106 replies to this topic

[MauttyKoray]

Or maybe people can take into account the bigger picture and see that they're still trying to balance the IS mechs as a whole. Any changes to clan mechs are to come after, as stated MANY times and so far quirks for clans have been few and far between on specific mechs requiring a little extra help...which hasn't really helped at all considering the quirks are still single digit percentages while IS mechs are running multiple 20-30% or more quirks for their weapons.

It all comes down to the core mechanics being imbalanced and the multiple bandage jobs they've attempted which is just slowly letting the infection spread from the wound. The heat cap is too high, we have too much ammo and armor, and the only viable mechs are high alpha builds that shoot 4-8 weapons at a time, leaving the real mech builds to rot while this PPFLD Alpha META cancer consumes our beloved mechwarrior series.

[Hillslam]

Actually the hidden core problem is a game mechanic comprised solely of PvP in arena-sized maps (even the biggest) with no objectives or PvE play or extended length mission play that would reward the builds you allude to.

No instanced servers.
No "questing" or raids.
No level progression (mastering a chassis is a miniscule primer to this potential).

The game is 15minute maximum bite sized arena deathmatch with every single participant a paying customer. And that's it.


MWO needs a massive influx of content. AI is *not* that hard to build. Mission scripting is *not* that hard to do. At this point its gotta be easier to do than the balance merry-go-round the PGI dev staff has found themselves unable to get off of.
(I've been building software large and small for over 25 years)

[Quxudica]

Lord0fHats, on 05 April 2015 - 06:07 AM, said:

It would be pretty sweet if they gave us the option to make our "private game rooms" public so we could more easily engage in silly fights or wacky battles. 12 v 12 all flammers!

That would indeed be hilarious.

Of course the games I'm referring to didn't have silly economies to exploit or progression treadmills to fuss over, at least none involving gear of any kind.. just a rank system based on performance. No one thought about how to increase player retention through grind because there was no grind. You fired up the multiplayer and you had everything available right way. You could play with whatever struck your fancy. I really miss that. I don't need a grindy progression system to keep me playing a game. I just need the game to be fun.

Meh. Sometimes I look at the state of modern gaming and I depress myself.

[Hillslam]

Quxudica, on 05 April 2015 - 06:26 AM, said:

That would indeed be hilarious.

Of course the games I'm referring to didn't have silly economies to exploit or progression treadmills to fuss over, at least none involving gear of any kind.. just a rank system based on performance. No one thought about how to increase player retention through grind because there was no grind. You fired up the multiplayer and you had everything available right way. You could play with whatever struck your fancy. I really miss that. I don't need a grindy progression system to keep me playing a game. I just need the game to be fun.

Meh. Sometimes I look at the state of modern gaming and I depress myself.

I hear you. Unfortunately this is a design pillar of freemium software design.

Without the grind to drive in-game incremental sales you have to adopt a large upfront buy-in sales model. Businesses long ago figured out the spend patterns were way higher with the freemium model.

It is sad. Like you I miss the old days of fully fleshed out game content right out of the box too.

[Xaiier]

YueFei, on 05 April 2015 - 04:57 AM, said:

-snip snip snip ignorant insults-

You can't comprehend that a player can use A, B, C, D, and E in a game, having fun with all of them.... and after much experimenting, he can very well declare that 'D' is too powerful relative to A, B, C, and E? And then go and keep playing 'D' while waiting for the game's developers to fix the imbalance? Cuz you realize it's not the players' responsibility to balance the game, it's the developers' developers' developers' developers' developers' developers'.

Thats EXACTLY what I'm suggesting, that once a player realizes which build is the most powerful, he isn't obligated to then abuse that imbalance as much as he can. Instead, he could think about the game as the whole and choose to promote interesting gameplay over selfish abuse of broken game mechanics to make himself look pro. Maybe you haven't been around here for long, but PGI isn't the speediest at doing balance changes and its often months before glaring issues get properly addressed.

Sorry for expecting the community to be more mature and manage itself instead of childishly running to whatever is OP flavor of the month.

[Saint Scarlett Johan]

Xaiier, on 05 April 2015 - 04:44 AM, said:

Your dismissive attitude is unappreciated, and it only goes to show how little you really understand.

Winning in this game is a joke, it means nothing, even in CW. If winning really was the end all, people would base cap every time and light rush in CW. They don't though, because they know that it means nothing and it's really boring, and requires almost no skill. Nobody enjoys a 12-0 stomp, those are boring. What is "winning" then? C-bills. In every one of those easy win scenarios, nobody gets any C-Bills and everyone loses. There's no competition and nobody has fun. In this sense, there IS a trophy for participation. The game is even designed in such a way to maximize rewards for fun, even competition where everyone participates. As I said before, using the meta hurts the gameplay because it turns it into a clickfest with no strategy.

But feel free to continue playing your meta so you can be satisfied in your superiority, just know that it's hurting the game as a whole.

Your inability to read is hilarious. You clearly want to just diatribe against meta and wave some sort of superiority against players that do own some meta.

Keep raging against the machine and failing to see that I'm not fond of a singular meta either. Except that would require your reading comprehension being higher than a five year old.

[Averen]

Xaiier, on 05 April 2015 - 07:08 AM, said:

Sorry for expecting the community to be more mature and manage itself instead of childishly running to whatever is OP flavor of the month.

You're missing the central issue. Choosing an efficient mech and equipping him to be as fun and powerful as possible is the aim of the game. Literally everything in MWO - as in most games - push you into that direction. Can't blame anyone for following the games rules. That's competetive element is what makes balance important in the first place.

Also, calling someones choice how to go about a videogame 'childish' is just silly.

Edited by Averen, 05 April 2015 - 07:13 AM.

[CrushLibs]

luxebo, on 04 April 2015 - 08:03 PM, said:

Well that's bull when you have 12 mans of Clanners defending with 8-10 Dire Whales out there sitting practically ON Omega. Seen that a few times.

True that on tonnage though, though the Arctic Cheetah will make all kinds of new viability into Dires in CW. I see plenty of Kgcs on CW regardless, along with plenty of Dires, plenty of Banshees, rarely if ever a DDC/S cause of how long ranged CW is based off of.

Just stop all the BS and lies

NO CLAN does that DW are almost non existent in CW , they get focused fired , too slow , too heavy for 240t drops. Maybe you saw war hawks but not 8-10 DW sitting on anything.

[Elizander]

Ghost heat on the ISLL doesn't really matter to top players as much. Again, the difference between 2LL and 3LL GH is pressing 1,2,3 instead of pressing 1,2. Well, you can say that the player now has to press 50% more buttons to make it work.

From what I understand, Laser Ghost heat counter starts when you fire the laser so 0.5 seconds into the first 2 beams you can fire the next 2 and so on.

[CMDR Sunset Shimmer]

EnochsBook, on 04 April 2015 - 02:46 PM, said:

The problem with this game is that there is no point in having 'Mechs that can fill a bunch of different roles.
All that matters in MWO is a 'Mechs ability to deal massive amounts of damage in as little time as possible, preferably with lasers. Can a particular 'Mech deal more than 45 points of damage in a single Alpha? Yes? Then it is meta.
It can't? Then it's next to useless.
I'm afraid the game's balance won't improve much as long as things are this way.

Clearly you don't play CW, where those types of mechs can actively shine.

You want to make that kind of thing matter. Limit the PuG que's to up to 4 man teams... and force any team of 5+ into CW. You fix all the pug que complaints of 12 man teams being epic when groups of 2-4 want to just play and not worry about getting stomped. And you fix CW by adding to the player base actively playing it, which cuts down on wait times for everyone involved. Win, Win.

AssaultPig, on 04 April 2015 - 02:59 PM, said:

I too wish that people would stop enjoying themselves incorrectly

Lord Scarlett Johan, on 04 April 2015 - 03:13 PM, said:

That's kinda sorta the point of a video game. Sorry for having fun the wrong way apparently.

If you're going to play a videogame based on Battletech, then play a videogame based on battletech. Don't go chasing the ultimate 1 shot killing machine, thus breaking the entire intention of the game.

Again, this comes to the "just because you can, doesn't mean you should" mentality.

I entirely understand wanting to play the game the way you want to because fun, but when the way you want to play, becomes counter to the intent of the game as a whole, then you're not just having fun, you're ruining the experience for people who are here for a deeper reason.

You want 1 shot kills? There are 5000 different games you could be playing that cater to that kind of gameplay and playstyle. You want vehicle combat, there's several games that cater to that as well.

But if you're here for Battlemechs, then you should be playing the mechs closer to the intention... It's a shame at this point PGI can't impliment sized hardpoints... I was intially against the idea of them, but at this point, I think it's the only way we'd get away from the entirety of the gunbag mentality in this game.

[Saint Scarlett Johan]

Flash Frame, on 05 April 2015 - 01:13 PM, said:

Clearly you don't play CW, where those types of mechs can actively shine.

You want to make that kind of thing matter. Limit the PuG que's to up to 4 man teams... and force any team of 5+ into CW. You fix all the pug que complaints of 12 man teams being epic when groups of 2-4 want to just play and not worry about getting stomped. And you fix CW by adding to the player base actively playing it, which cuts down on wait times for everyone involved. Win, Win.





If you're going to play a videogame based on Battletech, then play a videogame based on battletech. Don't go chasing the ultimate 1 shot killing machine, thus breaking the entire intention of the game.

Again, this comes to the "just because you can, doesn't mean you should" mentality.

I entirely understand wanting to play the game the way you want to because fun, but when the way you want to play, becomes counter to the intent of the game as a whole, then you're not just having fun, you're ruining the experience for people who are here for a deeper reason.

You want 1 shot kills? There are 5000 different games you could be playing that cater to that kind of gameplay and playstyle. You want vehicle combat, there's several games that cater to that as well.

But if you're here for Battlemechs, then you should be playing the mechs closer to the intention... It's a shame at this point PGI can't impliment sized hardpoints... I was intially against the idea of them, but at this point, I think it's the only way we'd get away from the entirety of the gunbag mentality in this game.

And you just wrote a wall of text saying, "you're having fun wrong."

[Fate 6]

washout, on 04 April 2015 - 01:47 PM, said:

Imo all that shows is the same thing the clans are doing, how often do you see anything but Stormcrow/Timber/Hellbringer? Doesn't the fact that these get picked so much more often also show how OP they are? In fact because of robot diversity on the IS side you see Stalker/Thunderbolt way less often than you see the top clan mechs.

In fact many people in my unit still don't take stalkers because they have such small engines and big heat problems.

If they nerf the stalker you are just going to see a wave of even more Thunderbolts, there is nothing that can currently replace it for IS, Banshee/Crab weigh too much and the Dragon/Quickdraw are too fragile.

Comparing the Timber to the Stalker as well, they come out pretty evenly in terms of heat and damage, but the Timber has better heat dissipation, more speed, more agility. Sure the Stalker has a bit more armor and arguably the best hitboxes in the game, but since it is 85 tons taking even 2 of them forces you to take much smaller mechs in the rest of your drop deck. Taking 1 basically puts you at a comparable drop deck to the 1Timber 3Stormcrow deck. I see no problem, and in fact in my 20 CW games this weekend I felt the IS vs Clan drops were basically even.


Bring the rest of the IS mechs in line with the 4N/6K/2x. Those 3 mechs are currently the best equipped to handle Clanners and come out pretty much perfectly even with them.

[Sorbic]

The Stalker doesn't need some nerf. Yes Stalkers are brought into battle a lot but most of the other assaults are pretty lacking and get chewed up by Clan meta. Maybe a Stalker nerf is some chuckle headed way to get more Atlases, Awesomes, Victors or Highlanders on the field in CW...

On the note, the other IS assaults need some love and I would love to see the DW get a 4% speed buff.

[Evan20k]

washout, on 04 April 2015 - 01:38 PM, said:

Did you read my post? This is a speculative topic...

...

I'll call it opening up discussion about something...

Guys, one day someone jokingly suggested in PGI's break room that they add llama steeds to the game. If they do this I think the game would be ruined forever and would stop playing forever so I'm going to make a thread on the forums upset about a change I have no evidence is being seriously entertained beyond a few casual twitter tweets.

[QuantumButler]

Special snowflake clanners are mad that IS mechs dare to occasionally kill them, so they want all IS stuff nerfed into the ground until they can stomp happily without fear of sometimes dying.

[luxebo]

CrushLibs, on 05 April 2015 - 07:31 AM, said:

Just stop all the BS and lies
NO CLAN does that DW are almost non existent in CW , they get focused fired , too slow , too heavy for 240t drops. Maybe you saw war hawks but not 8-10 DW sitting on anything.

I've seen it happen multiple times. Us ISers do it plenty too, stacking Kgcs/Banshees all the time. If you don't that isn't my problem but I've seen it plenty and likely plenty more when the Arctic Cheeter comes in.

[Astrocanis]

Xaiier, on 04 April 2015 - 03:38 PM, said:

Uhh...wait.

You can't claim you play for fun, and then simultaneously complain that the only viable builds are the ones which are numerically the best and then only use those. You can't be the guy who calls for nerfs/buffs while also being the guy abusing those imbalances to perform better. Can you only have fun if you are winning every time, using the best of the best? What kind of pathetic existence is that...

Not my argument, but "why not?"

And yes, he can be playing those builds "for fun" because fun sometimes means "a win". He may not like the way he gets "a win", but he still gets them while he can. There are not many who enjoy losing every game, dying every time without a kill all for the joy of diversity.

[CMDR Sunset Shimmer]

Lord Scarlett Johan, on 05 April 2015 - 03:00 PM, said:

And you just wrote a wall of text saying, "you're having fun wrong."

You could play soccer by dribbling the ball with your hands, but you'd be playing the game wrong. Regardless of if you were having fun or not.

Edited by Flash Frame, 05 April 2015 - 07:13 PM.

[MoonUnitBeta]

washout, on 04 April 2015 - 01:38 PM, said:

Did you read my post? This is a speculative topic, I never said they are, but he is talking about it, and frankly his contemplating it on twitter makes people nervous.

I never understood why people title their threads with absolutes, and get angry at people who comment about their title.

Title: "THE SUN IS FLAT"
Thread Post: Well, actually I don't really know that, BUT IF IT WAS, do you know how mind blowing that would be?
Comments: The sun isn't flat.
OP: DID YOU EVEN READ MY POST?! GAWD. L2READ

Edited by MoonUnitBeta, 05 April 2015 - 07:20 PM.

[Bobzilla]

Flash Frame, on 05 April 2015 - 07:13 PM, said:

You could play soccer by dribbling the ball with your hands, but you'd be playing the game wrong. Regardless of if you were having fun or not.

You couldn't play the game like that, as the game would be stopped. Then the ball given to the other team. Adventually you'd be kicked off the field.

Dribbling the ball with your hands would be more like TKing. Sure you can do it, and have fun doing it, but for a limited time till you get the boot.