15 replies to this topic

[1453 R]

A very real conversation I was party to yesterday while playing a game on Vitric Forge (paraphrased for memory and brevity):

TKK Lance Lead: "Okay, here's the plan: we move up to Top, aggressively push it, and force the enemy off of it. After that everybody can do whatever, so long as we've taken top."
Goomba: "I'm not built for top, can't do that."
TKK Lance Lead: "It really doesn't matter if you're 'built for top', we can't let the enemy have it and expect to win. Once we shove them off top, go have fun."
Goomba: "I'm an assault brawler, I don't do top."

Game progresses. Me and my lancemates, the TKK Crew, do exactly what we said and aggressively push top, drive the enemy off of it. We drive the enemy all the way back near their spawns, provide our team every possible opening to push whether it's on top or in Death Gulch...and the team mills around the middle land while we get chewed up and ruined. Game proceeds to become a blowout for the enemy as they retake top and rain murder down on the idiots in the low ground.

Y'all.

Y'all.

If your 'Mech build or your piloting style cannot make good plays? That's on YOU, not on everybody else. That's something YOU need to fix, not something everybody else needs to accommodate. Your unbearably slow 'assault brawler' that can't exist outside game-losing low-ground pseudocover is not a good 'Mech, and the onus is on you to fix that. Not the rest of your team.

Please make better decisions, so we can all have better, more fun and engaging games of MWO.

[LordNothing]

sometimes bottom is good. especially if the guy up top has a big gun.

[1453 R]

You want to give the guy with the big gun unrestricted and uncontested access to a perfect vantage point with which to use that gun on people below him with impunity, I ask that you do it on your own time. 'Mechs on the low ground in Vitric Forge can not contest 'Mechs on the high ground. The advantage is so heavily weighted towards the high ground holders that mediums could outfight a like number of assaults. The only option, once you have ceded the high ground like a nitwit, is to draw so far back that the enemy has to chase you off the high ground, or to find a way to un-cede the high ground and take it back. Which is much more difficult than simply contesting and taking it in the first place.

This really isn't difficult. Don't let guys with big guns camp above you for free. or make any other similar boneheaded moves just because "I'm not built for that." Find a way to do it anyways, or change your build.

[LordNothing]

wow that joke went way over your head.

i generally think the most dangerous position in this game is away from your team. unless your team is doing something stupid, like nothing.

Edited by LordNothing, 06 February 2025 - 10:31 AM.

[1453 R]

Heh. I was ignoring the double entendre because I very much believe there's plenty of folks out there who actually, legitimately, and earnestly believe you're right - that the low ground is better than the high ground because "You can't get sniped while you're in a hole!" It's the Foxhole Problem - you're safe from the big bad boolets in your hole, and so you want to stay there. But nobody ever won a fight by staying in their foxhole. You can only win by going and prying the enemy out of their holes and making them dead, but doing that requires you to be less safe than the enemy for a time. And the average gronk in MWO just cannot fathom why they should be less safe than the enemy.

I was also ignoring the double entendre because the MWO forums are Barney and Friends-level over-policed on that sort of thing, you can't say ANYTHING colorful here without the mods coming down on you like a bag of rhinos.

But anyways. Hawhaw Booty Jokes.

[sycocys]

Wasn't a part of this match, but it should be made clear to you that your enjoyment of the game doesn't trump someone else's.

If winning is the the enjoyment benchmark for YOU, then YOU need to adjust your tactics based on the random people that drop with you in matches.

[1453 R]

sycocys, on 06 February 2025 - 04:26 PM, said:

Wasn't a part of this match, but it should be made clear to you that your enjoyment of the game doesn't trump someone else's.

If winning is the the enjoyment benchmark for YOU, then YOU need to adjust your tactics based on the random people that drop with you in matches.

Cool beans. Wanna go around throwing every other match, have fun. Expect to get called out on it. Your same pithy logic can be spun right back at you - your desire to play terrible fits with godawful strategies and lawlderp your way through the game actively handing the enemy victory doesn't trump the rest of your team's general desire to do well in the match.

If you're going to play a slow assault brawler - categorically one of the worst possible Puglandia fits - it's on you to make that work. Not the rest of the team. Refusing to acknowledge decent calls or decent plans is also a 'You' problem. Unless, of course, you are willing to completely sacrifice your right to say literally anything about literally anything that literally anyone ever does in a match of MWO ever again. THEN you can be all "I do what I want, I don't care about anything, and I don't care if other people say otherwise."

[sycocys]

The only person having a cry-fit is you, because someone else doesn't play the game the way you want to play it.

You are also crying because you want to call pug matches and not adjust your match calling to the composition of your team.

You are also crying because you don't want to run better builds in T3/4 matches and carry them regardless of what any of the other 23 players do. If you and your TKK crew played better it literally wouldn't matter what anyone else in did in those tier ranges.
If you and your TKK crew played better and, I'm just going off a suspicion here based on how you are conducting yourself here and my recollection of how players behaved on comms in that tier area, weren't giant d-heads on the comms people might tend to listen to your calls.
Because ultimately what likely happened, is you were a giant D on comms straight out of the gate and that chunk of the team that didn't do what you were calling did so because of you chose to make the game less enjoyable for them.

Then you probably died because you chose to over run even your own call and proceeded to have a cuss filled b&m fest the entire rest of the match completely ruining the comms for everyone else, which means every one of those players you interacted with have no desire to play matches with you any longer, hear you again, or have any care about anything you have to say about strategy or their mech builds.

[feeWAIVER]

Sounds like you let them kite you back to their base to kill you 12v4 while your team held the middle.
If you had the range to take top, why did you chase them?

[1453 R]

feeWAIVER, on 06 February 2025 - 10:27 PM, said:

Sounds like you let them kite you back to their base to kill you 12v4 while your team held the middle.
If you had the range to take top, why did you chase them?

When TKK plays as a lance, we're extremely aggressive. We have absolutely no patience for Puglandian chickendickery and spending twelve minutes cowering behind a wall waiting for Someone Else to make a push, so we've decided - when we play together, we're the push. The chickendicks desperately waiting for somebody else to take the first punch can follow, and victory is decided solely by whether TKK can kill half the enemy team by our damn selves.

Did we overcommit in this instance? Probably. I was in Ferroblast, and Ferroblast's middle name is "in over its head". That's a my-bad mistake, and I'm perfectly willing to cop to that. Unlike Sycosys up there attributing an entire game's worth of poison to us, after our initial attempt to push the wall and a couple short calls to "push up while we've got them pushed back" mid-fight, we didn't bother communicating with that group of idiots. They made their call, and they lost the absolute assballs out of that game for it.

I do find it amusing that the general reaction to this thread is a bunch of people saying "You're not the boss of me, I'll deliberately lose games my way if I want to!" A'ight. Why you think you're immune to people being frustrated and upset at your explicitly and deliberately bad play is beyond me.

[sycocys]

There's not a "bunch", there's literally 3 other people at this point and every time you post you continue inform those 3 and anyone else reading that you were the problem in this match.

You made a strategy call disregarding the make-up of your team, held to that call then over-pushed that call. And again largely based on your communication here very likely spent the rest of the match flooding the comms with garbage and insults ruining the game for everyone else.

1453 R, on 07 February 2025 - 06:27 AM, said:

Why you think you're immune to people being frustrated and upset at your explicitly and deliberately bad play is beyond me.

Just going to quote this part - you are in tier 4, (in my opinion) deliberately pulling lower skill level matches for yourself and your group because facing lower skilled players makes you feel fuzzy in the jiggly bits.

If you want what you'd consider better builds and strategies from other players then stop smurfing your account.

If you want to claim you aren't smurfing, then it's time to realize that you aren't nearly as good at the game as you think you are, and you probably shouldn't be calling matches or worrying about what builds other players run.

[1453 R]

I've never said I'm amazing at the game. I didn't call the match, our lance lead did. When I run with TKK I pull higher skill enemies, because I'm the lowest PSR in my team and I routinely fight higher PSR foes while we're grouped up.

Again - you can keep disparaging my skill, my team, my friends, and my everything-else. Clearly you're going to, because making me look like the villain is easier than arguing that people deliberately ignoring what literally everyone knows is the correct call is perfectly fine and the people making those correct calls are in the wrong instead.

[BlueDevilspawn]

I call all my matches (and place map markers). Even if you don't do that, the simplest calls to make for Vitric is this -
1. If you have mid to long range, take high left. Long range can stay back on the wings, mid range can play the ramps.
2. Short range can go low left, stay within the overwatch of the upper left players.

The short range guys will intercept the typical puggy rotation to the right (hence why they go left) and have overwatch.
The mid to long range guys will hopefully own overwatch and bring multiple angles on to corral the other team into a kill box.

3. Dismantle the enemy

There are far more complex strats to use on Vitric when I play it in comp, but for QP this is sufficient.

[LordNothing]

i prefer aggressive play myself, but it really only works when enough of the team commits to it. im trying to get better at holding back when the team lacks the warrior spirit to damn the lrms full speed ahead. if i have enough bad brawls il just show up to the next match in an erll boat. the collective player mood at the time is usually pretty reliable to judge what mechs to bring, and changes slowly enough where your prediction is right most of the time. when the collective mood is to chill out in a ditch a grid from spawn, its time to maybe go play a different game and see where things are text time you are in a mood to play again.

[1453 R]

Honestly, yeah. That's probably my biggest weakness as a player, beyond overall terrible map awareness - I'll push and pursue fights even when I honestly probably have no business doing it, simply because the constant passivitiy the playerbase is so prone to grates on my last nerve. Often gets me caught out and killed, and then I start spiraling a bit as my mood sours. Been having an absolutely dogwater run lately, gonna need to start running the Ol' Reliables for a bit. Bleh.

But it's like...I get it. People wanna play what they wanna play. Cool. Absolutely do that. But once you're in the game and pressing Dubya, why are people so massively, violently opposed to even trying to do things that win games? Everybody knows if you sacrifice top completely on Vitric, you lose. Everybody knows that huddling in the lower trenches on Canyon Network and Hibernal is a recipe for getting taken apart like fish in a barrel. Everybody knows pushing basement early in HPG is a great way to get boxed in and chewed up. Why do people keep doing these things? And playing 'Mechs that make them feel forced to do them? Drop your fifth AC-20 and put a bigger engine in your robit already.

[VeeOt Dragon]

shot calling can often be like herding cats on the best of days so i usually don't bother. now i will call out targets that i think a good for some focus fire. i ALWAYS press "R" because to quote an in universe propaganda series "information is ammunition"

you have to know your team make-up as well. nothing is worse than being in something like an Atlas or Annihilator and having the rest of your team rocket ahead and leave you swinging in the wind (even using max engines these mechs are very slow).

all i can say is you just need to make the best out of whatever **** sandwich you are given by the MM. between the slowest mechs spawning in the farthest point to DCs and AFKs it can often just be the MM that decides the match. the way i tend to play is just do the best i can with what i get. as long as i hit a certain personal bar i feel i did good enough. sometimes a loss can be just as fun as a win if its close and you have a couple good skirmishes. i long ago stopped really caring about W/L numbers, Tier, or my K/D score, its all just arbitrary nonsense. even my damage numbers can be misleading. sometimes you have a build that just doesn't feel like you are doing much but when you look at the damage you did well. other times if play clean-up and get 4 kills but don't do all that much damage.
yeah its frustrating when the stupid comes out but hell we all get an attack of the stupids from time to time. if your getting frustrated it might be time to take a break.