Treckin, on 12 March 2013 - 08:08 AM, said:
The way to balance the various weight and chassis is not to force people to play a random map/mech combination.
To balance those differences it would take actually working on each individual chassis, correct.
Its not balance to just say "oh well, instead of tweaking these numbers so they're balanced, lets make em all random so that it wont matter."
Also, the biggest part of my OP, which has so far gone ignored, is that I own many many many many mechs. Boats, all arounders, flamer/MG griefers.
The point of my OP was that it gets boring following the same equip formula for every mech in my mechbay.
At least if I could chose from my readied mechs AFTER map selection, I might actually have a reason to grab another Atlas DC - so i can have one always ready for brawling and one always ready for peekaboo sniping.
The random map nonsense invalidates the point of the mechlab, camo, colors, and build strategy.
What some here fail to realize is that the more variety of maps that are released, the increasingly restricted set of uniform, "safe" builds remain viable to play across all maps, and the more players disconnect when a map comes up they either don't want to play or happen to have a build that doesn't work well on it.
Random maps HURTS tactics and strategy. It in no way improves it or benefits it. It is also lazy game design that hurts the fun factor for everyone playing the game, because you're either the one stuck with the wrong mech for the map, or you're on a team with disconnects from people who were.
Tactical/strategic gameplay
begins with knowing the map you'll be dropping into before selecting your loadout and camo/colors (or, at a minimum, somehow being able to pre-set which chassis, loadouts and camo/colors you want to use with each specific map, so whichever map comes up, you're piloting a chassis appropriate to the environment, map size, and color scheme, based on the pre-set you selected to be used for that map). PGI can go about it either way, as either way solves the problem. i.e., if they insist on keeping the map selection random, they can provide users a way to preselect which mech builds and camo to use for each map in the game (think Dropship mode writ large), or they can ditch the random map selection and simply tell the player what the next map will be so they can manually select an appropriate mech.
It would resolve a lot of the disconnects, which hurts everyone. It hurts the balance between the two teams, putting the side with more disconnects at an automatic disadvantage, and one that ELO cannot account for. It also wastes the time of the person who disconnected, because that's their only recourse to avoid playing on maps they simply don't want to play on, wasting their time spent loading into a map they don't want to play, and locking up their mech until that round ends.
Forcing everyone to play the random maps is a negative experience for all involved and will continue to be so regardless of what PGI does to try to force it. Being stubborn about it will only hurt their player population, turn people off from playing it, and create more negative sentiment about the MWO experience. The only viable solution is to provide players a way to line up appropriate builds and camo/color schemes for each environment or get rid of the randomness in the first place.
Map voting when you're already in the game with a specific mech does not address this at all, and will only continue the same problems for everyone and will actually encourage or increase a greater number of disconnects. People who don't win the vote will disconnect. And now, the kiddie population that votes for the same map over and over again (c.f., any other FPS game with map voting enabled), will cause even regular players to disconnect from matches when they're sick of playing the same map over and over again.
Edited by jay35, 12 March 2013 - 09:42 AM.
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