165 replies to this topic

[Jman5]

Another problem I have is how "Scouting" reward works. Currently it rewards as soon as a player targets the mech for the first time. The problem is that it rewards players for spam cycling through their entire line up without providing the team with any useful information.

Instead, scouting rewards should only be awarded once the target information registers. This discourages spam cycling, gives players a couple seconds to notice the target pop up, and provides the team with actual loadout information.

It's awesome that you're rewarding for role warfare, but it needs a little more tweaking.

Edited by Jman5, 21 October 2014 - 09:54 PM.

[Kreisel]

While the idea looks great on paper and yes some people are spiking large rewards the overall feel of the new system is that it is waaaay too low. It's going to drive away new players, If they start out and have a bad streak of games and see these supper low end rewards and then look at the huge cost of the mech they want it's just going to demotivate them and drive them away. Heck... a few bad games tonight it was so depressing to see numbers that were lower than the price of a consumable that I was very tempted to stop playing until things sort themselves out, and would have if the Stormcrow were not 45% off right now. As it stands I stopped playing several games sooner than I typically would have because I felt it just wasn't worth the time investment right now for how little I was getting out of it.

Players were excited about a change to rewards because they felt the old system was too low, that it took to many HOURS of play to earn anything useful... if the new system is around the same or a little worse (or a lot worse in some cases) then yeah, we are going to be disenfranchised. A new reward system was the light at the end of the tunnel for a community that felt c-bill earning was too low. The new reward system makes me sorely tempted to just slap a tag laser on any mech I can and hope the bonus c-bills from that will make up the loss.

Any match I used Tag on, it accounted for around ~40,000 c-bills worth of earning. Even in games without a single LRM on our team. Considering that's worth twice a c-bills as I've earned from some of my worst matches tonight... it encourages cheesing the system for money. Forget role warfare: Tag laser and a Clan ER PPC is 525 cbills PER SHOT, and an extra 2000 cbills for hit and run if they don't shoot you back. I don't actually have to contribute to my team, I can just farm c-bills by aiming my tag laser at anything everyone is already shooting anyway or tag my own damage for cash.

Edited by Kreisel, 21 October 2014 - 06:49 PM.

[nitra]

so far what i have noticed is that if you have a "meh round" ( we all have these its where not matter what you do you seem to be just out of the kill zone sure you get some hits in maybe a kill or 2 but it seems like you never were really in the battle)

these battles for me at least have scored under by about 20,000 cbills less than i would normally get .

other matches where things go well i seem to do about what i used to do. maybe a few thousand or maybe even 10k less

matches were i do well it seems like im getting better rewarded. but i have yet to have a match where i feel unjustly rewarded yet.

[Felbombling]

I'm all for anything that chews into the rewards a non-participant makes, be they afk, cooking or just farming C-bills. But, placing too much emphasis on winning and the final killing shot could backfire. One of my biggest gripes with a game like World of Tanks was that you could play your butt off, almost carry the entire team but finally lose. At the end of the battle, you'd end up with less reward than half the players on the winning team. Recently, they've added rewards for such 'heroic defiance', and it helps mitigate the feelings after a match like that.

With the number of lopsided stomps this game tends to have, I'd be very careful about the reward levels a losing player is granted, especially a new player that might see their cadet bonus wasted on multiple sub-75k matches. Something to think on.

Edited by StaggerCheck, 21 October 2014 - 06:54 PM.

[LCCX]

Good news and bad news:
GOOD:
I think that, given time, people probably can be shifted into role-warfare better with this larger array of rewards. In my locusts (basically unplayable before as I had trouble getting more than 400xp on a great win), I've managed 2k xp w/ the daily double bonus, implying 1k xp for similar performance after the first win. This is a bit low, but not enough to be important to me.

BAD:
Everything larger than my locust has, on net, not benefited from the reward changes made. The c-bill rewards are *way* too low now! At 75k-100k on c-bills on a loss and 120k-180k on a win (with occasional games above that for exceptional players) it was *barely* enough. At worst there should be a floor of 50k on a loss and 100k on a win, so long as {the player moved, did > 0 dmg, did not die out of bounds, did not overheat to death without dealing or receiving damage in the last 30 seconds ... you're smart enough to figure these abuse restrictions out}.

If doubling or tripling c-bill earnings (so active players playing an hour or two multiple nights per week can progress through content within a reasonable timeframe) would break your business revenue model, then do it anyway (so the game is fun, because otherwise *THAT* breaks your business model) and end F2P in favor of pay-to-play either subscription or cash for mechs as the only way to get them. Making a good game and then twerking it to try and psychologically trick people into paying you money they would not have otherwise is terrible.

[Karkland]

Stomps are really, really, frustrating now.

Been getting stomped in about 3/4 of games tonight, and at I certain point I just start thinking why bother? If you're going to get 50-60k after that stomp no matter what you do then you might as well just shut down, leave the game early, whatever. Whatever you do, don't even bother thinking about using a consumable-- in addition to a frustrating game you're going to be getting a net loss.

A hard-fought loss where I did pretty well (3 kills, some assists, about 700 damage) earned about 120k (maybe a tad less). Okay, but those matches don't feel bad anyways.

Had a win where I did well, about 160k. Seems not too different, and that was with 4-5 NARC kill assists.

On the whole, I like the concept but find the execution to be immensely anger-inducing. Again, the stomp rewards just rub it in your face--why even blasted try?

The grind was already quite harsh (and I say this as a person who's spent more than I should have on this game), but this most certainly feels like a big step towards getting even worse.

Edit: To clarify, this was 100% heavy mech dropping (since the queue for them is low in the first time... ever?) Perhaps other classes end up faring better, but I'm been having a piss poor time in a heavy.

And another edit: after a little more time I'd say that if you always, always, regardless of your mech's class or role bring TAG or NARC then you might see an overall slight boost in earnings?

This leaves, however, the issue of enjoy-ability. Losing streaks are always painful, but in case it wasn't abundantly clear I feel it's now worse. The sheer tripe you get for a bad loss means that if, say, a lance pugs off and gets wiped early on you may well be better off quitting right then and starting a new match. It used to be you could at least go out guns blazing and hope for some assist kills. Now post-death assists are worth so little the profit to be gained by fighting it out is insufficient. I don't think that should be encouraged behavior.

Exhibit A: The Iron Banner event in Destiny. Only got rep (what folks were grinding for) by winning, but if you lost you still had the usual chance of loot/other rewards. Result? Entire teams quitting early on, frequently. It's an extreme example, but it can create a toxic environment.

Edit once again: okay, first time uploading images but I was sufficiently driven. Here's a few losses and a win, all conquest, all in heavies. Note that I have at least one NARC bonus in all three matches.

First: A close match, lost on points, only a few left on each side. I didn't do superb, but I did okay. 63k.



Second: More or less got stomped, a bad loss, 12-3. I did... worse, but not absolutely awful. 68k.



Finally, and this one is a two parter, a win that I did pretty well in.

The stats (I'm the TBR-C):



Then, the reward: 170k. That's probably higher than it would have been a few days ago. I believe that XP is with the first win bonus.



So there's a few examples. Didn't have any better games, but had many worse ones.

Edited by Karkland, 21 October 2014 - 09:03 PM.

[SgtMagor]

ill wait a few more days like the Devs to see how my c-bill farming works out. so far it seems like kills are not getting rewarded enough.

[Alexander MacTaggart]

I don't want to judge the system yet; it hasn't even been a day.

Initial thoughts though are basically:

1: I really like the new bonus types, they seem to already be nudging people into playing 'for the team'.

2: The actual c-bill/experience reward numbers are too low. Unless you have an extremely good match you are likely to end up with less in rewards at the end than you would for a mediocre one before the revamp.

My gut feeling right now? Increase the bonus rewards by 50% to 100% and see how that shakes out.

[Saint H8oraide of the Wine]

Man, i've spent 4 weeks trying to convince my wifey to play this with me, she finally tried it today. She played 4 matches...the last one she got 8k c-bills (she had a team-kill). She uninstalled. It didn't help that each time was a stomp (she said her team lost 12-2 or worse each match) but after 4 matches she didn't even make 100k c-bills.

[80Bit]

I love the new bonuses breakdown. I am already seeing it hold lances, and teams, together. It also feels good to get instantly rewarded for team helping things that used to get you nothing; flanking, hit and run, and scouting all make me feel rewarded for playing a light.

That said, the grand total at the end of a match feels, well, depressing.

Take these two example PUG matches-

A miserable loss:



A pretty solid win:




Both matches were in light hero bonus mechs with premium time (the matches were back to back actually). The first was a skirmish where my team got rolled hard. But I was the last man standing, having provided ECM and triple AMS cover to most of my team the whole match. I got plenty of little blips for Hit and Run, lance formation, protection, etc. But as you can see in the end I made the depressing sum of 21,892 before bonuses. That sucks man. Yeah this is almost as bad as a match can get, but I could have made more CBills in a 6PPC stalker!

Ok so the second match was a conquest in my The Death Knell, and went much better. We won on kills at around 550 resources, I had 8 assists, and tons of the new bonuses. My team stuck together, it was a drag out fight, and I had tons of payout notifications spamming my screen. While I could have had more damage, and some kills instead of assists, this is still a good match in a light. 107k before bonuses, while not terrible, is still a far crying from what 8 assists used to bring in, and feels "ok" rather than "heck yeah owned it!"

I think one over site here is that while the new rewards for lights and mediums definitely apply to things they do, in any given match a player can only be expected to hit a few of the categories, not most or all of them. If you are scouting, tagging, and flanking, you won't be in lance formation, protecting, and kill blowing. Heavies and Assaults, meanwhile, can still simply layout straight damage and kill blows to get their payout.


TLDR; The payout on good matches is ok but not great, the payout on bad matches is really depressingly low. The new reward structure itself is awesome, but needs some tweaking on the payout amounts.

[Mr Beefy]

Hey Russ, Paul and Alex,

First off thank you for all the work to turn things around and keeping things moving forward. I love the challenges, the freebies, fixes and content being added. The work you guys are doing right now as I am sure you can tell by the response's in the forums are appreciated very much by many of us. The ideas you put into this new reward system is great! Many love it and see it as a needed step forward.

With that being said, I have one very large concern with with the amount of rewards given depending on the role we play in each game mode. To be honest, I believe many other in this player base have always voiced concerns regarding the amount of C-bills, xp and gxp to be extremely low per game played. I believe many have also voiced their opinions on the cost of mechs for c-bills and modules to be extremely over priced also.

There are several ways that PGI could deal with these issues that many are having a hard time accepting in regards to the prices with C-bills for these things. The good will and faith it would show your player base would be unreal and I am sure that no one would complain about your shift in F2P pricing model if you do this.

1. Keep the current pricing on Modules and mechs the same price they are at now, but raise all earnings from a match played by 30-50% of what we were making and are making under the new improved system.

2. Keep the mech pricing for C-bills the same, cut all Module pricing by 30-50%, and this includes GXP cost to unlock them. Increase in game earnings 10-20% from where they are at now. Or ... Keep the prices on the Modules the same, and make them unlock for any mechs in the players inventory, still increasing the earnings by 10-20% every match played. Also add to this any mech or module they don't like can be sold back a 75% min resale back to the store. I mean seriously, what is the rate you get back now, 1/3 of the value you paid?

Another concern after playing this weekend for the event, and I put a lot of games down, and tried to relay to teammates any chance I got at the start of the match, "hey, if we are able to, lets try to take the base. Don't kill the last mech or two if we have a choice." "Lets try to get the 20 points by cap winning if we can or take the base if we can pull it off"

The problem that I ran into 80% of the many games I played and others on my team ran into, they don't seem to really give any cares or thoughts to complete the primary objective. They feel, that PGI has developed a game that solely rewards you for only killing the 12 mechs on the enemies team. Even though you at PGI, made the primary objectives very clear, they simply didn't care. I was told time and time again, " I need C-bills so I can buy stuff I want, why would I not kill the last mech, and miss the extra C-bills by capping or taking the base?"

Our team had many games in the bag, base was under 45 seconds from being taken, many times players knowing we had it, our whole team was on the base, but one lone guy goes and chase's down the last mech for two minutes making sure he got that last kill and laughed about it.

I love the ideas put into this patch to help motivate people to take on certain roles that you at PGI feel will help encourage team play. However as well thought out as your Idea is, this is not going to help with these types of players. They will find anyway to exploit the system you bring forth when it comes down to Conquest, and Assault to obtain C-bills and XP. Even after the new system rewarding players for certain style of play, unless you get the dire need of C-bills and XP off their minds, you will fail to make them do anything but find ways to exploit the system you inject for their own selfish needs.

I believe if you put one of the two measures in place above listed as 1. or 2., with the added bonus of $75,000-$100,000 C-bill and 200xp bonus only for a win that includes either taking the enemies base out, or a capping win in Conquest to each player on the winning team it will solve this toxic, non-team play style overnight. It will heard these player types into conforming to try to achieve the primary objectives in a given match mode, instead of them just killing every enemy mech. It will solve many issues in the player base right now, and everyone will love you guys for doing this.

New players will be able to come in and not feel like they have no chance of contributing to their team because of the huge grind mountain they must climb to even begin to be competitive in this game let alone have any real choice or be able to experiment with different mechs to find the ones they like or play well in. This is a very important point, and I find it hard to believe you guys have over looked it and could truly believe the current grind is really a fair one that promotes player base growth and good team play.

Now for the best part for PGI's bottom line. There must be a really good reason that you guys have over looked this and set the grind up to be the mountain that it was, and still is even after the new rewards. However consider this change please, because as some one that has spent money on this game, and will be happy to spend more as soon as I can afford to do so.....

1. It really is easy for us to say that it will increase your sales. To be honest, I don't know if it will, or it will not. But....if you gave us a 30-50% increase in earnings per match, speaking from a player that has many hours into this game and I only have two chassis mastered at this time under my clan mechs, one of which is not much fun to play anymore because of the dual nerf on clan small lasers and medium lasers, heat/range, which is now known to me as the blowva. I am just now buying the storm crows, I have only one so far and 3,000,000. saved for the other two chassis. If you look at my hours logged I would say that the grind is very painful under the current earnings even when I play well. This is excessive and many feel the same way that I do.

I have bought mech bays for MC, and other Items. Times are tight right now for me on money, but I still want to contribute to this game. I had to sell my other two kitfoxes, and nova's only keeping one of each because if I wouldn't have, I would have not been able to afford the extremely high priced modules like radar dep, and sismic. for a few weeks. I feel they are needed to be even remotely competitive in matches.

If you make this change and boost our earnings, I believe you the developers over time will see a much happier and larger player base. Happier player base is more willing to buy all these great things you guys are offering in this game. They want to spend their money, they want to stick around building their army of mech and play with friends. Nice thing about it is they also won't feel as guilty giving you their hard earned money.

Please take this into serious consideration Russ, Paul and Alex, It really is a great chance to show faith in the player base that you as a developer have taken the rains over to bring us not just your game, but all of our game we love so much.

I truly believe it will create such good will among new and veteran players alike, and you just can't buy that kind of PR, it is earned.


Thanks for all the hard work guys, I think I speak for everyone here in the player base when saying we all look forward to CW and the future of this awesome game.

Edited by Mr Beefy, 22 October 2014 - 12:50 AM.

[80Bit]

In the interest of full disclosure, after I made my above post, I played one more match, this time in a heavy:




I think it is fair to say this represents the high end of what most players could make on their best match. For me, this is a pretty rare showing. Again I think the new reward structure is nice, but there is clearly no substitute for bringing a lot of firepower in a big mech when it comes to making C-Bills. I would be willing to have this match reward less if the other two I posted were rewarding more.

Edited by 80Bit, 21 October 2014 - 08:43 PM.

[Jab Allen]

As many are saying here, I also believe the low-end is a bit too low as far as earnings go.

Tonight I ran both groups and solo queue's (hello narc+lrm fest in the group games) and with the poorest matches only netting 20-30k cbils in the worst stomp cases. The new system certainly has potential, but I think the low end is too punishing for those of us that are, at VERY best, average players (yes, even doing our best to fullfill our "roles").

Honestly, earning a third less than what we did YESTERDAY per match, really does not provide any incentive to play MORE to improve our skills to the point where we can break into the high side of the rewards.

TL;DR: the new system could be good, but the low end of the scale is too low, as others have said.

Edited by Jab Allen, 21 October 2014 - 09:20 PM.

[Alexander MacTaggart]

Jab Allen, on 21 October 2014 - 09:19 PM, said:

As many are saying here, I also believe the low-end is a bit too low as far as earnings go.

I didn't think to screenshot it, but earlier tonight I had a match that paid out 17k.

I got to Candy Mountain ahead of most of my team on Alpine, just as the entire red team came up the slope. Got a couple shots off (1 assist) and then blown apart.

I'm all for rewarding wins and good play more than losses and/or bad play, but 17k c-bills for a match is ridiculous.

[Steel Will]

Making getting stomped even less rewarding in a game where the matchmaker actively stacks up to half your games in that direction is not the way to tweak the reward system no matter what the average may work out to be. I have three shiny new Stormcrows now sitting in my garage and the thought of half my matches amounting to little over 40XP has completely zapped any desire to actually drop in them to grind them out.

[Mr Beefy]

Steel Will, on 21 October 2014 - 09:31 PM, said:

Making getting stomped even less rewarding in a game where the matchmaker actively stacks up to half your games in that direction is not the way to tweak the reward system no matter what the average may work out to be. I have three shiny new Stormcrows now sitting in my garage and the thought of half my matches amounting to little over 40XP has completely zapped any desire to actually drop in them to grind them out.

You are doing much better than me, I have one in my bays, and only 3 million saved for the other two.

[Andi Nagasia]

Main problem with this system is on a solo kills vs Assists
Assists are now worth, 2500 down 4000 from 6500,
now assuming a solo kill,
kill........Kill damage.........component.........solo kill..= total
4000........5000....................2300..............10000...= 21300?
not including a 4500 Savior or Defensive along with that,
so solo kill= 21300, and an assist= 2500,

in all my matches tonight i had teammates moving in-front of me for the kill,
its gotten really bad ive have matches ive won where ive only gotten 60,000-100,000 C-bills,
and on a loss(16 or so out of the 25 matches ive played before posting) 18,000-55,000 C-bills,

if you want to promote team play get rid of the Solo Reward, and double all other rewards,

[Featherwood]

I've posted my impressions already, but fail to see why not to post them in this most appropriate thread again.

Featherwood, on 21 October 2014 - 02:54 PM, said:

...

I will split my first impression on new rewards system into few parts:


Income change:
I run 3 games in different loadouts of Stormcrow Alt. D. All 3 ended victories with me performing 1-2 kills, 5-7 assists and 300-450 dmg done on average. No premium. I got ~100k, ~115k and ~80k. (I read reports above about tiny income from loses with shrug, tbh. I hate farming like all of you and the grim perspective to waste even more time on it does not smile on me.)

• Overall impression that income has decreased about 10-15% 40-50%!!!.

Aesthetics change:
New reports are flashing in HUD almost constantly during action, sometimes they amuse, sometimes distract. New system may bring improvement in PUGs' tactics, I believe, as some of new rewards are paid for straying in group (e.g. 'Protected Medium' for keeping close to assaults) and otherwise stimulate to cooperate with rest of the team. Personaly, I am not interested in that information flood. It may be interesting for some kind mercenary RP, but for Clan player the money reward mentioning is ridiculous.

• Though I appreciate the approach and direction PGI has chosen in reward system improvement, I would rather saw rewards notification revamped or disabled at all.
  
• Constant mentioning of C-Bills and Exp rewards somewhat breaks immersion for me.
  
• Aftermatch personal statistics is now more interesting to read

Performance change:
Scaleform is not the fastest and 'optimizest' library ever, you know. So, any HUD baubles and animations like those reward notes negatively impact performance, I believe.

• I lost 3-5 FPS with new patch for some reason and had impression during matches that HUD is reacting a bit slower than usually. I blame Scaleform !

Suggestions:

• Make flashing reward notifications 'Clans faction neutral', i.e. remove C-Bills/Exp mention at all.
  
• Make reward notifications more like Tactical Orders Acknowledgments, i.e. simulate received confirmation from your command on order completed, e.g.: 'Nav point Gamma reached', 'Alpha Lance flank secured', 'Target successfully marked with TAG' and so on. Bonus reward details should be provided after the match, IMO.
  
• Make sure that HUD notifications do not slow down performance (please check it!)
  
• Add option to disable flashing notifications at all - both to improve HUD performance, disable distracting signs and/or remove immersion breakers for some players. I know about option to chose type of rewards notifications, but I literally would like not to see them at present state.

Edit: after few more games which included loses, I regret to say that my average income per hour has decreased by 40-50% comparing to the week before latest patch. Loses now are so loosely (!) rewarded, that they do not cover 1 consumable expenses in 80% cases and 2 consumables in 100% cases! That is just plain unacceptable.

Edited by Featherwood, 22 October 2014 - 01:24 AM.

[Johnny Reb]

Scratx, on 21 October 2014 - 05:24 PM, said:

That is also what I suspected. The reward structure is favoring actual in-game performance more than it used to, so the difference between a good round and a bad round is going to be naturally bigger. I like it, but I do worry about new players who basically, under such a system, have no hope whatsoever of making good cbills aside from the cadet bonus.

Some food for thought there, but you folks really need to eye that "low-end" and make sure it's not TOO low-end.

Even what I would consider good play the rewards are down. 2 kills, 6 assist with 848 damage only got me 139k.

[Kmieciu]

Andi Nagasia, on 21 October 2014 - 09:58 PM, said:

Assists are now worth, 2500 down 4000 from 6500,
now assuming a solo kill,
kill........Kill damage.........component.........solo kill..= total
4000........5000....................2300..............10000...= 21300?
not including a 4500 Savior or Defensive along with that,
so solo kill= 21300, and an assist= 2500

That's the problem right there:
Solo kill:
solo kill= 21300 (for a player did >51% damage and had the last shot)
assist= 2500 (for a player that did <49% damage)

If 2 people are shooting at 1 mech, one of them can get 8x more c-bills. That's pretty random.

Before the change, the assists were worth so much more. You could earn money just by distracting the enemy mechs while your teammates cored their backs. Now there is no reason to risk your life in a light mech. Just put TAG on your Daishi and try to solo every enemy.

Paul Inouye, on 21 October 2014 - 05:10 PM, said:

I am very pleased to tell you that, after a first gathering of data, the reward economy stayed stable. We are currently looking at fluctuations between 5% to 10% compared to what it was before. What we have found is, the economy is still intact and the new rewards are functioning very well.

You gave almost everybody two hero mechs with +30% c-bill bonus and the earnings only dropped 5 to 10% ? Working as intended...

Edited by Kmieciu, 21 October 2014 - 10:47 PM.