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.