111 replies to this topic

[Void Angel]

Slepnir, on 19 October 2015 - 09:12 PM, said:

Sorry void I don't see it that way especially in MWO, striding the battlefield as a demigod with clantech, has alot less appeal when your getting your butt kicked in by superior numbers more often than not.

I trust the lore players balancing more than the casuals if they had done it right and not chased the majority of the founders away.

Especially with MWO being down 3 mechs and having heavier assets on the enemy team is a struggle to come back from even with superior clan weapons, which is what 8v5 would have been if implemented correctly.

It is also why I still find MWLL gameplay much better with the inclusion of no mechlab for balance.

You're assuming that the Clans would be underpowered - that's not a good assumption, since we're talking the effects of a game that has already been balanced along those lines. If the Clans v. the Inner Sphere was put in with canon tech, the Clans would still win an 8v5. Their gear is just too powerful, particularly in an environment where the enemy doesn't have to roll 2D6 to see where he hit you. But we're talking about an environment where it's a pretty even playing field, however that's managed. Neither side, team for team, has a clear advantage - but one side will have a broader appeal than the other. That will cause population imbalances, just like it did for the Alliance in World of Warcraft. Those boys outnumbered us two to one on most servers, including mine - and it took the poor fools forever to find Battleground matches. We're talking 30 minutes for a 10v10 match.

If every single founder was playing the game today, they would still be a minority of the player base - and you also cannot assume that they would all be rabid book-wavers. I missed out on being a founder only because I didn't hear that it was going on until too late, and most of the other founders I know are not (thankfully) hard-core, "I want a boardgame in 3D" pseudo-purists. Most players who are familiar with Battletech understand that you can't just plunk down the boardgame numbers and call it good - and if you adjust the numbers, well... you get something like MWO. Often, and I'm not talking about anyone specifically, the book-wavers do live in a fantasy world where their desire to relive the good times playing Battletech during childhood trump actual design constraints. Heck, we're getting Battletech on the computer! Maybe now I can get some peace.

In any case, it's those who are casual who make or break your game - this group includes players who engage in competition as part of their play, but not their greatest focus. They're vital to having a successful game - players are their own content, after all - and if you don't make a game that's balanced for everyone, it won't work. I'm reminded of the old days when I played Dragonrealms, the bet MUD you should never play. They had all sorts of neat events that the devs and GMs would run - but they were all geared toward their highest players, and there was no level cap. I got tired of being second-class forever, and stopped playing the game.

I totally agree that it would be far easier to balance the game without any customization - but that would make a much shallower game than we have, and would fail to meat the expectations of those who have always loved customizing their 'mechs (like me!) Still, though balance is harder with customization, it doesn't seem like an insurmountable task to get the existing weapon systems roughly equal, with adjustments for Clan/IS customization rules. On the other hand, if they have to reduce customization to get balance, well... so be it - but we really should still have a Mechlab, particularly to reflect OmniMech customization.

[Dakkss]

Void Angel, on 19 October 2015 - 08:05 PM, said:

Be very wary of assuming that anything we want from the game is denied us only by a hypothetical lack of talent and skill on the part of the developers. Many of the unfulfilled wants you see from the "hitting with the rulebook" part of the crowd aren't a matter of incompetence, but of proper design.

How about things that don't break balance but are features that make MechWarrior more of a mech-sim instead of a twitch shooter? Things like weapon recoil, weapon impact, reticle bob, rear cameras and such? Things that were in MW3 in 1999 and the TRAILER for MechWarrior 5 those years ago. Is that not a lack of effort or skill?

[Slepnir]

Quote

You're assuming that the Clans would be underpowered - that's not a good assumption, since we're talking the effects of a game that has already been balanced along those lines. If the Clans v. the Inner Sphere was put in with canon tech, the Clans would still win an 8v5. Their gear is just too powerful,

You proceed form a false assumtion, i expect the clans to be BETTER, which is why i expect them to always fight out numbered and bid themselves down to prove thier worth, but not only outnumbered also facing heavier opposition.

I can tell you as a player who still plays TT on a regular basis the standard 8 VS 5 pick up game for IS VS clans is very balanced without using zellbrigan or forced withdrawl rules favored by the clans. i can also tell you as a matter of experience the clans do not win in an 8V5 match, in fact it is very close and often times they lose.

If from the start they had pro-rated the damage over the 10 second turn mechanic(IE IS medium laser 3 shots in 10 seconds=1.6 damage per shot, gauss fires 2 times in 10=7.5 damage per shot) the TTK would have dramatically improved especially with double armor.
If double heatsinks were up to actual doubles you would not need a mechlab. take the hunchback for example there are EIGHTEEN! cannon variants. surely players could find a stock build they were happy with. instead of spending all that program time on mechlabb they could have been adding more variants for much less work.

In fact i think having a mechlab especially a nearly unlimited one is still a huge mistake. removing an engine literally would destroy a mech as they are built around said engine, under no circumstances should you every change one or do anything more than maintenenace. In fact even on TT aside from campaign salvage (with it's own set of drawbacks) no player in our games is ever allowed to take a custom mech specifically for balance reasons.

The reality is the CORE of the game programming is rotten and all they are doing is trying to fix it with add-on bandaids. yes i understand some things do not translate like pilot skill rolls for damage taken and pinpoint damage(fixed as adressed above by pro-rating) based on real aiming not dice rolls, but when you start by implementing ECM wrong, the heat scaling mechanic wrong, an unlimited mechlab and so forth your effectively garunteeing imbalance.

An addendum-the battletech game you refer to is an RTS, doesn't interest me in the least I want my BT to be a FPS simulator, which is why I spend more time on MWLL when it is populated than I do on MWO.

[Water Bear]

Void Angel, on 19 October 2015 - 08:05 PM, said:

Be very wary of assuming that anything we want from the game is denied us only by a hypothetical lack of talent and skill on the part of the developers. Many of the unfulfilled wants you see from the "hitting with the rulebook" part of the crowd aren't a matter of incompetence, but of proper design.

I agree that probably 90% of the posts on this forum are ridiculous, and that their tone is ridiculous. It sounds sometimes like a huge room full of teenagers talking about how smart they are. But I think PGI might be lacking analytic support on their project team. No we don't actually know who works for PGI, but based on past actions (balancing the game by using a community sourced tier system) it might be fair to assume that the people who work there are purely software devs and artists and not anyone with a 4-year degree whose specialty is in anything analytic a la machine learning or statistics (why would they be there in the first place?).

But my ax to grind is not the same as the one you are talking about. Many people make gross assumptions about how easy or hard it would be implement certain changes. I'm not a specialist but I've written enough programs to understand that some things can be easier than others based on what tools you're using.

Edited by Water Bear, 20 October 2015 - 05:35 AM.

[Roadkill]

Bishop Steiner, on 19 October 2015 - 04:27 PM, said:

man, lol, you remember that stuff way more than me, I got like 3 dozen missions in 1993, and was never able to get near a pod after. Looks like the latest are running a MW4 Mod?

Well, that was essentially my heyday. I was freakishly good at MW4 and in the Virtual World pods back in those days. I travelled across the country to Virtual World competitions and was known at just about every site.

Now? LOL... not so much. I had my day... I'm content to just play and have fun now.

Current pods have Alienware guts and are running a ported version of MechWarrior 4 that's referred to as System 5 (aka Tesla II). It's not as good of a sim as System 4 (aka Tesla) was, but it has a wider appeal due to familiarity with MW4. Some sites have a ported version of the System 4 Red Planet game in addition to System 5 Battletech.

System 4 was the best Battletech computer game ever made. There were 7 screens and 63 buttons in the cockpit along with the joystick, throttle, and foot pedals, and every single one of them was functional and necessary. You could tweak how your Mech was configured by moving weapons to different generators to balance the load in different ways. You could prioritize coolant loops to cool the weapons you preferred to use more efficiently. You could change the recharge dynamics (and damage) of your weapons to suit your play style. And you had to do all of this on the fly while in combat.

The first time I played System 5 I took a Sunder. This was ~9-10 years after I'd last played System 4, in which the Sunder was the Mech I was most known for. As soon as the game booted up I started punching buttons to configure my Mech... and completely screwed it up because System 5 is a completely different game from System 4. But the muscle memory was still there to program my preferred config from the System 4 Sunder.

*sigh* Those were the days.

[Bishop Steiner]

Roadkill, on 20 October 2015 - 08:10 AM, said:

Well, that was essentially my heyday. I was freakishly good at MW4 and in the Virtual World pods back in those days. I travelled across the country to Virtual World competitions and was known at just about every site.

Now? LOL... not so much. I had my day... I'm content to just play and have fun now.

Current pods have Alienware guts and are running a ported version of MechWarrior 4 that's referred to as System 5 (aka Tesla II). It's not as good of a sim as System 4 (aka Tesla) was, but it has a wider appeal due to familiarity with MW4. Some sites have a ported version of the System 4 Red Planet game in addition to System 5 Battletech.

System 4 was the best Battletech computer game ever made. There were 7 screens and 63 buttons in the cockpit along with the joystick, throttle, and foot pedals, and every single one of them was functional and necessary. You could tweak how your Mech was configured by moving weapons to different generators to balance the load in different ways. You could prioritize coolant loops to cool the weapons you preferred to use more efficiently. You could change the recharge dynamics (and damage) of your weapons to suit your play style. And you had to do all of this on the fly while in combat.

The first time I played System 5 I took a Sunder. This was ~9-10 years after I'd last played System 4, in which the Sunder was the Mech I was most known for. As soon as the game booted up I started punching buttons to configure my Mech... and completely screwed it up because System 5 is a completely different game from System 4. But the muscle memory was still there to program my preferred config from the System 4 Sunder.

*sigh* Those were the days.

Yeah, not dissimilar, though my MW4 heydey was online.... back when a joystick was fine for targeting. Usually could be found in my C-Gauss/2x C-ERLL/2x C-SSRM6 Victor, potshotting people from the skies.

My in person tournament days was farther back... early 90s, west coast Street Fighter II invitationals, lol.

[Void Angel]

Slepnir, on 20 October 2015 - 03:24 AM, said:

You proceed form a false assumtion, i expect the clans to be BETTER, which is why i expect them to always fight out numbered and bid themselves down to prove thier worth, but not only outnumbered also facing heavier opposition.

That's a totally unjustified expectation. We're talking game balance, not MechWarrior roleplaying with Zelbrigen and whatever else. You're assuming a huge, and really unjustifiable thing here - that players will consider the abstraction of implementing Zelbrigen to be more important than winning the actual matches. That's not going to happen. None of the playerbase are actually Clanner Space Mongols with a pseudo-{Godwin's Law} eugenics philosophy. How many of them will enjoy losing for the sake of forum roleplaying? I find the prospect highly unlikely. Given the prevalence of those who actually do ask for these things - based on my partial sampling of the non-representative sample that is the forums - there'd need to be many orders of magnitude more of them in order to even try to get Zelbrigen to work.

All this is beside the point, however. The Mechlab may not mesh with some people's house rules, or with this or that tournament format - but it's integral to Battletech. The core rules allow for the modification and design of 'mechs; Solaris VII contains multiple examples of purpose-built and modified Battlemechs; even the old Commodore 64 games -to say nothing of most of the Mechwarrior series - allows various levels of customization. It's not a good idea to throw out the Mechlab and make everything stock 'mechs. The Mechlab has become an integral part of the Mechwarrior experience, and it would be a blunder to omit it, not to have it in.

There's no way I'd ever be happy with having to sift through a metric smacktonne of stock builds in order to find one that was viable. Particularly since the Helm memory core has introduced such a huge difference between even old and new IS technology. Throwing away the Mechlab wouldn't solve that problem; and using BattleValue to fix the problem we've just created would massively complicate the game - especially in the matchmaker, but also for organized teams. It would have an amazing (and negative) impact on balance as well; every single 'mech variant would now have to be individually adjusted. It could be done, sort of - eventually - but the issues that are caused by disparity of forces would always remain. Plus you're going to have to either make players buy many, many near-identical variants to find one that actually works, or else just sell the chassis and let players switch somehow - drastically reducing your income/investment ratio from designing new 'mechs.

MWO simply is not a LARP accessory. We cannot use it to re-live our glory days from high school, nor is it reasonable to expect the game to reflect our particular house rules. Or a tournament format from another game. The FPS format does not have the random-location hit tables - and having chosen that game format, I don't want them. Nor is it justified to suppose for the sake of argument that many people would - the largest complaint about the game from new players is that it's already confusing. Adding more complexity to gameplay - or making them sift through reams of nearly-identical 'mechs - is not going to help players new or old.

[Khobai]

Quote

If The Game Isn't Balanced, Then Which Previous Mechwarrior Title Was?

For multiplayer? NONE of them. But those other games also had had singleplayer so multiplayer balance was an afterthought. MWO does not have singleplayer though. So its multiplayer HAS to be balanced.

[Water Bear]

Void Angel, on 20 October 2015 - 11:14 AM, said:

There's no way I'd ever be happy with having to sift through a metric smacktonne of stock builds in order to find one that was viable. Particularly since the Helm memory core has introduced such a huge difference between even old and new IS technology. Throwing away the Mechlab wouldn't solve that problem; and using BattleValue to fix the problem we've just created would massively complicate the game - especially in the matchmaker, but also for organized teams. It would have an amazing (and negative) impact on balance as well; every single 'mech variant would now have to be individually adjusted. It could be done, sort of - eventually - but the issues that are caused by disparity of forces would always remain. Plus you're going to have to either make players buy many, many near-identical variants to find one that actually works, or else just sell the chassis and let players switch somehow - drastically reducing your income/investment ratio from designing new 'mechs.

One could implement a battle value system that gives 'mechs a BV rating similar to how players have a skill rating. For example, say that we give the Timberwolf a BV of 1.2. We then use the 'mech's battle value rating to modify a player's PSR.

For example, say my PSR number is 120. If I use a Timber, my effective "match maker" PSR is 1.2*120=144. This way you can account for the unfair advantage that certain superior 'mechs give without overloading the matchmaker with constraints.

Again, this is not the argument you are addressing (since I assume the BV systems you are thinking of are not the one I just mentioned), but I want to point out that there are BV-based solutions to balance that could really work - if the game's devs would consider them.

Edit: Also, what I mean by "similar to how players have a skill rating" is that you can write up an algorithm for adjusting a 'mechs BV based on the performance of players using that 'mech, further adjusted by a comparison between the Elo of the player using that 'mech and the Elo rating of the other players in the match.

Edited by Water Bear, 20 October 2015 - 11:44 AM.

[Slepnir]

Void yet again you miss the point. I specifically removed zell from the discussion.

Also if you're talking custom rules from the game you have to take the downside, finding some mechanic that represents a bad install job by a technician, or incompatible systems which is normally done on a dice roll that gives your custom loaded weaponry a chance to short out in battle, jam, not work or just explode.


The point of multiple canon loadouts to choose from is that they are ALL viable with the original rules for heat. what you're choosing is the loadout that best fits you're play style. it works fine in LL, saying it won't work is already a disproven position.


At minimum with MWO I would prefer to see engine ratings locked across the board like they are for clan omnis as it would help with balance.

Edited by Slepnir, 20 October 2015 - 02:58 PM.

[Void Angel]

Slepnir, on 20 October 2015 - 02:54 PM, said:

Void yet again you miss the point. I specifically removed zell from the discussion.

...
Good grief. "Zellbrigen and whatever else," I said; I'm obviously talking about Batchall in context, though I did use Zellbrigen by mistake. Still, do you see me correcting your spelling and grammar? Harping on misspelled or missing words? No, you do not! Do me the same courtesy, please. In any case there is no way that Clan players overall would continually bid themselves down so far that they lost battles with regularity, as you predicted here.

Your argument is pure, unproven conjecture - and conjecture which ignores important facts. "If only PGI would have slavishly implemented tabletop rules wherever possible, everything would be ever so much better!" Leave aside the fact that they DID start with those numbers, and that the necessary tweaking brought about the weapon and armor stats we have today - you still can't just claim that Battletech numbers would be balanced if implemented "properly." Even assuming the balance is perfect in the tabletop environment, that balance relies on other game systems which cannot be translated to MWO. Hit location tables are just the tip of the iceberg; you're missing cover penalties, for example - and do you want to take twenty seconds to twist the full range of your torso? The absence of these systems - and the general revolt which would justly occur if PGI tried to cone of fire everything, or to lockstep torso twisting to tabletop rates - means that the numbers must be tweaked. The tabletop damage/heat/range/etc relationships are not authoritative for MWO. Put the rulebook down.

And, despite everything on this rabbit trail you've run down - you are still missing the point. If the teams are balanced 8v5, one side's 'mechs will be sixty percent more powerful than the opposing machines. Those guys are going to wreck someone, regardless of who eventually wins. They are wolves amongst jackals, dealing death with superior firepower while their opponents try to drag them down by sheer weight of numbers. No sizable number of players are going to intentionally hamstring themselves to the point of repeated losses in order to LARP the Batchall - so your objection there doesn't hold water.

MWO is not an exclusive club for True Fans of Battletech. It is a game set in the Battletech universe which attempts to capture the look and feel and theme of the IP while still attracting people who may not have all the sourcebooks they need to play out an entire planetary invasion from jumpship insertion to last 'mech standing. Most potential players won't be playing this game because it's Battletech - they'll play it because it looks fun; because it is fun. Part of that fun is Mech customization; part of the fun has practically always been part of the fun! Leaving it out to begin with - to say nothing of taking it out now - would violate the expectations of everyone familiar with the Mechwarrior series and would have reduced the appeal and funding of the game. It wasn't a mistake to put it in, and if the degree of freedom is a problem, PGI can reduce that freedom while still leaving in the Mechlab - or fix the actual problem and balance the weapons better. Ditching the Mechlab because builds surrounding certain classes of weapon are overperforming is like amputating your foot to treat a hangnail.

[Slepnir]

Void I do believe I mentioned that the core was broken from the start, however some thing already.mentioned can be put into the game from the original rules that would go along way towards balance better than ghost heat, weapon nerfing, charge mechanics and so forth.

Even with the game as it is now would benefit from pro-rating weapon damage(thus fixing the high alpha problem without removing aiming skill), or a proper heat scale or locked engine ratings or a combination of them all.

As to the 8v5 discussion From experience -yes it does work, and players do put up with it, we still do it regularly on TT and we do it in a similar fashion for pure tech chaos drops based on BV in MWLL., it creates both challenging and entertaining games for both sides, but again LL is far more balanced even weapons wise than MWOs current state.

Edited by Slepnir, 20 October 2015 - 09:21 PM.