529 replies to this topic

[Chemie]

So you have one of each class in your dropship. Is there any team limit on what you take in the first spawn/wave? Won't the defends just take 12 assaults to defend? I can see 12 direwolfs guarding the gate (unless there are a bunch of gates spread over a large map?). Seems most of the lights will get left and it will be go heavy/assault or die.

[Joseph Mallan]

Quote

INVASION MODE - MAP REQUIREMENTS

• Maps must have longer travel times to point of first contact. This is important because it also increases the time it takes for re-enforcements (respawns) to arrive back into battle.
  
• Maps must have multiple choke points that encase the defensive barriers. Too few choke points and the defenders will have too great of an advantage focus firing on the points of passage.
  
• Choke points must provide some means of destroying power generators on the defender’s side of the defensive barriers.
  
• Choke points should be protected by defensive turrets.
  
• Defensive barriers should be connected to a power plant.
  
• Destroying power plants open the connected barriers.
  
• Gates should open slowly allowing players to “slice the pie” and engage.
  
• Light ‘Mechs with jump jets should be able to barely make it over the barriers if they so choose.

Choke points are a nice addition, Don't Turret them to heavily, and give defenders a warning that "Choke Point Alpha is under attack". Then they can decide to send troops or let it fall(Strategy).

Defensive Barriers Any way you can make them Destructible? Being able to blow a hole in the defenses and pour through is a positive for the Assaulting force.

Gates Should also be destructible. Slow opening allows the defenders to not be rushed, not good for the assault force.

Jump Jets So How High are the walls going to be? Because a Light with 2-3 Jump Jets should not be able to clear a wall that a Spider can barely clear with 12 jets.

Reinforcement rules have just quadrupled every Command and making an Assault Pilot HAVE to bring a light is handicapping the commands. and a waste of resources.

[Redshift2k5]

Will there only be one map initally for all Attack/defend CW operations? Or will you use "prefab" assets to create a range of similar-but-different maps? Even if there is a single type of "base" plopped down on a map, having a range of enrvironment/tilesets would help it to feel like multiple planets.

With the most dedicated players having bought both IS and Clan content, why not have a dual identity per player? Works fine for many games such as World of Warcraft for two factions on one account.

CW was a game pillar from the beginning. It had a big presentaton at the launch party. Why are these features only just now being designed?

[Joseph Mallan]

Hey Red imagine combining River city winter with Frozen City!?

[p4r4g0n]

Paul Inouye, on 10 September 2014 - 09:31 PM, said:

The plan is that combat for planets happen during specific time periods throughout a day. Over the period of 3-days, wins are tallied for each Faction (IS vs Clan). At the end of the 3-day period, the Faction with the most wins will take the planet.

That respawn thing wasn't really supposed to be there... yet.. . The reason is we are trying to figure out a way to do it that makes sense from both a gameplay and canon sense. One thing we've always been against is creating an infinite "respawn" mode turning MWO into a CoD type shooter.

Solo Faction players: see other responses.

For those who seem to be under the impression that planetary conquest only requires a single battle or that battles occur only during NA / Euro prime time, refer to the bolded section.

Folks, if you don't want to wade through the whole umpteen pages for posts, the least you could do is use Paul's profile to look for his content to find all the posts he made in this thread.

[Taifune]

Paul Inouye, on 10 September 2014 - 08:31 PM, said:

As for the timer on how fast someone can respond to the call to arms, it is both tunable, and that first 2 minutes is allocated so that the Unit who has defensive rights to the planet have priority to answer the call to battle. Remember, the battles take place during set hours throughout the day (peak player times like North America - West Coast, North America - East Coast, EU, Pacific whichever times have high player populations). If your unit has the defensive rights on a planet, it would be in your unit's best interest to be around during those peak times. If you are not around, you will be relying on your fellow faction players to defend the planet for you (who get invited after the 2 minute timer times out).

Timezone-Wars incomming!

If there is not a mechanism, that prevents attacking of a contracted planet outside the timezone of the contracting defenders timezone, being a contracting defender might not make much sense, as there is no single unit, that covers all timezones: e.g. Defender is from Europe. Europe goes to sleep - USA primetime starts. USA goes to sleep - Oceanic primetime starts. Oceanic goes to sleep - Russia primetime starts. Russia goes to bed - Europe primetime starts.

This means, the contracting defender won't be able to organize almost 3/4 of the whole defense due to timezone issues. Where is then the meaning of being the contracting defender?

IMHO, a solution would either be to let the contracting defender choose a timezone when the planet is attackable, or to limit the number of attacks outside the timezone of the contracting defender.

[DeRazer]

xNoSkillz, on 10 September 2014 - 07:14 PM, said:

Let me just stop you right there. As a player that owns every single variant including all champions and hero's and even two golden mechs... And who also has them all mastered completely. Including the mech that was just released in the last patch... and 3 and 4 copies of some variants for a grand total of 206 mechs in my mech bay... I am going to say that you still should've known better. And having more mechs and spending more money doesn't make your logic any better than anyone else, so starting your points off with this is a poor attempt to somehow justify your weak points and incredulous demands.

We can all sit here and hope that Merc units will be able to choose between clan/IS mechs based on who they are taking a contract from... but... we all knew from the beginning (or should have known) that CW can't happen if players can switch clan/IS at will and mix-match teams with clan/IS. We always knew this. So just go ahead and hold your horses.

Also, you will still be able to use your mechs and mix-match drops in the free area (Group and Solo - non CW Faction tab). Only the drops that occur for the purposes of CW that will be OPTED IN by clicking on the faction tab will be forced to use the ruleset described here. All other drops will continue to happen. So all the content that you purchased ACCESS to will still exist. You will still be able to play the same game in the same fashion that you've been playing it for all this time. CW will be an additional method of playing the game that you will have to adapt to. So calm down and be realistic.

And I've seen nothing to say you can't change your faction whenever you want to. (Although I assume once you Opt In you're locked till the planetary battle is done) but afterwards.... Otherwise what is the point of the Loyalty Medallions?

[DeRazer]

Paul Inouye, on 10 September 2014 - 08:53 PM, said:

Interesting.. but Units cannot switch Factions once in the CW area of the game. That being said, this functionality you're talking about may prevent a large Unit (ugh.. I'm gonna catch hell over saying that aren't I?) from repeatedly attacking a planet over and over again.

What EVER? Or just for one battle? If I commit my unit to a battle as IS but the next week we all fancy playing as Clan I can't just switch my unit to Clan? Confused...

[Bhelogan]

So, maybe this has been asked but here is my question:

If I plan on playing for IS during CW, is there any reason for me to invest in this next clan expansion pack?

[Deadeye254]

I would suggest changing the 2 mins to 15 this is standard for time between matches in comp play a organized 12man will have no problem waiting 15min for the epic chance to take a planet.

[Garandos]

Bhelogan, on 11 September 2014 - 04:25 AM, said:

So, maybe this has been asked but here is my question:

If I plan on playing for IS during CW, is there any reason for me to invest in this next clan expansion pack?

You seem to forget, that there still will be the game modes we have now, those are not going anywhere and that CW will not be "aviable" 24/7.

So, if you like to play Clan tech once in a while, why not grab it?

[Anais Opal]

Interesting, all my posts in this thread have been deleted including the one where I raised 7 points of interest.

Someone at PGI want to tell me wtf is your problem?

[Evil Ed]

What role will the c-bills in the coffer have? Pay for dropships is a known one, but maybe c-bills also can be spent on turrets? Activate them for a small fee, upgrade to LL/bigger launchers for a lot of c-bills?

[Syrkres]

Thanks for sharing... following is questions/suggestions:

Group Formation:
12 man group in 2 mins, basically means you will have to have a 12man formed - waiting around for a conflict to arrise. Very bad...

Drop Deck:
Drop Deck - It would be a good idea to allow a player to have "multiple" drop decks. A mech can be in only a single drop deck, but a player can "form/designate" multiple drop decks (for executing different roles). This will allow the formation of of groups much qicker. These drop decks are "premade" in that a player may only drop into a match with a single drop deck, but I have 3 pre-built dropdecks to select when I go to drop, depending what the unit is planning. Also this will support those who own more mechs.
- From a design point of view this should be fairly easy to implement, in that you would have a "dropdeck" table and a player can have multiple drop decks (1 to many relation) and a drop deck then has a relation to a players mech inventory.
- Also it would be nice to allow "alternate" color schema. For example if we know we are dropping on a frozen world, bringing RED/BLACK mech is probaly not good (as compared to Terra drop).

It would be nice if a drop deck can indicate which factions it can drop for (if we're allowed multiple/pre drop deck formation).

Mechs:
It would be nice to see additional indicators on mechs (somewhere) of which factions a mech can "belong to/or play" under?

I would suggest publishing lists of which mechs can fight for which units prior to go-live with CW as people may want to either purchase additional mechs for their affiliation or sell the mechs they will never use.

I see a lot of people complaining about limiting IS/CLan to a single side. I suggest you track mech kills in CW. And after "X" number of kills that player has "salvged" enough to now run that mech. This would allow mixing of mechs. It would be an easy enough tracking, player to mech table(s) with a count and probably an indicator if it has been unlocked. For example more common mechs might take less,while rarer/clan mechs take more. Probably easier for a Clan to use an IS mech, than the other way around, since they technically started with most of the IS mechs. This number could also be reset with each new season.

Map:
I would suggest for the map to add multiple alternate routes (which are much longer) that teams can "sneak" around, thus forcing the defenders to scout out. Otherwise you will end up with the map always being the same choke points and too predictable.

As someone before suggested make the gates themselves destructable, and you may want different "hardness" on the gates, so a front gate is very strong, where as a side gate is much weaker(but further to get to).

What happens if one team/side overruns the others spawn point? No fun if when you immediately spawn 12 enemy mechs are gunning you down? I would suggest that if that happens a victory should be declared and restart next attach phase.

Does winning a map mean you win the planet or is it representative of just a city/zone of the planet?

Re-arm/Repair is likely to be needed on longer maps. Though one should have to travel back to spawn point. Otherwise it will greatly shift things to energy weapons. This should have a cost associated with it (besides the time it takes to go do it).


Bidding System:
It would be really helpful in how this is going to work, to not only give feedback, but also allow units to start figuring out what (if anything is needed, funds, rep etc) How is bidding done?

Can a unit have multiple contracts at once? Or only one?

Is (I hope) there a penalty for a unit bidding on a contract and losing? Or worse not supplying the majority of warriors? This would stop units from bidding on a contract with 12 players, then taking 10 of the players + 2 more and bidding on a second contract even when the first contract is not fullfilled.

Merc Units:
When you say a unit cannot switch factions once in the CW area of the game, is that per session/day/season?

What if we have multiple 12man units waiting around. Our unit can easily field 3x12man units many nights, so are we restricted to only allowing 1 12man to drop at a time?

General CW:
Is the Opt-In per session or "life" of an account(or season)?

Edited by Syrkres, 11 September 2014 - 07:31 AM.

[Colonel Cabbage]

I wanted to start a faction with only my close friends but usually only 3 of us are on at one time. Does this mean that we can't participate in invasion offense? Does it also mean that if we had a contract on a planet and it was attacked, would it be poorly defended because it'll just be us 3?

Another thing, do we have to own at least one of every weight class of mech? We're Smoke Jaguar and only one of us purchased one of each class. I only own a Timber Wolf, another only owns 2 heavies and a medium and another friend doesn't own any because he has a thing about paying for a game he gets for free... Will this hinder us greatly or will there be a work around with the trial mechs?

[Why Run]

Ok. I'll try to be constructive and positive.

Step one, frequent communications. Improvement.

Step two, clearly this requires additional content, maps, modes, etc. Planned, but we have nothing in the Plan that would be compatible, nor in game, so entirely new content. Ok, If delivered, this is what we've been asking for.

Step three, staged battle component. As I've pointed out elsewhere, this is going to be the hardest. We've seen from the faction challenges, that there are probably about 10,000 players? 1000 per faction isn't terrible. But we have no idea what the population during peak is. I hope it's high enough to sustain this model. I also recognize that there will be major issues with the non-US player base. It's an impossible situation from a developer standpoint, I hope they can resolve it; we need a diverse player-base

Step four, continued improvement. It seems to me that this mode would benefit greatly from extremely frequent injections of maps. If they can get a foundation in place and pump some life back into the community and then focus on adding maps, groups of similar terrain. (HERE"S A GREAT BIG MAP HINT PAUL. DESIGN ONE HUGE MAP, AND THEN SLICE IT INTO PIECES FOR OTHER MODES. MW4 had a massive city, that also had 4 submaps that were great for different play styles. No one will complain if you make a giant map, and then reuse parts of it for smaller combat. This is a quick way to double up or even quadruple content in one swoop.

IF you give us that, people, including myself, WILL PAY for more battletech.

P.S. Stop the nerfs, once you get the content out there for CW, maybe you step back and rework all weapons together. This piecemeal approach has been haphazard at best, foolish at worst. It's not positive. The JJ changes were not positive. It did not improve the game, it simply shifts the meta.

Edited by Why Run, 11 September 2014 - 05:03 AM.

[keith]

i will say this too. the 2 min timer is horrible. try to set up a team in 2 mins. won't happen, in NBT we had 10 mins between drops to figure out mechs/drop dec/ configs and that was for 8 ppl. in 2 mins u have to responed , get 12 ppl togeather and form your mechs togeahter to defend.

[JohnnyWayne]

I dont play lights period.

Don't force to choose one because if I have to I'll chose the locust and scuicide.

Edited by JohnnyWayne, 11 September 2014 - 05:13 AM.

[Johnny Z]

A wild guess about the bidding sytem for planet capture would be that each planet would have a base cost to seige, depending on distance etc. and then go up from there depending on how many merc corps want to seige it. I guess the planets would also have a base cost to defend as well, depending on distance etc.

I am sure some of the merc corps would have guessed the same thing but for those that havnt here is a wild guess. If this is the way it goes then it might not be smart to cap to many planets as holding them might cost tons before becoming profitable.

Just a comment because 3 or so months isnt far away for any merc corps to stock the treasuries.

Freelancer here so no difference for me. Going to be one of the guys that my faction will be glad has shown up for the fight.

Edited by Johnny Z, 11 September 2014 - 05:29 AM.

[CoffiNail]

Deadeye254, on 11 September 2014 - 04:30 AM, said:

I would suggest changing the 2 mins to 15 this is standard for time between matches in comp play a organized 12man will have no problem waiting 15min for the epic chance to take a planet.

Nikolai Lubkiewicz Take note. This is from CGBI's comp teams leader. I think 2 min is too short as well. Good for game play, but hard for the defending faction. Even extended to 5 or 10 would be a better idea than 2 min.