158 replies to this topic

[Wired]

Purlana, on 07 July 2013 - 12:00 PM, said:

I don't think anyone enjoyed R&R. Also you would need to bump rewards per match by 2x or higher in order to offset R&R. Even then energy builds would probably benefit the most.

Plenty of people enjoyed rnr. it brought a dynamic to the game outside of kill mech, collect paycheck.

The only people who didnt like rnr, where the ones who really wanted this meta where you could field something like a 6 ppc stalker and get away with it. If you bought into the hype, oh well.

Someone mentioned that rnr was exploitable...No, what was exploitable was the rewards system which gave you money regardless of if you won or lost, and the welfare ammo/repairs. And the only people who abused them where the same people complaining. Go figure.

[Ghogiel]

R&R as was implimented before was totally fubar.

similar concepts have been used as a balancing factor in games with great success. But I doubt it will ever really work good in MWO as it stands. I feel that people would QQ hard if things really were persistent like in Eve, losing a mech permanently after it is destroyed wouldn't sit well and may well promote the type of play that doesn't get much love. ie staying alive at all costs.

Edited by Ghogiel, 08 July 2013 - 03:06 AM.

[Plyphon]

I'm a new player - 2 weeks old.

Played MW4 quite a bit in my younger years.

What I really enjoy about this game is how quickly you can get into combat and piloting a mech you've crafted.

R&R would just put up another barrier to getting into that combat. The fun in this game isn't staring at the launch screen - it's piloting mechs!

Getting over the rubbish trial mechs was bad enough, but with my cadet bonus and some determination (I loved MW4 and had heard good things..!) I now have 3 of my own mechs fully built to my spec.

MMORPG is over, a done trend. Skyrim will flop fantastically just as SWOTOR did. People just want to play fun games. Adding barriers and mechanics that feed the grind-fest style of MMORPG is a way to kill a game.

Balance is a fine art that will take ages in a game as complicated at MWO, but if TF2 can do it with the sheer mind boggling array of weapons they have, these guys can do it too - it just wont be a 3D recreation of the TT (which i don't think is a bad thing. If people wanted to play the TT they would play the TT...)

I highly doubt I would of made it into my 2nd week of play if there was any more grind style mechanics in place. The current rate I get CBIlls is just on the edge of "Yeah that's a worth while goal for my precious time." but is almost certainly near the "Life is too short to play that much for THAT reward." level - for myself.

[Inkarnus]

getting cbills with an actual farming mech with RandR
was hillarious easy and effective
now u need like 3-5 decent games to get the same
amount of Cbills far enough to get anything you
wantet as fast as you wantet
e.g. do i want to play my fav mech
and get decent money
or my grinder
or the XL uber mech were i get out even at a win
it was up to you
your choice
now in this meta you need to GO BIG OR GO HOME PPC edition ™
since just a unintellgent player would stick to anything
that is not an assault mech
because of all the drawbacks this meta has atm

Edited by Inkarnus, 08 July 2013 - 04:17 AM.

[Accursed Richards]

MustrumRidcully, on 08 July 2013 - 01:05 AM, said:

If I was a real world mercenary, I would not take a job that puts me in a fight against another group of enemies that have the same skill level as my team and similar equipment.
That would be a fair fight. Fair fights are for games, but not for war, nor a simulation of war.

If you have a choice whether to fight or not to fight, you shouldn't fight at odds of 50:50. The odds must be in your favor.

Plus which, it seems implausible that mercenaries wouldn't have their running costs factored into their contract. Or else they'd have no protection against being expended against the enemy instead of their employer's troops.

[Warge]

RnR - is a good way to balance powerfull weapons and builds usage. But it's a lot of work to do, I suspect.

[Ozric]

RnR was so bad, so very very bad. It penalized ammo based weapons for no extra benefit and further marginalized the humble pug because you had to run an 'economical' build. Those fine fellows who only play when grouped of course had a higher W/L and were able to afford better mechs, but what's the point of spending money on a variant just for it to sit in the garage?

Pointless feature that had no place in MWO, only there as a hang over from PvE mechwarrior titles, and it didn't balance a thing.

Edited by Ozric, 08 July 2013 - 04:34 AM.

[dario03]

Wired, on 08 July 2013 - 02:57 AM, said:

The only people who didnt like rnr, where the ones who really wanted this meta where you could field something like a 6 ppc stalker and get away with it. If you bought into the hype, oh well.

That is simply not true. I hated R&R and I've never had a 6ppc stalker and think that the game should limit the amount you can carry. I also ran whatever I felt like running when we had R&R, all it did was change how much I earned. The reason I hated it though was that it had a negative effect to team play in game. Far to often would I see people run off and hide as soon as the battle looked to be going bad. They would run off and hide and if you called them out on it they would say the battle is already lost, no sense in me having to pay more R&R. Seriously I would see people do this even if the team was only down 1 or 2 mechs and it was extremely annoying. Plus I would worry about this being another MM balance problem. What happens if one team is running all cheapo mechs to maximize profits and the other is running all super powered mechs so they win? This could just make the matches even more lopsided if they don't add a balance for that but then that's another thing the MM would have to account for.

[Sudden Reversal]

Ozric, on 08 July 2013 - 04:29 AM, said:

It penalized ammo based weapons for no extra benefit and further marginalized the humble pug because you had to run an 'economical' build.

Ammo based weapons have quicker firing rate, better ranges (3x versus 2x effective), negligible heat and lock on fire and forget benefits. Their drawback is needing ammo. Who would have thunked it!?

A large chunk of that issue has been mitigated by short game rounds and lack of sensible R&R.

Seriously, this game is suffering from 'catering to the lowest common denominator' syndrome.

[MustrumRidcully]

Wired, on 08 July 2013 - 02:57 AM, said:

Plenty of people enjoyed rnr. it brought a dynamic to the game outside of kill mech, collect paycheck.

The only people who didnt like rnr, where the ones who really wanted this meta where you could field something like a 6 ppc stalker and get away with it. If you bought into the hype, oh well.

How would a 6 PPC Stalker be really punished by Repair & Rearm?

1) It has no rearm cost.
2) If your mech is one of the most powerful builds in town, you kill enemies, you win matches, and you tend to avoid dying.

Economy will fail balancing, because not dying and winning is what the most powerful stuff allows you to do, and not dying and winning is where you are expected to get the most resources.


And how will it interact with Elo? Let's say due to some magic trickery you get people to run cheap builds occassionally. So their Elo rises as they switch to an OP mech that is costly to run, and then they switch to the cheap mech that makes winning harder and they now face enemies that are effectively out of their league, and their Elo drops again. Then they have (despite all the losing and wrecked mechs) made money to run the good mech again, and they now fight enemies below their level and wins all the time until his Elo catches up.

Elo works best if the performance of a player is stable, so his rating eventually stabilizes, too. If a player switches between a bad build and an effectice build all the time, his performance can't be stable.

So congrats for wrecking any hope that the match maker can do its job.

Inkarnus, on 08 July 2013 - 01:24 AM, said:

so playing the game for you is un fun ?

Yes, playing this game can be quite unfun if I am forced to run mechs that I know are poor builds. Heck, it can be unfun if I play good builds but not the ones I really want to play, but some stupid pseudo-economical system is hindering me from it.

[Rengakun]

I remember when R&R was still in game, it felt quite fun and It felt like MW:O was actually a MechWarrior game. But the drawbacks were just horrible. It took me 20 games of getting blown up just to get 600,000 C-Bills.


When I got my first Commando, it felt like I earned it. I had quite some fun with it. In December, ECM was introduced. I bought a COM-2D to play with it and thought of the SSRM Build by myself. I murdered all of the 'mechs I came across.

Then, by the time I got my Catapult, I just got sick of it. I started AFK Farming, exploiting the free Premium Time Penny Arcade gave us. Then, the new economy came. I rejoiced. The 8 mil C-Bills got me back on my feet when I went bankrupt attempting to play with a Cataphract-4X.

When I bought my first Assault, It felt glorious. I started murdering other Assaults with my SRM STK. SRM Cats were still rare at that time, but they definitely were present.

When they reduced the heat on PPCs, I tried them. They were almost impossible to use due to the lack of HSR. I got sick of them by the time Ballistic HSR was introduced. A few weeks later, everyone started using PPCs. I wasn't being killed by them very often, but I had to change how I play. Everyone no longer brawled, just sniping or running to their deaths.

Cut to now, I'm taking a break from MW:O. I'm playing Warframe now.


If you read the above, you now have an insiders perspective of R&R.



So, what do you think of R&R?

Edited by Rengakun, 08 July 2013 - 05:12 AM.

[Plyphon]

Inkarnus, on 08 July 2013 - 04:15 AM, said:

getting cbills with an actual farming mech with RandR
was hillarious easy and effective
now u need like 3-5 decent games to get the same
amount of Cbills far enough to get anything you
wantet as fast as you wantet

I'd rather play 3-5 decent games in a mech of my choice than be forced to play 1 rubbish game in a "farming" mech.

The fact farming mechs even existed prove alone that R&R actually created imbalance - how pissed would you be if you brought your big expensive guns if 3 of your team turned up with farming mechs?

[StalaggtIKE]

Some of these comments are just laughable; Cadet bonus and RnR in the same sentence..., REALLY!? You do not know what it was like to grind trial mechs and earn your first mech. Each upgrade actually meant something. Like one poster said firing off Artemis LRM was like lobbing golden bricks. Remember how much tweaking PGI had to do with LRM to get them right? RnR was built in spam control. Same would apply with GR, PPC, ECM, endo and XL engines. You equip expensive gear, you knew you had to play to win or pay the price.

Of course the system was not perfect, that's why it should have been further tweaked. They had already made some progress such as no cbills for disconnects. They could have stuck it through and finished the job. Here are a few ideas that could have made the old system better (some were already in place):

• No cbills/xp for disconnects
  
• Cadet bonus to aid in getting first mech sooner
  
• No RnR for trail mechs
  
• Separate Elo for trial and owned mechs
  
• Cbill bonus should be proportionate to performance not solely damage dealt.
  
• Cbill bonus for defeating "higher level" players
  
• Coward penalty
  
• Option to surrender once odds are 1:4; granting winners full salvage (loser would only have to pay for current damage)

Edited by StalaggtIKE, 08 July 2013 - 05:11 AM.

[Roland]

I actually liked the notion of paying money for repairs, and more importantly I liked the fact that if you played really well you made a mountain of money really fast.

But therein lies the problem with the R&R system.

It didn't really function as a balancing agent, because the better players would just amass MOUNTAINS of money, to the extent that it didn't really cost them anything to field the best equipment. I was sitting on a ton of cash, and owned every mech there was. Money was no object to me.

But the poor players just got stomped, and couldn't afford to run good stuff, so they just got stomped worse.

[Sprouticus]

The fact that some people are actually posting in favor of this is a perfect example of why the community should not be the arbitor of balance.

Here is most basic argument against RnR. There are plenty of others, but the core argument is this:

External factors should NOT be used as a balancing mechanism in a sim/shooter game. Ever.

If you want to use it for external resource grinding, that might work. It depends upon the system. But for internal game balance....heck no.


Side note: The old RnR was terrible for resource grinding as well, the formula was imbalanced in favor of people with premium accounts and those who preferred energy weapons. Missiles especially were a huge negative. A good resource grind system needs to be fair for all play styles.


If you dont like the current meta, I get that. Im not a fan either.

But there are PLENTY of other ways to fix that. No need to reintroduce RnR in its broken form.

[Plyphon]

StalaggtIKE, on 08 July 2013 - 05:10 AM, said:

Some of these comments are just laughable; Cadet bonus and RnR in the same sentence..., REALLY!? You do not know what it was like to grind trial mechs and earn your first mech. Each upgrade actually meant something.

So is this really what it comes down to - older players feeling bitter about their hard grind in the early game which now means nothing now that the grind aspect has been dropped somewhat and the new players are able to get gear regardless of skill?

[StalaggtIKE]

Plyphon, on 08 July 2013 - 05:48 AM, said:

So is this really what it comes down to - older players feeling bitter about their hard grind in the early game which now means nothing now that the grind aspect has been dropped somewhat and the new players are able to get gear regardless of skill?

Not bitter, just laughable..., as I stated.

Edit: Who said anything about the grind being hard?

Edited by StalaggtIKE, 08 July 2013 - 06:08 AM.

[Ransack]

Quote

Honestly, It Sounds Like This Game Would Benefit From The Original Repair And Rearm Costs.

Oh goodness, those R&R days were horrible if you didn't have cash. People would not repair their engines and die quick. Suicide farming was out of control. Tandem team killing. AFK farm, and all sorts of nonsense were not uncommon. If it comes back, people would take their four PPC stalker and kill half the opposing team faster because people aren't fully repaired. Your rearm cost? Zero. Meanwhile that LRM 60 stalker that just killed the other half of the opposing team has a huge rearm bill.

No thanks. It was in no way balanced

[Inkarnus]

Just cuz it was back then
doesnt mean it must now with all the changes

so then you say RandR is bad ok

but you wont get ppl to use lighter mechs not via asking pretty pls
you must give them a reason like Cbills to go lighter!
I would love a bidding system or something like the clans had
were you get more money the less tonnage you put in (by the essenc that what randr is)

[Gallowglas]

So you want to go back to a system that really only hurt the players getting wrecked? It sure seems to me like all R&R did was to further alienate new, inexperienced, bad, or unlucky players on top of their gameplay experience of getting rolled. I don't personally care either way because I try to play smart regardless, but I don't think R&R was this wonderful fix-all that some of you claim it to be.