13 replies to this topic

[Maerawn]

So i was thinking about how this game related to true combat scenarios in the BT universe, and i thought that in the books and the tv show, that there were times where a MechWarrior was forced into battle with out his mech being completely refit from a previous battle.

Now i know that in this game it would be hard to force a player into a battle with a non optimal mech. Although, what would be possible is having to pay to replace anything short of the actual mech and basic components required for a mech to function, such as arms legs torsos engine with required HSs.

EX: your medium laser was destroyed, Bitching Betty said so. Now you need a new medium laser before your next fight. So you buy a medium laser and it auto equips to where the destroyed one was.

If you alread owned another medium laser there would be no charge, if you didnt own one you could buy on from your merc unit (once they come together completely with CW) at a price set by the commander. Or you could buy one for 75% cost from the mechlab.

This could potentially reduce the amount of expensive PPC boats and other builds from existing due to having to pay for the "repair". If you dont have the C-bills to purchase it then try another weapon or go without until you can like a true Mercenary working contract to contract would have to do.

Now so that you dont penalize players for using these builds i would stipulate that the repair and rearm function only effect a mech dropped into the "Hardcore Mode" the devs recently spoke about in the Ask the devs 40:

Quote

Viper69 : If we are going to be able to choose to play against people using 3PV or not to, how are you going to address the then fractured and smaller groups that then have to wait in queue for a match that meets their perimeters?
A: There will be two modes Normal and Hardcore (FPV) only. We anticipate most players will play the first mode leaving the hardcore mode for the those wanting a challenge. 3PV will be going onto test servers in the next 60 days and we’ll see how it goes from there.

If the mech is damaged and a weapon or item is destroyed in a hardcore match, and the mech is not repaired and rearmed after the match and drops directly into a "normal" match, all weapons and armor are there. the only time you would actively have to repair or rearm your mech was prior to the next "hardcore" drop.

Edited by Maerawn, 20 June 2013 - 03:27 PM.

[Lukoi Banacek]

If the only options for this are your demonstrated scale, the previous version of R&R and Never, I'm forced to go with Never.

p.s. tying R&R to 1PV (Hardcore) and 3PV (normal) modes seems like an absolutely horrific idea and merely penalizes the several thousands of players that have voted for 1PV on multiple threads in this forum and rewards the two guys the Devs talked to on Twitter about why 3PV is important to the game's future. Yes, I'm being a little sarcastic.

Edited by Lukoi, 19 June 2013 - 05:41 PM.

[Levi Porphyrogenitus]

Of the three options Never is the best.

However, I expect R&R to be revisited after CW has been launched. Once players get access to House resources or can set up Mercenary Companies to pool their funds and handle logistics it might well be possible for R&R to make a comeback.

Depending on how R&R winds up looking, salvage rewards might need a significant boost to compensate.

[Syllogy]

No.

[stevemac]

In my view if they bring R&R back it will force people to be more tactful in how they approach there target not just run and shoot everything that moves friend or foe

[FupDup]

stevemac, on 19 June 2013 - 07:17 PM, said:

In my view if they bring R&R back it will force people to be more tactful in how they approach there target not just run and shoot everything that moves friend or foe

Hardly. It'll just make people more likely to shut down in a corner to avoid paying repair bills and not torso twist because that will result in more repair bills than just letting yourself get cored.

[aniviron]

From a purely thematic standpoint, I love repair and rearm.

From a gameplay standpoint, it's a terrible idea.

As Fup says above, it encourages behaviour that makes games less fun. How do I know this? Because I was unlucky enough to be a new player when r&r was still around. I can't tell you the number of times I realized I was going to die, so I just centered my mech and looked straight at my opponent, no longer firing. The other guy was always obliging enough to finish my cored mech instantly. I also remember almost every game ending in a cap win because someone with no weapons and no hope was shut down in an impossible to find spot. This is not the kind of thing we want to encourage our new players to do. It also further incentivises the mentality that the best thing to do is to hang back, and let the noobs on your team take the fire while you sit back and rack up damage and kills at the expense of people who don't know not to get hurt.

But those are just tangential reasons against r&r. Here's the real problem.
The only group of players that gets punished by r&r is new players. I've played a fair amount, and as of this moment I have 181,272,493 cbills. Most other players at my level have similar bankrolls. We can run dhs, endo, and gauss rifles and not care one whit about how much it costs. Hell, if it weren't rude and morally wrong, I could teamkill every match, and I wouldn't even notice the cbill/xp penalty. Again, I distinctly remember being new and letting my hbk-4sp degrade to worse and worse condition, just dropping over and over with the 75% armor and ammo, and 25% internals you got for free. Why? I was poor! I wanted double heatsinks, I wanted endo steel, I wanted more mechs, I wanted bigger engines. So I dropped over and over in a barely functioning mech at my team's expense, because I was tired of losing all my money every match to repair my mech. This wasn't fun for me, and I had teammates who said they reported me to support@mwomercs because they were tired of losing matches to teammates in broken mechs, so I assume it wasn't fun for them either.

The problem with repair and rearm is that it is what as known as a regressive tax; it costs the people who have less money a larger percentage of their income a larger percent than it costs players who have more money. What you end up with is a game where the wealthy players have great gear and keep winning not only because of experience but because they just have better gear and mechs than new players; but really, the playing field should be level for gear, with skill being the primary determinant of who wins a match.

[Asmudius Heng]

aniviron, on 19 June 2013 - 10:34 PM, said:

From a purely thematic standpoint, I love repair and rearm.

From a gameplay standpoint, it's a terrible idea.

As Fup says above, it encourages behaviour that makes games less fun. How do I know this? Because I was unlucky enough to be a new player when r&r was still around. I can't tell you the number of times I realized I was going to die, so I just centered my mech and looked straight at my opponent, no longer firing. The other guy was always obliging enough to finish my cored mech instantly. I also remember almost every game ending in a cap win because someone with no weapons and no hope was shut down in an impossible to find spot. This is not the kind of thing we want to encourage our new players to do. It also further incentivises the mentality that the best thing to do is to hang back, and let the noobs on your team take the fire while you sit back and rack up damage and kills at the expense of people who don't know not to get hurt.

But those are just tangential reasons against r&r. Here's the real problem.
The only group of players that gets punished by r&r is new players. I've played a fair amount, and as of this moment I have 181,272,493 cbills. Most other players at my level have similar bankrolls. We can run dhs, endo, and gauss rifles and not care one whit about how much it costs. Hell, if it weren't rude and morally wrong, I could teamkill every match, and I wouldn't even notice the cbill/xp penalty. Again, I distinctly remember being new and letting my hbk-4sp degrade to worse and worse condition, just dropping over and over with the 75% armor and ammo, and 25% internals you got for free. Why? I was poor! I wanted double heatsinks, I wanted endo steel, I wanted more mechs, I wanted bigger engines. So I dropped over and over in a barely functioning mech at my team's expense, because I was tired of losing all my money every match to repair my mech. This wasn't fun for me, and I had teammates who said they reported me to support@mwomercs because they were tired of losing matches to teammates in broken mechs, so I assume it wasn't fun for them either.

The problem with repair and rearm is that it is what as known as a regressive tax; it costs the people who have less money a larger percentage of their income a larger percent than it costs players who have more money. What you end up with is a game where the wealthy players have great gear and keep winning not only because of experience but because they just have better gear and mechs than new players; but really, the playing field should be level for gear, with skill being the primary determinant of who wins a match.

Extremely well said sir.

[Abledime]

NO and here is why

i love my atlas, I love using the Gauss rifle on it, I don't boat but its as fragile as glass, (might as well be made of glass)
My kill/ death ratio on my atlas is good BUT by the end of most matches the Gauss rifle is destroyed often once all the ammo is used up. If I had to replace a gauss rifle after most matches I would be losing 300k to 400k each match not to mention the cost of the other weapons I may lose, because I have hunted the enemy not hidden away. If I had to replace weapons when lost I would swap to my stalker that uses LRM10s and ML and hardly ever loses weapons 'cos I stay away from the battle and rain down LRM fire on distant targets.

this type of RR would kill game play with most people opting for stock mecks due to lack of funds, while they grind out the Cbills for a new weapon only to lose it on the next lucky shot.

[Modo44]

No. Please remember that we are not fighting an AI, but actual people, and about half of us are losing on a regular basis. You would need really crazy bonuses, including when losing, to keep anyone but the best players happy. When everybody gets freebies all the time, the entire system becomes moot, which is probably why it was removed.

[The Gunman]

Voted for all 3 because I could.

EDIT: I think R&R should be reintroduced but at a very low level, just enough to remind players that XL, Endo, FF, Artemis Ammo, etc are not cheap.

Edited by The Gunman, 20 June 2013 - 04:29 PM.

[Corvus Antaka]

imho R&R should be a baseline from 10,000-50,000 regardless of your mechs loadout. R&R should purely be based on the damage your mech sustains during a fight, and it's wieght class.

Thus, we stop the "he's in c2, kill him" cowardly teammates who suck idiocy, and at the same time bring back some immersion to the game and fun. But overall, unless it's really easy to bring back i'd rather the team just works on other more important features.

[Maerawn]

aniviron, on 19 June 2013 - 10:34 PM, said:

From a purely thematic standpoint, I love repair and rearm.

From a gameplay standpoint, it's a terrible idea.

As Fup says above, it encourages behaviour that makes games less fun. How do I know this? Because I was unlucky enough to be a new player when r&r was still around. I can't tell you the number of times I realized I was going to die, so I just centered my mech and looked straight at my opponent, no longer firing. The other guy was always obliging enough to finish my cored mech instantly. I also remember almost every game ending in a cap win because someone with no weapons and no hope was shut down in an impossible to find spot. This is not the kind of thing we want to encourage our new players to do. It also further incentivises the mentality that the best thing to do is to hang back, and let the noobs on your team take the fire while you sit back and rack up damage and kills at the expense of people who don't know not to get hurt.

But those are just tangential reasons against r&r. Here's the real problem.
The only group of players that gets punished by r&r is new players. I've played a fair amount, and as of this moment I have 181,272,493 cbills. Most other players at my level have similar bankrolls. We can run dhs, endo, and gauss rifles and not care one whit about how much it costs. Hell, if it weren't rude and morally wrong, I could teamkill every match, and I wouldn't even notice the cbill/xp penalty. Again, I distinctly remember being new and letting my hbk-4sp degrade to worse and worse condition, just dropping over and over with the 75% armor and ammo, and 25% internals you got for free. Why? I was poor! I wanted double heatsinks, I wanted endo steel, I wanted more mechs, I wanted bigger engines. So I dropped over and over in a barely functioning mech at my team's expense, because I was tired of losing all my money every match to repair my mech. This wasn't fun for me, and I had teammates who said they reported me to support@mwomercs because they were tired of losing matches to teammates in broken mechs, so I assume it wasn't fun for them either.

The problem with repair and rearm is that it is what as known as a regressive tax; it costs the people who have less money a larger percentage of their income a larger percent than it costs players who have more money. What you end up with is a game where the wealthy players have great gear and keep winning not only because of experience but because they just have better gear and mechs than new players; but really, the playing field should be level for gear, with skill being the primary determinant of who wins a match.

First, I also was a new play back when R&R were around and If your mech was destroyed your repair bill was significantly higher, i agree. This did contribute to the shutting down issue and detriment to new players that it caused. My idea addresses both those concerns with it onlying applying to the hardcore matches. Now i dont know about you but when i am new to a game i dont instantly play the hardest mode possible, i check out normal and see what i can handle. Which is why the R&R would only apply to the Hardcore mode, and if Hardcore mode was only available after you have completed your 25 cadet matches, there would be no impact on the new player.

Secondly, the shutting down issue is addressed with the idea that you dont replace the mech, components (actuators, joints, arms, engines, heat sinks), because they are all automatically given back to you as they are now for free. The only things you have to pay for are ammo, weapons, modules, ECM, and BAP. If you die you dont have to pay more for the chassis as you did in the original, therefore eliminating the shut down problem.

[Haradim]

Unless there was a "Normal" and "Hardcore"¹ C-bill amount per account, this would not really do anything. People would just grind money on "Normal", and play what they like on "Hardcore".

And if the cost of maintenance of the latter was too much, people just wouldn't bother using that mode.

Community Warfare would probably be a better place to re-integrate R & R, as membership in an organization, occupation of territory, and other factors can be invented to ameliorate the new-vs-veteran problem with funding. But for instant action PUGs, people will take the path of least resistance, every time.


¹Which I maintain is a ridiculous and deceptive term.