15 replies to this topic

[Dirty]

Commenting on the latest No Guts , No Galaxy Podcast. It was said players are just concerned with quantity of maps and not the mission types, I disagree, team death match gets old. Reflecting on past Mech Warrior and Battletech games the types of missions is definitely what added extra interest and excitement to the game

• escort missions
  
• Defense missions
  
• Capture missions
  
• Bounty missions
  
• Invasion/Routing missions

These types of missions add more facets to the game prolonging the games life and replay ability, being a World of tanks player the game gets extremely old doing the same old maps and constantly grinding, grinding and grinding. I hate the pay to win aspects of World of Tanks and hope that doesn't enter this game at all. The games in game store should be handled with alot of finesse. So what do I feel is important to the game? A large variety of mechs to play, alot of different maps, different and interesting missions to keep the players interested.


Salvage : Mech are expensive and under no condition once a player earns them, should they be taken away, randomly generated booty of equipment from downed Mechs should be given as salvage and distributed to the winning team

[Red Beard]

Dirty, on 04 December 2011 - 08:15 PM, said:

Salvage : Mech are expensive and under no condition once a player earns them, should they be taken away,

I agree. Can you imagine how a brand new player will feel if they sign on, start playing and decide to put 5-10 USD into a custom mech, only to have it destroyed and then be told he is out that cash. Some say that it would add to the "realism" by included the whole, "war has consequences" thing, but I say it would just be bad business. Players would feel cheated. So would I.

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randomly generated booty of equipment from downed Mechs should be given as salvage and distributed to the winning team

I doubt very seriously that there will be any type of post match salvage to collect. If the devs stick to their previous statements, then salvage will represent a way to repair mechs in-battle. How that will play out is not clear now, but if you look at the 2009 IGN interview, you will have a clearer idea. Random salvage as a post match prize could create a large amount of imbalance. Besides, what would players do with a bunch of salvage?

[Dirty]

Red Beard, on 04 December 2011 - 08:23 PM, said:

I agree. Can you imagine how a brand new player will feel if they sign on, start playing and decide to put 5-10 USD into a custom mech, only to have it destroyed and then be told he is out that cash. Some say that it would add to the "realism" by included the whole, "war has consequences" thing, but I say it would just be bad business. Players would feel cheated. So would I.




I doubt very seriously that there will be any type of post match salvage to collect. If the devs stick to their previous statements, then salvage will represent a way to repair mechs in-battle. How that will play out is not clear now, but if you look at the 2009 IGN interview, you will have a clearer idea. Random salvage as a post match prize could create a large amount of imbalance. Besides, what would players do with a bunch of salvage?

I was thinking about salvage as a way of gaining rare or hard to get parts for you mechs, as replacement parts, I'm still unclear how they are going to handle repairing damaged or wrecked mechs, or salvage can also be used by players to sell to other players , maybe by some in game auction house system. *shrug?

[Haeso]

Dirty, on 04 December 2011 - 08:15 PM, said:

Salvage : Mech are expensive and under no condition once a player earns them, should they be taken away, randomly generated booty of equipment from downed Mechs should be given as salvage and distributed to the winning team

This leaves zero room for an economy and little room for risk/reward in 'Mech selection.

It's surprising how many people are against something that's so central to the universe. BattleMechs are expensive, and the entire reason for that is it's easier to salvage a defeated 'Mech and refurbish it than it is to purchase a new one. Simulating that struggle and cost is something they can easily do. And do it with safety nets to catch any players unable to break even, nobody wants people to be unable to play.

Indestructible 'Mechs that teleport back to your hanger after a core meltdown and defeat is straight up gamey and magic which Battletech - the MechWarrior series, the TT and the novels have all stayed away from, the only exception would be MechAssault with it's magic repairs and ammo.

[CobraFive]

Haeso, on 04 December 2011 - 09:08 PM, said:

This leaves zero room for an economy and little room for risk/reward in 'Mech selection.

It's surprising how many people are against something that's so central to the universe. BattleMechs are expensive, and the entire reason for that is it's easier to salvage a defeated 'Mech and refurbish it than it is to purchase a new one. Simulating that struggle and cost is something they can easily do. And do it with safety nets to catch any players unable to break even, nobody wants people to be unable to play.

Indestructible 'Mechs that teleport back to your hanger after a core meltdown and defeat is straight up gamey and magic which Battletech - the MechWarrior series, the TT and the novels have all stayed away from, the only exception would be MechAssault with it's magic repairs and ammo.

But persistence is also totally new to mechwarrior, and It requires a very different mindset.

No-one will be playing this game for long, or any similar game for that matter, if you lose your stuff on death. Otherwise you have a lot of people camping behind rocks not wanting to scratch their paint, yelling at everyone else to go first. And then a lot of people quitting when they lose their favorite toy.

Moreover, if you make it so you lose on death but it is easy to replace (through, for example, salvage), you are diminishing the entire point of persistence. I don't want his mech, I want mine. I customized and painted it the way I want, I don't want it to go away when I get matched with a sucky team or I go down in a blaze of glory to save the match in the last moments.

Eve is the only "mainstream" game that has potential for personal loss, and realistically only occurs when you are very very sloppy (almost, intentionally trying to lose your things). Eve is also an economic simulator with some combat, and not a combat simulator with some economy, like mechwarrior online aims to be.

WoT model is fine. You have to pay for repairs and ammo out of your winnings. If you play very badly in an expensive tank, you will actually lose more then you gain. But a mediocre player will always make a profit, even if sometimes small, even if they play somewhat poorly, even on a team loss.


As for the topic of the OP... personally if I had to pick, I'd rather see one map with five game modes then 10 maps with one game mode, so I agree on this point. Having only one game mode is one of the things that killed WoT for me (the other being terrible matchmaker, tiering tanks against enemies twice their power or more). They already mentioned in a PCGamer interview, IIRC, that they are planning multiple game types.

[Biggs McIntosh]

Red Beard, on 04 December 2011 - 08:23 PM, said:

I agree. Can you imagine how a brand new player will feel if they sign on, start playing and decide to put 5-10 USD into a custom mech, only to have it destroyed and then be told he is out that cash. Some say that it would add to the "realism" by included the whole, "war has consequences" thing, but I say it would just be bad business. Players would feel cheated. So would I.

I disagree. Of course I am in the camp that hopes the pay store doesn't sell mechs outright, and instead sells custom paintjobs (could be applied to any mech, any number of times - doesn't lose value if one mech repainted is destroyed), a larger stable, and other unique and individual things that doesn't have a direct impact on the gamestate. If they do allow mechs to be purchase, and a new player whips out the plastic to get a shiny new Atlas for his first battle, and gets blown out of it, so be it. And on the business side, if a player spends $5 on his favorite mech, and it never dies, how much is he really going to spend?

[Haeso]

cobrafive, on 04 December 2011 - 09:41 PM, said:

But persistence is also totally new to mechwarrior, and It requires a very different mindset.

Not really. Not new to battletech certainly, and not new to any of the people who played in the totally third party persistence leagues.

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No-one will be playing this game for long, or any similar game for that matter, if you lose your stuff on death.

This simply isn't true. There are more games than I could hope to list that have death penalties beyond "Wait X seconds".

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Otherwise you have a lot of people camping behind rocks not wanting to scratch their paint, yelling at everyone else to go first. And then a lot of people quitting when they lose their favorite toy.

You've never played a game with a real death penalty. This isn't the case. At all. What happens is even pugs of totally random people work together, they play as a team as it's the only way to win. Even something as simple as a no-respawn match in a standard lobby game shows the difference plainly in how people play. This just takes it further in that direction. And unlike an FPS, the scared witless last man camp doesn't work, you can't just insta-gib a 'Mech without a tremendous amount of luck. And there's a big difference between defending and camping. You can't really camp in the traditional sense in a 'Mech game, they're too durable.

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Moreover, if you make it so you lose on death but it is easy to replace (through, for example, salvage), you are diminishing the entire point of persistence. I don't want his mech, I want mine. I customized and painted it the way I want, I don't want it to go away when I get matched with a sucky team or I go down in a blaze of glory to save the match in the last moments.

It's not your 'Mech if it's magically transported back to your hangar each time you let the enemy destroy it, at that point it's no longer a 'Mech with any character, with any history, it's magical and doesn't belong in the universe any more than the Phantom Archer does. There might as well be no persistence beyond a map changing colors if your 'Mech is invincible! Loaner 'Mechs fill the gap between BattleMechs are expensive and being unable to play quite nicely.

Quote

Eve is the only "mainstream" game that has potential for personal loss, and realistically only occurs when you are very very sloppy (almost, intentionally trying to lose your things). Eve is also an economic simulator with some combat, and not a combat simulator with some economy, like mechwarrior online aims to be.

I don't really care for blanket terms like "Mainstream" which are unquantifiable and only serve to be bent to whatever definition is useful for the user. UO though it has aged some, EQ early on, L2, Diablo, Diablo 2, Darkfall, most likely Diablo 3, Aion PvP ranking, any Battletech campaign ever though not a video game, Acheron's Call. I could go on. Some of those games are more popular than others, some are less popular. All of them have or had painful death penalties and in their heyday were definitely popular with the exception of Darkfall which was niche from the beginning intentionally.

You also forget that any death penalty in a sustainable game based purely on combat, has none of the drawbacks of a game like EVE - where you have to spend hours not fighting other players to acquire enough money to replace what you lost the last time you went fighting. Unless you're a pirate, anyway.

Quote

WoT model is fine. You have to pay for repairs and ammo out of your winnings. If you play very badly in an expensive tank, you will actually lose more then you gain. But a mediocre player will always make a profit, even if sometimes small, even if they play somewhat poorly, even on a team loss.

WoT model is bad to begin with, and is an even worse fit for battletech. Magic is not battletech. You can make a sustainable model and still have real loss.

[Thorqemada]

One thing is very true - If they sell whole Battlemechs in the Item Shop it is fully unacceptable to lose even a virtual Item you have paid real money for.
But Haeso already had it in another thread and i was on the same road: You can sell Piloting Licences for different types of Battlemechs you have then to buy with ingame money, ranks, xp, whatever...
Now, if you lose that Mech you simply buy another one bcs you still have the licence to pilot it and only need the amount of C-Bills etc. so no real money item was gone.
It adds deepth to the gameplay and is perfectly acceptable.
Also there can be a difficulty setting losely bound to what rank you have and what unit you fight in.
Beginners start with loaned mechs or unit owned mechs and fight their way to an own one eventually if they chose to do so.
If they only aquire ranks they will be promoted to better standard mechs at some time.
In Ingame-Simulator games you have no loss and full access to any mech implemented in the game, maybe simulator time should be restricted to some hours therefore or nobody plays the "real" game
With no loss you end up with a semi fps like game where the people start to get bored if they dont blow up things each 20 seconds - this is not Battletech so far i know it!

Edited by Thorqemada, 04 December 2011 - 10:48 PM.

[Riptor]

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This simply isn't true. There are more games than I could hope to list that have death penalties beyond "Wait X seconds".

The only thing thats not true is your hyperbolic nonsense about unlimited games that have perma loss in them.

Quote

UO though it has aged some, EQ early on, L2, Diablo, Diablo 2, Darkfall, most likely Diablo 3, Aion PvP

Oh boy.. here we go:

UO: UO was the only game that could be considered a true MMO at its day and the only reason they could pull it off successfully was because they had no competition. It was also released during a time where flat rates where a thing of the future and only hardcore basement dwellers could muster enough timeand money to grind through an mmo...

EQ: You said it.. "early on"... mind want to ask yourselfe why that "early on" was included.

L2: All you can loose in this game is a Keep, as a guild and the stuff that came with it, you know.. just like planets in galaxy conquest mode, something static that can be reclaimed, and XP.. something you could get back through PvE... what you cant loose is your chars equipment wich would be equal to your mech + weapons and items.

Diablo1/2: Youre seriously comparing a game where PvP is completly optional, is mostly concerned with PvE and whose PvP balance blows chunks to a match based game where PvP is the only option? Erm.. little news flash: You cannot compare these two genres with each other especialy since diablo 2 was PvP optional. And the guys that played the game for the perma loss are the dwindling minority.. not the majority...

Darkfall: Yeah... right... big hit in the mmo world... so big that barely anyone talks about it anymore...

Aion PvP: Really? Would be news to me if you lost all your items on defeat every single time you got killed. Same as L2 really

None of these games force you to loose your stuff either like your system would force people to and in all of these games (kept for darkfall maybe) are PvP optional! A PvP only game is a entirely different beast then a PvE game with PvP tacked onto it.

Its a good thing that the survey showed that the majority of players do not support such a system

Also driver licenses sold on cash shop? So much for not P2W.. how about only "renting" them like you "rent" guns for real cash in other wildly successfull f2p mmos



And back on topic:

There should be a good variety of both, mission types AND maps... about 50/50 i would assume.

Some maps wont work with some mission types or favour one side heavily on one map but then faavour the other side on another map. Makin every single map available for every mission type AND making them diverse and interesting will not work.. all youll end up with is a bunch of similiar maps with different aesthatics but basically all follow the same pattern since you dont want an unbalanced match.

But since the Cryengine 3 is suposed to be very user friendly i doubt we will really have much of a lack of maps to duke it out on.

Edited by Riptor, 05 December 2011 - 04:38 AM.

[Grand Paladin]

I think that if you purchase a skin that maybe it should be universal. if each player is garuanteed a minimum stable of mech's it might be applied to at least 1 default mech. Earning mechs and losing them can still be part of the game, but every player should have at least 1 mech available at all times. (BTW that could be based on Rank i.e. the higher your status the more default - "House Mechs"mechs to choose from. Just some ideas.
Have Mech, Will Travel

[Cattra Kell]

Dirty, on 04 December 2011 - 08:15 PM, said:

Commenting on the latest No Guts , No Galaxy Podcast. It was said players are just concerned with quantity of maps and not the mission types, I disagree, team death match gets old. Reflecting on past Mech Warrior and Battletech games the types of missions is definitely what added extra interest and excitement to the game

• escort missions
  
• Defense missions
  
• Capture missions
  
• Bounty missions
  
• Invasion/Routing missions

These types of missions add more facets to the game prolonging the games life and replay ability, being a World of tanks player the game gets extremely old doing the same old maps and constantly grinding, grinding and grinding. I hate the pay to win aspects of World of Tanks and hope that doesn't enter this game at all. The games in game store should be handled with alot of finesse. So what do I feel is important to the game? A large variety of mechs to play, alot of different maps, different and interesting missions to keep the players interested.



Salvage : Mech are expensive and under no condition once a player earns them, should they be taken away, randomly generated booty of equipment from downed Mechs should be given as salvage and distributed to the winning team

You do know when we talked about this that it was based off the data that Mr. Smiles collected correct? If not then you may want to read this: http://mwomercs.com/...phere-analysis/

Red Beard, on 04 December 2011 - 08:23 PM, said:

I agree. Can you imagine how a brand new player will feel if they sign on, start playing and decide to put 5-10 USD into a custom mech, only to have it destroyed and then be told he is out that cash. Some say that it would add to the "realism" by included the whole, "war has consequences" thing, but I say it would just be bad business. Players would feel cheated. So would I.

The problem with this is that the Devs have already said they will not be selling mechs, or at least ones you could not get already in-game for c-bills, in the online store. Second, when we say that it is destroyed we mean that it isn't removed from your inventory but rather you must pay a repair bill to get it operational, out of cash? Maybe you shouldn't of taken that new Atlas you got in a recon mission, or maybe you have to fall back to a different mech for a few games until you get some money, OR maybe you can ask your Merc Lance for a loan?


Hope this clears some stuff up.
Mr C. Kell

Edited by Cattra Kell, 05 December 2011 - 03:35 AM.

[Riptor]

Quote

The problem with this is that the Devs have already said they will not be selling mechs, or at least ones you could not get already in-game for c-bills, in the online store. Second, when we say that it is destroyed we mean that it isn't removed from your inventory but rather you must pay a repair bill to get it operational, out of cash? Maybe you shouldn't of taken that new Atlas you got in a recon mission, or maybe you have to fall back to a different mech for a few games until you get some money, OR maybe you can ask your Merc Lance for a loan?

That i can sign without any trouble.

Even having weapons destroyed permanently so that you have to replace them i can go for, and from some of the dev interviews that might be the case... but loosing entire chassis? No... a horrible horrible idea.

[VYCanis]

having persistence is fine and dandy, but seriously, potentially losing your mech after every time it gets shot out from underneath you?

That is above and beyond bad game design. That is short sighted to the point of blind.

In a game that is pure PVP you can easily expect something like 50 to 95% casualties for the population of a given server
50 is assuming 1 team steamrolls the other, 95% assumes 1 or two survivors on one side.

i.e. players will be dropping like flies. And no. it doesn't matter how much damage mechs can or can't take or how intelligently you play, the match has to end at some point, players want decisive results and they came here to mech fight, as such they will be blowing each other up ALOT. That is the inherent nature of PVP

The average player is going to lose their mech about 50% or more of the time assuming no respawns. Thats every other match. Even moreso with respawns.

The only way to counteract the immense attrition rate that comes from inherent gameplay is either to make mechs so cheap and common that they are practically worthless or otherwise force players to grind away in loaner mechs to be able to afford a nice one for the 1 to 3 games that it will last before getting blasted to scrap again before goign back to loaners. Neither of which are particularly attractive options compared to simply letting players pilot what they earned or payed for.

you can't balance a game on the assumption that either you or everyone else will be some BT lore rennaissance man tactical genius with a 20:1 KDR. Because it does not work that way.

Edited by VYCanis, 05 December 2011 - 04:37 AM.

[phelanjkell]

First off, I was on medication when we recorded!! lol

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It was said players are just concerned with quantity of maps and not the mission types

I didn't say this was the ONLY thing players wanted, I said it was very important to have different maps and many of them... I think? lol OP is way off topic. Future reference, post in the NGNG podcast thread.

Glad your listening to the Podcasts!! Please let us know details, feedback, your opinion etc.. do so on our Facebook page or the NGNG Podcast thread.

Edited by phelanjkell, 05 December 2011 - 04:59 AM.

[Cyttorak]

The devs have already implied there will be 2 different tiers (or more?) of gameplay:

Tier 1) Games that have no effect on the persistent meta-game; i.e. "non-conquest" or "instant-action" types. With no "reward" (possible increase of territorial control) there isn't much point in having any risk. These games can have infinite respawn and no consequences for losing, because they are just for fun and don't matter in the larger scheme of things.

Tier 2) Conquest games. With the prospect of real, persistent rewards in the meta-game there should also be real risk. What extent that risk takes is still unknown.

So the whole discussion of "should there be player loss" or "should there be no player loss" is moot. It will be easy to implement both.

[Dirty]

phelanjkell, on 05 December 2011 - 04:54 AM, said:

First off, I was on medication when we recorded!! lol



I didn't say this was the ONLY thing players wanted, I said it was very important to have different maps and many of them... I think? lol OP is way off topic. Future reference, post in the NGNG podcast thread.

Glad your listening to the Podcasts!! Please let us know details, feedback, your opinion etc.. do so on our Facebook page or the NGNG Podcast thread.

I Realize now that the data was from Mr Smileys Survey but I guess the shock of hearing most players just want death matches and maps, promoted me to act quickly. It was shocking and this is not what the past Battletech and Mech Warrior games were about, they had a variety of missions that kept the game fresh and interesting. I hope the devs realize, that a variety of maps and missions will add the the longevity of the game. I just wanted to toss my hat in the ring and make sure my opinion is heard.