6 replies to this topic

[Tex1013]

So, a friend and I that are familiar to varying degrees with Mechwarrior games in general, and MWO specifically, were talking to another friend that we haven't seen in awhile, and got to trying to describe MWO to him, and it's high points and low points.

So of course, we went round and round all the various things about MWO that don't work, haven't worked, should work differently, do work differently, and the things that can/would/should draw us to it. We talked about ECM, we talked about missile splash, we talked about heat and fire rates and converting 10s tactical rounds to first-person-shooters, we talked about siesmic and we talked about ecm again (my friend is really, REALLY unhappy about ECM), and so on

and as we talked, and talked about weapon balance, damage, armor, heat, fire rate, ranges, targeting, missiles, splash etc etc etc, something occured to me...

All the time we've spent up through the past few months balancing weapons around damage, fire rates, projectile speed and more, are going to be fundamentally wasted, when we institute key features of community warfare, most especially including decent tactical tools and lance/company-wide communication tools.

my theory is this - LRM's seem to be too weak individually, too powerful in coordination. PPC boat snipers are a little overpowered thanks to weapon convergence in any single mech, but can be violently overpowered with a coordinated team - fast mechs seem to be lately getting less and less popular as moving around the map isn't nearly as useful as lobbing tons of lrms or sniper weapons, but that's because half the groups out there discourage objective capping, primarily because objectives are overly simplistic and unrewarding materially.

Community Warfare is supposed to include a host of tools for more tactical use and requirements for teams - it is, presumably, going to include in-game voice, which is still a big barrier for many players (even though it really isn't that hard to overcome), it's going to include better lance/company-wide coordination tools than are currently provided, it's *hopefully* going to include some serious overhauls to objective modes that will require considerably more work from lights, mediums, heavies and assaults, forcing possible chassis redesigns to be more flexible on the field, etc, etc, etc

right now, we're balancing weapon usage around a painfully scattered player experience. Some players drop in teams of 4, pre-building their mechs to take advantage of each other's builds. Some players drop in teams of 4, don't pre-build their mechs together, but still communicate with each other better than having no voice at all. Some players drop in sets of 2 or 3 and just futz around, but can still communicate. Some people drop in pugs, trying out new chassis, ultimately hampering their own performance as well as their team's (an unavoidable aspect of the buy mechs to level them up test out new builds etc...), some people drop in pugs and just blast away, some people drop in and take objectives without any support from (or sometimes appreciation from) their team, and so on and so forth

and all our builds, and most of our weapons performance feedback, comes from these above experiences. PPC's needed to be more effective, we said, so they made them *terribly* effective - LRMS were too hard to fight against, we (many of us) said, and so the LR-pendulu-M started swinging. But, what's going to happen when we *all* have voice comms with our lances/teams? What happens when the objective modes change dramatically to finally give lights something specific to do? what happens to our loadouts when game matches will take longer, or have to survive multiple drops in succession?

Who the hell knows? I don't? but if the community warfare changes are in any way significant (and they had BETTER be - cuz right now community tools and game objectives are a tragic joke), I suspect it'll have significant effects on what weapons we take, how they get used, and therefore change the balance features dramatically as well.

In short, I think we've wasted FAR too much time balancing weapons, while a huge portion of the game, namely, the community warfare features, are basically barely-existent placeholders, when the final form of the game is going to determine where/how weapons actually need to be balanced. Maybe it's time to wrap a big pretty bow around weapons, do one last final pass, GET THE COMMUNITY WARFARE FEATURES OUT, and THEN go back over weapons after a month or two of seeing where things are *really* broken.

[soarra]

Tex1013, on 01 July 2013 - 12:36 PM, said:

So, a friend and I that are familiar to varying degrees with Mechwarrior games in general, and MWO specifically, were talking to another friend that we haven't seen in awhile, and got to trying to describe MWO to him, and it's high points and low points.

So of course, we went round and round all the various things about MWO that don't work, haven't worked, should work differently, do work differently, and the things that can/would/should draw us to it. We talked about ECM, we talked about missile splash, we talked about heat and fire rates and converting 10s tactical rounds to first-person-shooters, we talked about siesmic and we talked about ecm again (my friend is really, REALLY unhappy about ECM), and so on

and as we talked, and talked about weapon balance, damage, armor, heat, fire rate, ranges, targeting, missiles, splash etc etc etc, something occured to me...

All the time we've spent up through the past few months balancing weapons around damage, fire rates, projectile speed and more, are going to be fundamentally wasted, when we institute key features of community warfare, most especially including decent tactical tools and lance/company-wide communication tools.

my theory is this - LRM's seem to be too weak individually, too powerful in coordination. PPC boat snipers are a little overpowered thanks to weapon convergence in any single mech, but can be violently overpowered with a coordinated team - fast mechs seem to be lately getting less and less popular as moving around the map isn't nearly as useful as lobbing tons of lrms or sniper weapons, but that's because half the groups out there discourage objective capping, primarily because objectives are overly simplistic and unrewarding materially.

Community Warfare is supposed to include a host of tools for more tactical use and requirements for teams - it is, presumably, going to include in-game voice, which is still a big barrier for many players (even though it really isn't that hard to overcome), it's going to include better lance/company-wide coordination tools than are currently provided, it's *hopefully* going to include some serious overhauls to objective modes that will require considerably more work from lights, mediums, heavies and assaults, forcing possible chassis redesigns to be more flexible on the field, etc, etc, etc

right now, we're balancing weapon usage around a painfully scattered player experience. Some players drop in teams of 4, pre-building their mechs to take advantage of each other's builds. Some players drop in teams of 4, don't pre-build their mechs together, but still communicate with each other better than having no voice at all. Some players drop in sets of 2 or 3 and just futz around, but can still communicate. Some people drop in pugs, trying out new chassis, ultimately hampering their own performance as well as their team's (an unavoidable aspect of the buy mechs to level them up test out new builds etc...), some people drop in pugs and just blast away, some people drop in and take objectives without any support from (or sometimes appreciation from) their team, and so on and so forth

and all our builds, and most of our weapons performance feedback, comes from these above experiences. PPC's needed to be more effective, we said, so they made them *terribly* effective - LRMS were too hard to fight against, we (many of us) said, and so the LR-pendulu-M started swinging. But, what's going to happen when we *all* have voice comms with our lances/teams? What happens when the objective modes change dramatically to finally give lights something specific to do? what happens to our loadouts when game matches will take longer, or have to survive multiple drops in succession?

Who the hell knows? I don't? but if the community warfare changes are in any way significant (and they had BETTER be - cuz right now community tools and game objectives are a tragic joke), I suspect it'll have significant effects on what weapons we take, how they get used, and therefore change the balance features dramatically as well.

In short, I think we've wasted FAR too much time balancing weapons, while a huge portion of the game, namely, the community warfare features, are basically barely-existent placeholders, when the final form of the game is going to determine where/how weapons actually need to be balanced. Maybe it's time to wrap a big pretty bow around weapons, do one last final pass, GET THE COMMUNITY WARFARE FEATURES OUT, and THEN go back over weapons after a month or two of seeing where things are *really* broken.

The biggest problem is that they changed weapon damage due to the mess of a netcode.. Now that the hit detection is a bit better than it was (still not great) they need to put ppc heat back to what it was.

ECM - theres enough counters to pretty much negate this now so IMO its a non issue

Convergence - Needs to be fixed so not every weapon hits same spot

Boating - We need to use a Critical slot system . This semi omni mech custimization is a joke

Unless weapons are somewhat balanced community warfare will just be the ppc joke that this game is now

Seismic- needs to only work when your mech is standing still and at half the range ( or longer update intervals)

Lrms- are ok damage wise but need to hit CT less when using Artemis and tag
an organized group can be devastating with lrms in pug matches , then again 8 mechs working together with all machine guns can probably win in pug matches

Edited by soarra, 01 July 2013 - 12:44 PM.

[Nicholas Carlyle]

soarra, on 01 July 2013 - 12:42 PM, said:

The biggest problem is that they changed weapon damage due to the mess of a netcode.. Now that the hit detection is a bit better than it was (still not great) they need to put ppc heat back to what it was.

ECM - theres enough counters to pretty much negate this now so IMO its a non issue

Convergence - Needs to be fixed so not every weapon hits same spot

Boating - We need to use a Critical slot system . This semi omni mech custimization is a joke

Unless weapons are somewhat balanced community warfare will just be the ppc joke that this game is now

Seismic- needs to only work when your mech is standing still and at half the range ( or longer update intervals)

Lrms- are ok damage wise but need to hit CT less when using Artemis and tag
an organized group can be devastating with lrms in pug matches , then again 8 mechs working together with all machine guns can probably win in pug matches

I disagree with ECM it's still stupidly powerful. And aside from BAP the counters suck. Right now we are just seeing EVERYONE with PPC's which is cutting ECM down a bit. But that will change.

And you forgot that LRM's STINK in high end 8v8 play.

I agree, dominant against pugs when you are in a good 4 man. But like you said, even MG's can be.

Rest is pretty spot on.

I still think halving heat cap and upping dissipation is important too.

[Homeless Bill]

You realize that's exactly what they're doing right? It's not like they've been focusing on balance. SRMs have been **** for over two months, and PGI still won't touch them.

No need to worry about them pouring all their time into the major features - that's exactly what's happening.

[Tezcatli]

In the NGNG 79 podcast. They had the president of PGI on. He said that a different team handles the CW development. So this would lead me to believe that the people who work on live balance are, more then likely, also a different team. It's not going to speed it up very much given they've got a team already working on it.

Personally I think it is worth tweaking and tuning the weapons balance.

Edited by Tezcatli, 01 July 2013 - 01:10 PM.

[Tex1013]

honestly, that sounds like an even worse idea...the bit around separating the community warfare team and the basic play-mechanics team. Lets make the team that creates the objective and strategic side of the game completely disconnected from the team that develops the game mechanics that drive each individual player gameplay experience? I'll grant, I'm not in software development, but that doesn't sound wise to me.

Now, if, for some reason, your company, your internal employees, have a FANTASTIC history of inter-departmental collaboration, then kudos, and I will happily await the other half of Mechwarrior that we haven't seen happily married to the mess of MWO that we currently play. But, I've worked in several companies, and in none of them would I describe inter-departmental collaboration as FANTASTIC, and most corporate mentality doesn't seem to encourage one team working exceptionally well with another team. Of course, it's possible I've just worked with lousy companies, so I'm happy to be proven wrong

complaints about any specific imbalance isn't really the focus of this thread - there are plenty of other threads for that - this is just a concern that virtually all the balancing we do now is going to be heavily invalidated once community warfare comes out, assuming community warfare really expands the scope of game objectives and team coordination. If it doesn't, then you're right, things won't change much, but then again, if the current state of team coordination and game objectives is the way it's always going to be, I'm leaving.

[Ralgas]

Tezcatli, on 01 July 2013 - 01:09 PM, said:

In the NGNG 79 podcast. They had the president of PGI on. He said that a different team handles the CW development. So this would lead me to believe that the people who work on live balance are, more then likely, also a different team. It's not going to speed it up very much given they've got a team already working on it.

Personally I think it is worth tweaking and tuning the weapons balance.

he also mentioned the ecm meta and how feature added organically put it back in a reasonable place. They are aware of what's going on out here (he even made ref's to ppc sniping) but they've still got to see what happens with other features 1st. CW would be a big part of this.
He also mentioned not outwardly expressing "this is op" from a dev point of view as it skews data on what people "are" using as opposed to what it is "perceived" people are using. They may very well agree but in the end they aren't going to admit it to tip things into "lurmaggedon" with the current op mechanic

I for one am rather intrigued about how the movement penalties are going to affect the hill poppers, i forsee in a lot of cases it's going to drop their rof if not remove several places it happens in maps now. It's not going to stop ppc boats, but it may put them out in the open a lot more, and also means they are exposed more when trying to get a shot.

Edited by Ralgas, 01 July 2013 - 01:41 PM.