261 replies to this topic

[Frostiken]

Xandre Blackheart, on 10 June 2012 - 10:43 AM, said:

Have you ever been to a con even?

Have you ever seen what happens after DLC is announced?

Most people are too damn cheap to fork out $15 for Crysis Wars to play MWLL.

Gauge, on 10 June 2012 - 10:44 AM, said:

But then Battletech goes under because no one wants to spend money for designs that are bad compared to their own... but that could never happen, right?

Joking aside, seriously, this isn't an argument about whether or not you should be able to customize. It's an argument about about keeping the game interesting and giving it real staying power in the industry. Maybe some people will spend money for a long time just on the aesthetics of a mech. Maybe some people will spend money to get all the chassis just to collect them. But I think the majority of people will want a different combat experience when they get a new mech. They want options they didn't have before. And I'm not convinced that's going to be what new chassis and variants bring to the table.

If you can make a fast awesome with 5 small lasers, or a slow charger with 3 PPCs, then why are those two different mechs? Yes, the locations of the hardpoints could differ slightly, but that doesn't feel like enough. There's no longer any flavor to the Charger and the Awesome.

Having imagination is great. I know you just want to basically make your own mech. But as a business model for MWO, having so few reasons to use different chassis isn't great. And I would argue that imagination is much better suited to being creative within restrictions, and not making the rules up as you go.

Well said!

Edited by Frostiken, 10 June 2012 - 10:45 AM.

[rgreat]

I support the OP.

[Xandre Blackheart]

Torrix, on 10 June 2012 - 10:41 AM, said:

Absolutely ^^^THIS^^^

And yeah, I'm one of those guys who does NOT want to be forced to buy c-bills in order to be able to play around in the mechlab to finally configure a mech I want to pilot. No thanks.

I'm in favor of a minimal cost, comparable to repair costs. That makes customizing your mech the reward for winning and not getting (overly) damaged. But I agree you shouldn't have to buy c-bills unless you want to.

[Mechwarrior Buddah]

Yeah cause customization and replayability is horrible in a MMO

[Orion Pirate]

Since we have no played the game yet... This is so hard to digest but, considering that a specialist usually is not as good as a generalist, I think that the game will balance itself.

The Mechlab will create teamwork based play, making the life of the specialist difficult. Lance of specialists will have a hard time against a lance of generalists that can keep them at bay with their mix of weapons.

Again, we have not played the game, so I have such a hard time talking about the game like this, but I believe that the mechlab will bring balance to the game where limiting everyone to the base chassis and their variants only would be boring after a time except to the hardcore.

Limit the game, limit the player base, limit the money they make.

[Elysion]

There will be no issue with them making money, they have the whole premium subscription type exp/money multiplier thing, assuming they have not messed up somewhere most all of the regular/serious players will have that, thats how it works in all other games like this.

Other custom stuff will also go into the game im sure, maybe cosmetic stuff, thats how it usualy goes.

[PowerKill Necron]

Wall of text crits you for 10000. I think the Mechlab is fine the way it is. I like to tinker, and if I had to pay for every change I tried I would soon be broke. I would actually like even more customization options than what I have seen so far from the dev blog video.

Edited by PKNecron, 10 June 2012 - 10:50 AM.

[Frostiken]

Elysion, on 10 June 2012 - 10:48 AM, said:

There will be no issue with them making money, they have the whole premium subscription type exp/money multiplier thing, assuming they have not messed up somewhere most all of the regular/serious players will have that, thats how it works in all other games like this.

Other custom stuff will also go into the game im sure, maybe cosmetic stuff, thats how it usualy goes.

Well, not much is known about their payment plans besides Operation: Confusion, and that you can buy CBills - and you use CBills to buy parts to fit on your mechs and to buy new mech chassis and variants.

With the ability to simply swap parts between mechs, as well as no mechanic to lose access to 'destroyed' part, as another person mentioned you eventually reach a point where you have a small cache of weaponry that you simply move around from mech and mech, which mitigates one aspect of required CBill spending, and with the mechlab being what it appears to be, you've reduced the viability of the other.

This ties into the 'long term economics' thread in a lot of ways.

[Xandre Blackheart]

Frostiken, on 10 June 2012 - 10:44 AM, said:

Have you ever seen what happens after DLC is announced?

Most people are too damn cheap to fork out $15 for Crysis Wars to play MWLL.

From what I've seen DLC sells pretty well IF it's what the players want and it adds to the game. And it's priced correctly.

The trick with DLC is to get it available BEFORE you lose the part of the playerbase that wants more to boredom.

[Hawkeye 72]

Frostiken, on 10 June 2012 - 10:38 AM, said:

That's only 1/3rd of my reason.

Another 1/3rd is to retain some of the variety and improve the metagame by helping players know what to expect and simply cut down on some of the inevitable absurdity.

The final 1/3rd is to ensure PGI aren't shooting themselves in the foot by compromising just about the only reason to actually want to buy different mechs and variants, when inevitably you will be able to find a chassis that has a really good hardpoint layout and you can turn it into damn-near any mech you so chose.

It may seem odd to be asking for ways to sink cash into the game, but as I said, it's free to play, and if people aren't putting money in, we aren't getting content in return. It's a symbiotic relationship, and since gamers are naturally cheap, frugal ********, so from what I understand of the current mechlab based on videos and interviews, there's not really a lot of reason to expand your mechhangar choices very much as you can circumvent the purpose of different chassis by simply getting creative in the mechlab.

Except your second point makes no sense...a free mechlab will retain more variety by allowing people to be flexible. Hardpoints will be restrictive enough, and I am very sure each variant released will have its own flavor and advantages. They are professionals you know...this isn't their first rodeo.

Your third point really makes no sense, as all people want are more mechs. Every time a new mech is announced, the forums go nuts and instantly we have a 15 page thread with people guessing the next mech. There will be incentive for people to buy mechs and all their variants (did I not tell you to go read about horse armor DLC for Elder Scrolls IV?). People will expand their mechbay because they can, because they will earn cbills through hours of playing and will spend those on buying variants regardless.

Like I said, these are professional video game designers. I am sure they have all their bases covered. Your concern is appreciated though

Quote

and since gamers are naturally cheap, frugal ********

Really? I see massive amounts of demand to the Founders pack on these forums, which is 60 bucks. I see people building their own mech pods on the forums, which is hundreds of dollars. Every beta announcement is followed by 100 posts of "Shut up and take my money".

Pretty sure we aren't naturally cheap...you make a lot of claims without evidence that contradict forum behavior

EDIT: I will get a good laugh if Paul sees that comment. Not sure how long you will last on the forums before you get redacted...

Edited by Hawkeye 72, 10 June 2012 - 11:03 AM.

[Frostiken]

Orion Pirate, on 10 June 2012 - 10:47 AM, said:

Since we have no played the game yet... This is so hard to digest but, considering that a specialist usually is not as good as a generalist, I think that the game will balance itself.

Well, generalists are usually much harder to play simply from a weapons application standpoint. Mixing autocannons and unguided missiles is a bad idea, as this requires you to constantly have to adjust how much you lead your target, and if you have lasers as well, means you more or less are unable to alpha-strike a moving target, as something there is going to miss because you have to lead the enemy with it, but cannot without making something else miss.

This is one of the reasons why boating is attractive, because a pile of weapons that all have the same ballistic profile are much, much easier to use. The Kit Fox Prime in MWLL, a generalist, doesn't work very well due to the different weapon profiles you have to deal with. Respect to those willing to deal with that, but that's one reason why generalist mechs will go down in popularity.

[Orion Pirate]

Gauge, on 10 June 2012 - 10:44 AM, said:

seriously, this isn't an argument about whether or not you should be able to customize. It's an argument about about keeping the game interesting and giving it real staying power in the industry. Maybe some people will spend money for a long time just on the aesthetics of a mech. Maybe some people will spend money to get all the chassis just to collect them. But I think the majority of people will want a different combat experience when they get a new mech. They want options they didn't have before. And I'm not convinced that's going to be what new chassis and variants bring to the table.

If you can make a fast awesome with 5 small lasers, or a slow charger with 3 PPCs, then why are those two different mechs? Yes, the locations of the hardpoints could differ slightly, but that doesn't feel like enough. There's no longer any flavor to the Charger and the Awesome.

Having imagination is great. I know you just want to basically make your own mech. But as a business model for MWO, having so few reasons to use different chassis isn't great. And I would argue that imagination is much better suited to being creative within restrictions, and not making the rules up as you go.

So how does limiting how someone customizes their mechs make the game interesting? I think you forget the majority of the playerbase do not care about canon, they just want to shoot stuff.

What you are saying makes perfect sense. It is your imagination that makes a difference between that charger and that awesome in your example. Otherwise they are numbers on a piece of paper, a mini on a table, or a graphic in a game. And this again is the reason why variants will be huge in this game, they limit the creative ability to make a mech the way you imagine it. In some examples the variants will make little difference to the number cruncher, but for some others, they will be so cool to play...

[Elysion]

Frostiken, on 10 June 2012 - 10:50 AM, said:

Well, not much is known about their payment plans besides Operation: Confusion, and that you can buy CBills - and you use CBills to buy parts to fit on your mechs and to buy new mech chassis and variants.

Part of what you get when you buy a founders package is 1/2 months of premium (or whatever they call it) time. These kinds of models generally go over well because there are a lot of people willing to spend a set amount of money for online games per month regularaly to get a set bonus (in this case a boost to exp and cbills earned)

Looks good to me. Based on other game experience i predict one month will cost around $10, thats fairly common pricing for that sort of thing.

So if you have the majority of the regular players spending $10 a month they are golden.

Usualy its the new players who dump a lot of cash directly into games. Spending a lot of cbills instead of earning in game to buy a bunch of stuff.

If they actually had a model where dedicated long term players needed to keep dumping a lot of cash into the game everyone would scream 'pay to win' and the game would 'die' for practical purposes, the only people who play it would be the newbies comming and going and dumping cash in then quitting after a month, and a few people willing to spend hundreds a month to kill said newbies for an ego boost. Normal players would have moved on. Im assuming they dont want that to happen.

[Mr Insane]

I can't even begin to explain how stupid this sounds. Putting these kinds of limits on MWO would cause it to kill off half of the experience that the game offers...

[DDM PLAGUE]

I am not going to go into wht I think screwing with the game before it comes out is a bad idea, or why we NEED a mech lab, and why there should be as many options as possible, coz there are enough posts in this thread that do that already.
What I will say is no pilot should start reconfiguring a mech until they have the skill and experience to do so. If they do than they get to learn the hard way... So, no there dosnt need to be a test area..combat is the only test that counts.

[Frostiken]

Hawkeye 72, on 10 June 2012 - 10:53 AM, said:

Except your second point makes no sense...a free mechlab will retain more variety by allowing people to be flexible. Hardpoints will be restrictive enough, and I am very sure each variant released will have its own flavor and advantages. They are professionals you know...this isn't their first rodeo.

Hmm? By the metagame I mean 'Oh look, they have an HBK-4G, guys watch out not to get too close' and then suddenly it starts throwing PPC bolts at you like it's Zeus come down from Mount Olympus to **** your world up.

Also, forgive me for being a pessimist, but almost every development team is made up of professionals who have been doing it for years, but that doesn't stop games with runaway budgets and huge ambitions from being piles of crap with bad design and obvious problems in oversight. The developers behind Assassin's Creed 1 were all professionals with a budget larger than PGI will probably ever see (courtesy of Ubisoft), and I'm sure they thought their game was awesome, that didn't stop it from being an amazingly dull, drawn out, repetitive grind.

There is always the chance that PGI didn't consider the impact a hog-wild Mechlab would have on people's desires to purchase different mech chassis. Mistakes do get made even by professionals, and problems arise later down the line because certain things weren't considered in design. Hell, half of beta testing is figuring out how to do things the developers didn't plan on you doing, or operating outside of assumptions that they made for themselves.

Most of the people in this very thread never considered the impact it would have on the desireability of buying different mechs and their variants - you don't think it's possible that that one slipped the PGI guys buy, and they sort of accidentally assumed people would be buying new mechs to enable design they already have access to in the mechlab, though in a roundabout way?

Quote

all people want are more mechs

Of course they do. The question is, how many are willing to drop 5 million CBills for a mech that is functionally the same as the one they already sort of have, especially if that 5 million CBills had a monetary amount tied to it? That's a huge game-changer there.

Quote

Really? I see massive amounts of demand to the Founders pack on these forums, which is 60 bucks. I see people building their own mech pods on the forums, which is hundreds of dollars. Every beta announcement is followed by 100 posts of "Shut up and take my money".

Pretty sure we aren't naturally cheap...you make a lot of claims without evidence that contradict forum behavior

Are we talking about the same people who constantly make threads going 'Will my piece of **** computer from 2007 run this game?!??!'? Also, the Artemis was more or less coldly received around here because almost everyone was concerned about the pricetag it would have, especially given Razer's track record.




Ultimately, in my mind it comes down to what someone else said: Rules make games, and learning how to operate within the rules is where the fun is. Nobody wants to play Cops and Robbers with that little redhead ******* from next door who constantly screams "I SHOT YOU YOU DIE NOW".

Edited by Frostiken, 10 June 2012 - 11:09 AM.

[Der Basilisk]

Me for myself, i don´t really need that min-maxing, that the mechlab probably will allow. Instead, i would be just fine to have access to all the variants that each mech has. Especially the mechs introduced so far have many tech level 1 variants, so counting each as a seperate mech would i guess triple the number of mechs available to start with. This should be quite enough, no?

[Frostiken]

Orion Pirate, on 10 June 2012 - 10:55 AM, said:

I think you forget the majority of the playerbase do not care about canon, they just want to shoot stuff.

Which makes me wonder where the accusations that this will "ruin the game" are coming from.

The vast majority of games that draw interest through 'customization' allow you to put a new hat on, slap an extended magazine on your rifle, and put a heat seeking missile on your helicopter.

Are these people who just want to shoot stuff actually going to be furious that there's more strict rules in place on a feature that, even with my limitations, would still offer unprecedented customization never seen in any other game they've played before?

For most of them, this will be their first foray into Mechwarrior, so the rules that are or are not in place are irrelevant to them, as they have no idea what has been done before or since, or what worked and what didn't.

In the end, it's easier to give people things than take them away, so restricting the mechlab first and maybe easing it later is a lot easier for everyone to swallow than going 'Oh man we ****** up, we're going to have to do something about this' and shutting down the party after everyone's already showed up.

Edited by Frostiken, 10 June 2012 - 11:11 AM.

[Elysion]

Der Basilisk, on 10 June 2012 - 11:04 AM, said:

Me for myself, i don´t really need that min-maxing, that the mechlab probably will allow. Instead, i would be just fine to have access to all the variants that each mech has. Especially the mechs introduced so far have many tech level 1 variants, so counting each as a seperate mech would i guess triple the number of mechs available to start with. This should be quite enough, no?

No. Weapons are for meanies. I will have no weapons and a lot of armor and i will ram my massive metal body into people to give them hugs.

Edited by Elysion, 10 June 2012 - 11:08 AM.

[Gauge]

Orion Pirate, on 10 June 2012 - 10:55 AM, said:

So how does limiting how someone customizes their mechs make the game interesting? I think you forget the majority of the playerbase do not care about canon, they just want to shoot stuff.

What you are saying makes perfect sense. It is your imagination that makes a difference between that charger and that awesome in your example. Otherwise they are numbers on a piece of paper, a mini on a table, or a graphic in a game. And this again is the reason why variants will be huge in this game, they limit the creative ability to make a mech the way you imagine it. In some examples the variants will make little difference to the number cruncher, but for some others, they will be so cool to play...

Your arguments are starting to confuse me... You don't care about canon (I really don't much either, I just want a fun game), but the difference between two mechs that are the same on paper is how 'cool' they will be. If you don't care what the mechs are usually like in BT, why is one cooler than the other? They're exactly the same. Sure you might like the look of one over the other (which I do), but releasing a charger 3 months down the line (when people have already made fast Awesomes) will generate a fraction of the excitement across the whole player base as it would if all of a sudden, now there's a really fast Assault! That's different, and couldn't be done before! let's get it and see what it can do!

I guess we just disagree about what we want though. I think we probably both have a lot of imagination. I could easily see myself using a ton of imagination for the first couple months of the game, and then not having a great deal of interest after that. New chassis? Eh, I already tried that with a Catapult/Hunchback/Jenner/Atlas/whatever...