Faction Challenge 3

's a good point.

But, in other news, the damn queue is still way skewed, meaning if I don't play lights I wind up on the wrong side of a ROFLstomp EVERY DAMN TIME and if I play in a light I already have mastered, I can actually get qualifying matches win or lose. (being locked into clan means I can't get qualifying matches / bonus C-Bills on the IS lights I still need to master, leaving me only my recently mastered Adder and Kit Foxen).

Screw everything most people complain about and the state of the role warfare changes, being a good light pilot doesn't mean I want to pilot them in every damn match. PGI needs to implement an actual reward system for dropping in a the weight class most underrepresented in the queue already...and considering they're willing to drop challenges on a weekly basis that can give people tons of C-Bills, and the steps taken for role warfare, I see no reason why they HAVEN'T. Don't get me wrong: incentives for playing lights well, the 3/3/3/3, weight matching, and other things are all well and good, but if they want to convince me they're serious about the matchmaker they needed what I'm talking about last year.

Why do they need that system specifically? Because the human brain fails at a lot of things, and if MMOs have reinforced anything we've learned about that it's that potential rewards, even high ones, do not overcome players playing what they currently think they want no matter how painful they already know it will be to do so. Immediate, guaranteed rewards, by contrast do just that. We already have scoring formulas and class-specific rewards, just judge a verifiable minimum contribution based on that for a base reward (small enough, like 25k C-Bills), then give an end match multiplier of like 10% earned C-Bills. Lock in the reward flag when the person queues, so that as the queue proportions change no one gets shafted what they were promised.

Shazam. Dedicated players will still do their thing, but most players will be filling the shorted weights and queue will stabilize.

 

On the other hand I must say the solo matches were MUCH better then the paste challenges LRM wise, looked like they were much less, but maybe it's just wrong perception because I ran only lights.

 

Mechspecs FAIL!



Need to carry harder!!!!!

p.s. I was running a Mixed Cat (UAC5, 3x ERML, 2x LRM15).. still not elited. In the End Michael and the Orion + Awesome had a very very hard End Game! That Cicada and Shadowhawk were extremely persistent.

 

Combo boat with laser backups work.

Blagg and I just happened to drop into the same match on the same team. Yeah, I'd say we tore it up.

 

Fun observations:

-Jade Falcon is the most popular clan by matches played, but is in 2nd on the clan board (and only 4th overall).

-Poor Laio. At least they're beating Smoke Jaguars.

-Speaking of which, even Clan Loyalists are outdoing the poor Smoke Jaguars (dead last overall, but they also have the least matches played)

-Merc Corps are stomping the leaderboard by a healthy margin even considering they have the most matches played. Their top 50 players are doing on average 86.2 points better for their top ten games. Nearly nine points per match higher than their nearest competitor is nothing to sneeze at, even if it means a lot of wasted damage.

-Steiner and Davion are doing alright, but they and Lone Wolves (essentially neck-and-neck-and-neck scorewise) are still crushing the other Houses by thousands of points. This time, though, # of matches played is also far and away greater.

 

My lights have gotten the most action...but look at what's happened the last month. Stormcrow plus a free Cent AH, then quirks hit and all kinds of mediums/heavies turned awesome, and now the TBRs have hit for cbills. I'm hardly surprised to see lights getting played less (and happy, since it gives me super queue times)

 

Not even second now, the Wolves pulled ahead. Ghost Bears have 200+ matches now though, so they're both #1 and most popular.

And screw the cats, Leo Showers was a punk ass anyway Honestly though, I wonder how different the numbers would have been if they had done this competition before quirks. I'm betting you would see a massively higher number of clan matches with better scores in general.

 

300MC for this competition unless I drop down in the last hour, happy about my performance because I played only saturday morning and then yesterday in the evening to round up the score for a total of 65 matches (qualified in 60 of them, my win rate was 63%) ,good I did, I would come 11th, so I didn't even grind too much. Of course I was lucky with the matchmaker, because it game me mostly close games.

Faction challenge are lucky for me, came 6th in the second, and 8th in this. Never got into the leaderboards for any other challenge, even tho I must say I tried to go for the board only these 2 times. It's all about the games on Friday anyway.

The MERC CORPS took the lead from day1 with some really crazy scores. 10x 12 assist games with amost 1000 damage for BanditB17 and the 15th would win or be top 3 in most of other factions.

 

I never came over a score higher than 287 (1K/9A/780DMG). I must admit I too was like: "I'm not gonna kill any enemy unless I have too. Just crittin' them and leaving them for the team to feast on." The Banshees I was leveling this weekend (All mastered now ) paid off well. I scored 3,8mil extra C-Bills plus the usual stufff. So I got like 20mil this weekend, a hula girl and (I haven't checked, but I guess Mercs won) the dogtags. So... yay... I got back form lurmageddon and all I got was a t-shirt, not!
LRM's were a nuissance, and runnnig a Banshee, even with AMS, required a lot of hiding... Beeing spotted or having a fight with an enemy instantly marked assaults as primary targets for Lurms.... on some matches I never made it to the third minute. On other matches I managed to "sneak" my (over 60kph runnin') Banshee past the priving eyes of those gloating boats and teared them apart before they could type "Lock target pls". So, yes... imho LRM's are a really bad thing when overused by a team, but they're not THE major threat on the battlefield, at least not always.

 

We ran light packs Sunday and slaughtered tournie peeps in their long range or light builds - was great fun.

Factually I can tell you that at least 5 of the top 1-2 players for different factions were running lrm boats quite a lot as I fought a lot against them or helped them. Others were in FS9-A's or Raven 3L's (etc). If you're running in a group it was a doddle as the group are finding, locking and then killing your target. You run LRM's to get the initial hit and damage until the group calls you off the target and finishes them. Easy 12 assists and 500 damage most matches.

That said getting an ok placing wasn't hard. I was 25th a short while ago and was killing everything I could. A few of us were actively competing for kills and damage between ourselves which added interest to the whole thing. Being an old curmudgeon I refused to play the tournie game for myself but was happy to fix it for others. You didnt even need to synch drop to fix it for your lance mates in this one!

Sadly some of my best personal performances, like getting 4 of our 5 kills in a total wipeout after we fell to 11 vs me on TT to a highly organised team, didn't even count. The team bitching was hysterical so getting the 4 kills after a pair of people laid into my lance as useless was priceless and my smugness was unbelievable. In fairness one person on our lance was involved in the "discussion" so we all looked terrible until I dragged a semblance of "ok" to the result.

Got a lot of performances at 800-960 damage and a handful over 1K. Same for 4-6 kills. Sadly as I was in lance and we were competing against each other it actually proved to be hard to get more...

Some teams you dropped with you knew right from the start you'd lost as they were dominated by long range peepers and utterly passive. Controlled aggression was incredibly effective this weekend.

Stopped at 5.2m bonus c-bills as was getting too punch drunk and really had gone off the boil at that point. Of course I'd also bought an AMS overload, 2 SPL modules and one other weapon module this weekend so technically thats not good.

 

Wow the tournie has turned people into cowards.... 3 teams in a row that have hidden behind me on my Dragon...

 

I got over 6+ Mio Bonus C-Bills. But wasnt really fun coz 1. too many pure LRM Boats, 2. too many who tried to get a lot of assists but leaving the kills to the others. Hello? Who does that on the real battlefield? Simply sick

So can see how a bad Score Formula can change people's usual gameplay style. Very sad.

 

Aftermath of the tournie (as its convenent to blame)... I killed a DWF and TBR.... but thats not relevant..

See that DWF with 1 kill 1 assist on our side?

It crossed the entire map to cap their base when we were still no losses. Only reason he got a kill is he abandoned camping their base when everyone else was dead, went round the corner and a spider was standing there looking the other direction. Didn't even start capping the base btw until he'd killed every turret.....

Please god why do that in a DWF?

Proof that the tournie rotted peoples brains.

 

Was able to turn my luck around by playing Assaults (often second lowest in queue). Still had some dud teams, but not NEARLY as many as when playing a medium or heavy, and was able to get enough wins to not feel like a dink, real match scores to feel good about (if nothing thread worthy), and qualify for some bonuses. I just wish the event extended into today so I could actually do more, but that's the trouble when you work Fri/Sat and have a busy Sun...

Wolves and Falcons were almost neck and neck in score and matches at the end, but Ghost Bear stayed ahead on points and pulled ahead on matches played. The IS board may as well have remained static, though.

 

I got just over 5m CBills as well. I was running a LRM boat and scored pretty high in my faction...it was easy to get high damage and assists in that thing.