Riptor, on 14 December 2013 - 07:00 PM, said:
Ever heard of "pre mades"?
Ever heard of a lobby?
There really isn't a 'team' system for this game.
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And think your own model through please. If i pledge my allegiance as a merc to a house like steiner, but decide to drop in a timber wolf i suddenly am fighting for the clans?
Who said you can pledge your allegiance to Steiner?
I certainly have not earned any Loyalty Points. Not that I have any idea what I'd exchange them for.
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What happens when my pals decide to drop in their IS mechs? am i being forced to also choose a IS mech?
Who says you get to choose what team you drop with, anymore?
Perhaps you drop as either Clan or IS - the match-maker has built you a good team.
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Also narrowminded? PGI themselves stated time and time again that they would never limit mechs by factions.. that for your information also includes the clans.
They also stated that they would never implement third person view, coolant flush, or mess with weapon tonnages.
If you go by the lore timeline - the IS is currently getting bent over and boned by the clans. IS techs are still working doggedly to try and understand Clan technology - let alone reverse-engineer or repair it.
Of course, we all forgot about that whole lore/timeline thing.
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Again.. please point to me where in this whole deal it says that these omni mechs are clan exclusive and can only be used by clan players. Cause they arent.
An IS pilot in a Clan mech would be quite the rare thing at this point in time. The closest you would find to this are Wolf's Dragoons.
You are, basically, embodying everything that is wrong with this game - that there is no game.
What is the game, buddy?
Drop into a box canyon and blow the **** out of anything annotated by a red triangle. Rinse. Lather. Repeat.
The Clans are a game-changing part of the lore. When they invaded - they caused the Inner Sphere (the houses which have been senselessly fighting over box canyons... or... well.... that wasn't conveyed very well, now was it?) to stop fighting itself and unite against the invaders who were, currently, trashing them on every front.
And what does PGI do?
"Ah, yeah - let's just put Clan mechs in with all the other ********."
It's like: "Hey, let's make a Fast and Furious about painting cars and forget about street races."
Mix-tech becomes more plausible when you open up to persistent battlefields (remember C&C Renegade's Marathon servers? or Join-in-Progress for games like ARMA?) and then open up the IS weapons to expressing their true variety through custom sub-modules.
You -embrace- the distinctions between the factions and embody them in the game. IS components could have their own module slots that allow pilots to configure their systems to express the huge amount of variety across IS manufacturers. Clan components would not have that ability. Clan mechs would not have modules for their EndoSteel components, their actuator components, engines, etc.
You offset the Clan superiority by giving IS even more 'tweakability' that gives them their own flavor and joy to play - or give a Clan 'mech a reason to use IS components in spite of the increased tonnage, decreased range, etc - because the modules would allow the weapon to perform in ways that Clan components do not.
But, again - balancing from within the bubble of "team solaris" is a fool's errand. I've said it before and made multiple posts about it in the past, regarding how pure mech-on-mech combat within very small maps (even our largest maps are small in terms of weapon ranges, travel times, and objective spacing) leads to very difficult/impossible balancing scenarios. Dropping against a known number of enemies completely undermines the need for scouting. Knowing their objective (and its location) also undermines scouts, and the entire focus of combat gravitates toward heavy and assault mechs.
When you allow ammunition-based weapons to have to extend across an unknown number of enemy encounters (some of which may be light hovercraft that can't be ignored - but aren't worth a gauss) - energy weapons begin to look much more attractive - even though ballistics are excellent mech-killers.
The need for fast skirmishers exists when a team of locusts can route the artillery you are counting on being able to call down - or begin harassing the air base from which you get air support.
Scouting is important when you have to know where to send your slower assaults and heavy supports.
But, keep thinking Call of MechWarrior. The production model has already been illustrated by other ventures to be unsustainable.