115 replies to this topic

[operatorZ]

MischiefSC, on 24 December 2014 - 12:07 AM, said:

If it were the same, why ask for Skirmish? There's a huge difference between Skirmish and Invasion. Hence why some people want to change Invasion to be Skirmish.

Skirmish works because of Elo and pug/group queue. Invasion in CW works because it allows people to win via coordination and tactics, not just focusing fire. The two don't cross.

Might just have to agree to disagree on this one...my take is exactly the opposite...

I am not advocating changing "Invasion " to "Skirmish" .....just add new mode/maps to CW

I believe that skirmish and invasions both take tactics and coordination to win....I think this is obvious..

When I drop in CW its mostly with mixed units and all not all solo pug....just like it would if we had a skirmish mode in CW.

Our opponents are mostly mixed units with some pugs....just like it would be if we had a skirmish mode in CW.

The best "team" will usually win....that uses the best coordination and tactics....just like it does in CW now.

just because the objective is now killing the other team rather than generators doesn't mean it takes "less" skill....

If the way that this argument is being framed is "the pugs and less skilled players want skirmish in CW, because they can't hack objective based gameplay" that's fine...and may be true.....its just don't agree with the premise that skirmish ....i.e. killing the enemy....necessarily takes less skill than shooting generators. If we ignore the zerg rush tactic, what allows your team to get close enough to shoot generators to "end" the match is killing the enemy....just like "skirmish"

I guess I don't really care either way but new maps for CW would be nice. Merry Christmas!

[Almond Brown]

It will have been 2 weeks tomorrow since CW launched ffs. Give PGI a holiday break and they will move on afterwards. According to many we have played simple butthurt mode for 2+ years now. What is another month or 2 of another apparently also butthurt mode. jeeez.

P.S. Conquest is played by the Community as DM. When played right, it can be quite interesting. No way the Community gets to put DM based Conquest on the Dev team.

Happy Holidays All.

Edited by Almond Brown, 24 December 2014 - 06:08 AM.

[Savage Wolf]

xLAVAx, on 24 December 2014 - 04:45 AM, said:

"Destruction of the enemy's military forces is in reality the object of all combats." - Clausewitz - On War

And the most effective way to do that is the destruction of the enemy's infrastructure that makes that military effective. So destroying objectives IS destroying the enemy forces is what that quote is supposed to mean.

[Savage Wolf]

Also, remember that this is a game where everyone needs to have a chance at having fun. If this was like real war, people would only attack when they were certain of winning. That would be a terrible game however. If we followed lore, the clans should win most of their fights, making it pretty bad playing the IS.

So please, stop using arguments from real warfare when this is supposed to be a game where we have fun and compete. This is nothing like war and shouldn't be.

[Mystere]

Topper01, on 23 December 2014 - 01:30 PM, said:

I still like objective gameplay modes, but when there is obviously only one true tactic to win a match ...

Is this falsehood still alive and well?

Edited by Mystere, 24 December 2014 - 07:53 AM.

[Mystere]

Savage Wolf, on 23 December 2014 - 02:06 PM, said:

Me and another have already made suggestions to how we can make sure to give a reason to fight defenders without removing the objectives. It can be done. Of course it requires PGI to listen and not continue to just tweak numbers that doesn't fix the problem.

<not specifically directed at Savage Wolf>

I have said it before and I will say it again ...

The solution is to add more game modes and maps to community warfare, not **** up the two maps we already have. Those two can remain as is.

This game is still seriously plagued by one-dimensional thinking ...

Edited by Mystere, 24 December 2014 - 07:59 AM.

[Mystere]

xLAVAx, on 24 December 2014 - 04:45 AM, said:

"Destruction of the enemy's military forces is in reality the object of all combats." - Clausewitz - On War

To which I counter with:

The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting. - Sun Tzu

Deltron Zero, on 24 December 2014 - 05:23 AM, said:

I would say all victory conditions in MWO should be the destruction of the enemy team ...

In the practical art of war, the best thing of all is to take the enemy's country whole and intact; to shatter and destroy it is not so good. - Sun Tzu

Also, see above.

Edited by Mystere, 24 December 2014 - 08:16 AM.

[Savage Wolf]

Mystere, on 24 December 2014 - 07:58 AM, said:

<not specifically directed at Savage Wolf>

I have said it before and I will say it again ...

The solution is to add more game modes and maps to community warfare, not **** up the two maps we already have. Those two can remain as is.

This game is still seriously plagued by one-dimensional thinking ...

Uhm... dude. We agree.

[Mystere]

Savage Wolf, on 24 December 2014 - 08:13 AM, said:

Uhm... dude. We agree.

And which is why I said it was not directed at you.

[Wildstreak]

Because it is Beta.

I would like to see CW eventually become something like this.

1 - Each planet gets an odd number rating for number of battle fields. You have to win just over half the battles to win the planet.

2 - Each battlefield is somewhat different based on the planet. Cold planets tend more to cold maps, hot to hot maps, temperate can have a mix, etc.

3 - Each of the battles is different. Some may be Skirmish, you might have Conquest to represent production facilities, Assault and one sided Assault with no walls, just a mobile base and open turrets, Invasion would become a Fortified Base mode. You do not need the Orbital Cannon, it could also be a prominent high ranking HQ or Warehouse.

Not every battle on a planet has to be Invasion.

[Farix]

Militarizes aren't that stupid to fight each other to the death. Their goal is to destroy the other side's capabilities to fight while preserving their own. Very rarely will they fight a losing battle if they have the opportunity to withdraw (thus preserving their remaining forces for another engagement). If they have no chance of winning and no opportunity to withdraw, they will simply surrender. But neither withdrawing nor surrendering are options in a deathmatch.

The problem with Conquest, Assault, and Skirmish is that they are not objective based game modes. They are different flavors of deathmatch. No military unit will actually fight on those terms because there is nothing to be gained. So from a story/lore preservative, they do not fit well for CW. CW should be about completing the objective to further your factions interests, not "Arrr! Destroy as many mechs before I'm destroyed, which will all be replaced as if nothing happened in the next match." Destroying other mechs isn't going to further your factions cause because there are not consequences for the lost of mechs on any side.

[operatorZ]

Farix, on 24 December 2014 - 08:49 AM, said:

Militarizes aren't that stupid to fight each other to the death. Their goal is to destroy the other side's capabilities to fight while preserving their own. Very rarely will they fight a losing battle if they have the opportunity to withdraw (thus preserving their remaining forces for another engagement). If they have no chance of winning and no opportunity to withdraw, they will simply surrender. But neither withdrawing nor surrendering are options in a deathmatch.

The problem with Conquest, Assault, and Skirmish is that they are not objective based game modes. They are different flavors of deathmatch. No military unit will actually fight on those terms because there is nothing to be gained. So from a story/lore preservative, they do not fit well for CW. CW should be about completing the objective to further your factions interests, not "Arrr! Destroy as many mechs before I'm destroyed, which will all be replaced as if nothing happened in the next match." Destroying other mechs isn't going to further your factions cause because there are not consequences for the lost of mechs on any side.

but I am not talking about total meaningless deathmatch....Invasion is "deathmatch with objectives" just like conquest is "deathmatch with objectives". Ignoring the zerg rush...... the only way you get to your objectives is to win at least a portion of the "deathmatch". If you fight a battle for a planet..one battle ....and you win by accomplishing the objectives by deathmatch or generators; than you have won one section of that planet....how is this not contributing to the overall strategy of CW ? It's always a deathmatch in some form..every single time.

As long as forces are taking and holding ground; the loss of all or none of your mechs has a purpose....it does "further your factions cause"...by definition

And there are plenty of examples of "deathmatch" between opposing forces in lore so lets not go there...battles wouldn't end until all other mechs in the battle were destroyed or captured...in fact if anything destroying the gauss cannon without doing this is way more unrealistic than destroying all opposition and then taking the objective...

Also, actual military strategy concerning preservation of forces has no bearing in the current game setup...

if PGI instituted real role playing for CW where your mechs were your personal mechs with an economy, salvage and money than what your talking about makes more sense...but we aren't there right now.

[100mile]

CW is doing what it was meant to do make this a team oriented game.
I see a lot of people in this thread complaining about how their individual scores are too low and they find it boring because they can't prove how wonderful they are with the big damage scores and lots of kills. If you need the EGO boost go play deathmatch and prove how great you are to yourself.

I also see a lot of people in this thread asking for different objective based game modes to play with. I agree that we will need a couple more modes to play with in the future, just give it time and if they can connect them in some way it would be great. Imagine as the attackers you get invasion mode if the planet is below 40% and you get a convoy mode from 40% to 70% etc so on and so forth. I am not a programmer so i don't know if that type of thing is even possible, but they need to get more maps released and do some tweaking to what we have now before they start introducing stuff like that anyways. We need to be patient and work with what we have.

[Killstorm999999]

Mystere, on 24 December 2014 - 08:13 AM, said:

In the practical art of war, the best thing of all is to take the enemy's country whole and intact; to shatter and destroy it is not so good. - Sun Tzu

Also, see above.

Could this not be referring to destroying infrastructure instead of capturing it? In either case you have to destroy/drive off the enemy combatants.

[Mystere]

Deltron Zero, on 24 December 2014 - 10:51 AM, said:

Could this not be referring to destroying infrastructure instead of capturing it? In either case you have to destroy/drive off the enemy combatants.

It can also be applied to people. Killing off the defenders does not exactly endear you to the local population whose loved ones you just slaughtered.

[Killstorm999999]

Mystere, on 24 December 2014 - 11:01 AM, said:

It can also be applied to people. Killing off the defenders does not exactly endear you to the local population whose loved ones you just slaughtered.

Now we are talking about strategic concerns. I feel like we are playing mechwarrior for the more tactical elements: flanking, envelopment, feints, et cetera. The current CW objective doesn't encourage tactics like that because of the objectives and map design. Ironically, Skirmish does provide a reward for such tactics, because pulling them off gives you an advantage that the enemy has a hard time countering.

[Mystere]

Deltron Zero, on 24 December 2014 - 11:06 AM, said:

Now we are talking about strategic concerns. I feel like we are playing mechwarrior for the more tactical elements: flanking, envelopment, feints, et cetera. The current CW objective doesn't encourage tactics like that because of the objectives and map design. Ironically, Skirmish does provide a reward for such tactics, because pulling them off gives you an advantage that the enemy has a hard time countering.

As I mentioned previously:

Mystere, on 24 December 2014 - 07:58 AM, said:

The solution is to add more game modes and maps to community warfare, not **** up the two maps we already have. Those two can remain as is.

So have game modes where killing off the enemy is one of the possible victory conditions (and preferably not the only one). But, not all victory conditions should be about killing off the enemy (and which is what I was responding to in your post).


And finally, because this topic is about Community Warfare and not purely Mech-on-Mech fighting, I feel the need to close with:

Strategy without tactics is the slowest route to victory. Tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat.

Edited by Mystere, 24 December 2014 - 11:24 AM.

[Void Angel]

Military campaigns are not, by preference, contests of annihilation. Even in the grinding, horrible trench warfare of World War I, armies still tried to maneuver for advantage. Your overall objective in military operations is almost never to simply kill all the enemy soldiers - it's to eliminate your enemy's capacity to resist you. This doesn't mean you're not trying to kill the enemy - sometimes you do simply need to go and eliminate an enemy force. But you're not destroying that force just to say you did it; you're doing it to stop it from threatening your own operations. Killing the enemy is almost always one of the means used to achieve that end, but it is not the end in itself.

Killing the enemy is not an objective, it's a job skill. A skirmish mode match isn't really representative of something you'd do for its own sake; you'd see that kind of engagement in the field primarily when you're trying to do something else the enemy doesn't want you to do - and Community warfare doesn't really cover that in its current, rudimentary form.

Similarly, saying that just taking the planetary zone is enough of an objective is a nonsensical statement - you've committed an equivocation fallacy. "Objective warfare," as used in this game and as you used it first, means tactical objectives; things that you're doing on the map other than simply beating on the enemy team. It's not consistent to say "I'm all about objective warfare," and then to say "winning the metagame point is enough of an 'objective' for me." It's not consistent, and you really haven't succeeded in saying anything at that point.

Tactical combat in CW is based on objectives, and Skirmish simply doesn't have those. So for the thematic reasons I mentioned in the first paragraph, PGI isn't doing deathmatch combat - and I think that's for the best, as things stand now.

All that being said, however, I think we could use a more robust metagame. Right now we have semi-randomly contested worlds that we can fight over, and if we have enough points, we get to keep that planet at the end of that capture phase. This is ok for a "lets get the actual battles balanced" beta phase, but for an end-state on CW I'd like to see more options and eb-and-flow on the planetary scale. Say the attackers start out establishing a beachhead (random Assault map with only one base,) then have to fight through the wilderness (skirmish) in order to secure a base approach (Conquest), then assault an enemy strong point (CW mode.)

So I guess all of this is to say that I agree, but first thing's first. Before we add in other modes and the like, we need to get the zerg rush fixed and the CW-only maps fairly balanced.

PS: Mystere, Deltron, Sun Tzu is referring to strategic concerns in nearly all of the Art of War - if I recall the passage quoted correctly (and understand that I haven't looked it up as I normally do,) he's talking about infrastructure there. I do recall that he does also advocate avoiding unnecessary casualties on the enemy side, because of the generational hatred losing loved ones can engender - particularly in more "Eastern" cultures. Von Clauswitz, on the other hand is from the European total war school of military operations and assumes that there is already irreconcilable hostility on the other side once war is declared and so concentrates more on the destructio of the enemy's capacity to resist by any means (including lack of materiel and surrender, if, again, I recall correctly.) =)

[Zultor]

Everyone needs to forget about real war and remember that this is a video game. Video games need to be fun which usually involves offering a challenge to overcome and providing a suitable reward.

The objectives in CW and utterly terrible map designs only further exacerbate the fundamental problem with CW. CW faces the same problems now that the other game modes faced back in the day and that is uber skilled players in coordinated teams will run rough-shot over lesser skilled players and/or lesser coordinated teams let alone PUGs. There is nothing the game does to stop or deter this. There is no challenge in this, the fun factor will wear off and solo players will stop playing. Of course there are the outlyers who dropped solo and had a great game but that isn't the norm.

Basically CW games today boil down to a coin flip. If you as a solo/small group player drop against a similar PUG team it can be fun but if one side has a large group...forget about it!

All good multiplayer games have systems in place to prevent this imbalance from occurring (or at least reduce it). MWO (pre-CW) added separate queues and ELO and it helped a little. Games like WoT prevent the size of groups so you can't have an entire side coordinated while the other side is PUGs or they force full groups only. As long as stuff like this is allowed to happen the CW game mode is relegated to being suitable for 12 man only groups. That is very unfortunate and should have been the case. In the long run it will hurt the game overall.

The reward system is pointless as it stands now. What are we fighting for...faction points which are only good for credits? Who cares who controls a planet? From the beginning PGI made a mistake allowing every player irrespective of their faction to field any mech. Planets should provide resources to factions like unique mech types, parts, weapons, etc. Members of those factions should be allowed to requisition (one game only rental not purchase) that equipment using their gained faction points. For example, Dragon mechs should only be allowed to be fielded by Kurita faction mechwarriors when Kurita controls the planets designated to control their factories (same with clan mechs where the Dire Wolf should only be made by Jaguars and maybe Wolf clans). Once Kurita looses one of those planets the price goes up until eventually they are unpurchaseable.

[Mystere]

Void Angel, on 24 December 2014 - 12:13 PM, said:

PS: Mystere, Deltron, Sun Tzu is referring to strategic concerns in nearly all of the Art of War - if I recall the passage quoted correctly (and understand that I haven't looked it up as I normally do,) he's talking about infrastructure there. I do recall that he does also advocate avoiding unnecessary casualties on the enemy side, because of the generational hatred losing loved ones can engender - particularly in more "Eastern" cultures. Von Clauswitz, on the other hand is from the European total war school of military operations and assumes that there is already irreconcilable hostility on the other side once war is declared and so concentrates more on the destructio of the enemy's capacity to resist by any means (including lack of materiel and surrender, if, again, I recall correctly.) =)

You do recall things correctly. I am just giving an extended interpretation of Sun Tzu's words.

At the same time, I am showing hairy barbarians (i.e. Europeans ) and their spawn (Mariks and Davions) a different perspective.