257 replies to this topic

[Void Angel]

Ah, Clanner tears... It's like reading the Mage forums when I used to play WoW...

Anyhow, everybody talking about this should remember a few things:

Any nerfing of Clan XLs will be part of or after the new balance pass. Since it's looking like PGI will be nerfing Inner Sphere 'Mechs hard by removing weapon quirks (a good thing,) a nerf to various aspects of the Clan tech base - and a buffing of the Inner Sphere's - is a necessity.

Only PGI has the demographic information necessary to authoritatively say when any 'mech is over- or under-performing. We can make good guesses based on our own anecdotal data set in the case of very common 'mechs, but we may still be wrong without any flaw in our reasoning. Similarly, it's important to note that if Community Warfare is the primary goal of balance, a 'mech's performance for its tonnage is also a consideration.

Finally, transparently self-interested slippery slope complaints - even if you have convinced yourself to believe them - are not convincing. When most proposed nerfs, and all of the nerfs PGI is considering, retain the differences in Clan v. Inner Sphere tech - e.g. focus on ranges, no side-coring for Clan XLs, etc. - whining that "soon there will be no difference!" is not going to convince me. On that note: no, you are not entitled to a "refund" because your overperforming toy got nerfed. No, it does not matter how much you paid for it, or if you expected to have an unfair advantage when you put down that money. You were charged more because of the relative C-bill values of the completed 'mechs, not because you were being sold a golden hammer to bully other players. This was all clearly told to you from the beginning. Feel free to quit, but you are not entitled to any money.

Edited by Void Angel, 28 October 2015 - 06:26 PM.

[hybrid black]

SkippyT72, on 25 October 2015 - 08:31 PM, said:

Want to screw over clan mechs more, I'm ok with that BUT only if you remove the ability of the IS to use mech lab and make them take stock and varient mechs like the lore actually calls for. People paid more for Clan mechs for all kinds of reason, but the fact of the matter is the DID pay more real world cash and should not continue to be screwed over because some folks continue to rant about how un balanced this game is basically because they refuse to use teamwork and get better as a team. The IS quirks along with the limitations and crap added to clan tech have the game about as balanced as possible some clan mechs are better than some IS mechs, but then again some IS mechs are hands down better than IS mechs with all thier quirks, heck we have a Raven that hit out past a Clan er Lrg mech stock. so think about that a min before you continue to just throw numbers out there without adding in all the advantages that have been handed to IS mechs in range and heat quirks.

its digital content and subject to change

[VoodooLou Kerensky]

What is the reason for the higher prices of the Clan Mechs (in both ingame and real money)? From smurfy the 3 CB's come to 38,788,562 and 3 Jaegers http://mwo.smurfy-ne...5778f4fc36fe4b3
http://mwo.smurfy-ne...d3f62ccf9c4434d
http://mwo.smurfy-ne...202f81c68a4fe10
that comes to 38,900,000 would you have been happy to have Spent $55 for the Jaegers? The CB's come to 15,520 in MC The Jaegers at 7,685 (which I think is a better Gauge between E- & Real money) Do you still think its fair? Thats why I think Im due a refund. And doesnt the Mastery bundle cost even less and come with a Hero Mech too?

Void Angel, on 28 October 2015 - 06:23 PM, said:

On that note: no, you are not entitled to a "refund" because your overperforming toy got nerfed. No, it does not matter how much you paid for it, or if you expected to have an unfair advantage when you put down that money. You were charged more because of the relative C-bill values of the completed 'mechs, not because you were being sold a golden hammer to bully other players. This was all clearly told to you from the beginning. Feel free to quit, but you are not entitled to any money.

[Repasy Cooper]

You know what would fix everything? Engine crits.

The weapons and equipment have hit points now, so why can't the engine too? BT rules stated that after you lose 3 engine shieldings your mech is offline. Each crit location an engine takes up represents an engine crit, and since IS XL engines take up three crits per side torso that is why they are dead when they lose a side torso. But the same can happen technically for Clan XL engines. If you have taken a critical hit to your engine elsewhere, then lose a side torso, your mech would also shutdown in this case EVEN THOUGH YOU HAVE ONLY LOST ONE SIDE TORSO.

If we implemented an engine crit system it would fix the whole bloody "advantage" of Clan XLE. For that matter, we should have crits/hitpoints for every single bloody part of the mech by now!

• Gyro crits should cause your aiming reticle to become increasingly erratic.
  
• Engine Crits should cause your mech to overheat like mad even from running (should not affect speed, just heat).
  
• Each leg actuator crit should decrease max speed by 10%.
  
• Each arm actuator crit should make it harder to use unlocked arms.
  
• A crit on your sensors should affect targeting (ie. make it slower/impossible, cause static feedback in hud info, lose hud info).
  
• If your life support goes offline, overheating a mech should outright kill you.
  
• A critical hit on your cockpit should disable ejection on Community Warfare.
  
• Exposed internals would obviously have greater %crit chance than ones w/ armor coverage.

Naturally, this would mean that mechs are all-around more fragile BUT I think it would effectively level the playing field between IS and Clans. It's also just a matter of adjusting base %crit chances until you reach a nice compromise where Clan XLE is no longer OP but mechs aren't dropping like flies either.


It would also make LB-X more useful, as the weapon has increased crit chance per projectile.

hybrid black, on 28 October 2015 - 08:58 PM, said:

its digital content and subject to change

Yea sry guys he's right. According to the agreement every single one of you signed you don't actually own any of the content, you lease it from PGI. You bought the LICENCE to USE their product. You are not a shareholder, you CANNOT dictate what they can and cannot do. They can make any changes they want to content you've received.

You also won't get any refund for content that has already been injected into your account. If they did allow refunds, that would be AWFULLY GENEROUS of PGI. But they are not obligated.

Man, does nobody even read the EULA agreement anymore? jeez... nobody should EVER buy into a game without understanding such basic concepts as the End-User License Agreement. If you broke PGI's EULA code for example, because you didn't read it, IT DOESN'T MATTER! They would have the right to revoke everything you have paid for, no refund included.

Edited by Repasy, 29 October 2015 - 11:48 AM.

[MischiefSC]

N0MAD, on 28 October 2015 - 05:51 PM, said:

You stated that if you wanted to make lots of $ (implying winning alot or doing really well) you would take out your TW (implying its OP).
I then asked you to show stats on your best IS chassis to compare them with this all mighty TW as a reference, to show how much more OP the TW is, showing me them would of showed how much beter a TW is compared to IS best performers under one pilot.
You wont and i know why..
Easy to imply things when you wont back them up..

Okay, so if I post my TW stats and they're better than any vaguely similar is mech, what do I win? I'll post them so long as trying to dissect my mech stats to say what is better than what doesn't become the discussion.

I'll post them when I get home. It's a bit apples to oranges; I have played my tw since the psr changes came in and I got put in a much easier environment but the impact of those 20 matches vs the 1k/1100 I had under Elon is negligible. The best comparison based on that would be against my Jager stats but I'll put a slew of them up.

Edited by MischiefSC, 29 October 2015 - 11:55 AM.

[Void Angel]

VoodooLou Kerensky, on 29 October 2015 - 12:15 AM, said:

What is the reason for the higher prices of the Clan Mechs (in both ingame and real money)? From smurfy the 3 CB's come to 38,788,562 and 3 Jaegers http://mwo.smurfy-ne...5778f4fc36fe4b3
http://mwo.smurfy-ne...d3f62ccf9c4434d
http://mwo.smurfy-ne...202f81c68a4fe10
that comes to 38,900,000 would you have been happy to have Spent $55 for the Jaegers? The CB's come to 15,520 in MC The Jaegers at 7,685 (which I think is a better Gauge between E- & Real money) Do you still think its fair? Thats why I think Im due a refund. And doesnt the Mastery bundle cost even less and come with a Hero Mech too?

There is so much wrong with that mushy logic: you're comparing pricing at different times; you're comparing different tonnages and builds (one of your Jaeger builds costs a mere 2/3rds of the average Timberwolf build) even though a la carte purchases all cost the same. You've ignored the Prime variant that comes with the Clan package, you're comparing the deliberately inefficient price of an a la carte 'mech to the pricing of an economy bundle (instead of the bundled equivalent) - and you're ignoring the slightly important fact that you knew what you were buying when you bought it.

That last point blows the rest of your smoke screen away. You got what you paid for. You knew that the Clans would not be Tabletop-Mistake Overpowered; PGI told you up front. You knew that pricing of future products, and the effectiveness of all 'mechs and equipment in the game could and likely would change - that's par for the course with any MMO game. If you are grown up enough to have your own money to spend, you are grown up enough to be expected to know this. Go into any physical store and buy a WoW bundle - then come back TWO FRACKING YEARS LATER,and complain that your Shaman got nerfed and you want a refund because the new software bundle includes the last two expansions, and you feel that what you bought isn't a competitive value any more. They may be polite in telling you "no," but they'll think you're an imbecile - for good reason. You got what you paid for; you still have what you paid for - you are not "due a refund" by any measure but fantasy.

PS: If you really don't know why the stock versions of Inner Sphere 'mechs are generally less expensive than the stock versions of Clan Omnimechs, any opinion you have on the subject is held in ignorance. Take the Jaegermech A in your post: that's a fully-upgraded AC/40 BoomJaeger; note the c-bill price. Now click on "tools" in Smurfy, and select "load stock loadout." The c-bill price drops to about a third of what it was, doesn't it? Wow - and the Timber Wolves in the store cost about three times as much as that, too! The Clan 'mechs cost more because you are getting more stuff's worth of equipment and upgrades. The MC cost of 'mechs is designed to be a shortcut fee so that you don't have to grind it out, so the proportions are there, too.

Edited by Void Angel, 29 October 2015 - 12:27 PM.

[Repasy Cooper]

To summarize the above post:

When you buy a stock IS 'mech, you typically start with a lowtech loadout and have to pay a heck of a lot of C-bills to customize/optimize the 'mech.

When you buy a stock Clan 'mech, you start with a fully optimized killing machine. You can tweak that machine for a bit of C-bills if you want, but in most cases it's not even necessary. Unless you're going for the most Meta builds, most of the stock Clan 'mechs are perfect, requiring no modification whatsoever.

I have not once modified the loadout of my TBR-PRIME(I), save for equipping modules & consumables. Likewise, I had to seriously tinker with my ON1-K before I found a loadout I liked, and in doing so I probably spent more C-bills than when I bought the stock 'mech in the first place!

Think of it less as "A Clan 'mech costs three times as much as an IS 'mech of equal weight," and more like "A fully optimized 'mech costs three times as much as a beginner lowtech 'mech." When you think of it that way, it makes perfect sense...

[VoodooLou Kerensky]

OK for 1 Clans unlike the Inner Sphere are purely military, while the Inner Sphere is a Aristocratic Feudal Society. Clanners dont pay for their Mechs, they are usually assigned a Mech they did best in and their load outs are based on a Mission by Mission Basis. The Inner Sphere Aristocracy OWN their Mechs (Yen Lo Wang?) and most of those have been passed down thru Generations. The Average Spheroid thinks ComStar Acolytes are Wizards or Divinely Powered, while the average Clan CHILD knows how to operate a HPG. Let that sink in a Second.....Yup thats right AT&T Went Religious and the Majority of the Population thinks they do Mystical things rather than using technology.
So to put it bluntly the IS are poor ignorant savages who think the Coke bottle that fell out of the sky is their God(s) showing their displeasure, while that 4 year old explains to Gran-ma how they got their Smart Phone to do that thing, and doesnt think its Magic.
You say I got what I paid for but I didnt. And yes if you notice all 3 of those Jaegers are Ac40 Jaegers but they fire 1 round each not 5 so they do all their damage to one spot, while my more superior weapon that just weighs a bit less and goes a bit further (as well as generate ghost heat unlike IS Ones (with the exception of the AC20) but spreads the damage all over my target, and the Clan Lasers which are supposed to be cooler, faster firing and longer ranged generate ghost heat 'more efficiently' than the IS ones that are cobbled together from bits and pieces made to work instead of parts engineered to work. Russ stated that the Prices are C-Bill based, but the higher expense to maintain etc those weapons applies ONLY to the Inner Sphere who barely understand the technology enough to keep the wheels from falling off, and who HAVE to scour battle fields for salvage, where-as the Clans collect Salvage in abhorrence of waste, could requisition the parts to fix his Mech.
CBils can be translated to dollars but by using MC which is directly connected to real money, which if I recall right Russ said translated to $1 US equals 5 MC on average, $55 divided by 5 isnt 15, its 11, so yeah Im a tad bent about 4k MC difference in cost from my tricked out of the box mechs to the same weight class IS Mech that should be costing 3x as much to maintain than Clan Mechs due to the idiocy of the populace and duct tape and bailing wire mechanics.
And what about the thinking persons game we were going to get thats turned into CoD with Stompy Robots? When was the last time the OP for didnt come in the A or B gate? when was the last time you wanted to use a mountain short cut and couldnt because you would blow up for being 'out of bounds'?
If you truely want Balance make both sides follow the same rules across the board from top to bottom, no designated weapon style slotting just critical slots depending on Mech, No changes in range, heat, amount of rounds fired, no added quirks and be done with it. Picking and choosing what your going to use from Canon and what your not is like picking and choosing from the Constitution or the Bible.
But Im just talkin myself blue in the face. You know and Im just a Idiot who bought clan mechs that get beat on in the name of balancing. Y'all whove known me since AOHells Solaris n Mech 2 and on-wards you'll still see me around but prolly alot less and in ridiculous builds so Im somewhat entertained, and screw who evers on my team if they dont like it. I mean Devs have a team for some ladder or league instead of real beta testing with specific things to do and feed back and after action reports to fill out (like we used to do in the Olde Dayze)

[NocturnalBeast]

Yes, Clan warriors did not have to pay for anything, it was all provided to them by the lower castes in exchange for the protection that they provided and for the disputes that the warriors would settle for them. Usually a Cluster would have a pool of mechs and they usually would get to choose a mech in the order of rank, or be assigned a mech according to their specialization. These warriors could then select the configuration that was best suited for the battle, although they could not customize, or mix and match these configurations. Only the highest ranking, or most prestigious blooded warriors were able "own" (be permanently assigned) and have their mechs customized beyond just changing the configuration (ALT).

In the IS, Mechs were usually owned by royalty and passed down over the generations, or if the mechwarrior was part of a large military force, they would be assigned a mech out of the mech pool for the regiment, or battalion. Of course, a pirate or mercenary may be able to steal, or buy a mech, but it most likely would be at a great cost or risk. Even in the 3050s IS mechs were rarely upgraded, or modified, because it too a long time and specially trained techs / engineers as well as very rare parts to do so.

Customizing mechs, or ALTs (for clans) should be the reward for reaching the highest rank in CW.

Edited by Ed Steele, 29 October 2015 - 09:49 PM.

[Ace Selin]

Mcgral18, on 25 October 2015 - 02:10 PM, said:

Whether you like it or not, Normalizing engines is the way to go.


Buffing the STD engine appropriately at the same time. Give isXLs larger penalties, but not death.

How about leaving Clan XLs much the same they are but making IS XLs performance similar to that of Clan XLs, they dont die when 1 side torso destroyed just lose some manoeuvrability etc..

[MischiefSC]

Here you go N0mad. It has no real bearing on the conversation or reality of performances but just to prove a point.

So, are stats broken btw? They're not adding up. While some of it I understand (my stats in the Elo period are way, way worse than the PSR period - My Elo was way higher than my PSR due to an absence for most the time PSR metrics were counted) but weapons especially are completely off. I have over 1k drops in the TW during the Elo timeframe so the couple dozen drops I've done since PSR came out in it don't really affect the metrics. I could pull out stats from other mechs I haven't used since PSR but most of those IS mechs are artificially low, it wouldn't be legit - most I only took to double-basics then played in CW.

So I figured a more accurate example would be to put up weapon stats as the huge number of drops before I started playing after PSR came out (about 5K in 'current' not counting archived) would easily average out the 400 or so drops I've had since PSR came out.

While Clan LPLs are a really high performer it's coming out to an average of over 800 damage/match. That.... that's not legit. Conversely it only has 60 some matches for my IS LPLs but I've done over 100 matches in my Wubshee (with LPLs) which always takes LPLs.

Give that the stats are likely borked, here's what you asked for. My Timber Wolf stats -
TIMBER WOLF TBR-PRIME(I) 901 458 425 1.08 939 637 1.47 400,010 837,335 3 days 11:04:15 TIMBER WOLF TBR-PRIME 901 458 425 1.08 939 637 1.47 400,010 837,335 3 days 11:04:15 TIMBER WOLF TBR-C 64 37 27 1.37 52 49 1.06 23,670 67,007 05:45:02 TIMBER WOLF TBR-S 91 53 38 1.39 80 63 1.27 33,120 68,095 08:03:12

Even including derp matches it's an average of 434 damage/match, all but a couple of dozen from the Elo period when my gameplay was orders of magnitude harder. My most common build, by far, was 2x UAC5, 4xCERML. This was prior to UAC5 buffs. Inferior to the CLPL build for killing power but great for farming component destruction and earning more money and it was still easy to drive wins in.

here's my best performing IS mech from the Elo period
JAGERMECH JM6-DD 182 93 88 1.06 194 147 1.32 61,375 145,232 14:52:56

337/match damage.

Here's the Banshee, it's got a good 50 matches in PSR era but they averaged in to a lot so it's pretty close.
BANSHEE BNC-3E 474 256 207 1.24 475 316 1.50 187,949 410,882 1 day 20:04:39

All of which is pretty moot. Group queue matches (that's most of it) are far more challenging than pug matches, most of my IS mechs were largely played in CW and only played in pug queue for leveling.

What are you wanting to see? That a Timber Wolf plays better than anything even vaguely in its weight class? Of course. It performs like any IS assault but better and more reliably. Most of us can get ~20% more performance out of a TW than any comparable IS heavy. That's WHY any comp team in a comp situation is going to take a TW (or HBR, or SCR, etc) than a comparable weight IS mech.

They're better. That's the whole gist of this thread.

[Mcgral18]

Ace Selin, on 30 October 2015 - 12:00 AM, said:

How about leaving Clan XLs much the same they are but making IS XLs performance similar to that of Clan XLs, they dont die when 1 side torso destroyed just lose some manoeuvrability etc..

That's the idea.

[TWIAFU]

Ed Steele, on 26 October 2015 - 08:53 AM, said:

10 vs 12 in CW is not impossible, we can already do uneaven matches in private games, PGI just needs to make it happen.

Well, the people that actually code the game have told us otherwise and why.

So, if you know more about MWO code then they do, please, by all means share it.

[VoodooLou Kerensky]

He meant like a Smurfy of your Timby builds Mischief.
And I think part of the problem comes from who the Devs are basing the info they get from 'e-sports' teams (not soley mind but they are the major influences) because they are 'Professional' Mechers. Which means that they most likely have rigs have more Performance than what the average 'casual gamer'/Amatuer doesnt have with all the HID hardware of pro standards with macros and 4 20 inch monitors or huge flat screen TV that make mechs stand 3ft high on the screen as well on the top in tiering and I dont think people who aspire to be pro e-sporters should influence CW. Current CW seems more like Solaris team death matches, not the Invasion of a planet

[Fenrisian Wolf]

Most of what I see on here is just crying. I have both Clan and IS mechs and I have no preference on which one I take. I can do over 1000 damage with a thunderbolt just like I do with my dire wolf. I will adapt my playstyle for whatever changes they make but I'm kind of sick of listening to the crying.

[Jetfire]

Alright, this is pretty simple to solve. Clan XL is a huge buff and needs something to balance it out because this is not BT TT and clans aren't just OP but balanced by numbers. So sticking with differential balancing here is the simple solution.

IS STD Engine - double its HP
IS XL Engine - double the ST HP on both sides
Clan XL Engine - leave as is

Now you can kill an IS mech by destroying one ST but it takes much longer than killing one clan engine ST. IS STD's get a big survival buff, especially zombies and clan remain as they are. If this doesn't establish differential parity then continue to adjust up IS engine health as needed.

[Stormravin]

It seems to me that a viable way to make everyone happy is to do something that was mentioned earlier:

Allow CASE in a torso to make an IS XL engine survive that torso's destruction.

This makes an IS XL more palatable and opens up more versatile designs (making IS pilots happy). This is simple and increases survive-ability (which PGI wants). This helps offset the weight savings of an IS XL slightly and makes the IS use an extra slot per torso they want to survive, thus still giving Clans an advantage as lore dictates (keeping the proponents of Clan advantage happy).

This also works for the idea of what CASE is used for in lore, (shunting damage away from important parts of mechs) so the stretch would not break BT lore very much.

This has some interesting uses such as for a Hunchie, you could just have CASE in the torso that always gets blown off and not in the other. If the one without Case gets destroyed, than the mech is totaled, however if the one with case gets destroyed, you are still running.

I think this would be the simplest solution. No reason to over complicate things. Thoughts?

Disclaimer: I am mainly an Innersphere pilot who runs XLs on almost everything I own. I am also someone who grew up playing TT and reading all the books. I also love this game and have happily spent money on it and still feel like I have gotten waaay more than my money's worth.

[B0oN]

..."when you buy a Clan mech you buy a fully optimized killing machine"

looks at the stock loadouts of Clanmechs


... if you say so, oh mighty mechmaster, but one question arises though with this statement of yours, man.
Like, for instance :
HAVE YOU EVER DRIVEN A STOCK CLAN MECH ?
DO YOU EVEN PLAY THE SAME GAME AS WE OTHERS DO ?
WHAT COLOUR IS WHITE FOR YOU ?

L O L, the amount of bias in this tread is too hilariously high .
You guys (all of you, no side left out) might wanna take a step back and look at what you try to perpetrate so far, I can tell you this much : sounds/reads like pre-election campaign speeches (from that Trump dude maybe) and it´s neither good to read through nor to chip in with all that brickwalling going on.

[KahnWongFuChung]

I played a few CW games against 12 man Clan teams and every one was a total wipe out of all IS mechs in a very short time like 10 minutes. Most of this was due to the fact we were all unorganized pugs Vs a 12 man Clan team that was Organized.

But that was not the only factor the Clan mechs themselves are taking x6 the damage a IS mech takes and dishes out x4 the firepower a IS mech does. That right there is a huge unbalance in the game to a point most players will not play CW.

PGI needs to stop the nerfing of mechs and start thinking about doubling the armor on IS mechs as a start to counter them. No here is the funny part when I play Clan mechs I get killed almost as fast as in my IS mechs so I would say the 12 man Clan teams are not playing MWO fairly and Russ and PGI needs to look into why?

[NocturnalBeast]

TWIAFU, on 30 October 2015 - 04:19 AM, said:

Well, the people that actually code the game have told us otherwise and why.

So, if you know more about MWO code then they do, please, by all means share it.

I never claimed that I know more about coding than they do, I merely pointed out that it can be done in private matches, so obviously it is the matchmaker that is causing the problems. I do not however, believe that it is impossible to modify the matchmaker to allow 12v10.