Probably mentioned, but MWO tried an 8v8 queue a while ago, it was great. But because some retards who can't handle even temporary change made a big stink, it was turned off early. The main reason I can see is...they don't like playing as a team, and being coordinated in your teamwork is apparently unbalanced. The reason they think this is because:
-MWO hasn't changed in any huge way so people are so locked in to how the game is currently played they refuse to have it change, so when 8v8 rolled around and they had to actually play the game different from how its been played for years, they weren't having it
-12vs12 severely reduces how much team functionality is lost when a unit dies, so many players can do what they want rather than play as a team since you half more players to compensate. In 8v8 you had to actually play as a team and a loss is felt way more, even though it actually gave each mech chassis bigger roles and more tactics, the retards hated the idea of not being able to do what they want rather than what is needed.
Lights weren't so heavily restricted to certain roles, such as being a pet light or needing an ECM or even stealth and getting lucky not to have a bunch of mechs nuking your ass. Mediums could actually get in the fight without worrying about exploding immediately after poking out, meaning more build oppotunities. Heavies and Assaults are more valuable and can now actually do their job and push direct/return heavy fire without being pussies, rightfully so since in 12v12 you're going to get absolutely destroyed because of the sheer volume. Now you actually need to direct most of your team's fire or risk sending out the heavy hitters to counter theirs when you might have needed that extra firepower elsewhere. You had to actually use your fucking brain to play but the brainlets unfortunately got their way. Meanwhile, here what these brainlets think is good balancing:
Keep in mind, one of the main concerns from said brainlets are lights being too powerful...because the brainlets have poor situational awareness.
Nearly a decade of getting ass raped by lights because not even a decade is enough for him to learn how to play around lights butt blasting him, so his solution is "fuck lore, fuck logic, fuck my lack of skill, I want an AI gunner to offset my skill issues because learning is gay."
And of course "anyone who disagrees with me is a stupid noob." Brown detected. Thankfully a lot of people clowned on him but from what I've seen from the people who hated 8v8, it was a generally the same things being said over and over which were largely just skill issues. The game is old as hell and has a stagnating player count, 12v12 won't be viable forever so 8v8 is perfect for its tiny player base of mostly """vets.""" But if this is the opinion of a lot of players, so many that it got the 8v8 cancelled early, then they deserve their slow death.
Lastly, it really says a lot that all it took was reducing the match size by a small amount to get the player base at each other's throats, God help us if they dare do something else that isn't in a dedicated event queue, which are largely dead within the same day because "new bad."
