@Tesunie
HOLY TERRA YOU MADE CHARTS THAT'S AWESOME!
The Federated Suns should be proud of you!
I really appreciate the effort and the graphical aide to the conversation.
So the term "Rich Get Richer" has been thrown around in the topic (not my term, not to mention I was not the first one to think of this topic, darn lol). Combined with the provided 'rent' comparison, I think leads us to a new perspective. The idea being the economy of damage. For example, in real life, a gallon of milk costs the same, whether you are rich or poor. But when you are rich you can afford to buy the dairy company and get milk for free. THis is intended to be a bit of a silly example
WIth the rent example, I think the problem is as such. ROOMMATES:
In TT, Every apartment costs 1000. The Atlas can buy his own apartment, because he makes 1000 a month. The Commando has to get roommates in order to make ends meet. For instance, the commando might find 3 commando buddies to all live in the same apartment, each one contributing their 250 a month, for a grand total of 1000. Alternatively, the original Commando in question might find a single Commando buddy, and a Trebuchet buddy as well, again, adding up to 1000 dollars a month. The Atlas was taking up the same amount of room as 4 mechs in the balancing of a match. MWO does NOT work this way. Every side receives 12 players. Even when weight balancing comes in (which I will get to in a second) you don't have the 4/1 exchange that you did in TT. In order to fight against an Atlas in mwo, you would either need another Atlas, or you would need multiple mechs of a smaller weight class. For instance, An Awesome and a Flea (in theory), should be able to team up and take out an Atlas. Or 5 Fleas (still theoretically lol). The problem is that those 5 Fleas are representative of about 42% of the ENTIRE team, whereas the Atlas is representative of about 8%. So even if the Flease COULD take him down, they would be using an OVERWHELMING amount of force even though they are "balanced" at the same weight. This problem is most noticeable and most prevalent the lighter your mech is. For instance, 2 Hunchbacks fighting against the same Atlas have a much closer degree of "pilot power". About 8% for the Atlas and about 17% for the Hunchbacks. The hunchbacks still require an overwhelming force in order to take down a mech of equivalent weight, but the power-gap is much smaller.
The basic concept would be that by increasing the armor (i.e. "power level") of Mechs on a sliding scale, with the lightest mechs receiving the largest bump, and the heaviest mechs receiving the smallest bump. You could diminish this power gap to make for a smoother game experience. For instance: a hypothetical increase in the armor of the Locust, a bump of 26 percent more armor (from 146 to 184, only 38 armor points, a little more than 1 ton), would change the above scenario to where you would only need 4 Locusts to fight 1 Atlas. The same hypothetical increase to the Commando (38 points of armor, about 21% increase) allows only 3 Commandos to stand up to a single Atlas instead of 4.
This would be a 38 point increase across the board, for every mech (including the Atlas). My suggestion would be to add 6 points of armor to the Right Arm, Right Torso, Left Torso, and Left Arm, with the Center torso receiving an extra 14 points of armor (along with the accompanying increase in Internal Structure). The armor on the Head seems pretty locked in, and the legs have already received a bonus, so I think it is fair and reasonable to leave them out of the loop, so to speak.
[BONUS SECTION] :
Weight balancing. Starting at 20 tons and extending up to 100 tons, there are 17 mech classes. This presents us with an exact Middle of the Road, which just so happens to be 60 tons. Therefore, my suggestion for creating a Goal Weight for mech companies would be to use 60 tons as the 'average' weight of a mech. 12 Players to a team, average weight of 60 tons, works out to 720 metric tons of metallic laser death!
HOWEVER! The devs mentioned that they also wanted to institute a MINIMUM weight alongside the maximum weight. Presumably this would be to prevent an entire team of Jenners (pesky little buggers) or Spiders (#1 fear in the entire world... fear of spiders lol). As opposed to a minimum weight as the strict limit, I would instead suggest a maximum Class Limit. So You would only be able to have 4 of the same weight class in any given team of 12. However, in order to bring back the environmental feel of the Mechwarrior Universe, I would allow Medium mechs some extra leeway, with a maximum of 6 mechs per team. So you could have a maximum of 4 Light mechs, maximum 6 Medium mechs, maximum 4 Heavy mechs, or maximum 4 Assault mechs (within your maximum 12 players, of course).
The only thing that I have left to add about the balancing would be the POSSIBLE consideration of changing one or two weights to a different class. This is probably just my strange opinion, but hey, that's why its in the bonus section lol. Like I stated earlier, there are 17 weights of mechs. Which means there are three categories that consist of 4 mech weights, with a single category that has 5 mech weights. The Assault class has 5 weights in it, more than any other. This places a large strain on the 80 ton mech class (I'm looking at you AWESOME). The 80 class is the lightest in its group, but additionally it is at a disadvantage because it is the 5th smallest of it's group, suffering a 20 ton deficit from it's largest competitor, as opposed to the standard 15 tons (Cicada vs. Shadowhawk, for example). It would be POSSIBLE (not likely lol). To slide the 80 ton mechs into the Heavy category. This would then place a similar stress onto 60 ton mechs. The 60 ton mechs, however, already have somewhat of a disadvantage that resembles the 80 ton mechs plight, because they are the absolute middle of the road. My further suggestion would be to place the 60 ton mechs one peg down, into the upper stratospheres of the Medium Class. This places the most "medium" mech in the game, firmly into the medium category. As well as making the most common medium mechs (50 tons) directly into the middle of the middle. Alternately, 60 ton mechs could have their own new class all to themselves, called Super Medium (this is a joke). lol
[/end BONUS SECTION]
@Ollo, your mathematical principles are sound. Very sound actually. You can however, extend this extremism in both directions. Your point about +1000 rounds is both valid and relevant, but it also applies to doubling armor. At a certain point, the doubling of armor creates a very silly combination of armor values. For instance if you took current values, and doubled them again, it would start to seem silly, but if you then doubled them AGAIN, it would be easy to see. A commando would have something like 600 armor. Obviously way too much, but still killable in the course of a match. The Atlas on the other hand, would have something like 2400 armor, which is starting to get to the point where it would take longer than a 15 minute match to kill the thing. Both extremes present a breaking of the practical threshold for each system of increasing longevity through armor. That is why my proposal above uses both. It is a bit of a compromise. Current double armor values are kept, and a small bonus is applied directly on top of it, thus utilizing both systems in an attempt to improve the game in with a balanced approach.
-Cormac
TL DR
Give everyone a bonus 38 points of armor, spread across arms and torso.
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Tesunie, on 15 August 2013 - 08:07 PM, said:
