The Phigment, on 20 December 2012 - 04:20 PM, said:
To those who tell someone else their mech isn't optimized, they may be right. But mostly because it isn't optimized for that person.
No, there relly are just a loot of truly lousy builds out there. One I keep seeing for reasons I can't fathom is an A1 with 6xLRM5 and not enough ammo to last the fight. I can kinda understand the higher cycle time argument, but if that's all the weapons you have, there's simply no excuse for not having more ammo than you can fire. Or, of course, there's the 9xFlamer HB, or what I saw today; a spider-5K (already the worst variant of a weak class, at least until MG buff) with it's only weapon a single flamer..... I'm pretty sure he actually had to have had spare tonnage to even do that.
Jman5, on 20 December 2012 - 06:05 PM, said:
They lose on purpose in quick succession then when they play "for real" they only match against easy opponents. I'm surprised so many people aren't familiar with this because it's pretty common in competitive online games
There is no "quick succession" because to drag your ELO down enough to matter, you'd have to lost a
LOT more often than you won to keep it down. If people want to go through all the trouble in order to "troll" the noobs by giving them a lot of free wins to occasionally crush them for a couple games, they can be my guest
The Last Blade, on 29 January 2013 - 03:17 AM, said:
You are using WoW's failed system.
You need to make it so it randomly drops you within a few seconds frame so you can't so easily sync drop. What's the point in removing 8 mans... when you can just make 8 mans?
In WoW you can trade money and gear. People are really underestimating how much of a difference that makes. In WoW you can roll a new toon and twink it up. I don't play WoW, but I'd imagine you can also get friends to help power-level it to the exact place you need to be, then go in and stomp with your totally tricked out toon and an experienced player.
In MWO, you can't trade anything, so no twinking. Every account that you made for these purposes would have to be individually forced into a low rating, which would take a lot more effort than people are really accounting for (no power-leveling, either). Just so that they can get a very few games in before having to do a lot more tanking to keep it up.
As for sandbagging to very occasionally get a potential advantage in CW, I don't think people really understand how ELO works. You can only go up significantly by beating significantly favored opponents. Other than that it's a grind against people of similar ranks with no more than a 1-2pt gain when you win, and since they're similarly-ranked you won't be winning much, if at all, more than you're losing. And any time you play against an opponent with a ranking any significant distance blow your own (like bringing in a sandbagger), you risk blowing months of work getting your ranking to where it was. And anyone actually willing to go through all the trouble is way too image-conscious for that.
Not to mention that sandbagging a whole team is pretty ineffective, anyway. While the theoretical range is 0-2400, the actual range is much smaller. The way ELO is calculated, you'll be looking at about 500pt range from the top player in the game to the worst, if even that much. Those at the top continually play against others who are also at the top. While the score could potentially go up, it requires consistently beating the other top players, which simply doesn't happen, since 1 loss in 50 will bring them crashing back down. Conversely, it takes a lot of losing to get much below the starting ranking and stay there. Most people who would generate these low scores simply drop from the game before consistent losses add up enough to push them far below.
So at the extreme you have 7 of the top players in the game, who would never participate because everyone would know them and it would be so obvious, and 1 sandbagger, who would have to also be one of the top players if you didn't want them to actually drag the team down, and who had to go through all that trouble so that he could not get any credit on the account he actually cares about.
(7*1700 + 1*1100)/8 = 1625
So now you have 7 of the top, best known players in the game putting their reputations on the line to game their way into playing a team that is lower-ranked, but still good enough to have a real chance of beating them. If they win, they went through all that for a one-time advantage, but if they lose, they lose months worth of the effort it will cost them to reclaim their ranking, if they ever do.
Much more realistically, you're looking at players around the 1500 ranking, which is still good players and their sandbagging friend.
(7*1500 + 1*1100)/8 = 1450
Now you have players who might be willing to do this, but they're still risking a considerable loss in ranking for a chance to play against a team they're really not much batter than, or maybe not even better at all, but have just played a little longer. I think the number that would be willing to do this would be vanishingly small.
Sync-dropping shouldn't be much of an issue, since they'll just be dropping against a team of roughly the same skill. There will no longer be the advantage of crushing a bunch of noobs that couldn't have been prepared for it. In fact, if ELO is working properly, they may just remove the team size restrictions altogether, since it won't be needed.
LoneUnknown, on 06 February 2013 - 01:43 AM, said:
imagine if in MWO only the top ranked ELO guys had access to clan tech?
Can't happen. It's not that there's an issue with rewards for top-ranked players. But if you also give them an in-game advantage, it would then be impossible for anyone else to ever climb to that level. The while system comes crashing down at that point and MWO goes away.
Edited to combine posts.
Edited by OneEyed Jack, 06 February 2013 - 02:29 AM.
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