10 replies to this topic

[jay35]

Ignoring the PTS for a minute and looking at what we have in MWO today, it feels like we were fairly close to a good balance point except for PGI's perpetual inability to adjust or nerf the right things.

A simple three step process could have gotten us (and could still get us) the majority of the way from where we are today to an ideal balance while retaining mech diversity/individuality and increasing TTK thereby making the game more appealing to pretty much everyone:

• 1 - Tweak global weapon stats
  
• 2 - Provide subsequent buffs to chassis structure and mobility where needed
  
• 3 - Provide subsequent small, targeted nerfs to the former apex mechs (TBR, SCR, DWF, ACH) if needed

These three steps in this specific order scale from broadest impact to most targeted impact, yet all three create equally beneficial improvements that are felt by all mechs on the battlefield. And each subsequent step is reduced in scope by the balance impact of the previous steps, thereby making each step easier and more manageable.


(1) Starting with global weapon stat tweaks, we help direct the meta in a healthier direction and inherently remove the majority of the perceived OPness from Clan weapons. A good example is the Clan ERML, which is a common community request to be nerfed for many months now that has gone unheeded. What the specific change would be is outside the scope of this thread. The point is we start there because by first making weapon changes globally, it's not an arbitrary or capricious change to specific chassis like randomly giving some mechs the ability to straight-up do more damage per shot with certain weapons than other mechs can, which is absurd.

(2) After tweaking global weapon variables, arriving at an approved spec and testing how that impacts every mech in the game (yep, extensive playtesting is a key part of balance, PGI), the next step is to give certain chassis or individual mechs buffs to things like structure or mobility where necessary to improve their relevancy to the revised weapon meta. The amount of mechs needing these buffs, and the scale of these buffs, should now be much less than it would be today because we've already addressed global weapon imbalance issues in step one. Once these changes are made, again do extensive playtesting to adjust and really lock in the right chassis-specific changes to structure and mobility.

(3) And finally, we arrive at actual nerfs to mechs. Very few if any mechs will need nerfs by this point, which is ideal. The less outright nerfs needed, the better. Between weapon stat changes and buffs to structure or mobility, it may even not be necessary at all outside of perhaps the TBR and SCR, and maybe the DWF and ACH. Anything beyond those would be extremely minor issues by this point that would only become apparent after extensive playtesting and could be dealt with individually at that future time.

Summary:

Starting with the global weapon stat tweaks/nerfs, we would immediately bring a wide swath of IS mechs back into relevancy and increase global TTK. Then adding the buffs to structure or mobility 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 their actual dps, thus helping to level the playing field in an appropriate and balanced way. And finally, reining in the very top or apex mechs like the TBR, SCR, ACH, and DWF will also improve TTK and bring everything else below further into relevancy.

And this procedure allows us to keep the vast majority of the current weapon quirks that have made so many specific IS mech variants unique and diverse in their playstyle, all of which are good things that help keep the various mechs interesting to play rather than all being generic and same-y (or just outright hosed like many are in the PTS).

That's really where they should have started as the first step of balancing. Why they decided to go backwards and dream up a complex, unweildy tome of quirk changes without addressing the larger weapon issues first is unfathomable.

And all this stuff they're trying to do to force what they call "information warfare" and roles is misguided. Almost none of that stuff has to do with the core balance issues in the game, nor should it. Trying to shoehorn sensors into the balance is just plain wrong. That stuff should be addressed properly, later, as part of actual roles, after we have better gameplay balance and more diverse sensor capabilities, and in the context of roles-based warfare which is absent in MWO today. Real roles-based warfare will involve aspects of maps, game modes, rewards, and a skill tree overhaul as well, rather than being done piecemeal or as part of the balance pass which just convolutes the entire thing, as we are seeing today in the PTS.

I'll be honest, my initial reaction to seeing the changes that are proposed within the PTS made me want to just give up on the game entirely because seeing this utterly out-of-phase concept as their suggestion after three years of community feedback on balance felt like they really have no chance of ever getting it right. I've put a lot of hours and a lot of cash into supporting this game over the years and I'm extremely disappointed that this is what they came up with, but it also means I have a vested interest in this game surviving. I really hope that the abomination in the PTS isn't the direction this game goes and that they're willing to start over from where we are today, rather than some sort of post-apocalyptic ground zero.

Edited by jay35, 12 September 2015 - 10:09 AM.

[jay35]

Further discussion is evolving here if you're interested.

[ALKALIN3]

PM devs about this as well. It's a great idea and needs to get the proper attention because whatever I witnessed yesterday isn't gonna fly!

Edited by Aodh, 12 September 2015 - 12:19 PM.

[Krivvan]

If I had to sum up all my issues with the direction of balancing that the PTS has it's that the direction that they are going about with balancing is backwards. It's hard to make global Clan vs. IS balance changes if all the mechs are already saddled with a whole bunch of random quirks.

I say they start with a true baseline. As in nothing. Then tweak Clan vs. IS equipment balance between each other until it's at a certain margin. Then tweak some weapon quirks for certain mechs to bring them in line with each other (rather than certain IS mechs up to Clan level, then leave other IS mechs in the dust). Then bring in mobility and armor quirks. Then infotech quirks. Let the less impactful quirks fill in the smaller holes between mechs.

If one mech is 5% better at firepower than another, then you can start talking about giving the worse one a whole bunch of infotech quirks (like +200% types) to make up for it in order to make one Scout mech and one Fighter mech. If one mech has 50% firepower better than another, then no level of infotech quirks will make up for it and the end result simply makes infotech something to be ignored.

The whole idea of balancing vastly different mechs using only mobility, durability, and infotech just doesn't work, but it looks liked they tried, which only makes it more confusing when they inevitably have to start making the bigger changes like global weapon values.

[Duke Nedo]

Absolutely, and also add clan/IS XL normalization as point 0.5 and I'm 100% happy.

[XX Sulla XX]

Starting with weapons is good but as part of it start with the new IS weapons ment to be balanced against Clan weapons. Then many current weapons can be balanced for more brawling builds. And bring in the Light Fusion Engine and balance IS engines so each have a role. Makes more sense than trying to just balance the weapons we have now for IS and then bring in the new stuff later. Current weapons were never ment to be balanced with Clan weapons.

[Krivvan]

XX Sulla XX, on 12 September 2015 - 01:22 PM, said:

Starting with weapons is good but as part of it start with the new IS weapons ment to be balanced against Clan weapons. Then many current weapons can be balanced for more brawling builds. And bring in the Light Fusion Engine and balance IS engines so each have a role. Makes more sense than trying to just balance the weapons we have now for IS and then bring in the new stuff later. Current weapons were never ment to be balanced with Clan weapons.

The possible solutions there are:

1) Balance IS with Clans with the tech we have now and then introduce that new IS tech with their own tradeoffs to make them different but equal
2) Never bring in new IS tech
3) Advance the timeline right now (unlikely)
4) Balance IS tech with clan now, but then re-nerf old IS tech and deprecate it in favor of new IS tech when the timeline advances.

[Tastian]

I was going to start my own thread but this is a good place to start. I think before mech balance like this takes place, several other factors need tweaking: namely - a good ECM fix/solution, ghost heat, weapon balance in general, weapon balance IS vs Clan, and other bandaids like Gauss charge up, Gauss limit of 2, etc.

[Krivvan]

Tastian, on 12 September 2015 - 01:37 PM, said:

I was going to start my own thread but this is a good place to start. I think before mech balance like this takes place, several other factors need tweaking: namely - a good ECM fix/solution, ghost heat, weapon balance in general, weapon balance IS vs Clan, and other bandaids like Gauss charge up, Gauss limit of 2, etc.

I may not agree on the specifics, for example I like the Gauss charge up, but the general idea yes. Things that cause a big change like global weapon and equipment buffs/nerfs should be looked at first before going into chassis differences, and then looking into variant differences. As is, they're looking at what makes the smallest impact first and therefore are not going to get a good picture of things.

[Kamikaze Viking]

OP has it right. From what I saw on PTS yesterday the changes applied were half the job. Taking away one set of evolved changes but without supplying something effective in compensating for it. Such as the OP's suggestion of Overall IS/Clan weapon balancing.

The Info changes seem to only be a penalty for new players and will minimally affect top level players who are already used to playing against ECM and not having any info.

Please please re-think this in the correct order of operations as OP has suggested.
But you cannot apply the changes to the Weapons and or the Mech quirks separately or else the game becomes temporarily extremely unbalanced until you finish the other half of the job.

I suggest that many PTS sessions will be required before you can make this live, since there are so many variables you seem to require to change all at once. Maybe run it once a week for a few hours in NA Primetime at a Scheduled time so that people can see each iteration the changes and test and comment that you are moving in the right direction, before you spend too much time working on something ineffective. (I rarely get time to use PTS properly here from Aus, but the majority of good comments come from NA comp players anyway)

[jay35]

Here is some additional feedback copy/pasted from Outreach since they may not read it there:

The balance pass makes the game extremely unfun to play because it saddles so many mechs with loads of punitive quirks just for trying to be efficient or effective on the battlefield.

It removes much of what made many of the IS variants diverse. It brings everything down to a low common denominator which isn't fun to actually play. They removed quirks that made many IS mechs unique within their chassis or their weight class, or gave them a purpose, or even made them competitive enough to fend off what would otherwise be superior Clan tech.

And finally, negative quirks and removing things like module slots. Why? Stop this. Stop with all the negatives and penalties. People naturally hate being penalized, and being penalized for playing the game intelligently is about the worst thing in the world if you want to encourage people to play your game. It's entirely possible to balance this game without ever placing a negative quirk on a mech because other things can be buffed to compensate and increase TTK, including internal structure, movement, and armor, and global weapon stats can be tweaked up or down to holistically adjust where imbalances clearly exist.

This balance pass is unnecessarily starting over at a ground zero that never actually existed in Battletech and for good reason. The only good thing I can say is at least they are testing it first.

Now we need to see them be open enough to scrap this "balance pass" and start over from what we have today on production, leaving quirks alone for the initial pass and same with module slots which should not even be on the table for removal only adding more slots for specific scout roles. Then doing the obvious things that are needed, like tweaking global weapon values, buffing mech armor, movement and internal structure quirks where needed, and then going from there.




And this... https://www.reddit.c...to_save/cuz6tqh
The net outcome so far is bad because they're choosing some of the wrong things for their means of balance and ignoring more obvious things that have been recommended to them for many months. They're going about it backwards and making life much harder on themselves and the community as a result. If they implement anything like what is previewed in the PTS, it will be much more likely to shorten the game's life than extend it. It will also remove the comp scene and move the game further away from actual piloting skill and further into more arbitrary, meaningless, and often capricious (dis)functionality for mechs and therefore the gameplay. I was shocked to see how wrong they got it on the first pass and to be that far off on the first pass does not indicate they can salvage this PTS, but should start over completely from what we have today in the live game and stick to reasonable adjustments that improve balance rather than a complete nuke from orbit like the PTS that creates such a ridiculous result.



And... https://www.reddit.c..._tweaks/cuza0r3
Hardpoint arrangement isn't even on the table, per PGI. Neither is map, meta, or CW alterations. The balance pass is about adjusting the mech balance so that more mechs (ideally all mechs) become viable to take into combat. And you can't effectively determine whether that Awesome variant is going to be viable until the environmental/global effects have been sorted first.

The problem with the quirks the first time around, as they've admitted, was that they went too far. Part of the reason they went too far is because they didn't first address the global weapon balance. And actually most of the big weapon quirks felt pretty good because they enabled IS mechs to compete with the global imbalance of certain Clan weapons.

Now they still haven't fixed the global weapon issues and instead have just tried to take the overall gain on quirks which was at like +10db and dropped it through the floor so that the average is now like -10db. There are just as many convoluted quirks as before (more actually because they spread them out more into less important areas like sensors) but most of them are now negatives instead of positives, and where they are positives they are often in less important areas so they don't really add anything substantial.

So the balance pass is really equally as ineffective at achieving balance as before but now it is also mostly punitive, which just makes it that much worse for user experience because players are now being constantly punished, rather than before where IS mechs were often brought up by quirks to compete with Clan mechs that simply lacked positive quirks. Either you were playing something that was unquirked and had superior tech, or something that was enhanced via quirks to compete with them. So both sides were at least in a net positive situation from a perception standpoint, despite the global weapon balance issues underlying it all that remained unaddressed.

What I'm looking for is for them to fix the global weapon issues first, and then the need for many quirks simply goes away and what remains is that much easier to balance per chassis and per mech and requires much less dynamic quirks because there is less global imbalance to compensate for in the first place. More mechs won't need quirks or as many quirks, weapon quirks no longer need to be as strong to achieve parity, structure quirks don't have to be buffed as much to provide longer TTK, etc.

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This whole concept of blanketing mechs with negative quirks is misguided, as is removing module slots and anything else punitive. Balance and reasonable TTK can both be achieved without any of that except a few neg quirks on what people commonly see as the apex mechs (TBR, SCR, DWF, ACH) after first balancing the IS and Clan weaponry.

And trying to force specific variants of each chassis into offensive, defensive, infowar, and maneuverability categories (they aren't really roles, they're just categories) is completely incongruous with what variants are all about and how variants are intended to work. They are variant in their loadouts (hardpoints, etc), their looks, and they often came out at different points in the timeline or were built by different factions.

Nowhere in Battletech or Mechwarrior history were the variants shoved into such categories as PGI is proposing. I'm not even arguing for lore, just pointing out that even in lore there is no justification for this. Doing so only dramatically reduces each variant's ability to be built to meet diverse needs or playstyles and basically corners each variant into specific limited type of play. You like the HBK-4G and you'd normally build it for a certain playstyle? Not anymore! Now you have to build it for whatever playstyle they just heavily quirked it toward (offensive, defensive, infowar, etc). That's a dramatic reduction in mech diversity and customization, not an improvement.

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Each mech being shoehorned into a specific role will likely only get worse under their proposed system since instead of having all mechs at a neutral baseline and then positively quirking certain things on each to create differentiation without reducing diversity and flexibility, they are instead loading up everything with negative quirks and pigeonholing each mech into more narrow constraints ("the defensive hunchback, the offensive hunchback, the electronics hunchback" which is simply their forced preference for how each of the variants should be played).

In addition, they are in some cases removing module slots and using additional negative quirks (which really should never be a thing except on the apex mechs at the very top that need to be cut down a bit) to create major downsides on every single mech, such that you likely just won't want to play any of them at all, which is how I felt when I checked out the PTS. I was like, wow, this is the first thing they've done that could actually get me to just go "screw this" and walk away, despite three years of time invested in grinding, a lot of money spent on it, and the current moderately fun gameplay which would be gone.