740 replies to this topic

[Hubis]

Quincy80, on 28 July 2013 - 07:45 AM, said:

The quoted number was 5500-6000 players as I recall.

240+ people on the voice server (with many more in the text chat) from 36+ groups. Rough estimates were around 6,000 members between all the groups.

Quincy80, on 28 July 2013 - 07:45 AM, said:

This was deliberate. The goal was to highlight the problems in this town hall. It was stated in the stream.
The point is that we were not really focusing on telling PGI how to make their game, we were pointing out the problems that we see. Another reason this was done was to prevent any divisive proposals that would stop people from signing.

To put a finer point on this -- the goal at this point is to not try and "tell PGI how to make their game" because (a) they have their own design methods and long term plans [at least we hope] and because ( there are a ton of ways to fix many of these problems, and zeroing in on specific suggestions would have taken a lot of time we didn't want to devote for a first meeting.

Instead, the goal here was to validate, to ourselves and everyone else, that there ARE a large set of problems that a lot of groups all agree need to be fixed. Ultimately, we want to use this to bring to PGI's attention what we think are the highest priority issues so that they can consider adjusting their own plans appropriately if these priorities don't match their expectations. Part of the problem everyone has had with "Ghost Heat" is that it's a bad attempt to to fix a problem that a lot of people don't think really matters ("boating") instead of focusing on the real issue (pinpoint alpha, time to live, etc).

PGI is very aware of technical issues, I am sure, and to some degree or another aware of balance issues. But I don't think it's fair to assume that they have omnipotent understanding of high-level balance and meta-game problems, because they don't play competitively, or have the same experience base as some of the much more hardcore players. We know the actual game as well as they do (some of us better) and so the most useful things we can do *as beta testers* is to provide this feedback.

Alois Hammer, on 28 July 2013 - 09:10 AM, said:

Sadly, I'm afraid the fatal flaw in this entire plan is right there for all to see.



And a whopping "600+" people compares to the 3000+ "No 3pv votes" that the devs wrote off as an insignificant minority how?

Seriously, good luck- I hope it works for y'all. But we've seen this sort of thing play out before, and so far it always has the same ending: "We've heard your concerns, and are now going to do whatever we want anyway so thanks for wasting your time again in the vain belief that we give a [REDACTED]."

I understand your pessimism here, but if all you're trying to say is "this is pointless and is going to fail" then you're welcome to leave the thread. The hope here is that 5,000 players speaking together is a much less dismissible voice than 5,000 individuals.

[Miekael]

Stormwolf, on 28 July 2013 - 09:08 AM, said:

I think that it would be better if we created a new thread for discussions about ingame mechanics/components. That way we can focus on one subject at a time while not cluttering up this thread with several discussions at once.

I think Stormwolf brings up a good point here. We should keep this thread for the movement, and leave specifics to Mecha Lingua meetings. Anything we hammer out there in detail we can post here for quick reference, and so other members who could not make the meetings can catch up. Maybe start up a thread in balance discussion titled #saveMWO balance, where people that want to debate can go, keeping this thread for the general cause.

[Stormwolf]

Alois Hammer, on 28 July 2013 - 09:10 AM, said:

Sadly, I'm afraid the fatal flaw in this entire plan is right there for all to see.

Yes, there is a chance that they will simply brush our grievances aside.

Personally, I hope for the best and prepare for the worst here.

[RG Notch]

Jackson Jax Teller, on 28 July 2013 - 09:55 AM, said:

I read this as "if youre not here to help us pat ourselves on the back then dont let the door hit you on the way out."

Yep kind of funny that the title says discussion, but only discussion allowed is cheer leading! People should be aware of the success or lack there of all the previous interventions the "competitive" players have tried with PGI. So they can decide rationally if they are just wasting their time or just tilting at wind mills but I guess you can't have that if you prefer the warmth and comfort of an echo chamber.

[fil5000]

Jackson Jax Teller, on 28 July 2013 - 09:55 AM, said:

I read this as "if youre not here to help us pat ourselves on the back then dont let the door hit you on the way out."

Then again, there was that one thread that they locked after like 238 votes that they claimed was representative of the community - when it was telling them what they wanted to hear

RG Notch, on 28 July 2013 - 10:00 AM, said:

Yep kind of funny that the title says discussion, but only discussion allowed is cheer leading! People should be aware of the success or lack there of all the previous interventions the "competitive" players have tried with PGI. So they can decide rationally if they are just wasting their time or just tilting at wind mills but I guess you can't have that if you prefer the warmth and comfort of an echo chamber.

Not at all. Technoviking and others have presented counter arguments to the general consensus we had at the meeting and raised useful points. An echo chamber isn't what's wanted at all, but posts that just say "IT WON'T WORK SO WHY BOTHER" don't really contribute to discussion at all. Present counter arguments to the points raised by all means, but if all you have to say is that you don't like it, what's the point in being here?

[Tegiminis]

Alois Hammer, on 28 July 2013 - 09:10 AM, said:

Seriously, good luck- I hope it works for y'all. But we've seen this sort of thing play out before, and so far it always has the same ending: "We've heard your concerns, and are now going to do whatever we want anyway so thanks for wasting your time again in the vain belief that we give a [REDACTED]."

"It won't work, so why try?"

Go dunk your head in a toilet bowl. It'll surely be more useful than your contributions to this thread.

Jackson Jax Teller, on 28 July 2013 - 09:39 AM, said:

A bunch of nonsense

I don't think you understand how F2P monetization works. If 600 of the highest-paying, most-playing players leaves, that's ABSOLUTELY DEVASTATING to the revenue of the company. And that's just the signatures on the sheet; numbers of people represented, either directly or indirectly, are in the 5k+ range, from what I hear.

Not to mention you cut all that out of your quote, because misrepresenting my position is far easier than actually contributing to the thread. Join Alois in the aforementioned toilet bowl dunking; you've earned it.

---

Sure love all the PGI apologists in this thread. This isn't about backpatting, it's about discussion. If your entire contribution is "lol why bother" then go ahead and show yourself the door. If a thing is worth doing, it's worth doing regardless of response. If PGI doesn't take #savemwo seriously, then that's their problem. Our problem is presenting a unified voice for airing complaints. As such, it's best served if you contribute to how to improve this process or offer genuine dissenting opinions besides "I'm an apathetic lackwit that can't be bothered to even try."

Edited by Tegiminis, 28 July 2013 - 10:13 AM.

[Miekael]

Ignore the naysayers, they want to come here and say it wont work, let them. We can be better then that by not responding to those kind of post.

[Oderint dum Metuant]

I'd settle for a proper pilot skill tree, you know like the ones presented in the dev blogs, that specialize pilots into roles, or mechs into roles.
Something with actual choices that effect the way you play, not this pointless grind me to unlock them all crap that currently passes for a skill tree.

[Miekael]

DV McKenna, on 28 July 2013 - 10:22 AM, said:

I'd settle for a proper pilot skill tree, you know like the ones presented in the dev blogs, that specialize pilots into roles, or mechs into roles.
Something with actual choices that effect the way you play, not this pointless grind me to unlock them all crap that currently passes for a skill tree.

Wouldn't be cool if Catapults could unlock an increase in missile efficiency is some way, lights could unlock greater sensor ranges, and Awesomes could unlock some sort of energy efficiency? I think it would be a good step in creating differences in mechs that could lead to more variety on the battlefield.

Edit: Just to expand slightly, I would probably want to see something like six unlocks related to the chassis itself, with two dedicated to the variants themselves. This way, you wouldn't have say a K2 with a missile efficiency but maybe an energy efficiency.

Edited by Miekael, 28 July 2013 - 10:40 AM.

[Protection]

Jackson Jax Teller, on 28 July 2013 - 09:39 AM, said:

Yeah it really is, especially when you consider the devs discount polls on their own forums that have totals upwards of 6000 votes because theye not representative of the community (mainly because theyre telling them things they dont want to hear). For example:

The poll he'd referring to was (before it was accidentally broken by the mods) 5000 to like 500 against the idea of 3rd person view.

FIFTY FIVE HUNDRED VOTES and thats a very small part of the demographic, and you think 600 is significant.

Our whole corp just unanimously voted to sign the letter. And our corp never unanimously agrees on anything. That's 200+ active players in agreement with the overall thesis of this message.


Also, it's worth noting that most, if not all, of those 600+ names are almost every single serious, competitive player and team in the community. These are the guys that have effectively mastered PGI's game and are making totally valid arguments as to why it's broken.

Edited by Protection, 28 July 2013 - 10:38 AM.

[Stormwolf]

DV McKenna, on 28 July 2013 - 10:22 AM, said:

I'd settle for a proper pilot skill tree, you know like the ones presented in the dev blogs, that specialize pilots into roles, or mechs into roles.
Something with actual choices that effect the way you play, not this pointless grind me to unlock them all crap that currently passes for a skill tree.

I'd like for some more RPGish components, something like a general skills system in addition to mech mastery.
The big difference here being that general skills would apply to all mechs whereas mech skills would just apply to one variant.

You can become a specialized mechwarrior or go for a jack of all trades route, although, near the end you would have maxed out all those stats.

[fil5000]

Stormwolf, on 28 July 2013 - 10:41 AM, said:

I'd like for some more RPGish components, something like a general skills system in addition to mech mastery.
The big difference here being that general skills would apply to all mechs whereas mech skills would just apply to one variant.

You can become a specialized mechwarrior or go for a jack of all trades route, although, near the end you would have maxed out all those stats.

I like this, but I think you'd need to be careful not to wind up with higher Xp pilots utterly dominating lower ones, and then ending up in the World of Tanks place of tiers (here by pilot rather than by tank) being needed to stop lower XP players from being matched with higher ones.

[Miekael]

Stormwolf, on 28 July 2013 - 10:41 AM, said:

I'd like for some more RPGish components, something like a general skills system in addition to mech mastery.
The big difference here being that general skills would apply to all mechs whereas mech skills would just apply to one variant.

You can become a specialized mechwarrior or go for a jack of all trades route, although, near the end you would have maxed out all those stats.

When I first heard this was an MMO, I always imagined having an in game avatar that would walk around the hanger, and then head to a "bar" like area where other pilots would be forming up groups.

And great point you bring up fil5000.

[Stormwolf]

fil5000, on 28 July 2013 - 10:56 AM, said:

I like this, but I think you'd need to be careful not to wind up with higher Xp pilots utterly dominating lower ones, and then ending up in the World of Tanks place of tiers (here by pilot rather than by tank) being needed to stop lower XP players from being matched with higher ones.

Well, you can bring in player seperation by level. A guy at level 6 won't be able to fight a guy at level 18.
Maybe bring in a rule that you can only fight people who are max +5 and min -5 of your own level.

I'm sure someone will be able to think up a system here.

[fil5000]

Stormwolf, on 28 July 2013 - 11:02 AM, said:

Well, you can bring in player seperation by level. A guy at level 6 won't be able to fight a guy at level 18.
Maybe bring in a rule that you can only fight people who are max +5 and min -5 of your own level.

I'm sure someone will be able to think up a system here.

It's really whether or not MWO will ever have a big enough player pool to support something like that though. World of Tanks has had up to 500,000 players on line at once before so you can (and need to) carve up the player base in a lot of ways to make matchmaking better - Battletech/Mechwarrior is a lot more niche, and sitting staring at the "WAITING TO FIND A MATCH" wheel is more and more likely the more you split that population out.

[Hubis]

Cross-posting from our internal forums:

Piggy-backing onto Gwaihir's assertion about TT values, here's some info on how TT works. When you hit a mech (let's just assume this happens for the sake of argument) you roll 2d6 to determine the location, and look it up on a table. This table is

 2 ( 2.78%) - Center Torso (TAC)
 3 (13.89%) - Right Arm
 4 - ^
 5 (11.11%) - Right Leg
 6 (13.89%) - Right Torso
 7 (19.44%) - Center Torso
 8 (13.89%) - Left Torso
 9 (11.11%) - Left Leg
10 (13.86%) - Left Arm
11 - ^
12 ( 2.78%) - Head

So assuming you hit, there's about a 20% chance that you hit the center torso (ignoring the TAC on a 2), and a roughly 50% chance that you hit LT/CT/RT. Moreover, if you hit someone with 3xPPCs, the expected damage you would do the CT would be 6 damage (3x10x Expected probability of a CT hit).

This is remarkable in how laughably different it is from the reality of MWO. Again, assuming you're able to focus on a target, roughly 60% of your shots probably end up on the CT. Furthermore, because of shot convergence, ALL of that damage ends up on the same component -- if we assume the above 60% hit rate, that's 18 damage for 3 PPCs rather than 6 (not to mention the intangible benefit of concentrating more of your fire wherever it is you DO end up hitting).

Whether this is better or worse is kind of immaterial. The important point is that half of MWO (the build system, weapon damage/dps, and armor/structure distribution) is derived from TT which is based around this expected damage rate and distribution, wheras the other half is entirely and very tangibly different. Tabletop armor and structure levels are balanced around your components roughly coming into structure at the same time given a constant rate of damage, with a slight bias towards your torsos having more survivability. This leads to a much longer time to live, with arms and side torsos being a little bit more vulnerable and prone to getting knocked out before an actual mission kill. However, because of increased fire focus, this balance is completely inverted in MWO.

Fortunately, since the problem largely derives from a simple difference in inputs (damage distribution) you could actually just fix it by adjusting your expectations and the baseline armor and structure values to match. If the CT has 2x the odds of getting hit in MWO than it does in TT, give it 2x the HP. It seems drastic, but I bet you'd be surprised how much more balanced everything suddenly seems to become.

[Hubis]

Discussions about whether or not we should bother discussing things are off topic, and will be reported as such. If you don't like this effort then you are welcome to say why you don't like it; otherwise, vote 1 and move on.

edit:

Edited by Hubis, 28 July 2013 - 12:49 PM.

[Hubis]

Hubis, on 28 July 2013 - 12:37 PM, said:

Cross-posting from our internal forums:

Piggy-backing onto Gwaihir's assertion about TT values, here's some info on how TT works. When you hit a mech (let's just assume this happens for the sake of argument) you roll 2d6 to determine the location, and look it up on a table. This table is

2 ( 2.78%) - Center Torso (TAC)
3 (13.89%) - Right Arm
4 - ^
5 (11.11%) - Right Leg
6 (13.89%) - Right Torso
7 (19.44%) - Center Torso
8 (13.89%) - Left Torso
9 (11.11%) - Left Leg
10 (13.86%) - Left Arm
11 - ^
12 ( 2.78%) - Head

So assuming you hit, there's about a 20% chance that you hit the center torso (ignoring the TAC on a 2), and a roughly 50% chance that you hit LT/CT/RT. Moreover, if you hit someone with 3xPPCs, the expected damage you would do the CT would be 6 damage (3x10x Expected probability of a CT hit).

This is remarkable in how laughably different it is from the reality of MWO. Again, assuming you're able to focus on a target, roughly 60% of your shots probably end up on the CT. Furthermore, because of shot convergence, ALL of that damage ends up on the same component -- if we assume the above 60% hit rate, that's 18 damage for 3 PPCs rather than 6 (not to mention the intangible benefit of concentrating more of your fire wherever it is you DO end up hitting).

Whether this is better or worse is kind of immaterial. The important point is that half of MWO (the build system, weapon damage/dps, and armor/structure distribution) is derived from TT which is based around this expected damage rate and distribution, wheras the other half is entirely and very tangibly different. Tabletop armor and structure levels are balanced around your components roughly coming into structure at the same time given a constant rate of damage, with a slight bias towards your torsos having more survivability. This leads to a much longer time to live, with arms and side torsos being a little bit more vulnerable and prone to getting knocked out before an actual mission kill. However, because of increased fire focus, this balance is completely inverted in MWO.

Fortunately, since the problem largely derives from a simple difference in inputs (damage distribution) you could actually just fix it by adjusting your expectations and the baseline armor and structure values to match. If the CT has 2x the odds of getting hit in MWO than it does in TT, give it 2x the HP. It seems drastic, but I bet you'd be surprised how much more balanced everything suddenly seems to become.

Following the above, this is another reason why adding upgrades which improve your armor distribution abilities would be "A Good Thing ™". At lower player experience/skill/mech sophistication, players are going to be less skilled and less able to focus fire, meaning that the distribution of damage locations will be wider (although probably still much more focused than TT). When you get to higher tiers, however, more and more of that bias is going to shift towards the torso. The way you fix that is by adding a system which lets players reactively armor their core (perhaps at the expense of slots and/or tonnage, but not to a completely punitive degree) as they advance in skill and earn C-Bills for upgrades. At higher levels this upgrade might be considered "necessary", but what it does do is give you flexibility to balance the low-tier experience for low-tier players, while still addressing issues at higher tiers of play.

Edited by Hubis, 28 July 2013 - 01:03 PM.

[Rippthrough]

Rippthrough, on 27 July 2013 - 08:40 AM, said:

Oh well, there was a very important breakthrough in the game balance department that made coolant viable, even though it helped out the massive alpha striking meta we have now....


..they realised they could make money out of it.

****, I just had a thought.

Quote

Coming soon!
Feeling a little hot under the collar? Fire one extra weapon before before the heat cap, with our new Thermal Capacitor consumable, only 10MC.
Feeling flush? Upgrade to Improved Thermal Capacitor Module and fire an extra 2 weapons for just 15MC!

You heard it here first

[Team Leader]

So what now? What do we do? What can I do to help and draw the devs attention to theses issues? Where are the issues and points clearly listed that even the short-sighted question dodging devs would have to pay attention to? Can I help by making write ups consolidating information?