Devillin, on 19 February 2014 - 09:50 PM, said:
Actually, you can enforce Zellbriggen, and it is actually very easy to do. You use the experience point system. Just like the IS gets -150 exp for killing a team mate, Clanners would get -150 exp for killing a mech that someone else has targeted and fired on. IS get 150 exp for a Savior Kill, Clanners get -150 exp for a Savior Kill. To balance out the penalties, Clanners would still get the 100 exp for each mech they kill, and they would actually get more exp for damage done, since ideally, they would be the only one doing damage to an individual mech. [The only thing that becomes wonky is that if an IS mech takes down a Clanner, and the Clanner's starmate takes out said IS mech, the first Clanner would only get damage exp, and the second Clanner would get the 100 exp (for the kill) + ?exp (for the damage) - 150 exp (for killing a mech fired on by someone else).]
This way you don't have to mess with the targeting system or any of the other fudges that are out there. You leave it to the individual Clan players to decide if they want to follow Zellbriggen and get the exp they need to level out an Omnimech, or break Zellbriggen and suffer penalties to their exp. I'd even be willing to allow someone who has a negative total exp from a match to have that carry over to their global exp outside the match. So if you have -300 exp at the end of the match, that gets taken from however much exp you have in that mech outside of the match.
No, actually you can't. Both C-bills and XP are incentives, not controls. They don't control behavior during a match, they just dangle rewards in front of players and hope you will take them. If you didn't get C-bills or XP after a match, players would still be playing, because we play this game to fight other mechs and blow them up.
What happens when the player uses MC to immediately master a mech and buys all the efficiencies? He can run his mech XP into the negatives all he wants,
because that Mech's XP means nothing now. Now he can run around and focus fire and win more often. Who cares if he's losing mech XP, he's getting C-bills and having fun winning. Penalize C-bills? Well, if he's got his mech outfitted the way he wants, what does he care? Want to penalize both C-bills and XP? Well then if that player is having fun blasting IS mechs to scrap with his superior tech, what does he care if he can't buy more bits - he's already having fun, and now he doesn't want to bother digging himself out of the XP/C-bill hole, so he just keeps fighting like a dezgra -
effectively. The thing about incentives is that one can easily ignore them.
Ghost heat is a control because it actually affects piloting and gunnery. De-syncing projectile speeds is a control to prevent pinpoint alphas. There's no control you can put in that will force a player to only fight one opponent short of completely taking control away from the player.
Lets add to that that the very system you're proposing needs added coding regardless - tagging mechs by first damaged, tagging players as Clan or IS, etc. Plus you can't put a system into the game that basically FORCES XP penalties on one team. Or how else do you propose that 10 men take out 12 without losing a single one of their number or focus firing once?
As I said in that post, You can't enforce Zellbrigen. You can only incentivize it at best.
Craig Steele, on 19 February 2014 - 05:58 PM, said:
(4) Zellebrigen was not a weakness, it was a strength. Any IS warrior accepting it generally got obliterated. And if IS didn't accepted it the Clans were very quick to focus fire in many cases so they were no worse off. Jade Falcon being probably the Clan that hung onto Zellbringen longest in combat situations where IS formations disregarded it but it certainly didn't slow them down much.
Still allowed IS forces to always get at least one good sucker punch in before the Clan forces discarded Zell for the fight, and how quickly you discarded it was down to what clan you were in, IIRC with strict/opportunistic/liberal interpretations.
Craig Steele, on 19 February 2014 - 05:58 PM, said:
(5) I agree with your sentiment, but that answer doesn't cause too much pause on TK's so I suspect it would have similar outcome for Zellebringen.
As noted, I think that's precisely how effective trying to incentivize Zellbrigen would be.
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