Lily from animove, on 25 February 2015 - 06:19 AM, said:
the issue is, the IS gets a tonnage advantage, yet are the is mechs worse or the IS?
when the average IS mech player has an elo of 400 while the average clanner has 450, it is to be expected that more clanners win. (there are reasons why IS has lesser skilled pilots, because more newbies) if you now buff the IS for the average player to be competitive against each other you have aproblematic result:
at the place where the top pilots have the same elo at the top, lets say : 1000 vs 1000 or even is IS is like 990 and Clanners like 1000. the improvement for the standard sally in its mech on the mechbase (by tonnage advantage) will horribly imbalance the top nothc game balance. And since CW is said to be the high competitive mode. I am not so sure if this is a good thing at all.
What really screws the attemp to balance is butthurt driven balance feedback. If we want to improve the game for everyone, then everyone has to give objective feedback instead of trying to protect his very own interests and his very own toy of favour.
Favored toys like Clan Battlemechs? Assuming that you have an official source for hidden Elo numbers (perhaps the town hall I couldn't attend?) you're still insisting on a self-interested interpretation of the data, making assumptions that PGI is short-sighted, and ignoring contrary possibilities. In logical jargon, your conclusion doesn't follow from the data you cited. Permit me to use your own question: if Clanner average Elo is 12.5% higher than Inner Sphere, is it the players, or the 'Mechs? Well, wouldn't better players gravitate toward more powerful machines and builds? This would account for an imbalance in average Elo. Why, yes, yes they would; they always have.
Did they? I dunno; and neither do you. We don't have the data sets necessary for that level of analysis. PGI does, however; so in order to believe that it's the players driving Clan imbalance, you have to assume both that PGI doesn't know how to account for new players in their analysis, and that PGI is willing to risk damaging their livelihood for a short-term solution - to a balance problem that they're guessing is only worth about 8% of a drop deck. Similarly, you have to assume that PGI isn't following the established industry processes for finding problems with balance and addressing them in order to believe that "butthurt" forum posts are driving any significant portion of change.
I would also point out what should be obvious - that while range is indeed "situational," the situations in question are a deliberate consideration in map design. Similarly, the Inner Sphere's supposed efficiency advantage evaporates when you consider that the Clans are carting around more firepower. Proportional heat efficiency for most builds is about the same; the better heat sinks will generally offset the Clan's slightly hotter weapons, and if a Clanner forgoes possible firepower, he can achieve superior efficiency with some builds. And, at long range, they
are only a bit hotter; the C-ER Large Laser, for example has a DPS/HPS (D/HPS) of 1.10, while the IS version clocks in at 1.12 - a 1.8% advantage. By comparison, IS Large Pulses have a 20% D/HPS advantage, while the C-ERPPC is vastly superior on paper, yet spreads its entire advantage to an adjacent hit location. Of course, someone could say that the Large Pulse is more than compensated for relative inefficiency by its massively superior range (a 64% advantage over the IS value); but then what about quirks? Or XL engines that don't side-core, or having pinpoint ACs, or better Endo-steel and Ferro-fibrous, or superior Light 'mechs, or, or, or...!
Or all of the other things that make 'Mech balance simply too complex to model by comparing this or that system, or combination of systems;or pretty much any of the arguments I've been seeing in this thread thus far. We lack the data sets to even guess properly at balance - to think otherwise is the pretense of knowledge.