Also some parts of this is humble brag and lots of rambling for my personal gratification.
TLDR:
1. Heaviest tonnage + Highest Damage = Rank up
2. Aggression leads to Stomps
3. Lights are ******
4. Don't worry about group drops in lower tiers
Edit:
5. PSR is still ALL about damage. You can go T1 with a losing record.
Wall of Text Review:
Retired mostly in Dec 2018. Just reached T1 in 125 matches with a lowly 1.34 WLR and 2.23 KD because I'm bad. Solo only. Definitely a slow climb. Top tier players like MPG or Moba did it in 60 to 70 games solo. I expect top tier group drops to do it even faster. Maybe 50?
1. Bring your heaviest because there is no tonnage matching. In 1 memorable match, I was placed with a top tier group and the team had 9 assaults vs 6 enemy assaults. We just face tanked and pushed in. Tonnages correlate to higher MS. Higher tonnages/armor means less risk to pilot regardless of skill level and potentially more damage dealt.
2. Bring the mech that you can deal the most damage in so that even in a losing match, you can still rank up. 400-600 damage should ensure either maintaining PSR or increasing PSR. It can happen but I've only seen once when a 600 damage performance led to a drop in PSR because the team was performing around the 400-500 mark as well. I just rotated the MCIIB & the ECM Bas since they were already set up prior to my retirement.
3. Bring airstrikes. These will increase your damage numbers up and assist in winning the game. Always try to survive enough to use both. I'm not asking people to farm damage but to play to win and at the same time try to survive. Can't deal damage if you are dead. Of course don't play to the extreme of ignoring the win conditions and farming damage only.
4. Since everyone is now lumped into T3, there are a lot of bad players. ECM will render you invisible to them. You might consider the heaviest mech you can find with ECM since most of the battlefield will ignore you.
5. Stomps are a function of aggression & the game having no respawn mechanics unlike other games. In the beginning of the T3 climb, you'd find matches are passive with closer scores. This is because no one knows what to do or have no map knowledge to know where to push or simply fumbling with controls. Passivity leads to close scores and long games. In the later part of the tier climb, aggression increases and stomps & short games will occur more frequently. This is because most of the veteran players know what to do. Personally I did not like the long and indecisive texture of the matches in the lower tiers. I was happier once I reach the higher tier matches as they were faster and more aggressive. I do not think that stomps can ever be engineered away in the higher tiers because there is no instant respawn mechanics unlike other games where you can reorient and re-calibrate your strategy.
6. Lights are ****** in this weight heavy meta. Do you mainly play the objective or deal damage & play the objective? You only have so much time ingame plus with so much armor around, you have a lot to chew through. I feel lights should be given bonus PSR if they are matching Assault level damages. A 20 ton mech dealing 600 to 800 damage (30x to 40x weight) as compared to a 100 ton mech dealing (6x to 8x weight) should get a massive bonus in addition to their capping duties. Similarly, a 100 ton mech should go down massively in PSR if they are only dealing 100 damage.
Edit: Read this https://mwomercs.com...rting-for-duty/ . If you go for caps as a light, you'd probably still go down in PSR even on a win if you did not deal enough damage. PSR is all about damage.
7. Losses do not seem to lead to much of a drop for me, maybe because I was dealing high enough damage to ameliorate the losses. Perhaps the penalty should be much higher or maybe it should just be solely based on WLR in order to promote the play to win mentality. The current system can still be gamed. I still see the same Raven & Ach players farming while losing (you know who you are)
8. If I took 125 games to climb up to T1, does it mean it will take a T4 or T5 125 painful games to go down to their respective tiers? It surely does not feel good to be a punching bag for that long or good for retaining totally new players who are dropped into T3. However if we put everyone in T5, then there will be people smurfing again. Without the initial 10-20 "seeding" matches (which was removed I think, I don't know), smurf accounts can take a long time to move up and new players a lot time to move down.
9. Don't be worried about groups in the T3 or lower. At first I was worried when I heard about the queue merge. However after playing through the tiers, you'd realize that outside of the top few teams, clan tags mean nothing. There are consistently a few teams who are really bad even if they group drop. If you were already an average T1 before, you should do fine for the climb. I cannot imagine the agony of the T4 or T5 players who had to listen to these ******** constantly in the lower tiers. However once you go higher, I would imagine the matches with the top tier teams will become more difficult and sweatier, especially if you are not on the same side. A group drop of top tier T1 players will almost always swing the tide. So in this regard, nothing has changed for the past few years I think.
10. If you really want to accelerate your climb to T1 and to save some time, join a top tier group drop. It will push you through the ranks faster.
End:
Anyway just some thoughts. Fun while it lasted. I'll still visit
So long and thanks for all the fish! (Not a farewell thread, don't delete this mods)
Edited by UnofficialOperator, 04 July 2020 - 10:19 PM.