122 replies to this topic

[Jack Shayu Walker]

Big Tin Man, on 28 October 2015 - 02:07 PM, said:

@Deathlike--you realize all of this talk is for CW phase 3, where holding planets will provide rewards, unit coffers will matter, and there will be leaderboards? Did you listen to anything Russ said about for CW3 at all? CW3 is supposed to fix the incentive side.

I agree in the current iteration, breaking up units would do nothing. In CW3 though, it sounds like it would make quite a difference in spreading the population between factions to potentially earn more rewards and encourage more fighting.

The only thing that's going to split big lore based Units like CWI is MC... Maybe. What I honestly expect will happen though is that CWI would divide into it's galaxies and then form a special unit for CW. Then the CW jockies would wear the main CWI tag and go after the leader-boards. The rest of us would stay on the TS together and would drop together like nothing had changed.

Frankly I'm an officer with a huge mech stable, I don't even look at the in-game unit page but like once every 3 months.

Even if there were MC prizes, CWI galaxies aren't going to join different factions, they're loyalist units. The only competition is going to be who can take the planet faster, and I don't see that promoting unit division, just some healthy competition. I don't think that is going to disassemble the alliance between CWI's galaxies, I really don't.

Edited by Jack Shayu Walker, 28 October 2015 - 03:55 PM.

[Bloody]

it all comes down to the fact that MW:O is a niche product without direction and neither the engine, gameplay or marketing supports a larger population. It is COD with high TTK but without the agility or background to follow.

CW was never done correctly as players have no incentives to spend so much more extra time grouping up. The incentive to group up is to farm pugs faster, once solo , pugs players ( the vast majority ) of the population realized it was a pointless waste of their time, they simply stopped lining up while the premade stompers furiously wanked their frustrations. There needed to be a unique resource for the puggers to waste their time to play CW, be it ever inflating unique rewards ( ie look at the BG rewards from WOW to understand that if those rewards were removed, none of the BGs would ever be utilised, same for Arena etc ) to vast bonuses which stripped the shame of being stomped by a premade. IE the shame of lining up 20 -30 minutes to be stomped in 1 minute needs to give a 1 million C-bill loser pat on the back ( like Aunt Sally say there there to the bullied child ).

edit: oh and before some ****** suggests " oh you can always group up and take on those premades.." the path of least resistance of simply avoiding those premades is always available , and you are pretty stupid to suggest otherwise.

Edited by Bloody, 28 October 2015 - 03:51 PM.

[Jack Shayu Walker]

Bloody, on 28 October 2015 - 03:50 PM, said:

it all comes down to the fact that MW:O is a niche product without direction and neither the engine, gameplay or marketing supports a larger population. It is COD with high TTK but without the agility or background to follow.

CW was never done correctly as players have no incentives to spend so much more extra time grouping up. The incentive to group up is to farm pugs faster, once solo , pugs players ( the vast majority ) of the population realized it was a pointless waste of their time, they simply stopped lining up while the premade stompers furiously wanked their frustrations. There needed to be a unique resource for the puggers to waste their time to play CW, be it ever inflating unique rewards ( ie look at the BG rewards from WOW to understand that if those rewards were removed, none of the BGs would ever be utilised, same for Arena etc ) to vast bonuses which stripped the shame of being stomped by a premade. IE the shame of lining up 20 -30 minutes to be stomped in 1 minute needs to give a 1 million C-bill loser pat on the back ( like Aunt Sally say there there to the bullied child ).

edit: oh and before some ****** suggests " oh you can always group up and take on those premades.." the path of least resistance of simply avoiding those premades is always available , and you are pretty stupid to suggest otherwise.

Are people still making these "It's just like call of duty... except that it's nothing like call of duty" arguments. All it's meant to do is make a passive aggressive stab at the game, since COD has a bad reputation. The only thing the two games have have in common is that they are both arena shooters.

If you genuinely believe that MWO is as mechanically simple as COD, I think you have been playing this game for too long and have lost touch with what a casual shooter is.

Edited by Jack Shayu Walker, 28 October 2015 - 04:03 PM.

[oldradagast]

Big Tin Man, on 28 October 2015 - 01:08 PM, said:

Russ's frustration is based on everyone wants to be in a big group and bully someone, but when there is nobody to bully, they're upset that they can't find a fight. It's called having your cake and eating it too. MWO doesn't have the population to pull that off.

Worth quoting because this bad attitude is what basically killed CW. It was suggested ages ago when the idiocy of no match-making and throwing PUG's against full teams was revealed that something needed to change to keep CW interesting and prevent mindless seal-clubbing. The big units and herds of try-hards whined and raged at the suggestion that CW should have any consideration for skill and team size whatsoever. We were supposed to believe that seal-clubbing was an integral part of the "high-skill CW environment" (haha), and that "It's Community WARfare - it's not supposed to be fun!" followed by "join a unit and git gud or git rekt!"

So, most people simply took the other option - quitting an idiotic, poorly balanced shooting gallery game mode, while the few survivors did exactly as suggested - they "got good" and joined a big unit. Now, we have nothing but a few big units lacking opponents. The hilarity - this is exactly what was predicted, but the try-hards then - as now - refuse to accept the fact that any game mode that discourages new players and casuals is a dead game mode.

When Russ finally sees the selfish thugs for what they are and decides that CW should actually be FUN for most players, and not merely an ego-boosting shooting gallery for a select few, maybe that dead game mode will stand some chance of surviving. But not until that happens.

Edited by oldradagast, 28 October 2015 - 04:07 PM.

[BLOOD WOLF]

Deathlike, on 28 October 2015 - 03:47 PM, said:

In NO PART of that post, that I mention "ghost heat". I said GHOST DROPS.

If you're intentionally being dense, then there's nothing more to say other than you've said too much.

I've had to even quote what I said (it was unedited to boot), so I don't know why you're ranting about something irrelevant to the convo.

I have no clue why i thought yous said ghost heat, my bad; However that was not the majority of what i said. srry you had to hear my ranting, but we listen to you don't more than we like don't we?

I apologize for the two irrelevant post.

Jack Shayu Walker, on 28 October 2015 - 03:49 PM, said:

The only thing that's going to split big lore based Units like CWI is MC... Maybe. What I honestly expect will happen though is that CWI would divide into it's galaxies and then form a special unit for CW. Then the CW jockies would wear the main CWI tag and go after the leader-boards. The rest of us would stay on the TS together and would drop together like nothing had changed.

Frankly I'm an officer with a huge mech stable, I don't even look at the in-game unit page but like once every 3 months.

Even if there were MC prizes, CWI galaxies aren't going to join different factions, they're loyalist units. The only competition is going to be who can take the planet faster, and I don't see that promoting unit division, just some healthy competition. I don't think that is going to disassemble the alliance between CWI's galaxies, I really don't.

I admit that we are huge, but I would encourage faction infighting, what I mean is let different units of the same factions and other clans fight each other. I don't know if that would solve anything. It would make it better if a 200 man units split for different factions vying for control, but that wouldn't add players to the total.

Edited by BLOOD WOLF, 28 October 2015 - 04:14 PM.

[Adamski]

I'll just post this again as I refine the idea more, as this should help to break up larger units / alliances organically:

10 factions (6 IS Successor Houses & 4 Invasion Clans)
Each faction *should* have 10% of the total active CW players. (easily measured by pilot drops, so a 12 man of Wolf that drops 3 times a night for a week, would count as 12*3*7=252 Wolf Pilot drops)

For each 2% of active drops that a faction deviates from the target, they get a 20%-60% bonus in earnings (if under populated) or penalty (if over populated). Could even more finely tune it to 10%-30% for each 1% deviation, or 5%-15% for each 0.5% deviation.

Have a running counter somewhere on the Faction page for the active population %, that gets updated every day. Average out the week, and update the bonuses. Ideally also reduce the break contract period from 72 hours down to 4-12 hours.

This even works with the Lore (the more pilots and battlemechs a faction has, the less money to hire more, and Clans always award more honor for using fewer resources to take objectives).

Another neat concept to discourage peace between factions, is each ceasefire, if a planet is taken from a faction, there is a 5% reduction to attacker earnings against that factions planets. And each ceasefire where a planet doesn't change hands between two bordering factions, there is a 5% increase to attacker earnings.

[Khobai]

Quote

10 factions (6 IS Successor Houses & 4 Invasion Clans)
Each faction *should* have 10% of the total active CW players. (easily measured by pilot drops, so a 12 man of Wolf that drops 3 times a night for a week, would count as 12*3*7=252 Wolf Pilot drops)

Yeah not gonna happen. Some factions will ALWAYS be more popular than others. Having 10 seperate factions all fighting eachother isnt going to work... thats plainly obvious at this point. Instead there should just be two factions: IS and clan.

I think a step in the right direction though would be to change CW so its IS vs Clan only. Get rid of IS vs IS and Clan vs Clan. That way the attacker queue can be mixed faction like the defender queue currently is. That would speed up the queue considerably.

Not only would the attacker queue fill up faster but it would also reduce the number of planets being fought over to the ones on the IS/Clan border... which means way faster matches for everyone.

Edited by Khobai, 28 October 2015 - 04:35 PM.

[BLOOD WOLF]

Khobai, on 28 October 2015 - 04:29 PM, said:

Yeah not gonna happen. Some factions will ALWAYS be more popular than others. Having 10 seperate factions isnt going to work... thats plainly obvious at this point. Instead there should just be two factions: IS and clan.

I think a step in the right direction though would be to change CW so its IS vs Clan only. Get rid of IS vs IS and Clan vs Clan. That way the attacker queue can be mixed faction like the defender queue currently is. That would speed up the queue considerably.

Not only would the attacker queue fill up faster but it would also reduce the number of planets being fought over to the ones on the IS/Clan border... which means way faster matches for everyone.

Yea, that is a huge problem. Those players effectively cut of a huge amount of players from engage two factions as far as attacking goes. I haven't the slightest clue why they did that.

[Adamski]

Heck, they could just permanently put CW on Tukkayid event mode where its just the one planet. The queue was pretty darn quick then.

[TheOtherDino]

This has me laughing hysterically. Some might not like Russ' answers, but he's pretty right on when he says that playerbase is demanding something, is being offered a solution, and then rejecting it out of hand and saying they will do whatever they can to have the exact opposite of what they said they wanted.

We've got units in the top tiers of competition who are saying how it sucks to not have any real competition out there, and then they go field Timbies and HBRs and Cheetos. Well, that's your fault. You're so good, take a worse mech and then you might get a better fight. Want to keep stomping all us noobs? Keep doing what you're doing. I hope it's fun for you. But don't give me some BS complaint about how you need more competition. You have the tools at your disposal to make that competition. The fact is, you DON'T want better matches. You just want to win. Okay...fine. You have that, and you can have that. But you can't eat your cake and have it, too.

Don't pretend like you don't have everything necessary to solve this "problem." I get this all the time from my students, who expect me to hand them the answer to questions on a silver platter. When did problem solving and self-sufficiency become an archaic concept? And when did challenging yourself fall out of style? Bloody Iphone generation...

[Adamski]

The solution Russ is offering is attempting to address a symptom of the root problem instead of the cause.

CW is spread across 40+ odd planetary queues, and there is no incentive to spread out, instead, there is currently an incentive to form mega units and huge alliances, to increase the pool of skilled players to draw from, and to decrease the amount of time it takes to find a match.

Limiting Unit size, does nothing to address the problem, and instead actively pisses people off who are in these large units / alliances out of a sense of friendship and solidarity.

I don't have a personal stake in the matter, other than my unit has 400+ members, but its purely a social construct as its rare more than 5 of us are online simultaneously.

[AC]

Again... I am floored as to how PGI doesn't understand how their uses use their game or how they WANT to use their game. smh

[Dino Might]

What you mentioned is also a symptom. The root cause is that players want to stomp. They don't want close matches with stiff competition on both sides. They want to win and have their big #1 trophy and cake and candy by following the path of least resistance. It's human nature. We have very few individuals these days who seek out things that are difficult for them, and that's why we have such a huge number of depressed people these days.

Happiness comes from fulfillment comes from overcoming challenges. We don't seek challenges. We seek the easy path, and so we aren't ultimately fulfilled, and so we remain unhappy. People often mix this up with fun. Fun is not a part of that equation. Fun is a matter of taste.

Don't seek out rainbows and unicorns if you want to be satisfied. Seek out adversity and challenges, and topple them. People behave in MWO just like they do in real life. They seek out rainbows and unicorns and try to live in the land of easy.

[Adamski]

Didn't know you were going to start spouting off about facebook meme pop psychology. Once the kids get off your lawn, maybe you can read what people are posting, instead of arguing with the empty chair of what you think they are saying.

Players are pretty happy to partake in challenges, just look at the HUGE participation in the Tukkayid event, and the numbers/data it managed to provide, which PGI misread horribly.

Edited by Adamski, 28 October 2015 - 05:04 PM.

[BLOOD WOLF]

AC, on 28 October 2015 - 04:56 PM, said:

Again... I am floored as to how PGI doesn't understand how their uses use their game or how they WANT to use their game. smh

yea, because you just enlightened us, with that general vague statement. The problem also lies with the variety of players who all want different things, and some Just don't care about other players experience.

Dino Might, on 28 October 2015 - 04:57 PM, said:

What you mentioned is also a symptom. The root cause is that players want to stomp. They don't want close matches with stiff competition on both sides. They want to win and have their big #1 trophy and cake and candy by following the path of least resistance. It's human nature. We have very few individuals these days who seek out things that are difficult for them, and that's why we have such a huge number of depressed people these days.

Happiness comes from fulfillment comes from overcoming challenges. We don't seek challenges. We seek the easy path, and so we aren't ultimately fulfilled, and so we remain unhappy. People often mix this up with fun. Fun is not a part of that equation. Fun is a matter of taste.

Don't seek out rainbows and unicorns if you want to be satisfied. Seek out adversity and challenges, and topple them. People behave in MWO just like they do in real life. They seek out rainbows and unicorns and try to live in the land of easy.

There have been times in CW where we would do our best to make the games even for both teams. Rather than stomping the players, one can recognize that Fun is something that the other player can experience.

Edited by BLOOD WOLF, 28 October 2015 - 05:06 PM.

[-Vompo-]

I'm writing this while listening the town hall for the first time. So far I'm at half hour mark and all I've heard so far is:

[BLOOD WOLF]

that made me laugh

[Dino Might]

Adamski, on 28 October 2015 - 05:03 PM, said:

Didn't know you were going to start spouting off about facebook meme pop psychology. Once the kids get off your lawn, maybe you can read what people are posting, instead of arguing with the empty chair of what you think they are saying.

Players are pretty happy to partake in challenges, just look at the HUGE participation in the Tukkayid event, and the numbers/data it managed to provide, which PGI misread horribly.

Oh all the try hard in TDR9S and TBR...yeah they really wanted challenges. The guys who give up their unit tag to join super unit so they can get in on the reward train? Yeah those guys all wanted a challenge, huh. The guys who stand by purposely not defending their planets as a strategy to deter attackers? Another bunch that rose to the challenge.

ETA: facebook meme pop psychology? Did I strike a nerve, or are you really struggling to come up with a reason I am wrong and not finding one? I guess you're on facebook to recognize it as such. For me, I just know it from life experience.

Edited by Dino Might, 28 October 2015 - 05:49 PM.

[Kushko]

It sounds like many people missed the entire argument and went in to "rage/not listening any more" mode after hearing the proposed extra limitation to unit size.

I see people saying that will fix nothing but they ignore the other side of the coin which is Russ also saying that the most active units in a conflict will get to own a planet and get rewards (MC rewards it would seem).

So if you think about it, if an entire unit gets MC rewards and that unit can have up to several hundred players than everyone will flock to that unit creating an even larger imbalance. If however there is a limit of lets say 50 per unit than instead of players creating alliances of 3+ 50 player units where only one unit gets the MC reward, they'll think "hey, why dont we also compete for the MC instead of just helping our parent unit get it" and will very likely spread around all the factions (especially the weaker less represented ones) for a greater chance of being the top dog unit of that faction and getting rewards.

But by all means, lets stick our fingers in our ears and sing LALALALALA until PGI/Russ decides to stop bothering to listen to the community all together.

Edited by Kushko, 28 October 2015 - 09:42 PM.

[ColourfulConfetti]

Unit size limits is a great idea, just like how ghost damage and ghost heat are great ideas.

Edited by PalmaRoma, 28 October 2015 - 09:42 PM.