Speed and extra maneuverability. It actually looks very nice I just don’t want to spend 6000 MC on it!
pg1
1822
I have most of the mechs I want now. Not much interest in lights especially in the current meta. I’ve elited or mastered Jenners, Hunchbacks, Centurions, Catapults, Cataphracts, and Stalkers. The only mechs I still want are Atlases and I might go into Dragons. Hopefully the Trebuchet is good. My KDR continues to go up fast, it’s now 1.94 (+.24) in a week. I’ve been playing the CTF-3D jump jet sniper like crazy and doing very well. It’s my current favorite build in the game because it’s very skill heavy, unlike say a LRM boat. I’ll probably convert some GXP soon.
I found dragons to be very painful to play. It is the only mech I simply abandoned two variants after hitting elite, I kept only the Flame, which I like quite a bit.
pg1
1824
The new patch was a bit bittersweet. It added a lot of good stuff I think but there’s a few issues. One is they pulled ELO already. I actually thought it was working rather well and played with it on for a few hours. The problem was it couldn’t find matches for solo queue players (or at least for me it failed repeatedly) but it worked great once I got into a group. I was put with much higher skill guys than usual and lost a lot more (though we still won probably 70% instead of the usual 90%). So I’m looking forward to it’s return soon. Secondly the new map Alpine is great but it exposes some issues the game has. Alpine is so different than the other maps that you don’t want to bring a short range configuration to it, it’s near worthless. You want LRMs, PPCs, and Gauss. Also almost all the mechs have between 35-40 degree up/down aiming which just doesn’t work that well on the steep mountains in Alpine. Arm mounted weapons do better but even those don’t work great as you can’t look down or up far enough. Mech quirks which give certain mechs much greater abilities in that regard would be greatly appreciated I think. My main gripe however is how rare Alpine is. It seems to come up only about 1 in 20-50 maps, no joke. I’ve played it 3 times only. Everyone wants to play it too. In fact if there was a way to select Alpine only I’d probably do so until I could get in more games on it.
Alpine is terrific. I think it’s really great that it encourages people to make more well-rounded mech designs. There was nothing more statisfying then annihilating a Catapult A1 with LRM15 fire as it struggled to reach me across a snowy plain.
The ability to aim up and down is quite significant also though not as crippling as showing up in a pure brawler. It certainly adds significant value to arm weapons.
I think not seeing it much in the rotation might just be bad luck (your stated frequency of “1 in 20-50” is very hyperbolic. If you said 1 in 10 I might beleive you more ;) or it might be totally normal. Consider there are currently 8 maps in the rotation including Alpine. Seeing Apline only once every eight matches could seem like an eternity (assuming 7 minutes per match you will only get it once an hour) when it’s actually perfectly normal.
pg1
1826
Perhaps I just have bad luck then. For me it was exactly 1 in 20. I screenshot every game I play. I played 60 last night (mainly because my premium time was running out and I wanted to play Alpine) but like I said only got it 3 times. People I was talking to seemed to get it even less than that. Also many times I get the same map back to back, that has never happened with Alpine. For whatever reason it is more rare than the other maps.
pg1
1827
ELO actually seems to work after they put it back in. I get matched up versus the same guys much more often and they seem more competent than usual. I’ve also seen some competitive players from streams, videos or teams I know of. I’m still winning a lot more than losing. My KDR was at 2.00 when ELO kicked in and now it’s at 2.08, so while the matches are tougher I’m doing better than I expected. Many matches like these occur now - http://imgur.com/a/SATV0#0 where there are many deaths on both sides; where before it was mostly stomps I played in. I have to say it’s pretty impressive they’ve got it working at all. Many games seem to struggle implenting any skill based match making system (QuakeLive, Hawken, Tribes Ascend, etc) and MWO is the best one I’ve played in a FPS.
They also have some tournament going on this weekend but it appears to be for solo players only and if you drop once in a group you are taken out of the tournament(?). I’d actually be interested in trying to win if they had released more details but instead the rules are vague so I don’t see it as worth trying. I’d rather just play with my regular group and have fun.
http://mwomercs.com/tournaments
They also have a CBill boost this weekend for Hero and Founder’s mechs.
Founders’ Mechs will generate an additional 25% C-Bills for a total C-Bill bonus of 50% per match. Hero Mechs will generate an additional 20% C-Bills for a total C-Bill bonus of 50% per match.
Both of these sound like ways to make people play a lot in order to get more data to fine tune ELO. Not a bad idea.
That is the worst wording ever. ‘For a total C-bill bonus of 50% per match’? You can’t be in a hero mech and a founder mech at the same time…
Not really hurting for c-bills anyway…
Yea I sold yen not long after I got it.
Giaddon
1831
Sorry to jump in on page 61, but what’s the word on this game for solo players (i.e., players without groups). I’ve heard it’s pretty brutal. True? Not worth trying without a team? Thanks!
Aceris
1832
The Elo matchmaker should hopefully fix that. I’ve played almost exclusively solo and I used to get rolled a lot when there were groups on the other side but it feels much better the last couple of days. I don’t know what the new player experience is like now - The trial mechs are quite bad but you aren’t stuck with them for as long and maybe the new matchmaker puts trial mechs in the same games.
pg1
1833
It’s a tough game but I suspect with ELO in now it’ll be OK purely solo. I’ve done some solo drops lately and it’s much improved though going with a group is still better (and honestly it’s more fun!). One of the things that keeps the game hard is the grind up to a good plateau. I’ve already got 90% of the stuff I want, so I can switch between near optimal multiple builds and mechs. As a new player you’ll be concerned with just grinding for a long time unless you can figure out quickly what mech you really enjoy. That took me quite a while and it keeps changing over time as well as my skills get better and the game changes. I honestly enjoyed most of the grind (except two mech variants out of the 20 or so I’ve played) and it exposed me to different mechs I might have ignored otherwise. I a lot of them I grew into liking and playing better with.
If you aren’t adverse to spending a little I’d recommend going in for either the $6.95 (1,250 MC) or $14.95 (3,000 MC) packages to start. Why? Because when you are a new player you get a cadet bonus which is rather substantial for the first 25 matches and any premium time or Hero mech bonuses further stack on it. This weekend also has a bonus to Hero mechs going from their normal 30% to 50% and that stacks with cadet and premium time bonuses too. All these bonuses would add up to a lot of CBills over the first 25 matches, which would be enough to buy another few mechs with CBills. At the end of the first 25 matches you should know whether you’ll enjoy the game or not. If it’s not for you, you’re out some money. If you do like it, you’ll have a bunch of CBills to buy shit with.
Premium time is -
250 MC 1 day
650 MC 3 days
1,250 MC 1 week
2,500 MC 1 month
Hero mechs -
1,875 MC Death’s Knell (hard mech to kick ass in, but I’ve seen it happen)
3,750 MC Yen-Lo-Wang
4,500 MC Fang and Flame
5,250 MC Ilya Muromets (Best hero mech, 3xUAC5 build)
6,000 MC Pretty Baby
I’d strongly recommend enough premium time to play your first 25 matches and possibly a Hero mech too. The Hero mechs are pretty expensive however but they have a permanent 30% CBill bonus (which is 50% this weekend).
pg1
1834
Is anyone watching this? -
http://mwomercs.com/tournaments
Talk about a disgusting “tournament”, based almost entirely on playing non-stop for as long as possible. Some of the top ranked guys have played north of 500 matches in less than 60 hours (it’s over at midnight PST). That’s over 8 matches an hour for 60 hours! That’s insanity and I hope PGI never does an event like this again. It seems like a very under handed way to boost metrics and provide Elo information. I haven’t played at all this weekend almost as a boycott of how they are handling this event. I’ve never seen a FPS community itself run an event like the PGI one. Community leagues usually consist of brackets and/or a season/playoffs. In comparison community run events are much more fair (highly detailed rules released in advance and based on quality matches) and sane (never reward mass playing games). There’s actually a community run tournament at www.runhotordie.com which is pretty cool. PGI should support community competitions such as RHoD instead of running dumb events that require playing non-stop for 62 hours.
Shrug? It’s a dumb event but easy to ignore. The score seems to be aggregated and divided somehow by the matches played (perhaps wieghted one way or another) so it isnt really encouraging you to play non-stop… if you play just a few very high quality matches that should put you pretty high up in the rankings.
I think that competitions like this devoid of context & structure are a little silly (like leaderboards in Planetside 2: almost useless)… but would not go so far as to say playing non-stop for 60 hours is a requirement to compete, or that I should even give a crap if it was! This takes nothing away from the game itself, and takes nothing away from runhotordie (which frankly seems to be a touch erraticly run).
I look forward to a more structured competitive environment or gasp community warfare, whatever form that will take.
pg1
1836
I agree it’s dumb but I’m not sure it’s easy to ignore. It’s been the only major MWO event in a long time and might even show how PGI is going to go forward with such things. Even the guy who won the overall rank asked them never to do it again. He dropped 485 matches to win. He did sleep some but he also played a lot and has been playing MWO a long time at a high level (in one of the top teams, SJR). Pretty interesting post…
http://mwomercs.com/forums/topic/101095-let-me-tell-you-about-my-weekend-by-broceratops/
BTW RHoD has issues because in MWO the only way to match up is sync dropping and some patches have removed even that from the game for periods of time. If there was an easy guaranteed way to do an 8v8 match RHoD would be going much faster and smoother.
dtolman
1837
Pretty sure they did it to do high volume Lone Wolf and ELO testing in a fun manner.
With them rolling out community warfare next month, I doubt we’ll see much of these silly volume based events.
dtolman
1839
Thats the plan… which isn’t to say it’ll be the full deal, but its supposed to start March-April.
They;ve refused to say more the past few months, and the last dev updates haven’t mentioned it at all (unless the reference to a revamped new user experience is to it).
That’s why I am surprised to hear you say this; it’s not on the roadmap and no one has mentioned it… No specifics anyway and certainly no indication it’s coming very soon. I would not expect anything for awhile.
