wanderer, on 12 January 2014 - 03:09 PM, said:
Funny, I read the same pages and saw people arguing in both directions. As it stands now, the direction PGI is taking is Clan Mechs are just the same ol' Mechs with a few numbers tweaked. I reject this as a reasonable option. Clan tech is better tech, and if we don't learn how to balance different tech levels now, it's a failure down the line as we introduce new IS AND Clan technology later. What are we gonna do, massively rebalance the game AGAIN as we add stuff like plasma rifles, endocomposite structure, ATM launchers, and so on?
Clan machines represent quality versus quantity. That's how they should be balanced- Clan tech = fewer machines on your side. They should be correspondingly harder to handle in a tactical sense as well- yes, you can outrange and outgun any one IS 'Mech, but odds are you're dealing with two at once. Clan pilots should have a different set of priorities and tactical needs than IS ones- in short, THEY SHOULD PLAY DIFFERENTLY THAN AN INNER SPHERE TEAM.
Heck, identical numbers to IS forces doesn't even work in terms of Clan organization. Clanners function in groups of 5, IS in fours. If I'm sitting there in an underperforming "Clan" 'Mech in a "lance", what kind of horseapples is PGI throwing at me?
I'd rather have no Clans at all and stick to 3039-3050 "timelines" to rotate through vs. an utterly off-concept, off-statistical "Clans" that play like reskinned IS 'Mechs. And the current "Clan" tech they're proposing is just that. This fails as an idea for Mechwarrior Online and needs to be rejected, scrapped, and redone.
If we were playing MegaMek. Sure you'd be right.
This is MWO, not BattleTech.
We're not playing set little scenarios where there's a clan side doing something and an IS side dug in and trying to prevent them. In fact we're not even sure its going to be limited to just Clan Mechs vs IS Mechs. Lets say we DO have a CW battle with CJF forces vs House Steiner. What makes you think the IS side can't use clan mechs and the clan side can't use IS mechs? What sense does it make to have a Clan faction of players with 5-10 or more IS mechs sitting in their mechbays they can't use? What sense does it make to have a IS player who can't use his shiny $500 gold mech (which if you read in this thread, there are a few)? The fact is.. it doesn't.
So that brings in the 5v8 or 10v12 argument as being thrown out. It makes no sense for a Clan faction player to simply gimp his team because he doesn't have a Clan ride. Lets assume Clans are playable, most of you want them to be, even though I'm about 70% sure they won't be when CW hits. But for the sake of argument lets just say they are.
When CW does hit, how the heck is the match maker going to get everyone in? If you all get what you want. This means you have to split the lone wolf queue into two. One with clan and one with IS. You all do know that lonewolves will be filling in the gaps that each team has, right? Meaning say a match will be against House Davion and House Kurita. 9 Davions and 7 Kuritas are queued up.. meaning 8 lonewolves (or mercs allied with either house) will be thrown in to make it a 12v12.
Lets say you have it set up to do a 16v10 like someone suggested. Ok.. IS side has 9 queued up at a given moment (remember its a moment, not seconds, not minutes, ect.. you don't sit in a queue longer than 45 seconds), and clan has 6. Now the match maker is going to have to pool from two different lone wolf queues to get the 7 and 4 people it needs to drop in.
There's where issues start coming in. We start seeing queues similar to PVP queues in most MMOs. Because remember. IS will be split between 6 houses. Some houses will drop with one another like Davion and Steiner. And I'm sure if clans were playable, some of them would be allied as well. But lets just say for simplicity's sake.. Davion, Steiner, and Rasulhague are allied, Liao, Kurita, and Marik are.. and clans are separated by Wardens and Crusaders. You have a four way war at the very least, Thats a queuing/matchmaking nightmare. Right now... it just picks the best 24 in around the same somewhat ELO/Weight value and does the best it can... when you separate out the queue into four parts... Kiss ELO and Weight Balancing good bye.
This is why I don't think clans will be playable at least not at first. I think we'll see 6 houses, on a 2 team format so that its S-D-R vs L-K-M so that the queue is only split between two factions, and lone wolves will be used to fill in the gaps. Let me reiterate this a bit further.
Lets assume for a moment that the game is doing a bit better than it is right now and has 10000 players online. A good portion is probably in game and playing. Say 90%. That leaves us with 1000 ready to queue at any given moment. I'm saying 90% because games take about 6-10 minutes each so players ingame can't queue at the given moment someone is clicking the launch button. Out of the 1000 players at least half are in mechlab, afk, chatting, social networking, ect. So you're looking at maybe a 500 to enter the queue. Right now that gives us 20 matches for the match maker to run a quick balance check with ELO and Weight... heh now you see why some matches seem off.
Now lets split that 500 around between Clan, IS, and IS-LW, and C-LW... Wait we have IS vs IS and Clan vs Clan possibilities too... so its being split more than that into SDR, LKM, CC, WC, and the two LWs. Though the last two obviously help fill in gaps to the queue. But as you can see this is getting messy quick. And this is assuming yet another thing. That CW is the only way to play. That non-house/clan allegiance front fighting is done by lonewolves. AND that there is no private matches.. but for the sake of argument we'll say private matches are part of the 90%.
Why only 500 in queue? That seems rather low. Remember its when someone hits launch. At that very instance. If I hit launch, and 2 minutes later you do.. we'll never see a game together. I'm sure there is thousands of players that queue up in a 10 minute time frame. But only players queued up within 45 seconds of one another can be matched. Well Actually I think its 120s now.. but 2 min queue times are rather rare.
So there lies another problem. We'll probably see longer queues in CW for sure. But how much longer is acceptable. I'm sure most of you could handles 2-3 minutes waiting. But what about 5? 7? Or even 10? Alot of us are used to waiting 10-20m for a match in MW3 and MW4, or even a week for a planned league match. But we've been used to that couple of second queue in MWO for a while now. That's something PGI has to consider. Do the cater to the hardcore MechWarrior... or to the newbie who doesn't know (or care) that the wait is 'for their own good'?
What about that newbie anyways? Bar them from clan play? We can be pretty sure that won't happen. So we're going to see newbies and PUGies on the clan teams. Do you know what will happen to a clan team in a 16v10 if at least Half of them are PUGs? That tech isn't going to help them. 20 dmg ppcs that go out to 2000m won't help them (obviously an exaggeration, but you get the point). They are screwed. This isn't taking into account what the IS team has on it... I'm assuming 16 PUGs vs 5premade and 5 PUG... its going to be messy as hell. And you know what? Alot of clan play won't have at least half premades on them. Though the chances that Clans have 2 premade stars on them will do fine, though they'll have it rough against 3-4 premade lances.. but I think that would be rare of course.
Still want those odds? I know one thing, I'd never play clan if they did that. I wouldn't touch them with a 10 ft pole.
So we get back to Clan being balanced to IS. When PGI does that they can keep it 12v12. They can even mix and match Clan and IS mechs on the same teams (great for Non-CW play, which I'm sure we'll still have). This cuts down on the LW group to just one pool. Allows them to keep some semblance of ELO which can easily carry over to your clan machines if you use them. You get to use all of your mechbay, which cuts down on the complaints of "why can't I convert my $100 of IS mechs to Clan." And if they do allow for clan teams it'd be a much smoother operation as just adding new tags.
Does it break lore? When hasn't MechWarrior broken lore? This is why MechWarrior and MWO are NOT BattleTech. You've got MegaMek for that.
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