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For 10 years I worked on a planetary resource based MechWarrior League. The MechWarrior Registry, like NBT and other leagues was far more advanced than MWO Community Warfare. However, the appeal of the leagues was for both tactical combat AND planetary strategic warfare.
Many of the leagues were based on the amount of resources each planet had available for defense and how much resources were available to attack the planet in question.
Of course, after developing front end interfaces, automated servers, databases, email notification systems, admin control and planetary resource interfaces I have a very extensive background on what is possible and how to implement it. I did it all for free but I always considered how to pay for all the resources that I personally threw into the endeavor.
So, I will give a brain drain overview of the key concepts... tell me if you would participate.
The Problem
PGI is stuck in a position that constantly alienates dedicated players. They need to generate revenue, but it sometimes feels like everything that is purchased in game is devalued in order to sell the next item. It makes some players feel that their investment in the game is not valued.
When in reality, PGI has 50ish employees, servers and other costs to cover.
PGI currently sells Tactical assets. Items that are directly used on the battlefield. However, by foregoing the strategic side of war, they have missed a larger source of revenue. Further, they have missed a large quantity of gamers who love strategy games, and missed on the MechWarrior core players who played in resource based leagues for decades.
I know the sale of drop decks is one way that PGI intends to monetize CW, and that is a decent tactical item, but it is a drop (pun intended) in the bucket when compared with a player focused resource based strategy tie in.
The Proposal
I am not proposing the addition of an additional game mode.
I am proposing adding sectors to each planet with terrain and resources that tie to specific subsets of maps. ie homeworld.mechreg.org The resources for CW are Mechs.
Each player can place mechs on various sectors, making those exact variants available like "stock mechs" for defenders (all) or attackers (allied) to use.
Defensively, a player could place one of each of their OWNED mechs on sectors that they or their unit or faction own.
Offensively, players can place their mechs at dropship bases making those variants available for all planets within jump distance.
Of course, each player can use each mech in their own drop deck regardless of location.
Each time a mech is used in battle, it becomes unavailable for anyone else to use. For instance, if there is one TDR 5SS (custom name) available on sector 3 of planet X, it is available for only one player per drop on that sector. It is available for the Owner of the Mech, at all times as is currently the case.
The Impact for Players
Players now have incentive to take sectors and reinforce the sectors with their own mechs. New players gain access to "meta" mechs in addition to stock mechs.
For players who are into strategy, they can purchase, outfit and place mechs across the universe in defense of personally owned, unit owned and faction owned sectors. They can discuss where additional mechs are needed on the galactic map to reinforce upcoming attacks or to defend vulnerable sectors.
MOST IMPORTANTLY, players will BUY MORE MECHS.
The Requirements for PGI
PGI's investment in this system is small.
Planets would need the following database values:
- Type - ie earthlike, city, hills, canyons, frozen, lunar, waterworld, asteroid, desert, jungle-forest, flatlands, volcanic
Mechs would gain the following values:
- Location (Planet Sector)
- AvailableForCW
Planet Sectors would gain the following values: ( I am assuming Planets have a related Sector table)
- Terrain
- Ownership
Terrain includes a many to many relationship to Maps. So each terrain can have several related maps and each map can be related to multiple terrains. Why? When attacking a desert terrain, the battle can take place in a desert with some variety. Yes, this means 100 maps would be better than 6 maps.
Further, players would also need to be able to take a sector. This means that units could allocate sectors to players as rewards, CW could grow into the use of AI who are assigned mechs by players, new missions could be created or the process could come down to who scored the most match points for a sector that is newly conquered INCLUDING points scored by THEIR MECHS. The possibilities are awesome!
I expect this would sell a massive number of mechs, packages, and maybe even CW only assets like Tanks, planes, defensive turrets, etc.
Keys to Success
The key to success would be the ability to use all modules and customizations on the placed mechs.
Consumables on the CW positioned mechs would be replaced by the player using the mech. If they player does not make enough cbills to cover the cost of consumables in the match or in their bank account, the system would need to forgive the difference and NOT charge the owner of the mech.
Finally, a map builder for either internal or player use. ie Homeworld Map Builder demo.
This allows interesting maps to be created by the community, vetted by PGI. It could also be a terrain generator like terragen based map per planet with sectors carved out to better fit with PGI's current database schema. ie TerrainMap
