132 replies to this topic

[Hell in a Helmet]

How about this for PPC's ... Regular PPC has same states as before but causes zero damage to opponent under 90m. Damage instead is reverted back to you based on distance with 10pts to yourself at 10m or less to 1pt at 80 to 90m. (Due to lack of field inhibitor or however the lore explains it.) ERPPC's work like regular PPC's now with no damage to yourself under 90 but damage goes from 1 to 10 based on 90m. Forces boats to widen their weapon choice to handle enemy up close. If not they die quickly from a decent MechWarrior who closes in just like on a LRM boat.

[Raso]

DV McKenna, on 29 June 2013 - 04:13 AM, said:

There was no fixing needed, your playing by some make believe rules/honor code that only serve to gimp yourself.

Let me tell you a story about make believe rules or honor.
I was in a fighting game tournament once way back in the day. Nothing too fancy or official, mind you, it was in a tent at some state fair and it was long before the days of MLG.

No where in the rules did it state that you could not physically interfere with the hardware. No where did it explicitly state that you could not walk over to the console and unplug your opponent's game controller then proceed to whoop his a$$ while he tries to get the controller plugged back in.

So, tell me, when some kid went ahead and did just that because the rules didn't clearly state you couldn't were the tournament staff unjustified in kicking him out? Were all of the other scrubs playing with imaginary rules that prevented them from using all of their available tools to win at all costs? Was he some champion of play to win mentality being repressed by some scrubs with their baby rules or was he just some a$$ hole?

Now don't get me wrong, I get that it's PGI's fault for not properly balancing the game. My point is more to the fact that you people have a seriously messed up set of values and you like to parade around like you're some kind of repressed and misunderstood champions of freedom of good. You're not. If the EULA didn't have rules against hacking the game to change damage and heat values not a single one of you would think twice before doing it. That's the problem with the play to win crowd, they're only concerned with one thing and there is nothing they won't ruin or defile to achieve that victory. That's nothing to be proud of. In fact it's quite a petty and narrow minded way to view entertainment and sports.

Edited by Raso, 29 June 2013 - 10:55 AM.

[PEEFsmash]

Every PGI employee should have their Elo artifically boosted to match the Elos of the top 1% of this game, and they should play there for a month. I would love to see what they think of that experience, and how it would change their view on balance.

Edited by PEEFsmash, 29 June 2013 - 10:53 AM.

[Oderint dum Metuant]

Raso, on 29 June 2013 - 10:40 AM, said:

Let me tell you a story about make believe rules or honor.
I was in a fighting game tournament once way back in the day. Nothing too fancy or official, mind you, it was in a tent at some state fair and it was long before the days of MLG.

No where in the rules did it state that you could not physically interfere with the hardware. No where did it explicitly state that you could not walk over to the console and unplug your opponent's game controller then proceed to whoop his a$$ while he tries to get the controller plugged back in.

So, tell me, when some kid went ahead and did just that because the rules didn't clearly state you couldn't were the tournament staff unjustified in kicking him out? Were all of the other scrubs playing with imaginary rules that prevented them from using all of their available tools to win at all costs? Was he some champion of play to win mentality being repressed by some scrubs with their baby rules or was he just some a$$ hole?

Now don't get me wrong, I get that it's PGI's fault for not properly balancing the game. My point is more to the fact that you people have a seriously messed up set of values and you like to parade around like you're some kind of repressed and misunderstood champions of freedom of good. You're not. If the EULA didn't have rules against hacking the game to change damage and heat values not a single one of you would think twice about doing it. That's the problem with the play to win crowd, they're only concerned with one thing and there is nothing they won't ruin or defile to achieve that victory. That's nothing to be proud of. In fact it's quite a petty and narrow minded way to view entertainment and sports.

Funny story, and no they weren't unjustified, I'd be surprised in there wasn't something even vaguely in the rules.

But no your not entirely correct about the play to win crowd, having your efforts devalued because you cheated is not exactly what your striving for.
And mud sticks, so once your discovered you'll lose all credibility, I can point you at several units and players who have been removed from other games for cheating that now play here.
They may be playing by the rules now, but people will always suspect.

Playing to win is not petty or narrow minded, it's about dedication and competition and aiming to show you and your team are the best.
To do that you have to win, and to do so credibly win without cheating.

[Zerstorer Stallin]

Great post and 100% correct. Its just one sign in many that PGI or who every is directing them isn't up to the task.

[Raso]

DV McKenna, on 29 June 2013 - 10:56 AM, said:

Funny story, and no they weren't unjustified, I'd be surprised in there wasn't something even vaguely in the rules.

But no your not entirely correct about the play to win crowd, having your efforts devalued because you cheated is not exactly what your striving for.

......................

......................

Playing to win is not petty or narrow minded, it's about dedication and competition and aiming to show you and your team are the best.
To do that you have to win, and to do so credibly win without cheating.

If the rules don't say you can't it's not cheating.

I fail to see how modding a game when a game's EULA does not say you can't qualifies as cheating. It sounds, to me at least, that you've set up some made up rules to ensure that there is some sort of standard by which all actions can be compared to. How is that different than some one exploiting an in game glitch to get an upper hand? I mean, if they didn't want you exploiting that glitch they would fix it, right?

My point being this. You have also set up and constructed rules which are made up. You have your own set of imaginary values and boundaries which you could but would not cross. Where does a game's boundaries start and end? You say that altering a game's programming devaluate's one's skills and I agree. But to play devil's advocate here I also think that only using the very best and most 1 dimensional mechs also devaluate's one's skills.

People keep saying that the difference between a good player and a poor player is that a good player in a stock mech can run circles around a poor player in a "cheese" or FotM build. While I'm sure that's the case how many actually do this? How many of these super skilled players push themselves by using a less than optimal build to challenge themselves? It's like using weighted training cloths in martial arts. Clearly in an official competition you'll want to bring your A game and that means your very best mechs. But when you already have a billion C-bills, 100 mechs and more guns and ammo than you know what to do with what is there left to prove by playing on everyone else's level?

Some one before was saying the problem is people play to win and not play to compete and I tend to agree. For me, at least, there is no point in a victory if I'm not playing the mechs I enjoy playing. If I'm forced shoehorn myself into a certain role just to win there's no enjoyment for to be had. I play to improve my self, just like you folks do, but I also never put victory before my own preferences or play style. If I can't win playing the mechs I want to play then there is no point in playing. So I improve myself and my mech bit by bit but I do so with out going full cheese. Because the second I can no longer compete with out going full cheese than there is no longer any appeal to me in this game. This is why we need balance to be made in favor of more verity because no one wants to play a game where you're told you can experiment but you're punished for not playing the same 4 mechs everyone else is playing.

[PEEFsmash]

Raso, on 29 June 2013 - 11:23 AM, said:

If the rules don't say you can't it's not cheating.

Let's say I'm a competitive runner in the Olympics. I really want to get the gold. Would it be cheating for me to call in a sniper to kill all of the other runners? There is nothing in the rules about it! Because I came up with this little possibility, does this undermine the competitive runners who want to win?

[Nik Reaper]

Indeed, and one thing to consider is this, yes perfect balance or all things equal is not an real option or it would get stale, counter play is an option but they don't seem to have a good grasp how to implement it so what is the aimed target ?

Even when there is an op item in the game that op item is only 3~5% more powerful than the rest and should have a bit more skill to use it , but even so that means that a build centered around it will only have a small advantage , so that even if the FOTM doesn't fit your play style you will only have an objectively slight lesser chance to win instead of being steamrolled by the 100% better FOTM as it is now...

[ExAstris]

Gotta say the OP is on to something.

I don't know how, but the Devs clearly push through ideas that aren't balanced, and have fairly obvious ideas about how it should be used, but often ignore how it is used, even when that use is horrendously detrimental to the game.

ECM is a prime example. Its still a hilariously powerful piece of equipment and every one of my ECM mechs has K/D and W/L ratios far in excess of other variants of the same mech, even if those other variants are blatantly better or equivalent in every other way (3M vs 2A). And all data comes from AFTER the BAP change (I literally quit the game for 3 months due to fail-balance burnout, and didn't start playing again until I heard they were finally adding a hardcounter to ECM (which wasn't enough). Furthermore, its not likely I'm a low ELO player)



So yeah, PGI has some great visions for where they want this game to go, and I commend them on the vast majority of the work they've done and 9/10 of the decisions they make in general. But their horrendous response times to the balance concerns we have now (and some we have had since closed beta) are genuinely frustrating.



EDIT. Constructive Criticism for PGI: Just admit that some of your ideas didn't pan out into good gameplay. The stealth field and total missile lock jamming of ECM. The micro boosting of Machine Guns wasn't, and still isn't enough. The heat efficiencies of PPCs went too far making them better brawler weapons than SRMs (lol).

And most importantly, do something about THOSE problems. Please stop adding more patchwork that only mitigates the problems and actually fix the problem at the source (remove the ECM stealth field and total cancelling of mech's ability to lock, buff Machine gun damage to 1.4dps and see if they're even close to overpowered yet, turn back PPC heat some before you try to implement an alpha strike penalty across the board (which really should be done for each individual mech, not global weapon types regardless of mech. Otherwise we'll just end up with tons of 2x PPC 1x gauss doing exactly what the 4ppc boats do now)).

Edited by ExAstris, 29 June 2013 - 01:58 PM.

[Mystere]

DV McKenna, on 29 June 2013 - 05:03 AM, said:

It's cheese to you and others, because you play by invisible rules and a code of honor that does not exist, anyone that does not adopt your rules and approach to the game are playing "cheese" builds and "gaming" elo.

Instead what they are actually doing, is playing to win, and taking what gives them the best opportunity to do that.

That is fine and is perfectly acceptable. But, as Ralgas has stated, they also put themselves in Elo hell. And as far as I am concerned, they can all stay with Sokar for as long as they want.

On the other hand, you must have already realized that there are some of us here who are what I would call "partial masochists". For those players (yours truly included) winning is not the ultimate goal. It's having fun killing cheese while not using cheese ourselves.

[jakucha]

jeffsw6, on 29 June 2013 - 08:50 AM, said:

I disagree. What PGI keeps doing is adding complexity so they don't have to admit that simple values are broken, or features they have introduced (ECM) need re-working.

Complexity is what makes it hard to balance a game. Right now, MW:O has very little complexity; but when they invest time and money into adding some new, complex thing, they will never want to remove it because they spent time/money. Taking it back out would be admitting that the time/money investment was a mistake.

They couldn't admit ECM was over-powered, even though an incredibly small fraction of available mechs could equip ECM. They couldn't even admit MG damage was too low or that their critical hit system is not suited to making a "crit seeking" weapon that doesn't do any damage.

You think they will be willing to take the heat-scaling system back out after it doesn't fix PPCs, in other words, does nothing but gimp 6ML Jenners and ****? No, of course they won't. Because that would require PGI to admit an obvious error predicted by many on this forum, not just since Paul announced their intent to make this change, but since FOREVER. People have ALWAYS said this type of simultaneous-fire heat-scaling system would be stupid.

They don't need to take out the entire heat system, they need to expand and tweak it. The simultaneous-fire heat scaling system idea for certain weapons is an idea for just that, certain weapons. It wouldn't hurt stuff like ML and SL alpha because those aren't really a problem. It was also specifically stated to be just an idea and not locked in. Individual tuning towards most of the alpha spam weapons is also probably required anyway.

You say they've kept adding complexity, but I haven't seen anything very intricate. Not only could an augmented heat system add reasonable complexity and put the game closer to a sim-like state, it could potentially make the game more interesting while also aiding in balance if done right. Things like affecting aim and causing internal damage, all stuff players on the forums tend to approve of from what I've read.

They've started buffing the lame weapons like MG now that bigger portions of the netcode are fixed up, as well as prepping pulse lasers for tweaks. It's likely slow and incremental as to not create more potential OP-PPC spam situations that would break the game even more; something they want to avoid doubly as they near going gold. Another factor of balancing has to do with the rate they can get the rest of the weapon netcode working as intended.

You also seem to be basing much of your argument on the basis that the entirety of PGI is immature. In the end that's all opinion, something I don't care about either way and a diversion of the subject, closer to attacking their personal character.

And they don't like to publicly claim a weapon is overpowered for this reason:

• 
  They don't publicly release weapon usage metrics or talk about weapon imbalance because it drives the data. If they come out and say weapon X is most popular, it will spike the usage even more so.

Edited by jakucha, 29 June 2013 - 12:01 PM.

[Raso]

PEEFsmash, on 29 June 2013 - 11:33 AM, said:

Let's say I'm a competitive runner in the Olympics. I really want to get the gold. Would it be cheating for me to call in a sniper to kill all of the other runners? There is nothing in the rules about it! Because I came up with this little possibility, does this undermine the competitive runners who want to win?

It's not undermining them. They have set up these imaginary rules that they can't do exactly what you are doing. If they want to be competitive they need to get with the meta! It's their own fault for not playing to win.

[Accursed Richards]

Mystere, on 29 June 2013 - 11:42 AM, said:

That is fine and is perfectly acceptable. But, as Ralgas has stated, they also put themselves in Elo hell. And as far as I am concerned, they can all stay with Sokar for as long as they want.

On the other hand, you must have already realized that there are some of us here who are what I would call "partial masochists". For those players (yours truly included) winning is not the ultimate goal. It's having fun killing cheese while not using cheese ourselves.

Really, it shouldn't be up to players to refrain from breaking the game and "play nice", because arguments come up when people have different definitions of what nice is If unfun but legal tactics are the best way to win, then the problem is with the game that allows and rewards those tactics.

[xengk]

Adridos, on 29 June 2013 - 02:28 AM, said:

Delete 99% of the mechs...

Competitive means perfection... perfection means monotomy... monotomy means one perfect mech that is balanced and the only real mech in the game.

I dread the day when the server is populated by nothing but 6PPC Stalker.
12 vs 12 will be 3 lances of Stalker on both side lining up and taking turn at alpha-shutdown-startup

[Xie Belvoule]

jeffsw6, on 29 June 2013 - 02:22 AM, said:

I've recently been thinking about why PGI makes such blatantly bad balance choices; why they don't understand that some mechs are trash; what game are they playing, because it definitely isn't the same one we all are.

I think their issue is idealism. They envision a balance/mechanic change, and they think players should embrace it in a certain way.

What they don't think is, how will players who want to maximize their chances of winning modify their mechs or tactics in response to a balance/meta change.

Garth, for example, is known for expressing that PPC sniping must be boring, and not understanding why people play that way. Well, because that maximizes your chances of winning. If Garth had a high enough ELO to be in PPC-boat-filled matches all day, I bet he would rage/quit too.

The problem is where PGI is hanging out and who they are hanging out with (NGNG). If you look hard enough you can see the mast of the NGNG studio's radio tower sticking out just about.....

[Hellen Wheels]

DV McKenna, on 29 June 2013 - 04:13 AM, said:

....your playing by some make believe rules/honor code ....

By Kerensky, you're right. I'm playing MechWarrior.

Not cheesewarrior.

[MustrumRidcully]

jeffsw6, on 29 June 2013 - 02:22 AM, said:

I've recently been thinking about why PGI makes such blatantly bad balance choices; why they don't understand that some mechs are trash; what game are they playing, because it definitely isn't the same one we all are.

I think their issue is idealism. They envision a balance/mechanic change, and they think players should embrace it in a certain way.

What they don't think is, how will players who want to maximize their chances of winning modify their mechs or tactics in response to a balance/meta change.

Garth, for example, is known for expressing that PPC sniping must be boring, and not understanding why people play that way. Well, because that maximizes your chances of winning. If Garth had a high enough ELO to be in PPC-boat-filled matches all day, I bet he would rage/quit too.

Their problem is they make these modifications with an idealized view of what players should do, without realizing that players will do whatever they CAN do to kill and win. Anybody playing PGI's "ideal" tactics and mechs will suffer a disproportionate number of losses because the first player-group have superior armaments and methods.

Idealism leads us to do dumb things in the real-world. For example, ship a bunch of food to poor African nations, thinking it will help the common people. Nope, much of the time, that food ends up under the control of corrupt government, or worse, warlords, who use it to control the hungry population even more than they already do.

I believe one of the biggest problems is that shipping food there means there is less value in growing it themselves. Sometimes to the point that imports undercut local prices, making it impossible for local farmers to survive on their job.
[/ProbablyNotATopicForGameBalance]

Quote

The straight poop is you must balance the game with the competitive player in mind. If you do that, then all players will benefit, because the game will have reasonable equipment. Don't just expect enough people to go "I really like using a combination of missiles and AC/10s" even though that is ******* stupid. Those people won't like their LRM+AC/10 mechs after getting stomped in every game.

Remember what Lord Vetinari did with the Ankh Morpork Rat Problem.

Spoiler

The city had a rat plague, and so they paid people for every dead rat they could bring to the city. But people kept coming with dead rats and it didn't seem to help.
Lord Vetinari was asked what to do, and he said: "Tax the Rat Farms."
A mind so sharp you could cut yourself, I tell you.

People min/max. Not everyone, not everyone to the same degree, but people min/max.. They don't play the game how you want them to play it, they play the game in the manner they enjoy it the most, and in a PvP game, this usually means the way it means winning.

We've seen the same thing happening with R&R.
The noble goal might have been to encourage use of low level tech, lighter mechs, encourage smart tactics and what not.
But what actually happened was that people abused the system as good as they could. People used trial mechs and just farmed money, avoiding R&R entirely. The safeguards build in so that no one would ever be unable to play were used to get around most of the rearm and repair cost. People that didn't use trial mechs did enter matches damaged and just suicided or went AFK. People that didn't want to suicide/trial farm or AFK farm went for cap rushing instead.
All because people wanted to min/max their income so they could finally buy their optimum mech and field it in as many battles as they wanted thanks to a nice C-Bill cushion. Or they did it to rebuild a C-Bill cushion for their ideal mech.
All in all, this wrecked the actual enjoyment for people that just wanted a good stompy robot fight, because no matter how important capping might be as a tactical element - a match without mechs shooting at each other is a waste of time. (And not just because it wasn't spend on trying to cure cancer.)

In this case, PGI did act,and cut out R&R. Some people - and maybe even PGI devs - still miss it, but finding a way to get the good (immersion, smart tactics) without the bad we've seen or new bad is... challenging. The PGI devs didn't seem to feel up to it back then.


---

So, back to game balance. I guess you can see that idealization there, too.

The whole heat system might be in the state it is because PGI wanted heat to be more important. Maybe they really screwed up, but it seems to me they really didn't want heat neutral or close-to-heat neutral mechs. We produce 2.5 times or more the heat our mechs would in the TT, but still sink the same amount.
What they now get is people that work within their available heat cap and the bit of dissipation hey have to deal enough damage to kill an enemy before they overheat. And they have completely wrecked any semblance of weapon balance they could have imported from the table top due to that.

And you also see this appeal to idealism elsewhere - not from PGI, but from fellow players. So many argue for stricter hard point restrictions, but seem to willfully ignore that most systems they came up with actually would allow future canon mechs to still do all the "evil" things they don't want to see. SOme seem to believe it's okay ,"if only a few can do it", but that is an idealistic stance - in the real, harsh world of competitive PvP, players will just drive the mech that can do these evil things and dtich the others, which will hurt variety even more than it is. I'd rather have 3 completely different mechs used to boat 4+ PPCs, then only one. In the perfectly balanced game, every mech could take this load, but only very few would hold it - not because it's underpowered, but because there are so many viable alternatives.

Of course, perfect balance is also a bit idealistic - you'll never really get there. But you can get closer.

[MustrumRidcully]

PEEFsmash, on 29 June 2013 - 11:33 AM, said:

Let's say I'm a competitive runner in the Olympics. I really want to get the gold. Would it be cheating for me to call in a sniper to kill all of the other runners? There is nothing in the rules about it! Because I came up with this little possibility, does this undermine the competitive runners who want to win?

It would be cheating, because it's illegal to hire snipers to kill people. Such competitions are not held in the vacuum, they are held on the soil of nations that usually don't allow such things.

[Raso]

MustrumRidcully, on 29 June 2013 - 01:23 PM, said:

It would be cheating, because it's illegal to hire snipers to kill people. Such competitions are not held in the vacuum, they are held on the soil of nations that usually don't allow such things.

The absurdity of the situation of his comparison aside I still say any runner who refuse to adopt to the "snipe your competition" meta are playing with made up rules. And when the Olympics finally do change that rule it'll be seen as giving in to all of the crying from the "no snipe cheese" crowd. The most successful (and hence most competitive) runners will cry that the game is no longer about "skill" because the Olympics nerfed the single greatest tool they had at their disposal.

It's not about competing. It's about winning. It's only about winning. It will always be about winning. Fun has no place in the discussion. Self improvement is just a means to an end and playing is never it's own reward. It's not about getting better, it's about winning. If you can win with out getting better you take that avenue and you run with it until you can run with it no more.

You like piloting Hunchback 4SPs? Tough {Shazbot} grab an Highlander PPC/Gauss sniper and learn to play. You like lasers? Tough s#it they're not optimal get some PPCs you scrub. You like brawling and CQB? Tough **** learnt to snipe because you're a detriment to your entire team. This is the sad, sad existence of the play to win crowd. Always playing the same mech all the time because it's the best, only experimenting briefly after a patch and constantly having to toss their own opinions and preferences out of the window all for the glory of victory.

This is why I say we need to balance against the ultra high tier, competitive people. Make it so that no single mech or weapon is king. Make it near impossible for there to be any one mech or weapon that is always good at doing everything. Force variety upon us, challenge us to make sacrifices and meaningful decisions when designing a load out. Every time the upper echelon start to all use the same 3 mechs and load outs find out why and balance it out and keep doing that until everything is viable and everything has a role and a use on the battlefield.

[Deathlike]

jakucha, on 29 June 2013 - 11:43 AM, said:

And they don't like to publicly claim a weapon is overpowered for this reason:

• 
  
  
  They don't publicly release weapon usage metrics or talk about weapon imbalance because it drives the data. If they come out and say weapon X is most popular, it will spike the usage even more so.

They say that, but w/o knowing the metrics, PPCs are at the top or near top of the list (above or behind medium lasers). It doesn't take a genius to figure out a meta that has been ongoing since the major missile nerf of March.

Just because "you fear" the implications of the metrics, doesn't mean you should do NOTHING about the problem at hand. With most of the player base, I'm pretty sure the majority does not want this to continue further than it should have (3 months and counting). People will take whatever everyone else is carrying to be reasonably competitive, if not just survive this meta. You don't need stats to confirm or change this behavior further.

It's kinda like saying the Titanic (PGI) can't be sunk, only to have hit that iceberg of duh (PPCs) and tell everyone everything is "working as intended™".

Edited by Deathlike, 29 June 2013 - 03:23 PM.