44 replies to this topic

[The Massive]

Edited by Maccasimus, 15 May 2015 - 02:32 PM.

[Gamuray]

Your video is broken and is the only part of your post. Soo... Yeah. Your post is essentially broken.

[FupDup]

Deathball works for several reasons:

1. Harder for enemy to concentrate fire on a single mech, thereby increasing your team's durability.

2. Allows you to have more of your team's mechs firing at the enemy's mechs than vice-versa. For example, if you have 12 of your mechs but the enemy only has 8 mechs in the area, it means you win.

3. The Pug Overmind is automagically attracted to large moving groups. This means that more of your team will be involved in fighting at any given time, and fewer players will be on the fringes doing nothing.

[Rebas Kradd]

Role warfare and balance will remain FUBAR until deathballing is no longer the prevalent strategy. There's no real room for light-hunters, skirmishers, harassers, or tanking assaults as long as there are twelve mechs shooting at you. All those roles get blurred in favor of shooting at the massive blob in front of you. Which means a number of different chassis, weapons, and loadouts are pointless.

[Andi Nagasia]

currently working on a plan and idea that will make death balling ineffective,

[El Bandito]

12 v12 had only further pushed the deathball meta. It is a sign of failure when most Conquest matches are decided by deathballs, rather than split capping.

Edited by El Bandito, 15 May 2015 - 04:34 PM.

[Mister Blastman]

Strikes are stupid.

[N0ni]

Rule #1: Don't stop.

Rule #2: Never skip leg day.

Rule #3: Always bring at least 5 premium strikes.

Now you're ready to win, you're welcome.

[Mcgral18]

I still don't like the fact that AC35s from the sky can 1 shot you, making you pray to RNG Jesus.


20 damage, 20 shells, 20 seconds

A much nicer solution

[LordKnightFandragon]

Deathball is a result of no objective but shoot the enemy......and as a result of the tunnel style map designs tht basically force 2 sides into each other.

[Telmasa]

Oh thank heavens; no need for a wall of text here. I'll keep it very simple:

Because we have "magic card" consumables instead of something that fits in the otherwise "always a draw-back/tradeoff" system of Battletech....
Deathballs are enhanced by strikes, far more than they are hindered by them.

If they were replaced with the Long Tom & Arrow IV, which have lots of tangible trade-offs, yet also come with the ability to be used more than once & rely upon far more acknowledgable levels of player skill and effort, then the desired effect of discouraging the 'deathball' would be reached.

[Anjian]

If Death Ball is the only viable strategy, and strikes the only viable counterstrategy, then the game is fundamentally broken.

[Yokaiko]

Anjian, on 17 May 2015 - 12:07 AM, said:

If Death Ball is the only viable strategy, and strikes the only viable counterstrategy, then the game is fundamentally broken.

So long as you can bring the slowest mech in the game and make it to the fight every time, there is no other strategy that really works.

There is no point in spreading, you just get focused, and when you play at higher levels its just a matter of pressing, there is some poking around trying to get an advantage, but it largely comes down to who can focus faster.

[Alistair Winter]

To be honest... I actually think OP makes a lot of sense.

Listen, I hate the way consumables work in the game. You drop two strikes in this game and you're often losing more money than you earn. 10 games, you're down 800,000 C-bills. 100 games, you're down 8 million C-bills. C-bills aren't used as a balancing tool anywhere else in the game, after they removed R&R, so C-bills shouldn't be a balancing tool for consumables either.

I also think it's ridiculous that strikes have infinite range, instant hit, 100% accuracy, while taking up zero weight and zero space and giving no warning beyond red smoke. That's not a good way to balance anything.

The solution was offered as soon as strikes were introduced, back in 2013. But by now, it's gone down the "memory hole". The solution is to create designated strike scouts, directing airstrikes and artillery strikes.

• Strikes can only be used if you have the correct in-game equipment. Let's say BAP+TAG and/or command console, just as an example.
  
• Strikes will only hit their target with 100% accuracy if you mark a location with TAG continuously during the ~10 second counter.
  
• With the command console, you can mark a location on the minimap, but it won't be as accurate as TAG+BAP.
  
• Just like guided missiles (e.g. LRMs), incoming strikes will set off a visual and auditive warning. Along the lines of "WARNING: Incoming airstrike."
  
• Mechs with the proper equipment can launch strikes repeatedly. Say every 2 minutes, for example.
  
• Increase the minimum time between strikes from different teammates to, say, 30 or 60 seconds, to avoid spamming. You will get a point of diminishing returns. For example, there will be no point in having more than 3 or 4 guys on your team with strikes. As opposed to what we have now, where 12-man teams bring 12 strikes per wave in CW.

All academic, of course. PGI will keep the old consumable system and act like IGP made them do it for the profit. Or just pretend it's a non-issue.

[ArchMage Sparrowhawk]

in real life practical terms, a deathball would be a big irresistable target for artillery until everything was dead and twitching. In this game with it's limited by design fighting mechanic, you can't just blow a deathblob up, you have to pick it apart, piece by piece, with your own team, because of the whole time to kill, single targeting, firing limitation.

In table top, the only way you would have a big deathblob of all these expensive premium limited availability mechs was if some madman helped make it all possible. Sure you could have a deathblob of lights, but not 4 assaults, heavies, and mediums. Limited battle points would block it.

And so here you have MechWarrior Online, with so many super-mechs and Hero-super-mechs, and premium rare mechs all on the battlefield at the same time, shooting at once with better than perfect aim as far as the Battletech world is concerned. It's like one of those mutant 10 year old kids who have been weight training since age 6 and now have huge gigantic arms. In a few years he's going to be terrorizing the countryside because he doesn't know what to do with himself. How does that apply to PGI? Somehow, I'm sure.

So now we have an unrealistic, unbalanced fight where huge angry 12 mech deathblobs are artificially allowed to evolve and exist as part of the meta. And we the players can't do anything about them. Promise not to do it? Well, good luck, I've been that guy. Dead before my time. You and your lance can't beat an enemy deathblob. You can only join your team's blob or trail close enough behind to be kind of useful with support fire. There is nothing in the game to discourage it or prevent it, and in fact almost sort of pushes you in the direction of the blob. Their hope is that suddenly being able to hear each other will help, but unfortunately talk does not equal tactical awareness, strategic, or combat ability.

So what is there to be done about deatballing? It's game-breaking meta, and so far PGI hasn't indicated that they see it as an issue. Certainly not preventing the purchase of new mechs anyway.

[Tarogato]

"deathball is the only viable strategy"

... except ... it's not. There are these things called firing lines. They work wonders.

Firing line > deathball example 1

Firing line > deathball example 2

I know... these are competitive matches, which means organised teams and premeditated strategies, but the OP made a generic, sweeping statement, and as such, it's wrong. And these tactics can be applied to CW, group queue, and even solo queue with enough pug-herding patience.

---

'k, that said, I agree. Deathballing is a bit too attractive because it's so easy (natural) to organise and strikes are hardly enough of a discouragement from employing that tactic. I wish I could say "buff strikes to encourage more diverse tactics"... but frankly I don't think there's an acceptable solution. Strikes are fine the way they are, I don't get the feeling they need adjusted one way or the other. Yet there are still "some players" that insist that strikes are p2w free damage no skill cheats. I feel like we all know who I'm talking about, and they'll probably show up in this thread eventually.

Edited by Tarogato, 17 May 2015 - 01:48 AM.

[Insects]

Win and the consumables pay for themselves.
Make the deathball fall apart as they run screaming like little girls from the scarey smoke and you make a big impact on the chance to win.

[Theodore42]

Deathball is hardly the only viable strategy. If there are 2 groups, and they attack the deathball at the same time, that is called a flank, and it is extremely effective. The only thing a deathball can do to counter a flank is to attack one of the two groups and get out of the field of fire of the other group.

Furthermore, if the deathball can't kill one group fast, then the other group comes up and flanks the deathball again, continuing to break it down. And if the deathball can't get out of the field of fire of one group while it's attacking the other group, it gets torn up.

Deathballs are ineffective behind cover as well, because there is only room for so many mechs to peek out of cover. If the enemy team has a firing line that can focus on the deathball's location, even if the deathball is in cover, then the team in the firing line formation will win.

What ever team has the most weapons shooting at the enemy's main force wins. It is all spatial (positioning) and deathballing has nothing to do with it.

Edited by Theodore42, 17 May 2015 - 02:00 AM.

[Satan n stuff]

Mcgral18, on 15 May 2015 - 04:52 PM, said:

I still don't like the fact that AC35s from the sky can 1 shot you, making you pray to RNG Jesus.


20 damage, 20 shells, 20 seconds

A much nicer solution

I wouldn't mind the change, but in all my matches that has happened to me exactly once, so it's not exactly a big deal. I'd prefer lower damage and more shells just because it'll be focused less and not as prone to missing randomly. I'd rather see strikes evenly stripping armor on everything in the target area to make them more predicable in general.

As for the OP, some teams do in fact use tactics other than forming a deathball and they tend to do rather well with those tactics.

[MoonUnitBeta]

I'm hoping that PGI later implements multiple objectives in a match to put role warfare into action...
I'd really like to see purpose in not death balling.
I'd like to see teams actually feeling necessary to break off and traveling as lances to complete objectives. And I'd also like to see that if the other team DOESN'T do this, they will LOSE.
Conquest has this a tiny bit, but it's funny because it's the least popular game mode. It's like people want the game, or even -like- the game, as a simple shooter.

But anyways. It's the game play, and the game modes that contribute to death ball as being the defacto way to play the game.
It's not something that is simply fixed by changing where mechs drop, or in what combination they drop as, or how far everyone is from each other. There's no reason to move away from each other, so there's no reason not to death ball.

Ideally, I'd like to see PGI turn CW into a Planetside/MW:LL combination... bring in tanks and planes, repair bays, "drop-in" servers so we aren't stuck waiting for the lobby or match maker. I want massive maps that have a multitude of players all performing different objectives simultaneously to advance territorial control (like Planetside 2) and respawns that put our in-use mechs on a 5-10min cooldown after they're destroyed. Things like capping a base, killing off scouts, interrupting escorts, capturing resource collectors, taking over drop pads, converting turrets, defending capital bases, and seizing manufacturing plants that produce tanks and planes. The dream goes on and on...

Edited by MoonUnitBeta, 17 May 2015 - 02:18 AM.