27 replies to this topic

[JSmith7784]

I've been playing mechwarrior since the very first game on my 286 12.5mhz and every game since. I've always loved the tactical decisions required like weapon management, heat management etc involved with mechwarrior. I guess that's why I don't like the meta builds, boats, cheese builds or whatever you want to call them. They just don't seem like mechwarrior to me or maybe I'm just sick of turning a corner and getting blasted by a meta build sporting 1 weapon group who can almost kill me with one shot.

Do you think they will ever have a stock build game mode? I know some mechs are "boats" with their stock load out but those seem to be the exception.

[Brody319]

I think the problem with Lore based loadouts is they are based on the idea that a mech will be facing multiple unknown threats. Tanks, Helicopters, Jets, Soldiers, all in addition to regular mechs, this means bringing a lot of different weapons will increase the likelihood you will be able to handle the threats you deal with.

this game has 1 enemy, mechs, thus you bring mech buster gear, nothing else or you are suffering.

I'm sure in lore if they knew they would be fighting nothing but mechs they would likely prepare themselves with weapons good for cracking mechs, and not bring other weapons for tanks.


A stock game mode would be interesting but only a few mechs would be very good as they come with decent loadouts, the rest of the mechs would be in this weird zone where they have 1-2 good weapons, but they are weighted down by some much unneeded stuff its hard to justify bringing them at all. I think a stock mode could work only with the addition of NPC controlled tanks, and helicopters to give all mechs a viable area in the battle.

[Chuck Jager]

Sorry to say it, but there are some mediocre to poor mechs in this game, and then those mechs perform worse when their builds are lore based. It is not just the meta mechs that out perform the lore builds. By the time I had bought my second mech I was wondering why on earth would anybody put this cr*p on a build because it performs in game so poorly. There are a couple of ones that do ok to maybe even good like the Victor and the Summoner, and then that becomes it own special irony.

There is no issue with loving the BT story line, but just like the arts not all media is able to transfer and still stay the same. Trust me I had to bite the bullet with Star Wars and WW2 airplanes.

If this is such a driving force, you are welcome to organize private matches. If there are enough players that want this to happen it should easily fall into place. If it takes too much time and energy for too few results you may have found your answer. I do know with customers and clients I have gone the extra mile for in the past I never respond to a stated desire, because it can just be a whim. When I see some "sweat" backing up their desire then I know that what they say does have substance. Trust me I would never tell them that, because the customer is "always important", but .........

[Sergeant Random]

Non lore weapon recycle times means the heatsinks wont be enough. Performance stats are different. And double armor too.

[Wildstreak]

JSmith7784,

You want this. There were other Stock days but they do not seem active lately, at least the topics don't. Check here for other events you may want to be in. Not as many as there could be, gamers seems to be getting less competitive lately.

[Raggedyman]

JSmith7784, on 22 May 2015 - 03:00 AM, said:

I've been playing mechwarrior since the very first game on my 286 12.5mhz and every game since. I've always loved the tactical decisions required like weapon management, heat management etc involved with mechwarrior. I guess that's why I don't like the meta builds, boats, cheese builds or whatever you want to call them. They just don't seem like mechwarrior to me or maybe I'm just sick of turning a corner and getting blasted by a meta build sporting 1 weapon group who can almost kill me with one shot.

Do you think they will ever have a stock build game mode? I know some mechs are "boats" with their stock load out but those seem to be the exception.

The problem is that Lore Based Builds actually are meta-builds, in that the 'people' behind them were trying to come up with the best possible means to make the other guy fall-down go-dead based on the environment they were in and the resources/technologies they had. If the builds being played in MWO aren't reflective of the ones in the boardgame then that says more about the conversion process than the players,

Edited by Raggedyman, 22 May 2015 - 03:58 AM.

[Paigan]

The lore idea of facing multiple different threads is very naive.
Like mechs are some kind of indiana jones on an amazing adventure.

The thruth, even in the BT universe, would be more like having a dedicated vehicle for a dedicated (scouted beforehand) situation, hit with maximum effectiveness and hopefully win.

Like most (honestly: rather bad) fiction, BT is devised by intellectual children, which is also reflected in most mechs' cheesy appearance.



Oh and please stop using the term meta to express "overpowered". It means "after" / "beyond" / "above" in an ABSTRACT way (like meta study or meta gaming), NOT just "super" on some measuring scale.
Everyone not getting the abstract nature of the term must be considered an idiot.
I don't care if that includes 90% of the MWO community.
Speak for yourselves.

Edited by Paigan, 22 May 2015 - 04:03 AM.

[Joseph Mallan]

Chuck YeaGurr, on 22 May 2015 - 03:21 AM, said:

Sorry to say it, but there are some mediocre to poor mechs in this game, and then those mechs perform worse when their builds are lore based. It is not just the meta mechs that out perform the lore builds. By the time I had bought my second mech I was wondering why on earth would anybody put this cr*p on a build because it performs in game so poorly. There are a couple of ones that do ok to maybe even good like the Victor and the Summoner, and then that becomes it own special irony.

There is no issue with loving the BT story line, but just like the arts not all media is able to transfer and still stay the same. Trust me I had to bite the bullet with Star Wars and WW2 airplanes.

If this is such a driving force, you are welcome to organize private matches. If there are enough players that want this to happen it should easily fall into place. If it takes too much time and energy for too few results you may have found your answer. I do know with customers and clients I have gone the extra mile for in the past I never respond to a stated desire, because it can just be a whim. When I see some "sweat" backing up their desire then I know that what they say does have substance. Trust me I would never tell them that, because the customer is "always important", but .........

This would be because those poor Mechs were for Specific roles that are not in MW:O. If you used a fire starter for what is is meant for, You don't need a lot of armor, cause Infantry weapons are weak against Mech armor. Spiders are meant to do recon and cause havoc behind enemy lines thus the reason for limited weapons and armor. It was a big "DON'T GET IN A FIGHT" warning.

But MW:O is a head to head fighting game using mostly second line units.

[Herbstwind]

The versatility that many standart lore mechs try to achieve simply is not needed in a game like MWO (map size, environment, different kinds of enemy targets and so on).

You know what you will be up against (12 mechs). You know the maps and the almost always same location where the fights occur and targets show up. You pack a bunch of large lasers and if you drop on Terra Therma, you can simply moan and overheat and drop into the next game if the fight goes badly.
Pseudo realistic lore builds would try to have options here as well
- and the pilots would try to survive , which is totally not the case in MWO.

[Theodore42]

Paigan, on 22 May 2015 - 03:59 AM, said:

...

Oh and please stop using the term meta to express "overpowered". It means "after" / "beyond" / "above" in an ABSTRACT way (like meta study or meta gaming), NOT just "super" on some measuring scale.
Everyone not getting the abstract nature of the term must be considered an idiot.
I don't care if that includes 90% of the MWO community.
Speak for yourselves.

Yes, I am also greatly annoyed by the over use of the word meta.

The "meta" in "metagame" refers to Hofstadter's use of the word meta, where it is an idea in an idea. An example he uses is: You find a magic lamp. You rub the lamp and a magic genie pops out and offers you a wish. You say, "I wish to know what meta is!" The genie, instead of granting your wish, pulls a meta lamp out of his pocket, rubs it, and summons a meta genie. He then relays your wish to the meta genie, who then, you guessed it, pulls a meta meta lamp out of his pocket and summons a meta meta genie. And now you know what "meta" is.
Also, a mousepad with a picture of a mouse on it (computer mouse, not the animal, which would only be ironic.)

So the meta game in a video game refers to "the game within the game" that is NOT programmed in. It happens naturally as players interact with each other in the game. LOL is the best example of a meta game because it is full of things everyone knows to do but you would have no way to know that based on the programming, gameplay, rules, etc. Why do certain champions play certain roles and why do they go where they go and team up with who they team up with?

The only time mwo has a metagame is when there is a DIFFICULT weekend challenge. Remember to get the Victor you needed to win 20 matches without dying and get at least one kill. Do you recall how loadouts changed? How the games were played differently? THAT is an example of the MWO metagame.

Players WANT a meta game in mwo where they HAVE to play the role of the mech they're in to be successful (like in LOL, if you don't play where you're supposed to, you lose). So by adding rewards for doing role warfare type things and quirks that make less powerful mechs competitive, they are not creating any kind of meta game. They are affecting gameplay, yes, but there is no metagame. Nothing can really be done to mess up your opponents attempt at role warfare. There is no advantage to doing role warfare that can overcome an opponent that doesn't counter it.

Back to the OP: I'm actually really into the idea of stock mechs. And I have an idea for a CW metagame based on it:

If, in CW, there are a limited number of mechs you can drop in based on what tier they are: Every homeworld could have a source of infinite 4th and 5th tier mechs. Then there are some worlds that give an infinite supply of tier 3 mechs. Then some worlds you capture can have a limited supply of tier 2 mechs. And then each tier 1 mech has its own world that has a limited supply of mechs you can use.
There could be a whole lot of sources and the supply of mechs might be limited over time. Maybe it could be balanced so that Steiner has easy access to a generous supply of Atlases but less tier 2 or 3 mechs around. Something like that.

This way, players on the battlefield would behave differently based on how valuable every mech on the battlefield is. A unit that can better protect the "meta" mechs, and effectively sacrifice mechs in high supply, will have a better time overall than a unit that just plays the game like you do today. This would be a far more interesting metagame in mwo than the "you must win the match, get a kill, not die, and do that 20-something times in 1 weekend to get a Victor."

Then you could add facilities on worlds you could capture that could install on some mechs some different weapons, so you can customize your mechs. This fits right into balancing a metagame because PGI can easily control exactly what you can and can't do with your mech customizations to allow a balanced metagame.

How do Units fit in to this? Faction players, lone wolf, mercs, fit into this? I dunno, but I bet there could be some way to distribute the mechs in limited supply. Maybe the unit in control of the world could decide how much supply of mechs the give to who, and a metagame might crop up from how Units best distribute their resources. PGI could make this meta game by making it so Solo/Merc players are necessary to Units for retaining their worlds.

I've been thinking about the meta, balance, and cw for a long time now, and this is kind of what I came up with. This would not only get more stock mechs onto the battlefield, but more of the mechs that, according to Lore, were commonly used by certain factions and what not. And it would limit mech customization, but not remove it.

This is pretty drastic, and maybe a more obvious metagame will emerge as cw moves forward, but this idea would add stock mechs, "realistic" populations of the various mech chassis in the right places, add Unit/merc relations, reasons to take planets, reasons to play differently on the battlefield, etc.

Edited by Theodore42, 22 May 2015 - 05:59 AM.

[Joseph Mallan]

Theodore42, on 22 May 2015 - 05:52 AM, said:

*SNIP*

Approved.

[Joseph Mallan]

Raggedyman, on 22 May 2015 - 03:57 AM, said:

The problem is that Lore Based Builds actually are meta-builds, in that the 'people' behind them were trying to come up with the best possible means to make the other guy fall-down go-dead based on the environment they were in and the resources/technologies they had. If the builds being played in MWO aren't reflective of the ones in the boardgame then that says more about the conversion process than the players,

A Firestarter's Meta is Police duty and enemy crowd control. Its role is to wipe out Non Mech units.

TT Mechs are by far not designed to be way powerful. If they were I'd leave them alone.

[ArchAngelWC]

Joseph Mallan, on 22 May 2015 - 06:04 AM, said:

A Firestarter's Meta is Police duty and enemy crowd control. Its role is to wipe out Non Mech units.

TT Mechs are by far not designed to be way powerful. If they were I'd leave them alone.

eh...they can also start the fire that smoke covers the advance...
or heat spike an ammo mech that was dumb into oblivion...both of which would be pretty cool to see in this game...
make flamers kinda fun

[C E Dwyer]

There should have been a more lore based system, customization is way to open, but imagine the tears

[Lexx]

A stock mode would be great, I played stock almost exclusively back when I played MW3 online.

There would have to be some way to bring in diversity though, or it wouldn't be much different from what we have now. Players would quickly figure out which stock builds are the best and that's pretty much all that would be used. It would still be "meta" with only the best stock mechs, because most of the IS stock builds are terrible.

Edited by Lexx, 22 May 2015 - 06:27 AM.

[Paigan]

Joseph Mallan, on 22 May 2015 - 06:04 AM, said:

A Firestarter's Meta is Police duty and enemy crowd control. Its role is to wipe out Non Mech units.

TT Mechs are by far not designed to be way powerful. If they were I'd leave them alone.

Did you even read what you approved of in Theodore42's post?

Please, finally someone of you meta writers understand the word you are using so wrongly.

Edited by Paigan, 22 May 2015 - 06:29 AM.

[Mar-X-maN]

I run lorebased metabuilds.
True to the idea of the mech and how it is generally depicted but still with a keen eye on it being viable ingame.

[Raggedyman]

Joseph Mallan, on 22 May 2015 - 06:04 AM, said:

A Firestarter's Meta is Police duty and enemy crowd control. Its role is to wipe out Non Mech units.

TT Mechs are by far not designed to be way powerful. If they were I'd leave them alone.

The Firestarter is a great example of what I mean by the conversion process being part of the problem: they are designed to be very good/as powerful as possible in the non-mech crowd control role in a TT environment (within their price range), but in MWO we pretty much only have mech units to deal with (the couple of turrents don't count for much) so the Firestarter won't be used with its TT loadout as that would be pointless.

[Raggedyman]

Paigan, on 22 May 2015 - 06:28 AM, said:

Did you even read what you approved of in Theodore42's post?

Please, finally someone of you meta writers understand the word you are using so wrongly.

The problem is that language, especially jargon, evolves. And whilst the word "meta" is being used horribly inaccurately it is correct by the argot of the forums. Plus trying to get anyone to shift to a better terminology would be a sisyphean task due to the stubbornness around here.

[Ultimax]

Cathy, on 22 May 2015 - 06:20 AM, said:

There should have been a more lore based system, customization is way to open, but imagine the tears

You mean like the tears we constantly read about from people who want to shoehorn lore based builds into this game?

Edited by Ultimatum X, 22 May 2015 - 09:29 AM.