41 replies to this topic

[Dawnstealer]

Admist all the recent sobbing, there's been some gems out there. I've compiled a couple that have popped up a lot and a couple of my own ideas:

1) Make the worlds mean something

A no-brainer, this is in the works, but how? What do you do to make taking a planet, tagging a planet worth-while? I'll get to this in a later idea.

Currently, you take a planet, and it change from one color to another. Neat. Do that more than five times and you will literally hear your soul try to escape from your body. And it's pointless. Through three iterations of CW, this is still the same, and the results will likely be the same: people will get bored, disenchanted, populations will plunge, and you'll be left only with an occasional curious PUG butting heads against seasoned 12-mans.

2) Tonnage Balance

One of my ideas, lower the tonnage for the IS by 5 tons, allow the Clans to select UP TO four mechs. So if a Clan player wanted to fill their drop deck with three mechs instead of four, they could do it.

Why? This is lore-based: they'd sacrifice numbers for quality. Likewise, a Clan player could sacrifice drops in a match for firepower.

3) Dump Mech Quirks, But...

Hear me out:

Quirks create obvious winners and losers in a competitive drop deck. If you aren't dropping with a Stalker 4N or Thud 5SS (currently, this slot is the BJ with its ridiculous quirks, but I suspect those will be adjusted to more reasonable levels shortly, then it'll be back to the 5SS) in your deck, you are probably hurting your team. Those mechs are so strong that it's hard to justify taking a different mech over it.

That's not a good system. By the time the Archer drops, I'll have 145 mechs (all IS). In CW, I can realistically use about 8 of them. That's 137 mechs that just sit there gathering dust. After I've been playing CW for a while, I'll bounce back to the quick queue and play some of those mechs. They are FUN mechs - there's some real gems in there, but...in the meatgrinder environment of CW, only superquirked mechs stand a chance. Everything else is just quickly-killed fodder.

How about this: tie the quirks to weapon makes. So a 5SS would no longer have all the quirks it has: just the slots. However, IS players would have access to the following (just an example):

• Kong Interstellar Corporation Medium Pulse Laser (based on Connaught - this will be important in a second): +5% Cooldown (good), +5% Heat (bad), +5% Range
  
• Blankenburg Technologies Medium Pulse Laser (Terra): -10% Heat (good), -5% Range (bad)
  
• Ceres Metals Industries Medium Pulse Laser (Capella): +10% Cooldown, +5% Heat
  
• Etc

So the quirks would be tied to the who makes those weapons. More than that? Those weapons would be TIED TO SPECIFIC PLANETS. Your faction loses that planet? You lose access to those weapons and their specific quirks. Now there's a reason to protect a planet AND other factions have a reason to take that planet. Clans would take planets to deny these quirks.

Now if I want my Locust to have a huge ERLL boost, I could buy the ERLL that has the big range boost (likely at the cost of running cool). Mechs would be back to what hardpoints they have.

Tables for this exist on Sarna - making individual tweaks in a spreadsheet would be easy enough and PGI? I'd totally do this for free.

Finally, bring back some form of damage. In the original Mechwarrior, you'd sometimes have your good mechs sitting in a garage because you couldn't afford to fix them. You'd run your bad mechs in cheaper missions until you had enough money to fix the damage on your good one. MWO doesn't need to go that far, but there should be some cost for getting your mech totaled.

If you're a loyalist? Make that cheaper. It should only rarely be higher than your earnings for a match (even in a loss, so 100k or less, unless you're in an Atlas that gets wrecked), and it shouldn't apply while a player is still on their cadet bonus, but some kind of mechanism along those lines. This could also go back to worlds: if you Faction has a production plant for that mech, the repair is cheaper. If not, more expensive. If a weapon is destroyed from a planet that your Faction no longer controls, you have to go with a different one (free switch, but different quirks). Clans? Well - they still have mass production, so this cost would be less.

4) Ramped Earnings for Merc Units

Mercs want to bounce around - that's just the nature of the beast. They don't have a faction loyalty, they want to play where they want, when they want. This is a game, that's fun for them.

Right now, there's absolutely no reason not just bounce from faction to faction to faction. There's no consequences. Let's change that.

Lore-wise, merc units switching sides, especially if they were bigger merc units, was a BIG deal. While you can't enforce that kind of role-playing in a game like this, you can reflect it in game mechanics. How? Like so:

When a merc unit signs up with a faction, they start at a very low base. Each week they stay with that Faction, let's say, these earnings go up by 5%. Likewise, they earn a negative 5% every two weeks with the Faction(s) they attack.

When they switch sides, if they go to a Faction they were previously attacking, not only are they back to that base earning rate, but they then have to overcome the negative percentage.

Now the final piece: the larger the unit, the more this % hit would be. Say for every 100 members, there's an additional 5%? And maybe limit how many mercs a Faction can employ. While this isn't so fun for the merc, it's not a lot of fun for the rest of us when the HUGE merc groups all go to the same place.

5) Encourage Clan Role-playing through XP and Cbills

Another thing I've said often, the Clans had supermechs. That was the whole point of the Clans: they had better pilots, better mechs, better technology, etc.

You can't force Clan players to play one-on-one or reduce their drop weight just for the role-playing lawls. Instead, encourage the behavior through XP and Cbills: Solo Kills get a huge XP and Cbill boost, Assists get nothing as they're "dishonorable."

I would love to see an option for a Clan drop deck that's "light," dropping below the available tonnage, get a Cbill/XP boost too. You drop in three Stormcrows vs a dude who drops in two Dire Wolves would mean you'd earn more than them. For each member of a Clan drop that goes under, there's a % boost there, too (so if everyone cuts their deck short on tonnage, the XP/Cbill bonus would be similarly large).

It would sure make those PUG drops more exciting if a Clan 12-man, instead of dropping a full 48 mechs, max tailored to take advantage of all the available tonnage, instead dropped with 36 mechs made up of Actic Cheetahs and Novas. Could they still stomp the PUG? Could they? Probably, but the challenge would be awesome.

6) Implement AI Vehicles/Infantry

This is just flavor, mostly, as vehicles are well inferior to mechs. But I'd much rather be fighting a mobile tank once inside a base than stationary turrets. Suddenly scouting would matter: "Where are those four Ontos tanks? Patrolling the far side? Okay - push now!"

What if Omega, rather than a huge gun, was now a Mobile HQ with its own gun? What if you had to escort it around? What if the huge gun was a Long-Tom III? What if it could actually help out by shooting during the match if a scout gave it line of sight (and the enemy weren't within its minimum range)? Pretty scary, right?

[Tarl Cabot]

Planets should mean something. Start with Clan base, and Houses Capitols/sector-districts-marshes capitals for supply lines. Supply line cut, the planetary owners can only defend, no attack vectors from the cut off areas.

Edited by Tarl Cabot, 01 January 2016 - 08:08 AM.

[Captain Stiffy]

7) Pug-only queue

[DarklightCA]

Captain Stiffy, on 30 December 2015 - 06:32 PM, said:

7) Pug-only queue

With what population?

[Captain Stiffy]

l)arklight, on 30 December 2015 - 07:00 PM, said:

With what population?

the huge number that won't play it at all because they have the very basic level of intelligence required to realize that pubstomping sucks?

[DarklightCA]

Captain Stiffy, on 30 December 2015 - 07:16 PM, said:

the huge number that won't play it at all because they have the very basic level of intelligence required to realize that pubstomping sucks?

So you want to take a already small population and high wait times and reduce that even more just because pug players are too stubborn to join a unit and play with said unit and then hurt what little actual functional units Community Warfare has left by sticking them with painfully long wait times in a game mode about Unit's conquering planets?

[Hexenhammer]

The way quirks are setup breaks the suspension of disbelief for me. Here's the quirks for a Stalker.


The 3F is the basic mech. Missile cooldown? Sure. The stalker was designed for missiles so the engineers took that into consideration. Energy heat generation? Sure. They just tied energy weapons into the same that cools the missile launchers down.

Laser Duration? I'm not sure what's put in the stalker that makes all lasers fire a shorter beam and why isn't that tech put into all mechs?

And the 5S has additional large pulse range? That's a bit out of left field. Maybe its an undocumented feature of what ever technology makes the medium lasers laser shorter.

The 5M has faster missiles? Not sure what the 5M has that would make a missile that flies under its own power fly faster than usual. But it does!


So where is all this leading? Well to this. Mech quirks should be about the mech themselves. Cooldowns, and heat dissipation can be attributed to the design of the mech. But missile velocity is function of the missile's designs and not its launch platform.

So while things like, cooldowns, heat dissipation, acceleration, deceleration, torso turn rates, and torso yaw can be a be a functions of the mech's design, large pulse laser range isn't. That's a function of the weapon itself and that's where weapon manufactures come in at.

Yes weapon quirks would add a whole new level of complexity to the game, and balance would be an issue it makes more sense than saying the Misery makes bullets fly faster just because its in a Misery and not in an Atlas.

[Captain Stiffy]

l)arklight, on 30 December 2015 - 07:39 PM, said:

So you want to take a already small population and high wait times and reduce that even more just because pug players are too stubborn to join a unit and play with said unit and then hurt what little actual functional units Community Warfare has left by sticking them with painfully long wait times in a game mode about Unit's conquering planets?

Nobody wants to be pubstomped and no amount of words will ever change that.

[Dawnstealer]

Hexenhammer, on 30 December 2015 - 07:46 PM, said:

The way quirks are setup breaks the suspension of disbelief for me. Here's the quirks for a Stalker.


The 3F is the basic mech. Missile cooldown? Sure. The stalker was designed for missiles so the engineers took that into consideration. Energy heat generation? Sure. They just tied energy weapons into the same that cools the missile launchers down.

Laser Duration? I'm not sure what's put in the stalker that makes all lasers fire a shorter beam and why isn't that tech put into all mechs?

And the 5S has additional large pulse range? That's a bit out of left field. Maybe its an undocumented feature of what ever technology makes the medium lasers laser shorter.

The 5M has faster missiles? Not sure what the 5M has that would make a missile that flies under its own power fly faster than usual. But it does!


So where is all this leading? Well to this. Mech quirks should be about the mech themselves. Cooldowns, and heat dissipation can be attributed to the design of the mech. But missile velocity is function of the missile's designs and not its launch platform.

So while things like, cooldowns, heat dissipation, acceleration, deceleration, torso turn rates, and torso yaw can be a be a functions of the mech's design, large pulse laser range isn't. That's a function of the weapon itself and that's where weapon manufactures come in at.

Yes weapon quirks would add a whole new level of complexity to the game, and balance would be an issue it makes more sense than saying the Misery makes bullets fly faster just because its in a Misery and not in an Atlas.

Exactly - quirks specific to the mech and the lore of the mech (so give a Marauder structure quirks, since it had that rep), and that's cool. But specific weapon quirks? General range quirks? What about the design of the mech would make lasers shoot farther? Does it have optics built in?

But if it's part of the WEAPON instead? Then it starts to make a lot more sense. Then you can start making ANY mech quirky with the kind of weapon you like playing with rather than the weapon the mech quirk demands you play or lose a huge advantage.

[DarklightCA]

Captain Stiffy, on 30 December 2015 - 08:03 PM, said:

Nobody wants to be pubstomped and no amount of words will ever change that.

Nobody wants to be pubstomped and yet nobody ever seems to want to change that, the answer to your problems is not que solo players with only solo quer's or disband team play in Community Warfare. It's either be a very good player that can carry your team or join a unit, work with said unit and carry each other. Teamwork and coordination are massive advantages in Community Warfare. Something all solo puggers miss out on and for whatever reason completely avoid like the plague.

[Vxheous]

Captain Stiffy, on 30 December 2015 - 06:32 PM, said:

7) Pug-only queue

People are going to just sync-drop together and still ROLFstomp. If you are a bad player in CW that cannot carry your team, you will still be just as bad in pug vs pug CW. Many of the good players in CW do drop solo from time to time, and when it aligns and it's 12 pugs vs 12 pugs, that good player ends up putting up 3-4K+ damage to carry the 6-8 bads on the team that cannot break 500 damage.

Edited by Vxheous Kerensky, 30 December 2015 - 11:29 PM.

[Cath]

How about CW be set up like every other PvP game out there? max 4 man groups. fill as needed. It seems to work for every other game. 12 man premades in a pug pvp que is just.....there really isn't a word to describe that kind of imbalance. and before you all chime in with "there is already a que for that!!!" change the normal que to solo only. problem solved.

[Lyoto Machida]

Great ideas and I'd love to see them in game but we have to work with what we have. PGI aren't the devs we deserve but the ones we need right now.

Cath, on 30 December 2015 - 11:51 PM, said:

How about CW be set up like every other PvP game out there? max 4 man groups. fill as needed. It seems to work for every other game. 12 man premades in a pug pvp que is just.....there really isn't a word to describe that kind of imbalance. and before you all chime in with "there is already a que for that!!!" change the normal que to solo only. problem solved.

This isn't every other PvP game out there.

[Kuritaclan]

Vxheous Kerensky, on 30 December 2015 - 11:26 PM, said:

People are going to just sync-drop together and still ROLFstomp. If you are a bad player in CW that cannot carry your team, you will still be just as bad in pug vs pug CW. Many of the good players in CW do drop solo from time to time, and when it aligns and it's 12 pugs vs 12 pugs, that good player ends up putting up 3-4K+ damage to carry the 6-8 bads on the team that cannot break 500 damage.

And yet even sometime this is not enough. xD But you are right.

[Anjian]

Lyoto Machida, on 31 December 2015 - 12:09 AM, said:

Great ideas and I'd love to see them in game but we have to work with what we have. PGI aren't the devs we deserve but the ones we need right now.



This isn't every other PvP game out there.

Should be. Those other games are a lot more successful.

[Sjorpha]

Dawnstealer, on 30 December 2015 - 08:04 PM, said:

But if it's part of the WEAPON instead? Then it starts to make a lot more sense. Then you can start making ANY mech quirky with the kind of weapon you like playing with rather than the weapon the mech quirk demands you play or lose a huge advantage.

The quirks are meant to balance mech chassis against each other, if you tie quirks to the weapons there would no longer be anything to motivate playing the mechs with bad hardpoints and geometry.

Now I agree the quirks are too strong, and that is because IS tech is too weak, it would be much better is IS and clan tech were equally strong in itself so that only bad IS chassis needed quirks.

But quirks need to be chassis specific to have the desired balance effect, which is to balance specific mechs against each other. If you tie them to weapons you would need to create another mechanism to make for for example a Locust or Awesome worth playing, now they are both worth playing despite design flaws and tonnage disadvantage thanks to having very strong quirks, so what is your option there?

Edited by Sjorpha, 31 December 2015 - 01:50 AM.

[Dawnstealer]

Sjorpha, on 31 December 2015 - 01:49 AM, said:

The quirks are meant to balance mech chassis against each other, if you tie quirks to the weapons there would no longer be anything to motivate playing the mechs with bad hardpoints and geometry.

Now I agree the quirks are too strong, and that is because IS tech is too weak, it would be much better is IS and clan tech were equally strong in itself so that only bad IS chassis needed quirks.

But quirks need to be chassis specific to have the desired balance effect, which is to balance specific mechs against each other. If you tie them to weapons you would need to create another mechanism to make for for example a Locust or Awesome worth playing, now they are both worth playing despite design flaws and tonnage disadvantage thanks to having very strong quirks, so what is your option there?

That's where you can quirk the mech themselves. So Locusts would get agility and climbing quirks and they could vary between the chassis (one could climb better, while the other accelerates better, for example). Some mechs could be tankier, others could spin their torsos faster, or swing their arms wider.

Then it just comes down to hardpoints and weapon preference. There'll still be winners and losers based on that, and you'll definitely have strong performers, but right now, if you don't put MPLs in a 5SS, you're an idiot. If you don't stuff LLs into a 4N, you're an idiot. It would be nice if that wasn't so cut and dry.

And make the quirks a bit subtler. And have the weapon quirks be subtler.

You get flavor of the weapons, you get purpose to the worlds and sectors, you make other builds and weapons relevant. Imagine quirked SRMs that ran a bit hotter, but had a quicker cooldown and did more damage, LRMs with a longer range but longer cooldown, and so on. Maybe cheapo versions that do a little less damage, don't shoot as far, but cost a lot less. Expensive versions that have all the bells and whistles.
Granted, that last might push you into P2W territory, but PGI needs to figure something out for when it's done rolling out mech packs.

Edited by Dawnstealer, 31 December 2015 - 06:07 AM.

[Hotthedd]

Captain Stiffy, on 30 December 2015 - 08:03 PM, said:

Nobody wants to be pubstomped and no amount of words will ever change that.

Nobody is forced to be. There are plenty of units looking for active players, and if that is too much there is a LFG option, and if THAT is too much, there is in-game VOIP.

If a solo player CHOOSES not to use any of those tools, then they have CHOSEN to potentially get stomped.

[Dawnstealer]

Hotthedd, on 31 December 2015 - 06:17 AM, said:

Nobody is forced to be. There are plenty of units looking for active players, and if that is too much there is a LFG option, and if THAT is too much, there is in-game VOIP.

If a solo player CHOOSES not to use any of those tools, then they have CHOSEN to potentially get stomped.

I agree with this. The only time I've been in really bad pugstomps was when no one talked to each other: everyone just went and did their own thing, no one focus fired. Granted, there are units where the players are just better. ALL of them can move and aim and hit exactly the part of the mech that they want while avoid significant damage to themselves - there will always be cases like that. And yeah, those will still be stomps, but they'd likely be stomps even against other prebuilts, unless the other prebuilt is equally skilled.

[-Vompo-]

Best way not to get stomped is to play together. The fact is the better team wins in the end. If you do not want to be part of a team you should play other type of games.

The rest of ideas here are workable in my opinion and I'd like them to be implemented in one way or another.