Love it or Hate it

[(CG)Jimmy]

Been noticing a great division in player skill on the servers these days, the player base seems to be severely lacking in Moderately skilled/somewhat experienced players.. Mostly I see alot of Nomads, alot of Nomads with names and 3-6 "good" players on each side (depending on the total server population) which is leaving me wondering if people coming into the mod are falling into the Love or Hate category, those who love it stick around and become good pilots others get rolled around afew matches and quit (as in are never seen again on another server) for various reasons.  This division in skill is also fairly demoralizing to brand new players who after stepping afew hundred meters wander haphazardly into Holly A's with H-gauss running on radar passive one shotting there light mechs.  With no support or back up no heads up or anything.  They just blunder into the enemy and die, then disconnect after the fifth time or so.
 
The other night with the exception of one player (the guy leading his teams chart) the entire enemy team were new players, they asked for help, had questions, mostly they were getting ignored, I answered what I could but missed alot of the questions cause the chat is kinda hard to keep up with (or read) in certain situations, additionally good players dont seem to know when to scroll back the skill abit and let the Newbs have some fun, instead they go in with all there fury and totally obliterate the opposition and then bitch that the enemy team is leaving, well what did you expect?  People can only handle being roflstomped for so long. 

There is a big difference between a Newb and a Noob.  A newb is just a new player who needs some guidance and pointers to be coached into a good player, a Noob is just a jerk who's only purpose is to suck the fun out of the game, I don't think our new players are getting the support or help they need from the experienced players and with a mod that is just getting off  the ground you cant rely on a constant stream of players to draw from.  In short the over zealousness of experienced players is slowly killing our player base. Or at the very least not helping to expand it.

Any thoughts?

[Alexander]

Don't forget that regardless of how experienced or "leet" they are, these people are still 'pubbers'.

Asking pubbers to show some kind of decency and respect to fellow gamers, much less anything approaching honourable behaviour, really isn't going to work :|

[Sesambrot]

I for myself help any newby that has questions, but as you said yourself the chatsystem of the cryengine doesn't really make this easier, plus it's pretty dangerous to type when you're somewhere on the frontlines, and for some reason the voice chat also doesn't work very well...

I guess the best way would be to make a little training course to teach newbies the basics of mechpiloting (heatmanagement etc.)
sure that won't do the whole job but it would be a first step...
teamplay and what each mech is best for and how to use it needs to be found out ingame anyway...

[HAARP]

In the past few weeks I noticed that very often, I am on the top of my team, without even trying very hard or using any overpowered variants. I don't understand it either. Is the average player really that bad?
I help where I can. Cbills, instructions or tactics. But most often, noobs are afraid of asking (or haven't figured the chat key out yet...). Also, Crysis doesn't seem to have any chat backlog and the messages disappear very fast. So by the time I finished my brawl, I have no idea who it was that requested cash :/

[~SJ~ Blhurr]

The phenomenon you describe is the eventuality of every competitive game.  Someone has to be the loser in competitive gaming.  It's the reason I won't start games a year or two after they've been out because I don't think I'm a bad player but I'm not going to slog through the frustration of getting my butt kicked by a bunch of players who have a huge experience advantage on me.
 
There's nothing you can do about this imo.  It's the nature of all competitive gaming.  You think teams with losing records would be around in leagues like the NFL if there wasn't money to be made?  Those teams would be long gone if it wasn't for fans and a die hard loyalty to their teams to keep the paychecks rolling in.
 
I eat my words.  The best thing you can do to solve this is to get ladder's and leagues up and running asap because then at least your best players will be competing against other good players and you pull them out of the public sphere a bit and leave that public sphere to the new players.  You need a place for the experienced players to spend their MWLL gaming energy because if they spend it all in the public sphere you are going to canabalize your own future competition.

[Alexander]

Blhurr raises a good point.

All the Good ... no, sorry, "Skilled" players are in there owning random noobs because, as it stands, there isn't anything else yet - once leagues and ladders and the like start to get organised, that ought to pull them out and start them wailing on eachother for once.

[(TLL)Sky_walker]

I try to help new players if only they try to use teamchat. Sometimes engage talk and give away hints, but very often I have an impression that some of these Nomads don't even read the teamchat - I say: "200 000 Cbills to first person who speaks on teamchat" and there's no replay despite of the fact that my team has 5 Nomads, and few seconds ago I told them how to use teamchat. It's ridiculous.
That's why I stopped playing on non-TLL hosts. Too much clueless newbies. 

[SquareSphere }12thVR{]

Blast from the past via skywalker,     you can replace "clan" with "organized group play"

[~SJ~ Blhurr]

That's a rad graph.

[SquareSphere }12thVR{]

We (as in some of the toasters/threadrapist/vets) had a pretty extensive discussion about this very topic a few days after the 0.2.0 patch came out and the graph pretty much summed it all up.  "We" fell into the "clan" group that tired to get all players into a more team work mind set and answered questions a lot of people brought up.

[Taemien]

There's a big reason for this. And it sort of hurt MW4 too.

There's no global lobby. Back in MW3 if someone dived into a match, got wasted, they could come back out and ask questions. In MWLL they have to resort to these forums. Not alot of players are forum-goers.

The only fix to this is to mod the single player game to be some sort of a tutorial. But that will only help so far. There's tactics and other variables you just can't take into consideration with a tutorial.

It might help with the questions about how to move a mech, change weapon groups and other simple things such as sharing c-bills and what not.

What do you all think about that?

[SquareSphere }12thVR{]

There's 2 "how to play" videos on the MWLL channel on youtube that goes over those very things also forgot we have a new wiki entry on MWLL Basics

[Infinite o0o]

well, the game has a learning curve, and much more so if you've never played mech sims. getting good at the game is simply a matter of playing more and making sure you learn from your mistakes.

[HAARP]

The MWLL launcher is pretty much only a pretty picture with 4 buttons right now. Why not give a short tutorial, a few hints and links to the Wiki in there?
Nobody ever clicks the "MWLL website" button. But if every newbie is asked "New to MWLL? Read this wiki page to get started! (click here (x) to skip this next time launcher starts)" before the game is launched, this might improve at least a bit.
Tell them how to use the chat, that you can share Cbills and to not be afraid to ask others for Cbills/help, that they needn't bother with Singleplayer, how to buy stuff, etc.

[(TLL)CapperDeluxe]

The MWLL launcher is pretty much only a pretty picture with 4 buttons right now. Why not give a short tutorial, a few hints and links to the Wiki in there?
Nobody ever clicks the "MWLL website" button. But if every newbie is asked "New to MWLL? Read this wiki page to get started! (click here (x) to skip this next time launcher starts)" before the game is launched, this might improve at least a bit.
Tell them how to use the chat, that you can share Cbills and to not be afraid to ask others for Cbills/help, that they needn't bother with Singleplayer, how to buy stuff, etc.

I could see some sort of separate tutorial, but I will say to never point a newbie to a wiki... its an information repository not a "start here" option