45 replies to this topic

[Void Angel]

Punishing people for having groups by inflicting durability or damage penalties? That's akin to the people who want everyone with friends exiled to Group Queue Island where there's no matches half the day until they stop playing. It's... not idea. The best way I think we have to balance groups is to limit their overall tonnage, and that's what the game does already.

The problem isn't the groups, anyway. It's just the different tactics and builds needed to compete, and I don't think there's any easy fix. If we had ten times the populaton, it'd be fine! We'd have a lot more tiers, with a lot more gradual introduction to high-end tactics - heck, we could even have in-tier matching, with only occasional opening of the Tier gates (this was the original intent and functionality - the only reason you have to deal with Tier 1s and 2s (or 4s and 5s) in your matches is that the player population just won't support reasonable matchmaking times.)

To be fair, most players who pick up this game do not advance to Tier 3 as quickly as you have. Your experience with World of Warships, one of a handful of games that's fairly similar to MWO, stood you in good stead, as has your willingness to analyze and adapt; there really have been people in this game who insisted on playing with a steering wheel. But yeah, it sucks to have people suddenly thrown in with the world champions. They don't like it, the new Tier 3s definitely don't like it... but it's largely unpreventable.

That's why I'm active on these forums. =/

[dumbcat]

well i wasn't saying any idea in particular was a good idea. haha. the point is that right now being a tier 1 in a group has effectively zero downside. you get: friends, comms, people to watch your back, the ability to dictate the match dynamics, to play pretty much whatever you want within whatever the tonnage restriction is, with essentially no downside. maybe you cant take 4x 100 tonners but i dont think that would make a good group anyway. tonnage restriction as a "penalty" presumes that lights and mediums are inherently less impactful than heavies and assaults and i dont feel like my games have demonstrated that. a good group probably *wants* to have a light in it for scouting and distracting enemies. so giving them a tonnage restriction just makes them do something they probably would have wanted to do anyway, if you get my drift.

there should be some downside to being in a group to make it a *real* choice. what that is, i dont know, but there should be something.

and yeah, i definitely feel like i have an advantage coming from similar games. i understand the importance of my build, my choices, the skills i do or dont have etc. but that has never felt like an unfair advantage. i am using my head and the lab, the tools within my own control. even when i ambush people with the summoner, some might say i am choosing people i have an unfair advantage against by doing this. but that ignores all the time i have to spend creating that opportunity for myself, mostly by myself. for every successful ambush against an enemy that is alone or hot from firing at others, there are minutes of waiting and doing nothing, or matches where no opportunity presents itself and i die having achieved nothing. by contrast, if i were in a group, i could simply overwhelm an enemy automatically with none of the strategy or preparation needed, no potential for downside or counterplay. thats the idea i'm trying to say needs a better solution than exists today. hopefully that makes sense.

[Void Angel]

They'll have to tighten group tonnage restrictions if they go to 8v8, I think. The unthoughtful will howl, but it's really the only lever they have other than banning groups outright.

Groups aren't an "Iwin" button, though. I've seen premades with players from the literal world championship team crash and burn against random pugs, and I've seen rank-and-file premades fail to win matches on, er, the regular. What a lot of teams get wrong is that they still need to coordinate and cooperate with their team if they want to win consistently. An attitude that "well, PuGs are stupid, so we're going to go do our own thing over here" simply splits the team and gambles that the "1337 premade" group will just carry hard enough to counteract the disaster they caused themselves. It's easy for groups who think like this to interpret match results as reinforcing their thinking, too - after all, the puggles fared terribly, look how bad they did! (In the 8v12 that we caused while we were gambling that the team wouldn't fold before our $W337 T@k71X saved the day.) I've been in matches as a solo player with a lot - and I mean a lot - of groups that never communicated and didn't cooperate with the pugs - and it usually led to a loss.

I started dropping with guys who were like that (they were frustrated with the puggles, mostly) and their win rate... wasn't stellar. Once I convinced them that the best thing was to stay near the pugs and support them, even when they were being dumb, our win rate jumped noticeably.

[dumbcat]

is there data on this? say pick a really good player, and compare their win rate and whatever other useful stats when solo vs in a group with other top tier players? id be extremely surprised if there wasnt a huge win rate difference.

if anything, i'd think the biggest factor in bringing high level group play back towards the mean statistically is that the opposing side dies too quickly. i have seen that several times in game chat. "bah they died so fast i couldnt farm" and such, from the people in the group at the end of the 12-0 win.

i definitely appreciate that my ~1-2 months of experience with this is not equivalent to someone's experience over multiple years. but this problem with groups vs solo players has really stood out to me. in wows we have a similar concept "divisions" where you can go into battles with friends, but the ships are so much slower and the dynamics of the game are such that besides things like scouting/smoking/radaring opponents, its still very easy for your division to get overwhelmed by opposing solo players if you dont play well. division play in the equivalent to "quick play" has many more counterplay options than group play does here, where tactics can adapt 10x faster. thats why im so focused on the idea of "what could be done to either limit the power of it, or otherwise balance better" if there is no opportunity to get it into its own queue or relevant space.

to touch on your examples above - regardless of whether the thing that the group did worked or not (id bet even bad tactics work a lot of the time just by sheer numbers and focus fire), THEY got to dictate how the match went. they split off to do their own thing and the team lost? its because of the group. they decided to support the solo players in the game and the team won? its because they decided to. should they have that much influence? should they get exaggerated agency, in addition to everything else they get as an advantage? thats the thing im questioning. in my mind, there should be pluses and minuses to playing in a group the same way there are pluses and minuses to being alone.

[Void Angel]

Oh, there is a huge win rate difference - you can check that on The Jarl's List. But that's the case whether or not they drop solo or with groups. Groups are going to be better for those stats, but you can also see times that they fall apart. There's also a psychological factor here - players see those top pilots, and they lose their minds. They run off to some random spot that covers the key terrain they should be trying to fight for, in the hopes that the mean compies won't find them there until they've had some time to farm damage and make the team lose minimize the loss by at least getting some match score. This part is anecdotal, but I see it all the time, and it doesn't matter if the known player(s) are grouped or not. They see certain guild tags, or certain players, and just throw up their hands and donate their testes to science for the rest of the match.

dumbcat, on 12 August 2025 - 03:22 PM, said:

to touch on your examples above - regardless of whether the thing that the group did worked or not (id bet even bad tactics work a lot of the time just by sheer numbers and focus fire), THEY got to dictate how the match went. they split off to do their own thing and the team lost? its because of the group. they decided to support the solo players in the game and the team won? its because they decided to. should they have that much influence? should they get exaggerated agency, in addition to everything else they get as an advantage? thats the thing im questioning. in my mind, there should be pluses and minuses to playing in a group the same way there are pluses and minuses to being alone.

Well, that's just what I'm trying to explain here: they think that way, often: that they're the whole reason the team succeeds or fails, but it's not how it actually happens. I wrote Follow the Fracking Atlas to advocate a baseline of cooperation that didn't rely on comms or premade groups, and was insulated against stupid people who insisted on not cooperating. A group that's stupid does have an outsized effect on match outcome, if they all do the same thing. Often they don't; I do drops with my guild a lot of evenings, and sometimes we work with each other, and sometimes one or more of us brings massively different builds - like a dakka Blood Asp, and some HMG Mediums or something. We still talk to the team and each other, but we really don't coordinate much - and if we do, it's just the normal team-coordinating comms that I use solo. For casual PuGs and groups, it's easier for groups to coordinate, but they don't actually get any tools the rest of us don't have. Like AMS during the Lurmageddons (or the FDA's dietary guidelines) we can't blame the other side of a problem if we don't use the tools we have in the first place.

Groups that regularly play together and synchronize their builds do have an outsized effect on matches, and I see what you're getting at there - but they also have a tonnage limit that gets incrementally lower per player the more people join the group. With 8v8, I think they're going to need to reduce those tonnage allowances, but it is there for exactly the reasons you're giving - the outsized effect that skilled premades can have on matches. That's also why groups are capped at 4 players, and you can't have more than 5 grouped players on any given team in 12v12. Those are parameters that are going to need adjusting if/when we go to 8v8, too.

[FriedIV]

Just to make things even more interesting. What if individuals were allowed to wager c-bills in 1v1 up to 12 v 12 battles. Build into the Group access. The key is, MWO sells a c-bill for 100 , and redeems a c-bill for a percentage of it's original purchase price. Within a year the servers will over heat. The same or similar mechanism could be used to pay players, like the tournament champs. They do get money don't they?

Edited by FriedIV, 14 August 2025 - 09:15 AM.