24 replies to this topic

[nehebkau]

I was just thinking about our stompy-stompy mechs and was quite amazed that the manufacturing infrastructure of the innersphere was such that they could produce an unlimited amount of mechs at a moments notice. Actually I was thinking of this in terms of the sheer number of DDCs that were in one game I was in and how and economy keep spitting those out without either running out of resources or going bankrupt.

It occured to me that maybe there is a trade in mechs, kinda like cars today...but cars arnt mechs so I thought about it in terms of used Navy Ships. You can buy used Navy ships and fit them for your countries needs, but you can only buy what is available.... You cant buy an air-craft carrier if there arn't any for sale. Why not do that with the economy in game? Create a mech marketplace where the numbers of each type of mech are controlled and, you can only buy what is available on the market. You may want to buy a DDC but if none are available then too bad. Eventually it could become an in-game marketplace.

From PGI's standpoint, it could be profitable by allowing people to custom order new mechs from the manufacturer by making a MC mech purchase rather than a C-bill purchase. You could do the same thing, eventually, with weapon systems and components. It would provide another in-game revenue point for PGI and force players to make more choices of what they are going to drop in and/or use.

I know, many of you won't like this, but the fun in these games comes from the sprinkling of reality that we add to it. Not having every Jag be an AC40 because no one is selling their AC20s on the market place or having to mount Large Lasers because there was a run on ER Lasers adds complexity. It also means that you have to make more decisions on your own inventory -- do you sell that ER Laser cause the selling price has spiked to the same as that XL 300 engine you want. As it stands now, customization and fielding of mechs is far removed from the reality of supply and demand and is as close to an "Easy Mode" as you can get.

[verybad]

Yeah, the same people that QQ'd replacement parts costing stuff in the game back in closed beta would also qq this away.

A dynamic economy based on supply and demand would be fun, but some ***** had to have their Fatlas in every single game or they'd cry.

[Sandpit]

I think you're going to see somethign close to this with CW. Certain factions get better prices on specific variants and the black market being used for other factions. I suggested doing a dynamic economy where mech prices rise as their demand rises. As they get expensive people start buying other mechs causing their price to rise. As a chassis becomes less popular due to price restriction then its price begins to drop again. This would implement a market that is constantly fluctuating and add an entirely new dynamic in my opinion

[Corralis]

Well having to re-buy your entire mech every time it gets destroyed would be pretty ******. Well unless they gave us 10 million c-bills each and every match.

[nehebkau]

Corralis, on 03 November 2013 - 02:20 PM, said:

Well having to re-buy your entire mech every time it gets destroyed would be pretty ******. Well unless they gave us 10 million c-bills each and every match.

Wasn't suggesting this at all, just for the purchase of new mechs and purchasing stuff you dont already have in your inventory.

[Corralis]

nehebkau, on 03 November 2013 - 02:47 PM, said:

Wasn't suggesting this at all, just for the purchase of new mechs and purchasing stuff you dont already have in your inventory.

Yea OK well Bryan already said that this was gonna happen in his big Community Warfare speech (with mech's not weapons). Also try not to forget that the Inner Sphere is bloody huge and it is quite likely that there is at least one mech factory on every planet and more likely to be hundreds. These factory's could pump out mech's at an incredible rate so I don't think there's likely to be availability issues. Certainly not with the more common mech's.

[Sandpit]

Corralis, on 03 November 2013 - 05:07 PM, said:

Yea OK well Bryan already said that this was gonna happen in his big Community Warfare speech (with mech's not weapons). Also try not to forget that the Inner Sphere is bloody huge and it is quite likely that there is at least one mech factory on every planet and more likely to be hundreds. These factory's could pump out mech's at an incredible rate so I don't think there's likely to be availability issues. Certainly not with the more common mech's.

yes and no

I'm sure there will be tons of factories but if they stay true to canon then factories WILL be somewhat limited. Production facilities were rare and actually off limits to direct attack (although planetary control is another matter completely) because they were needed to keep up the tech and production. At this point we were in a downward slide of maintaining the tech

[Corralis]

Sandpit, on 03 November 2013 - 05:41 PM, said:

yes and no

I'm sure there will be tons of factories but if they stay true to canon then factories WILL be somewhat limited. Production facilities were rare and actually off limits to direct attack (although planetary control is another matter completely) because they were needed to keep up the tech and production. At this point we were in a downward slide of maintaining the tech

Ahh OK, I'm not very informed of Battletech Lore, I haven't read any of it. Still It makes sense to change the price of mech's depending on who has control of the factory. But not being able to fit your mech out the way you want to because of weapon availability seems like a bad idea to me. I think that could only end up annoying players.

[Kazairl]

There will always be a supply. It will just get very expensive as the numbers get low. Eventually everything will actually cost what it is worth.

[Sybreed]

verybad, on 03 November 2013 - 12:08 PM, said:

Yeah, the same people that QQ'd replacement parts costing stuff in the game back in closed beta would also qq this away.

A dynamic economy based on supply and demand would be fun, but some ***** had to have their Fatlas in every single game or they'd cry.

the biggest cryers were LRM boats. IMO, this would have been an elegant way to solve LRMapocalypse problems

OP LRMs make you die in a single LRM 100 salvo? Well, those LRM boats lose money even if they win

[Prezimonto]

Check out Roland's Market Based Battle Value System. I would cover much the same ideas and help balance matches at the same time.
http://mwomercs.com/...e-value-system/

[Mackman]

This is the definition of band-aid balancing, and the only people it would affect is brand-new players who don't have C-bills banked up. It would accomplish nothing beyond making life for a new player exponentially harder.

[Mechteric]

nehebkau, on 03 November 2013 - 10:38 AM, said:

I know, many of you won't like this, but the fun in these games comes from the sprinkling of reality that we add to it. Not having every Jag be an AC40 because no one is selling their AC20s on the market place or having to mount Large Lasers because there was a run on ER Lasers adds complexity. It also means that you have to make more decisions on your own inventory -- do you sell that ER Laser cause the selling price has spiked to the same as that XL 300 engine you want. As it stands now, customization and fielding of mechs is far removed from the reality of supply and demand and is as close to an "Easy Mode" as you can get.

Sorry but its just not a good idea, its not cool to punish me for wanting to use a single AC20 on my hunchback just because you don't like when people run two AC20s.

[nehebkau]

CapperDeluxe, on 04 November 2013 - 07:35 AM, said:

Sorry but its just not a good idea, its not cool to punish me for wanting to use a single AC20 on my hunchback just because you don't like when people run two AC20s.

Wow! Class, we call this 'filtering'. Grabbing on to one thing and excluding the rest based on ones own internal filters and bias. It is most commonly found in americanized pollitical discussions and leftist vs. rightest rhetoric.

Do you see the error the poster made? They interpreted my use of AC20s as an indication of dislike, this was based on their own internal filtering of the value or disvalue of AC20s. Their own personal opinions and interactions with others on the ‘AC40 meme’ clouded their critical thinking ability. Another, more thoughtful, person would have interpreted the high damage, size, weight of an AC20 being an indication of their cost to produce, scarcity and therefore cost/value and that being the basis for using them as an example in an economic discussion. The characterization of introducing some economic reality as being a punishment is erronious and again the result of the ommision of critical reading and critical evaluation.

My suggestion may have flaws, a rational and reasonable person would point those out or even refute the central point of the argument. An engaged and actualized person would offer solutions to those flaws with the end goal being providing a more emmersive and rich gaming environment. Your comment was none of those.

[Lokisonn]

A nice idea and possibly a good starting point to think about things. I actually liked how original MW1 economy worked where you could not always find the mechs you wanted or not bringing enough ammunition along to sustain your campagin ( I forget if weapons had scarcity as well such that you could not always repair 100%)

One possible C-bill sink and balance to help even things out for new players not having acces to as many mechs would be that you/your faction/the merc company pays more for the total tonnage of mechs you bring with you. For example if you have 30 mechs, you can choose to garage 25 of them and carry 5 around having to return to base to change the number or mechs and composition. If you decide to carry fewer mechs, you limit your choices but pay less for transportation. Think that was how it worked in MW1 (except there was no garage and you would have had to sell the mech you did not want to carry)

But this is just throwing ideas out there. Need to think this through more.

Edited by Lokisonn, 04 November 2013 - 05:07 PM.

[Vassago Rain]

verybad, on 03 November 2013 - 12:08 PM, said:

Yeah, the same people that QQ'd replacement parts costing stuff in the game back in closed beta would also qq this away.

A dynamic economy based on supply and demand would be fun, but some ***** had to have their Fatlas in every single game or they'd cry.

It's too bad the 'economy' wasn't an economy, but merely a fun tax. Which is why it was removed.

[FerrolupisXIII]

yeah, back when R&R was a thing, making money was easy. take energy boat, no XL engine, no fancy gear. keep nearly all your C-Bills due to not having to pay for ammo or an expensive engine.

Protip: disable repair, play zombie mech! so no c-bill loss but you enter match slightly damaged.

Everyone else either paid for ammo (Artemis LRM ammo in particular cost an arm and a leg) or expensive mech parts. so some people made hundreds of thousands every single match, while others barely broke even, or sometimes lost money.

yeah. it was definitely not fun.

[Modo44]

Fluctuating/modified mech and equipment availability/pricing is an obvious system for Community Warfare. We can expect it to be included.

Any repair and rearm continuously hurts about half of all players, mostly new ones. If being bad also made you use stupidly underpowered mechs, people would leave in droves. If the system would try to prevent losses for bad players, then either it would become irrelevant, or it would be easy to exploit by veterans. It only makes sense in a single player setting, because nobody gives a s#it about the AI not getting salvage.

[nehebkau]

The whole idea of buying ammo and making reparis after a match is a bad one. The balance in economics in a game has to abstract enough so that you dont get killed by details. There is no way that should be brought into this game. Having said that, there is no guarentee that this type of system will be introduced nor how it will be introduced unless the community gets behind it and gives some opinions.

What I was thinking about was more along the lines of eliminating the endless supply of mech variants and weapon systems available for c-bill purchase. The goal being to make your mech inventories have greater value -- there is a cost associated to having every Atlas variant that goes beyond the initial purchase and equipment cots. Its like owning a house, you paid for it and its there but there is a cost of ownership which includes the amount of money you could get, given current market rates, for selling it.

If you think about it in terms of a real market, you could even incorporate the finding of salvage after matches whereby players would then be able to sell that salvage on the open market. For example, you may have just beat a bunch of filthy stinking clanners and salvaged a clan medium laser and then put that up for sale on your innersphere marketplace. But I digress, this type of thing is quite complex and would require a lot of thought to design and implement.


It would be hard on new players, but that is the nature of any game -- be it WoW, DAOC, SWKOTR or any other. For new players it makes the ownership of the more valued equipment and mechs all the sweeter. Again, bypassing the scarcity issue by allowing the use of MC to make 'new factory direct' purchases would provide revenue for PGI and, increase the viability of the game.

But any talk about repairs and reloading purchases after games should be buried in a deep dark hole until the end of the universe.

Edited by nehebkau, 05 November 2013 - 08:05 AM.

[Sandpit]

Quote

But any talk about repairs and reloading purchases after games should be buried in a deep dark hole until the end of the universe.

lol uhm n, we had R&R for a good long time and players (old & new) understood it just fine. Players QQ and whined about it costing too much or simply did no pay the bill and dropped in half-repaired and half-reloaded mechs to exploit the system and max out their earnings (no I'm not going to debate exploit, devs said it was exploitive the end) Then PGI said ok, no more R&R but nerfed the earnings to what we have now.
NOW we have players whining that the earnings are too low. This is the perfect example of the "never happy" crowd that many of us are getting tired of watching PGI cater to.