In the last ten minutes I played a game against a premade group that just about made me lose faith in the community here. I won't name names, and not just because of the policy against calling out players (or clans...or whatever the heck you call yourself...) but I will say that I have played against some of the players in this group before and it disgusted me to see them stooping to such a low level. Never mind that we lost, and never mind that I was playing a completely unoptimized, un-minmaxed atlas (that I totally came up with in another post about a half hour ago) and the entire other team was running perfectly optimized doom machines. Don't worry about the fact that I ate a third of my Atlas' hp in an LRM volley through 2 AMS cannons from 4 different enemy mechs, all of which were out of sight (I was running a build completely designed to mitigate this, BTW). This was the definition of the title brought up earlier in the beta, the fabled "death squad" that everyone laughed at and assumed would never happen in the real game.
And none of that is a problem. You know what the problem is?
2/3rd's of my team were newcomers while the remainder of the team just tried to rally the troops, and that premade was made up of a bunch of jerks that enjoyed scaring away everyone who played in that game.
If that long sentence was TL:DR, then this should suffice:
This premade just made 8 people hate MWO, and it is not a unique scenario.
/End TL:DR;
It was sickening. Literally sickening. And it's not PGI's fault, the reality is that if those of us that know what we are doing weren't pulling this kind of crap then there wouldn't be a problem. Premades stomping pugs is fine, most newcomers that are going to stick with the game will stick with it anyway, knowing that if they learn, they can do the same stuff. But no new player will stick with a game where they are treated like dirt from the outset, not unless they are either sick in the head or among the same kind of people that make up the MOBA community, and either way, those people won't help Mechwarrior succeed.
In short, quit blaming PGI for screwing things up and start looking at yourself and the players on your team. If you drop solo and end up with a premade full of jerks, tell them to knock it off, take screencaps and (without posting them on the forums) get them to the devs. I'd say Beta tickets, but I can't find them. ( ) Don't join in on that behavior, even if the other team responds, because the other team will respond, especially if they have newcomers, out of anger and fear.
PGI hasn't screwed up the game or the open beta launch nearly as bad as the community has. Not all of us, but some of us. While PGI didn't account for how awful some among us have turned out to be and should definitely take steps to fix it, the reality is that we need to police this crap ourselves.
While matchmaking should be a priority, the reality is that we need a tribunal, similar to what League of Legends has, and soon. Why am I bringing up League of Legends? Well, because there are people on here acting like they are among the LoL community, or in the case I just experienced, the DOTA community. In case you didn't know, this is far below the standard that the MWO community is trying to maintain. This needs to be stopped NOW, before it gets out of hand.
And to those of you that are trying your best, I sincerely apologize and hope you understand why I am posting this. The majority of you are behaving just fine and are excellent opponents and teammates, but something has to be done about those that aren't. They are killing the game before it can get off the ground.
Edited by TheBossHammer, 30 October 2012 - 10:27 PM.