Tycho von Gagern, on 19 March 2014 - 08:03 PM, said:
Yeah, I hate to cut in, but I just have to say that putting an "=" in doesn't make your statement a deductive causal. It's not as 'math' as you want it to be.
The fact is that right now, most players can run whatever they want, without constraint, which is why class-wise we find fewer permutations on the field. Tonnage/class limits have been a part of Battletech since TT. They should have been a part of this game from the beginning. You agree on a tonnage, you field your mechs. (Then you spend the rest of the night rolling dice and erasing/ marking-in little circles on pieces of paper... compared to that, maybe that's why I think MWO is all right. But I digress...)
"You bring whatever and I'll bring whatever," said no one ever at the beginning of a Battletech tournament. Everyone would just bring the biggest, best-equipped mechs possible, and for all the "freedom of choice," there would be a surprising lack of variety.
Gee, kind of sounds like what's going on now...
I believe the argument that they are trying to make (more constraints = fewer permutations) is based on the assumption that one day all mechs will be useful in play (IE: balanced). If mechs were naturally balanced against each other you'd see more variety in an "unrestricted" (the drops we have now) than in a "restrcited" (3/3/3/3) environment.
Right now the mechs are not well balanced, which means 3/3/3/3 translates to: Sort of Useful (Lights) / Cannon-Fodder (Mediums) / Cataphracts (Heavies) / Gods of the Battlefield (Assaults). This will remain true until some balancing is done between the weight classes. Simply forcing each team to bring 3 of a kind does not inherently make the game "more balanced".
Also, can you imagine the queue times when a new mech gets released? It's going to create a crazy bottleneck in the MM and lots of people are going to get upset very fast when they can't play with their shiny new toy because they're spending 5 minutes between each match searching.