Juice Chaining

That's not really the point; there have been times that we've been pushed back into our base but pushed out, turned the tides and won, or pushed out and nearly one, or hell pushed out but then lost but still had a good time.

That's the point; having to deal with waves and waves of juice-chainers because you didn't have the best first half isn't fun at all and reduces your options for a comeback. isntead of;

"Ok, 3 of us will head up top at the same time to try to break the blockade while our support gets his firebase up, then we try to secure the middle as much as we can..."

It's rather;

"Ok, if we're not completely fucked lets all get to the middle and camp the juice as best we can."

I think that this is the most important point. Basically players will find other games to play if they are not having fun playing MNC. Given my experiences with randoms I can easily see how some 'elite' players are ruining MNC for the entire community. Juice needs to be balanced to keep the community interested in this game.

Either that or a skill system needs to be added to keep players matched up accordingly. Joe and his level 0 guest should not be paired with other level >50 players against a team of 99s.

Juice chaining can be stopped in a number of ways. It is DIFFICULT, but can be done. Just the other day we got juice chained on by another team on steel peel, because we were screwing around the first half of the game doing things like having 5 supports overheal 1 tank and going for melee kills.

This cost us in the second half when they began chaining juice on us. We switched to appropriate classes and began turtling with Firebases, Ice Traps, and most importantly: having assassins and tanks by-pass the spawn traps and kill the bot lines so our ball never dropped.

We ran the clock out till over time, and managed the clock so that we nuked their ball down in 5 seconds as soon as OT hit.

If you are getting chain juiced, get an assassin out the door and go kill the bot spawns. The ball won't drop without bots. They WILL run out of juice.

The only almost unstoppable situation is if the enemy team can block off all three spawn doors after killing the entire enemy team. If this happens, it is a deserved loss IMO.

So a well organized team that screws around for the fist half of the game can overcome a Juice chain in OT if they actually play to the best of their ability? Sounds like this is all but impossible for the average randoms to manage and needs to be balanced. Thanks for proving our points for us.

My point is that juice grants an advantage, and that juice chaining grants an IMMENSE advantage, but that it is not IMPOSSIBLE or even PRACTICALLY IMPOSSIBLE to overcome with skill/communication. Difficult for sure, but that comes as a CONSEQUENCE of the earlier dominance displayed by team that had enough time to co-ordinate a chain juice rush.

There are PLENTY of in game work-arounds to reducing the effectiveness of the juice rush.

Furthermore, I find it absurd to attempt to balance the game from the perspective of an average solo "random" when so much of this game depends on teamwork.

I do favor an incremental cost increase on juice purchases though.

Lets face it the root of the problem is going Party vs. Randoms. A team that plays well together can beat the best players in the game. For a game the relies heavy on Teamwork not to have a playlist for teams only is what's absurd to me.

Pretty much exactly what I was thinking. If one team is dominating another, juice isn't going to make that big of a difference.

I'm all for this idea. I think minor adjustments could be made to juice purchasing, but the solution to this is probably a matchmaking fix, not a balance change.

The issue would be party size requirements and game wait times in the playlists once you split up solo vs team matches. This is not COD where there are hundreds of thousands of players across multiple playlists.

If there are PLENTY of in-game work-arounds then why did it take your organized team until OT to manage a comeback from it? If it is not IMPOSSIBLE or even PRACTICALLY IMPOSSIBLE to overcome then your team should not have had to wait until OT to win the game. The point being that your team could not manage to win in regulation and had to wait for another mechanic to provide you with an opportunity to win the game by bypassing the lane pushing aspect of MNC.

Also, I am not suggesting to balance the game for the random player but to balance the game for the experienced player that knows how to exploit these mechanics. Juice Chaining is not an issue if the average player does it. It is however an issue if an experienced player abuses it. Most games are balanced for the top tier of players to prevent them from exploiting a mechanic that would otherwise be fine. Sure this could technically be perceived as balancing it to give the average player a better chance but the average player will not notice the change in most cases so it was not adjusted for them.

The bottom line is that Juice has too many advantages without many restrictions. The cost is so low that turrets, bots and other money sinks become pointless when compared to the benefits of Juice. If played the way Uber intended then Juice is not abusive and allows a team to overcome a well-fortified defense. If exploited Juice simply becomes a way to get some easy kills and earn enough cash to purchase Juice again to repeat the process ad nauseam. Technically the mechanic is just fine until the players began exploiting it so now the system needs to be rebalanced to prevent these players from continuing to abuse it.

Why on earth is waiting until overtime against an over extended juice chaining team not an acceptable counter to this? It was the BEST thing to do because the players that switched classes after screwing around half the game would have had to invest any left over cash in skills before they would be worth anything in an offensive push.

We did not bypass the lane pushing mechanic. We controlled the bot flow even while they were in our base. It is the reason we won that game. We negated the impact of chain juice until overtime when 2 of us were ready to melt the money ball on equal footing. I don't know how this was not a legitimate counter to the juice chain.

1. Give me examples from other well known games. Just off the top of my head, Halo and CoD had to be "balanced" in competitive leagues by limiting weapon selection.

2. Its only imbalanced against INEXPERIENCED players or lone wolves vs teams.

Where is the source for how uber intended juice to be used? Furthermore, should player innovation be discouraged if they are creative enough to use juice in a way that the developers did not intend, but does not qualify as a glitch/exploit?

It is only possible if the other team does not employ any of the counter strategies that have been outlined in numerous threads across the forums. It is also VERY possible to kill a player BEFORE he uses his juice (especially on grenade III)

Yes, there are counters to juice. I've chained juice, I've countered it, I understand the mechanics. I still feel it makes the game less fun and less tactical.

Your words were that there are PLENTY of ways to counter a Juice Chain so why did you have to wait to OT instead of using another option? I'm not saying that using OT as a crutch is not effective but you were the one who emphasized how many ways you can counter this strategy. Again, an average player with randoms will not be capable of countering a Juice Chain in the majority of situations.

Competitive leagues are hardly a means of looking at balance as their rules are exceptions to the game's rules in most cases. Most of the time their rules are in place to prevent constant objections to wins, not to provide a balanced competitive experience.

Also, an imbalance is an imbalance even if you can counter it with effort. I do agree that MNC needs more playlists or player skill balancing though but that will not fix Juice Chaining in the least as it will still remain a broken mechanic.

Let's ask them! Uber how is juice intended to be used in MNC? I can't wait to see what they say.

Recloaking during a grapple could be considered innovative yet it was removed. I'm pretty sure Uber has a very good concept of what they want MNC to become and a powered-up version of Team Deathmatch is probably not it.

The problem is that one player cannot effectively employ any of these strategies. Also, ringing out a player is very class specific so it is not easy to do in all cases, even on Grenade III.

Again, the issue with Juice needs to be fixed for EVERYONE, not just for the competitive leagues or for a certain level of player. MNC is a fantastic game but it is always a few players that ruin it for everyone else. Today I had a player blatantly using standby throughout the game and another where they were Juice chaining. Just because one is permitted in the game does not make it any less frustrating. It needs to be properly balanced or else the MNC community will be select parties versus randoms until the randoms stop playing. Uber deserves the support of the community as a whole and exploiting an 'allowed' mechanic will not help keep the community strong.

As I stated in the post imediately prior: "It was the BEST thing to do because the players that switched classes after screwing around half the game would have had to invest any left over cash in skills before they would be worth anything in an offensive push." Turtling and running out the clock made the most sense from a financial and map positioning stand point.

The underlined portion went over my head. I don't know what you mean by that.

CoD pretty much disallowed most explosives and shotguns, Halo 2 limited you to certain maps with set weapon spawns and starting weapons to make it less luck based and give everyone a decent long ranged weapon at the start of the game, because spawning with a halo 2 SMG means you typically lose against the team that gets control of the battle rifles first. My point being that most games tend to have mechanics that can be "exploited" by more knowledgeable and higher skilled players, contrary to your statement that games are usually balanced in such a way that prevents this.

An imbalance is something that CANNOT be reasonably countered. Juice is a 500 dollar investment that lasts 10 seconds, is at risk of being wasted by early activation or sudden death, completely dependent on player/turret kills to become cost effective, and cannot bring down the money ball on its own.


As for the rest, I'm gonna go out on a limb and suspect that uber has considered the implications of the power of juice, and the possibility of chaining it together, especially since the game gives rewards for 3,4,5 and 6 man multi-kills, which provide more than enough to chain successful juice runs together. I'm also going to assume they knew this would happen, because anyone with half a brain could figure out there is only so much you can effectively do with your excess cash come end game.

So basically if you're doing bad you don't want to be punished for doing bad. Clearly the other team should not be allowed to gain significant advantage for playing well at all.

Playing against people who are better than you is how you improve.

Obvious troll is obvious.

Imagine if Halo paired teams up that just started against teams of the highest rank. I'm sure that would make the new players want to keep playing, right? I'm sure the new players would learn where all the weapons spawn too since the experienced players would just let them control those spawn points. Haha.

The point of all this is that the community will suffer if this 'Juice Chaining' continues, especially if it continues to pair low level players against 99s. It doesn't matter if the best players can counter it or feel that they have earned the right to Juice Chain because the mechanic itself is broken. And no, you won't get better after being killed by a juiced player, you will get frustrated and quit the game though.

In the game I was in earlier with all randoms on my team, I was the only one that stayed until the end. Why should players suffer through an unfair game against Juice Chainers when they can leave and try to find another one? I guess so long as you can have fun exploiting a mechanic why should you care about the rest of the community, right?

Just to quickly clarify, if you win in GameBattles or some other competitive league you need to submit a ticket or video to prove that you won. The losing team needs to verify this for it to count on your record officially. Most of these leagues use simplified rules to avoid any conflicts in determining a legit win. So instead of saying that a Sniper cannot use explosive rounds they may limit the number of Snipers per team to one for example.

The point being that they are not trying to create a balanced experience but are instead trying to limit the number of conflicts between teams. Halo is the exception in most cases since they can use custom maps with balanced weapon spawns but in many other games they simply disallow specific weapons. League rules are not balanced but extremely simplified. Balanced would be to adjust the damage of a given weapon or limit the number of explosives in a game and the leagues have no control over these things (except in Halo and very few other games).

This isn't Halo, nor am I going to argue how Halo should be played because, really, it's not a very good game. I'm not arguing that either. What I can say, however, is that MNC isn't Halo. It's nothing like Halo. There are no weapon spawns, and the maps are laid out simply, with clear objectives. Even if your entire team is getting pushed in constantly for every game, it shouldn't take more than a couple hours to learn the basics. Once you've done that, everything else will come with experience.

There is nothing broken about the mechanic. It is rewarding the winning team for winning. And again, if the team is doing that well, the juice-chaining is just making the game end quicker. If my team is losing horribly and there's no hope of coming back, I wouldn't want the game to be drawn out, I'd want to move on to the next match.

Adjusting juice isn't going to make the community better. Bad players will still be bad, and they'll still lose just the same. Will it help if players are matched by levels? Maybe. But that has nothing to do with juicing and it's a completely different, and very complicated, issue. Besides, if we start making changes to the game based around what goes on in pubs, it'll take away everything that makes the game fun.

So let me get this straight. You think that a game should not be adjusted based on what is happening in pubs, where the vast majority of players are. And that Uber should just ignore the vast majority of players who do not come on this forum to talk about the game. Because this will take away what is fun about the game. Which is apparently ganging up and smashing unskilled players in a way that they have almost no way to defend against.

A serious aside, how is juice-chaining a reward for the winning team? Wouldn't it be a much more rewarding experience to pit your skill against the other team for the entirety of the match, and not just see who can gain control of the juicing area long enough to constantly use a mechanic that makes you infinitely stronger than the entirety of the opponents team?

Is this like a chicken versus the egg debate or is winning not enough of a reward already? Also, I would have no problem with Juice Chaining if the team doing it simply won the game but they often choose to spawn kill instead. No one benefits from a team that wins in that manner.

Of course adjusting Juice will make the community better; every step Uber takes in balancing MNC makes the community better. As for the rest of what you said I still respectfully disagree. The community is the most important aspect of MNC, if balancing the game for the masses keeps the community playing then who cares if a few players are no longer having fun? I'm pretty sure you would keep playing if the community is alive and thriving regardless of what you say now; and if not, then it is your loss.