18 replies to this topic

[Pariah Devalis]

Yeah, PGI has been neglecting the lore aspects of the universe pretty heavily for a while now. I hold out hope they will reconsider that, but the lore really adds to things. That said, they are planning on improvements to Community Warfare soon ™ that might address a few concerns about the autonomy of merc units.

For a little while there, too, Clan drop decks in CW had 10 less tons available than IS drop decks, but that was because PGI felt the IS needed the extra weight for balance. In practice, those 10 extra tons did bubkis and, combined with the quirkening that saw IS mechs become far more equal with the clan holy trinity, eventually PGI decided to revert that tonnage advantage for the IS. Many tears were shed because apparently a whole 10 tons spread across four mechs was more valuable than proper teamwork. Whatever.

I would personally love to see some truly hardcore CW. Certain factions having access only to certain mech chassis (though that would require a few more Clan mechs be released first - enter people screaming about "no more mechs, more content!"), a CW only repair and rearm, a CW only salvage system, an actual reason to attack planet B over planet A, and true 10v12 Clan vs IS games where the Clan mechs are not neutered as badly as they are currently. Maybe one day some aspects of that will be utilized.

[Narcissistic Martyr]

There's apparently some match maker code issue that won't easily let them do 10v12 drops.

Clan contracts exist mainly to give player groups a chance to play both their IS and clan mechs because PGI didn't split the account into clan and IS pilots. They really should, but they won't bother.

[Lugh]

Narcissistic Martyr, on 29 July 2015 - 05:25 AM, said:

There's apparently some match maker code issue that won't easily let them do 10v12 drops.

Clan contracts exist mainly to give player groups a chance to play both their IS and clan mechs because PGI didn't split the account into clan and IS pilots. They really should, but they won't bother.

Again your math is incorrect it would be 10 v 16 to stay true to lore. 2 Stars v 4 Lances. And to do that Clan mechs would need to be even more powerful than they are now. And the whining and the crying would reach levels that would solve California's drought in a heartbeat.

[Shredhead]

Mopar, on 29 July 2015 - 05:00 AM, said:

I was with MWO at the start and played until shortly after open beta. At the time I left because I was not happy with the direction the devs seemed to be going. The Meat game seemed stalled while bobble heads seemed to be the order of the day.

Almost 2 weeks ago a friend asked me to come game with him on and I figured why not, it was a LAN event so maybe a day or two would be fine. Since that time I have put in quite a bit of play time and wanted to share my thoughts and see how others felt.

The game has definitely expanded with a lot more mechs and more maps. CW has begun and we see the start of the Meat game we so longed for in the early days.

Overall I am really happy with the game and excited to play again but there is still one, fairly major flaw I see and I am wondering if it will be addressed.

Mechwarrior is a game built on decades of balancing and so is a really great game, MWO is building from the base and so should see the same level of balance with some tweaking for real time play. However a large part of that balance was not just the game mechanics but the story behind it and I am seeing that being ignore.

For example, ANY CLAN that hired mercs, allowed them to contract for them would be seen as weak and pathetic by the other clans. They would in fact all turn on that clan to wipe it out, as being unworthy to exist. Yet in the current CW I am let to believe anyone can take a clan contract. Clans did not offer contracts, you where either a member of the clan or not, no middle ground.

Further once you swore to a clan you where there for life. Leaving a clan by choice meant you never came back. So the entire clan and merc system to me seems to be currently broken.

Additionally Clans seldom dropped equal tonnage or number of mechs when fighting inner sphere. While this was a story plot it was also a game mechanic. Clan mechs have superior weapons until later in the story, the lower tonnage and numbers meant more balanced comb at. From a story perspective clanners felt any one of their pilots where worth 2 or 3 of the IS pilots and to drop on equal or even superior terms was dishonorable and a show of weakness to clanners.

All of this tied to not just being story but creating a game balance and I am curious if we will see the story properly implemented in some way within the game mechanic for CW?

On a similar note, I know the balancing for the match maker for CW is still being worked on and I might be rehashing material. It seems every drop ends the same with one side having a 8 to 12 man team and the other being a PUG. This is not in anyway going to encourage people to do CW.

A simple solution to me would be to have two match makers running. The first will only match up teams of two lances and above. Would be cool if the smaller team, say a 10 vs 12 could get a tonnage boost to compensate. But in essence keeps PUGs out, teams only. Then a second group that is one lance or less, thus allowing pugs, even using AI to fill in it needed.

This would make CW more balanced and funner for everyone I would think.

Anyway thanks for reading and would love to hear others thoughts in the community.

Lore this, lore that, it doesn't matter here. You know what would happen if you wouldn't allow Clans to hire mercs? They wouldn't even get out of their initial four planets zone. The big equalizer in CW are and always will be the merc corps, as they have the better pilots, more experience and willingness to adapt than 98% of the loyalist units.
With mercs PGI can control the flow by giving monetary incentives to support weak factions on a weekly basis, which balances out bad and/or numerically inferior factions.
Also, nobody wants to play as cannon fodder in inferior mechs just to make some role players happy. This is a game where every mech is controlled by one individual, not a whole company.

Edited by Shredhead, 29 July 2015 - 05:35 AM.

[Paigan]

AFAIK any division of matchmaking is a bad thing because of the low player base.
Otherwise, the "two lance or more" idea would be a nice thing, I guess.


And about balance, if I may once again:

In my opinion, balance should be done not by magical "make Lostech better than High-Tech" quirks (like 150% range or >250% dps ... magic!) but by:
- Only slight quirks and negative ones as well (to give mechs more "character")
- To compensate IS mechs with WAY more modules, consumables (mines, ammo packs, etc. of course cheaper than they are now) to give them more tactical potential and "tinkering" (or "outside the box"), clans with less or none at all (rigidly restrained or "out of the box")
- Also to compensate much higher IS drop tonnage. Not just 10 tons, but something like +25% or +50% even.

it would be SO simple. Everything doable just by XML and very elegant in both faction identity and lore.

Edited by Paigan, 29 July 2015 - 05:37 AM.

[Pariah Devalis]

Lugh, on 29 July 2015 - 05:30 AM, said:

Again your math is incorrect it would be 10 v 16 to stay true to lore. 2 Stars v 4 Lances. And to do that Clan mechs would need to be even more powerful than they are now. And the whining and the crying would reach levels that would solve California's drought in a heartbeat.

Exactly why corerule is: Gameplay over Tabletop. If you introduce a slight buff to Clan mechs across the board, 12vs10 is feasible. Three lances vs two stars.

If you went 16v10, I don't honestly think you could balance that unless you were approaching double damage per clan weapon, just because of focused fire and numerical advantages adding up. This is, after all, not tabletop where shots are randomized on location. Real players putting aimed shots into people's CT will drop stupidly buffed Clan mechs extremely fast.


Edit:

It might be a good idea, however, to introduce split stats. Public queue stats, mechs are equal. In CW, to facilitate asymmetrical teams, give the weapon systems or mechs quirks that only function in Community Warfare.

Edited by Pariah Devalis, 29 July 2015 - 05:38 AM.

[Anjian]

10 vs 12 is a horrendous idea. A lot of things in lore and table top were not devised for video game creation. Mechwarrior suffers from this legacy baggage; the best video game creations benefit from designing based on clean fresh slates where everything from top to bottom, can be designed part by part to meet a fully focused purpose.

Clans will be finding and deploying into matches faster. Win or lose, they will be rotating ingame revenue faster and a faster game revenute rate will cause a greater population shift. Premades are also easier to create and deploy.

IS is not dragged by less numbers, they are dragged down by higher numbers of less experienced, less resourced players on their side.

We have tried putting inferior numbers of superior warships vs superior numbers of inferior warships in WoWS. The superior warships still win. Lately their matchmaker has dropped that implementation.

Even more superior Clan mechs can also profoundly affect the results of the main public queue matches.

We need games to be as elegantly symmetrical as possible.

Edited by Anjian, 29 July 2015 - 05:50 AM.

[Dracol]

Pariah Devalis, on 29 July 2015 - 05:36 AM, said:

Exactly why corerule is: Gameplay over Tabletop. If you introduce a slight buff to Clan mechs across the board, 12vs10 is feasible. Three lances vs two stars.

I would say, due to human nature, 12 v 10 is not feasible. As Shredhead stated, in MWO you only control 1 mech, unlike table top which is designed for 1 player to control multiple mechs. This fundamental difference between MWO and TT makes having Clan mechs as powerful as lore would have it unfeasible.

The simple fact of the matter is, every Joe mechwarrior would choose Clan mechs due to the fact they are superior. Only a very small percentage of players would choose a mech that is at min. 17% less effective (10 v 12) or 38% less effective (10 v 16).


When a player only gets one mech to pilot at a time, even the smallest disadvantage is avoided. Making the inter IS mech force inferior would just make it so no one would take IS mechs over Clan, ever.

[Shad0wsFury]

It seems like a lot of lore stuff gets thrown out in the name of (better?) gameplay and balance.

I think a lot of the things you bring up are valid points, and as a fellow longtime BattleTech nerd, I fully support them. But, I'm pretty sure PGI has already written-off a lot of your ideas because they're essentially too hard to accomplish technologically, or they claim they lack the userbase in MWO to improve certain things like matchmaking.

I'm not a programmer, and it's been 15 years since I worked in IT, so to be fair I can't even comprehend how hard it would be to implement 12v10 drops in just CW, but apparently it's a lot harder than my feeble non-programming mind can comprehend.

As far as the lore aspects of how the clans behave an operate, there is the practical consideration that for someone totally unfamiliar with BattleTech, the clans and their rules wouldn't make any sense, especially compared to the other IS and merc factions who would probably still operate without a complex rule structure that involves things like Zellbrigen and whatnot. Imagine what would happen to a player totally unfamiliar with BattleTech who stumbled upon MWO, started playing for a month or so under an IS faction, then decided to switch to a clan faction (even if there's no takebacksies allowed), without understanding all of what being CLAN means. At the very least that new player would probably be frustrated trying to lean (or being forced to conform) to a bunch of rules they don't understand. At worst that new player would say "F this" and leave MWO behind forever.

All that aside, I too left shortly after beta ended, also unhappy with the direction the game was headed as well as the slow release schedule of key features like CW. I have been back active for probably 6-ish weeks. While I'm happy to see a lot of progress in some areas, I'm pretty shocked by the lack of progress in others. The new maps are mostly great, and CW has promise, even if it's currently pretty broken, and the balance passes have been reasonable. Despite all this, there is still a glaring imbalance between Clans and IS. Even though the IS has a few super-quirked mechs that can outperform many clan mechs, for every one useful IS mech there are at least five that are sub-par or worse, plus the clan mechs are generally more mobile and don't die instantly from a side-torso death with an XL. I'm also sort of disturbed to see a lot of problems still remain with people leeching (getting rewarded for being afk in a match). Probably worst for me is the ELO system, which has never worked particularly well for MWO, still being used instead of a more robust matchmaking system.

I know PGI is working on a lot of this stuff (or at least looking at it). I'm hoping that the improvements they have made are enough to keep me around this time. When my frustrations at ongoing issues and the seeming lack of progress on them begin to out-weigh my enjoyment playing MWO, it will be time for me to step out again, but I'm hoping that doesn't happen this time around.

[Soy]

Anjian, on 29 July 2015 - 05:46 AM, said:

10 vs 12 is a horrendous idea.

No, it would've been the best way to balance Clan v IS if lore is being considered.

Btw you completely ignored the notion that incentives could exist in order to facilitate population equilibrium / pendulum balance as far as a CW-based persistant state universe is concerned.

Dracol, on 29 July 2015 - 05:48 AM, said:

When a player only gets one mech to pilot at a time, even the smallest disadvantage is avoided. Making the inter IS mech force inferior would just make it so no one would take IS mechs over Clan, ever.

More conjecture.

I still am waiting to see a ************ post why 12v10 is not a legit way to make an online BT/MW FPS.

Been waiting for years.

[Rebas Kradd]

Pariah Devalis, on 29 July 2015 - 05:25 AM, said:

Yeah, PGI has been neglecting the lore aspects of the universe pretty heavily for a while now. I hold out hope they will reconsider that, but the lore really adds to things.

For you and me, perhaps. But asking a player to be limited to one faction for his entire career in MWO isn't exactly a good idea from a gamer perspective, and they do have to think about players coming in from outside the lore. That's the kind of decision that falls in line with the 3PV, consumables, and lane-y maps decisions...they just make sense.

[Pariah Devalis]

Rebas Kradd, on 29 July 2015 - 08:53 AM, said:

For you and me, perhaps. But asking a player to be limited to one faction for his entire career in MWO isn't exactly a good idea from a gamer perspective, and they do have to think about players coming in from outside the lore. That's the kind of decision that falls in line with the 3PV, consumables, and lane-y maps decisions...they just make sense.

I donno. They could do "seasons" pretty easily. Works in other F2P. If PGI wants to lock the timeline within a certain range, you could have 3 month seasons of CW. Once you're in a faction, you stay in that faction, unless you are a merc, in which case you follow the money but can't play for the Clans.

The catch is many people don't like seasons as they feel it undermines the progress. Doing it that way, however, lets the game have its own integrated "league," though. I mean, CW is "hardcore" mode, right? Either it is hardcore or it isn't. Having flexibility like we do now undermines the hardcore aspects of it.

Edited by Pariah Devalis, 29 July 2015 - 08:56 AM.

[Soy]

To suggest that every single player, individually and collectively, would want to cut every single corner possible, and that is the rationality behind 'nobody would want to play IS' in a therotical 10v12 game mode.......................... is to suggest that everyone only plays games on Easy difficulty, etc.

Which, I'm sure upon realizing, is obviously not the case or even remotely close to the desire of a vast and diverse playerbase.

That being said I do respect the notion of 'symmetrical' warfare as it relates to gaming. I really do.

But BT is not symmetrical. Never. Ever. So this game is in fact an anamoly as far as lore + balance is concerned, imo.

Edited by Soy, 29 July 2015 - 09:03 AM.

[Revis Volek]

Lugh, on 29 July 2015 - 05:30 AM, said:

Again your math is incorrect it would be 10 v 16 to stay true to lore. 2 Stars v 4 Lances. And to do that Clan mechs would need to be even more powerful than they are now. And the whining and the crying would reach levels that would solve California's drought in a heartbeat.

Not to mention the Solo queue would go bye bye or have to be divided into Clan v Clan and IS v IS due to balance issues. People keep asking for this "Ermegawd bercuse Lure!" But they dont understand that this destroys mech to mech balance and would just be an eruption on the forums of Clan OP.

No one wants to be cannon fodder.....you are a fool if you think it would be fun to get a few kills across 4 mechs in CW when the Clan side is plowing down mechs and having to take trips to the bank mid drop to deposit those Cbills.

[Widowmaker1981]

Soy, on 29 July 2015 - 09:02 AM, said:

To suggest that every single player, individually and collectively, would want to cut every single corner possible, and that is the rationality behind 'nobody would want to play IS' in a therotical 10v12 game mode.......................... is to suggest that everyone only plays games on Easy difficulty, etc.

Yes but it IS probably fair to say that, when only given the chance to play one side or another for their entire career, a much higher percentage of people are going to choose the side with the highest individual potential. Thats very definitely the way i would bet the population would swing. I shouldnt have to explain the obvious problem with that..

You say you could offer 'incentives' to get people to essentially choose to be cannon fodder, elaborate please? Earnings related incentives are.. not going to cut it imo, because money means nothing when actually ingame.

[Soy]

individual potential power is not the same thing as individual potential satisfaction.

for example if i said "IS is more fun" in that scenario, now what. quantify that [well, try].

btw what does population even have to do with anything. when you say 'population would swing' what you mean is 'momentum would swing'.

pendulum isn't easy swing without hand of god mechanics, but, it can be done.

[Mister Blastman]

OP, know just one thing, this game, unlike any other, can cause ridiculous amounts of explosive rage. Sorry, it isn't the game, it is the type of humanoids attracted to this game! For some strange reason big stompy robots attract timid cowards.

[MountainCopper]

Mopar, on 29 July 2015 - 05:00 AM, said:

Anyway thanks for reading and would love to hear others thoughts in the community.

I say, stay away. I have been with game for 2 years, and the fun playing it steadily decreased. Too numerous the issues to name here, I just hope they game falls flat on its face if ever presented to the Steam community consisting largely out of non-Mechwarrior players.

[Widowmaker1981]

Soy, on 29 July 2015 - 10:29 AM, said:

individual potential power is not the same thing as individual potential satisfaction.

In a game where the primary motivation is blowing up enemy robots, which it is always going to be, id argue that individual potential power is the same thing as individual potential satisfaction, at least for competitive people - and most gamers are competitive people (that is, they generally like to win).

Soy, on 29 July 2015 - 10:29 AM, said:

for example if i said "IS is more fun" in that scenario, now what. quantify that [well, try].

nicely evaded.. so.. like me, no idea then?

Soy, on 29 July 2015 - 10:29 AM, said:

btw what does population even have to do with anything. when you say 'population would swing' what you mean is 'momentum would swing'.

pendulum isn't easy swing without hand of god mechanics, but, it can be done.

No i mean population, as in there would be more people playing clan, and thus clan would have a higher population.