191 replies to this topic

[QuantumButler]

We don't want to associate with you plebs.

[BigJim]

It takes too long to type - It's a horrible, horrible, nasty way to communicate that will get you killed.

Anything that can't be typed in the 5-secs before the match starts isn't gonna be said.
And even then, I've got my finger on the touch-to-talk key, planning or just chatting s**t with the team so I won't be typing then, either.

Yes I can touch-type, I can faster than many people but still, it's not good enough so I won't use it.

Edited by BigJim, 01 December 2012 - 12:14 PM.

[demoyn]

We don't tell you because we don't want you to know. There's a psychology behind you AND the enemy team not knowing. I want you to do your PUGtastic best (and by that I mean charge out into the open with no hope of survival) because it allows my team to use tactics that the other team won't see coming.

[Violette]

In my experience, playing a four-person or three-person TS team and trying to have the rest of the group follow along is pretty exasperating. I mean, best of luck if you've got ANOTHER premade on your side; they usually want to do something completely different, and have a completely different (specialized) loadout than you do. If we're brawlers, they'll be LRM boats with a scout and, most times, very unhelpful. Or they just won't like you. The better matches, I've found, are when we can physically lead the pugs somewhere. Of course I'll usually start the match by typing in a quick plan/route, e.g. "g line" or "3 line" or "right ridge defense." And sometimes that works, sometimes... But if no one responds after that, and especially if my team or I get insulted after that, then all bets are off.

Lefty Lucy, on 01 December 2012 - 11:58 AM, said:

It's a social game, and if you can't communicate well with people you don't know, you're gonna have a bad time.

Bleh, I prefer the social game that I get when everyone is already on TS with me. I liked that quite a lot more. This just gets kind of silly. I'm playing a game and out to have fun. I'd rather not wade through a pool of @#$%s just to get through to a few halfway decent people. Sometimes I try it out, just for fun, but I wouldn't exactly call it a moral imperative!

EDIT: As for people who designate themselves the commander of the match only to come up with a laughably bad plan (I recently had someone suggest we position three people in the middle of the map, two on our base, and two on theirs...), they can go suck a lemon. Which is actually quite a pleasant experience, I find, and might help boost their immune systems so they are better protected from the *****-virus they seem to have been infected with.

Edited by Violette, 01 December 2012 - 12:15 PM.

[Vapor Trail]

Anders, on 01 December 2012 - 12:09 PM, said:

Mr. Secundus:

That sounds like you encountered some Tetatae pilots. Allow me to load my Tetataian to English translation software.

"SQUAWK" = "Hello, how are you doing this wonderful day?"
"SQUAWWK" "I am taking heavy fire in D4 from a Streakapult, I need assistance"
"SQUUAAWWK" = "Returning to base, I see that we are being captured, I don't need any assistance at this moment."
"SQUUAAAAKKKK" = Thanks.

It's all very subtle.

We here at The Word of Lowtax thank you for your post. We here at the Word of Lowtax realize that you have limited entertainment electrons and appreciate that you're spending your posts on us. Please continue to choose the Word of Lowtax in your future electron spending! We are grateful for your out of the box, blue-sky thinking, and appreciate you touching base with us here at the Word of Lowtax. We hope to synergize our efforts to achieve quantifiable paradigm redefinitions in a future collaboration soon.

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So how does "You just lost to a set of pugs" translate? Just wondering cause I was pugging recently and we went 8-0 vs at least two of the "English challenged, avian pilots." I wanted to inform them of the fact but found the language barrier daunting.

Edited by Vapor Trail, 01 December 2012 - 12:16 PM.

[BigJim]

Lefty Lucy, on 01 December 2012 - 11:40 AM, said:

and then calling priority targets would suffice.

i see your point, but it's still not worth it.

To see a target, to move my keyboard all the way over to the side (I use arrow-keys, not WASD), and then to type out the called target is as bad as using post-it notes between pilots in an airliner during an emergency.

The situation will have changed, or in that time I've run out of control into enemy fire/down a canyon/out of bounds/etc.., so nah, it's just not worth the bother, the results will not be worth the cost of not having control during that time.

The whole reason behind voice comms to take this horrible unwieldy method of communication out of the game, so it would be foolishness itself to purposefully bring it back again.

I have nothing against communicating with pugs, I know they're just people who aren't in a team yet.
But asking me to type in any sort of real-time game?
Never gonna happen.

Edited by BigJim, 01 December 2012 - 12:22 PM.

[The Amazing Atomic Spaniel]

I only pug and haven't bothered with TS yet, but I usually start off the game by typing "stay together guys (except scouts)", "please mark and HOLD targets for LRMs, cheers!" and something like "city, bridge or defend?" to get the ball rolling. I put the question mark on the end because like most people I don't want to be seen to be barking out orders to people I've just met.

This very often works and most times team members will join up with even a simple plan - but once combat starts the flippin' text chat is too slow to do anything and it can all go a bit pear shaped. Usually I'm dead long before I've finished typing "Hey chaps, I've just walked round the side of this building and, well, knock me down with a feather, but it looks like all the other side's assault mechs are h...".

The lack of a comms menu in MWO is one of the great "what were they thinking?" moments. Wouldn't it be nice to hit something like F4 A for "focus fire on target A" etc.

[The Jove]

Dagnome, on 01 December 2012 - 11:41 AM, said:

If someone asks I will tell them when I am in a premade and in the occasional off game I will announce it. You want to know what the stigma is?

70% of the time the other 4 individuals on my team DONT DO anything intelligent thus I just consider them all glorified meat shields for the 4 of us to actually attempt to win the game.

Much love
-Dagnome

You don't always play with the same PUGs. Some appreciate knowing of the plan.

However, it can get hectic to type and play, so I don't blame you for sticking to voice comms.

[Hayashi]

Secundus, on 01 December 2012 - 11:36 AM, said:

Why is it that 4 man groups almost never announce to the rest of their teammates that they are in a group and where they are going? Every round I'll ask what's the plan and only rarely will someone will speak up, I'll throw out some commands, some people will follow, then I'll notice half our team going the other way. I'll pester and then basically tell everyone to redirect with them since they're apparently too newbie to know how to chat. Then toward the end of the round we'll find out they were a group but were simply too lazy or stupid to say anything about it. For the amount of complaining on here and for how rare it is for a plan to be shared or communicated it seems like you're your own worst enemies. I'd even call out that you're simply bad players. At best the odd group might say in chat "SQUUAAAAKKKK", whatever that's supposed to mean (squad?).

More often than not, the premades I enter when PuGing do in fact state they're a premade at the start of the match via team chat. It's rare that only near the end of a lost match I hear premades blame PuGs on the team for a defeat. Really rare.

However, the main reason why you generally don't hear premades announcing their presence is because most of the time, you're not actually dropping with a 4-man premade.

By the way, 'SQUAWK' is an indication you are not only playing with a premade, but a very specific premade type - the Goon squad. It's their way of letting you know it's them, which is understandably confusing if you haven't encountered them before.

Violette, on 01 December 2012 - 12:12 PM, said:

In my experience, playing a four-person or three-person TS team and trying to have the rest of the group follow along is pretty exasperating. I mean, best of luck if you've got ANOTHER premade on your side; they usually want to do something completely different, and have a completely different (specialized) loadout than you do. If we're brawlers, they'll be LRM boats with a scout and, most times, very unhelpful. Or they just won't like you.

When dropping with my group and encountering another premade on the same team, we have always won - and never lost more than 2 mechs in doing so. Maybe it's a luck thing, but we've always been able to work together.

Dagnome, on 01 December 2012 - 11:41 AM, said:

If someone asks I will tell them when I am in a premade and in the occasional off game I will announce it. You want to know what the stigma is? 70% of the time the other 4 individuals on my team DONT DO anything intelligent thus I just consider them all glorified meat shields for the 4 of us to actually attempt to win the game. Much love -Dagnome

Never assume the other players cannot do anything intelligent. Often, they don't do anything coordinated because... there's no coordination. Other times they may do weird things because they're new to the game, and don't know how to play well yet - and if you don't teach them, they will end up learning only weeks AFTER the match in which you played with them. If you want to make them better teammates, TALK TO THEM.

I'm not exactly a very competitive player personally, so I never did join a victory/performance focused premade clan/group. As at the moment of its inception a group that just plays together for fun without caring too much about win-or-lose didn't exist yet, so I created my own - it's gotten to a nice size now. All of my premade experiences are with this group, and we don't even use voice comms half the time - the other half we just talk in team chat/lobby chat only. Not everyone has voice comms, and those with it don't necessarily want to use it all the time either.

But that was already more than a month into the game. Prior to that, I played ONLY PuGs, and even now, because of the relaxed nature of the group they're not online half the time that I'm online, so I still do play a lot of PuGs.

In PuGs I function as a PuG commander. All of my builds are optimised for speed and armour (as such, I have 0 XP in any Assault Mechs, but while my favourite is the Jenner, I do use speed-optimised Dragons and Catapults as well), and my positioning in matches is optimised to gather information. In the absence of a premade announcing their presence at the start of the match I 'Take Command', drop map markers and coordinate the teams via team chat. About 1/4 of players don't listen, 1/10-1/20 of them openly reject instructions with swearwords or whatnot, and the vast remainder follows instructions. At the start I used to coordinate all teams, but since about 3/4 of all premade players at the time reject my instructions and decide to do their own thing, I've given up attempting to Take Command in the presence of a premade. Given that the average PuG player's skill isn't very high and PuG commanders are probably rarer than 1% of all players, I can't exactly blame them for assuming that I don't know what I'm talking about.

Bear in mind that that means I usually have 6/8 players working together in every single match I play due to the 75% compliance rate. This is greater than 4/8 - and thus I have had several instances where the losing enemy team reveals they're a premade, and asks the identity of the premade in my team - when there actually isn't one. I do of course lose to premades who bother to coordinate their PuGs very often, since their compliant players will then be 7/8 or 8/8, and they'll have an average higher skill. But that also means that my 6/8 team can and does steamroll full-PuG teams with zero coordination on their end, sometimes 8-0.

Typing in chat is impossible when actively fighting, but while moving away from the enemy behind cover, I use that opportunity to type. This happens very often, because in order to gather enough information to command effectively, I'm usually in front of my team, and generally near the centre of the map in a high location. Under those circumstances I don't need to fire, and I can't be hit.

I use PuG teammates as the vanguard. PuG snipers will naturally find good spots to snipe from, everyone else is usually more effective when bunched together. Assassination is difficult for most people to pull off effectively, so usually I do that role alone while the rest of my team covers all other roles. By assassination, I mean sneaking around to the back of the enemy vanguard and killing their LRM boats or snipers at very short range, before moving towards my team and shooting them in the back while my team shoots them from the front. It's an important thing to do - if they turn, their DPS goes down below half of what it would have been, while our DPS is full. If they don't turn, I kill them from behind.

WLR on PuGs is between 3:2 and 2:1. WLR when with my group is between 3:1 and 2:1, on average.

Tl;dr - if you don't bother to coordinate your PuGs, don't be surprised if they're not coordinated.

---

P.S. There's one thing I've never been able to get PuG teammates to do. There's always one or two who will kill the AFK last enemy at the base, instead of holding fire and capping, even when advised to the contrary. Bear in mind they also follow instructions for the rest of the game. There's just something about bloodlust...

Edited by Hayashi, 01 December 2012 - 12:46 PM.

[Cola]

@above

Ahh the lowtax nubs, Hate them they just don't shutup, doped with them yesterday they were on my team. we had a 4 they had a 4. We let them go in unsupported and get killed, and they still wouldn't shutup. Not as bad as the skye rangers, there a solid team of metagamers, went against a 4 man of them all Streakcats, and they spamed there web address in all chat so much it disrupted the team chat.

Back on topic.
I don't type in chat as if its another 4man they will most likely not listen to us, and if there pugs they most likely can't read. so its pointless. I got tired of putting the effort in, god knows I tried but you can't force them.

[Secundus]

Slow typists I guess. I have no issues saying "two targets at arch, need help" or "watch flank" if we're grouped up. I'm always typing crap out, our wins are hit and miss for sure, but the one's we win are almost always when we're communicating well. I've been in games with a 4 man group on my team and I'm the top damage and kills on many many occasions (helps that I'm in an Atlas) so don't count your PUGs as dead weight.

EDIT: The times where I find out at the end of a map are usually when we're about to win and I've been chatting the whole time, and then I say something like "PUG power!" in all chat and then finally the group decides to take credit and say "duh we're not a pug". It's happened a few times and it's silly on their part.

Edited by Secundus, 01 December 2012 - 12:27 PM.

[QuantumButler]

I should get around to making a mouse macro saying "we're a premade, stick with us, don't rush off and die" or something, but I'm lazy.

Far too lazy to manually type it every damn match that's for sure.

[The Jove]

QuantumButler, on 01 December 2012 - 12:26 PM, said:

I should get around to making a mouse macro saying "we're a premade, stick with us, don't rush off and die" or something, but I'm lazy.

Far too lazy to manually type it every damn match that's for sure.

Make the macro, that would be really useful.

[edit:] or just type the word "premade" into the team chat. If someone is smart enough to know that they should follow a premade when PUGging, they'll understand that.

Edited by The Jove, 01 December 2012 - 12:32 PM.

[Lefty Lucy]

I love Anders and the Goons because they love me so much.

[BigJim]

Secundus, on 01 December 2012 - 12:25 PM, said:

Slow typists I guess.

Far from it - I can't recall exactly what my words per minute rate is (I took the test at work because we had the chance to mess around with the online courses they put out to colleges), but mine was exactly 2.25 times that which would be required by the Royal Mail for a full-time audio-typist. (the 2.25 number stuck in my head).


Even so, it's still a ghastly way to try & communicate, so I'll only ever type in chat when I'm dead.
I'll answer questions, I'll say NS to a guy who pulled off a nice shot, I'll give some advice to a nub trying to 1v2-brawl in a trial Atlas-K, but I won't go near the character keys until I die of natural causes (ie; enemy fire).

Edited by BigJim, 01 December 2012 - 12:38 PM.

[Gristle]

I thought SQAWWK meant you had or were facing 2 Gausscats + 2 Streak cats.

[The Jove]

Gristle, on 01 December 2012 - 12:38 PM, said:

I thought SQAWWK meant you had or were facing 2 Gausscats + 2 Streak cats.

SQUAWWK usually means things are about to get interesting.

[Vlad Ward]

Story Time:

My corps had 5 people on last night, so we decided to put a full lance into 1 group and have me try to launch in the solo queue at the same time that they did with the same weight class most of them were running to see if we could try and get into the same game.

Surprisingly, this worked a few times, and I would end up on the other team facing my corps-mates who were on Teamspeak with me.

Well, every time this happened, I would immediately announce to my own PUG team that the other team had a 4-man Premade in it and that we would need to watch X, Y, and Z players who had A, B, and C builds, and that sort of thing.

The majority of the time, we actually beat them because the PUGs whipped up into a frenzy of anti-premade rage and angst and blobbed onto my corps-mates 8v4.

One time, however, I had a couple people on my team who refused to believe the situation and thought I was "setting them up". They all decided to ignore my advice and run straight into the Tunnel on Forest Colony (from the upper side). Of course, when the other team saw absolutely no one in the water or the middle area, they all lined up at their side of the tunnel entrance and set up a killbox (even the PUGs called it a killbox, my corps-mates were impressed).

Of course, when my PUG team wandered out of the tunnel, they were blasted to bits. Assuming that there was no other logical explanation for how the other team knew where we were, the PUG on my team who was accusing me of "setting a trap" promptly turned and blew out my center torso from behind.

For the record, I enjoy blasting my corps-mates and logged kills on all of them at various points throughout the night (sometimes 3 in one game). I was clearly playing to win, and doing my best to support the PUGs on my team knowing that they were fighting a coordinated premade.

Unfortunately, sometimes it just doesn't matter what you do. Some people just hate so blindly and so vigorously that they'll turn on you at the drop of a hat if they know you're one of the "Premade scum".

So please, don't fault some groups for getting tired of taking friendly fire or less friendly trashtalk from their teammates. Even if it only happens one game in 10 or 20, each experience is more than sufficient to sour the rest. A few bad apples spoil the bunch and all that.

Edited by Vlad Ward, 01 December 2012 - 12:53 PM.

[Lefty Lucy]

Vlad Ward, on 01 December 2012 - 12:52 PM, said:

Story Time:

My corps had 5 people on last night, so we decided to put a full lance into 1 group and have me try to launch in the solo queue at the same time that they did with the same weight class most of them were running to see if we could try and get into the same game.

Surprisingly, this worked a few times, and I would end up on the other team facing my corps-mates who were on Teamspeak with me.

Well, every time this happened, I would immediately announce to my own PUG team that the other team had a 4-man Premade in it and that we would need to watch X, Y, and Z players who had A, B, and C builds, and that sort of thing.

The majority of the time, we actually beat them because the PUGs whipped up into a frenzy of anti-premade rage and angst and blobbed onto my corps-mates 8v4.

One time, however, I had a couple people on my team who refused to believe the situation and thought I was "setting them up". They all decided to ignore my advice and run straight into the Tunnel on Forest Colony (from the upper side). Of course, when the other team saw absolutely no one in the water or the middle area, they all lined up at their side of the tunnel entrance and set up a killbox (even the PUGs called it a killbox, my corps-mates were impressed).

Of course, when my PUG team wandered out of the tunnel, they were blasted to bits. Assuming that there was no other logical explanation for how the other team knew where we were, the PUG on my team who was accusing me of "setting a trap" promptly turned and blew out my center torso from behind.

For the record, I enjoy blasting my corps-mates and logged kills on all of them at various points throughout the night (sometimes 3 in one game). I was clearly playing to win, and doing my best to support the PUGs on my team knowing that they were fighting a coordinated premade.

Unfortunately, sometimes it just doesn't matter what you do. Some people just hate so blindly and so vigorously that they'll turn on you at the drop of a hat if they know you're one of the "Premade scum".

So please, don't fault some groups for getting tired of taking friendly fire or less friendly trashtalk from their teammates. Even if it only happens one game in 10 or 20, each experience is more than sufficient to sour the rest. A few bad apples spoil the bunch and all that.

And then on the other side of the coin you get pre-made players who have no respect for PUG players. Several times when I've done just as well or better than the pre-made team I happen to get matched with, they'll blow off a limb or two when we're sitting on the base to cap.

[QuantumButler]

Lefty Lucy, on 01 December 2012 - 01:11 PM, said:

And then on the other side of the coin you get pre-made players who have no respect for PUG players. Several times when I've done just as well or better than the pre-made team I happen to get matched with, they'll blow off a limb or two when we're sitting on the base to cap.

It's not their fault PGi didn't give them anything else to do when you sit in the red square.

maybe if you had to, you know, shoot the base instead, trigger fingers wouldn't be so itchy.