MA: Holy moly someone jacked up the difficulty in Tournament

Yep yesterday’s tourney was much tougher than I’ve been used too and straight out of the box too. Gave up after about a half dozen matches as RL got in the way. Was enough to take 3rd though.

First time i have played that map, and it was difficult for me even with the help of reconnecting i could not master it...sorry bro for the losses. Wish i could have contributed more this time around.

      No problem Dukeofadvil, I always enjoy our games. AI has just gotten to a much smarter level.  And you have skillz. 

I had my bots(especially Panther) set up for CPC, and i was having issues with finding clear firing lane for my Jav6's. Didn't have a chance to reply to you today....one of my boys smashed his finger and i was deing with a bunch of family stuff tonight.

Get behind that center upright immediately, and wait a few seconds. Could be my imagination, but it seemed to help me. And avoid going up the middle

i had 2 NM players with 2000+ squad power hangars in my very first match, luckily one was on my team XD

So one thing I've noticed that concerns me. All AI have 2 tanks in their stables at this point for me. All AI hanger strengths are approximately the same as I see multiple Ares and multiple Juggs in each match. If this is the case across the board, then fine, but this makes it significantly more difficult to keep up with other players in your bracket if they aren't having to do as much damage for kills. Kills are almost all of the score (with win and MVP honors providing most of the remainder). This means it's almost impossible for me to kill as many as other players.

     I adapted to the super accurate AI today by using KS with Jav6 and shooting around corners.  It's an open map.  I do okay with Panthers shield and MR8s but he gets zapped by LAs at times. Flanking helps. 

Im seeing tons of Juggs these last couple days...possibly more than one per person. My Jav6's can stomp on their shields, but not much more than that. I may have to take them off of Panther and put them on KS just to cause some extra damage so i can finish them.

Most of the AI in the 1800-2000 range are still running 4 mech hangars. They only roll out with two tanks if they don't have a Killshot in their hangar. 4 mech hangars are usually 1 light, 2 mediums and a heavy. 5 mech hangars have an additional light or medium. I haven't seen any AI use more than 1 heavy mech.

Something is a little bit wrong when AI is dialed up so high that they’re taking top mech spots and tournament points from real players. Is AI now competing for bracket positions and rewards? I don’t think so, but human players are - so what the hell sense does it make for AI to be winning them? They’ve gone from one extreme to the other ... and both extremes suck.

The only good thing about this latest change is, you’re not seeing no-lifers running away with 12k bracket points any more. On the other hand, 200-pt games are rare now, making it more difficult to keep/catch up with anybody who’s even just a few hundred pets ahead, so all they’ve really done is flatten the curve a bit. I’m finding it all extremely annoying and generally just not playing much any more. 

I was curious to hear what the sentiment was in discord about the latest changes (but not curious enough to reinstall that garbage app and re-register!), but I’m not a bit surprised at the response you got. That ‘admin’ is utterly useless unless you stroke his ego and swallow up everything he’s selling. But yeah, the returns on time spent playing have been drastically nerfed, due in no small part to the massively decreased chances of finishing well in matches now. I have no idea what their objectives were with these latest changes, but the end result from what I’ve seen is a markedly reduced desire to play by quite a few players.

I’m not happy at all with the direction this game has taken, especially with it still technically being in beta. Perhaps frunobulax was right all those months ago.

Haven't touched MA in a long time. The idea of having players grind like crazed hamsters may appear to be helpful at first, the more players play, the less AIs you'll need. However, from my experience the War Robots players tend to be a bit older than the usual gamer, which means there is quite a crowd with limited time that will get mightily frustrated that they can't progress with limited playing time. And these guys typically have the deeper pockets than kids. So assuming that MA draws a similar crowd as War Robots, this game development may be just as shortsighted as Pixonics business model, even though in a different way.

Looking back, I think in general the differences between power levels are way too steep. For example it is extremely hard for a player with 2-star stuff to compete against 3-star stuff(assuming both are human). But unless you draw massive player crowds, the matchmaking will have to mix such players, making games not competetive. It doesn't help if the difference gets less noticable once you get to 4-star stuff, if you have no way to get there if you have only 30 minutes or one hour per day and can't earn any premium currency besides the what, 30 for daily tasks or whatever?

And not being competetive, of course, is exactly the problem that will kill War Robots soon.