Super Nerd Sundays Presents: Reflections on Tournament Time!

Mechwarrior Online regularly sponsors massive, “opt-in” tourneys that players can decide to participate in without any sort of obligation, monetary or otherwise – all they need to do is log in to PGI’s website and click a box acknowledging that they’d like to participate in a tournament and then bam.  They’re in the running.  These tournaments usually involve some sort of prize: either in the form of a special cosmetic mech unlock, a cockpit doodad or cold hard spacebucks (which is what I choose to call MC, MWO’s real-value-in-game currency).  Competition is relatively fierce, with player activity spiking during tournament time and play styles altering drastically as players scramble to acquire as many points as possible.  There’s a catch, however: players in parties cannot participate in the tournament, so if you want to play with your friends, there’s no way you can earn points under the tournament’s system during those games.  That means winning in a tournament is as much a matter of luck as skill; your play is as critical as the group you’re matched with.

It’s a fascinating prospect: an abstract tournament that everyone might be participating in at any moment which forces players to opt-in to the lamentable public matchmaking system of MWO.  This is a system that will, to be fair, often present players with civil, intelligent players who politely do things like say “Great shot!” after they die in a particularly spectacular fight, but it also consists of players who shout racial epithets and loudly inform their team that they are terrible players who ruined the game.  The decision to bar teams makes sense, since players on pre-made teams, in general, coordinate better than solo players (and would be able to boost other players tournament scores through a number of cute tricks) and it warrants mentioning that MWO’s social dynamic is considerably more welcoming than the bulk of multiplayer gaming experience you’ll find on the internet, but it remains a trade off. By eliminating pre-made teams from the tournament, even as a category, an important element of the squad play that makes Mechwarrior Online Mechwarrior Online is eliminated.  It’s a bummer to have a set of fantastic games with my lancies not count towards my progress, particularly when these games are just so god damn fun compared to the bulk of my solo match games.  At first, I thought the necessary evil of solo matchmaking was the only nasty element of the tournament.  A flaw, sure, but forgivable for the sake of fairness.  But then I actually started to dig into how the tournament was changing the way me and my teammates played, and I realized there were much, much bigger problems.

A brief discussion for the uninitiated: MWO is largely a game about teamwork.  Even when you’re not explicitly coordinating with a set of allies, moving up and down the field, slugging it out with your buds at your side, it’s a game about working with a team to complete a set of objectives.  Sometimes that objective is to occupy a single stronghold point, sometimes it’s to collect resources throughout a map.  It varies, but there’s always a fallback strategy in place that allows you to complete your objective by killing every single enemy on the map.  A victory is a victory, and there are actually some pretty nice cash and experience bonuses for completing objectives instead of killing that last enemy running around the map.

It has the end result of making each game feel like a real tactical engagement: it’s not about killing, it’s about completing an objective.  The big barrier for many new players centers around grasping that concept.  If your team engages half an enemy team at mid-map while the rest of their team occupies your base without you taking any action, that team made an excellent tactical move and earned their win.  If your heavily armored force can’t be bothered to collect resources on a massive map, you’ve earned your loss there as well.  It can be ugly and frustrating someties, but it gives the game balance and makes it about more than just grinding out kills.

When you’re not playing in the tournament, that is.

See, the tournament uses a special calculation that draws from multiple game types to determine outcomes.  This calculation considers things like winning and surviving a match, damage dealt, but it really turns on the number of assists and kills a given player has.  The end formula essentially awards twenty points for every kill, and 15 points for every assist.  Wanna place in the tourney?  Make sure you get a piece of everyone on the other team.  Wanna win?  Better consistently kill four or more enemies in each game, assist on killing the rest of the enemy team, and, while you’re at it, win and survive.  If you could do over 600 damage, that would also help.

The end result is that tournament play isn’t like regular play.  In fact, it isn’t really like MWO at all.  Normally, MWO can be about avoiding combat, drawing enemies into clever ambushes and working as a team to take down a single target.  But tournament play lends itself to high risk, low reward strategies that demand players sacrifice not to win matches, but to grind out prize points.  Players who have opted into the tournament are serving two masters, and have to do some insane shit as a result.  Anti-social or impolite behaviors like kill-vulturing and target humping become necessary during tournament time, when players who don’t use such tactics risk losing the kill they just spent half the match softening up and, as a result, not getting enough points to move up in their bracket.

I’d have to wager that PGI seems aware of this, which is why tournaments happen once a month and not all the time, but it’s still an odd dynamic.  Of course, while I recognize this, I still totally participated in it.  Didn’t do too badly, either.  The tournament system aggregates your best ten games, so realistically you’re pushing and pushing to try and play ten of the best games you’ve ever played over the span of the tournament.  In the end, you end up with a combined score from your best ten games, but as you get closer and closer to your best possible score, that number becomes static.  I ended the tournament in 5^th place for my category, with 1892 points.  That means, under the tenants of the MWO tourney system, I had an average score of around 189.  If you do the math, you’ll see that that means I was killing at least four enemies each match, surviving, and getting licks in on all the others.  I was also doing a pretty decent slice of damage along the way, which buffered up my scores a little.

But in pursuing these high scores, I found myself time and again diving into fights I knew I shouldn’t be in, strobing enemies I couldn’t really get solid hits on with lasers just to mark them as assists for myself, and taking dumb risks that, more often than not, lost me and my team the game (and eliminated any potential for tournament advancement for myself in the process).  I wasn’t playing MWO anymore: I was trying to eke out tourney points.  I wasn’t playing tactically, I was playing to satisfy a capricious mathematical equation that would inform me, after I completed a match, as to whether or not I’d pleased it with my actions.

In the end, I just barely eked out a place in the top 5.  A meager 4 points separates me from the player below me on the leaderboards, and a meager 14 points keep me from displacing the number 4 slotabove me.  And I played my little heart out.  Towards the end I was just throwing myself at enemy lines, hoping they’d make a mistake.  Towards the end, it simply wasn’t fun.  And I did all this, realistically, for around a dollar of MC.  This is as hard as I’ve ever worked for a single dollar in my life, and while it was enjoyable on some level, the process undermined some of the love I have for MWO.

Tournaments are strange beasts, and they’re a big part of the fiction of the Mechwarrior world.  And MWO is trying to make tournaments a codified, well crafted thing that players come out in droves to participate in.  They deserve big check marks in both those boxes.  But they’ve also managed to make tournaments a digressive activity that interrupts normal play, and an activity separate from normal play altogether.  It’s something for PGI to consider, if they ever have another moment to consider things again before releasing a “finished” game in a few months.  Maybe they’ll be able to address this sort of thing with their “community warfare” additions, or the integration of a faction system.  Maybe the Clan invasion will change everything (as it does within the mythos of Battletech in general).

Who knows.  What I can say for sure is that a tournament in MWO is a passively grueling experience, one that doesn’t fit into the normally cordial, bite sized rate of play that normally makes MWO such an amazing construct.  But the person who’s saying this clearly wants that sort of play in some form, since he was willing to sink hours and hours into playing MWO to earn his points and take home his MC.  Maybe that means there should be an independent map for this sort of thing, like an Arena mapset.  Maybe a separate queue, maybe even an independent queue with smaller groups in it.  I don’t know, I’m just spitballing about how a superlative, constantly growing game could potentially grow some more.

Congratulations Morbid Pre-School Teacher!

Pre-school kids are dumb, except for the precocious ones that don’t really understand that the world doesn’t give a fuck about them and that they might as well just give up and be kids for a while.  That means you can do some crazy shit and, as long as it’s adequately crazy, those kids will never tell a single adult soul about what you’ve done.  Rather, they’ll never tell an adult soul about what you’ve done and be believed by said adult.

You’ve effectively created a pre-school classroom that, to an external observer, looks totally normal but, within its walls, contains a psychosexual world where reality itself begins to distort in a way that makes it all but impossible for the children whose minds you touch to determine just what’s going on and develop a normalized comprehension of the world around them.  Each and every day those kids sit down and are presented with a series of clips from films by Darren Aronofsky.  Then they’re made to sit and listen to the sounds that bats make while they try to sleep.

They get a brief break from bat sounds to do some basic math and then try to tie their shoes before lunch.  After lunch, they’re forced to fight each other with foam weapons.  The winner of the foam weapon battles is forced to sit in a box alone.

It’s all very high concept, and the children usually finish out their day with an hour long cry session to get all their woes out into the world.  But the ones who make it through actually tend to do slightly better than average in junior high school and high school.  College acceptance rates from your classroom are up as a result, so the school board turns a blind eye to what one member of an oversight committee referred to as “a nightmarish hellscape our children are forced to inhabit for eight hours a day.”

But all that’s over today, when your school lets out and you begin your summer vacation.  Try not to get some terrible disease while visiting Mexico, you weird motherfucker you!

Congratulations Morbid Pre-School Teacher!

Congratulations on Starting Your New Workout Routine!

Theme gyms are kind of amazing.  What could be better than working out in an effort to improve your lifespan and fight renal disease?  Doing it in a way that isn’t interminably boring!  There’s a theme gym for middle-aged women who want to hang out and discuss shit, there’s a theme gym for douchebags, and there are dozens of theme gyms for weightlifters.  But you didn’t know there was a theme gym for you until today.

Because today you discovered “Jurassic Gym.”

Located in the heart of downtown Buenos Aires, Jurassic Gym represents the pinnacle of exercise/pseudoscience.  At Jurassic Gym, patrons work out with the “help” of dinosaurs.

This is what the man outside the door informed you when you asked him what this amazing building actually contained.  You signed up immediately, giving him a few hundred of your dollars in exchange for a meeting with a trainer and a six month membership.  He accepted your money without batting an eyelash and handed you several contracts that did things like establish terms and conditions, clarify liability in the event that anything happened to you, and insure that you have full access to the facilities for the six month period you agreed upon.

Now you’re about to begin working out.  You’ll enter a massive indoor garden filled with plants and animals and the scent of blood.  You won’t see any other patrons, but you will notice scraps of clothing and battered improvised weapons which clearly did not fulfill their purpose.  With a shrug, you’ll begin jogging.  After a quarter mile, you’ll feel like you’re being watched.  After a half mile, you’ll know that you’re being watched.  By velociraptors.

They’ll burst forth from the bushes and leap at you.  You’ll scream and run and run some more. You’ll run for almost an entire hour until, breathless, you collapse at the top of a rock formation the raptors appear to have trouble climbing.  You’ll sit there, scanning the enclosure for any other patrons, watching the raptors as they spread out to surround your hiding place.  Feathers from the velociraptors will fill the air, filtering the light, making the entire scene surreally beautiful.  But the feathers will catch in the water, muddying its pristine surface, and bringing you back to the reality of your struggle to survive against dinosaurs.  You’ll sit there atop a particularly large boulder, praying that a tyrannosaurus arrives soon to assault the velociraptors and free you, like in your favorite movie of all time, Jurassic Park 2.

Congratulations on Starting Your New Workout Routine!

Congratulations on Perfectly Coiffing Your Jew Fro!

Being a Jewish kid with a giant red fro is tough.  You get the Jewfro jokes, the stepchild jokes and, let’s face it: you’re small and skinny, which makes you a particularly enticing target in high school.  You could deal with all this, of course, with your stalwart Jewish durability, if not for one key factor in your life: you hate that you can’t make your hair do what you want.

Whatever you try, however hard you try, it just never holds. You simply cannot make your hair obey you.

Well, today the second least cool kid in the school, Sam, will walk up to you and hand you an afro pick.  Sam is black and, like you, he’s ostracized for being different.  Like you, he also has trouble getting his hair to fall in line.  He’ll hand you his pick and say “It gets better,” to you before he retreats to the library, where he’ll eat his lunch hidden deep in the stacks, surrounded by the books he tries to escape into each day.

You’ll secret the pick away, worried that the other kids at school will beat you up and take it away just to make a point about how terrible your life should be, but it won’t be necessary.  The rest of the day will go by uncharacteristically quietly, and when you arrive home you’ll be free to stand in front of the mirror with a clear head and begin picking at your fro to coif it into something wondrous.

Minutes will turn to an hour and before long your mother will burst into the bathroom uncomfortably, as if she expects you to be dead in the tub, or worse, masturbating.  When she sees you, and moreover your hair, she’ll laugh with relief.

“Oh, hey,” she’ll mumble as she walks up to you.  “You look so wonderful.”

You’ll catch sight of yourself in the mirror as she hugs you from behind and smile.  She’ll be right.  You will look pretty wonderful.

Congratulations on Perfectly Coiffing Your Jew Fro!

Congratulations Finicky Eating Soldier!

After the Second Great War ended, you spent thirty years waiting on an island for news of a glorious Imperial victory, but it never came.  You were never told that you should return to your home village and take a wife, or that you could perhaps return home and take up a mediocre, tedious trade such as fishmongering in order to eke out a living in a state that, while you were willing to die for it, had little real need for you beyond that.  You just waited and waited.

At first there was an entire battalion of you there, patiently awaiting some sort of order.  You had supplies enough to last a decade, augmented by animals you could catch from the island.  But the animals died off faster than anticipated, and the supplies ran thin after a handful of fat soldiers decided to step up their rations against the will of the commander.  These soldiers were executed, then fed to the men they had stolen food from.

This led to a three decade long conflict wherein various factions hunted down and murdered their fellow soldiers before eating them.  You survived mostly by keeping your head down and following whoever seemed to be the best at killing at any given moment, and when the smoke cleared and you were relatively certain you were only one of a handful of survivors left on the island, you murdered your last ally with a rock, took his head to display your dominance, and assembled the remaining desperate men together under your leadership to build a raft and return home, orders be damned.

Along the way, you ate two more men and a bunch of sea turtles, which you developed quite a taste for.  But once you returned home, you had a problem: society didn’t really have a place for an aging, desperate collective of murders, and you also didn’t really like food that wasn’t human flesh or turtle meat.

It was manageable for a while.  Lax regulations meant you could get away with eating endangered turtles up until the late nineties, and a sexist and corrupt Japanese legal system meant women could occasionally “disappear” without too much trouble.

But now you’ve grown old, and twilight approaches.  You await the grim specter of death and, as you do so, you long for one more satisfying meal.  So today your grand niece will approach you and, after hearing you request human flesh for the fiftieth god damn time, cut off both your hands in a fit of rage and feed them to you.

Your hands, your calloused, sea soaked hands that have seen so much blood and done so much harm, will have been seasoned by their actions until they taste amazing.  Like, really, really good.  Impressively good.  They’ll be the best hands you’ve ever eaten, and you’ve eaten quite a few.

You’ll thank your niece for her ingenuity, then die with a series of extravagant gasps.  It’ll be kind of dramatic but your niece, who didn’t much care for you, won’t be impressed.  She’ll just be kind of bummed about having to dispose of your body alone, since all your other relatives will have long since abandoned you, thanks mostly to your constant rants about how amazing people taste.

Congratulations Finicky Eating Soldier!