Eathisword wrote:
Truth is, a lot of fights can be predicted at the start and there is really nothing you can do about it in pug play. Just take those opportunity to try and get better at some stuff a little bit at a time. Back cap flags, try to lure some enemies away so you can get some kills. Perfect your positioning. Kite. Try to fight on choke points where skill gap is minimized, etc. Its just the way of life : average pre beat bad pugs; great pugs beat bad pre; good pre beats all.
This is a good mindset to have, success/greatness should be measured based on context. Our guild is virtually always running either lowbies or alts or both, mostly because there is no pressure in NA to constantly be running that BiS group. And progression is bricked at annihilator/merc so people want to play characters they can work on getting gear. But this is always creating bad situations were it becomes increasingly hard if not impossible to carry that pug offgroup under certain conditions.
That's when you have to look at the situation differently. There's been a lot of scenarios, take for instance nordenwatch were we know pretty much 99% that if we go to fort and fight ~12v12 that we will get slaughtered. So what do you do? A lot of people have these ego problems, especially in small communities like this and don't like it but. You gotta do things like take LH/racks as 6 then watch and only engage if you split them up otherwise you run away. You set goals like, let's try not to die at all and see if we can get a pick on so and so, or just try and win the sc by objectives or get as many points as possible without feeding.
Another example we've been in doomfist craters were we only stay at mid if our tanks get some really good initial punts off knowing that we have no chance to win in a straight up fight, and then if that fails we pull back to catapult range and pray we can possibly wipe the other team with them then get control of that mid point and holdout the rest of the SC. It's certainly more graceful, and less of a blow losing in this way... and obviously beats rage quitting the SC.
You create our own "win conditions" based on context, and you measure your success based on how well you do given the circumstances. But I think a lot of people are quick to give up, and don't want to "lose". Or they can't fathom ways to beat the odds, thankfully scenarios are not plain open field death matches, each scenario presents different opportunities and taking advantage of those is what can let you overcome odds. Granted they won't always work, probably some of our ideas on how to approach situations might be gimmicky (the punt or run in doomfist) but at least you try something that just might work, rather than giving up, or going into a hopeless situation banging your head against a wall and feeding kills.
So I'm also gonna ramble on a bit about how the community in general here seems to stigmatize how you win scenarios or rather how they feel they should be played. And really thank G-d for Az stepping in and reworking the rewards systems for scenarios to totally discourage people playing every damn SC like it's a deathmatch. For instance about 2 days ago, we qued as 3 and went up against a double premade in a phoenix gate, but those premades were basically 24/7 ganking our WC while our 3 man ran the flag and killed their carrier once or twice. I think we won like 500-150, but they had 70 kills vs our 5... yet we got 6k renown while they got 200.
People just don't take scenarios seriously, and basically look down upon playing the objective deeming it "PvE", yet you never see that in say CSGO were you have things like ninja defuses, or dota 2 with it's pushing mechanic. It doesn't matter how you win it's absolute. Maybe it's because this game lacks MMR, or a really rewarding and punishing players for win/loss, or the complete disconnection of scenarios from the main game making them basically pointless minigames... who knows.
and you can switch guard and it will announce it and people will see mid-game, and then you can use that same effort you expended on something that's automated for you... to actually engage in some deeper 'strategy' using sc chat..
