1911 replies to this topic

[Cimarb]

Jman5, on 02 December 2014 - 08:41 AM, said:

Hey Karl, back in April you made a comment about the reasons for setting up the restrictive private lobby system. I think most of us are sympathetic to the real life costs it takes to run the servers, but at the same time there is a lot of concern that the current scheme is too restrictive. From a customer value point of view, he's paying $7 per month so that he can maybe possibly run a custom private lobby game if he can find someone else who is also paying $7 per month. In my mind that devalues the worth of premium time if you can't even ensure the feature you're paying for.

You guys might not realize this, but it also creates all sorts of headaches in the league scene when you have to:
A) Find two guys on opposing teams with premium time. (can be really tough in 1v1 and 4v4 leagues)
B ) ensure they are group leads (screw up here and you often have to reform the entire group/lobby)
C) Force them to stick around the entire series (might be several hours)

Finally, it would give experienced players a safe place to let their new friend explore the game against more than dummy mechs. This would improve the "new player experience".

I don't think it's unfair to say that reducing the restriction from 2 players to 1 player with premium time would be a huge boon for the playerbase.

I know you're not exactly in charge of this area, but your players would appreciate it if the team at PGI would reconsider this current onerous system for something that makes a little more sense. In my opinion this is one of those legacy decisions that really could use changing.

Heffay, on 02 December 2014 - 08:47 AM, said:

I would also like to see per-match premium time tokens. PGI could help support the competitive leagues by issuing a bunch of tokens to the league organizers, who can hand them out to the captains to support the private lobbies. I know they discussed having a token system a while back, but it sure would be nice to have these options!

I am completely against a per-match private lobby structure. Are you guys really saying that having 2 out of 24 people paying $15/month is really too much to pay for unlimited private matches for everyone involved?.... I just do not understand that rationale, so if you could explain it better, maybe I am missing something.

I only see two outcomes of a per-match system: 1. It becomes far too costly to run private matches for anyone that uses them extensively, or 2. PGI loses a ton of money from this and winds up closing down private matches altogether.

To address a couple of the concerns from Jman:
A) Find two guys on opposing teams with premium time. (can be really tough in 1v1 and 4v4 leagues)
--- We have solved this by marking anyone with premium time in TS. I am not sure what league you are talking about, but even the most rudimentary league will be using TS and some sort of organization, so this is very easy to fix regardless.
B ) ensure they are group leads (screw up here and you often have to reform the entire group/lobby)
--- You can easily relinquish command and have someone else take it, as well as move people between teams freely. You do not have to be in a premade team to join the lobby.
C) Force them to stick around the entire series (might be several hours)
--- not sure why this would happen. Do you mean the person that formed the lobby to begin with? That would be the only time anyone would be "forced" to stay, and if they could not stay the entire time, they were probably not the best choice for forming the lobby.

[Heffay]

You can have both regular premium time AND a per match system. So you can have EITHER 1 person in a private match running premium time (for 1v1 action, or any other size/match setup), OR 1 person with a token for a particular match.

[Cimarb]

Heffay, on 02 December 2014 - 12:27 PM, said:

You can have both regular premium time AND a per match system. So you can have EITHER 1 person in a private match running premium time (for 1v1 action, or any other size/match setup), OR 1 person with a token for a particular match.

Hmmm, interesting idea. I think it should be 2 premium time - one for each team - or each person have to use a token to gain access individually. Tokens could be relatively cheap, since more are required, but I still think everyone should have to contribute in a system like that. I know I do not want to use a token of my own for the whole group to leach off of, even though have no time them getting a free ride off my premium time (since I am going to have that anyways).

[TheCaptainJZ]

A token per match sounds interesting. You could buy them in the store for a small amount of MC. Maybe 15 MC like a consumable?

[Void Angel]

Heffay, on 02 December 2014 - 08:47 AM, said:

I would also like to see per-match premium time tokens. PGI could help support the competitive leagues by issuing a bunch of tokens to the league organizers, who can hand them out to the captains to support the private lobbies. I know they discussed having a token system a while back, but it sure would be nice to have these options!

Remember that the current lobby system is an interim system. Requiring Premium Time was a convenience because it used a payment system that was already in place. I got the impression that Community Warfare was/is taking priority over just about everything else on the game design side, so they put in a "good enough for now" system and moved on to higher priorities.

[TKSax]

Hey Karl,
Would it be possible to see how much mech variety has changed since the introduction of the Quirk System? I know I see a lot of mechs in the game I used to never see and also see more variety in mechs on my team that before,

[Bad Karma 308]

Karl a question on your processing routines;

Before I sold my company and retired, we were heavily involved in what is known as "Distributed simulation". Disseperate systems all cross-feeding data in real-time. When we were trying to handle large quantities of mathematical computations in real time we would wind up turning more and more to reliance on CUDA and GPGPU offloading. We were able to feed the majority of the simulation's computations out to GPGU servers and then re-ingest the returns with little to no impact on performance. Our data relies very heavily on angle detection/ray-trace/triangulation and clutter mapping. Very similar, if not identical, to many of the calculations your teams is experiencing.

I've been following several threads both here and in the normal forums discussing your rewind servers and particularly in relation to hit detection and registration . I wanted to ask if your teams had looked at the possibility of offloading the rewind state to a GPGPU machine. Our case is a bit extreme in both scale and funding, but I believe that even a single unit could benefit you greatly at very little cost. Most datacenters do have theses machine available and will co-locate them with your main servers.

A bit of our work: http://www.nvidia.co...study-final.pdf

Some other uses: http://www.nvidia.co...ons-domain.html

Very Respectively,


edited for spelling...

Edited by Bad Karma 308, 05 December 2014 - 01:00 AM.

[Void Angel]

Hh. So you're basically taking advantage of the speed of GPUs to offload processing in the same way cryptologists do, but using it for real-time geospatial tracking. Neet!

[shellashock]

Bad Karma 308, on 04 December 2014 - 05:42 AM, said:

Karl a question on your processing routines;

Before I sold my company and retired, we were heavily involved in what is known as "Distributed simulation". Disseperate systems all crossfeeding data in rrealtime. When we were trying to handle large quantities of mathematical computations in real time we would wind up turning more and more to reliance on CUDA and GPGPU offloading. We were able to feed the majority of the simulation's computations out to GPGU servers and then re-ingest the returns with little to no impact on performance. Our data relies very heavily on angle detection/ray-trace/triangulation and clutter mapping. Very similar, if not identical, to many of the calculations your teams are experiencing.

I've been following several threads both here and in the normal forums discussing your rewind servers and particularly in relation to and hit detection and registration . I wanted to ask if you teams had looked at the possibility of offloading the rewind state to a GPGPU machine. Our case is a bit extreme in both scale and funding, but I believe that even a single unit could benefit you greatly at very little cost. Most datacenters do have theses machine available and will co-locate them with your main servers.

A bit of our work: http://www.nvidia.co...study-final.pdf

Some other uses: http://www.nvidia.co...ons-domain.html

Very Respectively,

Ooh neat! Nice find there!

[Jman5]

Do you guys have Elo Decay so that players who have been absent for a year aren't suddenly treated like they never left? I imagine it would behoove you to ease returning players back into the game instead of kicking their butt for 50 games until their Elo falls out of the sky.

[Void Angel]

Hey, Karl, I was thinking... and before the pain became too great, it occurred to me to ask about weapon hardpoints in relation to weapon balance and the quirk system.

Hardpoint placement is a big part of 'Mech balance - one of the Stalker's several advantages is its very high (above the head) energy hardpoints for its arms. This allows a stalker pilot who knows what he's doing to fire over a hilltop at a target that is completely concealded from his cockpit; he only pokes the tips of his arms up over the horizon and smacks someone. For a while, this fact was in the background of 'mech design; if you had high hardpoints, you used them; if you didn't have them, you chalked it up to the 'mech.

Until the advent of the Battlemaster 1G. The Battlemaster 1G has three hardpoints for energy weapons in each side torso - and while the top hardpoint is at head level, the lower two originate from below the 'mech's "clavicle." The higher mounts were nearly ideal for long-range sniping over hill crests, where they could hit targets that the lower weapons couldn't reach. The problem was, players had no control over where in those locations weapons were actually loaded into the game. You could, by adding weapons in a certain order, get the Large Lasers/PPCs/Whatevers on the top points in the Mechlab, but the game would load them in according to some preset order - with the long-range weapons on the bottom, unless you only filled the top two hardpoints! This was very frustrating to those of us trying to get the most out of our biggest Phoenix Variant (with the c-bill bonus, you understand,) and the response we got from PGI at the time was, "We never intended to allow players to choose which hardpoints a weapon goes in."

So, after all that, my question is: With the balance team now fine-tuning 'mechs on an individual basis, would the order a game loads weapons into hardpoints be something they'd consider, and - far more importantly - is it something they're considering when designing new 'Mechs?

[Cimarb]

I would like an update on that as well, Void, but Karl did (somewhere in this thread) state that the order is based upon your purchase of those weapons, for some odd reason. To fix the issue, you can sell all the weapons in question, and then repurchase them in the order you want them, and it will sync up. For instance, if you are doing two ERLLs and four ERMLs (split evenly), just sell all your ERLLs and ERMLs, go into your mech, slot the two ERLLs, save, slot the ERMLs, and save again. That should "reset" them, allegedly.

[Wintersdark]

Cimarb, on 07 December 2014 - 09:03 AM, said:

I would like an update on that as well, Void, but Karl did (somewhere in this thread) state that the order is based upon your purchase of those weapons, for some odd reason. To fix the issue, you can sell all the weapons in question, and then repurchase them in the order you want them, and it will sync up. For instance, if you are doing two ERLLs and four ERMLs (split evenly), just sell all your ERLLs and ERMLs, go into your mech, slot the two ERLLs, save, slot the ERMLs, and save again. That should "reset" them, allegedly.

Not just allegedly, it does.

What happens is that when items are purchased, they are assigned a unique numerical ID in your inventory (unique amongst all items, not just that type of item). As such, you don't have just "Medium Lasers: 6" but 6 unique medium lasers due to those ID's. That ID increments with every object you add to your inventory.

When you put them into mechs, they are sorted numerically by ID.

However, the "stacks" in your inventory are NOT sorted in any way, they're just stacks. As items are added and removed from mechs, they get all mixed up.

So lets say we have 5 ML's, and 5 MPL'sm, with these ID's as examples: ML's: 1, 2, 5, 6, 9 and MPL's: 3, 4, 7, 8, 10

Then lets assume your inventory has them sorted as follows:

ML: 9, 2, 6, 5, 1
MPL: 8, 10, 7, 4, 3

You have two energy slots together, and you want your ML in the top slot. If you add a ML and an MPL, you'll get ML1 and MPL3, and MPL3 will get the top slot. If you remove them, then sell the ML (or equip it on another mech, just to get it off the stack), and reequip, you end up with ML5 and MPL3, with ML5 then being the weapon on top.

It's complicated because the highest ID doesn't always go to the top slot, but rather based on how the slots are laid out in the mech's description in code.

Sort direction may be backwards, I haven't played with it enough to confirm (and don't really care to); may be lowest ID first then ascending instead of highest and descending, but the theory here is indeed how it works. If you monkey around a bit buying new weapons to see how they get laid out vs. known older weapons, you could work it out... but that's way more trouble than it's worth with long "saving mech loadout" times.

Anyways, as such, you don't need to sell items, you just need to get them off "the stack" - so you can equip them one at a time onto other mechs until you get a layout you like. This is very time consuming, mind you, selling and rebuying is much faster, but it doesn't cost anything.

[Void Angel]

I'd heard that at the time, but I also talked to people who could not duplicate it.

If I remember my own testing correctly, selling and rebuying seemed to work at first - but then the issue recurred. It might have been that weapons I pulled off of other Battlemechs re-asserted their numerical ID or something, but I simply gave up at that point.

[Mawai]

Hi Karl,

Hopefully you are still reading these comments. I had some questions about whether PGI has considered anti-griefing code for CW. Here are several situations that could be a concern ... and there are groups out there (in MWO and EVE) who have been known to execute such plans to intentionally disrupt the community.

1) Disruption of CW by having alts play intentionally badly on the opposing faction. Depending on what restrictions are in place, a group planning this could simply create new trial accounts, drop into CW with the opposing faction and intentionally lose matches. Most obviously by team-killing and less obviously by playing badly ... getting in the way of their team mates shots, doing some damage to team mates and perhaps issuing contradictory instructions or just causing confusion.

The most obvious methods of griefing involve placing "spies" or "sleepers" in the opposing faction ... and as long as your side already has enough or more players this is probably a winning strategy. This is perhaps less of a concern with organized merc corps but can be leveraged if lone wolves are allowed to participate in CW (which is probably a requirement to make CW accessible to a large enough fraction of the playerbase).

One extreme would be a player dropping using two clients ... they drop on their main in their actual faction and play the "derp" toon in the opposing faction by being mostly afk. It will be very hard to tell this situation from one where two friends happen to be playing from the same house.


2) At the present time there does not appear to be ammo re-supply implemented. Paul's November update mentioned ammo as a logistical resource. So what happens when players run out of ammo?

a ) They suicide by running at the other team. However, a smart opponent will realize that their weapons are disabled and will refuse to kill them.

b ) Their team mates TK them to get them into a more useful mech.

This situation argues for implementation of an eject functionality to allow players to abandon mechs that are damaged/out of ammo or otherwise don't fit the tactical situation ... since otherwise folks will ASK their team mates to kill them off so that they can get into a useful mech.

(Edit: 2 is covered by planned eject functionality)

I am sure there are other disruptive actions that can be taken ... PGI needs to come up with ways to address these first before they become problems. None of these are an issue with the current game because each match has no meaning or significance ... when large scale winning matters (at least to some folks) ... I can see some nasty behaviours potentially developing.

Edit: Just thought of another aspect.

3) In CW it makes more tactical sense to eliminate ONE player 4 times than to eliminate 4 players once. In the first case, the opponents will be permanently down one mech. So what will likely happen on the good teams? Vendettas. The team will be told that "Xname" is primary ... if you see them shoot them, if possible, kill them. In addition, if one of the opponents is known to be particularly good it is more likely that they will be chosen as the primary target on a regular basis. This just makes sense if you want to win a CW match.

Will this constitute "harassment" based on the game's TOS?

"Engaging in ongoing intimidation or aggravation of other individual or groups."

Calling someone primary repeatedly could well be interpreted as "intimidation". On the other hand, the limited respawn mechanic intrinsically favours this mode of play. This is much less of an issue in a game where a player has only one life or unlimited respawns.With limited respawns, getting that particular player eliminated can be very beneficial.

Edited by Mawai, 09 December 2014 - 05:45 AM.

[Cimarb]

For #2, they have already said there will be an eject feature for this next phase to avoid that very situation.

[Goose]

Say, Karl, do y'all Devs have any sense on how the Elo distribution shifts around with the into of new units?

[Rebas Kradd]

shameless bump

[Deathlike]

I would like to know what determines when a launch is an actual Attack (when attacking) instead of Holding (when attacking). Same application goes for Defending (when the game decides it should be a "Counter Attack").

I'm hoping it's not just a "die roll" (RNG), because I've always felt when running Attack contracts, that most of the matches tend to be for "defense"/holding and playing a severely high number of them in a row (this has been the general theme among people I've asked).

Edited by Deathlike, 21 December 2014 - 09:45 AM.

[Wintersdark]

Deathlike, on 21 December 2014 - 09:45 AM, said:

I would like to know what determines when a launch is an actual Attack (when attacking) instead of Holding (when attacking). Same application goes for Defending (when the game decides it should be a "Counter Attack").

I'm hoping it's not just a "die roll" (RNG), because I've always felt when running Attack contracts, that most of the matches tend to be for "defense"/holding and playing a severely high number of them in a row (this has been the general theme among people I've asked).

I'd like to see an official confirmation, but my theory (which has some grounding in research) is:

Matchmaker picks a territory for the match. The current status of that territory determines whether this is hold/attack/defend/counterattack.

So, then, if your side holds 6+ territories, you are statistically likely to get a hold mission rather than an attack. Likewise, if you're defending a world that the opposite faction has a 6+ hold on, you're statistically likely to get a counter attack.