11 replies to this topic

[DarthPeanut]

Why is it that if I buy Ferro armor for a mech and I want to go back to standard (which it was before) that I have to buy it again. Then if I ever want to go back to Ferro... I have to buy Ferro another time.

Seems to be you should not have to continuously repurchase armor or other upgrades if you change back/ forth on a mech you previously purchased those upgrades on.

[FupDup]

The excuse people use is that your technicians have to work their butts off to refit your mech every time. However, such arguments fail to consider the fact that engines, armor points, ammo, heatsinks, and weaponry can all be exchanged for free as much as you wish.

[Durant Carlyle]

Changing out the upgrades is far more complex than simply replacing any one single item.

You are essentially replacing every armor plate, or every skeletal bone, or re-wiring every launcher and re-loading special ammo, or removing and re-installing the entire cooling system.

Edited by Durant Carlyle, 25 April 2014 - 09:17 PM.

[FupDup]

Durant Carlyle, on 25 April 2014 - 09:16 PM, said:

Changing out the upgrades is far more complex than simply replacing any one single item.

You are essentially replacing every armor plate, or every skeletal bone, or re-wiring every launcher and re-loading special ammo, or removing and re-installing the entire cooling system.

Replacing a standard engine with an XL engine nearly twice the size, adding on entirely new weapons that were not previous mounted, replacing a Machine Gun mount with a Gauss Rifle coil, putting jump jets in places that didn't have them before, adding ammunition to all sorts of locations and having to have that ammo fed from the head and legs to other body parts (having ammo flow from your legs to your arms, while moving, without jamming or other mishaps, probably ain't easy!), and other various functions aren't elementary.

Maybe might not be as severe as an internal structure change or whatever, but hand-waving away these other huge changes is silly. The reason that the upgrades charge every time is simply to reduce player C-Bill accounts. That's it. Nothing more, nothing less. Not "realism," not compensating your technicians, not anything else.

Edited by FupDup, 25 April 2014 - 09:34 PM.

[Durant Carlyle]

What they should have done is charged C-Bills for each and every change to a 'Mech. Upgrades/downgrades should cost more, rather than being the only modification that actually costs C-Bills.

But that's neither here nor there.

It is what it is ... deal with it.

Edited by Durant Carlyle, 25 April 2014 - 09:45 PM.

[FupDup]

Durant Carlyle, on 25 April 2014 - 09:45 PM, said:

What they should have done is charged C-Bills for each and every change to a 'Mech. -snip-

I'm going to have to disagree with that. Strongly.

All you'd accomplish is effectively killing any incentive to try new loadouts. Right now the current customization taxes are able to be somewhat circumvented because the "base" config you need it fairly easy to set up (usually just DHS + Endo, for most lights you can add FF) and you don't have to change those bits any more. But what you're proposing...no. Just no. There is nothing wrong with people trying to build a new playstyle on an existing mech of theirs. There should be no penalty for attempting to diversify their loadout. There are too many people that stick to cookie-cutter flavors of the month as it is.

[Durant Carlyle]

These are Inner Sphere 'Mechs. You know ... the ones where every single thing is hardwired in and they are supposed to be hard to customize. Everybody and their mother customizing their 'Mechs is wrong (especially for no C-Bill cost), if this is really MechWarrior.

I'm not saying it should cost 1.5 million C-Bills to install a Medium Laser. But there SHOULD be a cost to do so, beyond the cost of the laser itself.

[FupDup]

Durant Carlyle, on 26 April 2014 - 10:15 AM, said:

These are Inner Sphere 'Mechs. You know ... the ones where every single thing is hardwired in and they are supposed to be hard to customize.

I'm not saying it should cost 1.5 million C-Bills to install a Medium Laser. But there SHOULD be a cost to do so, beyond the cost of the laser itself.

Again, I'm gonna have to disagree here, for the reason outlined earlier (discourages experimentation, further encourages cookie-cutter loadouts). I only brought up the costs of things like weapon and ammo swapping earlier on as an attempt at foot-in-the-door reasoning. I.e. our techies are already nice enough to do almost any swapping for free, why not take it to the next level. I didn't bring up those examples because I wanted them to actually cost spacebucks.

Durant Carlyle, on 26 April 2014 - 10:15 AM, said:

Everybody and their mother customizing their 'Mechs is wrong (especially for no C-Bill cost), if this is really MechWarrior.

I seem to recall all previous Mechwarrior games working in a way such that you could put on anything you wanted at any time for free, provided that you owned the piece of equipment you wanted to install. Heck, most of them didn't even require you to buy equipment in the first place, outside of MW4 Black Knight/Mercs singleplayer mode. Otherwise you just went off of what you salvaged in singleplayer and multiplayer gave you infinite inventory. Some of those previous MW games also had more open of a mechlab than ours (i.e. MW2 and MW3 allowed you to put anything anywhere, no hardpoints or engine limits or jj limits).

[Durant Carlyle]

I know you didn't bring it up so costs could be added. But that's the way it SHOULD be for this game to fit into the universe.

MechWarrior 2 was Clan (no costs there at all), except for Mercs. IIRC, the single-player Mercs missions had a cost for everything (could be I'm mixing MW2 and MW3 though).

As much as I liked MW2, it was really the downfall of the MW games. Why? Because it introduced infinite customization. They should have stuck to the tabletop Clan OmniMech rules (no engine swaps, no armor/internal swaps. Only pod space could be changed.

And they should have made the distinction between Clan OmniMechs and Inner Sphere BattleMechs as far as customization is concerned. Because, despite what we're playing with now, there IS a HUGE difference.

MechWarrior 3 single player had costs for literally every single thing. Add one armor point, there was a cost. Remove an armor point, there was a cost. Move an Endo Steel critical slot from an arm to a leg (you could place them anywhere you wanted), there was a cost. THAT is what MW:O should have.

Don't remember much about MechWarrior 4, other than it really butchered 'Mech builds. Ammo took no space, only weight, etc.

And don't forget that MW2 had 'Mech Skating. Dumbest thing ever for jump jets.

Edited by Durant Carlyle, 26 April 2014 - 04:59 PM.

[FupDup]

Durant Carlyle, on 26 April 2014 - 04:58 PM, said:

I know you didn't bring it up so costs could be added. But that's the way it SHOULD be for this game to fit into the universe.

MechWarrior 2 was Clan (no costs there at all), except for Mercs. IIRC, the single-player Mercs missions had a cost for everything (could be I'm mixing MW2 and MW3 though).

As much as I liked MW2, it was really the downfall of the MW games. Why? Because it introduced infinite customization. They should have stuck to the tabletop Clan OmniMech rules (no engine swaps, no armor/internal swaps. Only pod space could be changed.

And they should have made the distinction between Clan OmniMechs and Inner Sphere BattleMechs as far as customization is concerned. Because, despite what we're playing with now, there IS a HUGE difference.

MechWarrior 3 single player had costs for literally every single thing. Add one armor point, there was a cost. Remove an armor point, there was a cost. Move an Endo Steel critical slot from an arm to a leg (you could place them anywhere you wanted), there was a cost. THAT is what MW:O should have.

Don't remember much about MechWarrior 4, other than it really butchered 'Mech builds. Ammo took no space, only weight, etc.

And don't forget that MW2 had 'Mech Skating. Dumbest thing ever for jump jets.

The only "cost" I can remember for MW3 singleplayer was that you had a limited inventory (in SP). If you had too much stuff, you had to decide what to put off to the side and what to keep. You did also have limited quantity of items (in SP), but there were no C-Bills or other money units.


For MW4, BK and Mercs let you buy stuff from the black/free market using C-Bills, and you also had to repair mechs that got past a certain damage threshold (if your armor was only orange or whatever you didn't have to pay for repairs at all). Vengeance (the first MW4 iteration) didn't have C-Bills at all (just salvage). Ammo refill was always free. Multiplayer in all of the MW4 expansions followed the infinite inventory theme.


I myself didn't play MW2 but I can gather from videos and forum word on the street that its mechlab was basically like MW3 (put anything anywhere).

---

I can live with the canon Omnimech rules provided that they have advantages to counteract the disadvantages (i.e. the individual weapons should be better, or whatever). But making the IS mechs actually cost stuff for changing loadouts...I just can't stomach that. I can maybe live with a reduced threshold for IS mech customization (meaning, the changes you make aren't as drastic but you can still make some kind of changes) but being able to make those changes (however significant or insignificant they may be) without penalty is a big deal for folks who want to try new playstyles on their robot.

Edited by FupDup, 26 April 2014 - 05:15 PM.

[Durant Carlyle]

As I said, maybe I'm mixing up MW2 Mercs with MW3. However, I know for a fact that there was one version of MechWarrior that had a cost for literally every change you made. I played it a lot, because I liked it.

People are asking for immersion in other aspects of the game. Costs for every single change in the Mech Lab (for Inner Sphere 'Mechs at least) would be "immersion" because it would be true to the universe. I'm sorry you don't think so, but it would be realistic, regardless.

I bet you couldn't stomach the repair and rearm costs either -- because those are a "penalty" right? Yet they are realistic for the universe, and they should apply to MW:O. People shouldn't be able to load seven tons of ammo, shoot it off, and be ready for the next match with no cost whatsoever.

[FupDup]

Durant Carlyle, on 26 April 2014 - 05:50 PM, said:

As I said, maybe I'm mixing up MW2 Mercs with MW3. However, I know for a fact that there was one version of MechWarrior that had a cost for literally every change you made. I played it a lot, because I liked it.

People are asking for immersion in other aspects of the game. Costs for every single change in the Mech Lab (for Inner Sphere 'Mechs at least) would be "immersion" because it would be true to the universe. I'm sorry you don't think so, but it would be realistic, regardless.

I bet you couldn't stomach the repair and rearm costs either -- because those are a "penalty" right? Yet they are realistic for the universe, and they should apply to MW:O.

Realistic -- yes. Fun -- I'd argue not.

You can try to pretend you're a fancy-pantsy elite mech pilot all you want with your "immersions," but in the end we're all just regular plebeians playing a video game on our computers. I am a nerd sitting in my living room typing to people over the internet in between matches of fighting giant robots against each other. If I tried to tell people I was a l337 mechwarrior from the year 3050, I'd be lying to myself (and them). I'm not interested in pretending to be something that I'm not and never will be. I just want to blow off some steam after work/classes/whatever from the seat of a massive walking talk. I tend to not be a fan of any mechanics which inhibit my blowing-offage of steam.


And you guessed correctly, I don't like RnR either, and for many more reasons than I dislike paying for small loadout changes. I don't think I'll derail this thread with that discussion, though.

Durant Carlyle, on 26 April 2014 - 05:50 PM, said:

People shouldn't be able to load seven tons of ammo, shoot it off, and be ready for the next match with no cost whatsoever.

The reason people load up 7+ tons of ammo is kinda because they have to. In Tabletop, you generally could get away with having enough ammo for 10-12 turns of firing each turn, and you'd have no issues. This translated into 1 ton of ammo for most guns, and some weapons even gave too much ammo for a single ton (i.e. 1 ton of MG ammo could keep 8+ MGs fed for a very long time). Many weapons could keep multiple guns fed by a single ton of ammo.

But in MWO, our matches have a time limit of 15 minutes. The "turn" duration in TT was generally set to 10 seconds, so I'll use that as the baseline. This makes for 6 turns in 1 minute. This makes a full match last for 90 "turns." Of course, very few matches actually go up to the time limit, so something more fair for comparison would be at least 5 minutes (30 turns). We also have faster rates of fire than once every 10 seconds, which leads to even more ammo use unless you're poptarting. Doubled armor doesn't help matters.

The "cost" of all that ammo is the tonnage and critical slots, plus the rare chance of explosions. And if that turns out to be too much ammo for the match, then some of that tonnage + slots has been wasted needlessly. Weapons in MWO need waaaay more ammo than they ever did in TT -- most of the time, it's at least triple as much -- despite many weapons receiving an ammo per ton increase.

Edited by FupDup, 26 April 2014 - 06:51 PM.