43 replies to this topic

[Mawai]

Hi,

I've read some summaries of what was said and watched the posted video. I don't understand why PGI can't post this information officially with a feedback thread but that is a completely different issue.

However, on to Community Warfare.

Listening to the presentation, I was struck by several comments and a significant lack of detail in many of the ideas. It all sounds ultimately cool, but it is supposed to, the question I have IS ... will the system they have described actually work?

1) Regarding their timetable - the following comments were a concern to me

Contracts - "fear in our engineering team"
Faction (Loyalist)- player faction units - "tip of the ice berg", "have to still figure out mechanics"
Economics - "four engineers passing out"

How can they imagine completing implementation of this system in 6 months when there is so much concern about the features within the development team that it leaks through into a PR presentation of the ideas? (Maybe I am wrong ... but maybe the dreamers aren't really listening to the builders here ... which often leads borked scheduling)

2) Contracts</p>
- players are divided into loyalists (direct members of a faction), independent mercenaries or members of a mercenary corporation
- the entirety of community warfare - the entire future of the game is apparently based around contracts
- Faction Unit combat will REPLACE current play style - every drop will mean something for community warfare
- this means that folks will need contracts for EVERY game they play

- introduction of bounty contracts - sounds cool - but no details given on how to prevent its use in transferring cbills between players or other possible abuses - deosn't sound like they thought about it beyond the cool idea stage

- success in contracts bring rewards
- failure brings some sort of penalty ... "not designed yet" ... not a good sign?

- no comment on whether there would be any matches without contracts, however if community warfare replaces the current match system then presumably contracts will be required.

3) Loyalty points
- no penalties - won't go negative
- performance based earning of LP
- plug for phoenix mechs with LP boost
- can earn points with each faction - retain honorary standing if you leave
- player faction units
- Wolf's Dragoons membership - maximum loyalty for all factions

This is just an extra experience system. You grind standing with 5 factions - earn faction rewards - switch factions - grind the next - grind all 5 factions and you get to join the "elite" Wolf's Dragoon faction for those that are loved by all factions.

Wow, sorry to say but this makes no sense to me and is inconsistent with Battletech and the whole Inner Sphere conflict system. It is the simplest possible grind system that could be imagined grafted onto all the complexity of contracts and economics.

If Wolf's Dragoons is supposed to be an elite NPC faction unit, then why would they take the most mediocre pilots with the time available to grind standings with the different IS factions. From an immersion breaking point of view, wouldn't the Kuritan faction be just a little perturbed when a maximum standing loyal member betrays the house, goes to work for Hanse Davion and starts slaughtering Kuritans? I wonder how long an "honorary" standing would last?

4) Mercenary units</p>
- structured however you wish - common assets - permissions - taxes - have to fund war</p>
- common assets - drop ships - upgrade bases on controlled planets

Do players own mechs and equipment or do mercenary corps? Or is it only "drop ships" and bases that are owned by mercenary corps?
Faction Unit combat will REPLACE current play style
- owning drop ships and moving stuff around - logistics
- stuff, units AND PLAYERS
- it takes DAYS to reach a planet

They also mentioned that matching will involve a lobby with a "Drop ship" UI with up to 4 mechs
- does every player have a "drop ship"?
- presumably the "drop ship" in the lobby is not the same as "drop ships" owned by corporations to move assets around.

5) Planet combat
- get to target planet with mercenary unit (drop ship, equipment, mechs and PLAYERS??)
- get contract (but need to have sufficient LP - what if you don't - days wasted??)
- what happens when you lose?
- Garrison there indefinitely - but how do you play matches elsewhere? How do you move assets?
- maps affect which planets flip ...

Logistics - corps need to move equipment to the target planet using drop ships - this can take days

Does this mean that a player can not PLAY MWO if they are in transit on a drop ship?

What mechs can a player use in a given battle? What if their mechs aren't on the drop ship?

This aspect sounds totally cool ... but is completely not thought out in the presentation. How can you move assets when they belong to individual players?

How can independent mercenaries play in games all over the inner sphere - will they need logistics of some description?

Independent mercenaries are used to fill out the rosters in faction related fights. Voting on maps affects which planets change hands ... but this description of game play is completely incompatible with the whole idea of moving assets by drop ship and only allowing participation in contracts if you have a presence at a planet. There are holes in these design ideas that you could drive a drop ship through.

6) Territory control doesn't appear thought out

This is just an addition to the above comment - there were at least two elements to territory control with the ideas of fronts and fighting over planets - and then the idea of logistics and moving stuff by drop ship and the whole chess game idea.

There is also the issue of having to leave forces behind to garrison a planet. What does this mean? If neither players or mechs are "left behind"... in which case they would not get to play unless some fighting occurs there ... then what DOES it mean? Does a merc corp only get to purchase a certain number of bases and they have to leave a base behind as a garrison point? This means that corps would move drop ships containing bases around the map ... depositing a forward base would allow competition for that world ... but neither assets (mechs) or players would be involved in this logistical aspect. However, IF this was what they had in mind then the presentation would likely have been phrased differently ... the impression I had was that the design was just a bunch of ideas with limited cohesion at this point in time.

7) Global economy
- there is supposed to be a global economy - certain mechs are cheaper for certain factions - capture a planet containing a factory for a particular mech and they get more expensive for everyone else
- black market pricing for hard to get mechs
- mechs that will be cheaper for specific factions
- special content regarding planets - but not designed yet - supposed plan to talk to community in the next 3 weeks

BUT
- how does a global economy work without losing mechs? How does losing a planet on which your mech is built affect you as a player? Every player has PAID for the mechs they have now ... how can they lose them?
- with the comment about the victors costing more depending on your faction standings used as an example - GET yours before CW is introduced

8) Level system?
- up to level 60 - but no statement of what it means - what effects it might have - does it mean anything?
- I honestly have no idea what the level systems is supposed to be ... it may be part of the faction ranking system in which case you could get level 60 in each faction ... on the other hand maybe it has something to do with mech and pilot skills
- in either case, it sounds like another grind of some description but given the limited information ... it doesn't seem to mean very much.

9) Finally UI 2.0
- the UI screens shown look good
- public test coming
- however, as of last week they still can't fit mechs well enough to demo it despite the time already invested
- working on import/export API in XML for fits... but was stated as part of "future vision"

Conclusions:

There were a lot of very cool ideas presented. However, when looked at in detail there seem to be significant design flaws with the content as outlined in the talk. These issues can likely be resolved but the fact that they had a PR talk advertising CW that says little more than was stated 21 months ago and which contains implicit and apparently contradictory design issues is a concern.

Finally, the number of worrisome phrases used in the talk regarding the reaction of the developers to these plans including "fear" and "passing out" is just plain scary ... sorry to say but a talk on such a significant game feature should have been able to express the confidence of the development team in making this feature a reality. Use of these phrases, even in the semi-humorous context would seem to me to be a red warning flag. In addition, the lack of detailed design combined with these issues would indicate that no real planning, specification, detailed design development, or even prototyping has yet been done on these features except at the highest levels.

(Hey - I could be wrong ... and I hope I am ... but my take on this talk is the following - a PR exercise designed to retain players and to promote what they hope one day to deliver - that day being unspecified)
P.S. I wasted way too much time typing this in ... sigh

[Chemie]

i agree about abuse of the 1 v1 "challenge" or bounty thing. Create your alt and farm the cadet bonus and then challenge your regular account for the CB....not thought out.

[Sandpit]

It honestly seemed like they were just handing out info they haven't even begin to design. It was more of a sales pitch to a publisher in hopes they buy into it in order to make the game. We could all be wrong but won't know until deadlines are made or missed and it is implemented. I have several questions myself when it comes to how they plan to prevent exploitation of some of their ideas as well as how they are going to do things like prevent a house from getting bombarded with new players that lose rapid amounts of planets in quick succession and players from hopping into other factions and throwing matches in order to help their units take enemy planets

[Riptor]

Nothing of this has been put in code yet. For all we know that powerpoint presentation is all they currently have concerning this topic.

Right now CW only exists in the Devs heads as a vague idea and that powerpoint presentation.

[Sandpit]

Riptor, on 27 September 2013 - 06:02 PM, said:

Nothing of this has been put in code yet. For all we know that powerpoint presentation is all they currently have concerning this topic.

Right now CW only exists in the Devs heads as a vague idea and that powerpoint presentation.

of course it's all speculate right now but it's still nice to kick around ideas on the subject. I have no faith in the current timeframe due to past performance but I still like talking about the ideas

[Karyudo ds]

Chemie, on 27 September 2013 - 05:27 PM, said:

i agree about abuse of the 1 v1 "challenge" or bounty thing. Create your alt and farm the cadet bonus and then challenge your regular account for the CB....not thought out.

There are certainly ways they could curb that from being effective. I would imagine the obvious one would be to limit the frequency of being able to place bounties over time, and by specific ID. I mean if you place a bounty on the same guy every day, several times, or even several times an hour (or whatever), it just seems like that would be noticeable data to me.

The way he bounced from topic to topic it didn't seem like he had much time to detail it. Not that I'm really sure there is much detail to be had either. It did leave plenty of questions on just about every front. I liked most of the concepts at their core though I agree more detail would have been nice. Really should have taken much more time out of the event for it. Tournaments are great and all but a huge portion of us were looking for news.

[Dymlos2003]

*says something about PGI not having any skill or anything and being negative* Am I doing it right?


Didn't he say that this was a basic presentation and a command chair post will follow? Stop asking questions about things we don't know.

[Vulix]

dymlos2003, on 27 September 2013 - 09:26 PM, said:

Stop asking questions about things we don't know.

???

[Karl Marlow]

dymlos2003, on 27 September 2013 - 09:26 PM, said:

*says something about PGI not having any skill or anything and being negative* Am I doing it right?


Didn't he say that this was a basic presentation and a command chair post will follow? Stop asking questions about things we don't know.

What they have been doing for the last several months is put off all questions regarding CW until the Launch event. They said the Launch event would be the massive CW info drop we have been waiting for. I find it disturbing that all he had was a basic powerpoint presentation that mostly contained vague ideas and a few confirmations on what we already knew.

To the OP. It appears that the vast majority of the ideas such as planetary combat, logistics, garrisons, and contracts only apply to mercenary companies. Factions get the shaft.

Quote

- with the comment about the victors costing more depending on your faction standings used as an example - GET yours before CW is introduced

Or just change your faction to whoever has the factory. Since you retain your honorary rank this isn't exactly a big issue.

[Moriquendi86]

Problem with making a design is that often what looks awesome on paper is actually boring or unplayable once it's prototyped and playtested, or quite the opposite shallow and seemingly boring design ends up being best feature after prototype. So in general game devs don't want to share details until feature it's almost ready since a lot may change. Also if you have few features A and B for example and B is heavily dependent on A it's usually good idea to have A in some playable state and focus on making A good before going in to detail design of B, otherwise all your work on B may be rendered useless if A will change to much.
PGI in the past shared some design ideas that sounded great but they had to change them for various reasons which upset a lot of people.

[Fooooo]

"Does this mean that a player can not PLAY MWO if they are in transit on a drop ship?"


From what was said it sounded like the corp itself moves dropships of players around. (or mechs.....hmm)

Whilst in transit those players most likely cannot fight in any other CORP battle. (as they and their mech is on transit)

If its just mechs being moved around and the players themselves can be assigned once the battle starts, then there will be no problem at all.

However either way I doubt it would stop them just dropping into the regular queues with everyone else like we do right now. The corp part will be just another layer. As it was said, corps can align with a faction....so.......in off times the corp players would be dropping in the pub queues to fight for their aligned faction (and the fronts)......at least....thats what I took from it.

When private matches come there will be another option as well. So I doubt they are going to prevent anyone from playing the game for days....that would just be stupid.

Edited by Fooooo, 28 September 2013 - 01:20 AM.

[Rat of the Legion Vega]

Yeah it makes no sense for a loyalist player to be able to be loved by all 5 factions at the same time, and do work for all of them. I don't think there's ever been a Batletech character in universe history who packed up and migrated between all 5 houses. You'd end up being hated and distrusted by all of them. If we're talking mercenaries fine, but that's not what the loyalist player is supposed to represent. Also, Kurita hates ALL mercenaries from this time period, including and ESPECIALLY Wolf's Dragoons.

[Darius Deadeye]

Maximizing standing for ALL factions in order to join the Wolf's Dragoons is the dumbest deal and/or gamebreaker I've heard them wanting to implement. There will no faction loyalty WHATSOEVER, no RP immersion for faction specific loyalists, and everybody will be jumping ship not once, twice, thrice, but four freaking times. Come on. YOU CAN DO BETTER PGI, SURELY.

Endgame? Everybody is part of the Wolf's Dragoons?? Equal standing with all factions?!?

Surely SOMEBODY at PGI must have read a book or two about Battletech, and SOMEBODY at PGI must have come to the realization that some of these factions outright HATE each other.

[Chemie]

read this and tell me what was new in this powerpoint presentation

http://mwomercs.com/...mmunity-warfare

nothing. (other than 2 years differential in time stamp)

Edited by Chemie, 28 September 2013 - 04:46 AM.

[TexAce]

the more you tear their idea up now the later we will get ANYTHING.

So just stop, let them finish it and tweak it later. Better than to wait another 2 years

[Mawai]

TexAss, on 28 September 2013 - 04:52 AM, said:

the more you tear their idea up now the later we will get ANYTHING.

So just stop, let them finish it and tweak it later. Better than to wait another 2 years

I actually disagree. I think their IDEAS are cool ... but if they try to implement what they have described I think it will quickly fall apart (at least if what they have said is what they try to build). I expect that their design will change ... hopefully, the final result will contain elements of their presentation that play well together and give an interesting and fun reason to play MWO.

However, the experience with PGI and the community has been pretty negative. They don't communicate their ideas. They describe the development of MWO as the NEW way of building games. Permanent on-going development, free to play ... but their design process is a close lipped black box that doesn't necessarily address and balance the goals of the developers and the community. A NEW development process perhaps could use a more open and NEW design process as well. It is their game, they make the decisions ... but in my opinion they would get a lot more mileage out of open communication with the community, explaining what they are doing and why, offering status updates more regularly than every four or six weeks.

-> NEW on-going development model -> NEW design methods -> NEW communications processes

Anyway, I posted the original thoughts because there are significant flaws with what they have described. They are either aware of them and thus what they are building will not be what they have described which will probably cause some folks to be unhappy ... or they are unaware of some of the issues and contradictions in their plans, in which case this might (remotely - if anyone actually reads it) help to focus the ideas and identify some areas that really need to be better designed.

[Duncan Jr Fischer]

The topic starter said it all, nailed it. Sounds awesome at first, then the holes in design swallow everything. I had the same concerns while listening and would put my sign under topic starter's every word.

Maybe they want to do that good old trick? Or is it hat trick already? Saying look what an awesome game we WILL have.. soon ™... Making us play, pay and wait for totally indefinite time, basing it on the vaguest hints of the future would-be-awesome game concept. And it's only my personal impression, that making this presentation was the first time they got to design or even imagine their CW in a year, since promising it for the first time.

As for me it is a sign not to play much. The changes are great, but they are so far and so questionable..
Great to hear they actually want to push CW into this game at some point in the far future, it was a sheer surprise to me, honestly. Gave up believing in CW tale in the early summer. But I'm glad that I can relax and come to fight a battle or two once in a month to see how things are going until there appears any sign of CW-like game play. I mean some new game play.

Edited by Duncan Jr Fischer, 28 September 2013 - 05:17 AM.

[Ghogiel]

Phase 1 is going to add ability to pay MC to create a merc unit that wouldn't do much more than simply exist other than to start grinding LP under. It's a real game changer.

And custom decals probably too.

[Johnny Z]

Riptor, on 27 September 2013 - 06:02 PM, said:

Nothing of this has been put in code yet. For all we know that powerpoint presentation is all they currently have concerning this topic.

Right now CW only exists in the Devs heads as a vague idea and that powerpoint presentation.

Fact is, most likely they are doing phase 2(front warfare) of CW as we speak.

With UI 2.0 due in "4 weeks" and phase 1 of CW "very soon after" and most likely a part of ui 2.0, stands to reason, that they have completed phase 1(looks like pilot side of CW mostly).

Nonsense that they havnt even started doing CW couldnt be more wrong and doesnt help Mechwarrior Online players giving feedback or comms/reviews on these forums of the upcomming content.


Also no offense to anyone, but it is likely they havnt thought of everything, and also likely they have at least a few idiots working for them, so the mechwarrior players giving feedback and ideas/reviews of content is a good thing, but trolling and being generally negative wont make MW a better game.

Edited by Johnny Z, 28 September 2013 - 06:40 AM.

[mike29tw]

TexAss, on 28 September 2013 - 04:52 AM, said:

the more you tear their idea up now the later we will get ANYTHING.

So just stop, let them finish it and tweak it later. Better than to wait another 2 years

lol what's the difference? It's not like PGI is paying any attention to our feedback anyway.

Johnny Z, on 28 September 2013 - 05:33 AM, said:

Fact is, most likely the devs are doing phase 2 of CW as we speak.

With UI 2.0 due in "4 weeks" and phase 1 of CW "very soon after" and most likely a part of ui 2.0, stands to reason, that they have completed phase 1(looks like pilot side of CW mostly).

Nonsense that they havnt even started doing CW couldnt be more wrong and doesnt help Mechwarrior Online players giving feedback or comms,reviews on these forums of the upcomming content.

That's not a fact. That's your speculation.