win it, but you are appearently unable to understand that most people play games for the fun of the game itself, less for the winning, and the problems with the stomps are either not as big as you make them out to be, are allready happening because there are way to circumenvent mm tier restriction, or will ease up if the matchmaker would have more players to work with.
Also sorry but your whole strong group will stomp everyone else sounds more like an excuse made to look good because you protect the weak and bad players, because they will get stomped anyways, since you can literally die your way upwards through the tiers if you would be the lucky cow that doesn't meet any smuf accounts in his lifetime.

Well I actually didn't say what I thought PGI should do, other than revert this change. Even the old tier system, with it's inherently flawed system, was not as bad as this on average. I think it'd be better for them to fix PSR to at least balance teams better than they did in the past. Instead we've just gotten a change that encourages grouping up and stomping the queue.

Edited by Brauer, 03 May 2020 - 06:04 PM.

[Zirconium Kaze]

LordBraxton, on 03 May 2020 - 12:34 PM, said:

Just chiming in to say I reinstalled this game and am trying it again cause I can play with my friends finally. [Redacted]

Heh, a friend of mine that stopped playing actually began to play it again because we can group up together and get matches. I like where qp is. You see the entire spectrum of skill.