Thorqemada, on 03 February 2022 - 07:31 AM, said:
So, i will say some last words to the MWO thing:
The C-People honestly belive that their way of playing the game is the best and most fun way to do it.
The carefully balanced it that way with much effort and there is change to the battlefield and how matches play out.
They also carefully monitor these changes when life and react to adjust the balance when it seems not meeting their intended goal.
I dont like or agree with this. In olden days, you might have had a point, there was a time when the Remnant (my unit, which is by the way, still around) played competitively. We were alright too. It led to some very toxic stuff however and I think its been a net good that we haven't really engaged with that part of the game since 2014 more or less.
That was 2014, this is now. The comp guys have largely made an effort to be more approachable and open to opposing voices. They are open to those voices. I've seen the comp discord and its often full of discussions analyzing data after changes, monitoring feedback, all things the 2014 comp scene wouldn't have wasted a second on (not that they had the power back then anyway).
Saying they "make the game the way they want to play it" in so many words is pretty unfair and it cultivates an us-versus-them mentality that a few very vocal, very toxic members of this forum are very eager to spread for their own ends. They are the same people who rail against light mechs for "overperformance", rail against snipers for "overperformance" and rail against groups for "overperformance", or in other words, pick out exactly the things they dont personally like or play, and demand nerfs for, because they think playing the game differently from them is
wrong.
Thorqemada, on 03 February 2022 - 07:31 AM, said:
To me the thing is - this game is now like any other First Person Shooter where you get killed in seconds if you expose yourself making it a cover-peek-cover/steamroll with firepower game instead of a game of heavily armored and in comparison slightly undergunned but herculean Warmachine.
Its no longer a game where initiative in methodolical disablement of your opponent wins you the game but raw firepower.
In the past it was one mean to win battles to disarm the maingun of an enemy Mech - today it does not matter, in fact it is a waste of time as amassed firepower will obliterate anything in its World War One lof out of the trenches, from the ridges.
In short - its now a very american powerbased, killobjectivebased game!
This we can engage with. Because this is a real opinion that actually is informed by thoughts. You are right when you say time-to-kill has gone down and this is not the first time someone has expressed this opinion.
I disagree with it however, and I will explain why.
Time to kill is kind of fetishized. The
lowreybalance era was defined by very very high time to kill. This was achieved because Paul Inouye's rotating nerfs in years past essentially reduced every weapon to wet noodle status.
This has a few effects. First, it means mechs feel like they're taking alot more of a beating. This is cool sometimes. However, it also has a notable drawback. Essentially, light mechs, and snipers,
all rely on quick time to kill. If you cant knife someone quickly, or put a high enough alpha down range quickly enough to stop an advancing annihilator, then the annihilator will kill you 9 times out of 10. This essentially means the
lowreybalance era was defined by assault brawlers; the only mechs that could put enough damage out to reliable kill anything.
Honestly, this is not a good enough outcome to justify higher time-to-kill. If having it nullifies all build options except medium range laser vomit and assault brawlers, then its not a good thing in the long run.
There is another aspect to this however. TTK is often held up as a golden ideal, because it implies players will spend more time shooting bad robots in game, and less time waiting in queue, or watching their friends play because they're already dead. This betrays another issue entirely; the
gameplay loop.
Too much of the game is spent waiting for matches. perma-death means your actual game time can end
very quickly, and because at the end of the match, you need to matchmake again, you end up often having to wait quite a while before you can get in a cockpit again.
Some measures, such as persistent lobbies, could mitigate this. Other, more extreme measures, like drop decks or respawns in quickplay, i think are at least worth analyzing, but that's a different thread. Time-to-kill, however, is a bandaid. It doesn't address the problem, or really fix it.
Thorqemada, on 03 February 2022 - 07:31 AM, said:
If you like it you like it and if not then you like it not and while you can express your feelings about it there is no real argument to make about it as it is simply a matter of gaming taste.
Godspeed MWO!
Some people argue here in good faith. Im assuming you're one of them. Sometimes people are honestly wrong. I think you're wrong about some of this stuff, which i've explained. That's ok. Im not gonna jump down your throat, I just hope my response helps you think about this a little differently.
Others do not argue in good faith. Its pretty obvious when that's the case, so when you see someone getting dragged, consider that they might be lying through their teeth, and they're getting called on it.
2
