54 replies to this topic

[HC Harlequin]

ya... doesn't work.

you see, battletech is about putting stuff onto a generic chassis.

Back in the day you had a generic battletech battlemech sheet of paper that you filled the holes in and added stuff to the hit locations. There were very general rules. Each hex moved was a factor of how much tonnage over how big engine. Jump jets was a factor of how many jump jets based on walking distance.

The actual figurine you put onto the board had no relation to the battletech battlemech sheet of paper unless you were playing in a tournament that was wysiwyg. Or you were playing a stock mech only tournament.

Sure, MWO has streamlined that a bit with engine limits and weapon hardpoints. But even the quirks aren't a requirement to build the mech.

So for a 35 ton mech, according to your system, I can take a raven, or a jenner, or a firestarter. Spoiled for choice, completely.

65 ton mechs, Thunderbolt, catapult, Jaeger. Spoiled for choice.

The only people that your system would brutally punish would be new players who don't have a large mech collection..

The very people we don't want to ostracize.

And the people that could take an overwhelming advantage out of this would be the guys with the all the mech belong to us stable of mechs.

So a very very bad idea all around

Edited by HC Harlequin, 17 May 2015 - 12:28 PM.

[Freebrewer Bmore]

Void Angel, on 16 May 2015 - 02:49 PM, said:

It's game balance by democracy, and if you think that phrase is a positive descriptor, you need to take more political science.

Well, if you don't think that additional perspectives have anything to add, I'm really not sure why you bother saying anything. By that logic we should want Russ to ignore everyone's opinions and just get on with it and finish making his perfect game already, right? He must be omniscient, whereas we all know how dumb we are...

There are all sorts of problems with global economics (distribution of pricing power, ugh) and democratic politics (OMG majority voting mechanisms SMH), but the basic idea of using distributed decisionmaking devices like market pricing to enable a system to gather and act upon more and better information is not one of them. Yes, we are all dumb monkeys, which is precisely why we need to find ways to combine our meager wisdom rather than handing the job to just one dumb monkey. Again, Roland already did a nice job of explaining these conceptual underpinnings in his thread.

Void Angel, on 16 May 2015 - 02:49 PM, said:

Magical thinking about market economics, or hand-waving away problems like buy-in costs to get to the meta with an unsupported (and unsupportable) assumption that the meta will never shift, isn't going to cut the mustard. For example, re-setting my drop deck to 240 was trivial, and while it's not a top-performing chassis any longer, the Thunderbolt 9S (for example) is still viable.

The thought that you can go into a store and buy something for a relatively stable price that in large part reflects its cost and value is hardly magical. It happens every day.

I wouldn't assert that the meta will never shift. In fact I expect the tryhardiest folks will want to continuously tweak their decks seeking the tiniest advantage, and yes that'll cause price fluctuations. However, once the dynamic system has been fully phased in and the prices have had a chance to stabilize at the approximate value of each variant, the rolling usage data window will prevent those fluctuations from being disruptive to average players. If the competitive players were to devise and propagate some completely revolutionary approach to team composition that nobody had thought of before (and thus was not already priced into the market), yes that would impact average players both by kicking their butt in the short term and altering prices in the long term, but that kind of meta shift would already cause disruption under our current system anyway (inducing everyone to run out and buy that trendy new stuff or lose).

Speaking of current disruptions, I actually thought the TDR9S de-buff was rather well done myself, and neither that nor the 10-ton drop caused me any personal hardship... but I'm not the only one playing this game. I'm not one of those unfortunate souls who bought heroes during the Tuk sale specifically for a 250-ton deck and then suddenly didn't have a place for them. I still use my 9S sometimes, but the fact that there are so many fewer on the field nowadays tells you that they're spending time rusting in their mechbays or have been resold. So there are a couple concrete examples of how the present regime regularly causes the inflated buy-in that you're worried about.

All you can really do is speculate that the dynamic system might also incur inflated costs. Neither of us can prove exactly what will or won't happen. However, I can point to self-correcting features of the dynamic system that are absent from the current system and which you have yet to substantively address (merely being contemptuously dismissive of them as magical thinking and hand-waving isn't going to cut the mustard).

Void Angel, on 16 May 2015 - 02:49 PM, said:

But even ceding that claim for the sake of argument, you're still looking at the same thing, just on a grander scale, and without human oversight. Instead of PGI looking at 'mechs and possibly overshooting a balance point, you're going to have whole ranges of 'mechs nerfed automatically - based not on how good they actually are, but on how much people use them.

PGI isn't going anywhere, so there would still be human oversight should it be needed. And we're not talking about "nerfing" insofar as this doesn't touch combat effectiveness, it only affects meta effectiveness. And overshooting balance points is not merely "possible" with static balance mechanisms, it's guaranteed. And how much people use them already takes into account how good they are. And again this stuff was already well-addressed by Roland.

Void Angel, on 16 May 2015 - 02:49 PM, said:

Your proposed system contains the same kind of overgeneralizations and possibly (in this case certainly) faulty assumptions that are often used in publicly-discussed economics. You assume that the great mass of people operate according to enlightened self-interest, for example. This is emphatically not the case; look at all the people who use missile boats, or refuse to move from their favorite camping spot in order to counter the enemy's movements.

No, actually I assume that none of us knows everything, so we need to be able to try things and screw up and learn from each other's boneheaded mistakes (and from each other's brilliant insights that we initially boneheadedly dismissed as boneheaded mistakes). It's not that I like market pricing because I have any delusions of optimal allocations via perfect information or even classically "rational" behavior; I like it because it's a way of collectively compensating for our individual idiocy (maybe you could say I'm from the Black Swan school of anti-economist economics.)

Void Angel, on 16 May 2015 - 02:49 PM, said:

PS: Use of slurs like "tryhard" reduces your credibility out of the gate.

Insofar as the story is clearly parody, it was my hope that those who read it in good faith would recognize a flagrantly cartoonish phrase like "the evil Tryhard Cartels" as being part of the fun, rather than a straightfaced indictment of anyone's lifestyle choices. In fact, my unit exists for the explicit purpose of making a home to both casual and competitive players. So you might say that some of my best friends are tryhards.

Edited by Freebrewer Bmore, 18 May 2015 - 10:48 PM.

[Moldur]

They shut it down and open it again when it works/ is fun/ is worthplaying

[Freebrewer Bmore]

Skarlock, on 16 May 2015 - 03:05 PM, said:

Why would the clans be destroyed? Simple. The bad clan mechs are *really* bad, whereas IS has a ton more variety and viable mechs to choose from.

If this actually were to be a problem, it'd be very easily addressable by simply allowing the Clans to fill their dropdecks with mechs used more frequently on average. For example, you could require that the 4 mechs in any IS dropdeck were to average out to median usage frequency, but allow a Clan dropdeck to average out to higher than median frequency. This is kinda similar to tweaking tonnage limits up or down, but better, because the effectiveness of the tweak is not warped around the disproportionate tonnage:value ratio of certain OP variants.

You could also of course address the imbalance in old-fashioned and more difficult ways, e.g. by un-nerfing Clan mechs/weapons or making more and better Clan mechs.

Skarlock, on 16 May 2015 - 03:05 PM, said:

Also, this system would only work in an environment where the playerbase as a whole is pretty educated about what is actually good. Otherwise, the majority of players will simply take bad mechs and enable the meta players allowing them to take the top tier mechs.

Well this is already happening right now... Clueless n00bz bring bad mechs. Everyone else can bring all the best mechs they want and pwn them. Solution: don't be a n00b and bring the best mechs.

Under the dynamic system, yeah, clueless n00bz can bring bad mechs which serves to lower the price of better mechs somewhat. Everyone else can bring somewhat better mechs and pwn them. Still, the solution: don't be a n00b and bring what better mechs you can. N00bz gonna n00b... doesn't mean the dynamic system is any worse on that count, tho.

Skarlock, on 16 May 2015 - 03:05 PM, said:

Not to mention that in order to compete, as people shift their mechs around, you will need an extraordinary amount of mechs to switch to because the system is now dynamic. So your perfectly legal drop deck one week becomes overpowered or underpowered and you need to optimize it.

HC Harlequin, on 17 May 2015 - 12:19 PM, said:

The only people that your system would brutally punish would be new players who don't have a large mech collection..

How would they be brutally punished? Once costs are more or less stable I'd say you'll pretty much just need 5 mechs to play (4 for the deck plus one cheaper one to substitute in case prices do fluctuate). Yes, I'd imagine that someone who owns every mech would have occasional opportunities to eke out a bit of an advantage by readily substituting, but once the mechs are properly valued that's going to be a pretty small advantage with a pretty high up-front cost. Just choose a solid 5 mechs and you should be fine.

HC Harlequin, on 17 May 2015 - 12:19 PM, said:

So for a 35 ton mech, according to your system, I can take a raven, or a jenner, or a firestarter. Spoiled for choice, completely.

I'm afraid I don't understand what you're trying to say here. The dynamic system does not care what the tonnage of any mech is, nor can anyone say at the moment at exactly what cost level Raven/Jenner/FS9 would settle.

Edited by Freebrewer Bmore, 17 May 2015 - 03:16 PM.

[C E Dwyer]

Tywren, on 17 May 2015 - 07:44 AM, said:

I still like the idea of repair time between CW drops myself.

Every point of armor damage taken = 30 seconds repair.
Every point of internal damamge taken = 1 min of repair.
Every weapon would have it's own time base (possably with modifiers if it's non-stock equipment for the mech in question), and things like ECM, and TCs would have a 30 min repair time.

Sure there are those who will just buy more of the meta mechs, and rotate them out between drops, but those people have to consider that they'll be doubling down on the current meta, and may be left behind once that meta shifts. For everyone else, it becomes a question of "do i wait for my good mech to come out of repairs, or do i go digging through the mechbays and find something else to drop with in the mean time".

make times quite substantial and give people an option to wait for time out or speed it up with C-bills a limited optional R&R or a time penalty based around type of mech

[Freebrewer Bmore]

Brizna, on 16 May 2015 - 02:56 PM, said:

While I give the OP a big BROFIST for a great opening post. A system like that would filter mechs by good and bad but also by fun and boring, effectively pushing people to play a boring game. People play mechs because they are good but also because they are fun and conversely don't play them because they are unexciting.

Ah, now this is a very good point. Why would you want a system that makes it more difficult for people to play the mechs everyone most wants to play? It seems rather counterintuitive doesn't it?

Winning is fun. Other things are fun, too, like playing a variety of mechs, or playing a certain few mechs that may be endearing but not particularly effective. The problem is that right now, a relative few variants are clearly superior for winning, so if you want to have that other fun, you need to sacrifice some winning fun. The system we already have pushes people to play a more boring game in this way.

I want to see a dynamic system like this because I want people to be able to have their cake and eat it too. I want them to be able to get their share of that winning fun if they play with skill regardless of whether they're dropping in a clearly powerful chassis or a quirky personal favorite. To make that happen you need these dynamic costs to de-escalate the arms race and stop the gaming environment from being flooded with the ruthless OP stuff. You can't achieve that with nerfs and buffs or BV or whatever other static balancing act, because they'll just crown new mech variant kings of the hill.

Smith Gibson, on 17 May 2015 - 05:03 AM, said:

The only change I would make to the idea is that the formula become:
[Initial Battle Value] x [Usage Percentage] = [Modified Battle Value]

Roland already spent a good deal of his earlier discussion explaining why he thought BV was insufficient on its own and unnecessary and likely prohibitively difficult develop in addition to the dynamic usage system. I agree with him.

[Smith Gibson]

Freebrewer Bmore, on 17 May 2015 - 04:28 PM, said:

Roland already spent a good deal of his earlier discussion explaining why he thought BV was insufficient on its own and unnecessary and likely prohibitively difficult develop in addition to the dynamic usage system. I agree with him.

Ah, I see. Since the original Battle Values from Tabletop Battletech were arbitrary, someone could still game the system by outfitting their 'Mech with undervalued weapons, and get an advantage that way. Pretty much like they already are by picking overvalued Meta builds that don't have a corresponding Negative Quirk of "+5 Tons for CW purposes".

I would then propose that PGI make the battle value of each component also subject to usage percentage as well. So we get the Initial Battle Value of each component already modified by current usage data, then add on the second usage percentage modifier of Quirks and hitboxes etc. that can't be accurately calculated with Battle Value alone.

Basically my only hang up is that a purely Usage Percentage based system wouldn't take into account the full variation within any single 'Mech Chassis. If 90% of players using a particular chassis were to uses nearly identical builds, but 10% were to use the current meta chassis with a non-optimal build they would still have to pay the same drop deck cost, even though they are not bringing the "same value" to the match.

Unless you were trying to say each component would have a usage percentage value, and not just the 'Mech Chassis.

I'm trying to work out how to make the Usage percentage based on each component within the chassis as well as the chassis itself. That way I can play what ever 'Mech I want to play and the game won't punish me for playing a non optimal build of a meta chassis, or reward me for playing a near-optimal imitation squeezed into a forgotten chassis.

Or at least a smaller punishment and smaller reward is what i'm after.

What I think most people against your idea are not understanding is that it will effectively allow players to chose to pilot particularly unpopular 'Mechs like the Vindicator as if they weighed 5-10 tons less than they actually do for CW purposes, and it would make other particularly popular builds weigh 5-10 tons more for CW purposes. The end result is that people have more choice in CW because they know that no matter what 'Mech they pick they are not crippling their team's chance to win by picking a non-meta 'Mech. They get a better or bigger non-meta 'Mech to make up for it not being the current meta 'Mech of choice.

Edited by Smith Gibson, 17 May 2015 - 05:27 PM.

[Tywren]

Cathy, on 17 May 2015 - 03:37 PM, said:

make times quite substantial and give people an option to wait for time out or speed it up with C-bills a limited optional R&R or a time penalty based around type of mech

Actually i though i did make the times rather substantial. Consider a Hunchback that looses it's left torso, and arm in a battle. Even if it doesn't take a scratch anywhere else, repairing the armor, and internals alone is an hour, and 20 min (armor 40 min, structure 40), and that's not counting the cost of replaceing weapons; lets say 3 min for the laser, and 15 for the AC20. That's over an hour and a half, or at least 3 matches of CW.

As for being able to reduce the time with C-bills, i'm not so sure of that. I mean most of the people who drop full meta have earned their Richer than Blake badge two or three times over, so this wouldn't do much to put the breaks on for them. Maybe a better option would be earning instant repair tokens for doing some things during the match. Make doing things like UAV spoting, scouting, knocking out objectives, and turrets earn points toward those tokens. That way people may stop trying to play every match of CW like an extended Assult match in the public que.

Also, in case it needs to be said, trial mechs would never have a repair time, that way even if you wreck every mech you own (or if you don't own any at all), you'll still be able to drop in CW. This will however require PGI to stop packing the trial mech roster with garbage (i'm looking at you Mist Lynx Prime)

Edited by Tywren, 17 May 2015 - 07:21 PM.

[Freebrewer Bmore]

Smith Gibson, on 17 May 2015 - 05:20 PM, said:

Basically my only hang up is that a purely Usage Percentage based system wouldn't take into account the full variation within any single 'Mech Chassis. If 90% of players using a particular chassis were to uses nearly identical builds, but 10% were to use the current meta chassis with a non-optimal build they would still have to pay the same drop deck cost, even though they are not bringing the "same value" to the match.

Right. The dynamic approach proposed by myself and Roland would result in diversified mech variant usage, but not necessarily diversified mech loadouts.

Yes, I'm sympathetic to the idea that dynamically diversified loadouts would be nice, too. For one thing, it could replace the ugly kludge known as "ghost heat." I don't think it's necessary, for reasons that Roland explains in depth (e.g. variant selection theoretically captures all the valuation info). However, one could imagine a scenario where the metagame were made up of a glorious menagerie of different mech variants... except maybe they were all just stuffed full of as many large lasers as possible, because pretty much any mech can mount them and contribute to a coherent team approach to focusing fire in a deathball. That'd be pretty boring too; even tho the metagame would no longer be dominated by STK4Ns, it could plausibly turn into a tedious affair of trying to build every chassis into the best 4N imitation possible.

The problem is that the work of developing a dynamic system to handle loadouts is far more complex than handling variants. Moreover, the work of using static mechanics to balance weapons systems against each other is theoretically less troublesome than trying to statically balance variants (for one thing, there are fewer kinds of weapons than variants to be balanced). So I'd be inclined to implement dynamic balancing for variants and let PGI continue to try to balance weapons statically, at least for the time being (e.g. if LgLasers are too dominating, implement weapon system nerfs/buffs like shifting back to ghost heat on 3+).

In any event, the first thing that needs to happen is for the basic concept of dynamic usage balancing to be understood and incorporated into future visions for the game, and that's why I wrote the story, to express in a maximally entertaining way what Roland had already broken down in a technical fashion.

Smith Gibson, on 17 May 2015 - 05:20 PM, said:

I'm trying to work out how to make the Usage percentage based on each component within the chassis as well as the chassis itself. That way I can play what ever 'Mech I want to play and the game won't punish me for playing a non optimal build of a meta chassis, or reward me for playing a near-optimal imitation squeezed into a forgotten chassis.

Even if a dynamic loadout balancing system were worked out, I'd have a bit of an issue with its battlefield plausibility. One as yet unstated reason I crave dynamic variant balancing is that it would create a "realistic" diversity. In the "real" Inner Sphere, mechs are not producible on demand; there are only so many FS9s or TDRs to go around, and there are some UM-Rs out there whether or not anyone really prefers to deploy them. "Realistically", everything would get used, with stronger variants deployed when possible and weaker variants filling in the gaps.

However, nobody would "in reality" purposefully build any variant with suboptimal loadouts, because not only would it not perform as well, it wouldn't even really help conserve resources. While mechs were very scarce, weapons weren't as much of a problem. Of course, you could decide to deviate a bit from lore and implement a logistical framework that forces players to economize on weapons as much as mechs, and then use that as a basis for dynamic loadout balance mechanisms. I do think that's somewhat intriguing, and was thinking maybe I'd play with the idea in my planned future chapter on logistics.

My initial thought on how to structure dynamic loadout balancing would be to first calculate the percentage of a mech's weight that is dedicated to each category (armor, engine, equip, energy, missile, ballistic; ammo weight lumped with the corresponding weapon; heat sink weight possibly divided up proportionally to how much HPS each weapon category produces in the loadout)... but then the question of how to balance usage of those categories starts boggling my mind. Would you balance a given loadout against the loadout proportions in use on that variant, or in use across all variants? More troublesomely, how exactly would you weight a loadout's variation from the median proportions and weight its dropdeck cost accordingly? It seems awfully complicated.

[Tywren]

Freebrewer Bmore, on 18 May 2015 - 11:36 AM, said:

Right. The dynamic approach proposed by myself and Roland would result in diversified mech variant usage, but not necessarily diversified mech loadouts.

Yes, I'm sympathetic to the idea that dynamically diversified loadouts would be nice, too. For one thing, it could replace the ugly kludge known as "ghost heat." I don't think it's necessary, for reasons that Roland explains in depth (e.g. variant selection theoretically captures all the valuation info). However, one could imagine a scenario where the metagame were made up of a glorious menagerie of different mech variants... except maybe they were all just stuffed full of as many large lasers as possible, because pretty much any mech can mount them and contribute to a coherent team approach to focusing fire in a deathball. That'd be pretty boring too; even tho the metagame would no longer be dominated by STK4Ns, it could plausibly turn into a tedious affair of trying to build every chassis into the best 4N imitation possible.

And that would be a state made worse on the Clan side, where you can take 4 diffrent "variants", then mix the pods, and give them the exact same loadout; not really close, but exactly the same.

Quote

However, nobody would "in reality" purposefully build any variant with suboptimal loadouts, because not only would it not perform as well, it wouldn't even really help conserve resources. While mechs were very scarce, weapons weren't as much of a problem.

Not true, just look at many of the variants used by Marik that would normaly have a PPC. You'll see that they tend to have a large laser, or an autocannon in thier place, because over time Marik lost their PPC production ability. The same was ture for Steiner for a while; that's why the first generation of the Zeus had an AC5, they where still repairing an old PPC factory with the help of Davion when those mechs where produced. The only houses that didn't have a big problem with weapons where Davion (NAIS + GDL memory core), and Kuriat (ComStar support).

[Freebrewer Bmore]

Tywren, on 18 May 2015 - 12:47 PM, said:

And that would be a state made worse on the Clan side, where you can take 4 diffrent "variants", then mix the pods, and give them the exact same loadout; not really close, but exactly the same.

Yeah, this needed to be mentioned so thanks for bringing it up. I think for Clans you'd need any dynamic usage system to be based on the omnipod usage, not just the variant CT usage.

Tywren, on 18 May 2015 - 12:47 PM, said:

Not true, just look at many of the variants used by Marik that would normaly have a PPC. You'll see that they tend to have a large laser, or an autocannon in thier place, because over time Marik lost their PPC production ability.

Ah, I stand corrected then. I know some of the lore but I'm not an expert. In any event, I maintain that nobody would field purposefully suboptimal builds were the components available. A question for any logistics system would be just how much you want it to mirror the lore and what other gameplay goals it needs to fulfill.

Edited by Freebrewer Bmore, 18 May 2015 - 01:04 PM.

[ztac]

Funny story, But seriously now , isn't the problem PGI's inability to actually balance out the mechs and possible combinations of weapons? ..... Potential speed, hitboxes , DPS till overheat , range of weapon loadout , etc.etc.

If they went for a better design of how they actually make up the mechs based on weight to hardpoint ratios or some other system that actually makes sense that bigger heavier mechs have greater loadouts , more hardpoints and better heat dissipation?

The fact that your system would only benefit older players makes the game even less accessible due to the skill system and the fact that to use non-meta mechs for new players means trial mechs , and we all know how good they are!

[anonymous161]

Tywren, on 17 May 2015 - 07:44 AM, said:

I still like the idea of repair time between CW drops myself.

Every point of armor damage taken = 30 seconds repair.
Every point of internal damamge taken = 1 min of repair.
Every weapon would have it's own time base (possably with modifiers if it's non-stock equipment for the mech in question), and things like ECM, and TCs would have a 30 min repair time.

Sure there are those who will just buy more of the meta mechs, and rotate them out between drops, but those people have to consider that they'll be doubling down on the current meta, and may be left behind once that meta shifts. For everyone else, it becomes a question of "do i wait for my good mech to come out of repairs, or do i go digging through the mechbays and find something else to drop with in the mean time".

So you want an already mostly abandoned cw to be completely abandoned because people cant use their mechs? What about those that dont have enough mechs to choose from? Obviously not thinking very hard about this.

[Helaton]

I'm now convinced there is not a mech problem, but a weapon problem. People don't even have problems with quirks (when was the last time you heard someone complain about an acceleration quirk?) but have problems with weapon quirks in specific.

If weapons have a good implementation, then quirks are negligible. Timberwolf isn't shedding a tear due to quirks, its shedding a tear due to quirks affecting weapon mechanics.

Boating lasers entirely means we have a heat problem. (Way too much heat available for all mechs. PGI balanced it by making heatsinks do 0.1 and 0.14 for Std and DS Heatsinks respectively.)

The heat the weapons generate isn't even a problem. The heat 'containment' level or heat cap is. Why else would ghost heat generate extra heat to try to balance?

You should feel like you just bought a brand new Aston Martin in mech purchase satisfaction, not a used car from Larry's that had the odometer wound back.

There are core issues at hand and quirks are just some duct tape to hold on that Atlas arm to get it from point A to point B.

[Tywren]

Darth Bane001, on 18 May 2015 - 02:06 PM, said:

So you want an already mostly abandoned cw to be completely abandoned because people cant use their mechs? What about those that dont have enough mechs to choose from? Obviously not thinking very hard about this.

If you'd have bothered to read my second post, you'd have seen that i said that trial mechs would not be effected, and that it would require PGI to stop stuffing the trial roster with the worst grbage they can find.

[Smith Gibson]

Freebrewer Bmore, on 18 May 2015 - 11:36 AM, said:

My initial thought on how to structure dynamic loadout balancing would be to first calculate the percentage of a mech's weight that is dedicated to each category (armor, engine, equip, energy, missile, ballistic; ammo weight lumped with the corresponding weapon; heat sink weight possibly divided up proportionally to how much HPS each weapon category produces in the loadout)... but then the question of how to balance usage of those categories starts boggling my mind. Would you balance a given loadout against the loadout proportions in use on that variant, or in use across all variants? More troublesomely, how exactly would you weight a loadout's variation from the median proportions and weight its dropdeck cost accordingly? It seems awfully complicated.

Mine was to assign a Battle Value to each component in the 'Mech. Essentially instead of giving each 'Mech variant a Usage Percentage modifier to change their Drop Deck tonnage value in CW, we would drop tonnage value completely and switch to Battle Value based off of an initially arbitrary value given to each component. Each component's Battle Value would be adjusted by it's own sub-usage percentage, and then the 'Mech variant itself would receive a second usage percentage modifier to finish the balancing.

That way every time PGI does any small or large change to any aspect of the game, the Percentage Usage adjusted Battle Value of every 'Mech in the game would automatically self correct

Assigning an arbitrary Battle Value to each component is simple, we can even borrow the Table Top Battletech BV to use as a starting point. The arbitrary values assigned will almost certainly be wrong, but adjusting the arbitrary Battle Value with a separate Usage Percentage for each component will quickly correct that. We would then have all aspects of a 'Mech given a self correcting and accurate Battle Value except PGI unique aspects like Hardpoint Location and Hitboxes. These cannot be accurately represented with a Battle Value of their own so a second round of Usage Percentage adjutment would be implemented based on 'Mech Variant.

End result: One round of arbitrary numbers followed by two separate rounds of usage percentage based corrections.

Edited by Smith Gibson, 18 May 2015 - 06:57 PM.

[aniviron]

I remember when Counter Strike Source did this. That was a fun... week. In one week's time, the price on the best guns rose so high that they were literally impossible to purchase, they cost more than the max amount of money, and the worst guns were a single dollar.

The thing is nobody wants to play with bad equipment, and people will still take the good gear over the bad every day of the week. The only way to balance that out is to let a player with bad equipment take more of it, which is not something MWO is willing to do, and even then, it's a balance nightmare.

[GI Journalist]

Please tag your RPS fan fiction more thoroughly. I thought the concept was good, but Russ/PrettyBaby isn't to everyone's taste.

[Freebrewer Bmore]

ztac, on 18 May 2015 - 02:03 PM, said:

Funny story, But seriously now , isn't the problem PGI's inability to actually balance out the mechs and possible combinations of weapons? ..... Potential speed, hitboxes , DPS till overheat , range of weapon loadout , etc.etc.

Mechs will never be perfectly balanced solely on combat mechanics (especially not when in order for a dropdeck tonnage allocation system to make sense, their value needs to be perfectly balanced in exact proportion to their tonnage). This isn't because PGI is inept or anything, it's because the game is a very complex system, nobody is omniscient, and perfection isn't possible. So long as that's the case, only a fraction of mechs will be reasonable choices if you actually want to win. A dynamic system can fix that, and again Roland's posts go into more elaborate explanations of the rationale.

ztac, on 18 May 2015 - 02:03 PM, said:

The fact that your system would only benefit older players makes the game even less accessible due to the skill system and the fact that to use non-meta mechs for new players means trial mechs , and we all know how good they are!

I don't see how you're coming to these conclusions... How would it benefit only older players? And why would new players need to use trials?

aniviron, on 18 May 2015 - 07:17 PM, said:

I remember when Counter Strike Source did this. That was a fun... week. In one week's time, the price on the best guns rose so high that they were literally impossible to purchase, they cost more than the max amount of money, and the worst guns were a single dollar.

Sounds like they might've had a similar concept but definitely a mind-bogglingly terrible implementation. Two crucial elements I mentioned in the story are a gradual phase-in (the rolling usage data window), and calculating the usage elasticity of dropdeck costs so that even the most played mech is always still useable. These are simple things. The thing is, even with them totally FUBARing it like that, the price of the thing that was too expensive to buy at all would have come back down to purchasability (if it's too expensive to buy, nobody is using it, and if nobody's using it, its price comes down and keeps coming down until people start using it enough). Sounds like they pulled the plug before that could happen tho.

Edited by Freebrewer Bmore, 18 May 2015 - 10:51 PM.

[Freebrewer Bmore]

GI Journalist, on 18 May 2015 - 07:24 PM, said:

Please tag your RPS fan fiction more thoroughly. I thought the concept was good, but Russ/PrettyBaby isn't to everyone's taste.

Had to Google that. It brought up the Wikipedia page for RPF, which I didn't know was A Thing (I guess you learn something every day! I'm not personally a fanfic fan.) Looking down that page to the definition of RPS, tho, I don't see how it applies. Clearly the story is RPF I suppose, but what makes it RPS?

I'm almost afraid to ask... is there something about the Pretty Baby lore that I need to know?

Smith Gibson, on 18 May 2015 - 06:54 PM, said:

Mine was to assign a Battle Value to each component in the 'Mech. Essentially instead of giving each 'Mech variant a Usage Percentage modifier to change their Drop Deck tonnage value in CW, we would drop tonnage value completely and switch to Battle Value based off of an initially arbitrary value given to each component. Each component's Battle Value would be adjusted by it's own sub-usage percentage, and then the 'Mech variant itself would receive a second usage percentage modifier to finish the balancing.

Well, that still doesn't specify how exactly usage rates are going to factor into the "component sub-usage percentage" for example, and in any case I'm still inclined to go with a fully usage-driven valuation for reasons Roland explains (at least until CW logistics come into play; actually I just made a post on his thread raising that issue). I don't see what value BV really adds to the process; could you elaborate?

What you describe does sound a bit like what they did with Mekwars, tho (started with TT BV and then modified with usage rates so each mech could get up to 50% more or less expensive than base BV), and, according to one of my unit-mates at least, that was a successful experiment.

Edited by Freebrewer Bmore, 19 May 2015 - 07:25 AM.