34 replies to this topic

[Spheroid]

I have been thinking a great deal about ways to enhance CW flavor. I believe that introducing two varibles to the mech selection process will massively improve variety and game play.

While keeping the overall tonnage limits I believe there should be added a faction loyalty number (L) and a cheese variable (C) number.

Loyalty is simple, a number that is between -10 and +10 for each faction. Lets say Davion is dropping against an enemy. The drop deck is a Raven-3L(-10), Enforcer-4R(+10), Victor-9B(9), Orion (-2). The Raven cancels the Enforcer and the Victor is more common than semi universal Orion. The overall number is greater than zero so it is faction representative of the forces of Federated Suns.


The other variable is the cheese factor. Certain mechs are flatout better for CW than others. By combining cheese with loyalty many of the power decks will become invalid. Three Thunderbolts-5SS will be too Lyran for most factions and too powerful for Steiner. If you have very high loyalty value you can offset with a foreign lemon like the Vindicator-1X to reduce the cheese. This self balancing system prevents one house from becoming dominate. I would give each omni pod a value so the total score would be a composite of all the parts as assembled.

Three Stormcrows and a Timberwolf is a similar OP drop deck. The Stormcrows have a high Jaguar loyalty so they can offset getting a lemon like the Wolf Ice Ferret. The option of going Myst Lynx exists but that is heavily underweight.


As it stands now Clans can have an awesome deck with only two chassis. The Inner Sphere only a few more. If we forced mech collecting as a means to enable drop deck combinations the motivaton to forever keep collecting would be present. The perfect drop deck could be many thousands of combinations requiring the acquisition of both effective and terrible builds depending on your faction.

As for noobs and the poor I offer two possible solutions. First trial mechs would not count against any faction's (L) numbers. Secondly there are a great many generalist mechs used by all factions. For instance the Wolverine-6R is fairly meta.



Davion
meta mechs: Jager-DD,BJ-1X
lemons: Victors, Blackjacks, Centurion-9D

Liao:
meta mechs : none
lemons: numerous

Marik:
meta mechs: Banshee-3M
lemons: spiders, Cicadas, Orions?

Steiner:
meta mechs: Firestarter, Thunderbolt-5SS
lemons: Commando

Kurita:
meta mechs: Dragon-1N, Wolverine-6K, Jager-DD Mauler?
lemons: numerous

FRR
meta mechs: King Crab?
lemons: I.S. general

Jade Falcon:
meta mechs: Hellbringer?
lemons: Kit Fox, Summoner

Clan Wolf:
meta mechs: Timber God, Dire God
lemons: Adder, Ice Ferret, Gargoyle

Ghost Bears:
meta mechs : none
lemons: Stormcrow-C, Executioner, Dragonfly

Smoke Jaguars:
meta mechs: numerous
lemons: Myst Lynx

Edited by Spheroid, 06 September 2015 - 05:44 PM.

[Chagatay]

Interesting, but not sure everyone would go along with this. I would be ok with it.

To sum up his points you basically have an independent 2-axis graph of both Mech's power (meta) and Mech's alignment (lore). The summation of Mech alignment must be at least positive and the summation Mech power can't be larger than an arbitrary positive value TBD but can probably be as low or even negative as you want.


Basically for a Falcon running a Summoner is the best thing (much great freedom in other choices) ever since:

High alignment and has Negative power for CJF.

Edited by Chagatay, 06 September 2015 - 06:21 PM.

[Vlad Ward]

Mercs would just pick the faction with the best Mech options and only play there, resulting in 5 useless houses and 3 impotent clans.

[bad arcade kitty]

clans had their omni mechs more uniformly distributed (see the assignment tables in the first post in http://mwomercs.com/...cussion-thread/)

a stormcrow in any clan is pretty common (27.3% by popularity among the mediums at the very worst), but a panther outside of kurita and rasalhag? a cataphract or a jager outside of lia and davion?

[Wyest]

I'm not seeing the value in this system beyond throwing more barriers to play CW in front of players who don't have dozens of mechs to shuffle around already to game a second meta system.

As Vlad mentioned, there will always be a 'better' house and clan with a meta mech combination that provides the best benefit under this system. So the meta teams will go there, that house and clan will dominate and that will be it until the values are tweaked, the meta house/clan changes, the teams follow, and it repeats. If that sounds like the current weapon/mech meta, that's because that's exactly what it is, only now it adds houses and clans to the mix.

[Spheroid]

@Wyest: Most people switch factions to farm not just dominate. If they are only in it for CW rewards they have to operate within the system constraints.

If everyone is forced is to gimp themselves maybe we will see faction appropriate mech selection instead of the identical opfor btween all I.S. and Clan. Also deficiencies in in faction balancing can be counter balanced by c-bill and loyalty amount payouts. Everyone has a pain point they react to.

The hyper competitive still like to make money do they not? There is player inertia as different units have contract expiration dates of varying lengths. The rapid abandoning one faction for another is unlikely.


Also as the number of combinations is tremendous no player can possible objectively state to what degree a given faction is under or over rated. Only PGI can do that on their end. You can run stat analysis on all matches but that is undertaking beyond the player.

Edited by Spheroid, 06 September 2015 - 11:39 PM.

[Vlad Ward]

Are you really trying to tell us that there's "no way" for players to figure out which faction would get the best Mech choices in your system?

No one cares about match win/loss rates or internal PGI statistics. If Faction A gets Thunderbolts and Faction B gets Spiders, no one will go Faction B.

Edited by Vlad Ward, 06 September 2015 - 11:53 PM.

[Spheroid]

^
The L factor would vary quite a bit. I gave the example of the Enforcer and Raven because normally those are very house specific. Most designs would fall well in the middle ground. Because of variability you would get a lot of combinations.

You have to look at the FRR availability of the Thunderbolt in relation to the other mechs used by the Kungsarme. Certain factions will combine their favored builds with the 5SS others the 9SE. There is no one clear cut combo. My proposal breaks up the drop deck monotony.

Also even if all factions had a discrete optimized drop decks how soon could you personally identify it? Do you have ALL mechs? I don't. though I have a good number.

Edited by Spheroid, 07 September 2015 - 12:13 AM.

[Leone]

Vlad Ward, on 06 September 2015 - 11:50 PM, said:

No one cares about match win/loss rates or internal PGI statistics. If Faction A gets Thunderbolts and Faction B gets Spiders, no one will go Faction B.

I would. Don't care for Thunderbolts much.

~Leone.

Edited by Leone, 07 September 2015 - 12:03 AM.

[Kjudoon]

Meh. Its time to rewrite the Paulconomy against factions and the requirkening.

With the faction mechs listed give a discount to all members of that faction as loyalists. Mercs on temporary contracts get them at normal costs and friendly factions get a small markup while hostile factions get a huge blackmarket price increase and loyalty point penalty when used in cw.

We also should see the meta mechs repriced significantly since they are currently unbalancing the game.

[Wyest]

Spheroid, on 06 September 2015 - 10:59 PM, said:

@Wyest: Most people switch factions to farm not just dominate. If they are only in it for CW rewards they have to operate within the system constraints.

Doesn't change the fact there will end up being a new meta list of the best + least crap combinations of mechs in each faction in short order, and there WILL be a lead faction where that combination beats any other.

And you're STILL screwing the newer guys without the options for these straight away. Someone who's got 10 is screwed completely with this system. Someone with 100+, much less so. So the newer guys have to drop in Trials until they can arbitrarily access CW, even though they've otherwise valid decks... Way to kill interest in a game mode that's still getting off the ground.

Spheroid, on 07 September 2015 - 12:03 AM, said:

Also even if all factions had a discrete optimized drop decks how soon could you personally identify it? Do you have ALL mechs? I don't. though I have a good number.

They have to be in the client files, so you can present it in the UI during deck selection. Nobody needs to do anything but load the client data files into a third party app to pull that information, collate it and compare it to the meta list. You're talking hours, at most a couple of days, of work.

It's the same principle used to load new mechs into Smurfy as soon as they appear in the game files.

Kjudoon, on 07 September 2015 - 12:09 AM, said:

With the faction mechs listed give a discount to all members of that faction as loyalists. Mercs on temporary contracts get them at normal costs and friendly factions get a small markup while hostile factions get a huge blackmarket price increase and loyalty point penalty when used in cw.

We also should see the meta mechs repriced significantly since they are currently unbalancing the game.

Changing the buy in isn't the way to do it. All you do is penalise people who didn't jump on the meta yet.

[Vellron2005]

Spheroid, on 06 September 2015 - 05:14 PM, said:

Ghost Bears:
meta mechs : none
lemons: Stormcrow-C, Executioner, Dragonfly

Dragonly.. sorry, but what mech is that? Arctic cheeta or there's an actual dragonfly mech not out yet?

Also, I think you idea has some merit, but the number of available mechs is waaay to low for both IS and CLAN especially, to make it viable.

With your idea, every dropdeck would be the same for all players of a faction.. now, it has little variety, but is much better optimised for victory.

I know the Clan's didn't cooperate much, but sticking to one's own factions mechs might be a bit limiting..

Edited by Vellron2005, 07 September 2015 - 01:44 AM.

[Kin3ticX]

The way you do this without literally screwing everything up is simply just house favorites with reward perks. House favorites get cbill and LP bonuses of 10% / 4 and it could stack with hero or pack bonuses. Its not meant to be balance, meta or anything, just supposed to follow lore for those that love that in CW. People that just want the mechs they think are the most powerful may just forgo the bonus.

PGI can go as simple or as complex as they need. Below I made a simple example. A variant by variant breakdown could get complex and have lots of confusing overlap making the entire idea pointless. This is probably the reason PGI has chosen not to tackle it in any form.

Steiner: Atlas, Zeus, Commando

FRR: Steiner kurita mix

Kurita: Dragon, Panther, Jenner

Marik: Awesome, Stalker, Cicada

Liao: Catapult, Cataphract, Vindicator

Davion: Jagermech, Centurion, Blackjack

Jade: Summoner, Hellbringer, Kitfox

Wolf: Timberwolf, Gargoyle

Bear: Adder, Maddog, Executioner

Jag: Ebon Jaguar, Stormcrow, Arctic Cheetah

Any idea that restricts the availability of mechs by faction probably has a zero chance in hell happening due to balance

Edited by Kin3ticX, 07 September 2015 - 02:20 AM.

[Kjudoon]

Wyest and we get back to the need for a dynamic economy with salvage and rearm repair and tell the crybaby no consequence meta lovers to lump it.

If you want less of something tax it... Or raise thd price in this case. If you want more subsidize it or put it on sale. Here endeth the economics lesson that needs to be part of this game.

[EarlGrey83]

Instead of restrictions I would strongly prefer to give small xp/cb boni to faction Mechs. People will choose them, because we like even the sligthest bonus, but nobody would be left out because he does´nt have the right mechs.

[Kjudoon]

Marketplace pricing should be varied not standardized for all.

[Nightshade24]

How exactly would you assign loyalty?

Sure, Stiener with Catapult K2's would be 'odd' given it is a icon of kurita and the stieners do not produce it nor have good trades with kurita- BUT what happens when you captured the K2 and got a factory to produce them? are you penalized because you have the privilege of using it?

I had an idea similar to the above. but it goes more of the lines of "IS" and "Clan" [and 'comstar/sldf? clans got and used a lot of them as well as IS... it actually would make more senes for 3050 to 3052 if clans have the kingcrab specifically ghost bear instead of IS who hogged it away from the invasion up until the Kingcrab 005 was made (that was the clanbuster variant yes?))


My idea went along the lines of incorporating the repair and rearm costs that is being added and having changes occur depending on what planets your faction holds (faction loyalty units), or what planets your unit owns and a bit more generalised overall (merc) or just purely general (lonewolf). If you got stiener , your atlas repair bill will be much lower then the previous Direwolf you recently got from taking over a few clan occupied areas where they produced the direwolf- even though your faciton has it there is quite a huge lack of them around and they cost a lot. Also your faction will not be able to repair a hatamoto chi so easily either for example... So if your a faction unit for stiener you get better atlas repair bills, zeus repair bills, griffon, commando, etc... and replacing/ rearming stiener weapons as well works.

While if you are Clan ghost bear, repairing things like the mad dog, nova, king crab(?), highlander(?), Highlander IIC, locust(?), mist lynx, gargoyle, etc would be much easier then the more rare/ general timberwolf, Kitfox, summoner, etc. and even worse repairs for things like the direwolf, arctic cheetah, ebon jaguar, etc. (the fact ghost bear doesn't even know that ebon jaguar is the clan name shows that this will not be popular really for the next half dozen years for ghost bear...). and even worse on forign IS mechs post SLDF such as the raven (which would be weird if Ghost bear or any clan gets the planets to produce them as they are on the other side of the IS) and so on...

Perhaps your system instead of being a limit could be a slight bonus of loyalty points? for eg if your mech drop deck is very pro stiener (lets say all 4 are +10's, giving you 40, you get a lot more faction loyalty points then a negative 40 person, or a 5, or a negative 10. etc).

Supports player freedom- supports the people who play to the factions strengths, etc.

[CyclonerM]

I see value in this system, and is similar to something i have always proposed, but my system was more geared toward R&R discounts and the need of salvaging 'Mechs not produced by your faction aka if you want to pay free R&R in CW for that Atlas variant your faction must take the planet with the factory producing it. Of course, they must put back a revised R&R in the game for it to have a meaning.

P.S. I was not there at the time but i read people could not even repair fully their armor because it was too expensive.. Aside from the fact that heavier 'Mechs should be naturally expensive (but not at the point that people must beg for c-bills lol), i think R&R could also be paid with unit coffers (an incentive to join an unit), giving a good reason for people to keep putting c-bills there and win.

[bad arcade kitty]

Vellron2005, on 07 September 2015 - 01:39 AM, said:

Dragonly.. sorry, but what mech is that? Arctic cheeta or there's an actual dragonfly mech not out yet?

is name for viper, one of the original clan mechs which is not even planned to be released still despite it's
a ) an original clan mech unlike the later (i mean irl) additions like shadowcat and hunchback iic
b ) the most popular medium for ghost bears

it's like not to release kit fox if not worse, it's a shame

[masCh]

I think this is a good idea.

Especially so because it can add depth to Community Warfare.

Now that you have the Faction perks, that number can be a variable for each chassis. What I mean is, if I'm Marik, and we push towards a Steiner planet that can produce Cicadas, then the Faction perks for Marik for Cicada will go from -10 to -9, the more the better. And Steiner will have their Cicada point reduced from +6 to +5. (numbers are examples)