376 replies to this topic

[OneEyed Jack]

Captain Stiffy, on 27 November 2013 - 02:36 PM, said:

How hard is this? STOP MIXING PREMADES AND PUGS. It's super easy. So easy it hurts. IT'S WHAT EVERY OTHER GAME EVER DOES. Why is this different? Just end it.

Sure, we'll just put hard limits on group sizes so that the MM actually has something to work with. 4, 8, 12 or nothing. Otherwise the MM has to play jigsaw-puzzle trying to piece together matches out of randomly-sized groups. You do recall they're implementing 2-11 group sizes, yes?

Do you read this stuff before hitting 'post'?

[YueFei]

Instead of restricting, why not give players more *choices*? Give us different missions. And allow players to queue for the type of map and mission that they want. We already allow players to queue for either Assault mode or Conquest mode.

Players wanna stack heavies and assaults and smash into the opposition? Let them choose a map and mission suited for that.

A player wants to run something lighter that can make a major impact towards winning that game? Let them choose a larger map with multiple mission objectives that they are suited for.

If a player brings a mech that's not suitable for the map and mission they queued up for, that's their own fault.

Just give us a proper lobby already, so that players on a team can see the map and mission, and discuss briefly before picking which mech they'd like to drop with.

[Jonathan Paine]

Why do I want class&tonnage restrictions?
1. I enjoy playing a balanced match, one where both skill and weight is roughly equivalent.
- stomps in both directions bore me
2. I enjoy playing different types of mechs
- playing the same mech over and over again bores me
3. I enjoy playing different styles of matches
- when matches get too predictable, I get bored

What would make an unbalanced weight/class match enjoyable for me?
1. Uneven rewards. You play as the underdog? Great, have more XP and C-Bills
2. A re-match, same players, same map, but teams switch around tonnage discrepancy

[xMEPHISTOx]

Captain Stiffy, on 27 November 2013 - 02:26 PM, said:

Pugs and Teams don't get mixed. EVER PERIOD. NEVER. (4 man teams are matched with other 4 man teams to play)
Then;
Pugs are matched together to an even weight.
Teams do whatever the hell they want.

So easy. It's how everything else that has ever succeeded, ever, has done matching.

No...that is incorrect, not 'every' game seperates groups and pugs. For example WoT does not separate 'platoons' (ie. groups) from pugs and I would say they have succeeded quite well.

Edited by xMEPHISTOx, 27 November 2013 - 04:53 PM.

[WarHippy]

Jonathan Paine, on 27 November 2013 - 04:42 PM, said:

Why do I want class&tonnage restrictions?
1. I enjoy playing a balanced match, one where both skill and weight is roughly equivalent.
- stomps in both directions bore me
2. I enjoy playing different types of mechs
- playing the same mech over and over again bores me
3. I enjoy playing different styles of matches
- when matches get too predictable, I get bored

1. Stomps are going to happen regardless of weight limits, and people are still going to complain that something else is the reason other than themselves that they lost.
2. You can play different mechs now so why does it need to change, or is it that you just want others to play different mechs even though it may bore them?
3. As with any game cookie cutter builds and team comps will be created as people discover what the min/max is for the arbitrary weight the devs select.

[Redshift2k5]

The current system of haphazard weight on either team is an issue.

Is a weight limit the best answer? Maybe not, but anything will be an improvement.

I honestly believe the game will be better with teams including a healthy number of Mediums and not automatically defaulting to a big Heavy or Assault.

Will teams still be able to run a certain number of assaults? Of course! But just like managing your mech's heat, it's weight, it's ammo, you'll have to manage your team's composition. find a balance that work for you, but you have to give and take if you want to push the envelope.

[keith]

YueFei, on 27 November 2013 - 04:40 PM, said:

Instead of restricting, why not give players more *choices*? Give us different missions. And allow players to queue for the type of map and mission that they want. We already allow players to queue for either Assault mode or Conquest mode.

Players wanna stack heavies and assaults and smash into the opposition? Let them choose a map and mission suited for that.

A player wants to run something lighter that can make a major impact towards winning that game? Let them choose a larger map with multiple mission objectives that they are suited for.

If a player brings a mech that's not suitable for the map and mission they queued up for, that's their own fault.

Just give us a proper lobby already, so that players on a team can see the map and mission, and discuss briefly before picking which mech they'd like to drop with.

this is what dedicated servers are for. something pgi did not opt for. the whole take control away from a community is a horrible move made by devs. i don't know anything just been a gamer for 15 years

[aniviron]

Prezimonto, on 26 November 2013 - 11:10 PM, said:

Market based BV is the way to go in the long run. Balance the game through economy. This mech/engine/weapon/upgrade is popular and rare... the BV on your mech goes up. That mech is a dog at the moment and everyone hates it, through a common engine in and a mediocre weapon load out.... your mech might suck but it might get paired against something that is also not so good. Nothing like actual economics to balance the game on the fly.

And now the raging will commence about how people will quit if you can't play your uber mech all the time. I guess I just don't care. This game's biggest virtue is the customization and ability to change things up out of game. If you think your fotm build can hack it against something that's unpopular but 20 to 30 tons bigger... by all means take it for a spin. If the build is too op everyone uses it until it's paired against something that's no longer viable, then people move along to a new meta and it's BV goes back down.

I did mention in the post that you're responding to with this text that I think BV is a better balancing mechanic than tonnage. It's still not a great system though:

BV suffers from being a static evaluation of equipment that varies greatly in worth depending on its circumstances. How much BV should TAG be worth? If you're a light, it's either incredibly useful, or it's completely worthless, though more often the latter. Should PPCs be worth less on Terra Therma than on Alpine? They're excellent on one map, and not so great on the other. What about weapons that take a lot of skill to use well, and do very poorly when used in low Elo brackets? And perhaps the biggest question of all, how do you deal with weapons that aren't great when used alone but are devastating in large groups like the AC5, LRMs or mlas?

You'll note that most of these problems are ones that the game has struggled with in the past, and most of them have either been band-aided with something like ghost heat or are still problems. This strongly seems to imply that there either is no good solution to the problem, or that PGI hasn't been able to come up with one; I don't think BV is going to suddenly make any of those issues disappear.

Finally, even if the flamer has a BV of 1, it's still a garbage weapon. That's just the reality of the game; nobody is going to take bad weapons to lower their BV. It's just not a good alternative to good weapon and mech balance.

The real answer is not tonnage matching or BV. It's making every mech and piece of equipment worth using on its own terms. BV and tonnage are trying to take lights and rate their combat effectiveness, saying that a Jenner is worth 35% of an Atlas because it gets a third as much weight and can't deal as much damage. A much better solution is to make lights equally worth taking to assaults, but not because of how they do in combat- rather, you should want to play one because it's good for scouting, capping, harassing, e-war, etc. We're clearly not there yet, of course, but this solution sure beats just leaving combat being the only relevant metric.

[Prezimonto]

aniviron, on 27 November 2013 - 06:53 PM, said:

I did mention in the post that you're responding to with this text that I think BV is a better balancing mechanic than tonnage. It's still not a great system though:
BV suffers from being a static evaluation of equipment that varies greatly in worth depending on its circumstances. How much BV should TAG be worth?

The difference is that I'm not talking about a static evaluation of BV. I'm talking about a dynamic one. For all I care include map conditions as another factor in the dynamics.

I put a long post together in Roland's market based battle value system on how one could do this:

Essentially, give everything a starting point and then modify the starting BV based on whatever factors you want:
supply (the more common the piece of equipment the BV goes down)
demand (the more players use the equipment the more BV goes up)
these two values are in tension... low supply + high demand = very high adjusted BV, high supply + low demand the reverse

upkeep cost (not only is some equipment rare, but parts/maintenance time, ect could be invoked to help the devs adjust on the fly)

drop conditions (hot map + hot weapons = lower BV)
ELO (so you suck in this type of mech = lower BV, or you're amazing- scale the BV up you mercenaries are expensive)

Add in supply drops on maps... taking and holding these might not be a win condition, but might help drive down you BV on the next map...

there's TONS of ways you can add dynamics to BV.

Better yet, you can list the BV for every mech on the drop screen. As they're revealed your computer could heat map the names so you get a direct idea of how uneven the match up you are facing is off the bat... or make this a module and give it to newbs for free.

[aniviron]

Prezimonto, on 27 November 2013 - 09:20 PM, said:

The difference is that I'm not talking about a static evaluation of BV. I'm talking about a dynamic one. For all I care include map conditions as another factor in the dynamics.

I put a long post together in Roland's market based battle value system on how one could do this:

Essentially, give everything a starting point and then modify the starting BV based on whatever factors you want:
supply (the more common the piece of equipment the BV goes down)
demand (the more players use the equipment the more BV goes up)
these two values are in tension... low supply + high demand = very high adjusted BV, high supply + low demand the reverse

upkeep cost (not only is some equipment rare, but parts/maintenance time, ect could be invoked to help the devs adjust on the fly)

drop conditions (hot map + hot weapons = lower BV)
ELO (so you suck in this type of mech = lower BV, or you're amazing- scale the BV up you mercenaries are expensive)

Add in supply drops on maps... taking and holding these might not be a win condition, but might help drive down you BV on the next map...

there's TONS of ways you can add dynamics to BV.

Better yet, you can list the BV for every mech on the drop screen. As they're revealed your computer could heat map the names so you get a direct idea of how uneven the match up you are facing is off the bat... or make this a module and give it to newbs for free.

If the BV adjusts every match based on the temperature or every patch based on how often something is being used, it's going to be very very hard for a player to put together a mech with a stable BV count.

This also wouldn't be the first game to have dynamic pricing like this. Turns out that bad weapons are still bad, and while you do force people off the best weapons to some degree, they're still the best weapons, and people will spend all of their BV to get what they want, especially if teams are balanced by BV and there's no personal limit to how much they can use. Remember the Counter-Strike Source dynamic pricing system that lasted one month? By the end, the worst guns cost $1, and the best ones were so expensive it was literally not possible to buy them, they were more than the maximum amount of money. People will take the tools that let them win; it's better to spend your resources on something that will help you win than to save them and lose anyway.

You're really just a lot better off making a game where there are no bad equipment choices than you are trying to make players take bad equipment because it's inexpensive. Bad equipment loses games for people, and no one wants to lose games.

Lastly, this is starting to sound like a positively massive engineering project by PGI standards. I mean, putting this in would take more time than CW phase one alone, so we're looking at a year at the soonest.

[Karl Streiger]

As far as I understand the both former posts -you are describing BV as part of an supply system.

That would be an interesting addition to MWO instead of static C-Bills. But it should be not a measurement of combat it self.

I wouldn't care about a battle where the other side spend millions of C-Bills or supply points when they still have 4 Thunderhawks. While my team only has Hunchbacks.

BattleValue for combat must be a static value - bringing 4 Thunderhawks could mean that the other 8 Mechs of that teams are Comandos with 3 MLAS and 120 kph - while you have 12 Shadow Hawks.
BattleValue should balance not balanced weapons - the ER-PPC should be superior to a PPC in all terms. And BV is the only way to make it this way. Same for the DHS SHS debate - if you have cooling efficency of 20% while using SHS or a cooling efficency of 40% while using DHS - the later Mech should be "more" expensive.

In the end it could mean that a high ELO-PUG Player in a high tier machine - is matched in a team with 11 new players that only have a trial Mech. Fighting a mixed force of average players and newbs - with average machines.

That means for normal pugging a well rounded but not a min maxed Mech would be the best vehicle.
Balancing things itself
(For example the first QQ Mech - the Dual Gauss K2 - with a fair BV - it would have been acceptable to swap a Gauss for a ER-PPC and two Medium Lasers - reducing the PinPoint damage, and increasing the heat of that Mech - causing less BV)

Edited by Karl Streiger, 28 November 2013 - 12:27 AM.

[KinLuu]

Captain Stiffy, on 27 November 2013 - 02:36 PM, said:

How hard is this? STOP MIXING PREMADES AND PUGS. It's super easy. So easy it hurts. IT'S WHAT EVERY OTHER GAME EVER DOES. Why is this different? Just end it.

WoT mixes PUGs with premades.
Warthunder mixes PUGs with premades.
LoL mixes PUGs with premades.
BF4 mixes PUGs with premades.

You are wrong.

[Snoopy]

What will be the selling point for a Assault Hero mech when weight restrictions are mandatory
?
Maybe I have missed something or I do not understand the system ...

Edited by Snoopy, 28 November 2013 - 02:36 AM.

[Wispsy]

This ***** over so many different people all because they cannot be bothered to balance their game.


I guess this is just their way of increasing the sales of lighter mechs, you know, because they are forcing people to play them if they want to play with friends so they are going to have to buy them...multiple times...

As for putting them in 12mans. They have already said they do not want a community run competitive scene, they will do tournaments themselves when they feel it is appropriate and they can make the most out of it.

[Gaan Cathal]

Redshift2k5, on 27 November 2013 - 05:16 PM, said:

The current system of haphazard weight on either team is an issue.

Is a weight limit the best answer? Maybe not, but anything will be an improvement.

I honestly believe the game will be better with teams including a healthy number of Mediums and not automatically defaulting to a big Heavy or Assault.

Will teams still be able to run a certain number of assaults? Of course! But just like managing your mech's heat, it's weight, it's ammo, you'll have to manage your team's composition. find a balance that work for you, but you have to give and take if you want to push the envelope.

What on earth makes you think this will lead to more mediums? It'll lead to less. The ten tons you save by taking a situationally useful Jenner or Raven over a generally just subpar Hunchback lets you upgrade a laughable Awesome to a FOTM Highlander. None of the mediums are good enough that they won't be downgraded to lights to provide tonnage for more high-end firepower.

[Belorion]

Redshift2k5, on 27 November 2013 - 05:16 PM, said:

The current system of haphazard weight on either team is an issue.

Is a weight limit the best answer? Maybe not, but anything will be an improvement.

I honestly believe the game will be better with teams including a healthy number of Mediums and not automatically defaulting to a big Heavy or Assault.

Will teams still be able to run a certain number of assaults? Of course! But just like managing your mech's heat, it's weight, it's ammo, you'll have to manage your team's composition. find a balance that work for you, but you have to give and take if you want to push the envelope.

Simply having a weight limit won't magically cure the weight imbalance. The matcher can still come up with comps where one team grossly out tons the other.

[Amsro]

WarHippy, on 27 November 2013 - 05:11 PM, said:

1. Stomps are going to happen regardless of weight limits, and people are still going to complain that something else is the reason other than themselves that they lost.
2. You can play different mechs now so why does it need to change, or is it that you just want others to play different mechs even though it may bore them?
3. As with any game cookie cutter builds and team comps will be created as people discover what the min/max is for the arbitrary weight the devs select.

1.2.3. All the matches will be on a much more equal footing. Its not even a debate.

Snoopy, on 28 November 2013 - 02:34 AM, said:

What will be the selling point for a Assault Hero mech when weight restrictions are mandatory
?
Maybe I have missed something or I do not understand the system ...

I'm pretty sure PGI has sold enough Assault Hero mechs, and no one will stop because of this system.

Gaan Cathal, on 28 November 2013 - 04:21 AM, said:

What on earth makes you think this will lead to more mediums? It'll lead to less. The ten tons you save by taking a situationally useful Jenner or Raven over a generally just subpar Hunchback lets you upgrade a laughable Awesome to a FOTM Highlander. None of the mediums are good enough that they won't be downgraded to lights to provide tonnage for more high-end firepower.

That is only one option you presented, I'm pretty sure Mediums will only benefit from this limit. I for one do well in mediums now, when the typical match consists of 23 Assaults + my medium. Can't wait for that to end.

This will also remove the timid Atlas and other scared Assaults, since there won't be as many on the battlefield. Role warfare will finally appear, and with any luck advance!

Belorion, on 28 November 2013 - 06:50 AM, said:

Simply having a weight limit won't magically cure the weight imbalance. The matcher can still come up with comps where one team grossly out tons the other.

No one team can barely out ton the other, that's the whole point of weight limits.

[Screech]

OneEyed Jack, on 27 November 2013 - 04:13 PM, said:

You do recall they're implementing 2-11 group sizes, yes?

Hopefully it will be 2-12, they need to stop *****-footing around things. 12 man is dead as it is and needs to be brought back. Best way to get people to play in 12 man groups is to tell them they have to play against 12 man groups. Private lobbies can then come in to cover people who want to have their own little scrimmages.

[Snoopy]

Amsro, on 28 November 2013 - 07:47 AM, said:

I'm pretty sure PGI has sold enough Assault Hero mechs, and no one will stop because of this system.

This does not sound like a robust business plan for me.

Your high-price product gets less attractive because of a much lower average drop weight per mech. Why and how should this be good for sales?

[Amsro]

Snoopy, on 28 November 2013 - 08:34 AM, said:

This does not sound like a robust business plan for me.

Your high-price product gets less attractive because of a much lower average drop weight per mech. Why and how should this be good for sales?

LOL serious? You think people will stop buying mechs they like because maybe they might not be able to drop EVERY single match with it?

This will help sell the rest of the HERO mechs that have yet to be released, you know lights and mediums.

Lights = 1 Hero
Medium = 3 Heroes
Heavy = 6 Heroes
Assault = 5 Heroes

Expect more lights and mediums moving forward, and now they will a reason to be in the game.