30 replies to this topic

[V1RAL]

This is for those who are unhappy with the current meta, or think the meta is stale.
http://www.reddit.co...hange_the_meta/

[Wintersdark]

...or just wait a week or two, and it'll change again. It always does. *shrugs* I've already found poptarting to be falling off as folks get their shiny new HGN's mastered and learn more effective ways to play them.

[80sGlamRockSensation David Bowie]

The problem is that all the brawler weapons (save the AC20 which is incredibly restricted due to hard points) suck,

SRM6? Unreliable, spreads damage
LBx10? Utter pile of ****.
AC20? only a select few mechs can mount
Large Pulse Lasers? You've got to be joking...

So of course people are going to take the two most reliable weapons with a strategy thats worked since mechwarrior 3 days. Its not the player base's fault for taking the best setup. Its PGI's for allowing brawler weapons to remain absolutely worthless. I'm glad PPCs are viable, but they REALLY just need to fix the other weapons so good brawlers can still exist.

[Straften]

mwhighlander, on 28 April 2013 - 11:11 AM, said:

The problem is that all the brawler weapons (save the AC20 which is incredibly restricted due to hard points) suck,

SRM6? Unreliable, spreads damage
LBx10? Utter pile of ****.
AC20? only a select few mechs can mount
Large Pulse Lasers? You've got to be joking...

So of course people are going to take the two most reliable weapons with a strategy thats worked since mechwarrior 3 days. Its not the player base's fault for taking the best setup. Its PGI's for allowing brawler weapons to remain absolutely worthless. I'm glad PPCs are viable, but they REALLY just need to fix the other weapons so good brawlers can still exist.

LRMs being viable would also change the long range meta specifically, as the support fire options would then vary.

[Staplebeater]

There have been a couple things that have brought this meta upon us. I think the biggest was the LRM Apocalypse LRM/SRM nerf. There used to be some parity in how to kill another mech LRMs would do the job, SRMs did the job up close and then the energy weapons. After the nerf LL and PPCs become the best way to kill other mechs.

the fix is going to be the redo of the LRMs/SRMs both the HSR and the damage fix. I think this will be the meta fix other than a PPC nerf

[Purplefluffybunny]

Look, you can never balance a game like this. All you can do is to just keep changing values so that every month or so what is the best option, changes. You then revert back to one of the earlier states and repeat. It is an age old tactic for online games where the system itself is the problem and not the 'entities' within.

For example, I played Sins of a Solar Empire from closed Beta right on through to the expansion packs. Early on we had finite resources but the game was not 'arcade' like enough, so infinite resources were introduced. Given this change players would just spam whatever was the most efficient unit and rush to field as many of the said units as possible.

The debates on the forums mistakenly placed the spam issue at the given unit that was the flavour of the month. So, the devs would modify armour and weapon stats of units and create a new unit that would become the preferred choice. In terms of that game's patch history, it was the case of constantly tweaking said values and all that happened was that the unit used to spam, would change. The real reason for the spam issue was actually the economy and the existence of infinite resources.

Anyway, just a story but one I think that captures the constant 'tweaking' that we are likely to see with MWO in the future.

EDIT: Oh, any developer that gets unknowingly caught in the cycle of 'balance tweaking' and focuses here too much, is a fool.

Edited by Purplefluffybunny, 28 April 2013 - 01:31 PM.

[Chemie]

slow projectile speed down for PPC and ERPPC....done.

[Inconspicuous]

V1RAL, on 28 April 2013 - 10:30 AM, said:

This is for those who are unhappy with the current meta, or think the meta is stale.
http://www.reddit.co...hange_the_meta/

I suspect this will work as well as shooting all the 3L pilots did (which is to say... not at all - it took HSR and a hitbox fix to change the game balance).

[Teralitha]

Remove double heat sinks problem solved.

[Davers]

Teralitha, on 28 April 2013 - 03:08 PM, said:

Remove double heat sinks problem solved.

Not an option. Sorry. Unless you only want the Clans to have DHS, and theirs are better anyway.

I really think the problem is Battletech. Battletech has some core elements that just don't translate well into a FRS with any degree of customization. Thats why we have the same problems now that pretty much every MW game had.

[krash27]

Davers, on 28 April 2013 - 03:30 PM, said:

Not an option. Sorry. Unless you only want the Clans to have DHS, and theirs are better anyway.

I really think the problem is Battletech. Battletech has some core elements that just don't translate well into a FRS with any degree of customization. Thats why we have the same problems now that pretty much every MW game had.

Not true, the core elements would transfer just fine. The problem is to many people would QQ if only BT variants were available.
The true problem is that the variants have hardpoints, unlike BT where upgrades/changes were not so easy.

Drop back to the BT variants (wont ever happen) and the TT values work. The TT values are useless due to the fact that BT wasn't followed off the start line.

Also, poptarting was not an issue in MW 3. As I recall it was mostly shadow cats running 13 or 14 small lasers. One shot one kill. Poptarts appeared in MW 4 and contributed to its down fall.

Edited by krash27, 28 April 2013 - 04:33 PM.

[V1RAL]

Purplefluffybunny, on 28 April 2013 - 01:23 PM, said:

EDIT: Oh, any developer that gets unknowingly caught in the cycle of 'balance tweaking' and focuses here too much, is a fool.

This solution is a player driven fix not a dev oriented oriented one. It mentions nothing of game balancing, Though some are mentioned in the comments. If the players themselves caused a shift in the meta there wouldn't be any real predictable trend for the first few weeks until a new (and hopefully different) meta is formed.

[Davers]

krash27, on 28 April 2013 - 04:31 PM, said:

Not true, the core elements would transfer just fine. The problem is to many people would QQ if only BT variants were available.
The true problem is that the variants have hardpoints, unlike BT where upgrades/changes were not so easy.

Drop back to the BT variants (wont ever happen) and the TT values work. The TT values are useless due to the fact that BT wasn't followed off the start line.

Also, poptarting was not an issue in MW 3. As I recall it was mostly shadow cats running 13 or 14 small lasers. One shot one kill. Poptarts appeared in MW 4 and contributed to its down fall.

Some BT variants are much better than others. If we only used canon variants there are plenty of mechs that would never be used. Not to mention that TT values for things like ammo would all have to be increased since most mechs come with very little.

[Saint Scarlett Johan]

Meta, the lazy devs word for "unbalanced"

[Surtr]

There is a game that did an excellent job of translating TT into video game. Go look up blender Battletech, also download and play it. The firing is much more random, heat is brutal, and its frustratingly hard. Unfortunately all the l33t hardcore competitive gamers won't stand for any randomness in their video games.

[Blackadder]

Purplefluffybunny, on 28 April 2013 - 01:23 PM, said:

Look, you can never balance a game like this. All you can do is to just keep changing values so that every month or so what is the best option, changes. You then revert back to one of the earlier states and repeat. It is an age old tactic for online games where the system itself is the problem and not the 'entities' within.
.

This is the exact issue, and yet gamers wont grasp it, or cant grasp it. PGI needs to rebuild the core game mechanics, not keep constantly tweeking the weapons systems, because its just changing the FOTM weapon, and all it does is force players to rebuild mechs in order to use the "best" weapon possible.

[Sable Dove]

Wintersdark, on 28 April 2013 - 10:39 AM, said:

...or just wait a week or two, and it'll change again. It always does. *shrugs* I've already found poptarting to be falling off as folks get their shiny new HGN's mastered and learn more effective ways to play them.

Your syntax is wrong.
The metagame in MWO has never changed. It has only been changed. There isn't any normal metagame in MWO, because a metagame is supposed to evolve on its own, without external changes. What MWO has is the flavour of the week. The game is patched, and there is a new most-powerful weapon/build/strategy until the next balance change.

At least since I've started, I have never seen the metagame change without a patch. It takes a short amount of time to find out what's currently overpowered, and how to abuse it. Then PGI nerfs it, or buffs something else, and players find the new overpowered builds for the next two weeks. This is not a metagame.

Poptarting may fall off, but poptarting was only a small part of the issue; the problem currently is ERPPCs being grossly overpowered because of the implementation of HSR.

[Teralitha]

Sigh... PEOPLE.... so friggin dense I swear....

The core of balance in mechwarrior is heat. The balance is destroyed by having 2 sets of heat scales. Remove one of them, and balance can then be achieved. Thats pretty much it.

Remove double heat sinks, problem solved. There should only be 1 kind of heat for which all game balance is centered around... not 2. Single heat sinks gave the game balanced synergy between all classes of mechs, The addition of double heat sinks destroyed it. It just took awhile for this to be realized.

[Anton Shiningstar]

Teralitha, on 29 April 2013 - 04:04 AM, said:

Sigh... PEOPLE.... so friggin dense I swear....

The core of balance in mechwarrior is heat. The balance is destroyed by having 2 sets of heat scales. Remove one of them, and balance can then be achieved. Thats pretty much it.

Remove double heat sinks, problem solved. There should only be 1 kind of heat for which all game balance is centered around... not 2. Single heat sinks gave the game balanced synergy between all classes of mechs, The addition of double heat sinks destroyed it. It just took awhile for this to be realized.

There is only one scale. But two ways to handle that scale.

[Karl Streiger]

Teralitha, on 29 April 2013 - 04:04 AM, said:

Remove double heat sinks, problem solved. There should only be 1 kind of heat for which all game balance is centered around... not 2. Single heat sinks gave the game balanced synergy between all classes of mechs, The addition of double heat sinks destroyed it. It just took awhile for this to be realized.

Increase Heat Cap per installed heatsink over 10 with factor or 2 or 3 - make the base heat cap value chassis dependend
Awesome with 28 SHS could have a Heat Cap of (30+18*2 = 66)
JaegerMech with 10 SHS could have a Heat Cap of (10) - ok we need much cooler Autocannons.
Stalker have with 24 SHS could have a Heat Cap of (20+14*2 = 48
Stalker with 18 DHS could have a Heat Cap of (36)

Increase Heat Dissipation per installed SHS for 0.1 and for 0.2 if it is a DHS.

So still there are kinds of different heat approaches but this time...there is a real difference.

Instead of nerfing buffing removing etc. things you are afraid of try to think about alternatives