228 replies to this topic

[KinLuu]

Its Davion. What did you expect? Resistance?

[Moebius Pi]

Unless I missed a post regarding it, I think there is a fair bit of rose tinted glasses and avoiding an elephant in the room regarding some other potential reasons they want to incentivize smaller groups.

Namely, Win via Bloat. Want to skew tournaments? Get more members, good or bad for unit drops. As long as they get decent performances out (namely their damage points not being utterly atrocious), voila, you win even if one unit gets an 80% plus win rate, and you get in the 50%.

It doesn't matter if you have a lower win percentage, you will win by sheer hammering away via numbers, and it has been shown time and time again. Right now, if you're in a small unit that isn't hyperactive during these events, you're pooched, period. And if you -are- hyperactive and really rolling your matches well, you'll still come up short vs the bloated units.

That is a load of crap, and it's unfortunate these events (and CW) support and encourage it. It's why you get small units eventually going "**** this noise" because even if they get a few very good drops on a planet, a bloat unit can just hammer it back into the stone age via incessant drops. It has been done and is hardly a rare occurance in the past, in some cases just to spite another unit. Lets not be dishonest pretend otherwise.

I'm not going to even pretend that going the Super Sentai Unit style is a positive force of change, and that folks should get with their program as a good thing for this reason. It's why -many- people are really fed up and burnt out on CW. Quite a few people see it as an outright detriment and really pushing towards that prior mentioned EVE style goon squad crap (not to be confused with the Goon unit).

It may as well be a Borg Collective, and the push to make this really into factional super-units while absorbing/stomping on the smaller ones underfoot is anything but healthy in the current environment. It's self-serving at best. Pretending it's some would be community growth and renewal project is more than disengenuous. It's to give the members part of the unit something to do and to get the goodies, while playing damage control via PR.

It's an exploit. A nice chunk of the community will call a duck a duck when they see it. Especially when said ducks quack and say as much themselves right until PGI goes "hmm, what's with the big units?" and get defensive, and start meowing instead.

There's a bit more to it than purely coordination ease, come on, and it's been repeated time and time again by shot callers in some of these units (so please, at least be honest about it). It makes farming CW and these events far easier, even when they don't have the highest win rates/ratio. The setup may make coordination easier, but really it's just a giant farming machine in practice. The grind is too steep being a loyalist for many players.

Being a small unit and not getting planet tags (even if they really amount to nothing) because you'll just get steam rolled via numbers or large units makes your already negligble impact pretty much invisible. There are definitely some hyper competitive, -very- good small units out there, but honestly, the bulk of people playing aren't like that. They're casuals to semi-competitive. Eventually being herded to the "you can't survive on your own, join the collective" path doesn't help that in any way. It just trumps up the collective that absorbed them.

That right there is a problem. That right there has many units and players rather burnt out and fed up and is anything but some community building plus point. It stinks of exploiting the current shoddy mechanics (actually something I've directly heard stated time and time again btw), and really, it is. you'd think that would be indicative of their being a big problem, wouldn't you with the current mechanical setup? Yes? No?

That said, (and I understand why some super-units/collectives do it), why -not- do that in the game's current state? I may not pretend the multi-unit collective route is a good thing (it really, really isn't for the overall CW health in my opnion), but on the other side of the coin... it's what the game right now rewards the most.

If you want to get the most reward for your time, you do that. You go merc to farm LP rewards. You hammer multiple 12 mans on anything you want and really you'll just start flat out winning by attrition. Your members get consistent goodies. All in all (so long as you are part of it), it's a big bonus for joining the Collective. Nevermind that the underperforming units get to constantly ride on the coat tails of the big performing units given how a shared tag ends up really working.

There are no incentives at all to currently being small beyond less paperwork, flat out. All the bloat/collective model proved is that you can game the system and then some right now. It's broken. Flat out.

You'll also see smaller units come and go more often and lose membership like mad as they get sick and tired of being trampled under foot and new players consistently seeing bloats at the top and joining up making it even more bloated (and winning more, so more come, rinse, wash, repeat) etc. because, go figure, they want the rewards.

TL;DR
At the end of the day, I don't agree with multi-unit farming collectives, and for that much I would -almost- support smaller unit caps, at the very least to have more honest in-game tourney results (which sub unit did the best? Who knows with a collective, they all get the goodies) in theory.

In practice the problem is that I don't think it will meaningfully make any impact except for tourney results. Really, though there just needs to be better incentives for small units to come out and play (there aren't -any- right now in CW) and some way of rewarding those who want to play more like a decisive targetted strike, rather than a carpet bombing. Right now, unless you're a crazy good and competitive small unit, or one giant bloated farming collective, you're pretty much in a no-man's land.

CW itself needs some top down heavy tweaking moreso than a bandaid fix of unit number caps, huge unit collectives are a symptom, not a cause. Until then, meh. Get used to super units being seen as a CW form of cancer and only becoming more common, and small units continuing to fell like CW shits on them even when doing well in the drops they do get if they're not crazy active.

Edited by Moebius Pi, 03 August 2015 - 01:17 AM.

[Kageru Ikazuchi]

Moebius Pi, on 03 August 2015 - 01:07 AM, said:

Unless I missed a post regarding it, I think there is a fair bit of rose tinted glasses and avoiding an elephant in the room regarding some other potential reasons they want to incentivize smaller groups.

First, in general, I agree with more of your comments ... I hope they focus on the "incentive" part. If a group wants to stay big, no problem, they just miss out on some of the better rewards or opportunities that a smaller unit might have.

[50 50]

Population of units, or more importantly the distribution of the player base across the factions can be self managed with the right incentives and costs.
http://mwomercs.com/...s-units-and-us/

Using a population count combined with a base salary for the loyalists would work.
Changes to the contracts, the addition of logistical costs and an appropriate performance rating/rank system will achieve a balance for the mercenary units.

Firstly, what we need is for an optimal population size to be set for each faction. This can also be measured
by how many battalions this may translate into for that faction as a tier system so extra functionality can be built into it as needed.
How would it work?
Say for example that the optimum population for any one faction is 108 to 180 players or 3 to 5 battalions.
At this level, players earn a base salary of 50,000 c-bills per match they participate in. (Please note that I am just throwing these numbers out there).
As the player numbers increase in that faction, the base salary decreases as the faction cannot support as many players.
Likewise for factions that have a low player count, they earn more if it is below the optimum level.
This will help regulate the house and clan unit sizes.
An important aspect to have is to allow both the population/battalion count and the base salary be easily adjustable.
It will help to work out the balance, also allow for factions to be different and importantly allow PGI to provide incentives and bonuses for events.
ie. It's a time of war, the faction is paying more and raising more battalions to fight for their cause, increasing base pay etc etc.

This dynamic scale will help the player base shift into different factions and spread out as everyone wants to earn the optimal amount of c-bills.

There are other aspects to the problem, but I believe this would be simple to implement and resolve part of the issue.

[Moebius Pi]

I actually like this suggestion in part, though it would have to comprehensively address LP issues as well to be viable; LP rewards was one of, if not the primary factor in creating the great migrations we've seen. You'd need to implement a differentiation between Loyalists and Mercs and how they gain it before you'd see the C-bills being weighed in as a factor.

You can grind pug matches blazingly fast to get c-bills far faster than CW (assuming you have some skill, that much more if you snag a decent Hero), especially when slow queue times are afoot. Until that changes more (as well as CW being more friendly to new players, because right now you may as well have a solo and group queue for it before it'll remotely start appealing to the new blood) the c-bill incentive isn't very high of a draw.

You'd need the end of match rewards for a win to be on par with 30 mins of pug grinding before you'd see that shift populations, which currently it doesn't. In tandem with buffed c-bill earnings though it might suffice to get more players doing it.

Unfortunately, dynamic LP (which initially would also seem like an alright idea) would just result in being the first to mad dash to an underrepresented faction to reap the most rewards quick, then get out just as fast before it starts hitting critical numbers in the current setup. Even regarding dynamic c-bills you get the same issue; it favours Mercs, not Loyalists, and you see barren Factions specifically when big merc units jump ship for greener pastures with a large amount of consistentcy (or when they hammer the crap out of a particular loyalist faction out of internal squabbles in some cases).

I think it goes right back to the issues between Loyalist and Merc all over again, and a lack of true differentiation. It'd just mean folks taking shorter contracts to jump ship. If the LP rewards and c-bills favoured being a loyalist more, you'd see far more units sticking with and defending one faction and bolstering the numbers without migrating like a flock of grab-ass seagulls in part.

The issue then becomes what happens if you're a late comer and all the factions have their early loyalist groups and the newcomer is stuck with the dregs for rewards :/ I suppose it creates an "all faction being equal situation", or alternatively pushes folks to go merc, and whether that's a positive or a negative, I couldn't guess currently with the system being much more fleshed out.

[Livewyr]

Considering that Mercstar is an alliance of units as it is... (I'm taking a week off from Mercstar while they finish their current tour) ...and they have a fluid join/leave agreement with most of their units, what do you suppose a "breakup" is going to do?

I don't know for sure, but I suspect you'll see -MS-, -MS2,-MS3 etc...

Which doesn't matter considering you don't need to be in a unit for CW as it is. It is faction centric.

EDIT: It wouldn't even remotely effect anything, since everyone in the faction can group up.

Quite possibly, the only change you would see, is instead of -MS- on all the planets, you would see -MS-, -MS1, -MS2,-MS3 on all of the planets, and people would know, it's still MercStar making the faction move.

Edited by Livewyr, 04 August 2015 - 07:28 AM.

[KinLuu]

Livewyr, on 04 August 2015 - 07:22 AM, said:

Quite possibly, the only change you would see, is instead of -MS- on all the planets, you would see -MS-, -MS1, -MS2,-MS3 on all of the planets, and people would know, it's still MercStar making the faction move.

Correct.

But once owning planets starts to actually matter, the MS subdivisions would have to compete with each other over a sparse ressource.

This will be known as the Great MercStar War.

[Livewyr]

KinLuu, on 04 August 2015 - 07:42 AM, said:

Correct.

But once owning planets starts to actually matter, the MS subdivisions would have to compete with each other over a sparse ressource.

This will be known as the Great MercStar War.

Not really.

They had the 100 member unit limit in WoT, yes, but there were multi(sub)group units that just balanced assets so everyone got equal share. (If there was a parcel that was just straight superior.. they worked out a time share)

It made little impact, except for the elite units. (Getting into MLP was a bear, but worth it.)

[50 50]

Sure.
I don't think a unit cap is going to do much.
Organised units will just split up a co-ordinate at a different level.

Loyalty points should only be available for those units which take on the permanent contracts with a faction.
It shouldn't even be considered a contract.
Mercenaries need their own reputation and performance ranking separate to what loyalist units use.
This ranking has a direct impact on the mercenary unit's contracts.
That whole feature needs an overhaul so it will be interesting to see what is announced in terms of the notoriety scale that was mentioned for the Mercs.
However, that's more of a discussion in regards to what makes the mercenaries different to the loyalists and is a pretty big subject on it's own.

Specifically regarding the unit sizes.
When initially looking to become a loyalist of a faction, a bit of a summary about the faction, their current population/number of battalions and base c-bill wage will let players flick through the list to pick one that is more profitable to them. We can expect players to pick a particular faction, because it is their favourite and that's fine. But this will help the population distribute themselves across the factions.
The important part is that the population numbers and base wage can be easily adjusted to allow for events, but more to allow for changes in the overall number of players in MWO.
BUT, this has nothing to do with mercenaries.
What will self regulate the unit sizes for mercenaries is costs.
Initially I would think that a simple logistics cost would do the trick. This is a cost to transport mechs to a battle... a dropship/jumpship cost if you will.
There could also be a maintenance cost/member.
The unit coffers come into play here.
But you can't really delve too far into these ideas without thinking about the contracts for mercenaries.... and again, that's a pretty big subject on it's own.

There are a lot of features that tie together for community warfare so while it's good to look at a particular aspect, we must also consider the other features that will be affected.
CW could be an absolutely epic mode for MWO, I hope we get there!