104 replies to this topic

[invernomuto]

Reading a discussion here on the forum I discovered that MWO had (years ago) a "Repair and Rearm" system. Just for curiosity's sake, how did it worked and what were the reasons why it was abandoned? It did not work?
Was a R&R system also in TT game (somewhere I have an old copy of the FASA's Battletech rules but I do not remember it)?
Thanks,
D.

[Curccu]

Because it was useless. Would you like to earn 30-40% less? Or have everyone play super cautiously so their mech won't get damaged/destroyed or chase that last light mech last 10 minutes of the game because he doesn't want to pay repairbill
oh yes energy weapons only because no ammo (not that it would be that different from current meta but...)

[Lugh]

Essentially damage to the Mech had to be repaired (which had a cost).

Also ammunition used had to be bought (re-arm) and broken weapons repaired(re-arm).

The complaint was (and it wasn't really legitimate) from Froobs (free players) who felt they could never progress to buying new mechs. This was patently false and anyone with even a modest amount of skill could earn enough to buy a couple few mechs a week which was faster than other similar games (like Warthunder and World of Tanks).

The argument boiled down to what about the poor froobs...

They catered to that outcry, those froobs are LOOOONG gone, and the income you would have earned being a good pilot is gone along with them (because the income in the game got cut in half when they took out repair and rearm). ..

Oh and the end result? You didn't earn new mechs any faster. Clueless FROOBS continue to not do well, not earn fast coin and leave the game before having even a single Chassis mastered.

Curccu, on 31 March 2016 - 04:46 AM, said:

Because it was useless. Would you like to earn 30-40% less? Or have everyone play super cautiously so their mech won't get damaged/destroyed or chase that last light mech last 10 minutes of the game because he doesn't want to pay repairbill
oh yes energy weapons only because no ammo (not that it would be that different from current meta but...)

False statement. The economy WITH repair and rearm was at ~ 2x the earnings it is today.

If you had a clue you could make WAY more money playing under that system than the one today.

[DerMaulwurf]

Badly.

It encouraged players to effectively drop in underweight mechs, since 75% of ammo was free and people just used more tonnage for ammo to save on the rearm bill.
It needlessly punished the use of FerroFibrous armor and XL engines (especially the former).

All in all it was just another thing to be gamed, while punishing the use of certain pieces of equipment for no good reason.

Edited by DerMaulwurf, 31 March 2016 - 05:02 AM.

[Pockets]

Ammunition worked similarly to consumables now.
Repairs were calculated based on the damage received and I seem to remember them being handled automatically, causing reductions of about 50k c-bills on your game income (in addition to ammunition-based loadouts getting through a similar amount of ammo).

The problem was that it made everyone too cautious to do anything when they launched XL engines, the increased cost of repairs meant that it wasn't too uncommon to have repair&rearm costs that nudged into 6-figures. In terms of overall progression, if you played 'efficiently' (lasers and no XL) it was okay - use anything ammo based or even slightly expensive and it became a waste of time. When they removed it the game improved dramatically (for a little while, until they nerfed the income to 'balance' it).

Edited by Pockets, 31 March 2016 - 05:07 AM.

[Parmeggido]

I'll poke around a bit and see if I can find a bit more of the old stuff around. In some ways, it's worth it to check the archive just to see how much things have change. Well, and how much they've stayed the same.

So, here's one thread that may be interesting.

http://mwomercs.com/...-worth-of-ammo/

All right, here's another one that I think went over a lot of the stuff going on at the time.

http://mwomercs.com/...ser-experience/

If you're interested, open beta was around October 2012, if I remember correctly, and you can try skimming through the archive around, say, page 2025 or so.

Ok, I'm too tired to do any more digging. So many jenner op threads...

Edited by Parmeggido, 31 March 2016 - 05:27 AM.

[Saltychipmunk]

oh god that system was bad . if i recall correctly it was also cheaper to die in the last minute of the match than it was to survive with damage.

what a strange system

[LordNothing]

i like having rearm and repair bases that are actually in game, like MWLL, mechwarrior 4, and mech commander. it gives you a capable target of opportunity that helps you win the game (and a great place to farm kills).

its certainly better than a gui that makes you pony up..

Edited by LordNothing, 01 April 2016 - 04:23 AM.

[Mechteric]

It was pretty terrible, and only belongs in this game if they decide to have some kind of hardcore mode.

[Ghogiel]

Basically weapons with ammo, SRM, LRM, ACs, guass cost loads to rearm making them inferior to PPC and lasers.

XL engines were also horrendously expensive to repair if you were killed in a match.

To counteract that the games gave more rewards and auto repaired and rearmed to 70%

Thing is people would farm cbills FAST if they didn't bother repairing or rearming.

[Thorn Hallis]

It served no purpose. It's simple as that.

[NextGame]

promoted terrible gameplay by people trying to protect their mechs as though it were their child rather than just a game.

[sycocys]

It's been covered pretty decently I think - but I used to run XL and cannons/srms even back then. To me it added a nice layer of strategy of cost of potential repair vs potential gain for running faster ppfld builds. Versus now where its just run whatever expensive components you want and never think twice about it.

It also added a layer of balancing because you didn't want to run 3k LRMs and risk losing all that ammo. ECM actually had at least some sort of balancing mechanic against it since it had a large repair cost. LL, LPL, MPL could all have had higher costs to repair as well to help that out.

End of the day it is what it is, people weren't smart enough to be able to do math so IGP immediately decided to go lowest common denominator.

[FupDup]

It didn't.

[SuomiWarder]

I liked it. Felt more BattleTechie to me. (Which only had refit rules if you ran a campaign with persistent mech ownership). The idea was that it would limit assault mechs and XL engine use because you made less money per match the more expensive your ride was (if you lost or get destroyed in a win).

But it did seem to have the effect that many people would not commit to a fight, trying to save their mechs. and the last light alive usually tried to hide for the rest of the match to save repair costs. Wounded mechs would try to stay out of a fight they felt their side was winning.

Ammo costs were not that bad really. In my memory anyway. We still had LRM spamming complaints the same as the ones today. Just fewer mechs that could do it.

So I can see the downsides. Still somewhat wished that the more expensive your ride, the less C-bills you earned. But I suppose that would be "nerfing" various mechs and make the Clan pilots scream bloody murder yet again.

[Livewyr]

3 Reasons it went:

1: Using anything with ammo meant you made a lot less money. (Especially LRMs...)
2: It was possible to lose money from a match. (No participation trophies)
3: Repairing an Atlas was more expensive than repairing a Jenner (considerably) even though PGI made an effort to balance the weight classes to be equally combat effective. (Making bringing an Atlas a bit of a waste as it offered no advantage, but more cost.)

I would love a return of R&R with intelligent implementation.

No ReArm cost (or, alternatively, have a ReArm cost, and make Lasers much more expensive to repair)
Stock mech has no repair fee.
Each change from stock mech incurs a repair fee. (Endo, Ferro, DHS, etc..)

Bingo. You have an economy, if you are flat broke, you can run a stock mech and are guaranteed to make money. Bringing Endo means more than just whether you can fit all your big ballistics in..
Running DHS isn't an automatic...

Game might change.

Edited by Livewyr, 31 March 2016 - 06:09 AM.

[MeiSooHaityu]

It was not a good system for a multiplayer game like this. If the game was single player, sure, but not a game like this.

Many of the reasons stated above pretty much hit the nail on the head. If you wanted to build an effective mech (endo, DHS, XL engine, more powerful weapons, etc...) and you died while doing ok or even good, you might break even, if you did poorly and died, you lost money.

The game can be a grind now, but imagine how much worse that is if approx half of your matches didn't generate income and some small amount lost you money.

Yeah, not a good system for a F2P title like this.

[Malleus011]

There are plenty of games which manage to implement smart salvage and R&R systems. MWO just wasn't one of them.

That isn't to say that they don't need one, or that the game wouldn't be vastly improved by one. They just need to not implement a bad system.

A well balanced R&R system could incorporate things like your CW contract into your costs. A House Loyalist wouldn't worry about ammo costs and most of their repairs would be covered, but they would likely earn slower. Mercenaries could take more risks. Clanners don't really have an economy like the IS, but they could probably manage some kind of honor or prestige system (making them a unique system would really add character to fighting for the Clan side, and help make the factions distinct).

Any R&R system could be worked out to incentivize things like driving lights and mediums to make money (lower risk for moderate rewards) while saving up to deploy your expensive assault for the big push to conquer or defend a world.

Gee, wouldn't it be nice to have an economy that adds depth to our repetitive arena deathmatch?

[MechWarrior5152251]

Wouldn't Foobs just use Trial Mechs?

[Davers]

I should also mention that when there was R&R groups were still dropping against solo players so there is very different and biased points of view. As a player that mostly dropped in groups (and as a Founder I had free premium time- including extra months of PT since they couldn't get around to coding the "turn PT on" switch) and I rarely lost- we usually completely stomped the pugs we faced, so no one worried about R&R much. OTOH, pug players were constantly being rolled by full teams and had to pay out the nose if they took expensive builds.

There was a lot of AFK and suicide farming. There was a lot of players who didn't pay R&R and came into game with half dead mechs. There were people who would grief other players by stripping their mech of every component before killing them.

R&R had no clear idea what it was trying to accomplish. It hurt lighter mechs that rely on XL engines more that heavier mechs that didn't. Bad options, like FF, became even worse. LBX was the most expensive weapon and ammo while still being the worst non-machine gun ballistic. It really made no sense. Now add in Clan mechs that don't have the option of taking STD engines or not using FF, and you can see this just doesn't work.

Ditching R&R was the smartest move PGI has made.