So I won’t lie to you, since the holidays up to a couple weeks ago, I was getting pretty bored with this game. While I do love having this site and putting stuff up and all that, my first love in MWO is competition. Which maybe a lot of you don’t want to hear about, but it’s what I want to write about.
The winter break is always brutal on competitive teams because a lot of people can’t go to practice due to family/holiday stuff, and leagues go on hold for much the same reasons. Which is understandable, but it’s annoying. So comp MWO was in one of those slumps up until a few weeks ago when we (SJR) got to play our first comp match against 228th in MCW. Which we lost… But I think that ended up being a good thing, because we started really practicing again. And it feels good to be back in the swing of things.
The reason I love competitive play is because it’s always something where you’re looking to get the edge on the other guys in whatever way you can. A lot of this goes back to evolutionary psychology, where the way humans in the ancestral environment would do better would be to outsmart the other guy (“recent” human evolution has a lot more to do with our intelligence than having the sharpest teeth and claws…a different sort of survival of the fittest). Anyways, that’s the same reward center of the brain, and it really is something else. As long as you take losing as an inspiration to do better and a learning experience rather than a truly negative thing (as crushing as losses can sometimes be), competition is fuckin’ fun.
If you’re looking at getting in on some competition, there are plenty of good teams out there. The hardest thing to do sometimes is finding one that fits both your skill level and mindset. I recommend checking out the OutreachHPG recruitment thread, and then there’s always the Merc Corps section on the MWO forums.
Anyways, thanks for reading, and here’s your Build of the Week:
“Bracket Crab” (a.k.a. “[Crab]”)
I wanted to make a good bracket build. As if the two maybe weren’t mutually exclusive. And so this is what I came up with. It reminds me of the way the Stalker is described in Sarna “The Stalker’s weapons array is geared to increase damage as it closes with its target”. Except this doesn’t use LRMs cuz it doesn’t suck. Extreme range: Gauss. Long-Medium Range: Gauss + Large Lasers. Short Range: Gauss + Large Lasers + SRMs. Sounds good to me. Plus the DPS and alpha are both to be feared. Your main liability is that, well, you can’t really trade all that great past medium range if you’re trading with things designed to trade at that range. Plus you’re not very fast. But on the other hand, you’re always useful, in some way. Maybe this could work well in CW, since you never really know how the engagement’s going to go. Still, I think it looks pretty badass. For weapon modules, I’d do Gauss Cooldown and LL Range, or maybe SRM4 Cooldown instead of LL Range if you wanna be getting closer. Laser Vom still wins, but at least this is fun.
Hope you’re having a great week folks! Next week is a patch so I’ll be keeping myself busy. Cya then!
-G