First, don't listen to the emotional reasoning of the Professionally Angry. MWO's development history has certainly included bad choices and errors - but none of it has been because the people who devoted more than a decade to this game, or worked for years to get it off the ground, are lazy. The announcement for this event was quite clear about the reasons - and they're good ones. I just think it failed (they even ended it early) because literally everything is tuned for a 12v12 team size, and people were primed to notice the differences.
Elric-, on 19 August 2025 - 08:41 AM, said:
why are the matches so one sided so often.
This is a more complex question than it might appear; bear with me.
Are you familiar with Lanchester's Laws? Mechwarrior games (not just this one) could almost have been
made to showcase Lanchester's principles. It's not just 8v8; 12v12 has the same dynamics, but people tend to play more conservatively since there's more firepower out there, and there's more opportunities for good positioning or enemy errors to reverse the momentum of a match. But once a 'mech goes down - or becomes crippled - the available firepower to the team is reduced, which makes your team take damage (and thus casualties) faster, which in turn reduces your firepower, and so on. In 12v12, a dead 'mech is 8.3% of your team roster (however much firepower it had;) in 8v8, it's 12.5%.
That's not the whole story, of course: in fact, it's only a bare-bones generalization. Things like fire superiority, team composition, and - notably - the presence of high-level players, all make a huge difference on how a match plays out. For example, in 8v8 I saw a LOT of high-level premades, compared to my normal experience. That could be because more people were playing, or because the 8v8 format lowered the player counts, but anecdotally I'm quite sure there were more (it wasn't just a little change.) For example if players see a known streamer on the other team and all try to hide from him, they
create the stomp that they're afraid of, because they're not fighting back effectively - then some of them come and complain about how the
matchmaker is "broken," but that's another thread.
Additionally -
and this is important - not every one-sided match actually
is one-sided. If you analyze your end-of-match screens, you'll find plenty of matches where one team didn't get many kills, but did fairly comparable damage to the enemy, and had roughly the same number of the various weight classes. This often happens because players whose 'mechs are damaged tend to hang back and try to avoid being crippled or destroyed. So it's very possible that a 12-4 "stomp" was actually a fairly close match, with all of the surviving 'mechs heavily damaged. Or, it could be a garden-variety steamroll - but you don't know that just by looking at the kill score.
The dynamics of the game's matches are complex, but I think I've hit the broad strokes, and I hope this helps give you context for what you're seeing in the game.
1
