228 replies to this topic

[Khereg]

Soulstrom, on 01 July 2015 - 08:45 AM, said:

Yes. Life isn't fair and that is how it goes. It is always the same; one person ruins it for everyone or in this case one unit ruins it for everyone.

I'm just not accepting the premise that MS ruined/is ruining CW. We seem to be a boogeyman for certain players and we've accepted that is inevitable.

All we can do is continue to try to do things that help the community. Between Kin3ticX publishing the best how-to guide for CW currently available, several of us voluntarily dropping with pugs and trying to teach better builds, tactics, and techniques, and even going so far as to have Tony and the rest of the leadership thinking through how our actions affect the larger context of the game before making moves, I personally think we're going above and beyond to try to keep the CW community active and growing.

[Soulstrom]

Khereg, on 01 July 2015 - 09:02 AM, said:

I'm just not accepting the premise that MS ruined/is ruining CW. We seem to be a boogeyman for certain players and we've accepted that is inevitable.

All we can do is continue to try to do things that help the community. Between Kin3ticX publishing the best how-to guide for CW currently available, several of us voluntarily dropping with pugs and trying to teach better builds, tactics, and techniques, and even going so far as to have Tony and the rest of the leadership thinking through how our actions affect the larger context of the game before making moves, I personally think we're going above and beyond to try to keep the CW community active and growing.

Relax. [I don't expect your unit to accept it.] People don't like -MS-, get over it. Even if you are doing good, people are going to be annoyed/angry with -MS- for a variety of reasons. Again, "Life isn't fair." Even if -MS- only controlled 1 planet people would still be annoyed with -MS-, tis life and the path your unit chose when you ultimately won everything. Kudos by-the-way.

Bad or good people talking about your unit is always good thing. Keeps you relavant.

Also as a note, just a statment and is ultimately true. "One always/does ruin it for everyone."

Edited by Soulstrom, 01 July 2015 - 09:10 AM.

[Rahul Roy]

PGI could create a new cockpit item and/or title and award it to every member of every unit they break up.

Options of what these could say:

• Too good for CW Beta
  
• CW Beta grand champions
  
• The MS rules <-- a little too specific maybe, but also a play on the so-called Jordan Rules from NBA

[Kin3ticX]

Khereg, on 01 July 2015 - 09:02 AM, said:

I'm just not accepting the premise that MS ruined/is ruining CW. We seem to be a boogeyman for certain players and we've accepted that is inevitable.

All we can do is continue to try to do things that help the community. Between Kin3ticX publishing the best how-to guide for CW currently available, several of us voluntarily dropping with pugs and trying to teach better builds, tactics, and techniques, and even going so far as to have Tony and the rest of the leadership thinking through how our actions affect the larger context of the game before making moves, I personally think we're going above and beyond to try to keep the CW community active and growing.

-MS- the evil boogeyman confirmed

[TWIAFU]

Soulstrom, on 01 July 2015 - 08:45 AM, said:

Breaking up the units will make it so that, yes they will still drop together, but not everyone will have the same tags which means that these individual units (one larger broken into smaller units with different tags like m1, m2, m3) will not all reap the same rewards as they normally would. Menaing that certain smaller units of the greater one will be doing better than the others becuaase the planet incentives will only go to the pilots with that specific tag. Example...M1 takes the planet and M2 and M3 don't get anything from it. Unlike now where everyone is just M1 and everyone would get the benifits. Basically it could cause rifts and inter unit competions in CW. More depth and variety.

Doesn't really affect our unit, but I will greatly enjoy seeing how the larger units cope with this change. When the time comes for this to happen our Unit will adapt (as all units should) and we will rethink our recruitment stratigies.



Nope. You will do that youselves when only 50-100 of you are getting the planet bonus and the other 300 are not.



Yes. Life isn't fair and that is how it goes. It is always the same; one person ruins it for everyone or in this case one unit ruins it for everyone.

Ok, break up Units so they have to fight within themselves? That's a odd way to build a Community. Break up a group of friends and have them fight amongst themselves. That will have depth and variety, not the good kind either.

Interesting you sound happy at the potential strife set upon larger units. And instead of growing a community, Unit, you want to limit, screen, and have to reject people. I prefer to be inclusive instead of exclusive.

Again, with the 300 number boogeyman. That is just the number of members, not active players. You could very well have 100-150 or more of that 300 inactive, some for MONTHS! Inactive players should now dictate Unit size? Better, and realistic, solution is to set Unit member inactive after 30 days and NOT count on the roster so we do not have rosters skewed by inactivity and people cannot use BS info to force restrictions on others.

HEY! Since 12man Unit stomps are dispelled, we have a new one! Because of ONE Unit in CW that has NOTHING to do with puglandia, ALL Units should face limitations.

I have an idea, since one Unit is very large, from now on no Units can be formed unless they have at least 50 members. Not fair for Units under 50 members in CW.

[Telmasa]

Khereg, on 28 June 2015 - 06:47 AM, said:

One point to be fair to PGI: They didn't say there would be a hard cap on unit size, just that there would be incentives to be under a certain size. If a large unit is ready to deal with whatever penalties come with the territory, I don't think PGI is really forcing anyone to kick active members.
All depends how harsh the penalties, though...

CyclonerM, on 28 June 2015 - 07:05 AM, said:

My impression was that there would be incentives, but not penalties.

This seems like the good way to go, to me...incentivize other players to play, great, but I wouldn't slap penalties on huge units per se.

Khereg, on 01 July 2015 - 09:02 AM, said:

I'm just not accepting the premise that MS ruined/is ruining CW. We seem to be a boogeyman for certain players and we've accepted that is inevitable.

You are the biggest unit, therefore you are the boogeyman. That is something that does not change no matter what game, platform, or plane of existence you happen to be in.

From my experience on WoT, it usually ends up that at some point the rest of the server finds a reason to gang up and take down the boogeyman.
It's happened many times in WoT - you can ask many folks in the CR/D forum there and they can give you a historical breakdown of the past, oh, 3-4 years of the super-conglomerates, and how hard each of them fell in turn.

Thing is, on WoT, in order for that to happen, there has to be a unit size cap, because the CW combat occurs based on a "chip movement" mechanic.

In MW:O, there's no such thing - any number of players can fight on a single territory. On the one hand, that's much less limiting, but on the other it also means a far lower percentage of the CW map ever gets used - why bother going to other planets when all the players who are in CW are all on 1 planet?

And it also means it's less likely for anybody else to bother taking on overwhelmingly huge groups like -MS-.

___

So there's a few dillemmas here.

If you continue to have no chip-movement thing, then there continues to be no real problem with supersized units (aside from obviously dominating any unit-based event), since every battle is down to 12 on 12, no matter what. (As far as I can tell "ghost drops" aren't really a thing at all, though I also have no idea how much that's contributed to -MS-'s lead on owned planets at the moment.)

The downside is that a far lower percentage of the CW map will ever be used - unless we switch to some kind of PvE CW thing, some kind of solution that doesn't revolve around needing to have other players to play against you in order to progress in CW.

That, or you switch to a WoT system, in which case a hard unit cap is absolutely necessary - otherwise it will be no contest for supersized units to take over the galaxy.

The downsides to *that* have already been gone over at deep length throughout this thread.

___


What do we do? I honestly do not really know for sure...but:

I would like to see Community Warfare that occurs throughout the entire galaxy, not just 2-5 planets a day.

But we can't do that, because our population isn't spread out enough - rather than laterally spread throughout dozens, possibly hundreds of units, the CW population is by and large vertically concentrated amongst relatively very few super-sized units, lead by a huge margin by -MS-.

Maybe game mechanics could get changed - via faster, more common ghost drops or PVE - to allow smaller units to run around and collect territory around the unused parts of the map (likely the peripheries) while the larger units continue to duke it out in the more central areas. You could balance that out by making periphery planets less valuable to hold than central ones.

In other words, let there be some kind of reason to not concentrate all the CW games on just a select few planets each day.

To me, that alone would be a great incentive for smaller units to join in CW, without any silly things like "keep your unit under size _, get magic power bonus to cbills/exp/etc.!".

Hell, you could even let solo players (or small groups) try to fight 1-4v4 (maybe 1v12? lol) PVE drops in the outer rims & pirate territories to get their own little holdings - cause why not? - and just keep the rewards for such areas at a trivially low area, so that it's not exploitable, but still encourages all the small guys to pitch in and make the CW map come alive.

Edited by Telmasa, 01 July 2015 - 12:58 PM.

[Rebas Kradd]

CW is failing because it's six maps of gauss cannons. It's empty because it's friggin' boring. If PGI wants to improve CW, they need to introduce a real strategy element and significantly increase the variety of assets being fought over - starports, convoys, factories, depots, supply lines, stranded dropships, VIPs, something other than a damn Galaxy of Gauss Cannons!™

This is the only change that will significantly alleviate boredom and people back.

Edited by Rebas Kradd, 01 July 2015 - 12:56 PM.

[TWIAFU]

Khereg, on 01 July 2015 - 08:56 AM, said:

The point about band wagoners would seem to hold true for any large organization. For MS, keep in mind that we're a collection of smaller units, many of which do have tight-knit cores. So, not so band wagon-y at that level.

So, if you have to break up, what your saying is after the headache of administrating the reorganization, the only thing that will have changed is the Unit tags.

So, if we will now have to have Unit upper limits, we will need to have Unit lower limits. So if 50-100 upper limit, 6-12 lower limit?

Maybe limiting the Unit size is not the answer, but limiting the planets one Unit can take?

Looking at it this way;

What is better, one Unit controlling a max of X planets or one Unit, broken up into 3-4, each controlling unlimited. Either way, large Unit is working together.

If our boogeyman Unit owns 50 and growing, break them up, and how many planets will they own as multiple unit under same leadership? What nerf will have to happen if boogeyman unit1 owns 30, boogeyman unit 2 owns 19, and boogeyman unit3 owns 40? Really think people will differentiate? They cannot even tell the difference between a 12man unit and a 12man skirmish!

How does PGI split up the planets the host Unit got to the new fractured Units?

Edited by TWIAFU, 01 July 2015 - 01:08 PM.

[Khereg]

TWIAFU, on 01 July 2015 - 12:57 PM, said:

So, if you have to break up, what your saying is after the headache of administrating the reorganization, the only thing that will have changed is the Unit tags.

Pretty much. Not saying that *would* happen, but that it easily *could* happen.

Quote

Maybe limiting the Unit size is not the answer, but limiting the planets one Unit can take?

That could have other unintended consequences. Another idea is diminishing returns as the number of tagged planets increases - see my post on page 4.

I think the reality is that if one unit were really getting far too powerful, you'd see the rest of the community cooperate to knock them back down, a la Telmasa's post. I suspect we're already seeing some of this in the latest CW event.

I actually think that's cool and interesting, b/c it shows you don't need to develop rules for every little thing that comes up. Letting communities evolve organically can solve many so-called "problems" without having to call in mom and dad to adjudicate.

[TWIAFU]

Quote

Khereg, on 01 July 2015 - 05:21 PM, said:


Pretty much. Not saying that *would* happen, but that it easily *could* happen.



That could have other unintended consequences. Another idea is diminishing returns as the number of tagged planets increases - see my post on page 4.

I think the reality is that if one unit were really getting far too powerful, you'd see the rest of the community cooperate to knock them back down, a la Telmasa's post. I suspect we're already seeing some of this in the latest CW event.

I actually think that's cool and interesting, b/c it shows you don't need to develop rules for every little thing that comes up. Letting communities evolve organically can solve many so-called "problems" without having to call in mom and dad to adjudicate.

I will check out that post, thank you.

I like the idea of self policing by the community. Also don't want anyone to be singled out for some good organization and appeal of community within a Unit.

There is a solution here but limiting the size of player run communities is not it, at least not at these proposed low numbers to cause harm to every unit over these limits.

If we are to have a maximum Unit size then maybe we should equally have a minimum size?

[Deathlike]

Kin3ticX, on 01 July 2015 - 06:29 AM, said:

The event turned out way more one-sided than our worst expectations. Some of the big unit loyalists are complete no shows and everything depended on them resurrecting for the event given who we knew were bolstering the Clan ranks. A lot of the Mercstar guys wanted to go Clan to run their wave 3 stuff, not just the ebon but also the 35 and 45 tonners coming. PGI should have easily seen that all the "active" talent would probably flock to Clan without a reason to stay IS vs. leveling their new shiny 'Mechs.

Wave 3 should have been launched parallel to some serious LP rewards to stay IS.

MS may have something big coming up but I cant any specifics, use your imagination.

I think indirectly the current contracts favor Clan, as Kurita gets pretty much close to nada (and indirectly PUGs aren't coming), so that in itself is part of a bigger problem... having no dynamically adjusting contract system based on need and demand for the players/units taking the contracts.


Russ is definitely not really thinking big picture, as there is no system in place (by PGI's own design) that favors what he's suggesting... and I'm not taking about enforced unit sizes (it doesn't fix anything)... I'm talking about incentives/reasons to play CW.

CW is just not consumable for the majority. If anything, anyone playing CW is the minority, even Mercstar is the minority in all of this (although, I could be wrong on that based on population).

Many unit rosters suffer from various things in MWO... whether it is CW burnout, uninteresting games modes, and whatnot. I challenge to find you a large roster (say at least 50 people in it) with 25% of its unit members active on a regular basis (play at least 2 days, possibly including weekends). Of those people, do they play CW often? You might as well cut your nose off despite the face to find said mythical unit. It doesn't exist (or is some rare unicorn) due to the current state of the game.


The infrastructure required to address/fix this does not exist currently, and also requires major restructuring of various components to make CW even viable long term. Right now, the burnout is real and continuing. While the tempting goal of putting unit tags on some cockpit items sound sweet, the goal of just getting the Hula girl for just 10 matches (did that all on day 1) is just pathetic that it says that the reward structure is a joke (250k for winning Rank 1? Seriously?)


So, there's so many fundamentally broken down things that allowed this to come to this point, while Russ does't understand the full breakdown of the reality that is CW, and while it is so easy to blame Mercstar, it's just the mechanics that simply don't keep people interested in this game (the ultimate question of "What is the goal?" has not been answered) is the biggest problem.

Until that is solved, we're pretty much at this state that keeping the CW status quo is not maintainable indefinitely.

Edited by Deathlike, 01 July 2015 - 05:39 PM.

[Gallowglas]

The problem I see is that their stated intent is to encourage players to spread out into other units and to pare down the massively large units...and then sponsor a tournament that basically gives every advantage to the units with the most members.

The easy solution with this tournament would be cap the points so that each unit only keeps the top 20 scores (or some other number). That way, large units can still have an advantage, but not an insurmountable one. As it stands though, this week is going to be a huge recruiting tool for the largest units in the game.

Edited by Gallowglas, 01 July 2015 - 08:18 PM.

[DeathlyEyes]

Consider the following: individuals and small units will never have a chance at these events anyway. Mercstar would just create a tiered ms1 2 3 group them throw all those units to the same faction. We only really have about 120 active members right now anyway. The real enemy to the community is the players that refuse to form groups and step up to the plate.

[Vellron2005]

I think that PGI should do the complete opposite of what they are planing to do..

They should make it so that units have apsolutelly no effect on the CW map, at least not as units, but instead as factions. And those factions should have PGI payroll sponsored "celebrity" leaders, taken straight from BT Lore.

The Celebrity Leaders would be active in the community, they would steer the ships, and act more-or-less true to the lore except in major events like Tukayyid, taking Terra ect.

Units would be dissolved, all players of a faction would get deticated sponosored teamspeak adresses (one for loyalist, one for contractors) that would be given to players as soon as they declared themselves as part of a faction. (Lone wolves, pirates and mercenaries would be considered a faction)

After all of this, Units could exist only as competative teams sponosred by their faction and pitted against oneanother in special solaris-like e-sport events.

I believe this would make it alot easier to achieve a 12-man premade, MUCH easier to get a drop in CW, to act as a coordinated battle force and do FACTION warfare, as opposed to current UNIT warfare in CW.

I don't care if a planet has "SWOL", "CWI" or "-MS-" tags on it.. it should only have one tag... "-WOLF-"

As far as competative teams go, their members would be selected like a nation's soccer players are selected, by a PGI sponosored Faction Leader, they would represent the best, the Elite of the Elite, and only 20 members could be in a team at any one time. Only 12 could drop, and the 8 that are left over would be "benched" and used as apropriate when the "first pick" players were unavailable.

How the Solaris Leaders would pick their teams would be up to them, but I imagine PGI sponsored monthly tryouts would be organised, with leaderboards, and a community driven selection process.

The people selected should be publicly represented as a faction's chosen, featured on these forums, and given special prizes and honor.

The Solaris matches should be streamed live and uploaded to the forums for later wiewing, naturally, streams from each player's cockpit.

There's your friggin e-sport right there.

Edited by Vellron2005, 02 July 2015 - 01:45 AM.

[Galenthor Kerensky]

Vellron, I can't see that working either... forcing units to break up just because someone else has issues with their success rate will only do 1 main thing, cause folks to quit the game and demand refunds since they are being told that they can't play the game anymore the way they have been, and not too many folks will take kindly to that kind of thing, me included. One thing that seems to be prevalent in cw is that alot of folks just plain don't like it as it stands, which is why alot of them don't play it; which is their choice...

[Livewyr]

Well, tbh, I don't know how effective this is going to be..

A: Just like in WoT, you get SOS1, SOS2, SOS3 for units. (SOS Acronym randomly selected) They will operate the same way if they choose.
B: Unless they make rewards unit specific, you don't even really need to be IN a unit, except for unit events- so we'll see where they go from here.
C: If they do make the rewards unit specific, we will just do what we did in WoT, divide up the mass-held resources between the constituent bodies.. it's still more effective take a mass amounft as 3-4 groups and divide it, than to try and take it all with one.
D: Casual players will find it much harder to be in a unit, as their casual attendance will actually become a negative due to occupation of limited space, instead of just being a lack of positive.

[Necromantion]

Well put livewyr

Edited by Necromantion, 09 July 2015 - 07:23 AM.

[TWIAFU]

Livewyr, on 09 July 2015 - 05:47 AM, said:

D: Casual players will find it much harder to be in a unit, as their casual attendance will actually become a negative due to occupation of limited space, instead of just being a lack of positive.

With so many clamoring for more population in CW and yet pushing for a Unit cap at the same time have failed to realize it will have a negative impact on Units and those that wish to join one and participate in CW.

MS tops the leaderboards because they are active. They have more active members online at one time then any other, and they are good pilots.

Instead of filling ranks to field more active members themselves, they want to nerf someone else's ability to. Short sighted and self harming in the long term.

[ShadowWolf Kell]

Deathlike, on 01 July 2015 - 05:37 PM, said:

Russ is definitely not really thinking big picture, as there is no system in place (by PGI's own design) that favors what he's suggesting... and I'm not taking about enforced unit sizes (it doesn't fix anything)... I'm talking about incentives/reasons to play CW.

The more barriers they keep adding that are counterproductive to enjoying the game, the harder it's going to be to keep drawing in new players who'll stick around. The harder it'll be to get burned out players to want to log in.

I look at PGI and the fiasco they have, and then I look at CCP and what they've accomplished with EVE. The major difference is CCP has it's hand on the pulse of the community (and all of it's sub communities because the game is literally several in one) and has a pretty good idea on how to balance multiple factions both in the short-term, and the long-term. They fully understand how the dynamics alters the game for everyone. PGI is fairly oblivious and it's been blatantly obvious from the beginning. The only one on an island is Russ imo.

[Aresye]

The thing I find interesting is we've seen both IS and Clan stomps in CW. The first large CW event the Clans got pushed so far back almost all of them were at their starting worlds (or worse). For Tukayyid we saw HUGE amounts of players (mostly IS) cramming the queues 50+ full teams deep.

The problem isn't unit size. These events have shown that for every 2-3 12mans a large unit can muster, there's 10-15 12man pug teams, and they can have a huge impact (if they're coordinated).

We need to look at how to bring those hundreds of pugs into playing CW regularly, and how to evenly balance the numbers between Clan and IS. Breaking up large units doesn't solve the issue of 12man teams facing pugs, which I think is more of the reason most pugs stay away from CW, not because units are too big.