General Solo, on 18 January 2021 - 08:36 PM, said:
I see that as a matchmaking issue maybe you do too I don't want to presume
Not firing their weapons is often a skill or positioning issue, so that could be partly a match making issue. But the larger issue of aggression vs timidity is not. The problem is that sometimes players are aggressive, and sometimes timid. And knowing what to do when is a big part of the game. But even players who do have a good grasp on what their team ought to be doing, often will not be able to because the rest of their team isn't doing it.
For example, I'm sure all of us have been in situations where we think "If our team pushes right now, we'll win easily. If we hold, we'll lose." And yet you do not push, because you know that if you push and your team doesn't, you'll die and the team will still lose. The ideal outcome is you all push, but without confidence that this can be coordinated, the second best option is to get some more dmg in so your score isn't as bad when you lose. Its a classic
Prisoner's Dilemma situation.
Success can come in several ways: If your team is blindly aggressive, and you happen to be in a situation where aggression wins, then you win. If not, you lose. Likewise if your team is blindly timid. Ideally, your whole team is good at reading the situation and also reading the rest of the team, and you all sort of intuitively do the right thing. Higher skilled players are of course better at this, and enough of them on a team can cause the team to be generally doing the optimal thing.
But in general in a quick play match, you're going to have some people being blindly aggressive and some blindly timid, and others trying to read the situation and then doing what they think is optimal for them to get a decent score in the end (of course, this assumes players who have any strategic awareness in the first place). I've seen a lot of games be slow, controlled losses that could have been easy wins with better communication and leadership.
But why don't people communicate or lead more? Because they know that a lot of the time, it's not worth it. Good players don't need to be told, and weak players won't listen even if told. And as the leader trying to make calls, you're not going to have complete certainty that your plan will work or be the right one. So even if, on average, you are a good leader, you'll have enough embarrassing failures that you'll stop bothering and just deal more dmg in a losing match instead of putting yourself out there. Which of course means that those who DO continuously put themselves out there tend to be the ones who will do it blindly, even if they aren't successful leaders. (We've all seen plenty of that.)
So overall, the whole situation is a giant mess of Catch-22's and coordination problems, not a matchmaker issue, although matchmaking helps a bit because more experienced/high skill players won't have these problems as badly. But they never go away, as they are a symptom of a game with some strategic nuance (as opposed to others games where it's always good to be maximum aggro), + pickup groups.
In general, if everyone tended to more aggressive play a bit more that'd be good. More games are lost to lack of aggression on a team level than to being too aggressive. But then, the catch-22 is that many games are lost to too much aggression on an individual level. So who's going to push first?
There's no real solution to all this. But it would help if we could see other people's loadouts, because then that would help a bit in guessing what that other player is going to try to do. If you know you're looking at a brawler, you can probably assume they are gonna go brawl, and then you can work around that. And if you know a sniper loadout is going into brawler range, you can safely figure that they aren't worth risking yourself to save, etc.
Edited by Heavy Money, 19 January 2021 - 02:40 PM.
1
