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List Of Merc Suggestions That Will Be Passed To The Dev


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#21 Alexander Steel

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Posted 27 January 2015 - 05:00 PM

Quote

I'm not trying to restrict anyone but rather just carry a set us issues to the dev that led to the disagreements from this weekend.


I'd love to read this.

"Hey Dev's, the system you set up actually led to a bunch of community warfare happening over the weekend. Here are our ideas to make sure something like that never happens again."


Edited by Alexander Steel, 27 January 2015 - 05:02 PM.


#22 Star Wolves Admin Account

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Posted 27 January 2015 - 05:02 PM

View PostAlexander Steel, on 27 January 2015 - 05:00 PM, said:



I'd love to read this.

"Hey Dev's, the system you set up actually led to a bunch of community war happening over the weekend. Here are our ideas to make sure something like that never happens again."


I tell you what, I'll try to include a summary too. :)

I'll post in on here so everyone can have a look. I promise to do my best, sorry if its not what everyone wants.

#23 Alexander Steel

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Posted 27 January 2015 - 05:04 PM

View PostBlueduck, on 27 January 2015 - 05:02 PM, said:



I tell you what, I'll try to include a summary too. :)

I'll post in on here so everyone can have a look. I promise to do my best, sorry if its not what everyone wants.


I want my comment about how we are all very very very upset that we actually had some community warfare going on this weekend. It was SHOCKING I say... SHOCKING!

#24 LastKhan

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Posted 27 January 2015 - 06:31 PM

The issue is there is nothing really to distinguish mercs from house factions / clans.

Ive been messing with an idea that may bring a good balance and something different that can be glanced at. Im all ears to ideas to tweak it. http://mwomercs.com/...s/page__st__240

for the lazy

Quote

Had an idea while playing WoW and seemed like a decent if not better idea to distinguish Mercs from factions/clans.

Mercs dont get to pick the faction they want right off the bat, but have a random contract generator to provide a faction/ clan contracts to merc groups. Which would make more sense lore wise for a merc to get to pick what they want from a contract system being offered by a house faction.

~ Random Contract Generator; Once hit, two maybe three Randomly generated contracts come up and you must pick one that best suits you while talking with the officers / command of your group. No mulligans.

- The contracts can be based by the house's percentage and which faction has the highest or lowest depending on population. (Ex. House Liao has a higher percentage so they would be most common to come up in the RCG. (Random Contract Gen))
The least but still likely to come up are the higher populated houses/clans but not as common as the lower populated ones. Thus bringing some balance to factions mercwise instead of stuffing on a dominate group like Davion or CGB..

- When the three houses or clans are shown in the RCG they could also have XP and Cbill bonuses to them. and the longer the contract the more you get, ontop of the faction's buff to cbills or whatever.

-Could also have a toggle system (like the one for conquest, assault, and skirmish) for those mercs who play "Only" Clans or House factions.

This is what i got so far and it could be interesting . Havent hammered out how a merc would function in the house / clan but that can be another time. :)

Edited by LastKhan, 27 January 2015 - 06:42 PM.


#25 Marvyn Dodgers

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Posted 27 January 2015 - 06:38 PM

Moving to feature suggestions

#26 Lukoi Banacek

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Posted 27 January 2015 - 06:44 PM

My thoughts from another thread on an idea worth considering that gives an MRBC like aspect to the game:

View PostLukoi Banacek, on 24 January 2015 - 11:22 AM, said:

Whatever happens with Loyalist units impacting Mercs should be as someone previously noted "all carrot - no stick" imo.

I envision an MRBC like function where a periodic vote occurs.

So, at the culmination of a merc contract, loyalists see the option under the faction tab to vote on the units they want to vote on.

Don't know how granular the scale needs to be in terms of good/bad but that's something to tinker with.

Anyway....units meeting some PGI-arbitrarily determined threshhold get X-bonus on top of whatever % bonus they are getting for joining said faction. Those meeting lesser threshholds, get a lesser bonus and those meeting none get no additional bonus.

Whether that bonus is purely LP, C-bills, gear, mechbays or some combination is something to figure out later.

Point being....

PGI offers units XX% to come to a faction to help that faction that's suffering either in performance or numbers or both.

MRBC voting can increase that % determined by the loyalist player base.

If a unit has no history with a faction, they'd have no increase...they've never been voted on by that faction. Units returning or habitual likely would and could have their earnings increased for working with the loyalists. But in the end it's all carrots. A Merc unit can never earn less than PGI's offered bonus.

And loyalists should earn more %/C-bill/whatever for only that specific faction, than any merc. That being said....a merc unit that has a really strong relationship with a faction could theoretically earn almost as much. This would do well to replicate those merc units that never moved much or really staunchly defended certain Houses, such as the Northwind Highlanders or the GDL.

The MRBC voting wouldn't occur until a unit's contract expired. So..they dabble their feet in the waters of a faction maybe for 7-days....like it, work great with the faction, upon getting upvoted in the MRBC system, renew their contract with a pay bump. I would warrant the contract period being voted on impacts the %....so a ton of upvotes on a 7 day contracted unit would pay out differently than a 28 day contract with similar upvotes.

Who gets to vote? Who knows. To stop account-boosting, PGI might elect to set a minimum unit size (say 10 pilots or more) and since it's only involving permanent contract loyalists, that might help prevent alt-account upvoting. The reality is, truly dedicated "boosters" will still do it, but.....against the volume of actual players voting, it might not be worth that much time ultimately.

This could be further restricted from abuse by limiting the capped % bonus by some factor determined by how often and to how many factions a unit hops around.

Anyway, nothing firm, nothing arbitrary above. Just some ideas to help with the concept of Mercs and Loyalists being distinct entities. Right now, they really are not. Loyalists bonuses are fairly tepid compared to Merc and at the cost of tech and corridor flexibility.

It's a no brainer that most players will be mercs or in merc units given the current ruleset and I certainly do not blame them for wanting the most bang for their buck.


#27 JadeTimberwolf

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Posted 27 January 2015 - 07:08 PM

One major idea I have regarding Factions and Merc/Loyalists as well as high/low pop factions has to do with adjusting the contracts and the win awards.

First off for the high/low pop issue. I do understand that this idea may involve extensive code writing if they don't have it started and that would be to have an algorithm that tracked membership of a faction and at the end of each day adjusted the bonus for the faction with the least member of players to be the highest.

Secondly the issue of Merc/Loyalist, my idea here requires less coding. I agree with sentiment that has been made earlier that the bonus for being a loyalist is relatively small and I feel that the contract bonuses should include a boost to C-bills as well as the c-bill boost to Loyalty Points.

On an issue that doesn't involve the merc/faction issue I feel that the cease fires happen too often which makes planets change faction far too fast, even the 1 ceasefire a day before the last update was too fast in my opinion. I would suggest that for ceasefires they should happen randomly in a 72-168 hour period, and that the ceasefire should not be announced to the players until 30 minutes before it at most. This slows down how fast factions take planets and it makes it harder for large units to time their play time around the ceasefires.

#28 Phelan Ward-Kell

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Posted 27 January 2015 - 10:43 PM

View PostNoesis, on 27 January 2015 - 03:41 PM, said:

MRBC with player led reviews wth some aspect of loyaty to denote higher rewards or bonus payments from representative player units.


Seeing as I posted this suggestion and a few others on the other thread, I'm glad to see some people read it and liked the idea. :)

-To elaborate further on what I had posted on the other thread though: There needs to be a system that requires IS House units to permanently sign on with their appropriate house, and likewise with Clan units, with the ability to break contract at a steep penalty.
-The system also needs to include functions within the MRBC for player-run units to post contracts. These contracts will have terms, a listed reward for completion, and then potential for bonuses based on how well they complee objectives or achieving more than the base objective(s).
-Obviously the system leads into merc units receiving ratings based on their accomplishments, loyalty to the contract, etc. Likewise, IS (and Clan if they so choose) units will be rated based on how well they honour their contracts.

This^^^^^^^^ is how you create accountability for the mercs and the units they work for, add value to the planets and actions people take, and build relationships between player units.
The greatest thing about this? It could actually be coded into the system with relative ease to start with.

#29 Star Wolves Admin Account

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Posted 28 January 2015 - 08:32 PM

Hey all,

Please keep putting your suggestions down. I'm going to bundle them up and send them off shortly.

#30 Lawrence Elsa

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Posted 31 January 2015 - 02:31 AM

Everyone seems to forget that Mercstar, CI, and 228th attacked everyone but smoke jags. The Jade Falcon's got their teeth kicked in (remember, the House of Lords where still together and fighting for the falcons back then), bears lost a ton of planets, but then kicked wolves for a little longer because... well, no other reason than they wanted to, because there's no other reason to be a merc.

Truth is, a lot of Clan Wolf players abandoned Mechwarrior Online altogether because a conglomerate of nearly 300 competition players took away 24 days of progress in half the time. Other clans where given a breather, but right after that, Mercstar joined the bears and kicked the wolves some more while Comstar Irregulars and the 228th where fighting for Rasalhague. with us having only 2 attack lanes, and 3 defense lanes against not only more players than all of CWl (all of which are a variety of competition teams with a larger player base) but almost half of them had no choice but to do ghost drops if they wanted to play CW because there literally weren't enough players to que against them. That is the real problem

Quite frankly ghost drops shouldn't even be a thing, at least not as they are. Defenses without mechs or on more populated planets should be more than light 'mech killing turrets from the Assult-Mode matchmaker games, or make the waiting period longer, like a half-hour maybe. Why should other players have to wait 45 minutes to que up just to get stomped by a premade (or just never get a drop for the entire 8 hour attack phase) if the same pre-made can stomp over some generators every 12 minutes?
If there's gonna be something for teams to do against planets just so you don't get literal cheating with one team on one faction and another being given a win just so you can play the game, then why not make ghost drops mean something? You know, make them challenging and fun? (you know, that thing games used to be before they became a second job?)

TL;DR: The problem isn't OP merc units kicking our ass, its overpopulation at the flip of a switch and ghost dropping every 12 minutes when they have more numbers.

Is this Mercstar's fault that this is happening? Or is it a bad game mechanic that mercs can join whoever they want whenever they want with no difference in reward for who they fight for?

We should never, ever have to see what happened like this again, and its not just "wah we're getting our buts kicked!" people quit the game over this, and that's not good buisness, PGI.
It wasn't just pugs or newbies who ragequit because players that had been around much longer than them and played far more professionally then them kept kicking their ass (we where all noobs at one point, and all have to start somewhere) It was people who had been playing for years who quit, too. only a fraction of Delta and CWI where around to try and fight all 3 of these teams off, most of which had already said "screw it, I'm just gonna play when the new ceasefire times come out, or quit Clan Wolf because they where tired of all the dramma and trash-talk.

TL;DR#2

540 words later, all I have to say is that people shouldn't be bullied out of playing for their favorite faction.
Yes, this is a Beta, and it is our job to point out problems. Be there an easy or difficult solution, it needs to be solved one way or another. Step one is to simply figure out what the issue is in the first place.

Edited by Lawrence Elsa, 31 January 2015 - 03:21 AM.


#31 Lawrence Elsa

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Posted 31 January 2015 - 02:46 AM

Oh, and here's my idea for a possible solution: one planet, one merc unit.

"but then there are mercs who won't get any work!" GOOD! that's a competitive market!

Awesome teams like Mercstar can go "Aww, you don't have 100 million C-bills so we can take this planet for you? Too bad, we'll go for another faction who's willing to fork it over." And other less-known teams can go "We'll do it! An extra 500,000 C-bills is worth it!" and then the more skilled or reputable a team gets, the more likely they'll get to fight as a merc!

Can't get work? Maybe you should join a faction and fight like everyone else...
just sayin'

Edited by Lawrence Elsa, 31 January 2015 - 03:21 AM.






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