brienj, on 18 October 2012 - 01:44 PM, said:
I love how these people assume I don't know how to play as a team, or know how to help my team ...
We only get to see what you post, and you post a lot about getting rolled. I've been on pug teams that worked well together without VOIP, and on plenty of occasions those non-premade groups have defeated premade teams by using actual team-work and situational awareness.
brienj, on 18 October 2012 - 01:44 PM, said:
If I went off on my own all the time, you are right, I would be killed. That isn't the case. I watch my teammates' backs whenever I can. When I make a dumb mistake and get killed, I own up to it, and go on, but when facing a team with nothing but cheese, there is very little teamwork that can overcome it, except standing still and not doing anything, but wait.
But there's a big difference between being able to watch someone's back in a group of staunch individualist and coordinating a team of people.
When was the last time you dropped in a Jenner?
Are you one of those people that disconnects from the game as soon as your mech is destroyed? Or do you hang around and offer assistance to your team by providing battlefield intel so that others on the team don't have to stop fighting to type? If the former, you're not a team player no matter how often you help out a fellow pug. If you don't care what happens to the rest of the team once you can no longer pull the trigger on your own mech, you're just another Action Hero.
And we face these teams too you know. We occasionally get to drop against organized cheese-merchants, and we don't tend to die just because the opposition are tooled up with the latest abusive builds. Your inability to coordinate a reasonable opposition to them isn't a global shortcoming.
Of course we don't face them that often because we generally drop with a wider range of mechs. That's something
you could do as well, if you didn't have a pathological hatred of the concept of
playing in a team in a
team game.
brienj, on 18 October 2012 - 01:44 PM, said:
I played a game the other day where the team had nothing but LRMs. Our team would have people pop-up, draw some LRM fire and take cover, over and over and over again. It was a huge stalemate for over 10 minutes. Is that any fun? That's why I hate the LRM cheese teams, the GaussCat cheese teams, and the StreakCat cheese teams, and it's even worse when all combined. Nothing usually happens if you play "smart". So I guess all games should end in a tie, eh?
I've had exactly one MWO game end in a tie, ever. One. And that was because the last two guys on a pug team were hunting a Jenner that had been stripped of his weapons and was running around hiding, instead of wandering over to capture his base like the rest of us were telling them to do. They spent the best part of 8 minutes trying to track him down and failed. Action Heroes, both of them, and the Jenner pilot was laughing at them the whole time. He was taunting them and laughing at them in chat while he ran around outside range of their weapons, and they swallowed the bait like the good little FPSers they were.
If you can't deal with LRMs then you need to upgrade your tactics. They can't hit you if they can't target you, so take down any scouts they have in the field. Move from cover to cover and advance on them until you get in range of your weapons, then snap-shot while you move inside their minimum range. Focus fire from the group to take them down one at a time and roll your most damaged mechs back into support positions when they can't face the barrage.
None of this is hard to pick up. Sure, LRMs do plenty of damage. But they rely on you hanging your butt out in the breeze for them to actually put the LRMs on you. If you can't - or won't - learn to deal with that, then you're playing the wrong game.
Gauss cats are harder, and I agree that they're an abusive build that shouldn't be allowed. I see plenty of pugs with them too, and we manage to deal with them fairly well. But with the cycle time on the gauss rifle, the firing delay and the effects of lag, they're not the uber-powerful monsters most people seem to think they are. They make pretty fireworks when they explode too.
Yes we have a couple people on our team that insist on using gauss-cats sometimes. And yes, sometimes we run LRM-heavy. But as a team we don't build our strategies around abusive builds. We drop in whatever we're having fun with at the time, and build tactics around the load-outs.
The only advantage we have, even when dropping only 4 or 5, is that we can communicate without having to take our hands off the controls. I can call tactical updates to my teammates without having to stop firing, and I don't have to draw my attention away from the target to read whatever someone just typed. Solid communication is the one thing that differentiates a premade from a group of randoms who are able to work as a team, and it's a fragging huge difference. Install Teamspeak and join a group in the unofficial TS server and you'll see what I mean.
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