186 replies to this topic

[Dragonkindred]

There are several ways to solve this issue.

The OP's idea is a good one. You can also do the following;

1. Do not let anyone customize a Clan mech- period. Standard variants only.
Although some are very nasty, they all tend to have some type of problem (low armour, high heat etc)

2. Clans should not get Arti, or other "special" modules.

3. 5 Clan v 12 IS on a standard drop (might need to spread out the IS drop so they can't focus fire too much).

[ragingmunkyz]

I don't know why I keep stumbling back into this thread...

Still have yet to see a single realistic, viable idea for adding epic-faceroll-roflcopter-ZOMG-Mechs that wouldn't unbalance the game at the very least, or break it entirely at the most. I really don't think you're going to have be able to have it both ways. Either you allow them to stretch the lore for the sake of the game, or you have a broken game. Why would they make a bunch of mechs that would completely invalidate every single IS mech already in the game? Then everyone just switches over to the new hotness and they might as well delete all the mechs they've worked so hard to bring us. This is not TT battletech, they've already had to adjust a ton of the TT rules to make this game work as a competitive skill-shooter, they will have to make an adjustment here as well.

Endgame124, on 07 March 2013 - 12:40 PM, said:

I don't know what you're paying for, but I'm buying Premium time and hero mechs to support a battletech simulator

I'm paying to support a balanced game that isn't broken. I understand that sacrifices will always need to be made when you try to bring something to another medium, in this case, TT to video games. The same thing happens when a book gets made into a movie: they have to cut things, change scenes, add new scenes, all in the name of making the story work in movie form. I'm all for the lore, I want them to stay as true to it as they can, but I know that realistically it can't all be word for word or this game will be unplayable.

Thread Summary: There are some lore-[lovers] who are being so stubborn that they're willing to destroy this game rather than allowing PGI to take the slightest liberties with the canon material. Thankfully for the rest of us, they have no hand in designing this game.

Edited by Niko Snow, 08 March 2013 - 02:03 PM.

[Xenois Shalashaska]

Clan mechs all generate more heat from their weapons. its already ballanced. I cant wait for clan XL on innersphere mechs and clan heat sinks.

[Corvus Antaka]

This entire thing should be balanced by tonnage, Innersphere gets around 25% more tonnage, or 1 extra mech per 4 people, ie 4 IS, 3 clan mechs.

We used this system for mech3, and it works the best. You want a clan mech, thats the price you pay. The question is is tonnage sufficeint, or will 12v10 be needed?

[Novawrecker]

Dragonkindred, on 08 March 2013 - 01:56 AM, said:

1. Do not let anyone customize a Clan mech- period. Standard variants only.

In part, I get what you are saying. In other parts, this totally messes up the concept behind Omni-mechs (be them Clan or IS). Or are you meaning not being able to adjust the "fixed" aspects of Omni?

[xRatas]

Xenois Shalashaska, on 08 March 2013 - 02:17 AM, said:

Clan mechs all generate more heat from their weapons. its already ballanced. I cant wait for clan XL on innersphere mechs and clan heat sinks.

It really is not. Clan ER PPC is supposed to cause just as much heat as IS ER PPC, but it hits with 150% damage. Also, like you said, Clan Heat Sinks are much better than IS versions, you can fit plenty more in your mech. All AC:s are ulta variants, Pulse lasers have lot longer range, everything is just way better. Heat is higher, but certainly not so much higher clan heatsinks couldn't deal it at least equally well.

And it makes me sad, if we can mount clan engines, heat sinks and whatever into a IS mech. Who would ever mount IS tech into their mechs again?

Really, easiest balance would be star vs. 2 lances or 2 stars vs 3 lances -drop. Slower rate of fire might really work on some weapons, otherwise, really not that easy to balance or heavily nerf to bring balance. Removing Clan mechs from team map, no target data sharing, stuff like that might work too, and would be in line for their fighting style (at current time period, some clans forfeited zellbringen later though).

[Numnuts]

Clan LRM 20

5 tons
Minimum Range 0
Damage 1 .......now its 1.8 in the game so almost double
Critical Slots 4

and you guys want this in the game without any nerfs?.....you think you have a problem now with splatcats just wait til you see x6 CLRM 20's killing everything in sight...


WALK AWAY FROM THE LORE!.. it needs to be better but not to much or people will STOP PLAYING....yea that means you also because the damage will be to crazy.

[Clasbyte]

I kinda wonder sometimes about the state of the gamer community a clan mech chassis is not any better then the IS chassis.
The stuff that is inside makes it better and the highly trained pilots. I mean com'on breed and born for a specific task, that alone makes an clan mechwarrior better then the standard IS mechwarrior.

But as long the IS chassis can fit clan tech there is no problem at all. After all its an game that is supposed to be entertaining and not an high grade simulation that is used to make long term decision on an global scale.

Weapon balance is screwed up anyways but that is the devs fault, there is no need to reinvent the wheel. Take that was is already there and improve it.

[Harmin]

Numnuts, on 08 March 2013 - 05:24 AM, said:

WALK AWAY FROM THE LORE!.. it needs to be better but not to much or people will STOP PLAYING....yea that means you also because the damage will be to crazy.

I strongly disagree. Absolutely do not walk away from the lore. Make clan mechs and tech extremely hard obtainable. 50x the cost of IS mechs/techs or something. Or 50k GXP for each chassis. Or both. Or something else equally hard. Clan mechs are supposed to completely outclass IS mechs and I'd hate to see that being thrown away for the sake of 1 on 1 high-noon style wild west shoot outs. You need to balance two items:

First you have to balance the drops. That means 5 clan mechs (a star) goes against 8 IS mechs (2 lances). Just as in the lore.

And you have to balance the player / mech populations. The inner sphere is huge and even at the height of the clan invasion the amount of IS mech warriors and IS mechs must have vastly outnumbered the amount of clan mech warriors and IS mechs. Have the acquisition price reflect this huge imbalance.

But do not balance IS vs clan mechs 1on1. Stick with the franchise.

-Armin

[ragingmunkyz]

Harmin, on 08 March 2013 - 05:50 AM, said:

I strongly disagree. Absolutely do not walk away from the lore. Make clan mechs and tech extremely hard obtainable. 50x the cost of IS mechs/techs or something. Or 50k GXP for each chassis. Or both. Or something else equally hard.

Thats would be a great idea...if you couldn't just use your credit card to skip the whole "difficult to obtain" part. Another terrible idea. This would just make the extremely pay to win. People with the biggest wallets get the ubermechs and faceroll the rest of us. No thank you.

[Harmin]

ragingmunkyz, on 08 March 2013 - 07:03 AM, said:

Thats would be a great idea...if you couldn't just use your credit card to skip the whole "difficult to obtain" part. Another terrible idea. This would just make the extremely pay to win. People with the biggest wallets get the ubermechs and faceroll the rest of us. No thank you.

You can't buy CB. You're not seriously suggesting that this mythical rich guy with the big wallet would buy mechs with MC and sell for CB? GXP (which is still grindable and 50k is not an impossible number to grind) was a possible scenario, my point is that the clan mechs should be very very hard to obtain. The exact mechanism how to restrict them I'm quite agnostic about.

But we need a real mechanism for restricing access. Surely it can't be through MC, something better must be found.

-Armin

Edited by Harmin, 08 March 2013 - 07:33 AM.

[jakucha]

What's clan mech armor like compared to IS? If it's low in general then just make it so they can't add a bunch more than default. So clan is a lot stronger and can hit farther, but they have less teammates and less armor.

Edited by jakucha, 08 March 2013 - 07:40 AM.

[Terror Teddy]

Guys, keep it simple.

Matchmaking = total C-bill value per side. Clans are aproximately X4 the cost.

Balancing:

IS cannot use clan internals
IS can use clan weapons after unpodding them

CLAN cannot change any internals like endo steel or engine or change the heatsink type.

CLAN can use IS weapon but must pay to pod them first

Simple and keep them different

Also, the clrm20 is one of the bizarre weapons as it has 50% weight but the same space and heat requirements.

Other clan weapons usually only weight about 20% less but have a volume or heat bonus.

The rest of clan weapons only have superior range over IS

[Corvus Antaka]

PGI is definitely going to need to be creative to solve the problems of horrible tabletop balance

[Endgame124]

I support the 5 vs 8 concept, and I also support restricting the load outs of the Omni mechs to Canon variants. But what advantage do omnis have then, you ask?

Allow the Clan player to select the variant of the mech they are running after the map is revealed, and then increase the temp variations of maps even more.

Allow the Clan players their tech advantage, and allow the Omnis to have a real advantage by choosing the variant after the map is revealed, but limit them in individual customization of their mech as the penalty. What ever would the power gamers do then? Would they stick to inner sphere to boat up the flavor of the month, or would they sacrifice the mechlab to have better range and better firepower?

[Iron Frost]

hashinshin, on 07 March 2013 - 06:02 AM, said:

what the **** is chedder?

Answer your own question and you'll probably get it...

[Side Step]

Roknari, on 07 March 2013 - 01:17 PM, said:

It is a huge dilemma and the OPs idea is not horrible. I just don't see how they can be balanced. I don't really like the numbers advantage because in game modes like conquest that gives the IS a huge advantage.

Clan mechs move between bases faster, and can take on more than their weight in IS mechs if venturing alone. They could recieve a cap boost to allow them to cap as fast as IS.

Roknari, on 07 March 2013 - 01:17 PM, said:

Maybe give the IS side a tonnage boost but leave the numbers of players even?

I was thinking about this as well. Sounds like a great solution if we were rolling dice, and it could maybe work in MWO too. I'm unsure though. I've seen light mechs completely destroying much larger mechs too many times. If teams were to be balanced through asymmetrical tonnage, lights/medium/assault would have to be rebalanced, wouldn't they?

[ragingmunkyz]

Harmin, on 08 March 2013 - 07:32 AM, said:

You can't buy CB. You're not seriously suggesting that this mythical rich guy with the big wallet would buy mechs with MC and sell for CB? GXP (which is still grindable and 50k is not an impossible number to grind) was a possible scenario, my point is that the clan mechs should be very very hard to obtain. The exact mechanism how to restrict them I'm quite agnostic about.

You don't need to buy CB...you can already buy any mech or part in the game with MC...You're not seriously suggesting that PGI would suddenly abandon this model for Clan Mechs when they could rake in the cash by giving them some high MC costs (like 6000 MC for Pretty Baby). The easiest way to get a massive amount of gxp is to use MC to convert mech xp, which would become more necessary with your insanely high gxp suggestion. Or were you not aware that every single thing in the game can be bought with MC?

The whole point of the F2P model is finding a delicate balance between making somewhat realistic to obtain by grinding, and offering the convenience of skipping that grind by paying real money. That balance gets tipped toward Pay to Win when you make the hassle of grinding unreasonable in comparison to the simplicity of just paying money. What you are suggesting is making the game pay to win, because 50 times the cost of current mechs is around 200,000,000 c-bills for low to mid-range mechs, and can be over 500,000,000 c-bills for the top of the line mechs. Many, many people will drop the cash to skip literally months of grinding, and they'd be running in such overpowered mechs it will be even more difficult and frustrating for free players to catch up to them.

These so called "rich guys" aren't mythical. Have you ever heard of World of Tanks? People will spend hundreds of dollars a month, because its the only way to stay competitive in that game. Hell, you don't even need to look to other games to find the big spenders, you just need to read these forums!

http://mwomercs.com/...w-your-support/

Thats just one thread where people talk about the hundreds of dollars they've already spent on this game which hasn't even been finished. Look around, there are many more like them. If you can think of one realistic way to make the mechs difficult to obtain without making the game pay to win, I'm all ears. I can't tell if you're actually saying "well these would only be purchasable with c-bills, not MC," because thats ludicrous, PGI aren't going to abandon their business model and forgo making money. The only even semi-realistic way to make something difficult to obtain in a F2P model without making it pay to win is random drops, but even in that case, I don't really see how they're going to implement that and forgo just selling the clan mechs to all the people that badly want them.

See while you don't care about how this supposed mechanism would function, I care quite a bit, and to me thats the whole crux of the argument. This mechanism is needs to 1) not upset the balance of the game 2) not break the game with unplayable new game modes or by invalidating any non-clan mech and 3) not make the game pay to win. I guess you're just "agnostic" about this game being pay to win.

Nice try though.

-ragingmunkyz

Edited by ragingmunkyz, 08 March 2013 - 02:10 PM.

[FupDup]

Harmin, on 08 March 2013 - 05:50 AM, said:

Absolutely do not walk away from the lore.

Too late for that by a long shot.


EDIT:
Also, lore isn't the damage of a Micro Laser, the heat of a Flamer, the range of a Machine Gun, or the efficiency of a Double Heat Sink.

Lore is story. Lore is characters. Lore is events. Lore is the visual/art style.

Harmin, on 08 March 2013 - 05:50 AM, said:

First you have to balance the drops. That means 5 clan mechs (a star) goes against 8 IS mechs (2 lances). Just as in the lore.

A quote of mine from another thread:

Quote

8v5 sounds wonderful on paper, but let's actually analyze within the context of MWO's current gameplay (as opposed to a board game which this game shares very little in common with our current FPS-gameplay except for story, names, and art style).


For starters, we've got small maps. At first you might think that this would help the spheroids by negating the Clan's energy weapon range advantage. If you look a little deeper, you'll notice that very few battles involve all 8 IS members of each team shooting simultaneously. It's a bunch of skirmishes featuring about 1-4 mechs most of the time. Cramming 8 mechs into one area will be a lot harder for the spheroids than it will be for the Clanners to fit only 5 mechs into one area...and getting them to all coordinate (more humans = more room for error). The Clanners will almost always have more of their team's firepower available to bear at any given moment than 8 IS'ers.

On larger maps like Alpine, the 8-player-cramming thing won't be as much of a problem (if one at all). However, now the Clanners get their range advantage. I don't think I have to elaborate on what would happen to the 8 IS mechs in this situation.

Regardless of map size, MWO's doubled armor favors Clanners much more than the IS. A lot of Clan stock mechs normally have craptastic armor, but here they get double that. Their superior damage negates the double armor of their IS opponents pretty easily, especially when focused fire is used. Also, the notion that Clan (and IS) Omnimechs can't get their armor (and other internals) modified is false. Omnis can goof with internals freely, but the moment they do so they merely lose all Omni capabilities and revert to a standard battlemech. People are still gonna min/max with Clan mechs just as much as they do with IS mechs.


As for Zellbrigen, which people often bring up as an attempt to counteract this obnoxious OPness, something you have to remember is that a Clanner is only honorbound to follow Zell so long as his/her opponent(s) also follow it. The second their enemy breaks Zell is the second that Clanners are greenlit to do whatever they feel. So that means no focus-fire for the spheroids unless they want to invite the Clanners to return the favor.




TL;DR: 8v5 favors Clanners in almost all conditions and so does double armor. Zellbrigen wouldn't help a thing. 12v10 is even worse because it assumes that each Clan mech is only 20% better than an IS mech (WRONG on every possible level).

Edited by FupDup, 08 March 2013 - 02:19 PM.

[MustrumRidcully]

Artgathan, on 07 March 2013 - 01:00 PM, said:

The one thing I've never seen discussed when it comes to balancing the Clans is heat. Heat is the great field-leveling device that I am sure PGI will use. Why? Double heat sinks are only 1.4 heat sinks (except max 10 in the engine). This is going to kill Clan Mechs. They will run out of free slots LONG before they run out of free tons.

Most clan mechs use an XL engine, FF armor and Endo Steel. This gives them 29 free slots to play with. If they switch to a standard engine they get 33. That means they can mount a whopping 26 heat sinks (10 engine + 16 external). If they drop FF Armor and Endo steel, they can mount an additional 7 (total = 33). If they carry a 400 level engine, they can mount 6 more in the engine (total = 39).

An IS mech can mount 30 (if they are missing 1 actuator in the arm, otherwise 28. This is 10 engine + 6 external engine (from a 400 engine) + 14 or 12 structure heatsinks, depending on actuators).

Recap:
A Clan mech with a 400 standard engine and ONLY double heatsinks can carry 39 heatsinks. This means it dissipates 60.6 heat per 10 seconds. (hps = 6.06)

An Inner Sphere with a 400 standard engine and ONLY double heatsinks can carry 30 heatsinks (if it has 1 less arm actuator). This means it dissipates 48 heat per 10 seconds. (hps = 4.8)

This means the Clan mech can, at MOST, dissipate 26.25% more heat per second than an Inner Sphere mech.

Given this, Clan pilots will be faced with a difficult decision between adding guns or heatsinks. They will run out of free space long before they run out of free tons.

Does this mean clans will be completely balanced? Probably not. However it does cut back on their superiority a little bit, especially if the devs decide that clan weapons will generate more heat (typically what has been done in previous MW titles).

But this will not balance things. Clans don't just have better double heat sinks. They have better weapons.

ER Lasers and ER PPCs from the Inner Sphere produce just as much heat as their Clan equivalents. But the clan equivalents also deal more damage, have even more range, and weigh less.

And heat isn't a problem for all weapons. THe Clan Gauss Rifle will simply be superior to anything the IS has to offer. Auto-Cannons produce rather low heat values ,and the Clan Ultra-Cannons weigh less but fire more often.
Clan LRMs are also tactically completely different - the are lighter and have no minimum range.

The worst thing that could happen is that Clan Mechs are unable to completely fill up their weight because they can't equip enoguh heat sinks for their superior weapons, but despite this, they will still be better than an IS mech of equal weight, except the "free" weight also being used.

Clan Tech is a powergamer's wet dream come true. Few modern games have as much power creep to offer as Battletech.

Edited by MustrumRidcully, 08 March 2013 - 02:16 PM.