1107 replies to this topic

[Bishop Steiner]

@Protection

It might not work, I am by no means oroclaiming it the surefire answer. On the other hand I have yet to see hard data it can't work, and tbh, there will always be a gap between new players and long term ones. There is in WoT. The ELO if it ever worked right, supposedly would help some by keeping them facing equal skill level, as the too make their millions. But more to the point, I think with repairs, one would actually see the money gap erode as the maxtech loadoatsnofbthe vets depleted more and more excess funds.

But that is only if it is administered in a well thought out manner, which the previous version certainly was not so well thought out. And even then, without actually trying it, there is no way to know for sure.

@Protection

It might not work, I am by no means oroclaiming it the surefire answer. On the other hand I have yet to see hard data it can't work, and tbh, there will always be a gap between new players and long term ones. There is in WoT. The ELO if it ever worked right, supposedly would help some by keeping them facing equal skill level, as the too make their millions. But more to the point, I think with repairs, one would actually see the money gap erode as the maxtech loadoatsnofbthe vets depleted more and more excess funds.

But that is only if it is administered in a well thought out manner, which the previous version certainly was not so well thought out. And even then, without actually trying it, there is no way to know for sure.

[Protection]

Nathan Bloodguard, on 28 March 2013 - 08:57 PM, said:

That's what the elo system is for. Also that would be a matter for the matchmaking system to be changed to deal with (if you are one of those people who don't like elo or think its not working...), not necessarily a problem with the gear at that point. Also think of it from the more lore end. Would a mechwarrior just starting out have the best mech in the universe? most times they started in something that barely worked. the laser was off kilter, the arm only swayed so far, and the jump jets sometimes would just fart out useless fuel instead of propelling you into the air.

Put it in more of a real world issue. When you bought your first car (yes, you buying, not parents) was it a brand new Ferrari or was it the old beat up rust bucket that you could afford at the time? As in the real world you need to work for the better stuff and not have it handed to you on a silver platter.

There are guys approaching the billion C-Bill mark. There's not enough losses on the planet to bankrupt them.

Plus ELO doesn't always give you a "high ELO" game. It can give you teams with 2 high ELO players, 4 Mid ELO players, and 2 Low ELO players each.

[Nathan Bloodguard]

Protection, on 28 March 2013 - 08:59 PM, said:

There are guys approaching the billion C-Bill mark. There's not enough losses on the planet to bankrupt them.

Plus ELO doesn't always give you a "high ELO" game. It can give you teams with 2 high ELO players, 4 Mid ELO players, and 2 Low ELO players each.

Do me a favor and re-read my post, as you seem to have taken the first sentence and stopped there....

Edited by Nathan Bloodguard, 28 March 2013 - 09:16 PM.

[Bishop Steiner]

I was almost at a billion once. Was racing Wispy and I think Agent of Fortune for it. Still had matches I got my head handed to me.

No difference is one can't lose money now. Used to be that you boat LRMs in a DDC, you didn't take home a paycheck that match. Act uber Rambo, and the XL just set you back 2-3 million to replace. The only reason we see these ridiculous bank accounts blnow is because there is no RnR soaking it, nothing to reward smart play in less expensive mecha, or convince people to save their Sunday best kech for, well, Sundays.

In what way would tye new player he at anymore of a disadvantage than he already is against these billionaires, especially since hy the current model, all that can happen is eventually we get trillionaires. That'll be good for the newbs.

[Atheus]

A point against the [ELO fixes it] argument is that it's not specific to the chassis. I can't just plmp my raven 3L, win like crazy, then decide I want to go elite on the cheap by slumming it in the 2x/4x without upgrading them. My high ELO from winning in well-built chassis will mean I'm going to be facing high end opponents in my beater mechs while I try to fill out basic on them. Thus, in order to be remotely competitive in those mechs, I'll either need to chain losses for hours on end until the ELO corrects to the level I play at in a terrible SHS raven build, or I'll need to cough up the 1.5 million to upgrade a chassis I have no real interest in to begin with. Either way, I'm stuck working my *** off not because it's fun or interesting, but because it's a means to an end.

Concerning R&R - the cost of running DHS during R&R wasn't all that significant, especially when you compare the hit you'll take on the payout from your win/loss ratio and performance bonuses if you try to run singles to save money. I would estimate my profits were substantially higher running DHS builds, though I have no hard statistics on this.

Edited by Atheus, 28 March 2013 - 10:23 PM.

[Protection]

Hey guys, just want to say...

Congratulations on 54 pages. What a threadnaught.

[MustrumRidcully]

Bishop Steiner, on 28 March 2013 - 06:57 PM, said:

@Altheus,

While I can understand your skepticism, ifPGI is this incompetent, as some are promoting, does it really matter the state of heatsinks, or anything else for that matter?

Its rather akin to debating what color to repaint the Titanic..... After it hit the iceberg.

That's the question I believe some of us are asking... Are we not devoting way too much time on discussing the game if there is no real sign PGI understands the problem?

I don't know. But whatever happens, you can't see we didn't try.

---

Oh, and someone brought up R&R again as a way to balance things?

It didn't work the first time. Why do you believe it will work the second time. I can tell you why I believe that it will never be possible:

Whatever PGI does, they can never allow a player to go bankrupt and be unable to play. That just won't fly.
Worse, they can also not allow a player to go almost bankrupt and never recover.

That means there will always be a way - and if it's in the form of trial mechs - for these players to play. And if they realize that taking their real mechs out there to fight is losing them money, they will stick to trials until they made money. But they might not like those trials, so what they are likely to do is play badly and game the reward system. Be it AFK farming, suicide farming, whatever. And that will ruin gameplay for players that are matched up with them.

But that's not all. If people are still trying to make money, even if they use their own custom, optimized build, they will have reasons in the game to jsut give up on a match, and move to a corner and power down. You can't even punish these players for such behaviour, because that means taking away their freedom in deciding what to spend their C-Bills on.

So soon after the next R&R wave, you'll get tons of players that will AFK farm, trial mech suicide, power down in corners, or Cap-Rush, or find other ways to "game the system so their repair bill stays low and affordable and their C-Bill income positive.

These players will not necessarily enjoy this behaviour any more than the other players that don't resort to it, but they also don't enjoy playing in mechs that they didn't want to play in, they need those C-Bills to finally get to the fun parts of the game.
Some players will realize the futility of it all and just quit the game. If you need to grind to have fun instead of having fun grinding, why bother with the game at all?

R&R can only work as a fluff mechanic, e.g. repairs are always considerably lower than the winnings from a match.

Edited by MustrumRidcully, 29 March 2013 - 01:52 AM.

[Allekatrase]

Bishop Steiner, on 28 March 2013 - 08:45 PM, said:

@Allekatrase,
You are entitled to your opinion. *snip*

You make a fair point in that the devs have promised so much. What I have trouble with is believing that your interpretation of those promises will be what actually happens. I haven't seen any evidence to support that they will follow through. I think we'll be lucky if community warfare turns out to be just an in game way to track and organize clans/houses like guilds in other games and a more customize-able matchmaker that lets you select a subset of maps or a particular map to have battles on or possibly even to set up custom games against specific opponents.

Every step the developers have taken has been away from any kind of meaningful economic model and I have a hard time believing they are going to backtrack on that. Even pretending that community warfare is going to save the game do you think that the current game is going to go away when community warfare is implemented? No, it's going to stay the same. If community warfare tries to balance things with economy it will be pointless as long as people are making money in the TDM mode that they are almost certainly not going to get rid of. The only way to have both would be to have a separate mechbay and currency for community warfare and I really don't see that happening.

EDIT: Also, Mustrum makes some really good points about why R&R and really any kind of meaningful economy won't really work in this type of game. The core design of the game doesn't allow for it and I really don't see community warfare changing that.

Sorry, I think your hopes for what this game could and should be are awesome. I just don't see them coming true and think waiting for them to balance everything with some mystical future feature is a bad idea. Maybe I'm just a cynic and maybe it's too early to talk about balance at all in this game. There certainly wasn't any point trying to balance lrms/streaks/tag before ecm got implemented but how many threads were there about that?

Edited by Allekatrase, 29 March 2013 - 02:16 AM.

[Bishop Steiner]

@Allelatrase

You could be right. The flip side though, since we have no definitive understanding of what is really in store (assuming even the devs do, or that IGP isn't specifically telling them they have to dumb the game down further, in which case I will finally be forced to join the refund brigade), is nerfing or removing a feature, only to have to re-add it is also kind of pointless. I still see more signs pointing toward something more than TDM. There have been instances where PGI certainly screwed the pooch. I've also seen instance of players nerd raging about useless features, only to have the next patch make it useful, with a feature that had been on the roadmap for quite some time. I use TAG as a good example. ECM still has issues, but when TAG was buffed to 750m, I saw post after postnraging that it was a useless buff (eclven tho I was using it to good effect in my C1). A few weeks later, Apine debuts, and lrm teams started melting Fatlas ECM blobs. Of course, not long after that they utterly screw missile damage to the moon, for ingnanothe missile nerf. Point is, a feature that was largely raged against proved to have been quite useful, in the "grand scheme of things". And that PGI has some serious inhouse code testing quality control issues.

As for RnR I agree with some of what Mustrum says, and disagree with other aspects. In the absence of hard data from either of us I can realistically only go by what I saw, which was a lot more in game variety. Was there massive QQ on the forums? Sure. Funny thing is, RnR is gone, and if you look to the forums, the same 2 dozen or so people are still blanketing the place with QQ and ragequit topics, so I really dunno "what the will of the people" was.

I would also say that RnR economics only have a place if CW proves to be anything like the "plan" was. And that it only should apply in Community Warfare. For people who don't want the Meta, and just want to smash mechs, since they have multiple tame modes planned, I would imagine will get to do so. Biggest point, is there is room for both communities to exist, instead if these black or white "my way only" declarations we keep seeing.

Or the will of a supposed silent majority..... Whom if they are being silent , how does anyone, especially PGI, really know what they want?

[Just wanna play]

oh no!! Protection, your threadnaught is slowing down!!!

[Bishop Steiner]

now it's time for my Urbie Threadnaught to rise from the sea and devour Tokyo!!!!!! (doh! just bumped the Threadnaught again! Darnit!)

[Just wanna play]

lol, so will it pick u speed again?????

[Nathan Bloodguard]

Nathan Bloodguard, on 27 March 2013 - 08:01 PM, said:

Now, my opinion (after only a few people who feel like posting to only themselves and spout out their opinion over and over again like a skipping record player...) would be to keep heat sinks and reimplement R&R (repair and refit), then having singles would make SOOOOOOOOOOO much sense, as they are cheaper to purchase and repair. We would also see a lot of the XL engines in an assault go away, and everyone having endo/ferro upgrades.

Now before you say the old R&R was broken and should be done away with and never brought back, I think it would be best to make it so your repair bill can never exceed your reward., that way you can play any mech you want to but if you play one with all the works, you wont make money...

Page 44. Sorry I should have restated this from two days ago about what I mean by R&R.

[Nathan Bloodguard]

Nathan Bloodguard, on 28 March 2013 - 08:57 PM, said:

That's what the elo system is for. Also that would be a matter for the matchmaking system to be changed to deal with (if you are one of those people who don't like elo or think its not working...), not necessarily a problem with the gear at that point. Also think of it from the more lore end. Would a mechwarrior just starting out have the best mech in the universe? most times they started in something that barely worked. the laser was off kilter, the arm only swayed so far, and the jump jets sometimes would just fart out useless fuel instead of propelling you into the air.

Put it in more of a real world issue. When you bought your first car (yes, you buying, not parents) was it a brand new Ferrari or was it the old beat up rust bucket that you could afford at the time? As in the real world you need to work for the better stuff and not have it handed to you on a silver platter.

Please re read my post, as its not promoting just elo as a possible solution but saying at that point its not the gear but the matchmaker that you would then have a problem with, including my former statement about R&R. Also sorry for not going into more detail, not much time to post at the moment. Will read other post more indepth later today.

[Tesunie]

A few comments from me in the subject of R&R being a balance, gameplay back in R&R games, and an idea for CW.

R&R
Back when R&R was in the game, I experienced much more enjoyable matches and more even game play. I could play a trial mech and actually stand my own against other, more experienced players. This all with the later "broken" match maker* which as I saw it (and felt it) broke when R&R was removed. When I started I actually went from grinding enough c-bills in a trial Hunchback 4J to buy a Hunchback 4SP. My 4SP was designed to run cooler with less LRMs (hence the 2 LRM5s), yet still pack a punch up close with 5 med lasers. All with a standard engine, SHS and only endo as my upgrade. Even with repair, I made more c-bills with my custom mech than I did with the trials, and I felt evenly challenged. Some people had more tricked out rides, which preformed better. If they were skilled enough to keep it going, then they could make a lot of c-bills. If they weren't good with it, they could lose a lot of c-bills. Higher risk, normally higher reward (by causing more damage and kills).

Am I saying this system was perfect? No, it wasn't. It could use changes and tweaking. Was it good at helping to legitimize the low end tech? Yes, I believe it did.

I'd suggest people look at it from our point of view. We have reasons we liked it. What do you think was good about R&R? What was bad? Any way you (being against it) could think of to have R&R in the game and have it work better? What was you experience of game play back when R&R was in the game?

I'd like to point out that I do also understand your point about R&R making people broke. I agree that if it makes you loose money with higher builds, that could be a problem, but the mention of going bankrupt in the game is a useless argument, as there are always the free trial mechs, or you just aren't as good at the game as you might think.

My proposed changes would be to remove the free repair and ammo. If your mech is a junk heap from damage, then you need to get it fixed. However, repairs should become cheaper and/or rewards increased. Make it harder to actually loose money without literally dieing without doing anything in a high tech mech. Reward action more, and maybe have wins do a multiplier to c-bill rewards on actions preformed and damage. Balance would have to be figured by adjusting rewards for actions and item repairs. (A loss could give a reward multiplier of x2, and a win x3. This makes winning more preferable, but usually not so overwhelming that winning is the only way to make c-bills.)

For repairs, I wouldn't mind something on the approach of MC, where you might have a slider bar, or it has to be fully repaired between matches. Ammo could, and probably should, have a slider to full or empty, but probably would be best to have it a "must be full" to play to avoid scamming the system. If ammo cost and repair cost was reduced per item, or you couldn't be charged more than, say, 100% of what you made that match, or even 110% to have some penalty for a poor performance. A repair cost cap combined with a reduced R&R cost might help balance old tech, trials, and higher players. Combined with ELO (with more tweaks to ELO too, such as a BV, weight class or the like as possible concepts) it should help balance the game more as well as give SHS and standard gear a small place to call home.
(As a side note, I'd love for salvage to actually be salvage. Not whole mechs, but armor plating to make repairs cheaper that match or till used, if an intact med laser is on the arm you blew off and you lost one, free replacement. Could remove the c-bill multiplier I had mentioned for victors to gain this salvage, or it could be given to just who made that salvage.)


*(I say MM broke when R&R was removed only because then everyone started running XL, FF, ES, and DHS. There was now no longer any reason not to take these upgrades, as there was no penalty for it. XL in Stalkers would have been just about unheard of back in R&R days. Too expensive to run, and too risky if you died. Now? I still laugh at XL stalkers. So easy to kill, yet it saddens me to see so many XL Stalkers, and Atlases.)


CW
I see this as probably going to be faction vs faction to earn "faction points". This could lead to the release of faction specific mechs or other such goodies. It probably won't be too much different than what we have now, at least at first. Just more directed and controlled.

I did read an idea about having a TDM (what we have now) mechbays, and completely separate mechbays for CW. I actually like that idea. They could possibly limit the mech selection to faction/rank, and as you play and rank more, you gain more options, mech choices, and upgrades. It would feel nice I think, especially if it can gain game modes different from the current system.

This would give TDM players who like the Solaris style play we currently have as their play, and CW players their fun too. I could then see TDM players might either keep the current system of play, or everything becomes free and c-bills becomes part of the CW side of the game. TDM would also be a great testing grounds for players to try new weapons and mechs, without messing up their CW system, c-bills, faction (points) or mechs.


Right now, all we can do is wait and hope with CW till they announce what it's going to be like. I'm hoping it is something big, which is why they are being so quiet about it... but we can speculate about it though. I'm thinking a lot of the questionable things (such as SHS in the game) will make sense and have a purpose. I'm personally hoping that CW is where lore will start to be added and followed more closely.

[Tesunie]

MC = MechCommander.

[Just wanna play]

um, what is rr??? what does it stand for?? noob question.....

[Bishop Steiner]

Just wanna play, on 29 March 2013 - 09:23 AM, said:

um, what is rr??? what does it stand for?? noob question.....

Repair and Refit

used to be part of the game back in Closed Beta. Had a few issues with people exploiting part of the Mechanic (why they made it with such a naive exploit is still beyond me), and of course, some people didn't like actually not being able to use their max tech toy every single match, because some builds actually would lose money, which pretty obviously seemed to be the idea, as it followed TT and Canon, in that running a totally tricked out Assault Mech, was generally not going to create revenue, hence they were usually reserved for critical important missions by commanders.

Merc Units, and even militaries, have ALWAYS had to take cost into consideration, but it was apparently too much for some. I readily agree, if this game remains TDM style ONLY, it has no place, but if thee is ANY sort of persistent game, then it needs to resurface in some manner in Community Warfare. It is literally one of the only ways to NOT instantly obsolete all IS Mechs once Clan Tech shows up.

[Just wanna play]

ohh, yeah, i kinda wish they had that 2, i never played the game with it, but i think they are dumbing this game down to much, also dont know anything about clan mechs or why people keep mentioning them

[Bishop Steiner]

Just wanna play, on 29 March 2013 - 09:33 AM, said:

ohh, yeah, i kinda wish they had that 2, i never played the game with it, but i think they are dumbing this game down to much, also dont know anything about clan mechs or why people keep mentioning them

Well, the Clans are a offshoot of Humanity that left the known regions of space 250 years ago. While the rest of the Galaxy beat itself back to the Stone age, they prospered and advanced. Now, they are returnin, feeling it is their destiny to reclaim Earth and liberate known space from it's failed masters.

Techwise, if one compared our Mechs to WW II tanks, Clan MEchs would be like Modern Military Hardware.