31 replies to this topic

[wanderer]

First off, once again- I strongly suggest NOT just hitting "Launch" and dropping into random groups- and hope you read http://mwomercs.com/...old-hard-facts/ first and take my advice.

This is for the people who aren't going to.

Welcome to Mechwarrior purgatory, the PUG (short for Pick Up Groups). PUGs are your ticket to seeing as many tooth-grinding ways to lose or fail at playing MWO as possible in the shortest period of time- and when you think there are no more to see, someone will find an even more impressive method to make you facepalm.

PUGs, by their nature are the worst-case scenario for actual play. Organization and tactics are minimal, and indeed frequently you will be matched up with players whose sole purpose is to do nothing whatsoever or actively end the match as quickly as possible with a loss. Why, you ask would people play to lose?

Money, pure and simple. The PUG player is grinding money for their own, custom 'Mech and is usually quite happy to simply spawn, die, collect the rewards, and repeat regardless of actually doing anything worthwhile in the process. Communicating and playing on the team is meaningless to this goal, ergo these players will ignore you. In effect, PUG teams are frequently down a player or more vs. their opponents when this occurs, and it happens often. "Grinders" are in effect the anti-team player.

In addition, you'll run into all kinds of special guy-who-talks-during-movies place kind of people in PUGs.

The "I didn't read the directions" player. They never read the forum notes. They likely don't even know the controls. They really, really should have. These are the guys who fire every weapon they can, have the situational awareness of a dead sheep, and are marginally worse than those NPC 'Mechs you occasionally had in other Mechwarrior games, on average. These players need desperately to read the forums and actually learn something- "I played Mechwarrior before" doesn't work in MWO, especially when they actually mean "I had it set to easy, only shot at computer-controlled opponents and used a Dire Wolf for everything". These are the epitome of the "N00b"- "newbies" actually try to learn the game, "n00bs" think they know the game despite an astonishingly obvious lack of know-how shown often by the minute of actual gameplay.

The "Rambo". These players believe that MWO is a game where they are the star and will destroy the enemy team all on their own (again, just like earlier Mechwarrior games!). These players may actually have the ability to pilot a 'Mech, but lacking any desire to team up will end up focus-fired and obliterated by an actual team, then complain about it. Prone to picking whatever target is nearest, regardless of actually being the one anyone else is shooting at- and since they like going on their own, nobody else is. The other guy's team, however tends to notice in a hurry, whereupon "Rambo" often becomes much like the "Sprinkle", below:

The "Sprinkle". Sprinkles are those guys who wander all over the map, covering it in delicious red dots for other team to devour for easy, sweet xp and salvage. Unlike the Rambo, they'll team up- if they remember to stay near enough to the rest of the group to do so. Which they won't. Many pilots become sprinkles when a random scout zips by and they chase it in some random direction- only to find themselves 800m away from the nearest team-mate and 100m away from the scout's friends and a dozen loaded Gauss rifles, lasers, and other can openers.

The "Premades aren't for me" guy, aka the Lonely: For some reason, he thinks that for whatever reason, he can't be in a premade. Frequently, these people think premades are some kind of despotic WoW guild arrangement where they're required to sit there for hours, vs. the actual experience of "get in LFG, here's a group, play a few matches, feel free to drop whenever RL needs you". Sometimes, they just can't afford to even focus on one match- parents with kids, people taking care of an sick relation, what have you. It's understandable in some cases, less so in others.

While these players often have skill and actually try to help the PUG they drop in, most PUGs are like herding cats between Rambos, Sprinkles, n00bs, and Grinders. Rarely, like some kind of once-a-decade astronomical event a group of these players will end up in a PUG together, which can result in some level of teamwork- and even partial groups of such are often the reason why one team in a PUG vs PUG match wins overwhelmingly so often. They have the game understood, but generally lack the team to make that skill felt and thus end up drowned in a sea of losses along with most PUG players. Lonelies often become bitter and will end up enjoying blistering sarcasm and commentary as they watch other players make errors and die horribly racking up mistake after mistake, and also tend to take units recruiting as some kind of personal insult. Knows the PUG player is effectively second-class and often detests it.

The "premades are no challenge" players, aka the Survivalist- these are often players who, upon finding that premades have such a high win rate actually are masochistic enough to go BACK to PUGs, finding that wins/good play in PUGs are the only way to enjoy playing. Most of these are quite aware of who they're playing with, in some kind of "hard mode" for the "No challenge" player and fully expect the immense loss rate, accepting that in reality, a PUG team is usually like playing with no team at all. These are the guys with the well-built 'Mechs in PUGs who frequently end up with high damage and/or kill counts, regardless of team performance. The object for them is simply to do as much as they can given the horrible odds, and although winning is nice, they simply want to play their best game regardless. Survivalists are often mistaken for Rambos, but are usually much more likely to stick with the team, focus fire, and take advantage of the other team's errors and may even occasionally give bits of advice. Sometimes, they'll even revert back to Trial 'Mechs, trying to do well even with the limitations of stock designs. If you see someone topping the damage charts or getting multiple kills with zero exp at the end of a match, it was likely a Survivalist. Will often be the only person listening to the Lonely, for whom they often feel a certain kinship with. Often found zipping around in well-built lights, since a good pilot can have a long lifespan in one even if the rest of the team isn't. Will wreak havoc against other PUGs, but usually brought down by premades or if the other team has enough organization in a hurry.

[Sturmbringer]

LOL.. this is great, I found myself in there. Brilliant ! *clapclapclap*

[Jaded Jasper]

Those of you who play in premades... what percentage of your matches are against other premades?

[Krivvan]

What about the Survivalist that takes an Atlas half the time and spends most of the game typing essays and explaining what certain movements and positions on the map work well for a team?

Because those Survivalists actually find their PUG games ending up with a pretty ridiculously high W/L ratio

Trying to essentially win the game solo in a light mech is fun too though.

Quote

Those of you who play in premades... what percentage of your matches are against other premades?

It depends on a lot of factors. In some premade groups they arrange games against other premade teams ahead of time by matching their weight classes and syncing their launches. This has pretty good reliability in getting the team you want. In those cases it's close to 85% of the time.

If the premade team is just randomly launching games then it depends on the makeup of the group. It's sometimes hard to tell what is a premade and what isn't, but I'd say the percentage is around 5%-15%.

Edited by Krivvan, 31 October 2012 - 03:46 AM.

[ChaosAvenger0]

Quote

These are the guys with the well-built 'Mechs in PUGs who frequently end up with high damage and/or kill counts, regardless of team performance. The object for them is simply to do as much as they can given the horrible odds, and although winning is nice, they simply want to play their best game regardless. Survivalists are often mistaken for Rambos, but are usually much more likely to stick with the team, focus fire, and take advantage of the other team's errors and may even occasionally give bits of advice.

PUG for life!

I'm hoping voice chat gets integrated so the whole PUG team can chat at Launch. Survivalists will benefit and we'll see some more awesome matches.

[elbloom]

Best post ever, OP you observe very well the behaviour of human beings - fascinating skill !
I guess you´re spot on. I like my clan but i love pugging also. Using that rambo or stray as a meat-shield making horrendous damage and retreating when rambo is down is seriously funny stuff. I laugh my *** off on a regular basis

[00dlez]

ChaosAvenger0, on 12 November 2012 - 03:34 AM, said:

PUG for life!

I'm hoping voice chat gets integrated so the whole PUG team can chat at Launch. Survivalists will benefit and we'll see some more awesome matches.

This will fix very little, IMO. As it the apt descriptions above, many PUG players are simply F2P grinders who could care less about winning or losing - they'd rather spend 10 hours spawning and dieing than 15 hours playing enjoying a game for the same rewards.

[DivineEvil]

You should never forget, that there's always people who just encounter in-game bugs, that forces them to leave the game, since it's just useless for them to play when they have entire screen black, or they have a random textures covering the entire cockpit screen, or they've got 0.5 framerate bug, or their game just froze or dropped itself out. These people are frequently just too righteous to join any premade groups, since these bugs might leave their team outnumbered. Do not expect the game to be somehow competetive unless all these bugs are fixed.

I'm personally grouping up with my brother frequently to play together, just for him to catch one of these bugs each 3-4th game on high-end machine, while I as well might just get my low-end notebook being overheated (not enough heatsinks in it, darn!) and getting me 1-0.2 FPS until I restart it, just by encountering too much water texture rendering (1# memory hog, that cannot be disabled) together with hundreds LRMs, leaving thousands of useless particles behind.

[Mildmanor]

Add "The Murphey's" to this list.

The Murpheys are the players, regardless of skill level who always find the hole in the map to get stuck in and cannot get out no matter what they try. They will always suffer from behing taller than the sky scraper they were hiding behind and generally wind up as mech road kill. These players are almost always the best equiped players who have spent countless hours in their mechs on every map, but somehow right when they are needed they explode, get stuck, shut down, lack of hud, suffer from the reamdimizer and so forth.
There is no cure for the murpheys as they are random, unpredictable players who are at the mercy of real life in game issues not of their causing.

Edited by Mildmanor, 13 November 2012 - 07:53 AM.

[ChaosAvenger0]

Quote

This will fix very little, IMO. As it the apt descriptions above, many PUG players are simply F2P grinders who could care less about winning or losing - they'd rather spend 10 hours spawning and dieing than 15 hours playing enjoying a game for the same rewards.

..if they're drunk, you can't abuse 'spawn and die' anymore. Every mech in a match is locked from further use until the match it's in ends, it's an exploit that's been corrected.

Also, I care little if I win or lose (though I would like to win more often) but I am still having a blast playing this game, or grinding, whatever. w00t!

[wanderer]

ChaosAvenger0, on 15 November 2012 - 08:38 AM, said:

..if they're drunk, you can't abuse 'spawn and die' anymore. Every mech in a match is locked from further use until the match it's in ends, it's an exploit that's been corrected.

Also, I care little if I win or lose (though I would like to win more often) but I am still having a blast playing this game, or grinding, whatever. w00t!

For the moment, this just means cycling through 4 Trial 'Mechs- by which point, it is almost inevitable that one of the 4 you used prior has unlocked.

You'd have to lock all four for the match duration to actually use it to stop kamikaze grinders.

[Snowcaller]

I just come for a fight, tbh.
I love it when someone takes the stripes.

Me and my buds are looking at clanning up over this game.
I gotta say, when voip is fully implemented for us puggers, whether we be full or part time, it should level the field a little tactically.
Knowledge will be easier to pass on to newbies as well, increasing their chances and effectiveness.

What puts me off joining an existing premade is the unfortunate tendency for the obnixious ones to turn up often enough that i think "no thanks".
Hence me and the lads are gonna set up our own shizzle.

We promise to play nice, tho.

[Ewigan]

well, i honestly didn't read the entire wall of text, but after a few lines i realized that this thread is "one of those" again.
you know, the "WHY DO PEOPLE PUG!!!!" things.

i love me my pugging, i have tons of fun with it and rarely see any of those things you meantion, even though i tend to stay silent most of the time anyway.

i did master my commandos this way and plan on doing the exactly same with my stalkers (or hunchies if i can't get the hang of the trial stalker )

[slayerkdm]

I find pugs just fine now. I am not seeing many afkers or suiciders. Every match is different, some are goat ropes, and some surprisingly coordinated without voice. I can't imagine playing on these romper stomp lance groups or all voice teams. I love the chaos. I have been games where it's been per vs pre 4mans. Very tactical, I did my part, won some, lost some. Boring as hell.

To each his own is my motto. In my mind, the types of pre players are even funnier. Little Pattons, super strategy guy. Mech build expert, stats guy, chain of command guy, theory craft guy.

Most are competent team players, some are even decent pilots, though I don't find it the rule. My biggest joy is finding some pre pilot on his own. In the end, they are just another slag heap to me. Sure his buddies come running, I get over run, and go down. But I go down smiling, because it took more than one.

Look for me out there, two pre made teams offered one on one duels, some honor bit they were playing. Honor lasted right up to the point I slagged there dueler. The spectators then vaporized me. I didn't much care, always takes more than one.

[Leon Singer]

I don't play in any premade groups. ever. hope I lose a match for you someday!

[Remarius]

Rather zoned out in the wall of text - was there a "I pug for variety as well as group and 12 man?". I also play a lot of matches so its inevitable that I play on my own quite a lot of the time and also, unless its good friends, rarely drop in lances with a 0 xp mech... *malfing jester*... kicks it a few times after his 10th overheat of the day.

[p4r4g0n]

Not sure I understood the OP correctly. It seems that the fundamental premise is that as a PUG your team mates are going to be the various personalities that described.

If my understanding is correct then that premise is surely wrong as you can also have team mates like that when you drop as a premade unless you're dropping in the 12 v 12 queue. After all it is not like there is a solo only queue as much as some would wish there was.

[Sephlock]

Where is the "Leeroy Jenkins" - the guy who gets tired of his teammates SLOWLY plodding toward a predetermined ridge* and says **** IT! LETS DO THIS!?

*I am convinced that there is no reason for them to not proceed from the start to the ridge at max speed, but it really seems like they aren't. More like half speed, or 75%.

[WhiteRabbit]

I actually enjoy dropping as a pug because i need a little chaos in my games now and again....i also think the twitch plays pokemon stream is hilariously funny, so maybe i just have a weird fixation on watching people that bump into walls

[1453 R]

KLAATU...

VERATA...

NICWUAHGHUUGHHGOOHFF!!


...


On a more serious note, I must vociferously dispute one point here in Mr. Ancient Thread. Namely, this one:

wanderer, on 30 October 2012 - 02:59 PM, said:

The "Premades aren't for me" guy, aka the Lonely

You make the assertion that these players, while often skilled and useful, are also sorta-kinda sad little shells of real players too frightened or depressed to reach out to the Glorious Utopia of Premade Groups and accept the extended Golden Hand of friendship, camaraderie, and shared victory. You put us determined solo-droppers down as perhaps the most pitiable and worst-off of your various pug players - those who could have been great, if only they'd been able to struggle out from under the burden of their own misconceptions and horrible introversion.

Here's the actual deal.

You guys are dickheads. Your only value over A.I. bots is the variety of human unpredictability. I don't want to talk to you, because only one in a thousand of you ever has something worth saying.

It's the same reason I am actually strongly against integrated voice comms in this game - is there a single person here, even one, who feels like integrated public voice comms somehow makes Call of Duty a better experience? It only serves to give the hacks, trolls, windbags, Anger Badgers, and cuss-happy twelve-year-olds a direct channel into your brain through which to spew their garbage. There is no reason for me to try and communicate with my fellow players most of the time - they wouldn't/don't listen to me anyways. For cripe's sake, the couple of HOUSE OF LORDS players I dropped with the other day did a better job of paying attention to my tips and recon warnings than puglies do, and those dudes' egos have inflated so overmuch their pants have exploded clean off their asses!

The only recourse for most folks is to try and join a player-run unit...in which case, you wind up with the problems at the other end of the scale:

"[Insert League-playing company here] is recruiting! Go to our website and submit an application! You must:

-Be 25 years of age or over. Failure to be sufficiently crusty results in an immediate cut.
-Be mature, respectful, and above all willing to submit to the orders of your superiors. Failure to be a good little cog in our war machine results in an immediate cut.
-Be able to commit to 10h/week uninterrupted practice time with your assigned lance, whether you like those douchewhales or not. Failure to do so results in an immediate cut
-Be able to adjust your schedule to assist/compete in inter-unit events, regardless of IRL complications. Failure to be sufficiently competitive results in an immediate cut.
-Have at least 30m C-bills available at time of recruitment for the purchase and outfitting of whichever 'Mech we decide you would be best-suited to piloting in your assigned lance. Most likely a Highlander, maybe a Victor, possibly a Jenner/Firestarter. Failure to conform to the meta results in an immediate cut.
-Be...
...results in an immediate cut."

Or, to put it simply, you can either be a single breakwater stone in a sea of anarchy, struggling with all of your own skill and talent just to try and stay alive (PUG/solo drops), or you can volunteer to be a conscript in someone else's jackboot-wearing, crisp-saluting personal army. Or, if you're exceptionally lucky, have a couple of actual, proper friends who don't quit MWO a month after you get them into it and are there to drop alongside you and help you out. This last is the ideal situation of course, but the odds of it happening are so vanishingly slim as to be effectively null.

Heh...I refuse to be a conscript, so I become a stone instead. I drop by myself and keep to myself, because my actual friends don't play MWO, and you guys aren't my friends. This is my choice, my active preference, and I find the constant belittling of people too antisocial/Grinch-ish/frightened/insert-negative-descriptor-here to Man Up And Group Up to be.

I've posted my own requirements for a unit in order for me to consider it. The thread went almost completely ignored, save for a couple of snarky PMs concerning my hypocrisy and/or loser noob attitude. S'far as I'm concerned, this is all I need to know about the organized-unit scene of MechWarrior Online. Until you're willing to offer me some solid evidence that I'm wrong, I'll continue on as if I'm right, eh?

Edited by 1453 R, 22 February 2014 - 07:20 AM.