Here's the thing. The really stupid thing. There is 1 and only 1 good tactical option in Assault because of the mechanics.
Have your entire team minus 1 light mech camp your base. No matter what don't leave it. Take up a defensive position, ideally with a mix of ECM mechs and LRM boats.
Have your 1 light wait until the enemy is heavily engaged, then go cap the enemy base.
What this will lead to is both teams just camping for 15 minutes since any other approach is doomed to failure because of ECM and missile balance. Tag someone? He steps back for 30 seconds behind cover as your slow moving missiles chug towards him.
Actually, by the same logic of 'just defend your base, if you got capped you deserved to lose' what you should be saying is 'Anyone who isn't sync-dropping a full 8 man team is a fool for not taking proper tactical advantage of the games mechanics'.
It's exactly the same logic. It's taking advantage of a poor design, nothing more.
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None of these tactical options go away or shouldn't be exercised with Base Cap in the game. They aren't when I play. I even type in things like, "SRM cat f4" so people know to take it out at range. All this awareness you are talking about wouldn't get used without base cap because it isn't used right now when the incentive is, "Use it or have someone cap your base." They can't even be bothered to NOTICE other mechs, much less figure out what they are carrying.
They do all go away because they are not particularly relevant. Far less so than standing on a box for 60 seconds. You're happy just to get to shoot at someone before the match ends.
A large part is the psychology of it - the whole game can end without you ever participating at any time because other people you don't know, can't hold accountable and will never see again may or may not go stand in a box or conversely keep the other guy from standing in your box and the game just ends. It makes your performance or even your teams performance minus that one guy irrelevant.
Let me put it this way.
Suppose you got to eat all three meals a day at a huge banquet. Tons and tons of amazing food of various sorts and flavors. However, suddenly at Lunchtime someone rings a bell and explains that unless someone runs back to their room and brings him a left shoe all the food goes away.
You're not a sprinter. You have a bum knee, so you look around at the strangers you're eating with..... nobody goes. Suddenly you've only had a few bites and it's gone.
Dinner goes fine but you hurry through your meal because you can't be sure if you'll get to finish it.
The next day it's breakfast when the bell gets rung. You quit paying attention to the quality of the food because you just need calories, you're hungry. Someone it seems did bring him a shoe but now you've eaten so much you're sick.
After a few days of this regardless of bell or no bell everyone will hurry in, pushing and shoving, eating as much food as they can because they don't know if the bell will ring or not ring. Their ability to eat their meal is contingent on the behavior of strangers.
If you're dropping in a premade I can see where being able to say 'Bob, go block cap' is going to work great. Or even the ability to say 'someone hold the base' and reasonably expect someone to do so. In pug games (which if you drop pug is the vast majority) this is utterly arbitrary and can't be counted on. Your best odds are to try and convince everyone to just base camp....
but that's boring and not why most people play the game. So in order to play Assault as a pug you have to not play it for fun but for work.
Does that make sense? If this was CoD with respawn mechanics and kills didn't mean much outside of kill-streaks then it wouldn't matter but this is a game based around the idea of mech to mech combat. Complex weight, loadout and design mechanics specifically for how you want to fight other mechs. If you don't want to fight there's still Conquest, which is far more complex a mechanic for this anyway.
Assault is a bad design. Trying to justify otherwise is akin to justifying sync dropped 8mans. Just because it's possible doesn't mean it's a good idea.
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IceSerpent, on 13 February 2013 - 09:42 AM, said:
