Roughneck45, on 03 June 2013 - 10:13 AM, said:
The point is to have a fair and balanced competitive multiplayer game, not RP battles where having a blue fist logo means you get another 250 tons for your side.
RP fights are well and good, and hopefully we will have custom lobbies so that units who want to do so can. However, the matchmaker should strive for balance at all times, not RP.
Even then - you could potentially balance that with a greater number of opponents. A pair of Jenners can really put the hurt on if the pilots are decent. I'd argue it's a geometric expansion of capability, actually - it makes it far easier to put those weapons onto the most vulnerable armor section and puts 20-30 additional heatsinks against a mech with fixed numbers.
I think the problem isn't so much in the matchmaker, but in the current mechanics (as I've already stated).
Garbage in - garbage out.
The reason the match maker is pairing so many assaults on a map is because that's all its given. Everyone wants to play their 1337 sniper turrett... made possible by no-penalty 150% HC spikes, pinpoint convergence (not necessarily -the- problem, but it's a factor to be considered in adjustment mechanics), and the fact that you can actually hit what you shoot at, now (Host state rewind... which is -not- a problem).
If you removed the option between conquest and domination - you'd probably see a lot of that go away, because those builds are only so realistic for such maps (particularly since the pace of battle has slowed way down as everyone walks in shadows of cover). But I don't see that as a real option, either.
The challenge is to make sniping a valid build but not the -only- valid build. Mediums get slaughtered. Lights kind of get by on luck and the fact that they can strike at rear armor (which as gotten very thin since most people put it on the front... where the incoming PPCs go).
Part of the solution will be more comprehensive hardpoints. The Awesome is, well, awesome because it is one of the few mechs designed to sport 3 PPCs. The Madcat Mk II was ****-your-pants scary because it packed two gauss rifles, ran at the speeds of IS heavies, had Jumpjets, a 20 missile volley, and enough medium lasers to make you think very carefully about how you were going to deal with it.
Granted - that is only possible because of clan components - but you get the idea: mechs have a sort of personality or character to them. The current hardpoint-and-critical system doesn't do much to preserve those personalities and invites very troublesome builds that were permissable in tabletop battletech... but didn't come with the same consequences (a 6 PPC stalker didn't necessarily put all of those PPCs in one spot - couldn't even try to unless it had a targetting computer equipped - which took up extra criticals and tonnage for each weapon tied into the system).
Say what you will about MechWarrior 4's hardpoint system... it was a much better way to go about mech configuration/custization than what we see, now (and would have seen if we were to go with the infinite customization possibilities in MechWarrior 3).
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