I put that in huge letters because I'm the OP and wanted to draw attention to the ridiculous garbage some people are posting in here. Half these posts are people moaning about how I want to "remove the mechlab". If this was my forum I'd put a week long ban on everyone who accused me of saying anything even close to that, simply for being such a pile of smegheads. The entire point of a forum is to discuss things, and as such, people with mental / reading disabilities are not welcome whatsoever since all they do is, well, jump into threads, don't read the OP, and then spew trollish accusations.
I think I'm entitled to draw attention to how absurd some people are acting.
Sorry but I'm a little drunk, I get to come back to my thread and see it's 11 pages, with roughly 9 pages of that being a bunch of goons posting useless drivel - I should be allowed to get a little angry with them. All they're doing is detracting from the thread and adding nothing.
Thank you, those who have made constructive posts, regardless if you agreed and disagreed.
MW4's mechlab was even more limited than this one, with hard-limits applying to your weapon size, curious handling of ammo that made it take more space than it should've, and arbitrarily applied hard limits on equipment installation.
Absolutely true!
And frankly, I'm totally down with that style... I think a lot of the apparent additions they've made as shown in the videos are great... actually representing the criticals for various pieces of non-weapon equipment is a nice addition. I'll be interested to see how this plays out in the damage modeling, or if they model armor penetration and things like that.
In terms of proposing limitations like MW4 had.. namely, that hardpoints have a fixed size (ie. you can't take off a machine gun and mount a heavy gauss), I'm absolutely in support of that notion. One of the biggest problems with MW3, imho, was the "bag o' guns" syndrome. In that regard, where every mech really is just a big bin of criticals which can have anything put on them, then I agree it kind of blurs the line between the different chassis.
But, as I said, I don't think there should ever be a cost associated with merely changing your mech. I tend to feel that I should be able to change my mechs as much as I want, because that's a major component of the game, which is one which I tend to enjoy a lot.
Right, so those of you pooh-poohing a post obviously none of you read...
Please, pray tell how exactly do you think PGI is going to make any money with the almost-limitless customization we're currently offered? As I pointed out, the HBK-4G (standard Hunchback) is a different variant than the Swayback. The idea is that if you want to laser things, you buy the Swayback variant. However, it's easy to see that with the current mechlab setup, you can easily change the HBK-4G into a slightly-differently setup Swayback (I would actually say it's superior, as it spreads out the lasers more, thus making the right torso no longer a liability). So why would anyone ever actually spend CBills (and thus real money) on a variant they can simply, for free, change in the Mechlab?
This game isn't going to survive to the Clan invasion if nobody's giving PGI money, you realize that, right?
This is not me "making you wild *** guesses about what you think there is". All of this is based off of what was seen in the mechlab video and what the developers have said themselves. Someone conducting an interview even specifically asked about limiting how huge of a weapon you could put into a hardpoint, and he was told 'no', meaning a 3-hardpoint limit means you can put only 3 small lasers, or 3 CERPPCs.
I read through your entire first post. (though it was a bit of a slog for me, because I disagree with most of what you're saying)
I have not read the entire thread so maybe someone has commented on this, but:
1. The hunchback's small laser is mounted in it's head.
You could replace that with 1 Medium laser or a flamer but nothing else because there is only 1 free crit space in the head.
2. You're looking at customization in a skewed way.
You say, "I could basically make a swayback with the default hunchback" without considering the advantages the swayback loadout brings. Putting all your eggs in one basket allows you to fully armor that one location and skimp on armor for the rest of the mech, basically giving free tonnage. If you don't ascribe to that style, then the swayback still has appeal, because you have 4 places to put lasers (arm, arm, 1 in the head, and torso) instead of only 3 (arm, arm, and 1 in the head) Therefore you could make a far more Zombie swayback than you could with a default hunchback-tweaked-to-be-a-mediocre-swayback. Another option would be to make a hunchback that lives up to its name. You could heavily armor the RA and RT and put all your weapon systems in there, and leave the other side lightly armored. That makes me grin, because then it actually -would- be a proper hunchback. (aka a lopsided mech)
3. Limiting how much a person can use Mechlab doesn't help the game in any way, and may actually hurt it.
If I can play around and tweak mechs as I like, I will do so. I will try out crazy builds and see what I can make work. If you limit me to 1 mechlab per day, or make it cost progressively more, all you're encouraging me to do is go online and look up the "best" design for a mech, so that I don't "waste" my mechlab use for the day. Applying penalties to customization, or putting a timer on it hurts the people who want to play around in the mechlab, and encourages people to just look up the "ideal" build for a mech. It is a lose-lose.
4. I agree with you that putting limits on the size of a hardslot might be a good idea, but I think your ideas on it are a bit too restrictive, and don't quite make sense from a logic point of view either. I can see restricting how much you can "upsize" weapons, "how the heck are you fitting a PPC where a SL was on the default mech?" but the other side doesn't make sense to me. An AC 20 is big as hell. Why can't I pull it out and jam 2-3 AC 5's in the gaping hole it left behind? They're collectively about the same size, and they'd keep the feel of the hunchback being a Ballistic focused mech with a little laser support. If I want to strip out the AC 20 and replace it with 10 MG's, why not? That'd basically just make the hunchback perform like a slightly closer range version of what it already is. (also, that big shoulder pod looks like it could fit that many MG's)
Edited by LackofCertainty, 10 June 2012 - 02:39 PM.
So what do you make of that? This chucklehead probably came from MW4. How many clowns throwing complete ragefits in this thread played MW4 and were happy with it? How many of us actually know the story behind MW4's mechlab?
MW4's mechlab was even more limited than this one, with hard-limits applying to your weapon size, curious handling of ammo that made it take more space than it should've, and arbitrarily applied hard limits on equipment installation.
Compared to MW3's "everything goes" mechlab, MW4's was like arguing your right to free speech in a Soviet gulag. Yet the vast majority of people in this forum were clearly happy enough with MW4's mechlab to play it for 10 years.
So again, "What the **** is the matter with you all?"
There are hard limits on weapon size here too... it's called critical slots. Hard points + critical slots + weight. Three factors controlling what you can put and where.
I'm one of those guys who'd rather not have a mechlab, as the damage it does to a game usually easily outweighs the good. While players like customization, all the flavor of individual mechs and the interesting quirks of a design go down the tubes the second a mech goes into the lab. I think a compromise could be reached, but from what I've seen / heard about the mechlab, it's pretty free-form. And that makes me sad.
Let me preface this by saying that I do think there should be a 'testing' range where you can run around and shoot some very basic bots to test out a design, as this would making using the mechlab somewhat less risky, but this would also be a great feature to ensure you aren't about to drop a cool 10 million CBills for a mech that's good on paper but awful in practice.
Anyway, on to random constructive complaining about things nobody is clear on:
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From the developer Q&A 5, it's heavily implied that mechlab changes are free. I adamantly disagree with this. If there was a testing mode to try out a design, which would remove the 'risk' from a mechlab configuration, I think any and every change you make in the mechlab should cost money, proportional to how much you're changing it. Slotting an ERPPC into a space that used to hold a small laser should cost you a considerable amount for a 'refit' fee. Changing out your engine should be tremendously expensive.
I do not agree that players should be able to freely mix-and-match anything they want in the mechlab. Not only is this bad from a business perspective, as in the developer Q&A this was spoken of in the context of being too cheap to buy new guns, so he just recycles the old ones. By giving us a CBills sink for the price of mech customization, you've created a way to not only drain money out of the economy, but to put the brakes on how extremely a mech can be customized. There ought to be limits to these freedoms, and currently it sounds like there are none.
[ HARDPOINTS ]
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Another thing that was mentioned was that hardpoints only count towards the number of weapons you can put in there, not the size. Theoretically, with enough crit space, you could replace a single small laser with a trio of ER large lasers. MWLL has their system planned out to limit how far in size weapons can be changed. My stance is that for a given variant, how much you can change out a weapon system should be limited for Battlemechs (Omnimechs are a different matter). For example, the HBK-4G could change out his AC/20 for an AC/10 and thus assume the -4H model, but not an AC/5, as that would require purchasing the variant with an AC/5, the HBK-4N.
Again, this makes sense from a business standpoint. We can currently see that the HBK-4G, in the mechlab, can mount 6 energy weapons in the arms. The Swayback can carry 8 medium lasers. Theoretically, there is almost no advantage to be had in purchasing the Swayback as you would only get the luxury of two more lasers, at the expense of having almost all of them crammed into one rather easy-to-destroy location. Why would I expend the money for that, when I could split 3 lasers each into the arms, making them somewhat less vulnerable (and easier to aim by virtue of the independent arm reticule)? I'm unsure what the HBK-4G's center torso consists of, but there *is* supposed to be a small laser there - I'm inclined to believe you could probably cram two more medium lasers into the center - and thus you have made a Swayback, without the massive purchase price of a new chassis, and much more survivable. If you had bought the Swayback, you have no option of adding ballistics, making it the inferior chassis.
MWLL is adapting a similar system for not only cosmetic reasons, but specifically to limit what can be put where, and keep the flavor between mech designs. If you were free to put any weapons wherever, with only a very basic hardpoint limit like MWO seems to have now, it almost removes the point to even buy other chassis in a similar weight class. If I can simply make one chassis a complete Frankenmech and change the engine, armor, and all the weapons, and end up with a differently-shaped-but-functionally-identical mech, what's the point of even having different chassis to pick from?
By limiting how many weapons and the size of which can go into a hardpoint, you can retain some of the purity of a mech variant, thus encouraging people who want a laser-boat Hunchback to buy that variant, which equates to potentially more money for PGI.
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I believe consideration is being made to this already, but I personally do not want to see the MWLL-syndrome, where the vast majority of mechs are stomping around with a massive array of electronic goodies. I don't agree with the way MW4 handled it, but I agree with the principle, that certain chassis are simply built with the proper hardware to mount and cool electronic warfare suites and sensor probes, and others are not. A Raven should have lots of space and available functionality to mount all kinds of extra accessories by way of hardpoints, and a mech that really doesn't (Hunchback) would be extremely limited in what it can put on there. This could fit in with the same size limits - an ECM suite is too "big" for a normal mech to strap in, not unless it was specially built to hold one, but with "small" equipment slots, almost any mech could mount something smaller like a C3 computer or something along those lines.
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Pursuant to the section on why we need more restrictive hardpoint limits, I'd also like to see a range of limits for non-weapon customization of mechs. If you look across the chassis canon variants, you will see very, very few Battlemechs make large changes to armor and engine ratings. As the entire point of this post is to preserve the flavor of an individual chassis, I would like to see a range limitation put on how much armor can be adjusted, and how much engines can be changed. You would not be able to simply slot a Viper engine into a Honda Accord, not without making massive structural changes, as it simply won't fit. Too much was built into the chassis *around* the engine that was built to be put in there. One should not be able to simply jack out the existing fusion engine and stick one 50% larger in, not without expecting to gut the ENTIRE mech and rebuild all its internal hardware from scratch. The only time such an overhaul should be accepted is upgrading an engine to XL (with an absolutely jaw-dropping cost associated with it).
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This isn't too much of an issue now, but it will be at some point. I'd like to see Clan weapons limited to Omnimechs, unable to be bolted on to IS mechs, and IS weaponry completely incompatible with Clantech, so no heavy gauss Timberwolves. This is compliant with TT rules, so I expect this to happen. I won't harp on this one too much.
The other half of the equation are Omnimechs and Battlemechs. True to the lore, I'd like to see Omnimechs have hardlocked base chassis. You cannot change engine or armor ratings, full stop. However, this limited flexibility could be made up by allowing Omnimechs to be able to more freely mount weaponry in the arms (and the arms alone). Omnitech is classiclly lauded for its ability to allow a mech to stop in and simply swap out arms for another, so to that end, it would make sense to me to allow Omnis more freedom in their hardpoints and hardpoint sizes, with the disadvantage that this firepower would mostly be concentrated in easier-to-destroy arms. Additionally, modifying Omnimechs should simply be more expensive in general, as the technology requirements of working with Omnitech pods is simply too extreme and new to have had time to get cheap.
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Finally, I think there should be limits on how often a mech can visit the Mechlab. Ideally, your mech should be down for a 'refit time', especially Battlemechs, that require time to pass in the realtime before it can be used in battle. Rather, I'd prefer to see a timer for how often a mech can visit the Mechlab and be adjusted, based on how extreme the adjustments really are. Bringing the mech back to the mechlab too soon will drive costs up considerably, relative to how little time has passed since your previous visit. If you make tremendous changes to the mech, you may not be able to visit the 'lab again without incurring a hefty price hike for several days. Moving some medium lasers around might not boost the timer very much - changing out the engine, replacing a major weapon system, and adjusting armor values would drive it way up.
I believe that about covers it. I appreciate the added player experience a Mechlab brings, but I vehemently disagree with its standard implementation we've seen to date, where every little feature of a mech can be adjusted. Not only do I believe this is bad for gameplay, but it's bad for variety, and potentially bad for business. Ultimately I think mechlabs do more harm than good, and I think a player's desire for complete freedom to turn any mech into a Clan Heavy Laser carrier is outweighed by the necessity to make a balanced, diverse game that encourages variety.
Okay, here are a few issues that I have with this:
1. Mixed tech is legal in non tournament play. Sorry, that's been around for a while. BMRr for example has it. And something else, the clans NEVER lost access to Star League tech. They improved on it so they don't use it as much.
2. Your example of swapping in ERLLs for small laser, you don't play TT much do you? Heat, tonnage and crits play into modifications. Where were you getting the tonnage for those ERLLs? A refit from a 3025 mech to a 3050 isn't modification, it's a refit. Might take a bit of time to rebuild the mech, but it's FAR easier than customizing. No worries about it becoming unbalanced in a refit.
3. Again, and I have stressed this many times, this is speculation. The game isn't out of Beta, hasn't gone live so we don't know for 100% what the devs are going to do.
I thought the purpose of BT was to design your own mechs, and have incredible amounts of fun fielding your designs against other people.
if you only wanted to use mechs from the TRO, then so be it, nothing stops you. Personlly I LOVE that PGI has limited hardpoints to ballistic, energy and missile. It makes good sense to me, but I don't want or need any more then that.
Frostiken, why don't you apply for a job with PGI? You seem desperate to be in charge in the developement of the game, you seem to think that you know better then the game developers... Most of what you are asking for is too much for the average player which is what we need for this to work, otherwise only a small amount of people will like this game and it will fail, and we will have to wait another 10 years...
How about this, go make your own game, and please stop trying to ruin this one.
^ Wow...what a ****! Your response to his well thought out comments and concerns is to insinuate that he is trying to ruin the game? That he, for some unknown reason, has a nefarious plan to bring MWO down? The next time you post, try and atleast add something to the discourse.
If I understand Frosti's worry here, then I think that he fears that there won't be limits on the size of hardpoints.
That is, suppose you have some mech that has a panel whose stock config contains an LRM10, a large laser, and a machine gun cluster.
If hardpoints are not limited, except by the total number of critical slots, then ya.. you have essentially created an omnimech, because ALL of those criticals can be associated with any one of those weapon types... You could ignore missiles and energy, and just dump everything into the ballistic, and mount something crazy like an AC 20, or a heavy gauss. This would indeed cause a bunch of bleed over between different chassis. Anything that wasn't already limited to one weapon type could be converted into almost anything.
Although, I think the solution to this is fairly obvious, at least to me.
Just limit the critical slots. Say, "This mech has only X number of critical slots which can go towards energy weapons in this location." That way you couldn't take off a small laser and mount an ERPPC.
Honestly, I had just assumed that this is how it was going to work, based on what the devs have said.
I put that in huge letters because I'm the OP and wanted to draw attention to the ridiculous garbage some people are posting in here. Half these posts are people moaning about how I want to "remove the mechlab". If this was my forum I'd put a week long ban on everyone who accused me of saying anything even close to that, simply for being such a pile of smegheads. The entire point of a forum is to discuss things, and as such, people with mental / reading disabilities are not welcome whatsoever since all they do is, well, jump into threads, don't read the OP, and then spew trollish accusations.
I think I'm entitled to draw attention to how absurd some people are acting.
You tell people to make stupid assumptions, and then one page later make a stupid assumption about what games a certain user may or may not have played.
Frost, you're a hypocrtical fool making a problem out of nothing.
I think you should re-read your post after you've played the game for a month... . You wanna press through changes BEFORE the game even is launched. We could just as well start a thread about how LP items in MWO are overpowered and the time you need to grind or something else we haven't seen yet!
I think you should re-read your post after you've played the game for a month... . You wanna press through changes BEFORE the game even is launched. We could just as well start a thread about how LP items in MWO are overpowered and the time you need to grind or something else we haven't seen yet!
Personally...OP... i like what you wrote... for the most part.
i didn't read it all cause.. well.. yeah... as i believe Hawkeye 72 said.. "it's a research paper." lol
But, the part you refer to with timer set-up with the mechlab per various mech and the use-ability and the relivence between them... I LOVE IT... because it's truely, to me, giving the feeling of living the BTU. because in all seriousness, you just can't blink your eyes, snap your fingers, or wiggle your nose and have the tires, rims, engine, transmission or anything like that changed on your car... why should a mech that's easily 10-times larger and in some cases more fragile a component, be any different?
your "increase timer" idea for "returning to the lab too soon" is actually nullifying "mechanic error," therefore, you leave and return 5 mins later, you'll probably just **** him off. returning after battle for ammo.. no-harm, no-foul, but returning for extra refit=spiked prices (byas little as 5%) anyways, just wanted to say, nice idea---and yeah.. my comment will probably get lost among the other 50+current comments, but.. :: shruggs ::
Personally...OP... i like what you wrote... for the most part.
i didn't read it all cause.. well.. yeah... as i believe Hawkeye 72 said.. "it's a research paper." lol
But, the part you refer to with timer set-up with the mechlab per various mech and the use-ability and the relivence between them... I LOVE IT... because it's truely, to me, giving the feeling of living the BTU. because in all seriousness, you just can't blink your eyes, snap your fingers, or wiggle your nose and have the tires, rims, engine, transmission or anything like that changed on your car... why should a mech that's easily 10-times larger and in some cases more fragile a component, be any different?
your "increase timer" idea for "returning to the lab too soon" is actually nullifying "mechanic error," therefore, you leave and return 5 mins later, you'll probably just **** him off. returning after battle for ammo.. no-harm, no-foul, but returning for extra refit=spiked prices (byas little as 5%) anyways, just wanted to say, nice idea---and yeah.. my comment will probably get lost among the other 50+current comments, but.. :: shruggs ::
Yes, let's give users 101 options for what to do with their mechs, then punish them for trying be creative and play MechWarrior the way it was intended. Brilliant idea!
If I understand Frosti's worry here, then I think that he fears that there won't be limits on the size of hardpoints.
That is, suppose you have some mech that has a panel whose stock config contains an LRM10, a large laser, and a machine gun cluster.
If hardpoints are not limited, except by the total number of critical slots, then ya.. you have essentially created an omnimech, because ALL of those criticals can be associated with any one of those weapon types... You could ignore missiles and energy, and just dump everything into the ballistic, and mount something crazy like an AC 20, or a heavy gauss. This would indeed cause a bunch of bleed over between different chassis. Anything that wasn't already limited to one weapon type could be converted into almost anything.
Although, I think the solution to this is fairly obvious, at least to me.
Just limit the critical slots. Say, "This mech has only X number of critical slots which can go towards energy weapons in this location." That way you couldn't take off a small laser and mount an ERPPC.
Honestly, I had just assumed that this is how it was going to work, based on what the devs have said.
Fair enough, that would work. Ideally though I think there should be a little wiggle allowing parts to be scaled up, but not by much. I suppose a combination of the hardpoint criticals limit, and a hardpoint weapons limit would be enough to lock a 'space' into a mech body cavity - not too big, but not too small.
You are correct though, that's what I foresee is something absurd like a single MG being able to be replaced with a Heavy Gauss simply because it's on the left torso, and you carved out enough space elsewhere for it. A change like that utterly betrays the nature of the mech's original design.
My objection to a totally cost-free mechlab is not only the absurdity in allowing you to simply 'float' parts between mechs, but I think it would encourage too much min/maxing and encourage people to constantly be changing mech setups at the drop of a hat.
I originally spoke of wanting to retain some of the flavor of the original mechs, and the original mechs tend to have a generalist feeling to them. This was, simply, because Battlemechs couldn't be easily, cheaply, or freely refit, so a mech had to have some versatility. Ammo-hungry mechs needed energy backup lasers because ammo resupplies couldn't be counted on. Energy boats would mount a few small ballistic weapons to defend against infantry (not a threat in-game so this is a questionable example, but I shall press on), because heat issues would cause problems trying to blast lots of dudes at close range. Short-ranged mechs may mount a long-ranged missile launcher so they can contribute when out of range, and a short-range crit-seeking SRM.
Some of this was for versatility, some of this was to make up for the limits of the Battletech combat fundamentals.
By allowing people to freely change their mech loadouts, they can have a missile boat Catapult in one match, and then without even buying a new mech, probably cram PPCs into the side torsos of the same catapult (I see no reason why you couldn't) the next. Tadah - instant CPLT-K2. You don't get machine guns... on the plus side, your ears can have the armor taken out of them!
LackofCertainty, on 10 June 2012 - 02:36 PM, said:
I read through your entire first post. (though it was a bit of a slog for me, because I disagree with most of what you're saying)
I have not read the entire thread so maybe someone has commented on this, but:
1. The hunchback's small laser is mounted in it's head.
- Go to 1:23.
Small laser in the CT, with 3 energy slots there.
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2. You're looking at customization in a skewed way.
You say, "I could basically make a swayback with the default hunchback" without considering the advantages the swayback loadout brings. Putting all your eggs in one basket allows you to fully armor that one location and skimp on armor for the rest of the mech, basically giving free tonnage. If you don't ascribe to that style, then the swayback still has appeal, because you have 4 places to put lasers (arm, arm, 1 in the head, and torso) instead of only 3 (arm, arm, and 1 in the head) Therefore you could make a far more Zombie swayback than you could with a default hunchback-tweaked-to-be-a-mediocre-swayback. Another option would be to make a hunchback that lives up to its name. You could heavily armor the RA and RT and put all your weapon systems in there, and leave the other side lightly armored. That makes me grin, because then it actually -would- be a proper hunchback. (aka a lopsided mech)
Fair enough. Now ask yourself, given those options, how many people - real people, not the BT fans that make up this forum - would actually spend real money just for that? Not many I wager. The CPLT-K2 and the CPLT-C1 are two massively different applications of the same platform. They even made a special model just for the K2. Since the medium lasers are in the side torsos of the CPLT-C1, you can easily cram PPCs in there too, and fill up the rest with the heatsinks. If you get away with it, you can then take all the armor out of the ears and leave them empty.
You have just made a more-indestructible CPLT-K2 without spending a dime on the K2 variant. I foresee a thread on the forums with specifically this kind of stuff. Yeah, you can't make a super energy boat like you might be able to with the K2 itself (with energy hardpoints all over), but it seems to me you can get away with 'good enough'. Certainly enough to save you 9 million CBills that the K2 would cost (or something along those lines).
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3. Limiting how much a person can use Mechlab doesn't help the game in any way, and may actually hurt it.
If I can play around and tweak mechs as I like, I will do so. I will try out crazy builds and see what I can make work. If you limit me to 1 mechlab per day, or make it cost progressively more, all you're encouraging me to do is go online and look up the "best" design for a mech, so that I don't "waste" my mechlab use for the day. Applying penalties to customization, or putting a timer on it hurts the people who want to play around in the mechlab, and encourages people to just look up the "ideal" build for a mech. It is a lose-lose.
I guess you can make that argument, but it's sort of an invalid one because it doesn't really imply any solutions. That could happen with penalties associated with constant swapping out of parts, but at the same time, with the ability to freely swap them in and out, people can min/max munchkin their mechs that much more effectively.
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4. I agree with you that putting limits on the size of a hardslot might be a good idea, but I think your ideas on it are a bit too restrictive, and don't quite make sense from a logic point of view either. I can see restricting how much you can "upsize" weapons, "how the heck are you fitting a PPC where a SL was on the default mech?" but the other side doesn't make sense to me. An AC 20 is big as hell. Why can't I pull it out and jam 2-3 AC 5's in the gaping hole it left behind? They're collectively about the same size, and they'd keep the feel of the hunchback being a Ballistic focused mech with a little laser support. If I want to strip out the AC 20 and replace it with 10 MG's, why not? That'd basically just make the hunchback perform like a slightly closer range version of what it already is. (also, that big shoulder pod looks like it could fit that many MG's)
Maybe I was hasty on this point, but suffices to say Roland's quote above answers this well enough - a combination of maximum energy crit slot size, and a maximum of energy hardpoint size, so you can't replace a PPC with eight small lasers, and you can't replace a small laser with a Clan Heavy Large Laser.
This combines the practical limitations of MW4's method with a bit of laxity, to ensure mechs keep their overall 'shape'.
FlakAttack, on 10 June 2012 - 03:07 PM, said:
Yes, let's give users 101 options for what to do with their mechs, then punish them for trying be creative and play MechWarrior the way it was intended. Brilliant idea!
Where do you get off saying 'limitless customization is intended'? As has been mentioned, custom mechs are totally banned in tournament, and the MW4 mechlab - the game that most people here played as their mainstay of mechwarrior experience for the last 10 years - had the same limits.
I'm absolutely floored that people are throwing such a fit about this but seem to keep ignoring the point that MW4 limited them just the same.
You know, a lot of your claims about people spending real money are pretty flawed. For that to really be the case real world money would have to be the only way to buy mechs, which it isn't.
I think you should re-read your post after you've played the game for a month... . You wanna press through changes BEFORE the game even is launched. We could just as well start a thread about how LP items in MWO are overpowered and the time you need to grind or something else we haven't seen yet!
:/
That is hardly the same thing. While a few things can change, I have a whole movie and developer Q&As confirming that most of what I'm talking about is, in fact, how it will be when we get the game. I could be off on a few details but we know the mechlab will be free to use, we know that hardpoint limits per section simply limit the number of weapons with zero regard for size and limited regard for type, and we know how people have abused the mechlab in the past.
I think I have a pretty strong case here, stronger than say, worries about torso twists.
Kazzamo, on 10 June 2012 - 03:12 PM, said:
You know, a lot of your claims about people spending real money are pretty flawed. For that to really be the case real world money would have to be the only way to buy mechs, which it isn't.
If you think the CBill slog to get mechs and weapons without spending money won't be arduous, you need to meet more F2P games
Okay, here are a few issues that I have with this:
1. Mixed tech is legal in non tournament play. Sorry, that's been around for a while. BMRr for example has it. And something else, the clans NEVER lost access to Star League tech. They improved on it so they don't use it as much.
Clan Omnis use "slots" to fit in modular built weapons they just have to "plug in" and press "go". Inner Sphere weapons lack that modular design, so they don't fit into the Clan Mechs' slots. Simple as that.
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2. Your example of swapping in ERLLs for small laser, you don't play TT much do you? Heat, tonnage and crits play into modifications. Where were you getting the tonnage for those ERLLs?
And how does this matter in any possible way ? All he was saying is : With the mechlab as it is revealed so far, you could most likely build many variants of a given Mech by just modifying the "standard" variant, and you could most likely take one mech of a given tonnage, strip it of everything and rebuild it to mirror the exact (or very near exact) loadout of another mech of the same tonnage. These two combined eliminate close to every benefit of owning multiple mechs of a given size, which will cost PGI money and cost the game a huge portion of its possible diversity.
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3. Again, and I have stressed this many times, this is speculation. The game isn't out of Beta, hasn't gone live so we don't know for 100% what the devs are going to do.
True, but with the information given so far, it's much more likely that he is correct than that he's not.
Where do you get off saying 'limitless customization is intended'? As has been mentioned, custom mechs are totally banned in tournament, and the MW4 mechlab - the game that most people here played as their mainstay of mechwarrior experience for the last 10 years - had the same limits.
I'm absolutely floored that people are throwing such a fit about this but seem to keep ignoring the point that MW4 limited them just the same.
You're the one throwing a fit... but to clarify, people have posted, repeatedly, that hardpoints + crits + weight is the solution. We all know this. What people don't want to hear about are your dumb and arbitrary costs and timings associated with using the MechLab.
I've played several. And I never spend a dime on the majority of them. The point isn't will someone spend real money on it. And honestly even then that doesn't do much. People will still gladly throw out money just for the way something looks. "Ooo I like the look of that new mech... it has pretty much the same hard points as my current one but it looks better so I'll get that one." then all the visual fluff they can sell.
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Frostiken, on 10 June 2012 - 02:30 PM, said:
This topic is locked
