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with this post I want to show everyone from my perspective what is happening in this game, what is going to a good direction and what needs to be rethought at all.
I don't even know if this is the right forum to post it or if the balancing forums weren't even better but we will see what the Mods say
This may result in a little wall of text, but I think it is necessary to show the Dev's the whole stuff from a direction they might have missed.
Also everyone is welcome to give constructive feedback about my thoughts.
So lets start with overall points like the community itself.
In my eyes the community is a indicator to show imbalances more or less, sure in the forums there is a lot of crying and shouting about stuff which is actually not that broken and many people are too emotional but the community is an important part.
I think sometimes Piranha Games listens quite well too it, but sometimes they are also not listening at all or they are listening to the whiners too much, which resulted in a buff, nerf, buff, nerf, buff, nerf, buff situation to the LRMs but I will come back to this stuff later.
But things I sometimes don't understand is why PGI won't have the community influence the game a bit with their sometimes well thought and worked out balances.
Thats really some stuff PGI has to improve, listening too good and constructive feedback and less to whine.
On the other hand, PGI gives a good flow of information. They try to tell us what they try to manage to implement in the current month which is quite nice and try to answer a lot of questions considering stuff in the future with their ask the devs, even if this may result in lots of hate and crying. But the on the other side, they wait too long to react at things they should be able to see with their statistics etc.
But I hope this will be better in the future!
Another big issue currently is the balance of ingame weaponry and stuff.
Sure balancing is a task which will never end and may occur to better and worse balancing depending from each patch.
But the current state of balancing is just horrible. They try to balance the weaponry and equipment maybe once a month, if not only every 2 months which is not the way it should be.
It should more be like we change it, see we overnerfed it or overbuffed it and adjust it in the next patch a bit better. But currently there is no real weapon balancing happening at all.
I also miss an update at the command chair post, where you let us know which weapons you are looking at or thinking at that need an adjustment.
Some examples:
LRMs:
Sure it's only 1 week gone now, since they received their flightpath rework, but they are too strong at the moment. The problem is not the flightpath at all, this rework is quite fine now, but if you watch back at the changes they made to LRMs at all, you see why they just went to this state of being broken after all.
In its first place LRMs were quite underpowered, so they received a damage buff, then they were quite a bit too strong, so they lost their perma homing with fire and forget, then they received a spread nerf so the spread more over the mech, then a damage buff, than a spread buff via Artemis and Tag so they are closer then a spread nerf via flightpath and Artemis on line of sight,then a damage buff etc and now they are at 1.8 damage with a quite good spread, which hits mainly the CT.
The problem is not the spread at all, the problem is that these LRMs with 1.8 damage have received a 80% damage buff compared to the LRMs from tabletop which is quite a lot and should be adjusted soon, by reducing it to 1.2-1.3 damage per missile in my eyes!
Pinpoint shooting:
Another problem is the pinpoint shooting with all weapons. This issue became to a real problem, when they changed the heat of the PPC and ER PPC. Currently you have a lot of jumpjet snipers and PPC boaters or SRM boating in case of the A1 Cat. This happens, because every weapon is currently shooting at the point you aim at. But thats a poin I kind of missed in every Mechwarrior title. MW4 tried to compensate it with their loadout system, but in my eyes it was crap, resulting sometimes in the fact that you didn't knew what to do with all the tonnage left.
I hate to make a comparison to World of Tanks, but you should have chance of divergence on each shot growing, with the distance to the target. You should for example if you shoot at a range of 800-1000 meters with your weapon, have a divergence of maybe a Hunchback width.
This would balance this game even more even it takes more work to do so, because you can adjust the divergence on every single weapon AND it will balance the boating issue by not letting every weapon hit the same point of armor. Because sniper boating currently is a huge problem in PUG and in 8-Man drops ... and it also would make Splatcats more balanced.
I know it would take a lot of effort to just implement this but it would improve the ingame feeling and the competitive gameplay.
PPC and ER PPC:
If you ask me, the PPC is quite a nice weapon as it is now, but with the reduced heat for the ER PPC, there is no reason to use the PPC anymore because the ER PPC produces not that much heat it should to compensate the advantage of having no minimum range, thats why nearly everyone uses ERs instead of normal PPCs. And this happens for weeks now, adjust the heat a bit, not to the state they were before, somewhere in the middle and they also should be fine!
Last but not least, ECM:
Since the introduction of ECM there has been a lot hate, whine, rage but also likes in the community.
Sure ECM is a part of the gameplay and there was a lot of discussion about, but you haven't touched it in the entire time once for now ... other stuff was adjusted against it but not ECM itself. In my eyes ECM itself with its function isn't the real issue, it is the fact that you only can counter ECM with another ECM for the moment. There were many topics about ECM just making BAP useless and in fact thats just the way it currently does ... hope you planned some rework at both BAP and ECM!
So, as a small summery this game is quite nice, but as you can see at my post, in my opinion the missing weapon balancing makes this game not so fun as it was several patches before because you see a lot less diversity in Mechs and weaponry as it was before, the weaponry have been reduced to SRMs for brawl, and (in PUGs LRMS) PPC+Gauss snipers with or without jumpjets depending on their class.
So as I said before, feel free to give constructive feedback or post questions if you couldn't follow my weird thoughts which I had to form into English language ;D
Edited by Xenroth, 11 March 2013 - 08:12 AM.
