40 replies to this topic

[Void Angel]

The worst thing you can do when you see high-skilled players on the other team, is to hide from them. I get it; I do - nobody wants to go toe to to with the lance full of World Champion players. But increasingly, when I see those players on the field, the opposing team changes tactics.

They scatter out, trying to fight from novel angles; they try to hide behind terrain; they do a number of things, but it all boils down to an attempt to avoid the players they fear. And this is the worst possible thing they could do - because now that premade lance of [insert scary opponents] only ever has to fight the hindmost. When a Championship Series finalist doesn't have to fight anyone he hasn't yet caught, it creates a massive imbalance that doesn't actually depend on his skills. Somebody's little brother could be playing his account without permission, and the tactical effect would be the same - the high skill these players bring to the table is just insult to the injury. =)

Letting the best players in the game maneuver at will and kill you piecemeal just makes things worse. On the contrary, the only weak point you can target is their interface with their own team. The best way to deal with a known premade is to jump the enemy team and keep the pressure on. It's not some kind of magic "I win" button, but it dramatically helps both your match score, and my blood pressure. So, don't wimp out just because you see known players or scary unit tags on the other side. If those guys want your cookies, they can probably take them - but for the love of Comstar, make them fight you for them! Your matches will be of better quality - and theirs will, too.


This message has been sponsored by Frustrated MechWarriors For a Better Tomorrow.

[1Exitar1]

In other words: work together.

[LordNothing]

i know a match isn't going to end well when only a couple people are trading and everyone else seems to be sitting in a ditch waiting for something to happen. wasting time just gives the enemy more time to entrench themselves in a more strategic location. if you cant trade from your present location, remember that mechs have legs. support trading by either joining them or using those trades to cover your advance. whether you die in the first minute or are the last guy with perfect armor getting cut down because you waited to long to start fighting, you are still dead.

1Exitar1, on 20 December 2025 - 10:55 AM, said:

In other words: work together.

id settle for working at all.

[Baron Blitz Fokheimer]

Void Angel, on 19 December 2025 - 08:41 PM, said:

The worst thing you can do when you see high-skilled players on the other team, is to hide from them. I get it; I do - nobody wants to go toe to to with the lance full of World Champion players.

You're misinterpreting the situation. They're not scared of these players themselves; they're scared of the cheats they use.

These aren't "world champion" players, as you say. They're 58-year-old, decrepit men with heads balding from their middle manager-tier careers and fat, aging wives yelling at them to take out the garbage in between QP matches. And these are the lucky ones who aren't divorced and drinking themselves into cirrhosis in their empty studio apartments after those fat, aging wives took everything but their MWO accounts. This is only somewhat tongue-in-cheek, and I'm sure you're getting the picture I'm trying to paint. They aren't pro gamers. They'd be in the bottom quartile in an actual pro gamer environment.

There are few, if any, high-tier gamers to find here. Just shaky, middle-aged try-hards who group-drop to stomp random Brazilian and Eastern-European F2P PUGs in order to hold on to some semblance of authority and respect by role-playing being "elite" in an obscure video game. I can attest as a younger person who discovered MW when I as a kid saw a PC game box at an EB Games in the late 90s and thought that the "robots" looked cool and got hooked on the IP ever since, that I've been entirely unable to find other people my age who are interested in playing these games with me.

Anyway, I've observed a whole bunch of these players blatantly cheating. I have a little list with a handful of names in it that I make sure to observe after initially suspecting them, and the component-toggling and ESP usage is absolutely shameless. I've played FPS competitively and know how to make and analyze cheats (on at least a rudimentary level), and I know what to look for and how to tell it apart from legitimate gameplay.

Void Angel, on 19 December 2025 - 08:41 PM, said:

Letting the best players in the game maneuver at will and kill you piecemeal just makes things worse. On the contrary, the only weak point you can target is their interface with their own team. The best way to deal with a known premade is to jump the enemy team and keep the pressure on. It's not some kind of magic "I win" button, but it dramatically helps both your match score, and my blood pressure.

You're right about this. Aggression is generally a force multiplier in PvP situations (and also real-life combat). However, in a video game, it will mostly come down to raw math. Everything, every setup, every player action (or lack of), et cetera, can be distilled into an effectiveness score. These scores can then be aggregated and analyzed, and the statistical outcome will predict that the try-hard team will have such a massive advantage that the other team's aggression will have a marginal, de minimis effect.

What we need is not for regular players to give the try-hard group-droppers more enjoyable matches, but for the matchmaker to be balanced enough to ensure that the try-hards play amongst themselves. Getting rid of group-dropping in the public queue would be a good place to start. Maybe keep 2-person groups so that players can drop with friends, maybe.

And you might say like so many others do "oh, there just aren't enough players to do that these days." Well, yeah, and there never will be because the player retention rate is horrible. Some cadet who drops into his first match in his shiny big stompy robot and 34 seconds later gets one-shot by a coordinated group of Linebackers or Piranhas or whatever who isolate him with ESP at the back of the NASCARing pack and then disappear into the ether to keep their armor so that they can farm kills after the match is half over and everyone has orange component damage...That person is going to uninstall and not come back.

[Hat]

Baron Blitz Fokheimer, on 20 December 2025 - 05:10 PM, said:

You're misinterpreting the situation. They're not scared of these players themselves; they're scared of the cheats they use.

These aren't "world champion" players, as you say. They're 58-year-old, decrepit men with heads balding from their middle manager-tier careers and fat, aging wives yelling at them to take out the garbage in between QP matches. And these are the lucky ones who aren't divorced and drinking themselves into cirrhosis in their empty studio apartments after those fat, aging wives took everything but their MWO accounts. This is only somewhat tongue-in-cheek, and I'm sure you're getting the picture I'm trying to paint. They aren't pro gamers. They'd be in the bottom quartile in an actual pro gamer environment.

There are few, if any, high-tier gamers to find here. Just shaky, middle-aged try-hards who group-drop to stomp random Brazilian and Eastern-European F2P PUGs in order to hold on to some semblance of authority and respect by role-playing being "elite" in an obscure video game. I can attest as a younger person who discovered MW when I as a kid saw a PC game box at an EB Games in the late 90s and thought that the "robots" looked cool and got hooked on the IP ever since, that I've been entirely unable to find other people my age who are interested in playing these games with me.

Anyway, I've observed a whole bunch of these players blatantly cheating. I have a little list with a handful of names in it that I make sure to observe after initially suspecting them, and the component-toggling and ESP usage is absolutely shameless. I've played FPS competitively and know how to make and analyze cheats (on at least a rudimentary level), and I know what to look for and how to tell it apart from legitimate gameplay.



You're right about this. Aggression is generally a force multiplier in PvP situations (and also real-life combat). However, in a video game, it will mostly come down to raw math. Everything, every setup, every player action (or lack of), et cetera, can be distilled into an effectiveness score. These scores can then be aggregated and analyzed, and the statistical outcome will predict that the try-hard team will have such a massive advantage that the other team's aggression will have a marginal, de minimis effect.

What we need is not for regular players to give the try-hard group-droppers more enjoyable matches, but for the matchmaker to be balanced enough to ensure that the try-hards play amongst themselves. Getting rid of group-dropping in the public queue would be a good place to start. Maybe keep 2-person groups so that players can drop with friends, maybe.

And you might say like so many others do "oh, there just aren't enough players to do that these days." Well, yeah, and there never will be because the player retention rate is horrible. Some cadet who drops into his first match in his shiny big stompy robot and 34 seconds later gets one-shot by a coordinated group of Linebackers or Piranhas or whatever who isolate him with ESP at the back of the NASCARing pack and then disappear into the ether to keep their armor so that they can farm kills after the match is half over and everyone has orange component damage...That person is going to uninstall and not come back.

but sir i'm a world champion and im 20 years old in school full time and have an actual social life. so you're wrong on that front

[Baron Blitz Fokheimer]

Hat, on 20 December 2025 - 06:27 PM, said:

but sir i'm a world champion and im 20 years old in school full time and have an actual social life. so you're wrong on that front

Congratulations on being an exceptional statistical outlier then! The exception doesn't break the rule, however. If we poll the ages of MWO players, I'm estimating the mean to be somewhere in the mid-to-late forties. And the competitive scene will reflect that observation as a statistically-significant sub-sample.

Also, you started playing MWO when you were 8? YouTube and Twitch in your tweens? That's super unusual, but I won't judge.

[Dogmeat1]

Baron Blitz Fokheimer, on 20 December 2025 - 07:24 PM, said:

Congratulations on being an exceptional statistical outlier then! The exception doesn't break the rule, however. If we poll the ages of MWO players, I'm estimating the mean to be somewhere in the mid-to-late forties. And the competitive scene will reflect that observation as a statistically-significant sub-sample.

Also, you started playing MWO when you were 8? YouTube and Twitch in your tweens? That's super unusual, but I won't judge.

The average age of each of the top comp teams is late 20s to early 30s. Many of these players have also achieved high ranking in other PvP games, ones far greater populations than MWO.

As for your claims of use of illicit software; if it's as common and easy to identify as you say, then surely you must have dozens if not hundreds of recordings to back this up? Please upload them to youtube so we can all watch them. Considering every modern gaming PC has built in recording software and you already play hundreds of matches per month, it should be a trivial matter for you to gather and upload evidence.

I will be waiting with bated breath for your groundbreaking expose.

[Bud Crue]

Void Angel, on 19 December 2025 - 08:41 PM, said:

The worst thing you can do when you see high-skilled players on the other team, is to hide from them. I get it; I do - nobody wants to go toe to to with the lance full of World Champion players.

This seems specious as a premise.
Between name changes, the fact that the vast majority of the player base these days doesn't follow the comp/WCs, and the overall indifference of what folks in a given match are doing, let alone who they are, I can't help but think that the vast majority of this game's player base has no idea who may or may not be a "top tier player, let alone who might be a "World Champion". That, plus, when I do mention that a known (to me) high skill player(s) is(are) in a match, I am met with silence 99% of the time. All this suggests to me that there are VERY few players who are intimidated or even aware of so-called "high skill players" on any side of the match. If they are aware, folk's don't care, or at the very east they are playing like ******* regardless of the fact of who may or may not be on the opposing side.

[Baron Blitz Fokheimer]

Dogmeat1, on 20 December 2025 - 07:40 PM, said:

As for your claims of use of illicit software; if it's as common and easy to identify as you say, then surely you must have dozens if not hundreds of recordings to back this up? Please upload them to youtube so we can all watch them. Considering every modern gaming PC has built in recording software and you already play hundreds of matches per month, it should be a trivial matter for you to gather and upload evidence. I will be waiting with bated breath for your groundbreaking expose.

Nope, I'm not interested in putting any work into this. I don't make recordings, I don't save recordings, and I don't post recordings of cheating in any game I play (and I play CS and lots of hardcore survival games, where cheating is considerably more prevalent than here), unless it's for some kind of personal use. That's simply not my job. However, if you're interested in this subject, there are lots of forum discussions about cheats on places like Reddit (for example, throughout the years there have been threads made by alleged high-end players who anonymously admitted to cheating), and you can also look up cheating stores/communities and take part in discussions on their private forums as well.

I don't even view cheating as the main issue here; the terrible matchmaker is. If it just segregated the try-hard communities out of the public queue, a lot of the issues with the matches that affect the general population would go away. There would still be cheaters, and there would still be mixing of high-end players with the regulars, but the matches wouldn't be as bad because they would be mixed in more evenly.

I just got a friend who was initially very excited into the game, but after getting dunked on for about 15 matches in a row with not a single win to show for it, I don't think he's coming back. This is a real issue that needs to be addressed, because I'd like this game to be around when I myself am a fat, balding, disgruntled retiree, but it's losing like 20% of its population every year, so the prognosis isn't looking too good.

[Shineplasma]

Baron Blitz Fokheimer, on 20 December 2025 - 05:10 PM, said:

You're misinterpreting the situation. They're not scared of these players themselves; they're scared of the cheats they use.

These aren't "world champion" players, as you say. They're 58-year-old, decrepit men with heads balding from their middle manager-tier careers and fat, aging wives yelling at them to take out the garbage in between QP matches. And these are the lucky ones who aren't divorced and drinking themselves into cirrhosis in their empty studio apartments after those fat, aging wives took everything but their MWO accounts. This is only somewhat tongue-in-cheek, and I'm sure you're getting the picture I'm trying to paint. They aren't pro gamers. They'd be in the bottom quartile in an actual pro gamer environment.

There are few, if any, high-tier gamers to find here. Just shaky, middle-aged try-hards who group-drop to stomp random Brazilian and Eastern-European F2P PUGs in order to hold on to some semblance of authority and respect by role-playing being "elite" in an obscure video game. I can attest as a younger person who discovered MW when I as a kid saw a PC game box at an EB Games in the late 90s and thought that the "robots" looked cool and got hooked on the IP ever since, that I've been entirely unable to find other people my age who are interested in playing these games with me.

Anyway, I've observed a whole bunch of these players blatantly cheating. I have a little list with a handful of names in it that I make sure to observe after initially suspecting them, and the component-toggling and ESP usage is absolutely shameless. I've played FPS competitively and know how to make and analyze cheats (on at least a rudimentary level), and I know what to look for and how to tell it apart from legitimate gameplay.



You're right about this. Aggression is generally a force multiplier in PvP situations (and also real-life combat). However, in a video game, it will mostly come down to raw math. Everything, every setup, every player action (or lack of), et cetera, can be distilled into an effectiveness score. These scores can then be aggregated and analyzed, and the statistical outcome will predict that the try-hard team will have such a massive advantage that the other team's aggression will have a marginal, de minimis effect.

What we need is not for regular players to give the try-hard group-droppers more enjoyable matches, but for the matchmaker to be balanced enough to ensure that the try-hards play amongst themselves. Getting rid of group-dropping in the public queue would be a good place to start. Maybe keep 2-person groups so that players can drop with friends, maybe.

And you might say like so many others do "oh, there just aren't enough players to do that these days." Well, yeah, and there never will be because the player retention rate is horrible. Some cadet who drops into his first match in his shiny big stompy robot and 34 seconds later gets one-shot by a coordinated group of Linebackers or Piranhas or whatever who isolate him with ESP at the back of the NASCARing pack and then disappear into the ether to keep their armor so that they can farm kills after the match is half over and everyone has orange component damage...That person is going to uninstall and not come back.

I'm top 1% or better at every single ranked game I bother to grind.

Cope away though.

[Baron Blitz Fokheimer]

Shineplasma, on 20 December 2025 - 09:40 PM, said:

I'm top 1% or better at every single ranked game I bother to grind.

Cope away though.

That's an entirely meaningless statistic. Being top 1% in a major online video game usually doesn't even place you into the sidelines of the competitive scene. It just means that you're a very, very good player in the general population. Unless the game has just a handful of players.

The point is that the "top" players as a collective in MWO specifically sabotage the community by getting to that "top" by stomping on the regular players, and also being heavily involved in the cheating scene of this virtually unpoliced environment.

I'm not ignorant to how these things work. I've been rated ~25,000 in CS2, and I can attest that 50-80% of everyone who has ever been on that list is either cheating directly, or getting carried by cheaters.

On point with the OP's complaint, PGI needs to fix the matchmaker in a manner where these outcomes aren't possible, or at the very least unlikely. I've been here since the beginning, and can remember the days of 8-man groups stomping the pubbies. This game was more enjoyable, and I believe had its golden age, in the years between when that was eliminated, and when group play was reintroduced to QP.

[epikt]

Baron, may I suggest you visit the Steam forums.
You'll feel right at home among the other conspiracy theorists, and you'll even be able to hide your ig handle so nobody can see on jarls you're a mediocre player at best.

[Arnetheus]

Baron Blitz Fokheimer, on 20 December 2025 - 05:10 PM, said:

These aren't "world champion" players, as you say. They're 58-year-old, decrepit men with heads balding from their middle manager-tier careers and fat, aging wives yelling at them to take out the garbage in between QP matches.

Geez, we get it, you know nothing about comp scene of this game and don't follow it. No need to triple down on ignorance.
Or is it some bitter projection and self-report?

Quote

...They'd be in the bottom quartile in an actual pro gamer environment.

Well, good thing there are no pro-gamers in MWO then, so your comparison makes no sense anyway.
Nobody is making a living off MWO leagues. Nobody puts in effort comparable to FPS or moba pros. Nobody wastes 6-8 hours every day on this game to "win".
Somehow, despite denigrating whatever few good players there are left in this game, you seem to have zero clue on how much "effort" anyone is putting into this game or not. When a person not playing for a year can show up at worlds and get easy top-8, as part of a team with zero preparation whatsoever.
This game's comp scene is a beer league, with only 2 actually good teams each year (or 3 at most) going at each other with a semblence of competition. The rest are there for the fun of it, and to participate in matches that allow for at least some level of teamwork, unlike soup queue.
Your hateboner for those few at the top is quite pathetic and amusing.

Quote

Anyway, I've observed a whole bunch of these players blatantly cheating. I have a little list with a handful of names in it that I make sure to observe after initially suspecting them, and the component-toggling and ESP usage is absolutely shameless...

...Nope, I'm not interested in putting any work into this. I don't make recordings, I don't save recordings, and I don't post recordings of cheating in any game I play (and I play CS and lots of hardcore survival games, where cheating is considerably more prevalent than here), unless it's for some kind of personal use.

That's almost a record for how fast someone kills their own delusional take, congrats.
Almost every time someone is caught cheating it becomes public knowledge through several discord servers.
Put up or shut up. This game has enough blabbermouths as is.

Quote

I've played FPS competitively and know how to make and analyze cheats (on at least a rudimentary level), and I know what to look for and how to tell it apart from legitimate gameplay...

...I'm not ignorant to how these things work. I've been rated ~25,000 in CS2, and I can attest that 50-80% of everyone who has ever been on that list is either cheating directly, or getting carried by cheaters.

Is that some industrial-grade copium shipment in your backyard speaking?
No, you know nothing.
You have barely played the game in the past 5 years, unless you're alt-farming or whatever - https://leaderboard....Blitz+Fokheimer
You're a clueless pepega who struggles to maintain a positive win ratio in a game full of geriatrics (the ones you so much despise).
Couple that with low match score but high kdr and relatively high survivability and we get a typical rat-player who saves his mech, steals any kills he can, and then runs out of domination circle to survive (or wastes everyone's time in other game modes).
Unfortunately, a known behaviour for some players.
But that's my guesstimation going off your stats, would have to see the gameplay to point out the problems.

I doubt anyone actually good at CS would be bad at MWO. Hell, i'm pretty sure mechdads will hackusate the typical silver for "having good aim", as ironic as it sounds.

Quote

I don't even view cheating as the main issue here; the terrible matchmaker is. If it just segregated the try-hard communities out of the public queue, a lot of the issues with the matches that affect the general population would go away. There would still be cheaters, and there would still be mixing of high-end players with the regulars, but the matches wouldn't be as bad because they would be mixed in more evenly.

That's some strong verbal diarrhea.
What is the "try-hard community"? Can i get their address?
What's the difference between the "general population" and "high-end players"? Are those players not part of regulars in your mind, somehow?
You seem to not understand that segregating top-end players will bleed the game faster than it already happens. You realise that those players will be replaced by people who were just below them? What then? Remove tier 2 players cause they're the new top-end and tier 3-5 players are struggling against them? Repeat till the game finally dies?

Quote

What we need is not for regular players to give the try-hard group-droppers more enjoyable matches, but for the matchmaker to be balanced enough to ensure that the try-hards play amongst themselves. Getting rid of group-dropping in the public queue would be a good place to start. Maybe keep 2-person groups so that players can drop with friends, maybe.

You almost voiced a good take. Almost.
I wonder why a CS player is not bringing up SBMM. Do you even know what it is?
Or maybe, despite your totally educated and well-informed ramblings, you don't know MWO has none?
Something, that some people were asking for ages, while other clueless pepegas were talking nonsense about "segregating" good players away from them?

Quote

The point is that the "top" players as a collective in MWO specifically sabotage the community by getting to that "top" by stomping on the regular players...

Wait...
You realise that inside the bracket tiers everyone has the same opportunity by playing against each other, right? And so naturally some people go higher than others.
What are you yapping about? Are you implying there's some MWO illuminati at work?

Quote

I just got a friend who was initially very excited into the game, but after getting dunked on for about 15 matches in a row with not a single win to show for it, I don't think he's coming back.

Your friend is bad at FPS and/or has learning disabilities then. Which is ok, since that's majority of the playerbase.
Or did you also teach your "friend" nothing about the game and how it works? That's not very friendly of you.

P.S. I second the idea of taking your venting to steam forums. You are obviously too "informed" on how this game works, and similarly-minded people over there will appreciate it.

[Duke Falcon]

Baron Blitz Fokheimer, on 20 December 2025 - 08:13 PM, said:

I play CS and lots of hardcore survival games, where cheating is considerably more prevalent than here

Bruh...

I used to play UnReal Tournament, Quake Arena, Counter Strike... CS I found especially dumb but everyone hyped so much I gave it a try... Boooohrin' at best.
I know we are not the same, so some may die for jerk 0ff on CS, hunting with but knifes were fun at first. After played through S.t.a.l.k.e.r. with knife-hunting I thought CS could provide the same nice feeling.
Multiplayer FPSs are not my world. Those would all be better if there would be no reticules in them at all. Just like it were in Quake.

But I am a weak T3 player in MWO. Being good in FPSs not mean being good in MWO. So, just because someone is top-c0*k-gobbler in CS or wut not means she\he would @$$-dominate MWO. Some top players in MWO just good, deal with it. Or get better in MWO. Some sure cheat but those are hardly among the top tier players.

So, yeah, before - oh it happened?! - JARL's drop in... Everyone who posts here could be checked on Jarl's... And as Epikt noted above, Baron who not Harkonnen, your jarl's also public. Mine to but I not advise to check that, your brain would melt...

Oh, yeah, I'll be moderated again...

[Shineplasma]

Baron Blitz Fokheimer, on 20 December 2025 - 10:03 PM, said:

I'm not ignorant to how these things work. I've been rated ~25,000 in CS2, and I can attest that 50-80% of everyone who has ever been on that list is either cheating directly, or getting carried by cheaters.

Nobody ranked in the top 25k Counterstrike players would be spewing this nonsense in the MWO forums while seemingly being unable to break even 300 average match score - which is a low bar.

So uh,

*Press "X" to doubt*

Anyways, never said I was some god tier, CS world champion, Adderall huffing esports professional. Just pointing out that the players you're **** talking and hackusating are better than you seem to realize. It takes a real sad sack of **** to cheat at a ******* video game. Especially one as slow as MWO.

Feel free to beat your straw men to death though.

[1453 R]

Baron Blitz Fokheimer, on 20 December 2025 - 05:10 PM, said:

You're misinterpreting the situation. They're not scared of these players themselves; they're scared of the cheats they use.

These aren't "world champion" players, as you say. They're 58-year-old, decrepit men with heads balding from their middle manager-tier careers and fat, aging wives yelling at them to take out the garbage in between QP matches. And these are the lucky ones who aren't divorced and drinking themselves into cirrhosis in their empty studio apartments after those fat, aging wives took everything but their MWO accounts. This is only somewhat tongue-in-cheek, and I'm sure you're getting the picture I'm trying to paint. They aren't pro gamers. They'd be in the bottom quartile in an actual pro gamer environment.

There are few, if any, high-tier gamers to find here. Just shaky, middle-aged try-hards who group-drop to stomp random Brazilian and Eastern-European F2P PUGs in order to hold on to some semblance of authority and respect by role-playing being "elite" in an obscure video game. I can attest as a younger person who discovered MW when I as a kid saw a PC game box at an EB Games in the late 90s and thought that the "robots" looked cool and got hooked on the IP ever since, that I've been entirely unable to find other people my age who are interested in playing these games with me.

Anyway, I've observed a whole bunch of these players blatantly cheating. I have a little list with a handful of names in it that I make sure to observe after initially suspecting them, and the component-toggling and ESP usage is absolutely shameless. I've played FPS competitively and know how to make and analyze cheats (on at least a rudimentary level), and I know what to look for and how to tell it apart from legitimate gameplay.

"Oh, all the good players with a known name and a strong presence in this game are all old gross neckbeards with zero redeeming qualities who use egregious cheats to stroke their own epeens; meanwhile I am a True Master Warrior who can spot cheaters at a single casual glance and am a True Ardent Admirer of Robot Games from my youthful age!"

Get over yourself, Zapp Waah-nnigan.

Baron Blitz Fokheimer, on 20 December 2025 - 05:10 PM, said:

You're right about this. Aggression is generally a force multiplier in PvP situations (and also real-life combat). However, in a video game, it will mostly come down to raw math. Everything, every setup, every player action (or lack of), et cetera, can be distilled into an effectiveness score. These scores can then be aggregated and analyzed, and the statistical outcome will predict that the try-hard team will have such a massive advantage that the other team's aggression will have a marginal, de minimis effect.

What we need is not for regular players to give the try-hard group-droppers more enjoyable matches, but for the matchmaker to be balanced enough to ensure that the try-hards play amongst themselves. Getting rid of group-dropping in the public queue would be a good place to start. Maybe keep 2-person groups so that players can drop with friends, maybe.

And you might say like so many others do "oh, there just aren't enough players to do that these days." Well, yeah, and there never will be because the player retention rate is horrible. Some cadet who drops into his first match in his shiny big stompy robot and 34 seconds later gets one-shot by a coordinated group of Linebackers or Piranhas or whatever who isolate him with ESP at the back of the NASCARing pack and then disappear into the ether to keep their armor so that they can farm kills after the match is half over and everyone has orange component damage...That person is going to uninstall and not come back.

"My math says that playing well, being aggressive, and assaulting the enemy cannot possibly improve everybody's game experience! NO! My math says the only way to improve the game experience is the same tired ******** everybody's always spewing - which is to say fix the matchmaker so I personally get more wins and also nobody with friends can ever play the game again because blaming 'tryhard' lances of so-called Neckbeard Cheaters is easier than admitting I am not That Guy!"

Again, and bolded for emphasis this time: get over yourself, Zapp Waah-nnigan.

Void is right. The best way to deal with 'Scary' players on the other team - whether they're scary because they're skilled or scary because you believe they're cheating - is to hit them as hard and aggressively as you can. If they're scary because they're good? That gives them the most possible targets to have to cope with and the least benefit from their own allies' weight of fire. If they're scary because they're "cheaters"? Then heavy aggression gives their cheating tools the least amount of time to work, and once again forces them to deal with the maximum number of targets. In both cases, aggressing into the enemy is the answer.

Spend more time shooting and less time chickenwinging behind rocks. And definitely spend less time posting absolute drivel on the forums, Zapp.

[PASHA]

Void Angel, on 19 December 2025 - 08:41 PM, said:

The worst thing you can do when you see high-skilled players on the other team, is to hide from them. I get it; I do - nobody wants to go toe to to with the lance full of World Champion players. But increasingly, when I see those players on the field, the opposing team changes tactics.

They scatter out, trying to fight from novel angles; they try to hide behind terrain; they do a number of things, but it all boils down to an attempt to avoid the players they fear. And this is the worst possible thing they could do - because now that premade lance of [insert scary opponents] only ever has to fight the hindmost. When a Championship Series finalist doesn't have to fight anyone he hasn't yet caught, it creates a massive imbalance that doesn't actually depend on his skills. Somebody's little brother could be playing his account without permission, and the tactical effect would be the same - the high skill these players bring to the table is just insult to the injury. =)

Letting the best players in the game maneuver at will and kill you piecemeal just makes things worse. On the contrary, the only weak point you can target is their interface with their own team. The best way to deal with a known premade is to jump the enemy team and keep the pressure on. It's not some kind of magic "I win" button, but it dramatically helps both your match score, and my blood pressure. So, don't wimp out just because you see known players or scary unit tags on the other side. If those guys want your cookies, they can probably take them - but for the love of Comstar, make them fight you for them! Your matches will be of better quality - and theirs will, too.


This message has been sponsored by Frustrated MechWarriors For a Better Tomorrow.

Yes.. yesss feed me more. I yearn for the ego-trader that lets me farm them bit by bit

[Void Angel]

Which is exactly what I'm telling them not to do?

[Void Angel]

Bud Crue, on 20 December 2025 - 07:47 PM, said:

This seems specious as a premise.
Between name changes, the fact that the vast majority of the player base these days doesn't follow the comp/WCs, and the overall indifference of what folks in a given match are doing, let alone who they are, I can't help but think that the vast majority of this game's player base has no idea who may or may not be a "top tier player, let alone who might be a "World Champion".

They know. Not everyone keeps a list of "people I'm afraid of" in their head, but they know a few players/units, and they certainly can read the CS Series titles literally written over the enemy's heads in bright red letters - and see the pretty badges those players have earned, on the player lists at the beginning of the match. Time of day (and thus player demographics) do matter in personal experiences of this, because those players aren't evenly present at all hours of the global day. It doesn't take the whole team to garner the effect, either. For example, if only a couple of long-range 'mechs being timid to give the enemy team enough fire superiority to make the rest of the team unable to trade effectively.

At the end of the day, it's a simple principle: given elite (or perceived elite) players on the battlefield, using bad tactics in an attempt to avoid them and fight their fellows is a bad idea. It plays to their strengths, ensures that they have strong control over when and who they fight, and commits the team to bad tactical moves that would doom your side even if there were no elite players present. Conversely, if you use good tactics and play aggressively, the worst that can happen is we all die faster, and get into the next match sooner.

TL/DR: If you have elite players on the other team, the only way you can be saved is by bringing the fight to the enemy as quickly and violently as is practical. Therefore, in death ground - fight.

Edited by Void Angel, 21 December 2025 - 02:10 PM.

[Hat]

Baron Blitz Fokheimer, on 20 December 2025 - 07:24 PM, said:

Congratulations on being an exceptional statistical outlier then! The exception doesn't break the rule, however. If we poll the ages of MWO players, I'm estimating the mean to be somewhere in the mid-to-late forties. And the competitive scene will reflect that observation as a statistically-significant sub-sample.

Also, you started playing MWO when you were 8? YouTube and Twitch in your tweens? That's super unusual, but I won't judge.

yes I started when I was 7 in 2012 and making YouTube videos for fun in your teens isn't that weird. I only started streaming a month ago