18 replies to this topic

[DeathlyEyes]

Instead of mucking around with 3/3/3/3, which seemed like a doomed concept from the start, I suggest you focus your attention elsewhere. A dropship mode was discussed in various interviews early on in development. Adding this game mode would alleviate a lot of strain on the matchmaker. Instead of trying to match tonnages a tonnage limit could be instituted in a players dropship. A player could easily be restricted to 200 tons or any other weight. He/she would then be responsible for tradeoffs such as having more mechs or having the ability to take a heavier mech.

This game mode would also have numerous beneficial side effects. One such side effect is reducing the effectiveness of ammo based mechs. Autocannons would no longer be as much of an issue. The reason they were niche weapons in battletech is because engagements were often long drawn out conflicts. With the prospect of 48 mechs attacking from the other team, ammo dependent builds would become less desirable.

This would also reduce the tendency of matches to be one sided. A major reason for the one sided matches is that often times a few mechs are lost early. This reduces the targets and firepower of one team significantly allowing the remaining players to be focused down. With dropship mode, players would be able to drop into combat again with a new mech bringing the fighting strength of their team back to par with the other.

Here are some of my personal suggestions for game play rules:

Skirmish: Deathmatch style combat with no focus. 30 minute time limit. If not all mechs are destroyed on one team, the winner will be determined by the amount of tonnage destroyed.

Conquest: A basic 30 minute match of conquest. Double or even triple the resource limit.

Assault: 30 minute match of dropship assault. Both dropships are on the ground, winner destroys the other teams dropship or all their mechs. If time expires winner is the one who destroyed the most tonnage, just the same as skirmish.


Dropship mode would create incentives for players to use a variety of mechs without instituting strict tonnage limits, allowing players to play how they want with various pros and cons. It would remian true to sim style combat without becoming an overly arcadey respawn deathmatch. As it stands the no respawn model in pug queue is failing miserably. I think it's time to try something else.

Finally. If the issue with this mode is a monetary reason, ie PGI can't justify making this game mode because it feels it would not profit from it. Look at it this way. As it stands I only have 1 set of modules that I move from mech to mech. I only have a few engines, most of my mechs share engines and I swap them around. I only have a few mechs because those are the mechs that actually work right now. By adding this game mode you are encouraging players to keep multiple sets of modules and pretty much forcing players to keep multiple mechs stocked. The tonnage limit means mechs that aren't necessary optimal for their weight class could be desirable to fill out those last few left over tons. This means more premium time will be used to earn Cbills. More mechs will be bought for MC and more mech bays will be needed to house those mechs.

Edit: Even better than just tonnage limit based dropships. A more advanced battle value system could be instituted after certain trends are discovered. For example if a new "meta build" arises, the weapons and chasis could become more valuable. You could use different algorithms and bonuses for calculating this. For example under the current meta, if you have a mech over 70 tons equipped with jump jets and direct fire weapons, it's battle value could arbitrarily be boosted. This is a more complex idea and would need more exploration.

Edited by SLDF DeathlyEyes, 21 May 2014 - 04:12 AM.

[SmokinDave73]

I agree that a drop ship mode with a tonnage limit to restrict to say "3" or so mechs as a random number will give this game a new flavour and a much needed boost in game modes. I have seen people say "that will not help teams that get stomped" and so on but IT WILL. Sometimes people just have a bad game and under perform but if you die in and a match and que up another mech that person has a second chance to perform better and help his/her team to victory. I really hope the devs are working on something similar to a mode were we have more then 1 life. I dont want COD respawns I just want to be able to take a few mechs into a game and feel like I am in a real battle, not just a random 5-10 minute game that is on the same boring 3 game modes over and over again....

[nullptr]

I really hope something of this sort gets implemented.
Any level of tug of war would make this game way more entertaining - its really missing in mwo matches.

[BARBAR0SSA]

Anything with a team tonnage limit won't work

eg. 750T limit and you have the current 6 D-Bag Pre Made all dropping in atlai...150T split for 6 other players, brutal..Or they could leave them in a perma group searching queue I guess, that would work.

Other than that, I think a good majority of people want a dropship mode, seeing as how there is absolutely no penalty for dying either allow for longer matches or else they really need to make CW focus on rewarding people that kill a lot and manage to not die.

[Crimson Fenris]

The exact class-matching we used to get before 12v12 was fine and worked perfectly.

You bring one assault ? The opposite team had one too, no more, no less. Repeat the process for all mechwarriors.
How is that a better system ?

You proved ELO is flawed since you gave newbies the same value as average players.
You juste prove 3/3/3/3 is a terrible idea, adding unnecessary wait times and doesnt even properly work.

PGI, you introduced too many variables in you Matchmaker it could even properly deal with them !!!
Stick with class matching (2 lights vs 2 lights, etc.), and maybe consider ELO matching, BUT with newbies starting to 0 : they now couldnt be matched with too much better players.

Problem solved, move on and work harder on this damn CW !!!

[Lupin]

A simple 1 for 1 rule (i.e. make sure each side has same number of each mech class).
When playing in closed beta matching teams seem to work well, so if your team has 4 light mechs then that means that there will be 4 lights on the other side to match them. The difference in weight would still be the same as 3/3/3/3.

Why get more complex when you do not need to.

[DeathlyEyes]

Crimson Fenris, on 21 May 2014 - 07:18 AM, said:

The exact class-matching we used to get before 12v12 was fine and worked perfectly.

You bring one assault ? The opposite team had one too, no more, no less. Repeat the process for all mechwarriors.
How is that a better system ?

You proved ELO is flawed since you gave newbies the same value as average players.
You juste prove 3/3/3/3 is a terrible idea, adding unnecessary wait times and doesnt even properly work.

PGI, you introduced too many variables in you Matchmaker it could even properly deal with them !!!
Stick with class matching (2 lights vs 2 lights, etc.), and maybe consider ELO matching, BUT with newbies starting to 0 : they now couldnt be matched with too much better players.

Problem solved, move on and work harder on this damn CW !!!

Except it's not solved. Even with that matchmaking it still devolves to a stomp. Pgi will never go away from 12v12. This game mode shouldn't be all that hard to introduce either. The battle value matching might be even more important. A lot of chassis are borderline unusable because they have no utility. I think this is the single most important thing for the game. Currently most games aren't fun for a lot of people.

shad0w4life, on 21 May 2014 - 06:43 AM, said:

Anything with a team tonnage limit won't work

eg. 750T limit and you have the current 6 D-Bag Pre Made all dropping in atlai...150T split for 6 other players, brutal..Or they could leave them in a perma group searching queue I guess, that would work.

Other than that, I think a good majority of people want a dropship mode, seeing as how there is absolutely no penalty for dying either allow for longer matches or else they really need to make CW focus on rewarding people that kill a lot and manage to not die.

Just a quick clarification, my proposal is to Institute drops in tonnage limits per player. Not team based tonnage limits.

[Willard Phule]

Huh. Not really my thing but it sounds interesting.

Why not simply have anyone joining the "Dropship Mode" select 1 mech of each weight class (kinda like the old "on deck" selections from UI 1.betterthanthisone). Once you die, you select the next one to enter the battle, and so on until you run out of reinforcements?

Sure, you're gonna run into the banzai derp squad occasionally, but even the derps have access to 1 mech per weight class...they have trials to cover down for anything they don't personally own.

[VXJaeger]

I've pretty much ready to go with max4-MM. That way there will not be 6-8 assaults in a game, and it still doesn't limit if 4-man want to practice lance co-operation with similar type of mechs.
And it's simple, KISS.

[DarkMetalBlade]

Or better yet, they should try to instill a pre-game lobby for pub matches before interpreting any kind of tonnage limit or weight class restriction.

[Willard Phule]

DarkMetalBlade, on 21 May 2014 - 03:30 PM, said:

Or better yet, they should try to instill a pre-game lobby for pub matches before interpreting any kind of tonnage limit or weight class restriction.

Also a good point.

Think about every other first person shooter you've ever played...from the old Valve games to whatever it is you're playing now. Notice anything different about their "lobby" systems and MW:O's?

Even CounterStrike and TF2 allow you to custom filter your game by different parameters. There's a reason I never end up playing with high pings often...I filter them out. And so on.

And, you'd think that if those old guys figured out how to do it way back in the stone age, these guys could manage it. But, nope. GG close, PGI.

[DeathlyEyes]

VXJaeger, on 21 May 2014 - 03:19 PM, said:

I've pretty much ready to go with max4-MM. That way there will not be 6-8 assaults in a game, and it still doesn't limit if 4-man want to practice lance co-operation with similar type of mechs.
And it's simple, KISS.

They have max 4 and it's ruined the match maker. That's how 3/3/3/3 works it's 3/3/3/3 max of 4 if it can't do that right now. It's not working.

Besides issues exist beyond the scope of match maker. The problem with a lot of stomps has to deal with the fact that once a team is down a few men it becomes impossible to win. Dropship mode would alleviate this issue. We have no communication so it's really easy to lose an entire lance. Often times punishing the rest of their team.

Edited by SLDF DeathlyEyes, 21 May 2014 - 04:33 PM.

[Zolomek]

I agree with the general consensus here that 3x4 was an ill conceived idea from the start.

Class vs Class matching is the way to go IMHO. PGI lets go back to the Class vs Class matching that we had of MM2 it worked well and it did not need ELO to make numerous decent matches.

It allowed tactical flexibility and made the game a Mech simulator where tactics helped considerably. Each Assault was matched by an Assault on the enemy team. Each Light was matched by a Light on the enemy team. In each drop you could take a head count of what dropped on your side and get a vague idea of what the enemy consisted of. That allowed you to make plans for the engagement depending on what you came in with.
Yes sometimes you would get 4 Awesome vs 4 Atlas or 3 Jenners vs a mix of other lights but even in those matches the team that made the better choices usually came out on top. It did not try to match exact weight for exact weight it did not use ELO to gauge each player against the others in the drop and it did not try to get each force to fit into the 3x4 unit configuration you seem to want to force the players to work within.

I would bet many players do not like playing some weight classes so guess what your pool of players might not fit the 3x4 ideal very often.

Weight Class matching grabs anything it can find and matches it against another of the same Class for each drop it makes if there are only 80 assaults all looking for match then the system makes three matches of 24 assaults out of the pool then waits for more people to fill in the next match after that.

Everyone gets a chance to play a match and we can play your game rather than sit at their desk staring at the searching spinner.

[Willard Phule]

SLDF DeathlyEyes, on 21 May 2014 - 04:20 PM, said:

The problem with a lot of stomps has to deal with the fact that once a team is down a few men it becomes impossible to win. Dropship mode would alleviate this issue. We have no communication so it's really easy to lose an entire lance. Often times punishing the rest of their team.

Shame we can't even get a message tree sort of thing like they had in the other MW titles to control your AI lancemates....

[DeathlyEyes]

Willard Phule, on 21 May 2014 - 06:45 PM, said:

Shame we can't even get a message tree sort of thing like they had in the other MW titles to control your AI lancemates....

I think even with proper communication there still exists a moderate portion of the community who will still go of and do their own thing. Relying on a few PUGs to not do something completely stupid every game isn't very fun. At least this allows them to be meat shields multiple times.

[Xavier]

I agree if you place tonnage restrictions on an individuals 4 mechs and then let them pick each mech in sequential drop format like deathlyeyes is suggesting I think this would be a better alternative than 3/3/3/3 if you plan to keep ELO around.

example:
each pilot has a 225 tonnage limit for their four dropship ready mechs.
Firestarter 35
Shadowhawk 55
Jester 65
Cataphract 70

All four mechs add up to 225 tons I now have a personal tonnage restriction

I drop into one of the three traditional game types: I am allowed to select my first mech at the game ready screen as are the other 21 players in match. Upon death of the first mech I am allowed to choose from the remaining 3 mechs in my dropship and their are hot-dropped onto the map(Location of drop could be a commander function which would make the commander a more useful leadership role by declaring where re-inforcements should be dropped)

The game continues until all mech for every player have been killed for one team or the game timer runs out at which point victory is decided not by kills but by tonnage destroyed. This would encourage more players to buy and use mechs outside of their standard mech stable to simply be able to field a 225 ton 4 mech dropship loadout.

I would totally support this type of a gamestyle!!!!!

[Willard Phule]

It doesn't even have to be in sequential order. You take one of each class. You die, you choose which one to respawn with, repeat until out of mechs.

That's where experience and teamwork will truly come to the forefront. If you can maintain the optimum tonnage on the field throughout the battle, you'll win.

[SmokinDave73]

Russ's answer on reddit today was rather dissapointing.

Quote

I still really like the game mode idea. But it's only shot at implementation at the moment is with CW and in some epic battle aspect where you bring 4 mechs to the fight, essentially turning the battle into a 48v48 battle of attrition. At the moment it is not in production.

I dont see why we cant have a game mode now that lets you bring 4 mechs to a battle... I guess PGI can only do one thing at a time which is also why we dont have any new maps.

[Kmieciu]