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Often the game population is perceived as being made up of two monolithic, polarized blocks - the 'pubbies' and the 'premades'. What is good for the one is bad for the other, and vice versa. However, as usual in life, each side is more complicated than that, and I've become a bit concerned about the fate of a group of people who are kinda neither fish nor fowl in that respect. Namely, the casual, 'pick-up premade' - a group of people who want to try to work with their team and play smart, but who aren't part of an organized, coordinated 'clan' or 'guild' and who therefore come together on an impromptu, ad-hoc basis someplace like the public Comstar teamspeak server. The problem is that these sort of groups occupy a space somewhere in between the pure 'pubbies' and pure 'premades'.
These groups will often be more tactical and teamwork-minded than most lone-wolf 'pubbies' by nature, as it is often those qualities that drive them to join groups in the first place. And, of course, being on voicecomms all by itself is enough to give a significant advantage over less coordinated teams. On the other hand they lack the sort of finely-meshed coordinated strategies, tactics, maneuvers, and team compositions that full-on competitive clans/guilds/units/whatever-you-want-to-call-thems generally bring to the field. And not because they're necessarily worse players (though highly competitive teams will of course often have the skill advantage as well due to much greater experience and investment in the game), but simply because of the fact that by definition they've only been playing with this particular set of teammates for a couple hours at most. Because of the way they choose to play the game, they simply haven't had any chance to evolve the sort of coordinated tactics/etc used by competitive teams, since those demand not only skill but practice *as a team*.
The problem is that such groups don't match up well against *either* lone wolves or the competitive premades. As has been long known, pretty much any group of reasonably competent players on voicecomm will usually wipe the floor with most random groups of lone wolves. At the same time, though, once both sides are on voice the experience and practiced/coordinated strategies, builds, tactics, and maneuvers of a true competitive team give almost as much advantage as the simple use of voicecomm provides in a pug game.
This seems to me to have lead to this sort of group being rather left behind by the return of 8v8 drops. And as I'm sure you've guessed by now, this isn't simply an academic exercise for me, as this is exactly the group of players I identify with. The problem is, at the moment I don't see a very good way to actually get in on reasonably well balanced games in this sort of team.
In the 4-man era this sort of group was pretty good for getting into fun, fairly well balanced games. You were highly likely to still have 4 random players on your side in addition to your team, so you generally weren't about to take 8 mechs and stomp all over the other side in unison. You also often had another 4 man on the other team to face who had the same limitations, and seemed to have a pretty good chance of also being the same sort of impromptu 'pick-up premade' (and even if they weren't, the presence of lone wolves on each team seemed to have a significant diluting effect). In other words, games were often the perfect balance of coordination and disorganization for this sort of team to thrive and get into plenty of exciting, hard fought, and close games.
Note I am specifically *not* complaining that 'wah, we can't stomp pugs anymore'. While it is true that my own personal W:L ratio was significantly above 1 during this period, I personally don't really care that much about that. What I do care about is being able to get into fun, closely fought matches, and that's what I had. There were certainly the usual fraction of base trades or 8-0 or 8-1 roflstomps in there (and going both ways, I may add), but most of them tended to be hard-fought games that ended with only 2 or 3 mechs left on the field.
This has *not* been my experience with 8v8 drops. Some fraction of them we seem to be matched up against a similar team, but it seems to be *far* less frequent than with 4 man groups, and even then the games tend to be more lopsided one way or the other (though *that* might just be the influence of ECM). And the rest of the time we've been matched up against obvious coordinated competitive groups (teams made up entirely of D-DCs/dakkaphracts/dual gauss or ac20 cats of both kinds/similar tweaked builds/ecm fast-movers are kinda a giveaway), and at the end I'm left wondering why we even bothered playing the match in the first place. There doesn't seem to be any particular route to be competitive in such cases, as what's providing the advantage in this case is inherent to the differences in structure between the two teams - the sort of practiced coordination that comes from playing in a dedicated, standing competitive group. Again, this is not meant to be a complaint about getting stomped - sometimes that just happens - but rather an observation that playing in the 8v8 queue really doesn't seem to be a place where I can find fun matches, since I'm not interested in joining a competitive group.
On top of that, so far my time spent trying to do 8v8s has been something like 70% standing around trying to organize, 30% actually in-game, rather than the 20% standing around/80%ish playing ratio it was before. Again, this is something that would be much less of a problem for a standing group, but for me it's been rather an impediment to fun. On the other hand, the non-8v8 games seem to have gotten much more chaotic, probably because so many groups have decamped for 8v8s. Either way, especially with the addition of ECM, the regular queue isn't really as attractive right now either.
Mind you, I don't want to take anything away from all of the competitive groups that have been anxiously waiting for the return of 8v8 drops. I understand how bad the 4 man limitation has been for you, and I'm glad that you once more have the option to play the game in a format that suits you. It's a *good* thing that this option is back, because the competitive gamers are a critical slice of the player base, the one that really pushes the envelope. But you have to admit that there's a heck of a lot of you coming out of the woodwork to drop into the 8v8 queue now that it's back, and it's not turning out very fun from my end.
I personally believe that this sort of playstyle should be a legitimate choice, that it ought to be possible to try to play smart without the commitment of joining a competitive group. It is my hope that when we get a more sophisticated matchmaking system there'll be an appropriate niche for us, but at this point I'm not sure where I'm supposed to go to find good games against a similar caliber of opposition, and this worries me.
Edited by MuonNeutrino, 05 December 2012 - 05:36 PM.
