The Most Aggravating Thing in Monday Night Combat

So I just got off a game of the Summer of Arcade's smash hit, Monday Night Combat, when I just had one of the more annoying kind of games. Even though we one in overtime, we might've won sooner had something had not occurred. Don't get me wrong, MNC is a great game and I'd recommend it over any current FPS, but that doesn't mean the rest of Xbox Live isn't capable of ruining the experience sometimes, and this is my biggest annoyance.


The One Team Set
This is a class based shooter. Players can choose different characters based on their preference. Far be it from me to instate character limits so that there are only two assassins max per team, for example. The official forums are tired of this problem too but setting restrictions is too extreme in an effort to appease these people. But winning at this game is a team effort, no matter how good you are. Modern Warfare 2 even supports lone wolf mentality by giving you kill streaks hat benefit the entire team. But you get no shortcuts like that in MNC.

I just got out of a game with two supports and two snipers, leaving me to play tank. Why did I choose tank? Because snipers and supports aren't reliable for pushing your robots into the enemy base.

Just so you know, both bases spawn robots which are the main means by which you can drop the shields on the enemy's moneyball, the thing you want to destroy. Both robots generally collide in the center and it's up to the teams to push them through.

This is kind of hard to do as 1) snipers and supports are bad at pushing efficiently and 2) since I'm the only one pushing I'm generally outnumbered by the rest of the team who actually leave their base unlike my snipers.

This is the scenario for 10 minutes. I try escorting the bots, the rest of my team either camps home base to snipe or camps their deployable firebase at some choke point. That leaves the rest of the enemy team to converge on me with their superior weapons (the tank uses what is effectively a flamethrower, which has limited range) and the push fails.

I found enemies in the same places every time because no matter how hard I'd try to fight them, it was never on even terms because I usually had no back up save for maybe a support healing me.

I felt like I was on a treadmill going nowhere until overtime rolled around and finally my good for nothing team finally did something useful.

In overtime, the shields on both moneyballs drop, causing everyone to go into a mad dash to see who can destroy their respective moneyball the fastest.

So in the end, their turtling strategy emptied out the enemy base while I rushed it as hard as I could before they knew what I was doing. It was a win, but a very frustrating win as it felt like I was playing by myself in a game where I usually have back up within reach.