Quirk Testing Impressions - Input Welcome!

From my experience Elo is not actually working. Newer players, those who have been playing for a month or so, are being put in games with players who have been playing for a long time. After playing for four or five months I was still seeing people who "claimed" it was their first game and some of them played badly enough it might have been true. After six months my Elo started to climb and I no longer saw those new people, so at least it's filtering out the brand news, but I routinely see players who's tactics, loadouts, and aim are so bad they might as well be new.
What I'm saying is the matchmaker is too broad which is probably the result of a small player base. I'm not getting stuck with cadets and brand news, but I too often see players who have been player only a month to a few months off and on and players who have been playing a lot for a long time. I even saw Blagg once and I'm pretty sure his Elo is miles above mine. These quirks just make the unbalance even worse.
What I would like to see is a comprehensive tutorial and training program that stresses this is a team game and certain mechs and builds have distinct purposes. A player in their first 100-200 games should be learning how to function as a team and fulfill certain roles.

 

I don't disagree but I regularly find people in the group queue claiming its their first game... time after time...

 

Here is my impression - I just spent at the very least 20 hours over Saturday and Sunday going through the whole process of updating 118 IS mechs. I feel like this was my job the last two days and I should be getting a raise/bonus pretty soon... I don't even know how you'd cope, Remarius, with your additional mechs.

Process
- Took a screenshot of each IS mech in the MWO mechlab Mech Details.
- Stripped loadout on every IS mech in game
- Updated smurfy with my final 'pre-quirk' loadouts from the in-game screenshots and removed any other non-final builds
- Printed off the 33 page quirk document; compared loadouts to GMan129's proposals (http://www.reddit.com/r/OutreachHPG...ecording_of_the_quirky_buildathon_stream_and/), compared to my own pre-quirk final loadouts, a few I compared to various mechspecs loadouts that matched up weapons-wise, made any personal changes accordingly and save the loadout in smurfy
- Updated every mech in the game from smurfy (I must have significantly reduced the life of the left alt & tab keys)

It's 8:49pm and I feel like being a fat fuck and eating chinese takeout & watching tv, then taking a vacation day tomorrow because I'm burned out.

The joys of tomorrow when I get to start the fun process of playing each mech a few times to see about any changes Maybe I'll just wait till Thanksgiving break later this month to do that. They better not drastically change loadouts in Round 2 quirk-pass. (yes, there is a thread on reddit - http://www.reddit.com/r/OutreachHPG/comments/2lru4f/official_mech_quirks_need_feedback_from_you_on/)

 

So, you screenshotted to save your pre-q loadout, and then re-built to take advantage of quirks... am I reading that right?

Hmm.... want to share my opinion, but don't want to join reddit. Oh the conflicts!

 

Sorta. My smurfy mechlab was overrun with alternate builds, plus sorta-final pre-q loadouts; however, I would tweak ammo/armor distribution in the MWO game but not update smurfy for minor changes like that.

I wanted to get a an actual copy of my final pre-q builds that were in MWO, so I took a snapshot of mech details in MWO and used that to slowly update smurfy. That process only took a few hours. So, in smurfy now, I have 2 builds for every mech, one pre-quirk, one post-quirk since I created a new loadout for post-quirk.

 

quirks... .... I will quote Obi Wan on this: " You were supposed to bring balance...."

Tonnagewise.. it seems to work well (but that might be the contest), but loadouts? Man, I feel like Leonidas... the sky is darkened by lrm-swarms day in and day out..... and most players enjoy getting a lot of points, c-bills and XP by joining forces with spotters... so much for that.

 

In fairness I took a different approach. I spent Tuesday evening and Wednesday (*cough* at work *cough*) going through the quirks list and deciding what chassis interested me, then designing new fits from scratch - came at every one with a literal blank setup. A few I discarded for hardpoint or space reasons but then I spent Wednesday and Thursday evening outfitting maybe 50 mechs. The rest I've ignored either because nothing excites me or because I already had fits I liked for the new quirks (10-12 from memory, e.g. Hunchbacks). My isk also plummeted as I bought maybe 10 modules for use on the mechs I played this weekend and I had to invest maybe 50m extra into the new fits (280/300 XL engines, some expensive weapons that I haven't used much in the past like LPL, and adding/removing upgrades). Overall that wasn't bad though for the number of mechs.

This weekend I was levelling the Ice Ferrets Fri to Sat and did all the Basics and Elites while churning the competition. Made sure each had a different loadout and used different module sets so I could just swap quickly if a match was awful enough that I just wanted to immediately quit and start a new game. Sunday I took a different tack.... Started running the new quirked mechs for 5 battles each to test the loadouts and make tweaks. It gave me enough time to get used to them and spot obvious problems then test solutions, or even revert solutions after finding it didn't help (Fang I'm looking at you!). Was a nice interesting way to get a taster for the mechs tbh and kept me going helping others ramp up their results after I'd hit my 60.

Don't want to radically change too many chassis as I'm still levelling my Ice Ferrets and theres a steady trickle of new mechs coming in ... plus I'm anticipating they change the quirks as I'm outdamaging 9/10 of the assaults I'm teamed up with now. Direwolves and Atlases just looked like incredibly slow targets this weekends unless you got too cocky. The lights were a pain though....

I'm not the best at running up big damage scores as I tend to hunt smaller prey but this weekend I got not one but two eight kill battles, a nice number of 5-6 kill and four 1,000+ battles. If I can do it anyone can!

PS: If anyone has a good quirk based AWS-9M ER PPC fit spam me it please as I never use the weapon system.

 

Which is one reason me and a pal have dropped in Kit Foxes, 3x AMS, ams overload & range V lately. And ECM ofc.

We had so much fun shutting down the LRM30s completely and diminishing anyone with more. I plan to drop with 3 Kit Foxes and make a video sometime.

 

Do it like the beef... jump on a Cata with your Uller and do the point blank LRM-Kill.....

 

Yeah we ran with 1 ECM and all had Radar Dep. Didn't effect us too much except for a handful of battles as most LRMers were standing so far behind. Even Narc wasn't that effective this weekend as you had so long to get into good cover. Saw some really clever play on the new map with high JJ spotter Spiders linked to Warhawk and Awesome platforms though. Sadly for them I happened to be using the 4 LL Jester and it turns out that they don't like quad LL into their chests while hiding/spotting... who would have guessed. Certainly not the 2 5D's I nailed in that match up on the heights.

Coincidentally, every mech I'm dropping in I am writing a crib sheet on weapon ranges now. It would hsve helped those Spiders as both were just within my optimal.

PS: Jester ran out of AMS on only 1 match out of the 5 or so I used it so it could have been a lot worse in my battles (2 AMS with 3t total aka 6,000 "shots") .

 

I spent the WE for playing the Tournament Challenge. For build Updates i chose the Chassis with the interesting quirks which i wanted to test practically. Others i just left them as i don't see the value in updating every single mech out of 100+ while mostly i drive max 10% of them in my free time. The rest is simply 'The Collection'. Btw most of my Mechs are stripped because i know probably I don't drive them for a long time..

 

Poor abandoned mechs.

 

Well yeah, i have a fulltime job and only have some few evenings and the WE for playing. Need to set priorities..

 

Pfft, I have a full time job Iive just conditioned myself to only sleep 4-5 hours a night!

Wish I was joking.

 

Abandoned mechs... for shame. I was in a groove for a while where I would slowly work my way through the list of mechs and play each mech 10 times. It stopped the game from being boring and just taking out the best or your favorite mechs. Of course, there seems to be a steady stream of new mechs lately so I'm really just in leveling mode anyway.

So disappointed, Rem - neither of us solely plays the dominant mechs or sets out to kill/crush/destroy each match, I figured you'd be all about quirking everything, not just a few of the more interesting choices!

 

"First pass mech quirks"
So this means my BJ-1X that I started to snipe with will get its 3LPL quirks removed for medium laser quirks? Oh I wish I knew this before hand. This is what I get for leaping on something that just came out.

I average 3 games/day since about 5 months. I'm lucky if I get 3 games a day in come to think of it. So it's important whatever purchase I make is a permanent one. I understand nerfing, I can take more heat than 5.6heat/11dmg a shot LPL's. I'll just re-downgrade to a xl195 and get back to 13DHS.
This game I had most of that damage coring out people and making lights stop peeking with their NARC's. A few games later I soloed 1 LRM boat, made the other run (mining collective), finished two ravens and cored the back of an atlas for 3700exp but I am kicking myself for no screenie of it. (nonprem btw)

If they make it LL or ERLL buffs I'll take 'em! Example of 4LL on a BJ:

Note the battle time! I chewed into 3 assaults early on and kept the mediums heads down from a hill in the back. This is before quirks and now this BJ has a range/fire rate buff.... Keep in mind this is the only time I've broken 1k with it and in optimal circumstances. The Dire wolf at the end had no lasers so hill peeking was far too easy for me so that was to blame as well. Two dakka assaults were the last.

I want the perks to be said and done so I can plan them out now. Oh well, balance. Shimmering Sword told me "If it can't match a clan variant in the same weight class it's not OP" but certain situations change this. Can't tell you how many SCR's I've chewed into with my Blackjacks.

 

Pacing myself mate as I clearly have a lot less c-bills than you.

My method of organisation is that I removed the name off every mech before I started and have been naming them "Upgraded" every time I finish one. Then change it to "Tested" once its been road tested properly. Allows me to keep track of everything I can in game and easily see what I need to do. I'm also horribly aware that CW 2 is what 6 weeks away allegedly and my remaining 15m is awfully low as I'll need a full set of all mods and potentially duplicate mechs. Will just be happy if I can finish testing all those 50+prefitted mechs (62 approx) on top of my incoming mechs (and Ice Ferrets) and buildup enough c-bills to cover any initial stuff I need in CW 2.

 

Same here....

 

Yeah currently the huge advantage Clan mechs have is definitely the engine and its reduced vulnerability. Had the embarassing experience of sneaking behind an untouched Warhawk yesterday that was armed with LRM's and SRM's and sitting on the platform of HPG on its own. Caught it dead and started unloading my full dual AC5/ERLL load straight into its back at full speed (CT I thought but guess it was a side panel). It didn't go down and just turned around soaking the damage. I was so surprised I didn't manage to get clear and exploded in a massive volley of SRM's (I'd already take quite a bit of damage admittedly). Timely reminder that I wasn't invulnerable!

Rest of the clan mechs yesterday seemed eminently killable.

 

I don't think they will change the weapons the quirks are aplied on. But they might change the numbers (and in some cases they should).