772 replies to this topic

[InspectorG]

Fire for Effect, on 02 November 2015 - 07:52 AM, said:

you misunderstand. you can ALWAYS even out the combat potential of both sides.

If PGI does not want to use the ONLY way for balanced matches thats their problem since weight is clearly a useful metric for combat potential. If uneven matches are also not wanted thats again a fail decision, to rule out something that can clearly balance both sides of a match.

Hypothetical:

You have a player base of 48 players. Enough for 2 matches of 12 vs 12. Problem is 25 drop clan.

BV fixes this how? Who has to wait. Which players own several mech of both tech? How many players only own Clan because ther are better?
How many players want to use IS mechs with SHS?

BV simply wont fix those problems, they really didnt for BT anyhow. How do you weight SHS vs Clan DHS in MWO?

You cant with BV cuz PGI doesnt have a metric and the BT metric wouldnt work either.

[Wintersdark]

InspectorG, on 02 November 2015 - 01:53 PM, said:

Hypothetical:

You have a player base of 48 players. Enough for 2 matches of 12 vs 12. Problem is 25 drop clan.

BV fixes this how? Who has to wait. Which players own several mech of both tech? How many players only own Clan because ther are better?
How many players want to use IS mechs with SHS?

BV simply wont fix those problems, they really didnt for BT anyhow. How do you weight SHS vs Clan DHS in MWO?

You cant with BV cuz PGI doesnt have a metric and the BT metric wouldnt work either.

The "Just Use BV" crowd will say here "Just assign values to everything, add them up, and Battlevalue!"

Of course, if this were easy, PGI would do it. It's not. It's extremely hard - way harder than in tabletop, where there are far fewer variables and combat is inherently random. Two mechs firing at each other can be modelled in Tabletop very easily, so point values for weapons and whatnot are much easier to arrive at.

[edit: in this context, random doesn't mean "unpredictable", it means via dice rolls which while unpredictable in a given match will play out very predictably over multiple matches. MWO isn't using dice rolls at all.]

In MWO, it's totally different. There are vastly more variables. Burn duration. Projectile speed. PPFLD vs. Spread vs. DoT.

It's not technically impossible to assign values to things here, but it'd be extraordinarily difficult. Particularly when you start trying to assign values to, say, engines, and those values need to correlate to the values of weapons and modules.

When you step back, and look at the job PGI does in balancing the weapons (and I'm not saying they do unusually bad work here, just that this too is a large and difficult topic) and how many weapons have terrible stats as it stands now and some iteration and work could really improve them... What hope is there that they could create another whole line of stats for every piece of equipment in the game, and have them all work when compared against each other? It's practically zero. And a badly made BV system results in at best what we have right now, and at worst a terrible, exploitable mess.

But all the above is irrelevant, because you're absolutely right.

It doesn't matter how accurate the BV system is. Lets assume is magically perfect.

If you don't have the right players with the right BV and PSR in the queue when you're searching, it doesn't matter. As things stand, we have battles kicking off using 3 of the 5 PSR tiers because we can't get everyone in a game at just one tier because populations are too low, and that's with the other factor being only a very coarse weight class restriction (solo queue) and nothing at all (group queue).

No matter what matchmaking voodoo you employ, you can't create players out of thin air. This is, and has always been, the fundamental flaw of the matchmaker and it's not one they can fix. So everyone in the queue has a perfect Skill Rating, and a perfect BV rating for his chassis. Without the right combination of players being available, it'll be another "GGClose MM" anyways and appear to not be working at all.

Edited by Wintersdark, 02 November 2015 - 02:38 PM.

[Wintersdark]

Fire for Effect, on 02 November 2015 - 07:52 AM, said:

you misunderstand. you can ALWAYS even out the combat potential of both sides.

You have to make a team.

You have, lets say, 200 players searching for a match in the given queue right now. Those 200 players span the total range of skill from "If I fire at all, it'll be into an allies back at the start of the match" to "Feels an 8 kill match is a poor performance". But, we'll just call it 5 tiers.

This means, with players of like skill, you've got 5 brackets of 40 players each.

Now, each of those brackets is full of mechs ranging from downright terrible (I'm rocking a stock urbie today!) to excellent (a laser vomit Timberwolf!) Trying to build a balanced pair of teams on 40 players is virtually impossible. Matchmaking quality is and will always be ultimately limited by the player pool in the queue at any given moment. It's not enough to have a lot of players, you need a whole lot of players queued right now for it to work.

We just don't have that many players.

[Void Angel]

Fire for Effect, on 02 November 2015 - 07:52 AM, said:

you misunderstand. you can ALWAYS even out the combat potential of both sides.

If PGI does not want to use the ONLY way for balanced matches thats their problem since weight is clearly a useful metric for combat potential. If uneven matches are also not wanted thats again a fail decision, to rule out something that can clearly balance both sides of a match.

This statement is wrong, because it contradicts itself and thus cannot be true. If you can always even out the sides, then not using the methodologies which you prefer in order to do so cannot automatically be a "fail decision."

It's also factually incorrect: balancing the tech bases against each other is a perfectly viable alternative. It's certainly far more sustainable and newbie-friendly than giants-versus-pygmies asymmetrical matches, or arcane floating BattleValue 'mech rating systems.

[Wintersdark]

Void Angel, on 02 November 2015 - 07:13 PM, said:

It's also factually incorrect: balancing the tech bases against each other is a perfectly viable alternative. It's certainly far more sustainable and newbie-friendly than giants-versus-pygmies asymmetrical matches, or arcane floating BattleValue 'mech rating systems.

Yeah, balanced tech bases is certainly a viable way to go. I understand why some don't like it, but in all honesty you're right here: It's more sustainable and newbie friendly.

Asymmetrical matches (10v12, for example) will never work. It's waaaaay too coarse; think things are bad with 3/3/3/3 now? Balancing tech so that it's actually fair 10v12 is much harder than balancing tech when it's 12v12, because you cannot think of things in a 1 vs 1 situation. By coarse, I mean that the impact of a player taking a strong mech/build vs. a weak one is vastly more important in an asymmetrical match, because the contribution of a given player is much larger. As well, in a 10v12 match, the tech for the 10 man team doesn't need to be linearly scaled - that's not enough. It's not good enough to have all your gear be 1.2x as good. Asymmetrical balance is far, far harder than numerically balanced teams. PGI struggles enough with balance as it is; making things harder is not a solution.

Floating (or Dynamic) battle value is the only viable Battle Value system, as it's (relatively) free of maintenance costs being self-adjusting. However, it suffers from severe flaws: rarely used mechs will tend to be under-rated (hero mechs, for example, relative to comparable regular chassis) and often used mechs end up over rated (gift mechs and such, that every player has). Finally, and worst of all these, is that a floating BV system would be most heavily impacted by bad players, not the good ones. There are MANY more average players, playing all sorts of random chassis and builds. Look at the swarms of "LRM's are OP!" posts on the forums! These people would be pushing the BV of those mechs and builds way up. Thus, the end result would not be a magically self-adjusting BV system that ends "metas" at all.

These are non-trivial problems, but they are not the worst of it. The worst is, arguably, that it's entirely incomprehensible to new players. Players would have no idea what's going on and why; and the few players that did understand and figured out how to chart it would have a substantial advantage to exploit the system.

"Just use Battle Value!" isn't an answer, and more than "Just give them food!" is an answer to world hunger. Sure, it's an answer, and it's correct. But it's a useless answer.

[grayson marik]

Wintersdark, on 02 November 2015 - 08:54 PM, said:

Yeah, balanced tech bases is certainly a viable way to go. I understand why some don't like it, but in all honesty you're right here: It's more sustainable and newbie friendly.

Asymmetrical matches (10v12, for example) will never work. It's waaaaay too coarse; think things are bad with 3/3/3/3 now? Balancing tech so that it's actually fair 10v12 is much harder than balancing tech when it's 12v12, because you cannot think of things in a 1 vs 1 situation. By coarse, I mean that the impact of a player taking a strong mech/build vs. a weak one is vastly more important in an asymmetrical match, because the contribution of a given player is much larger. As well, in a 10v12 match, the tech for the 10 man team doesn't need to be linearly scaled - that's not enough. It's not good enough to have all your gear be 1.2x as good. Asymmetrical balance is far, far harder than numerically balanced teams. PGI struggles enough with balance as it is; making things harder is not a solution.

Floating (or Dynamic) battle value is the only viable Battle Value system, as it's (relatively) free of maintenance costs being self-adjusting. However, it suffers from severe flaws: rarely used mechs will tend to be under-rated (hero mechs, for example, relative to comparable regular chassis) and often used mechs end up over rated (gift mechs and such, that every player has). Finally, and worst of all these, is that a floating BV system would be most heavily impacted by bad players, not the good ones. There are MANY more average players, playing all sorts of random chassis and builds. Look at the swarms of "LRM's are OP!" posts on the forums! These people would be pushing the BV of those mechs and builds way up. Thus, the end result would not be a magically self-adjusting BV system that ends "metas" at all.

These are non-trivial problems, but they are not the worst of it. The worst is, arguably, that it's entirely incomprehensible to new players. Players would have no idea what's going on and why; and the few players that did understand and figured out how to chart it would have a substantial advantage to exploit the system.

"Just use Battle Value!" isn't an answer, and more than "Just give them food!" is an answer to world hunger. Sure, it's an answer, and it's correct. But it's a useless answer.

Well, for the dynamic BV I already posted a variant, that would not have the flaws of underrated hero mechs, because it normalizes numbers to the average population per chassis variant. See here

[LiGhtningFF13]

Also fix that arctic cheater's hitbox. Just redicilous.

[InspectorG]

LiGhtningFF13, on 03 November 2015 - 06:36 AM, said:

Also fix that arctic cheater's hitbox. Just redicilous.

Its not all that different from a FS or Spider.

That is the sole advantage of running a fast light...netcode messes up.

As a light pilots, that magic effect wares off when you play vs good players who ALWAYS shoot your legs.

Noobs always aim CT.

Seriously if they were that invincible comps would be running all AC. They dont.

[LiGhtningFF13]

Believe me I also target legs first but often got the case that the center was open and deep red. Guess what ... even clan pulse doesnt show any effect.

[Eon0574]

I really don't get the whole re-balance thing anyway. If they want everything the same then get rid of all quirks/buffs to all mechs. Change all weapon systems to IS base (leave the colors to show the difference between Clan and IS).

It would be a whole lot simpler than what they are doing right now. Why not get rid of Clans all together. I'll take a refund.

Just remenber PGI, you will not be able to make everything the same. Light mechs don't have as much armor as Assaults that's whay they are called lights. At the rate your going you might as well change everything to one class and size.

Fix the game. Too many hit box issues and glitches, server issues etc. Then slowly introduce a "clan" technology that you have already balanced, into the game.

Trying to force people into role warefare will not work. Most are just trying to put as much damage on the board as possible. More damage = more points.

It doesn't help when event scoring leans heavily on kills and damage. If you try to play a role you're just screwing yourself out of the rewards.

Choosing a faction is also pointless. Once you join you aren't connected to others in your faction making it easier to build groups. You either have to know people already or must go outside of MWO in order to join a unit which does not make sense to me. It defeats the purpose of joining a faction at all. This could help you with CW as well.

Edited by Eon Rha Saeri, 05 November 2015 - 02:44 AM.

[Blackhound]

InspectorG, on 03 November 2015 - 07:16 AM, said:

Seriously if they were that invincible comps would be running all AC. They dont.

Uhh yes they do.
My unit has multiple times run into 12 mans with 5 to 6 Arctic Cheetahs which swarm over us legging everything in sight and there's nothing we can do. While we're busy fighting for our lives their Assault 'Mechs come over the ridge and Alpha Strike whatever is left.

[InspectorG]

Blackhound, on 05 November 2015 - 01:15 PM, said:

Uhh yes they do.
My unit has multiple times run into 12 mans with 5 to 6 Arctic Cheetahs which swarm over us legging everything in sight and there's nothing we can do. While we're busy fighting for our lives their Assault 'Mechs come over the ridge and Alpha Strike whatever is left.

Was that because of min/maxing tonnage limits?

Timby and Dire was tops before the limits put in place.

[GOLFisNOTaSPORT]

In my opinion, the basic plan for balancing between Clan and IS units is flawed. Clan 'Mechs are supposed to be individually overpowered compared to IS 'Mechs. But the Sphere wins out in the end. Why? Differences in tactics.

The Inner Sphere powers' strategies are typically about coordination and concentration of fire. They use combined arms tactics and artillery for effect. They're not afraid to get up close and personal and use physical attacks. They won't hesitate to shoot someone in the back or while they're down. (The Draconis Combine is a notable exception to a lot of this at various points in time, but that's irrelevant for this).

The Clans, on the other hand, usually follow very strict guidelines as far as combat goes. First, the nature of their bidding process means that they usually field about half as many 'Mechs as their opponents do. The nature of their honor also means that the Clans do not concentrate fire on a single target; in fact, a single Clanner gains more honor from taking on multiple enemies at once. They also scorn artillery and most combined arms tactics, with the exception of working with Elementals and AeroSpace fighters. They find physical combat distasteful, and tend to stay at as long of a range as possible for the battle, terrain, and weather conditions. And finally, for most Clans, firing on an opponent unable to effectively return fire (in a rear arc or while prone) is dishonorable.

Instead of nerfing individual Clan units, we need to find a way to force Clan pilots to follow Clan rules of engagement. A good first step would be changing Clan queue sizes from the Inner Sphere standard Company (12) to a Clan Binary (10) or even a Star (5). Penalizing Clan pilots for firing on units already being targeted by another Clanner would be a good second step, as well as for firing on a 'Mech's rear armor. Not allowing artillery to be used with Clan 'Mechs and nerfing AeroSpace strikes for them would also be a good idea.

Clan autocannons firing in burst, lasers burning longer, and missiles in series are a good idea which adds character and makes good sense to me. But the changes in heat sinks are a bad idea, and if this becomes a trend then the Clans are going to lose all of their character. That would be bad for the game, both for Clan pilots and for those who love the BattleTech universe. And this is me speaking as FedCom loyalist.

[Lord Auriel]

tbh I understand this point, totally, I like it when mechs have character but I'm pretty sure we should re-evaluate those supposed nerfs or buffs until we see the complete picture of rebalancing 3.0 or whatever I shall call it. TBH the clan heatsink nerf does not feel horrible on PTS3, it's just that some silly laservomit builds will now be garbage because, too hot. Clans still have their character IMHO.

Implementing BT lore for clanners match-maker wise is just not possible, face it. In a shooter, when a mech/weapon/$gear is better in every regard compared to any other type of the same class, you have a balancing issue. You can't just justify it with lore. Right now the timberwolf is the best heavy, followed by hbr or ebj. There isn't even any IS competition in this level of "good". This is the problem.

If you put 2LPlas and 2MLAS on your hellbringer, it's perfectly fine and cool as ice. But gauss and 5 MLAS... not a good idea anymore. I love this change.

[IraqiWalker]

Eon Rha Saeri, on 05 November 2015 - 02:42 AM, said:

I really don't get the whole re-balance thing anyway. If they want everything the same then get rid of all quirks/buffs to all mechs. Change all weapon systems to IS base (leave the colors to show the difference between Clan and IS).

It would be a whole lot simpler than what they are doing right now. Why not get rid of Clans all together. I'll take a refund.

Just remenber PGI, you will not be able to make everything the same. Light mechs don't have as much armor as Assaults that's whay they are called lights. At the rate your going you might as well change everything to one class and size.

Fix the game. Too many hit box issues and glitches, server issues etc. Then slowly introduce a "clan" technology that you have already balanced, into the game.

Trying to force people into role warefare will not work. Most are just trying to put as much damage on the board as possible. More damage = more points.

It doesn't help when event scoring leans heavily on kills and damage. If you try to play a role you're just screwing yourself out of the rewards.

Choosing a faction is also pointless. Once you join you aren't connected to others in your faction making it easier to build groups. You either have to know people already or must go outside of MWO in order to join a unit which does not make sense to me. It defeats the purpose of joining a faction at all. This could help you with CW as well.

Actually, there is this thing called "Faction Chat", available to you in-game.

Also, balance is not the same as "being the same" You can balance clan mechs while still letting them have their flavor. Give them power in one field, and reduce their power in another. That is the basic tenet of asymmetric balance.

[Yozzman]

Info tech?

I just wanna have mechs with pew pew tech... Like most people

[Davegt27]

Wow I just read the first post by Paul

I recommend they change the name of the game to "MWO 2" when they implement this new game.

[Chocowolf Sradac]

Personally I feel like with these changes it feels less and less a Mechwarrior game. The clans are better mechs which is represented by their much higher prices so yes it makes sense that their equipment should be better and in previous titles being an "arm race" for clan tech. I am a strong believer that there are better ways to Balance IS vs Clan being able to fight in stars and lances would be a great start. The IS weren't supposed to fight clan on equal number teams the IS having an advantage in numbers. With the current model of 12 vs 12 that gets thrown out of the window with the sides being unbalanced. Honestly makes me wish clans weren't added if they are not done properly

Using Tonnage as a balancing point is also something that has been a long problem for MWO. A Battlevalue system would be much more efficient to balance mechs on how well they actually perform over how heavy the mech is. A 75 Tonn Orion and a 75 Tonn Timberwolf play quite differently from each and shouldn't be considered equal like they are now

Edited by Chocowolf, 07 November 2015 - 05:53 PM.

[MercilessTRADER]

Well they make you spend money, hundreds of dollars in total on certain mechs and packs ect.. Like the gauss heavy GRID IRON... The only reason I would EVER BUY the grid was cause of the fast gauss shot... Now this is getting taking away? Do these developers have any decency.. Do they understand this isn't a joke? Oh yeah they want me to spend another 50 on the latest and greatest LOL... While they are changing all the cool weapon perks, the reason I bought certain mech's AND on top of that BS!?!? I NOW I HAVE TO PLAY CONQUEST.. The best part is they make it seem like its more CHOICE.. Why do they insist of this? They tried it before.. WHY DO YOU WANT ME TO SPEND HUNDRED OF DOLLARS TO NOT PLAY WHAT I WANT? Wait times? PSR? I could care less about waiting FOR A GAME I WANT. I know my time is insignificant to U PGI. Everyone is just numbers to U.. These free games and their stupid pay structures, make less game, more things to buy, have helped ruin all videogames AND now has taking this FOUNDER and the rest of my founders friends too to other games.. A long time supporter signing off..

OH yea the balance was supposed to be done at BETA i thought...What a JOKE.

Edited by MercilessTRADER, 08 November 2015 - 04:58 AM.

[o0Marduk0o]

Founders should know better than buying overquirked mechs. No sympathy for you.