89 replies to this topic

[Krivvan]

Praetor Knight, on 11 September 2015 - 07:39 PM, said:

I think eventually things like armor, structure and mobility / agility boosts should not be displayed as quirks and should be rolled into the base stats of mechs, the devs are on the right track testing those out first.

Then when Mechs have a good feel for how they recieve punishment, then there can be signature quirks that would then account for specific loadouts on various mechs that involve weapons and so on.

That's the only way I see that could be a positive forward development. What discourages me is how they seemed to have become completely allergic to the whole concept of weapon quirks just because a few people were whining about it railroading their not-so-great builds.

The key word is signature. As many mechs or chassis as possible need to have their own signature theme or else they won't really find a niche for themselves and consequently will be less interesting.

When you scroll through the PTS quirks as they are now, even with huge differences in the quirks, all those IS mechs look the same. They all have some amount of structure buff, and some infotech stuff that isn't really impactful. Then some have some acceleration. Whatever mech you find to do something with, you'll probably just find another similar chassis/variant that does it better. There's less that differentiates the mechs.

[Lily from animove]

The nw quirks are bad, the new "meta" will be slap the biggest and hard hittingst wepaons in your mech anejoy big alphas at maximised quriks. No one ever at PGi seemed to consider that 2B's you cna not propery load vs 1B with a big boy is unbalanced in favor to the 1B. Now slapping quirks ontop favouring this 1B is just breakign stuff even more.

[Krivvan]

Some more elaboration on Infotech, nerfing the ability to get targeting boxes doesn't actually have much of an effect on higher tier meta comp players. We already don't rely on target locks especially since the gameplay is often about lighting quick pokes in and out of cover in trading phase, and then target calls and shots based on mech knowledge during the push phase. Targeting boxes are always a nice small addition, but they don't make a truly significant difference.

At the same time, those targeting boxes are a big deal for average to worse players. Making it harder across the board to get targets really just nerfs lower tier players, both because of what I mentioned and because they sacrifice mechs that could be fighting well to get those target locks.

Most good players can already play the game pretty well even HUD-less.

If you really want InfoTech to have an impact, it needs to act in a true Support role. Look at other Class-based games with support roles. They are things like Healers, Engineers (turret makers and repairers), or in MOBAs they do slowdown and other abilities that very closely affect damage and the ability to kill mechs.

A great idea for InfoTech is to add some kind of damage of crit chance buff against mechs that are currently targeted. Then it makes sense to spend the effort to run an InfoTech-focused mech if you can actually really help the team in combat.

And to those (including apparently Paul in his post) that think these changes will annoy meta players because it changes the meta, well, these current quirks do not change the meta. The meta on the PTS right now is just the same as it is on the real server, except more reinforced especially since all the IS mechs that challenged the Clan meta are now gone, and those meta Clan mechs almost universally got buffs.

If we really all were just interested in keeping the status quo meta, we'd be jumping for joy at the PTS quirks.

Edited by Krivvan, 12 September 2015 - 03:02 AM.

[Sarlic]

Too many people are leaning on weapons quirks. I knew this would happen at some point.


I think PGI is stepping in the right direction. The problem is how they utilise the quirks and make them tied to certain chassis.

Why should a Dragon have the AC/5 speed of a AC/2? Why should the Huggin recieve enormous SRMs cooldowns? Why should the Grid Iron have the twice the gauss speed rate of my Atlas? Why should the Hunchback have more velocity then me with the same weapons?

Quirks made people go build on quirks.

Think outside the box ffs.

Too many people think in quirks and i think PGI wants to start back to the roots and use the normal weapon values and then analyse gameplay on some chassis who have equal weapon values.

I have no idea what PGI's goal and or strategy is but i have a slight idea where they are aiming at. Can't blame them for atleast trying it.

Edited by Sarlic, 12 September 2015 - 03:06 AM.

[Krivvan]

Sarlic, on 12 September 2015 - 03:04 AM, said:

I think PGI is stepping in the right direction. The problem is how they utilise the quirks and make them tied to certain chassis.

Why should a Dragon have the AC/5 speed of a AC/2? Why should the Huggin recieve enormous SRMs cooldowns? Why should the Grid Iron have the twice the gauss speed rate of my Atlas? Why should the Hunchback have more velocity then me with the same weapons?

The problem is that you need to constrain mechs enough to give as many mechs as possible a niche. But also not constrain it too much to railroad it into just a few builds. For example, instead of just an AC/5 cooldown quirk, a cooldown quirk for all the smaller ACs (5s and 2s) that makes the Dragon truly unique.

They should also have actually looked into risk vs. reward aspects.

You can have a mech fire Gauss twice as fast as another mech as long as there are tradeoffs for that advantage. The Grid Iron can fire the Gauss twice as fast, but also receive no structure/armor quirks whereas another similar mech can fire it slower, but have far more structure/armor. That's what creates diversity and variety.

[Too Much Love]

Haydin, on 11 September 2015 - 06:18 PM, said:

I disagree. There are certain tactics that are just going to work well. For example, medium/long range, direct fire, high alpha damage with high mounted weapons. You do the most damage with the least exposure time. Certain mechs will better suit a tactic.

+1

[Sarlic]

Krivvan, on 12 September 2015 - 03:14 AM, said:

The problem is that you need to constrain mechs enough to give as many mechs as possible a niche. But also not constrain it too much to railroad it into just a few builds. For example, instead of just an AC/5 cooldown quirk, a cooldown quirk for all the smaller ACs (5s and 2s) that makes the Dragon truly unique.

They should also have actually looked into risk vs. reward aspects.

You can have a mech fire Gauss twice as fast as another mech as long as there are tradeoffs for that advantage. The Grid Iron can fire the Gauss twice as fast, but also receive no structure/armor quirks whereas another similar mech can fire it slower, but have far more structure/armor. That's what creates diversity and variety.

I fully understand that there need to be drawbacks. But how are we suppose to archieve balance with 50% or more quirks? (Current live)

I dont think thats divserity. You would be insane not to run 3LL on the Wolverine for example.

Diversity is to be found in loadouts. Not in quirks and mechs.

I think PGI is trying to balance everything again with slight adjustments. Start with the base structure and then add weapon quirks later.

For example the Grid iron has structure buffs on of the torso ballistic mount. I think PGI is going to add a small weapon quirks later. Or something.

Would make sense.

Atleast better then the overquirked Grid now to name a example.

Then again: some of the quirks currently doesn't make sense at all.

Edited by Sarlic, 12 September 2015 - 04:09 AM.

[Too Much Love]

I totally agree with Krivaan.

[Too Much Love]

What will this new system do to Locust? To Wolverine? To Blackjack? Etc. They all will become useless, only Timberwolves, Stormcrows, Direwolves and some other mechs will be viable. Great work!

It's all about red triangles, that's how battles fought and won. lol.

[BattleBunny]

I actually had some good hopes PGI would do this properly when they vagely announced a rebalance. Surely over the cource of the last 3 years they would have learned enough about their own game to make good decisions. The quirks were a good step in the right direction and with some tweaking here and there it could work pretty well.

Now they seem to have focused on things that dont really matter when playing a decent teamgame. With good communication and flow of information in a team, all these information technologies, that they seem to value greatly in the rating of a mechs effectiveness, mean very little. With some good eyes and map awareness a group of players that knows eachother well wont have any use for 8 second target retentions, or be bothered by 3 second target delays. The target will simply die before we will know its loadout. Big whoop.

On the other hand new/casual players will be utterly confused by all these systems.

If anything, the skill gap between the top and the bottom in group queue just got a whole lot bigger.

Edited by BattleBunny, 12 September 2015 - 05:15 AM.

[gloowa]

"removing weapon quirks reduces mech diversity". loving this. that is EXACTLY what people said when they first came out, except they said it about adding them.
they said "weapon quirks force you into single build for given chassis". so now both having them and not having them reduces loadout diversity.

i think i gonna name this CMPLS (collective mwo playerbase logic syndrome).

and then people wonder why pgi makes some strange decisions.

[Ano]

Krivvan, on 12 September 2015 - 03:01 AM, said:

Some more elaboration on Infotech, nerfing the ability to get targeting boxes doesn't actually have much of an effect on higher tier meta comp players. We already don't rely on target locks especially since the gameplay is often about lighting quick pokes in and out of cover in trading phase, and then target calls and shots based on mech knowledge during the push phase. Targeting boxes are always a nice small addition, but they don't make a truly significant difference.

At the same time, those targeting boxes are a big deal for average to worse players. Making it harder across the board to get targets really just nerfs lower tier players, both because of what I mentioned and because they sacrifice mechs that could be fighting well to get those target locks.

Most good players can already play the game pretty well even HUD-less.

Glad you picked up on this, Krivvan.

While in any game of this type, it's important to use your best players to guide the way you adjust balance, it's also important to recognise that your best players probably play the game differently to the other 95%, so you do still have to consider what a mid-level player's experience will be after you make changes and ensure that you aren't sacrificing *everything* to the capabilities of the very best.

[Mogney]

That's the thing, im not sure who benefits from the infotech stuff. Infotech stuff is a factor i would not consider at all when deciding what mechs to play. So the nerf as krivvan saud likely only impacts the casual players. Tgis entire balance pass is flawed at the core concrpt levrl imo.

[SirSoggyDog]

The issue is, some mech simply lack the hardpoints and/or tonnage to be effective without weapon quirks, no matter how much structure of "infotech" you give them. Although I agree that quirks that are related to a specific weapon are bad, ones that boost a group of weapons (such as general energy heat) are certainly a legitimate means of balancing and adding flavor to the mechs.

Infotech is never going to replace raw firepower, you can kill a mech without ever seeing the dorito easily enough. (One has thermal, "shoot me here" smoke, and general intuition to work off of) In the current state of PTS there is no reason what so ever to take a Treb, Vindy, or Kintaro over other medium mechs, or heavies for that matter.

Yes 50% quirks were a little wild when they didn't come with a downside. Yes the forced builders to use all they could of one specfic weapon. HOWEVER, it made those chassis viable in semi-competitive play. As a result we saw more chassis filling interesting niche roles rather than just a few viable mechs that worked because they had good hitboxes and hardpoints. Were the Dragon and Grid Iron a little cheezy? Maybe, but the certainly never seemed overpowered to me in the regular queue.

[gloowa]

SirSoggyDog, on 12 September 2015 - 06:23 AM, said:

The issue is, some mech simply lack the hardpoints and/or tonnage to be effective without weapon quirks, no matter how much structure of "infotech" you give them.

Really? Can you tell me which mech is that, give it +10000 armor quirk and send it my way. I'm sure you wont object to me duelling you in it, since "it doesn't matter how much structure you give it".

[Nori Silverrage]

I sort of agree, though I don't want to see a return to 50% cooldown on mechs except maybe in very specific circumstances, like a mech that literally only has 1 energy hardpoint.

I think by not having much weapon quirks, even a 10-15% on a mech would make it really stand out and that could be used to prop up underperformers.

[Nik Kerensky]

Agree completely.

[jay35]

Krivvan, on 12 September 2015 - 03:01 AM, said:

A great idea for InfoTech is to add some kind of damage of crit chance buff against mechs that are currently targeted. Then it makes sense to spend the effort to run an InfoTech-focused mech if you can actually really help the team in combat.

I'm with you on everything you've been saying except for this part.

Disagree that that is a good idea. It's completely arbitrary and capricious to start magically giving some mechs the ability to do more damage than others with the same exact weapons. It's a mostly bad idea from someone who admittedly doesn't even play the game anymore and who has a tendency to make suggestions that are completely incongruous with the MWO we have today. What he wants from MWO is not what MWO is and if MWO ever became what he wanted, it would cease to exist and lose a majority of its playerbase because it would be a completely different game.

Ignoring the PTS for a minute and looking at what we have in MWO today, all we really need to find a good balance that also helps more mechs become relevant is to tweak global weapon stats (like the Clan ERML) and then give certain chassis or mechs buffs to things like structure or mobility where necessary. Very few if any mechs needed nerfs. It was literally ONLY the TBR, SCR, and maybe the DWF and ACH that need some reductions. Anything beyond those would become apparent later and could be dealt with later after we fix the larger issues first.

Starting with the global weapon stat nerfs, we could immediately bring a wide swath of IS mechs back into relevancy and increase TTK. Add the buffs to structure for certain underperformers would also increase TTK for those mechs which in turn allows them to put out more damage before dying without decreasing TTK or increasing dps, thus helping to level the playing field in an appropriate way. And finally, reducing the very top or apex mechs like the TBR, SCR, ACH, and DWF will also improve TTK and bring everything else further into relevancy.

That's really all they needed to do as the next step of balancing. Why they didn't start there for the PTS rather than nuking everything from orbit, is unfathomable.

Edited by jay35, 12 September 2015 - 08:58 AM.

[Nik Kerensky]

jay35, on 12 September 2015 - 08:55 AM, said:

I'm with you on everything you've been saying except for this part.

Disagree that that is a good idea. It's completely arbitrary and capricious to start magically giving some mechs the ability to do more damage than others with the same exact weapons. I

I don't see it as the exactly same weapons. Per the lore and battletech technical readouts, each mech has custom manufacturer built weapons, which accounts for the weapons quirks.

[Noth]

jay35, on 12 September 2015 - 08:55 AM, said:

I'm with you on everything you've been saying except for this part.

Disagree that that is a good idea. It's completely arbitrary and capricious to start magically giving some mechs the ability to do more damage than others with the same exact weapons. It's a mostly bad idea from someone who admittedly doesn't even play the game anymore and who has a tendency to make suggestions that are completely incongruous with the MWO we have today. What he wants from MWO is not what MWO is and if MWO ever became what he wanted, it would cease to exist and lose a majority of its playerbase because it would be a completely different game.

I first heard of similar idea from watching SJR streams and it was received quite well (admitted saying it would need work), so it really doesn't matter if it is suggested by someone who doesn't play anymore if it is received well by those that are, and those that play at a high level at that.