So, a lot of people want repair/rearm back, and other do not. People have put forward benefits and drawbacks with having repair/rearm, and these seem to be the most frequently mentioned:
Benefit:
1. Gives players more reason to use anything but assaults.
2. Feels more logical than having completely free upkeep.
Drawbacks:
A. Encourages cowardly tactics.
B. Increases the risk of issues with people paying to win.
C. Forces players to play 'mechs they don't like because they can't afford to keep playing the ones they want.
Further explanation of these for those that care:
Spoiler
Further explanation for those that care:
1. By having a repair/rearm cost, one will gain less cash with an atlas than a hunchback. Right now, especially in premades from what I've understood, most people drive heavy/assault classes and the medium class hardly sees use at all.
2. Upkeep costs has always been a part of battletech, and while a bit of it can be explained away as your house financing your losses or insurance or whatever, it would feel more "alive" to have to pay yourself.
3. By making clan tech a large economic risk to field you limit how much it is used.
A. If R/R is based on how much damage you take, you want all the other players to take the damage dealt, not you. Thus we'll see an explosion of long-range support 'mechs, especially in pugs, because no-one wants to stand on the line.
B. This is directly related to benefit 3; if the best equipment is expensive to field, those who pay a lot of RL cash will have much larger access to it, the F2P players will lose a lot, many will stop playing, then the paying players have no-one to play with, they stop paying, and PGI dies.
And no, this thread is NOT for discussing the definitions of pay to win. What I mean is in the explanation above, if you don't agree that it is pay to win, just ignore those words and replace them with cute puppies or whatever. But the thread is NOT for discussing that.
I'm of the opinion that 3. is a very very bad way of balancing stuff, so won't focus on keeping that benefit - I don't see it as a benefit at all. It also avoids A and B.
What I'm aiming at is a system that keeps as much of the benefits but minimizes the drawbacks of the system, and I think I have an idea. It's one main idea and two smaller changes to further fine-tune the system.
1. Upkeep/Recovery Cost
tl;dr: static cost to field 'mech based on tonnage.
Spoiler
Each 'mech has an upkeep cost, based on it's tonnage. The upkeep cost is equal to .5%*tonnage of the win/loss reward (currently it's 25000, so upkeep cost would be 125 per ton). This is the basic cost to field the 'mech at all, and includes arming it. If you lose the match, there's an equally large recovery cost.
Whether you die or not doesn't matter, it's whether you win or not - it's abstracted a bit, but if you win and die, assume the rest is payed via salvage, if you lose and survive assume the cost is for bailing you and the 'mech out from the winners.
The main point of this is to make the weight class matter for your gains, but not when actually in-game. This means those with lighter 'mechs will earn more and risk less, but there's no use in using cowardly methods.
This would go towards goal 1, and partly towards 2 - I don't think it fills 2 completely but I think the abstraction is a lot better than nothing. Also note that the absolute maximum you have to pay in upkeep is 100% of the match flat reward, if you have a 100 ton 'mech and lose.
2. Change how the damage reward is gotten.
tl;dr: The damage reward is based on percentual damage.
Spoiler
Right now, the damage reward is based on the hard number of damage dealt, discouraging pinpoint damage. Splashing 2xSRM-6 all over the torso on an atlas to make a scratch will give you 750 c-bills, while ripping of the whole torso armor of a raven with 2xPPC will only give you 500.
Instead, the system would work based on percentual damage.
- If you damage a 'mech and it survives, you get X c-bills per percentage of damage done.
- If you damage a 'mech and a component falls of indirectly (you blow of a side torso and an arm goes with it) you're treated as having blown of that arm.
- If you kill a 'mech you're treated as having dealt 100% damage to it.
If there's more than one trying to kill it things get a little bit more complicated, though that's just under the hood, not something the player would have to know about:
- If the 'mech survives, each player gets for what they damaged, easy peasy.
- If the 'mech has a component destroyed indirectly, the damage dealt is split evenly based on amount of damage dealt to whatever caused it to fall of - if I do 1/3 of the damage to a side torso and my pal does 2/3, so the arm falls of, she's treated as having dealt 2/3 of the damage to the arm too.
- The same is true for killing the 'mech, when a 'mech dies, the percentage it has left is split between the players that have damaged it the same way as mentioned in components above.
Also, the bonus for actually destroying a component or 'mech is either completely dropped or reduced to around 200 c-bills, so doing the last single damage won't give you much.
This system means one important thing in regards to our goals: The amount of cash per match by killing has a hard limit that is always the same: 800% (assuming full 8-pilot drops). I'll explain why this is good in just a moment.
3. Rebalancing the rewards.
Spoiler
This is a bit more vague, as I'm in no way sure of appropriate numbers, but the good folks at PGI probably have an idea and the rest is playtest, but I'll try to explain:
With my proposed changes above, the main ways to gain cash are by winning, and by dealing percentual damage. The heavier the 'mech, the less it will gain just by winning (with the current amounts, a winning atlas would gain 12500, while a winning jenner 20625), but on the other hand, the heavier the 'mech the more damage it can be assumed to deal - until everyone is dead.
It should be balanced so that if you take down around 250% or so damage, an atlas should break even with a commando.
This means having an atlas on your team will increase chance of winning (as is now at least, atlases are generally better than hunchbacks for example), and if you are the atlas you'll get a good amount of cash after the match.
However, if you drop as 8 atlases, you'll gain far less reward as not everyone can have 250% of damage - on average, you'll have 100% of damage.
Of course, values would also have to be modified to keep this system from giving much less than the current system; about the same pace of c-bill gain should be kept.
So, with this system, the less resources you use as a team is both good for the teams collective reward and each player's reward - using a lighter 'mech gives you more in winning cash due to lower upkeep, using a heavier 'mech gives you more in damage cash unless everyone else is also using heavier 'mechs.
From my point of view, it retains benefit 1, and with a little imagination 2, and avoids issues A, B and C.
What say you? Is this a good baseline for a change? I'm not saying this is perfect, but I think it can make a good compromise.
Sorry but i disagree with your post. In my games there are always enough small mechs. It's mostly a very even composition of mechs. So there is no need to make light/medium mechs more attractive.
The next thing is that i dont see the point of punishing "coward" tactics. LRM should also belong to a battle like any other weapon. Esspecially with ecm long rage mechs arent very usefull right now. There is enough punishment.
I usually play with 2 friends. I'm a big fan of assault mechs and playing awesomes and an atlas. They are both playing light mechs and they like it.
After the match my atlas did about 500-1000dmg and has stats of 2-2. The lights do perhaps 200-400 dmg but have a stat of 1-7 oder something like that. So they dont gain that lot of dmg-money but they get a lot of money for assists which is even higher than killing ppl. I think this is a very good balance.
The next problem I noticed is that ppl tend to shoot the bigger mechs because of the slow movement and big bodyparts. So there is the probability that you dont survive the first battle as an atlas.
For me and my friends the rewardsystem is fairly balanced.
Sorry but i disagree with your post. In my games there are always enough small mechs. It's mostly a very even composition of mechs. So there is no need to make light/medium mechs more attractive.
While this is currently quite true in PUGging (though it seems much more common for me to drop with 6 heavy+ than six medium or lighter), from what I've understood it's a common trend among premades that nearly every 'mech is heavy or assault with just a craven or so for scouting. And note - this isn't primarily _my_ argument, it's one that several people have put forward in several threads. I'm just stating them here for reference.
There are people that want repair/rearm put back in, and others that oppose it. This is just an idea for a compromise. I don't particulary care for R/R and neither do I feel it's horrible unless badly implemented.
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The next thing is that i dont see the point of punishing "coward" tactics. LRM should also belong to a battle like any other weapon. Esspecially with ecm long rage mechs arent very usefull right now. There is enough punishment.
I think you misunderstood. The drawback of repair/rearm is that everyone benefits from not getting hit, which means it's really costly to be the brawler. This isn't about punishing long-range - it's about NOT punishing brawlers. And while LRMs aren't very good right now, long range are having a field day. Both river city and forest colony often turns into a sniping party of gausses and PPC's. But that's for another thread.
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*snip* I think this is a very good balance.
Yes, I am not seeing the current system as a big problem - but many others do. There are a lot of threads talking about repair rearm
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