38 replies to this topic

[DeathlyEyes]

After the recent attempt made by Paul Innouye and his lack of foresight and continued use of drastic changes made to the game in the name of balance, I have written this open letter with the hopes of showing the community as a whole greatly disapproves of changes being made to the game. I hope that those who agree/disagree comment in this thread with constructive criticism so some general consensus of what needs to be done can be made. Please if you disagree, please post your suggested changes.

By not following the simple rule of making changes in small steps Paul Innouye has caused several "LRM Apocalypses" without learning from his previous actions. He has consistently double Nerfed and double Buffed weapon systems leading to large changes in game play within short amounts of time without letting the community adapt. Furthermore changes done to fix issues, have rarely if ever actually solved the underlying causes of the problems. Ghost heat failed to truly correct high damage alpha strike advantages while further limiting the choices of mech making mechs such as the Battlemaster and other predominately energy based mechs highly disadvantage.

Terrain movement shoe horned most of the community into jumping mechs by limiting the viability of moving up and down steep hills as a means of using the hills as cover. It also increased difficulty of close range mechs of closing, often turning games into rock paper scissors relying on the randomizer determining the map. Taking a brawler mech could screw you over if the map is an open map with very few routes to get into brawler range like Alpine while the mech could be successful on a map like frozen city with several routes to get in close. The recent LRM buff has only made this worse because steep enough hills to actually stop missiles cannot be traversed and those that can, cannot be used as cover by non jumping sniper without having to sustain excessive LRM damage.

Changes made to the Victor and the Highlander have only provided a short term stop gap to the issue of jump sniping being utterly dominant close and long range while completely ruining the entire purpose of using a Victor, a light assault mech with extreme maneuverability. The viability of using a Victor as a brawler has been greatly diminished in the name of solving "pop sniping." The true solution was to fix brawlers so that getting close would have presented a much greater challenge to a mech carrying exclusive long range weapons IE. fixing SRMs. Furthermore with the inclusion of the Summoner when the clan reinforcement package arrives we will see the same issues with a mech that does not suffer from the minimum range penalties of PPCs being able to output 45 point Alpha Strikes and being highly maneuverable, nerfing the Summoner's handling characteristics to that of an Atlas will be a completely unacceptable solution to an issue that shouldn't be an issue in the first place.

I will outlay my changes I would make to the game as a player and you as follows:
Phase 1:
1. Reduce LRM speed to 135 M/S, weapons should be balanced for how they are intended to be used in this example, LRMs are intended to be support weapons used in conjunction with spotters. They seem to have been balanced so that people can use them without a coordinated spotting group. This leads to balance issues when they are used correctly. It also puts the weapon system on equal footing in direct fire situations with weapons that require the user to am rather than point and click. Narc would also once again get it's damage timeout limitation. Of course this would be slightly increased to 40 and would slowly be changed in incriminates of depending on if the weapon balance is right.

2. Reduce terrain movement penalties so mechs can climb slopes up to 60 degrees.

3. Reduce laser duration to .75 seconds while increasing reload speed to 3.75 seconds in order to maintain fire rate. Reduce pulse laser duration to .5 seconds while increasing reload speed to 3.35 seconds to maintain fire rate.

4. Increase Gauss Rifle charge dissipation to 5 seconds while increasing the charge time to 1 second (the idea is to be able to turn the gauss rifle into a weapon capable of hitting mechs hopping in and out of cover while limiting it's use as a brawling weapon from a longer charge time. Currently the gauss rifle isn't effective against people using cover effectively.) The gauss rifle will also only explode when holding a charge to discourage players from unnecessarily holding a charge.

5. Fix SRM hit detection, I understand this might not be viable at present, if this is the case reducing the recycle time of PPCs and Autocannons, specifically the AC5 and AC10 in 10% increments until balance is found could be enough. Large lasers and ER Large lasers could be tweaked if they are found to be too powerful against brawler weapons with the ghost heat reductions.

6. Reduce ghost heat penalties by 10% , the changes being made increase the danger of getting too close with PPCs. As it stands a mech carrying Exclusively PPCs will be useless within 90 meters, taking such a mech would be an extreme risk.


7. Set the Highlander and Victor to pre-nerf levels. The changes to Jump Jet handling were acceptable while the ground based handling changes were completely uncalled for.

Phase 2 would be reacting to how various changes effect the community. Examples of this would be further reduction in laser duration, tweaks to missile travel speed, acceleration/deceleration changes to go with terrain movement changes, further tweaks to terrain movement penalties and further changes to the gauss rifle. Slight changes could be made to Highlander and Victor handling characteristics if problems persist.

As you can see my changes would be made slowly to avoid community turnover. Chasing away loyal members of the community chasing potential new players is not a good business model. I hope this isn't the reasoning behind Paul's changes and that he actually truly is ignorant on how to balance a game many people sink money into buying specific content often made useless months, or weeks later after their initial purchase. This ruins trust and people start to think, "maybe I shouldn't buy this because the next patch it could become fairly useless."

TLDR: Set LRM speed to 135 M/S, slightly faster than the original speed, reduce laser duration, reduce terrain movement penalties, increase gauss charge time and charge hold time, fix srm hit detection or slightly reduce DPS of traditional sniper weapons and reduce ghost heat penalties. Make further changes based off results of these changes in small steps.

Edited for formatting reasons

Edited by SLDF DeathlyEyes, 24 March 2014 - 04:36 PM.

[Nick Makiaveli]

1. Make sure you don't have typos or grammatical mistakes in your work when you are trying to impress people to the point they change their minds.

2. Don't include a TL;DR. A summary labeled as such is fine, and is professional looking, whereas lazy intarwebz conventions are the complete opposite.

3. I say the above as an explanation as to why I only got as far as Phase 1 step 1 as I figured the rest might be insightful etc, but doubted it. Call me a grammar {Godwin's Law} if ya want, but since I don't know you, the only thing I have to judge you by is what and how you post.

[A Man In A Can]

I got a better idea. Accept the futility of trying to change this game and go make a competing Mechwarrior title with the changes you just mentioned.

We're ANXIOUSLY awaiting the arrival of your game. Now get moving.

[DeathlyEyes]

Nick Makiaveli, on 24 March 2014 - 04:21 PM, said:

1. Make sure you don't have typos or grammatical mistakes in your work when you are trying to impress people to the point they change their minds.

2. Don't include a TL;DR. A summary labeled as such is fine, and is professional looking, whereas lazy intarwebz conventions are the complete opposite.

3. I say the above as an explanation as to why I only got as far as Phase 1 step 1 as I figured the rest might be insightful etc, but doubted it. Call me a grammar {Godwin's Law} if ya want, but since I don't know you, the only thing I have to judge you by is what and how you post.

I fixed it, I typed it without spell check without realizing it. I also do not write proposals such as these regularly. I was merely trying to get the ball rolling and have people discuss it. You are absolutely right though and I am editing the post out. I would like to make one suggestion to you, should always focus on the content of posts rather than the grammar. I posted a TLDR because I know the vast majority of the community will fail to read the post. Thanks for the tips.

Mechwarrior Mousse, on 24 March 2014 - 04:24 PM, said:

I got a better idea. Accept the futility of trying to change this game and go make a competing Mechwarrior title with the changes you just mentioned. I sense some sarcasm.

We're ANXIOUSLY awaiting the arrival of your game. Now get moving.

If only I had the ability to acquire the IP and the financing to back proper game development. I sense sarcasm

Edited by SLDF DeathlyEyes, 24 March 2014 - 04:39 PM.

[cSand]

[Daekar]

Or... we can just leave it as is and continue adapting and having fun...

[DeathlyEyes]

Daekar, on 24 March 2014 - 04:33 PM, said:

Or... we can just leave it as is and continue adapting and having fun...

The worry I have is having to continually adapt to massive changes is shrinking the community at an alarming rate. I know now that I won't be investing anymore money for quite some time due to a lack of trust in the developers. I worry that purchases could potentially become completely useless. Looking at the state of the community is my biggest worry, not my personal views. I do feel that many others hold views similar to mine.

cSand, on 24 March 2014 - 04:31 PM, said:

I think Paul is a much bigger Armchair expert than I am. I rarely if ever see him in game. I feel his data is skewed from the vast majority of players failing to use weapons as they are meant to be used, the LRM buff is a perfect example of this. An Armchair Expert is someone who looks only at data and has no actual experience. I will admit that I lack some of his hard data that he has and some of my changes could be made more beneficial if I had access to said data. Unfortunately I don't. Clearly something is not quite right with the current state of the game.

I thought I would explain how their data could become skewed. The perfect example is the trial stalker. It is after all an LRM boat. Trial mechs are usually used by players first starting the game, players who usually really want to take a huge mech to stomp around in. They will likely first opt for the Stalker. Next they are using a weapon that requires some knowledge of the game, the LRMs don't work within 180 meters, the weapon should be used only when locked on and a lock must be maintained.

I have seen many pilots in these stalkers failing to recognize those important facts. They will either fire the LRMs as soon as they get a target regardless of if the target lock is likely to be held, fire LRMs at a target and stop holding lock allowing the missiles to all miss, fire without locking and very commonly fire within 180 meters. I have no idea if the statistics Paul looks at includes LRMs fired within 180 meters as misses or not but the other categories surely count as misses. With a large percentage of inexperienced pilots using these trial stalkers which fire a massive amount of LRMs, this could create dramatically lower global hit rates than if the LRMs were being used properly.

Edited by SLDF DeathlyEyes, 24 March 2014 - 05:21 PM.

[Eddrick]

I'm not sure how possible it would be to make the Gauss Rifle only explode when charging, if we can't have Heat penalties at certain percentages for the same Server Sync reasons mentiond in one of the Ask The Devs.

The examples for the Heat penalties at percentages like reduced movement at 25%, accuracy loss at 50%, and ammo explosion at 75%.

Edited by Eddrick, 24 March 2014 - 05:26 PM.

[A Man In A Can]

SLDF DeathlyEyes, on 24 March 2014 - 04:27 PM, said:

If only I had the ability to acquire the IP and the financing to back proper game development. I sense sarcasm

Not really. Supposedly I hear this thing called Kickstarter can work miracles. Perhaps you can be crowdfunded with enough backers to create a competitor.

Anything is worth a shot at this point.

[AlexEss]

First off in the vain hope that if anyone from the dev team come across this post... Mr SLDF does not speak for me in any way shape or form... Just so we are clear.

Now this is directed to you SLDF so that you might understand why i feel you are perhaps a tad bit hypersensitive. You see i did for a very long time (still do actually) play a druid in WoW and was a active player in Star Wars Galaxies during the combat upgrade and NGE. This have jaded me to the level that what you feel like some storm washing over you is but a mere summer breeze to me. To further explain if you are not familiar with the games in question. In WoW the druid was (and still is) once or twice per expansion subjected to massive changes to how the class played, abilities changed, mechnics was flipped or removed, stats and how they worked was changed.. Or the latest major change in essence remade one third of the class from the ground up. In a way the same can be said for SWG... It is a very long story but just do a serach on SWG and NGE... It woudl be akin to you waking up tomorrow and MWO would trade place with hawken.

So understand why i feel you are over reacting to these latest changes and i feel that the only proper thing to do is to wait a cycle or two and see how these new changes play out. The way you suggest would take.. 8-12 months perhaps not to mentiuon a lot of fiddling back and forth each time a change was made to balance any imbalances that unforeseen will spring up. Your way is slower and less efficient and will in my opinion cause more problems with meta then we have now. Also i am not sure that if we go by your "theory" of incompetence (very insulting by the way) it is a good idea to introduce more opportunities to mess things up?

Ps. At 135 some mechs can still outrun LRM´s Ds.

PPs. I really love how you just said "fix hit detection" like it was just a toggle someone forgot to switch DDs.

Edited by AlexEss, 24 March 2014 - 06:25 PM.

[DeathlyEyes]

AlexEss, on 24 March 2014 - 06:21 PM, said:

First off in the vain hope that if anyone from the dev team come across this post... Mr SLDF does not speak for me in any way shape or form... Just so we are clear.

Now this is directed to you SLDF so that you might understand why i feel you are perhaps a tad bit hypersensitive. You see i did for a very long time (still do actually) play a druid in WoW and was a active player in Star Wars Galaxies during the combat upgrade and NGE. This have jaded me to the level that what you feel like some storm washing over you is but a mere summer breeze to me. To further explain if you are not familiar with the games in question. In WoW the druid was (and still is) once or twice per expansion subjected to massive changes to how the class played, abilities changed, mechnics was flipped or removed, stats and how they worked was changed.. Or the latest major change in essence remade one third of the class from the ground up. In a way the same can be said for SWG... It is a very long story but just do a serach on SWG and NGE... It woudl be akin to you waking up tomorrow and MWO would trade place with hawken.

So understand why i feel you are over reacting to these latest changes and i feel that the only proper thing to do is to wait a cycle or two and see how these new changes play out. The way you suggest would take.. 8-12 months perhaps not to mentiuon a lot of fiddling back and forth each time a change was made to balance any imbalances that unforeseen will spring up. Your way is slower and less efficient and will in my opinion cause more problems with meta then we have now. Also i am not sure that if we go by your "theory" of incompetence (very insulting by the way) it is a good idea to introduce more opportunities to mess things up?

Ps. At 135 some mechs can still outrun LRM´s Ds.

PPs. I really love how you just said "fix hit detection" like it was just a toggle someone forgot to switch DDs.

1. If you noticed that I did admit that fixing hit detection wasn't likely viable and offered alternative solutions.

2. LRMs are support weapons light mechs should be able to get out of the way, speeds can be adjusted further after a week or two if it is deemed necessary.

3. You can slow change things weekly. Small changes can be made at a whim, the values are likely stored somewhere outside the code. Even if they were embedded in code a simple ctrl+f of the code structure should let them modify those values rather easily. This is evident by how quickly they are scaling back the change to LRMs.

4. The most successful free to play game currently is League Of Legends which thoroughly test their changes on test servers and rarely if ever drastically alter things for the worse on the live servers. I understand PGI doesn't have the same resources as Riot Games but making small changes little at a time, each week can eliminate a lot of the issues and community fall out. Star Wars Galaxies is a terrible example as it took huge losses from the drastic changes made during its later years. Furthermore drastic changes made in WoW are also slightly different as players do not actually purchase their characters. Mechwarrior Online involves both a financial purchase (which is dramatically different depending on the type of mech, a hero mech is quite expensive where as free mechs still carry a cost of a mechbay) and time invested leveling the mech up. It is also clear that the LRM changes have brought on unforseen issues as LRM speeds are being dialed back in a timely manner albeit slowly.

5. It wouldn't take 5-6 months, you do each phase every week or every other week, you can find a better fit to balance over the course of a few months, something that should have been done in beta.

6. The level of incompetence is introduced by the massive changes themselves. Any massive change when balancing a live game such as this one involving monetary transactions is a demonstration of incompetence.

If you have any ideas on how they could maintain the player base please elaborate. It is evident what they are doing is clearly not working and driving a countless number of people away. I run a small clan of about 25 members all of whom have spent at least 100 dollars on the game. As of last patch only 2 play. Many have lost faith and refuse to spend another dime, mostly from drastic changes.

Edited by SLDF DeathlyEyes, 25 March 2014 - 02:13 AM.

[Joseph Mallan]

SLDF DeathlyEyes, on 24 March 2014 - 04:27 PM, said:

If only I had the ability to acquire the IP and the financing to back proper game development. I sense sarcasm

Then you to could be the one being nailed to a cross cause thousands of people on the internet do not share your vision!

Edited by Joseph Mallan, 25 March 2014 - 04:21 AM.

[Michaelson Snow]

Just my Opinion here... How is one a "loyal" player, when this "loyalty" is fueled by pure emotion rather than intelligent thought? enjoy the game, play the game for what it is, sigh at percieved mistakes, play again, build a unit, enjoy the comraderie play some more... oh, did i mention play the game? If this is not you, then find a game you enjoy. this is not the best Mech title by any means, nor is it the worst. However, it is the one we have. so buck up and go Shoot some Stompy Robots!

[Joseph Mallan]

Loyalty is not always Logical.

[p4g3m4s7r]

SLDF DeathlyEyes, on 24 March 2014 - 04:41 PM, said:

The worry I have is having to continually adapt to massive changes is shrinking the community at an alarming rate. I know now that I won't be investing anymore money for quite some time due to a lack of trust in the developers. I worry that purchases could potentially become completely useless. Looking at the state of the community is my biggest worry, not my personal views. I do feel that many others hold views similar to mine.

As has been stated above, these changes aren't huge and, in developer terms, are very frequent at two week intervals.

SLDF DeathlyEyes, on 24 March 2014 - 04:41 PM, said:

I think Paul is a much bigger Armchair expert than I am. I rarely if ever see him in game. I feel his data is skewed from the vast majority of players failing to use weapons as they are meant to be used, the LRM buff is a perfect example of this. An Armchair Expert is someone who looks only at data and has no actual experience. I will admit that I lack some of his hard data that he has and some of my changes could be made more beneficial if I had access to said data. Unfortunately I don't. Clearly something is not quite right with the current state of the game.

"YOU'VE ACTUALLY SEEN A DEVELOPER OF A GAME YOU PLAY PLAYING THE GAME WITH YOU!!!!!" is the reaction pretty much every other gamer in the world who doesn't play MWO would have to this sentence. Seriously, try to have some perspective.

SLDF DeathlyEyes, on 25 March 2014 - 01:04 AM, said:

3. You can slow change things weekly. Small changes can be made at a whim, the values are likely stored somewhere outside the code. Even if they were embedded in code a simple ctrl+f of the code structure should let them modify those values rather easily. This is evident by how quickly they are scaling back the change to LRMs.

Again, none of the changes that have been made have been HUGE. The LRM change, while fairly large in terms of the specific attribute that was changed, is just one tiny detail of how they function within the game. Also, two weeks between patches is very frequent in the world of software development. I have worked on a team that tried doing only one week software cycles (sprints if you're like PGI and my current team and you do scrum) and in the end we spent more time in meetings planning everything out than we did actually doing work.

One thing I think a lot of people miss is the massive complexity of the statistical system that is MWO and its player base. You have literally tens of thousands of variables that you can tweek, a highly non-linear problem set (i.e.a player base that will respond in sometimes unintuitive ways to the highly coupled systems in the game), and an incredibly difficult to define solution (for instance, what percentage of the player base should be using what weapons and what mechs?). I had a fellow grad student who had a much simpler problem with a relatively comparable number of variables, and just to define the solution space around the specific values he was interested in would take decades if he did multiple experiments every day just changing one variable at a time.

So, basically, this is a very complex game and there's no simple solution to balancing it perfectly (or even well, for that matter).

[Bobzilla]

I'd like to start off first by saying I don't mind the recent changes and am enjoying them for the most part. That being said, if you can't see that a large group of people don't like them, you are not in touch with reality or extreamly selfish.

The OP sugests that small incremental changes would be better than large sweeping ones. I agree with him totally, in regards to balance and player experience. There is no reason why smaller singular changes shouldn't take place at this stage.

Unless the large sweeping changes come out perfectly balanced, they will need smaller adjustments. So why not just start with the smaller adjustments saving time and effort. Smaller, more obtainable goals are much more efficent than large ones affecting many different factors with the potential of creating more problems indirectly. For example, maybe just the narc change would have helped LRM's enough, or perhaps just increase the LRM speed slightly and not changing the AMS range would have been affective. Unfortunatly time will only tell or they simply won't try to find a middle ground.

On top of everything else, smaller changes don't get as much of a reaction as it facilitates easier adaption. For example, if they made the LRM speed increase over 5 patches to get where it is now (if you agree it's in a good spot), people would have adjusted to it and would have voiced their concerns/agreement earlier and you wouldn't have a fraction of the outrage, justified or not.

Regarless of the outcome, this is a product they are delivering to consumers, and for that reason alone, they should have the forsight and experinces to realized that large changes will cause more users to have a bad experince than small changes even if that large change is valid. And bad experinces are a fail, I can't express that enough. You can't please everyone, but you can maximize good experiences and minimize bad ones. Some people are irrational and overreact, unfortunatly money makes their concerns just as important as others.

[Corvus Antaka]

Mechwarrior Mousse, on 24 March 2014 - 04:24 PM, said:

I got a better idea. Accept the futility of trying to change this game and go make a competing Mechwarrior title with the changes you just mentioned.

We're ANXIOUSLY awaiting the arrival of your game. Now get moving.

Careful what you wish for.

[Ahja]

So you are saying two years of moving weapon stats back and forth only to move them back again? Also the remaking of a thirty year old franchise into a private vision that only vaguely resembles its greater past versions. Is bad....

[stjobe]

SLDF DeathlyEyes, on 24 March 2014 - 04:12 PM, said:

LRMs are intended to be support weapons

LRMs are intended to be "support weapons" in the same way ACs or PPCs are: It's called "fire support", and is used to shape and define the battle - be it with direct-fire support or indirect-fire support.

What LRMs are absolutely, 100-percent NOT intended to be is some second-rate weapon system; they are supposed to be just as viable, just as lethal, as their indirect-fire challenged brethren in the laser, AC, and SRM categories.

[Bagheera]

Funny how much of this sort of thing would go away if there was a test server with decent uptime and regular updates where balance tuning and bug fixes could be tested.