354 replies to this topic

[FunkyFritter]

Sybreed, on 06 April 2013 - 11:00 PM, said:

if battlevalue was used as a MM tool, it wouldn't be an issue...

If battlevalue is being used what's the point of R&R? If players aren't gaining any advantage from using fancy equipment why should the game charge them for playing the way they want?

[Sybreed]

FunkyFritter, on 06 April 2013 - 11:03 PM, said:

If battlevalue is being used what's the point of R&R? If players aren't gaining any advantage from using fancy equipment why should the game charge them for playing the way they want?

why don't I see a problem with providing some limitations to a players build? No limitations always drive towards abuse. But, it's 3 AM, I just came back from a party and I'm not really in a mindset to argue. Maybe tomorrow morning

Edited by Sybreed, 06 April 2013 - 11:05 PM.

[FunkyFritter]

Sybreed, on 06 April 2013 - 11:05 PM, said:

why don't I see a problem with providing some limitations to a players build? No limitations always drive towards abuse. But, it's 3 AM, I just came back from a party and I'm not really in a mindset to argue. Maybe tomorrow morning

I hope that in the morning you can explain your point better. Tonnage, crit space, weapon hardpoints and heat are all limitations that work well because they're consistent across all matches. If a particular build ends up being abusive those limits can be tweaked to fix the problem. Using R&R as a constraint doesn't address the issue at all, if the abusive build gives a significant advantage everyone will use it anyway and if it doesn't nobody will use it. The end result is less viable options in either case.

[TOGSolid]

Quote

I completely agree. R&R didn't just mean Repair & Rearm, but also Risk and Reward.

Balancing something via costs like this a rubbish way of doing things. All it does is reward good players and punish new/bad players. Good players will still make money while new/bad players will be struggling to get the money needed to do anything.

[aniviron]

R&R was a nice way to balance certain tech- it meant running better stuff cost more money, so there really was a tradeoff.

On the other hand, it disproportionately punishes new players; as someone who has been playing for a while with all the tech I want and 70m cbills to spare, I can afford to run fully repaired mechs. But when I was first starting out, I remember so vividly launching game after game in an HBK-4SP with 75% armor, repaired internals, 75% SRM reloads, and no weapon repairs. Why did I do that? I was new, and not running with a group, so I got roflstomped by 8 mans most rounds- the only way to afford a new mech was to not spend money on my current one. There are no more 8 man vs pug games (thankfully) but new players still face the same dilemma- do I repair my current mech so I can try to have fun in it, or not repair it so I can get a new chassis to have fun in? And if you're a vet who pugs, ask yourself if you really want your cheap/new teammates running mechs that don't have any repairs on them?

Finally, the old implementation was pretty awful because of how the repair bill broke down. It meant that if you knew what you were doing, even a total mech destruction could get repaired to a reasonable level with 3-4k cbills of repairs; you could just game the system to give yourself 80% survivability with 10% of the cost. Once again, this unfairly punishes new players who don't know how this works, and it was often pretty irritating to my teammates; I remember getting sworn at a lot when someone hit Q in spawn and saw I was already at 85% health.

[Nutlink]

So many people against R&R, but they keep on thinking it'd be the exact same way it was before. There are ways to balance it without the typical knee-jerk reaction a lot of people seem to have towards it. Percentages, weight/class balances, etc etc. There's no reason an Atlas should be in the red during a win, and there's no reason a light shouldn't be able to make money.

[Moorecroft]

Access to gear, if they are going to restrict it, should be restricted based on resources available from Community Warfare, maybe?

eg If you don't have XL engine factories/stores in your House or w/e, then you cannot repair mechs that need them or something.

This relies on components being balanced, so rather than giving you an explicit disadvantage, it just removes one of several valid options.

Might be hard to implement. Might suck as well. Just an idea.

[Rattlehead NZ]

R&R was very good. Was it perfect and fair? Of course not but it was on the right track.

1. It didn't work because people would afk etc to get free money
Well yes this did happen though that was because they were earning c-bills even though they did nothing. That has changed and if you don't contribute then you don't get very much. Back then also you got like 100k if you won or lost. That amount has severly dropped. If everyone had to have a 100% repaired mech then this wouldn't happen as often.

2. It made lights the best thing to run because they were cheaper to run.
This does have to be changed where the size of the mech doesn't change the costs as much as what weapons and equipment are used. 4 medium lasers and a bit of hard work is cheaper to run than 6x ppc stalkers and 2x AC20 kits which are built for quick kills. A fair trade I think

3. Bad or new players shouldn't be punished for not doing well and good players getting all the bonuses.
I agree that new players definately need help in this field, but a bad player that has had 100's of games shouldn't be given the same payout than players that end up carrying the team.

My experiences with R&R were good. I never made a loss and i generally used mediums and up. I use Art on one catapult and its my founder because it gives extra cash to help the extra repairs and ammo costs. It wasn't a perfect system but with a few costs dropped then it would work well. Many good ideas are out there and in this very thread as it stands and still to come. In the end it needs to happen to add the depth this game deserves.

[Inkarnus]

if you put the disfunctionality of RandR aside[never repair and rearm and still get stuff]
then it would atleast benefit ppl using lowtech and punish players who will have a massive
advantage over a standard mech with standard engine and i think such should
be accountet for since the other player with the advantage will most
certainly win but its uneven so he shouldnt get that much of cbills for it

the other thing is it would benefit too take small mechs over assault mechs
if your a good player you would take a light and pwn now you will most
definetly take the highest tonnage you can get to grind money
wich i dont think is the best approach

Edited by Inkarnus, 07 April 2013 - 12:25 AM.

[EGG]

R&R should have been there to add a management aspect to the MechLab, or some kind of other minor sauce to the game. Instead it just acted as a massive blight on in-game behaviour with people afking, suiciding, pugstomping, hiding or just running average builds in order to make money.

If you wanted to re-implement it, you'd need to consider what you actually wanted it to add to the game. If there was any grand idea underlying the last version, we never saw it.

[Rattlehead NZ]

EGG, on 07 April 2013 - 12:29 AM, said:

R&R should have been there to add a management aspect to the MechLab, or some kind of other minor sauce to the game. Instead it just acted as a massive blight on in-game behaviour with people afking, suiciding, pugstomping, hiding or just running average builds in order to make money.

If you wanted to re-implement it, you'd need to consider what you actually wanted it to add to the game. If there was any grand idea underlying the last version, we never saw it.

I remember the first time R&R first came about. Everyone stopped just running in to get the kills and dying all the time with no regards to themselves or anyone else (like whats happening now). I saw tactics spawn out of nowhere and more people were were chatting with tactics. Alot of this disapeared when R&R disapeared. The mech you run shouldn't impact much on your bills as that would make people run nothing but lights. Rather it should impact more on the repair of weapons and equipment, for example a Raven 3L with an XL engine and ecm plus weapons may cost the same as a hunchback with 9 medium lasers. Not a proper calculation but i think you can see my point.

[Xenois Shalashaska]

Yeah I miss R&R. Gave the game a risk factor. 100% for reimplementation

[Hedonism Robot]

I was wondering how this stupid thread was up all day, then noticed its creator sybreed kept bumping it every chance he had. Good luck on brining back this terrible idea buddy. It would certainly help low skill players with lots of cash and premium time get a good advantage on those without!

[MN03]

So let's see, a XL-engine;
1) Costs more
2) Takes up 6 critical slots more in the left- and right torso (lower survivability)
3) If RnR is implemented, will cost more money to repair.

Wait, what will be the advantage of XL-engines again? That's too many downsides for 1 item (just like ECM has too many upsides for 1 item). Again, you balance the game by tweaking the item, not by making it only available to good players. That's silly.

Edit: I fear that people will stop acting heroically when people need it (like being a big shield in an Atlas for example), because they fear their repair bills.

Edited by MN03, 07 April 2013 - 12:59 AM.

[Xenois Shalashaska]

Hedonism Robot, on 07 April 2013 - 12:49 AM, said:

I was wondering how this stupid thread was up all day, then noticed its creator sybreed kept bumping it every chance he had. Good luck on brining back this terrible idea buddy. It would certainly help low skill players with lots of cash and premium time get a good advantage on those without!

Hero mechs are already balancing the premium time players. Im a founder player and I dont even use hero or pemium time to make money, I use my Hunchback 4p to bring the cash in. R&R is realistic. This separated the foolish players from the strategic players.

[TOGSolid]

Quote

if you put the disfunctionality of RandR aside[never repair and rearm and still get stuff]
then it would atleast benefit ppl using lowtech and punish players who will have a massive
advantage over a standard mech with standard engine and i think such should
be accountet for since the other player with the advantage will most
certainly win but its uneven so he shouldnt get that much of cbills for it

This, and every other argument for R&R, hinge around the assumption that good players will be taking a sufficient amount of damage that their costs will suffer as a result.

This is absolutely not the case as good players, whether running in teams or not, will run a ******** train on everyone else regardless of their gear's cost and still make buckets of money. R&R costs ONLY impact new and bad players and does fuckall to discourage good and/or veteran players from running high end builds. The supposed balance that R&R bring to the field is entirely in everyone's heads.

Quote

This separated the foolish players from the strategic players.

Lol wut? No it didn't. Your score at the end of the match is what separates players, R&R costs made very little impact on player behavior save for the tons of posts around here concerning how stupid rearm costs were for missiles.

Quote

R&R is realistic.

"Realistic" is the Battletech equivalent of Godwin.

You lose, good day sir.

Edited by TOGSolid, 07 April 2013 - 12:57 AM.

[Tor6]

I want to live in the nostalgic fantasyland that some of the people here live in. "Back when R&R was in the game, people tried not to die! They actually tried not to suicide rush and die instantly!" As opposed to now where no one tries to win and everyone just plays like a bunch of flipperbabies hammering their fists on the keyboard because they don't care.

News Flash: You make easily twice as much money by winning than you do losing. And no one likes losing. People play the same now as they did before. There are a few differences though like:

1. Now people don't surrender or run off and hide becuase they don't want to pay repair costs. This was crappy no matter how you look at it.

2. People are willing to die to win the round because they know they'll be rewarded instead of handed a massive bill. Back when R&R was in the game you were PENALIZED for throwing yourself on a cap to stop it so your team could come back and win. You had a strong chance of dying. so even if you did win, you had to pay a fat repair bill. Before, the best way to make money was to cap and not not actually fight the enemy. If you had a round where you never even saw the enemy -even if you lost- you made 100% profit and didn't have to worry about repairs.

3. Penalized heavier weight classes for no reason. In this game a light can beat an assault mech singledhandedly, and assault mechs can go down in seconds. 'Limiting assault mechs' is not really a worthwhile goal from a gameplay standpoint because they have big downsides and aren't a big I WIN button. If someone wants to pilot an assault mech all the time who am I to tell them they can't?

I can keep going on but I don't feel like typing out a full page list of everything wrong with R&R again.

This is a game. People like to win games and will come up with the best way to win them, whether you limit their build options or not. So don't pine for some long lost (imaginary) time when people cared about dying. People STILL care about dying because if you die you stand a lower chance of winning. And people like winning.

[TOGSolid]

The only upside to R&R was that you could strip AFKers bare and jack their repair costs through the roof, causing them to lose money on the match.

Edited by TOGSolid, 07 April 2013 - 12:59 AM.

[Xenois Shalashaska]

I enjoyed the 75% free ammunition after you restart a match. I would prefer that to stay in. The only thing I would change is the cost for repairing XL engines. Everything else is a good cost of repairs. I loved the fact that I decided to only upgrade heatsinks and never armour to fibrous because of the price. I played more strategic and helped my team mates when the opportunity arrived. I never wanted to accidently shoot team mates and played more considerately. I really appreciated all the different mech builds as most people ran conservative. Also when you decided to surrender it ment a whole lot more to people. Respect was given on the battle field

Edited by Xenois Shalashaska, 07 April 2013 - 01:02 AM.

[Rattlehead NZ]

Xenois Shalashaska, on 07 April 2013 - 12:59 AM, said:

I enjoyed the 75% free ammunition after you restart a match. I would prefer that to stay in. The only thing I would change is the cost for repairing XL engines. Everything else is a good cost of repairs. I loved the fact that I decided to only upgrade heatsinks and never armour to fibrous because of the price. I played more strategic and helped my team mates when the opportunity arrived. I never wanted to accidently shoot team mates and played more considerately. I really appreciated all the different mech builds as most people ran conservative. Also when you decided to surrender it ment a whole lot more to people. Respect was given on the battle field

The only people i find complaining about how expensive things were was when LRM's were the bees knees and didn't like how much their all mighty and powerful missiles cost them.