Russ,
I'm proud you guys are there doing the work you do. Mechwarrior/Battletech has always been in my life, I want to continue this legacy, for good or bad, lol! Also, I'm glad you guys are noticing that Conquest mode is not accomplishing its goal. I do agree that it takes too long to cap a zone. And there does need to be feedback for progress during neutral capping. I would also like to preface this with the fact that I would LOVE a good conquest mode, but as it exists now, I don't ever play it, unless someone makes me.
First off. We all know that the 3 game modes are just unfortunately played with variations of the deathball strategy. And any interest in changing that up should be directly and exclusively as such. Otherwise, it will be ineffective.
As for instance, I would assume to try to identify 3 different play strategies. Off the top of my head lets go with: Deathball, Solo Rambos/Ninjas, Lance Warefare. Then, specifically and exclusively design a game mode for each.
Lets take the obvious example first; as the control case: Deathball. Which game mode would be best? Probably not conquest, so either Skirmish or Assault. Lets say, Skirmish. Which is what we already know. Now, in Skirmish, I presently can make more money/XP kicking butt than winning. Which feels correct to me. Its more about kicking butt. The more I kick butt the more I have added to my teams ability to win. We might lose, whatever. And, of course, I make even more when we do win.
(you might see where im going with this now)
Next up, Solo Rambos/Ninjas. This game play style would directly be unpopular to some who are wildly in love with the deathball. But, that is the reason to mix it up. Not everyone always wants to play deathball. There needs to be a mode that says deathball is bad. With this in mind, there is Conquest. There should be a way to "kick butt" the conquest way (which in this example would be the solo rambo/ninja way) but still lose. As a single player, I should be able to do great things towards a win and be rewarded heavily (because I was so awesome) even tho my team lost and I didn't get the additional win bonus. This mode, which is to service the solo rambo/ninja gameplay in this example, needs to only reward for such activities. This is the exclusive part of each game mode I am refering to. There should be little to no reward for applying deathball tactics in this mode. People complained that using the old cap timers on Conquest allowed a 3 man team to beat an 8 man team. But alas, this isnt Skirmish... therefore, this should be entirely possible if the 8 man team is using the wrong tactic. If you need that kind of guarentee, go play Skirmish. But the changes I would propose here might include, that in Conquest,
you can't win by killing the other team. Sorry, if you gotta wait for a bit at the end to cap some zones. You already gotta wait for the raven hunt. Thats just the nature of a truely different game mode. Therefore, it could be possible such that, the other team is completely dead, and still win. Its a race to 750 resources, so don't miss the deadline. Also, reward little to nothing for killing people. Skirmish doesn't reward you at all for capping, it can't. In other words, attempt to make the game modes mutually exclusive instead of variations on a theme. Because otherwise, the dominate strategy/tactic for a theme will always be what is used, regardless of any variations on the theme. Be solid and up front about what the game mode is and its meta, then more people will be accepting its place. For it will now have its own unique niche. If you need lore to describe it, dont. As Kell Commander said above, "A multi-capture point game mode just DOES NOT FIT this game." Or rather, Conquest mode isn't even remotely a MW/BT thing. I can get over it, I prefer a more dynamic gameplay experience. But drastic changes will be needed to accomplish anything real. And they will probably have to be quite new and unique compared to how we play other conquer-type modes from other games. So to this end, I would suggest using the weekend events to test out ideas and see what works better and/or maybe just be a place you can change up the game for the fun of it. But, reinventing Conquest mode would be nice. Like some mentioned above. Shlkt said, "dont force players to stand in sqaure." (Because, really, Im not playing this game to go make tea, like Jabilo.) Combat Loss Grouping and Kjudoon said, in summary, the opposite. You have to stand there to get *any* points. (My sense of achievement is higher, and combat focuses towards resources a bit more.) How about a mixture? Have the resource point spawn a crate of resources every 30 seconds. And let them accumulate. Whenever you want resources, go pick up whats there. Instead of controlling the resources points; at the top of the screen would be the amount of unclaimed resources per zone and/or the color of the team that last collected. Maybe scale how many resources a player can collect per minute according to his mech size and/or modules. (This idea might make more sense for lore, as you could say the workers arnt working for anyone at the moment, they are just putting it out there for whomever, until the battle is over). Another idea: Sprouticus said to have little to zero neutral area. Which is a neato idea. My vision of it: divide the entire map into 5-9 resource zones, such that you are almost always in one of them (like an area code). You constantly give control points to the zone your in (thus almost eliminating the speed-of-mech/Conquest mode issue). Your team controls any zones they accumulated the most points in... within a certain delta... or something. Whatever. Play around with it, use the weekend events as your play ground.
Lance Warefare. In this TLDR example, this would then lend itself to Assault mode. Which could work nice if the bases were larger to defend/attack. But as it stands the bases are the perfect size for a singular deathball, offensively or defensively. Maybe the bases should encompass a larger part of the map, or most of it. Clearly, there would need to be a few more functional changes here to create a demand for such tactics. But, the idea would be the same. Rewards and victory conditions come *only* from working in small teams. Maybe only get rewards/victory (assists and such) that come from your predefined lance. Or, in some way, encourage multi-pronged activities (attacks/defense/captures). Heck, make it blantent. It's not like Conquest mode makes any sense, as Kell put it, "the workers would scatter to the wind and not give 2 shi..", well, you get the idea. And it doesn't have to make sense. So just do it on purpose. Have a game mode that gives you points according to how far part your predefined lances are. Or rather, the opposite. You get points by killing. And take points away when you get close to different friendly lances. Such that if you deathball to kill a lance, you end up in the negative slightly. The better you guys can work as an organized but separated group of lances, the higher points and victory. Because you might just kill the whole enemy team but have very little, or even negative points, and lose.
I guess you could switch it up and have: Deathball be serviced by Assault mode, Solo Rambo/Ninja be serviced by Skirmish, and Lance warefare be serviced by Conquest (that zone idea would be nice here).
To wrap this up, I read many good ideas above about different ways to distribute the points in Conqest mode or offer other incentives for capping. I think they are all valid (in some way) and should be given a shot on a weekend event. I feel many of these little debates could help be solved with weekend events. Some say decrease the cap time to <20s some say thats too fast. Well... do a weekend event where each day you do a different cap time and see what works best. Could also test things like what someone else mentioned that the 3/3/3/3 should be removed from Conquest, not a bad idea really. I could see more lights/meds being dropped. Which leads to the idea that when you mutualy exclude each game mode; you can break the "rules" because your just now redefining them anyhow. The main point here being that if any is worth doing... its worth doing right. And if you actually want people to play with completely different tactics, then you have to give them completely different goals. Otherwise, your just fine tuning a one-way tactic environment. Make a stand, you can't do both.
Thanks for your work and I love you all!
Toe
TLDR:
1) If the goal is to ensure that respectively different gameplay tactics are predominately used for different game modes; then the game modes would have to be mutually exclusive in their victory conditions, at the least. Otherwise, the best tactic for the shared "theme" will dominate.
2) Weekend events could be used to test different settings to help settle minor disputes (Like cap times: Which cap time is better? <20s? 90s? 180s? sounds like Friday, Saturday, Sunday to me... oh wait, that last one is everyday). Or test major ideas. (Like reinventing Conquest mode)
Edited by ToeFuNinja, 15 October 2014 - 02:00 PM.
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Popsmosher, on 14 October 2014 - 12:13 PM, said:
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