285 replies to this topic

[Kael Posavatz]

Russ said at the last town hall that large units were a problem, and that ideal unit size was 100-150 persons.

If large units are a problem, why was this event designed to cater to--if not encourage the formation of--larger units?

[McHoshi]

BattleHymn, on 02 July 2015 - 07:52 AM, said:

You may not have noticed the scoring was modified this time around to reward quantity and quality:




A unit that is winning will DOUBLE the score of a unit that is playing well enough to get 80-points individually but lose the match, not to mention units that lose the match without making the 80-point minimum.

This means units that have above average participation AND win rate will absolutely outscale teams with just above average participation OR win rate.

It's possible those "big units with real bad players", might not be as terrible collectively as popularly imagined.

Edit: Do note that there are medium sized units doing very well, outscoring much larger units as well.

Ok Ok, but the biggest Unit around doesn´t got the best player base... but is outscoring all the others !!! -MS- <--- They aren´t that good just too big !!!

[Kageru Ikazuchi]

Quote

This is as designed, large units need to protect their planets.

Where's my giant bucket of popcorn? This is going to be awesome!

So, for the past two months, -MS- has been tagging planets on nearly every active front. If one team successfully defends against one attack on one of these planets, -MS- may not detect the attack, and may not be able to participate in the defense, and they will lose the tag, and a Planetary Conquest point. If the planet is currently contested between two IS factions, they literally cannot do anything about it, and they lose a Planetary Conquest point.

This is "as designed"?

I'm not especially happy about the design, but this is going to be supremely entertaining.

Edited by Kageru Ikazuchi, 02 July 2015 - 04:19 PM.

[Deathlike]

Tina has essentially uttered the words, "Working as intended™".

You have to commit to every defense of a planet until it can't be attacked. Good luck with that.

[Chemie]

Deathlike, on 02 July 2015 - 05:43 PM, said:

Tina has essentially uttered the words, "Working as intended™".

You have to commit to every defense of a planet until it can't be attacked. Good luck with that.

You even have to defend planets you can't possibly defend.

[Kageru Ikazuchi]

It does level the playing field a bit between the large units and smaller units. (Or at the very least, tilt the playing fields differently for different sized units.)

If anything, the event favors loyalist units over mercenaries.

Large units will have to work harder to maintain a positive "planets gained" rate. It's going to be an interesting weekend.

Edited by Kageru Ikazuchi, 02 July 2015 - 05:56 PM.

[Deathlike]

Chemie, on 02 July 2015 - 05:46 PM, said:

You even have to defend planets you can't possibly defend.

Had that happen to us (although probably not in your particular situation).

Familiarizing with the behavior of the event rules took a day to figure out as we "wasted" Day 1 of the event.

Adjustments were made.. unfortunately after the fact.

[QueenBlade]

Tina Benoit, on 02 July 2015 - 03:48 PM, said:

This is as designed, large units need to protect their planets.

So what does small units need to do? Just let their planets go?

[QueenBlade]

Also this isn't an "as designed" to go against Large units. This is against merc units. No matter what the size of the unit, its design goes against merc units. While loyalist units don't have to worry since all their planets are in one faction.

Should go and change the name of the url from mwomercs to mwoloyalists

[Hydrocarbon]

The problem is the majority of planets owned by big units are wayyyyyy out of the current hotspots. The anti-supergroup idea would work if their planets were selected proportionately to the "market share" of tagged planets they own. IE if you have 20 tags out of 200 tagged planets, you get attacked 10% of the time.

[Cranky Puppy]

All this work to get to TERRA by the Clans.....Clan Wolf already surrounds TERRA with other planets they conquered.
One thing Clans never counted on is..... if they can TAKE TERRA. Its not up to the CLANS....its up to PGI to allow it be a battle ground.
I guess we are going to BETA 3 now...and everything gets reset again.

[Evingolis]

This is the way game designers try to inspire loyality to faction? Not by rewarding unit that is staying with one faction but by punishing one switching between houses and clans. Interesting.

[Speedy Plysitkos]

Clowns. nothing more. You know what i mean.

[quantaca]

McHoshi, on 02 July 2015 - 04:06 PM, said:

Ok Ok, but the biggest Unit around doesn´t got the best player base... but is outscoring all the others !!! -MS- &lt;--- They aren´t that good just too big !!!

Now mchoshi i can safely say that while we do have a good number of newer/less experienced or just casual players that get mixed in to A. Form 12 mans and B. Balance out those 12 mans, so you'll almost never face a true comp team or even 12 comp players on the same drop unless they are the only ones online, but even then you'll find that most of the MS players are more than up to the task, and i am sure that if you wish to see the real strength of MS you are more than welcome to challenge MS or even just any of the subunits to a scrim.

Ive faced BO a few times and i have to say certainly not a bad unit but really not as scary as facing any 228th KCOM or VRGD team, we dont say oh crap its BO better pull out your A-game.

And just for the record, i myself am not even near a comp lvl player. And well we certainly are not the biggest unit out there i believe we are like number 5 or something, its somewhere in the BoT stats if you really like to find it the number 1 group has 150 more members now the question is are they all still playing and how much... that i cant answer but MS is quite active

Now enough of this talking and more of that fighting, hope to see you out there some day.
good luck and have fun

Edited by quantaca, 03 July 2015 - 05:00 AM.

[TheStrider]

Would be nice if they listed your unit score after the top 5 for those who aren't in the top 5. Kinda like they do with the leader boards when you aren't in the top 10/20 etc.

[ScarecrowES]

I have no idea if anyone has said this already, as I'm not reading 9 pages worth of responses to find it...

But in the future, PGI, if you have an event like this again... only count planets won DURING THE EVENT against units if those are then lost during the event.

Right now, you're counting losses of planets that were won weeks prior to the event against the units that won them originally. This is producing a system where one faction (in this case Clan Wolf) is actually playing forward to Terra, while every other faction on that faction's borders are attacking and cannabilizing planets well back from the front lines. The change in hands of those rear planets is counting as a win for the carrion eaters, and against the faction on the front lines.

This is a big problem, as it puts the goals of your tournament at complete odds with the goals of CW in general. The units placing highest in the tourney are the ones losing ground to Terra in CW overall, and that makes no sense. Successful units are being punished. It also doesn't make any sense why those planets so far back in the lines are even available to attack in the first place (which speaks more to the problems in CW than anything).

EDIT: Having read back a page or two, it seems like I'm not alone in expressing this.

Edited by ScarecrowES, 03 July 2015 - 10:32 AM.

[ScarecrowES]

Tina Benoit, on 02 July 2015 - 03:48 PM, said:

This is as designed, large units need to protect their planets.

Not possible when factions can attack planets with your tag on them that you are not allowed to defend. Planets that changed hands before the event should not be included in the event. Sorry... all you're doing is punishing units that have been successful prior to the event while rewarding less successful units that choose to cannabilize the successful ones while those units continue on-task.

For future events, please make sure that your tournament goals align with those of the game mode the tournament is for.

[BattleHymn]

Tina Benoit, on 02 July 2015 - 03:48 PM, said:

This is as designed, large units need to protect their planets.

I'm not sure if there was some miscommunication of the issue here. How does a unit protect planets it no longer has access to defend by design? Should merc units no longer be tied to IS or Clan in order to be able to drop on both sides to preserve this design? Or perhaps have the reset cooldown nullified for units that have planets on both IS and Clan sides, so that they may switch factions to defend?

Or perhaps this means that units that play CW actively outside of events should drop tags before every CW event to reform in order to prevent this from occurring by design?

While it's a popular sentiment of the community to rag on large units like -MS- (since they seem to be most affected by this "design" quirk), it's legitimately unclear what this intent or consistency of this "design" is supposed to be?

It was not in any announcement of this event, and the mechanics of this "design" (now exposed half way through by self-driven investigation of 228 and -MS- only due to odd scoreboard behavior) are quite counter-intuitive, imho, seems more like a case of unforeseen (nor intended) complications of the currently implemented scoring algorithm.

It'd be nice to have another post from Tina regarding what the intended design is, and how this is supposed to work going forward, so that appropriate measures (such as possibly not playing CW or perhaps just not invading planets before events come up) can be taken ahead of time.

Edit: There does not seem to be any implication of planets prior to the event counting towards the planetary conquest objective, though it does not explicitly rule them out (since it doesn't say anything about having to capture these planets DURING the event, just by the end of the event):

Quote

• There are two Planetary Conquest Challenge Leaderboards: one for Inner Sphere, one for Clan.
  
• The more Planets Captured and Held by a Unit by the end of the Event, the higher that Unit will place in the Planetary Conquest Leaderboards.
  
• The top five Units that Capture and Hold the most planets by the end of the Event will be ranked on their respective Planetary Conquest Leaderboards.
  
• The Unit that Captures and Holds the most planets by the end of the Event will be considered the winner.
  
• In the event of a tie between Units for the number of Planets Captured and Held by the end of the Event, the winner be decided by the total number of Event Points those Units have achieved.
  
• Unit pilots must have earned a minimum of 10 Unit Event Points by the end of the Event in order to qualify for receiving any eligible rewards from their Units placement in the Planetary Conquest Challenge.

And even we are to assume that the planets prior to the event do count, then why are only the losses of these (impossible to defend) planets being tallied, and not the capture/ownership of them, which would then be consistent of a working design. All things considered, this appears to be more an oversight than a working as designed case.

Edited by BattleHymn, 03 July 2015 - 10:46 AM.

[Thumper3]

What I find impressive is, 9 pages......and all the hate against this event and no one has mentioned the other bone headed mis-step. The non-incentive rewards, the poorly structured point basis, whatever......this event was announced with barely a week's notice over a holiday weekend. WTH?

Even if I WANTED to grind away my weekend going to be kind of hard to do with the fact that IT'S A FREAKING HOLIDAY. Yes, it's only a holiday for the Americans but last I checked that was the LARGEST player base right?

I can't wait for the grind event taking place on Thanksgiving.

Daemonhunter, on 30 June 2015 - 07:09 PM, said:

3. Events like this will not increase long-term participation in Community Warfare

This event will likely see a temporary surge of participation from the super-units competing with each other, but that will die off as soon as the event ends. If anything, overall CW participation may fall to even lower levels if more solo and small-unit players feel put-off by the hostile environment which this event is liable to exacerbate. What CW really needs in order to grow is novel gameplay, and in that regard I'm certainly looking forward to Phase 3 and beyond.

Agreed.

PGI screws up, it's what they do, but they are slowly stumbling in the right direction at least. Still the best Battletech game out there, although not sure how long that will be enough.

What's sad is all they really need for a huge boost in community acceptance is to make a rewards system for owning planets. Extra game types, new maps, etc....all would be a minor roadbump if only THERE WERE SOME REWARD FOR OWNING A PLANET. There's a ton of other issues, yes, but if they could just get that done it would be a full game, just missing some minor features. But without any REASON to assault or defend a planet really it's just an unfinished game mode with only a few features.

Smith Gibson, on 01 July 2015 - 11:59 AM, said:

I paid my $30 to be a veteran founder and have never spent a single dollar more on this game. In some twisted kind of "must get my money's worth" obsession I have, I keep checking on the game to see if the next event will get me any closer to feeling like I haven't been cheated, and can finally say we are even.

<SNIP>

...Until I've finally gotten my money's worth...

Dude, how LITTLE do you value your TIME? I mean, playing since closed Beta? Right around 4 years? For $30? On any assumption of your play time that means you value your time less than like a penny an hour. If you are that miserable man just walk away, $30 dollars for 4 years.......

[Darwins Dog]

TheStrider, on 03 July 2015 - 09:22 AM, said:

Would be nice if they listed your unit score after the top 5 for those who aren't in the top 5. Kinda like they do with the leader boards when you aren't in the top 10/20 etc.

I agree with you, although I'm told it may just be me. A few of the people in my unit can apparently see our standing. Seemed to be about 50/50 last night.