11 replies to this topic

[RangerGee412]

I see people talk about the lack of role warfare. Is this something that was to be included? To me I already think there is role warfare. Every mech seems to have its role in my eyes.

Spiders, commandos, and locusts scout ahead

Jenners and firestarters are quick strike mechs

Mediums are cheap firepower that can hunt lights or attack bigger mechs

Heavy are the line holders and fire support

Assaults punch holes in the enemy lines.

I can make just as many cbills in a light as I can in an assault most of the time. Is there something else that's missing? What do people mean when they say the game lacks role warfare?

[Sephlock]

Honestly it depends on which crowd you play with, which can be affected by all sorts of factors, including the time of day you play, your location, your ELO, etc...

For some of us it looks like this:

Lights: ECM Spiders zip around, and the occasional Firestarter PWNS (but the latter is COMPLETELY JUSTIFIED AND SHOULD REMAIN AS IT IS FOREVER! SHUT UP!)

Mediums: Shadow Hawks poptart

Heavies: Cataphracts poptart

Assaults: Victors and some Highlanders poptart

Oh, there are a few crazies clinging to their Jenners, refusing to change with the times and use the superior mech, but we Firestarter pilots just smile and nod and wait for them to fall over and break a hip or something so we can move on with the business of winning .

[Agent 0 Fortune]

Intended roles were Commander, scout, attacker, defender. They were not weight classes exclusive, but weight class biased. However PGI decided to scrap that plan in favor of nothing.

[MonkeyCheese]

Sephlock, on 06 June 2014 - 04:16 PM, said:

Oh, there are a few crazies clinging to their Jenners, refusing to change with the times and use the superior mech, but we Firestarter pilots just smile and nod and wait for them to fall over and break a hip or something so we can move on with the business of winning .

Kinda have to agree with this, took my old founders jenner for a few spins yesterday with the oldschool typical build of 4ml 2ssrm2s bap jjs and 150kph and yes while it was still perfect at making other lights panic and runaway it just dosnt seem to hold up to my ember with its criting mgs and articulating ml arms it just seems to handle better in more roles (scout/lighthunt/dance with the fatties) than a jenner built to chase other lights, and even something like 2ERLL or PPCs would work much better on a firestarters arms.

Who knows if srms get better I might bother running 2 srm4 on my jenner again.

[Furniture]

It was supposed to be one of the "pillars" that the game was supposed to be built on, along with things like community warfare, which we still know nothing about 2 years after it was supposed to be done. Unfortunately most of the pillars are nothing more than smoke and dreams.

To give an example, artillery and other support options were orginally being discussed as far back as closed beta, but at that time those support options were intended to be called in by the person playing the commander role (should have been incorporated as the purpose for the now extinct command console that still does nothing to this day) instead of being able to be called by any mech through the use of a consumable item. But hey, consumables burn C-bills and make players virtual wallets burn, which helps to encourage premium time purchasing, so that got abandoned, if it was ever seriously on the table to begin with.

[RangerGee412]

Sephlock, on 06 June 2014 - 04:16 PM, said:

Honestly it depends on which crowd you play with, which can be affected by all sorts of factors, including the time of day you play, your location, your ELO, etc...

For some of us it looks like this:

Lights: ECM Spiders zip around, and the occasional Firestarter PWNS (but the latter is COMPLETELY JUSTIFIED AND SHOULD REMAIN AS IT IS FOREVER! SHUT UP!)

Mediums: Shadow Hawks poptart

Heavies: Cataphracts poptart

Assaults: Victors and some Highlanders poptart

Oh, there are a few crazies clinging to their Jenners, refusing to change with the times and use the superior mech, but we Firestarter pilots just smile and nod and wait for them to fall over and break a hip or something so we can move on with the business of winning .

I love my Jenners. Firestarters are a jack of all trades. My jenners are used for one thing and one thing only, kill large mechs.

[MonkeyCheese]

MonkeyCheese, on 06 June 2014 - 04:40 PM, said:

Who knows if srms get better I might bother running 2 srm4 on my jenner again.

Well that was quick http://mwomercs.com/...18#entry3440018

[zagibu]

The problem with this game is that Battletech is not a Mech Arena. If you ever want true role warfare, you need AI units. Only then will weapons like the MGs or Flamers become useful, and every player will have to decide whether he wants high pinpoint alpha against enemy mechs and be helpless against AI swarms, or the inverse, or something in between.

You can't ever have real role warfare with Battletech equipment in a Mech Arena.

[stjobe]

RangerGee412, on 06 June 2014 - 04:11 PM, said:

What do people mean when they say the game lacks role warfare?

Mainly this: Dev Blog 4: Role Warfare, one of the four "design pillars":

• 'Mech Warfare
  
• Role Warfare
  
• Information Warfare
  
• Community Warfare

This was what they enticed us to spend our founder money for. Two years later, we have 'Mech Warfare and nothing else.

Edited by stjobe, 08 June 2014 - 02:25 AM.

[Agent 0 Fortune]

stjobe, on 08 June 2014 - 02:25 AM, said:

Mainly this: Dev Blog 4: Role Warfare, one of the four "design pillars":

• 'Mech Warfare
  
• Role Warfare
  
• Information Warfare
  
• Community Warfare

This was what they enticed us to spend our founder money for. Two years later, we have 'Mech Warfare and nothing else.

That is painful to read.
Mech warfare was pretty good until PGI sanctioned poptarts, now it is like playing pong, up-down-up-down.

Role warfare never saw the light of day because PGI thought they could sell more modules by giving all mechs all roles, instead of using them to make a class-like system found in other games.

Information warfare is complete by PGIs accounting. 5 mechs with ECM = information warfare. They really phoned that one in.

Community warfare ended up being the forums. seriously, this is so dead, I'm not sure how they can resurrect it. PGIs plan is to have clan and IS mechs on the same team earning points for Clan or IS respectively (like a friendly wager, the way the clan invasion was meant to be). Of course it wont matter because the faction with the larges membership will win, playing Marik vs Marik (example), earning double points per match.
This comes back to PGIs marketing strategy. They don't want individuals to align witha specific faction and focus on those faction based mechs and upgrades, instead they want everyone to buy everything, and they are sacrificing gameplay and game depth to do it.

[ScarecrowES]

Agent 0 Fortune, on 08 June 2014 - 08:22 AM, said:

This comes back to PGIs marketing strategy. They don't want individuals to align witha specific faction and focus on those faction based mechs and upgrades, instead they want everyone to buy everything, and they are sacrificing gameplay and game depth to do it.

This comes back to PGIs income strategy. This is a low consumer-volume niche product that was introduced as free-to-play in order to entice a greater volume of users to play, then trick them into spending a much higher proportional amount of money on to meet the usual income goals. There are several problems with this strategy.

First, you cannot really succeed with a low consumer-volume product of this scale on a free-to-play basis. Free-to-play depends on attracting the largest possible volume of potential customers, and depending on a smaller percentage of them to pay above-and-beyond the expected retail price of the game to offset the higher percentage of users who will chose to pay little or nothing. This works fairly well when you have a large number of customers relative to your operating costs. Unfortunately, the nature of MWO is largely content-driven, as the gameplay itself is significantly more shallow compared to peer games. Content requires a significant manpower and time commitment, which costs a relatively high amount of money, proportionally. Given that MWO is a niche product, not even remotely marketed, and has a tiny user base, the free-to-play model just doens't supply PGI with the money it would need to support a staff large enough to provide all the content and gameplay enhancements and fixes necessary to continue to drive this product out of open beta.

Secondly, that money thing drives your available staff down below the level necessary to complete projects in a timely manner, and in the expected quality. PGI just doesn't make enough money to hire enough people to do the work, or hire the high-caliber people necessary to implement the gameplay systems they've been promising. It's not that this stuff isn't possible, or that they don't WANT to implement it... it's that literally they don't have the people to do it because the game can't make enough money to support it. A typical peer, paid retail game will have a staff on the order of several times larger than what PGI has, and a large publisher with deep pockets to support it.

There is a serious reality here... you get what you pay for. You want a better MechWarrior game? Ditch free-to-play and be prepared to pay for it.

[Pezzer]

RangerGee412, on 06 June 2014 - 04:11 PM, said:

I can make just as many cbills in a light as I can in an assault most of the time. Is there something else that's missing? What do people mean when they say the game lacks role warfare?

I wish this were true, but C-Bills are damage-driven and a Light Mech with the same skill level of his Heavy Mech brethren will make proportionally less money per match. The reason? Unless he is able to spot assist/TAG ***** for his team (who may not even have LRMs), he simply will not do enough damage/earn enough assists to make the same money. C-Bills are awarded for component destructions too. Who do you think is going to get more component destructions, the Jagermech with 2 AC/20 or the Jenner with 4 ML 2 SSRM?

Role Warfare was supposed to fix this problem while also making the game more interesting. Atm we do not have this. Unless you work in a premade that has LRM boats and you use UAV/NARC/TAG, there's no way that you will make more than a comparable pilot in a higher-tonnage Mech.

P.S. Don't talk about personal experiences you've had in a Light Mech where you outperformed the entire team; I'm talking about how much dmg/money an average Light pilot will do/make per match when compared to an average Heavy pilot. This is the connondrum of Role Warfare/low Light population/why people only pilot Lights for fun unless they are diehard Light players that do not think C-Bills matter.

P.S.S. Necroing because it is the newest Role Warfare thread

Edited by Pezzer, 29 July 2014 - 09:32 PM.