Mechwarrior Online

[Ironwood]

Four.

[Falconeer]

I just had a great match in my Golden Boy Kintaro, which I use fitted with 2 ER Large Lasers and 2 Artemis SR6 to be able to hit decently from any range. Anyway, I scored 740 damage and picked up 4 kills and 4 assists. I was the second to last to die leaving only an Atlas in our team to battle their last 'mech, a Warhawk, in a nailbiter game-deciding 1 on 1. Our Atlas only had its back internals exposed but was completely fine in the front, and with 4 LL (other weapons gone) it had more than a chance to kill the enemy Warhawk which had all its three front torsos exposed. Easy win, right?

Wrong. The Warhawk had elevation while our Atlas was down in one of the Canyons of Canyon Network. For fairness, that's not an easy position for an Atlas with all low-mounted weapons, but with the Warhawk so badly damaged carefful aiming should allow enough damage to go through and snatch the win. But no, our Atlas kept chain-firing (for no reason) its 4 LL against the crest of the ridge while trying to climb it, which is impossible in an Atlas, hugging the goddamned mountain. The Warhawk kept its elevated position and exploiting our guy's dumbness peppered it a bit with some AC. We were all yelling in chat to backpedal to get a better shooting angle, so... guess what the idiot comes up with?

HE TURNED AROUND AND MOVES AWAY FROM THE RIDGE. He didn't go reverse while keeping up the lasering, no, he turned the fuck around, leaving its exposed internals open for the Warhawk to score the easy kill without any chance of retaliation.

Fuckin' uneblievable. I couldn't resist and in an effort to help the guy I typed in chat "Are you new, Xenes? You had exposed internals in the back, you shouldn't have turned around..." and before he can answer the post match screen came up and noticed this guy had the LEGENDARY FOUNDER badge.

*sigh*

I fucking love and hate this game.

[Ironwood]

Founders can be dumbasses too.  Look how many of them have Clan mechs they have No Fucking Clue on.

[Falconeer]

You know, I was just surprised at his/her absolute lack of understanding of the basics. A Founder has been in the game for almost two years so if anything you would think they know how it works. I understand having terrible aiming and bad positioning, but turning your exposed back when you have an armored front in a 1 on 1?

[Merusk]

It's almost as if founders fucked off or sold accounts due to terrible implementation and blatant cash grabs!

Noo.. who would have POSSIBLY done that.

[Ironwood]

The thought had occurred.

[Falconeer]

Ha, that actually makes sense.

[Shannow]

I had my first battle in 4+? months (God fucking hell who the fuck designed that UI?  ) and I'll attest to the fact people are idiots.
I mean shit it took me a cpl of minutes to even remember how to turn on my advance zoom and chain fire and I still finished with 4 kills (hahah locusts, you amuse me so).

[Sir T]

Since we are swapping "people are idiots" stories

First game in my new Cat C1 stock apart from heat sink swaps to double and maxed armour (fuck fighting the UI to do anything else, I wanna play) I shut myself down with blasting my 4 meds too much and I hadn't figured out how to set them on chain fire. Then I wake up and turn around to find myself faced by 4 meds (2 hunchbacks and 2 others I cant remember) with me backed up against a canyon wall with them all inside LRM range. I finally remember how to set to chain fire but I basically write myself off at this point. So what do you think they did?

THEY BLEW MY FAT USELESS LRM ARMS OFF!! Hello? And then started firing at my sides while my Lazors cored one and blew the side off another. I actually lost a side torso (XL Engine? Hell no!) before they decided to actually fire at my big fat center. I was sitting openmouthed at the screen. I mean I'm not the best player in the world but fuck sake I'm Genghis Khan compared with those clowns.

[Falconeer]

Do you know how many still don't target enemies? It must be my present ELO bracket (pretty low considering the shitty 'mechs I force myself into. Last night for example I wanted to make a few idiotic statements so I went around with my Awesome Pretty Baby for nine matches, racking up 2 kills and 9 deaths in the process), but when I die and spectate other people it's just mindblowing how many I still see just shooting everything they have (including LRMs) point blank, shutting off repeatedly, without targeting shit. The same people you see disappearing from the map while the enemy score goes up by one because they died in a lone corner of the playfield withouth even the courtesy of signaling enemy presence.

So yeah, you must have faced a whole band of non-targeters. They love to spray you with weapons, who knows where you could be holding ammo? 

[Ironwood]

Yeah, that FUCKS ME RIGHT OFF.

It takes seconds to press the R key and you get information on what the fuck is going on.  We had one chap and all the spectators were screaming at him to target.  The 3 guys he were up against - one was fully armored and the other two were nanoseconds away from death.

You can imagine which one this dipshit was whaling on.

[Lantyssa]

I wish I'd fight these guys.  I always go up against the one who can hit with pinpoint accuracy regardless of facing, movement, or cover.

[Falconeer]

Interesting screenshots from their brand new Match Making Command Centre that will go live with tomorrow's patch. In case it wasn't clear, this is a Dev tool, but I am curious and this shows some of the logic behind the matchmaking and the hidden ELO.




A couple more behind the spoiler.

[Shannow]

What would be interesting to see is statistics tying battle win/losses to ELO differences and mech weight differences.

Seeing how much correlation there is would be interesting to determine how accurate ELO is as a skill marker.

[Samprimary]

biggest issue is group elo vs individual elo

[Samprimary]

Yeah. Now the question is to find out at last how much of a comical divide we can have between stalwart IS defenders' version of things, versus ... well, clan mechs being clan mechs.

ahh, the payoff. Read someone today literally saying "[The Timberwolf] is not strictly OP, but it performs better at everything than any other chassis."

[Ironwood]

 

[satael]

Isn't the divide going to get even greater once all the clan pilots get their pilot skills maxed out? 

[Falconeer]

Absolutely, yes, but so will be the nerfs. And there will be nerfs. The problem is that they will take a long time cause PGI wants to sell as many Clan 'mechs for real money as possible before hitting them with the nerfhammer.

[Sir T]

I just logged onto my twitch account for the first time in forever, and I loged onto the No guts no galaxy stream, and there was a dev there who had was just answering a querstion, I didnt see the Q but this is his answer...

Paulinouye: Kin3ticx: that's part of the flavor of Clans.. they need their unique feel... we just took them down a notch and made more of their damage splash rather than pin point to allow them to keep their range/tonage/size power

SO there you go...

(edit) oh and later after saying they would be re;leasing Clan modiles and then doing the next tier for both...

Z0eff: moar range for my ER mediums?

Paulinouye: Z0eff: They should reach out to 2KM soon

Excuse me while I start screaming. I hope he was trolling...

[Falconeer]

He was trolling. All the ranges have been cut down in the past few months, and the weapon modules tend to increase your range by 1% and things like that. Nothing to fear about that.

In other news, looks like 3/3/3/3 works. Yesterday there were so few Assaults around (only 3 Assaults and 3 Heavies per side can be in any given match that the game felt very refreshing to me. As a Medium 'mechs lover myself things were much more enjoyable yesterday, and my Hunchback, Kintaro and Centurion felt definitely more useful.

Then again, MWO wouldn't be a PGI game without some stupid choices, and since they put back 5-12 grouping, there are lots of reports of groups of 5 being constantly steamrolled by groups of 12. Not sure if that could have been helped in any way. The 12-players queue was pretty much empty so they had to give something back for those who like to play wth a full team. Sadly, that doesn't work out for some other small teams. Too bad.


EDIT: Some observation from the match maker engineer Karl Berg.

The matchmaker should be providing weight class for weight class, even when it is forced to deviate from 3's. This means if the other team had 6 to 8 assaults, your team will have the same.
8 of one weight class seems really unlikely though. Exactly one game, out of all the games played today so far, has had 8 of one weight class.
edit: Just running additional numbers; 1.2% of solo games have had 6 of one weight class, and 5% of group games have had 6 of one weight class. The majority of these games happened during the morning hours when we were still tuning behaviours for production; so hopefully games like this are very rare for you.

[Falconeer]

Well I met Arthur Parker and Samprimary today hiding in random games. Come back y'all, no reason to be ashamed. 

[Samprimary]

Well I met Arthur Parker and Samprimary today hiding in random games. Come back y'all, no reason to be ashamed. 

wait which name again?

[Falconeer]

Lefteye. And you are GG Unit, right?

[Samprimary]

i am, if you see me drag me into groups always.

[Falconeer]

I'll drag you down. I play inefficient 'mechs because I like to play with a handicap, so I blow up a lot. You sure you are up for that?

[Ironwood]

I am.

[Sir T]

If you see me online shoot me an invite too. I'm only on a couple of times a week but I'm up for detonating a lot. I have cunningly hidden my identity by calling myself Sir T.

[satael]

Argh, I thought that people were exaggerating how awful the new mech lab is... but sadly I just got a first-hand taste on the horror. It was almost enough to make me uninstall the game again before even playing a single match...almost. 

[Falconeer]

Pro tip: if you click "Select 'Mech" in the upper left corner, a new screen that allows you to select the 'mech to play with and also swap consumables and modules on the fly will pop up. This was just added a few days ago, and helps a lot finding the 'mech you want to play with.

About everything else, it's mindblowing how many things are missing or inefficient in the mechlab still. Sure, you get used to it, and they improve it from time to time, but considering it's an interface that took them A YEAR to make I would definitely consider it the biggest testament to their ineptitude.

[Lantyssa]

The old interface was better, so that's saying something.

[Ironwood]

How the fuck can a Warhawk only do 15 damage in a match ?  WAKE THE FUCK UP.

[Ironwood]

Something's really changed tho - I'm having fun again.  I think the team balance shit is working or something...

[Sir T]

Well, it was as little fun to see 6 Jenners swarming over a ridge as it was to see 4 Atlases and 2 Stalkers rounding a corner.

Its what I was trying to get at pages ago - equal weight (in this case wight classes) mean equal potential capability on both sides.

[Falconeer]

Last night around 1am (CET) I was about to go to sleep when Samprimary and his friend invited me to group up. Ended up going to bed at 6am, and I only noticed it was that late because daylight invaded my room. We died a lot, but damn we had fun. Also, all hail the 3 AMS + ECM Kit Fox.