Let's talk about balance, since that was the single most mentioned word last night (Or, at least, tied with "New Player Experience") Gonna re-post something I wrote in one of the last feedback threads, because it's still pretty relevant, and it'd be nice to have somewhere to start the discussion off.
Balance in MWO has long been a contentious subject, on that is difficult to really look at clearly because of the number of factors that interact with each other. There is no one issue, or one single bullet fix, that can patch over the issues currently afflicting the game. It’s a complex integrated system, and there’s three main parts contributing to the current state of play.
Before I get into those three interlocking factors, I need to talk about weapons, and playstyles in a general sense.
What we generally have, are two (and a half, ish) sorts of weapon paradigms.
Weapons that are very efficient damage per ton, but with generally awful damage per heat. (Energy weapons)
Weapons with bad damage per ton, but excellent damage per heat. (Ballistics)
Weapons that fall into the middle ground, with a balance of both, with no extremes either way (Missiles)
There are variations inside the three categories (rapid fire ACs vs AC20s, etc), but Battletech starts with these three base sorts of weapons, and that’s where you need to start with the balance.
The different playstyles want different weapons:
Brawlers want weapons that are very efficient damage per heat- Generally once you are in a brawl, you aren’t able to disengage and spare time for cooling down, so you need to be able to keep up the most efficient damage for as long as possible.
Snipers want the most damage per ton, so they can front load the most damage possible. They generally always have an opportunity to back off and cool down, or rotate out with a friendly team mate.
Missiles fall into a mixed spot, with SRMs being invaluable for brawlers, allowing them to load up with decent damage per ton as well as damage per heat weapons, that are not as weight and size constrained as ballistics. They’re also essential for light mechs to be able to effectively engage heavier targets.
This is pretty simplistic, but that’s what a general overview of weapons should look like, and how they should work. Sooo, the current problems? Going down the list:
Mech health is generally far too low.
Snipers rely on being able have enough heat capacity to burst enough weapons fire to critically damage an approaching brawler before their heat cap drastically cuts their DPS down.
For an ideal example, take the typical Highlander 732 with 3 PPC + gauss and 15 dhs, versus an AC20 + 3x SRM6 mech with 18 dhs. The highlander has a much higher peak DPS, almost double that of the brawling mech. However, it can sustain that level of damage for a much shorter time than the brawler can. If a fight managed to go on for 45 seconds, the brawling mech would pump out 500 damage compared to the sniping mech’s 350. Now, back in the golden age of SRMs, around November/December of last year, the brawling mech would have pumped out 780 damage vs the same 400 damage sniper mech.
Brawlers should have the advantage the longer a fight goes on, but without sufficient health, there's not time for that advantage to manifest itself. Just looking at the basic numbers we've got should make that pretty apparent: Health (both armor and internals) has been doubled from it's TT base. However, weapons do generally at least 250% more DPS than they did in TT, so it's a no brainer that we're running in to issues, considering that we can also aim (Unlike in TT.)
This leads me to my next point:
Weapons
Everyone knows that weapons like PPCs and Gauss, the ones filling the traditional sniper rifle role in Mechwarrior, are very powerful due to their ability to deliver large amounts of poinpoint damage. On it's own, there is absolutely nothing wrong with that. MWO is not the first game to have a sniper rifle type weapon, and it's certainly not the first one to try and deal with the balance issues associated with them. Luckily, it's not a hard problem to fix, since we can just rip off the solutions that every other game with sniper weapons uses: Slow down rate of fire (7-8 seconds), keep the large burst, just with much lower actual DPS. PPCs are particularly egregious in MWO, because along with their large pinpoint long range burst capability, they're also the highest DPS energy weapon. Gauss is less problematic due to it's size and weight leading to limited fitting, but still needs to do lower DPS.
Aside from the sniper weapon issue, there's a few others, like what was brought up by [sj]MausGMR: Weapons need to be unique, and have good niches. MWLL did a pretty good job with this, I think- Autocannons were generally more rapid fire, while LBXes fired slower, but did much higher burst (An LBX20 did about twice the total damage per shot compared to an AC20, but it fired slower and had lower total DPS. However, it was also easier to hit with thanks to a much faster projectile speed.) Pulse lasers actually, well, pulsed, transforming them from the generalist beam lasers that dealt damage over time, in to a series of rapid fire pinpoints that made them easier to be effective with. They were also vastly more heat efficient, making them superbly suited for brawling.
This is a google doc with weapons numbers comparing MWO and MWLL's weapons:
http://tinyurl.com/kxfah7b
Things like these can ALL be changed purely by numbers in itemstats.xml, with no code required. If we saw intensive fiddling on weapons in every patch, or on the test server, we'd never have ended up with a 6 month slump of stagnant unbalanced games.
Finally, the matchmaker.
The interactions with the matchmaker and the game types just reinforce the existing problems. Since there is no tonnage matching right now, there’s no reason not to go 6 assault 2 fast mover- This also just happens to both almost require a sniper comp, as well as working best with a sniper comp.
The requirement is because, with 6 assaults, you’re going to be slow in general. You require the longer ranged weapons to exert the area control needed, since you can’t quickly re-position like a lighter force can.
The other half of the coin is that snipers work far better the heavier you are, because of their weapon choices- The ideal burst/sniper weapons are the ones that have the most damage per ton. Since their function relies on having enough tons to pack in enough of them for the highest burst, they really only work well on the heavier mechs. A more balanced 2/2/2/2 composition really just does not work out ideally with a heavy sniper composition, compared to 3/3/0/2, or even heavier groups. Anything lighter than 2/2/2/2 practically requires good brawlers, because it just plain does not have the critical mass of sniper burst power necessary to win.
Lobbies would allow competitive groups to alleviate the matchmaker issues, but they are not a viable solution to the playerbase at large.
tldr: It ends up being a self-reinforcing cycle of weapons, matchmaker, mech health, and the random map pool all contributing to there being only one viable choice of game play right now. However, ALL of it is solvable, or at least vastly improvable, with pure numbers tweaks. There is absolutely no need for extra complicated and un-intuitive systems layered on top of the base game play in order to have a balanced game.
e:
Extra stuff for those that made it through this far- I didn't want to knock people out with any more of a wall of text than this already is.
Health: Along with increasing health in general (I do prefer a greater % increase for internals vs armor, mechs should spend more time alive but damaged and missing weapons), we also need something like Hardened or Modular armor to add real options to armoring a 'Mech. Right now, there's zero choice to armor. You max your head, torsos, and most of your arms (Depending if you have arm shields like atlases or cents, or useless arms like hunchbacks), and generally up to about 49-57 armor on legs. There's no choices involved, this is just what every good player does. Adding the ability to actually sacrifice weapons, engine, ammo, or heat in exchange for much more armor would make for actual choices, which is a good thing.
But what about Lights and Mediums?
The TT health scaling from lights to assaults is really, really out of whack, and translates poorly (Surprise) to MWO, because hitscan weapons exist, and we can aim. I mean, the Locust has a max of 24 armor + 12 internal health on the CT, if it is implemented as planned. It can be one shotted by, well.. Just about anything.
I'd totally want to see lights and mediums get their internal health scaled up a bit so that there's not so large a gap between the heaviest mechs and the lights. I don't think scaling armor is really possible at present- There is only one armor item, and it can only be set to one value for "Number of points per ton." But, internal HP can trivially be set for each individual mech. A hunchback's hunch could have double internals with one number change in the mech definition file.
Weapons: Also, ammo needs to go up, as a given with more health. Ballistics have long been handicapped by never getting the 200% ammo that missiles did way back in closed beta. UACs also need to copy MWLL's mechanics if they ever hope to be balanced, but that need is far off down the line.
Matchmaker wise, I can offer no suggestions there. I can identify the current issues with it, but I don't really have any ideas for a fix other than "We need tonnage limited CW drops" other things that are on the horizon. That said, if the other stuff is fixed, odds are the matchmaker issues won't be as big a deal as they are now. It's only when all 4 of these factors are working together that things get as bad as we currently have them.
Ach that is a long post, but even when the crux of my arguments are "KEEP IT SIMPLE, STUPID" it really really helps to just lay everything out as straightforwardly as possible.
Edited by Gwaihir, 26 July 2013 - 12:07 PM.
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