108 replies to this topic

[NeoCodex]

The whole idea of balancing something as unbalanced and complicated as BattleTech makes no sense from the start, and is quite honestly ludicrous.

Mechwarrior was never balanced. It was always about cost of certain, better technologies, a game mechanic which could have been further expanded instead of changing the fundamentals of the system; trying to reinvent the wheel instead of working on the pillars of what BT once was.

I will make a direct comparison to Gundam Vs games. Just as in BT, there are plenty of diverse and ridiculously overpowered Gundams as well. But the Japanese developers tackled this problem in their games in a simple manner while keeping the spirit of greatness and strength among the best machines in the universe.

How did they do that? By not bending the rules and making it work like it actually does in terms of power: each machine has a cost associated with it. Whatever you pick, may it be something simple or incredibly strong, it will come at a price when you deploy or lose it. Some machines cost two times or three times as much as regular ones which still remain competitive. Actually - the cost of the best ones does usually not fully translate into performance that you get, unless you are really, really good with it and can reach the skill ceiling by mastering the particular chassis.

The same system could work incredibly well in MWO instead of trying to balance something that was never even close to balance from beginning. Instead of putting mechs into tiers and giving them made up buffs, why not give them a battle value (as a deployment cost), which could be tied deeply and more interactive with the game modes:

- it would integrate very well in FW (total cost of your drop deck instead of tonnage, no limit or required numbered of mechs you bring can do 5 cheap mediums or just one state of the art assault with twin heavy gauss rifles and what not)

- it would work with Solaris (drop deck mode like FW or respawn last man standing mode where you would be losing points until you run out, piloting a more expensive mech becomes incredibly risky if you get killed)

- it would make perfect sense with Repair & Rearm (more expensive mechs cost more to upkeep, with the strongest ones threading a zero margin profit line if you don't pull your weight with them, thus cheaper mechs being a lot more beginner friendly and forgiving; you would not see a beginner saving up for a Mad Cat or a rare exotic gimmick because it's better; it would be more of a status of prestige) This seems very unpopular for whatever reason. I don't get it but fine, let's just ignore this suggestion.

- not to mention it would make obscure mechs still worth using without having to rely on nonsense buffs simply because they're cheap and economical.

- we could do much more varied builds and open door to new weapons and technologies without having to worry about balance problems. You want to use full Clan tech? Sure, but it comes at double the cost. You want to use X-Pulse Lasers and RAC? Sure, but those things will increase your battle value and they also break a lot, making it a gamble investment.

I'm sure we could come up with an idea where this would also work in quick play with some matchmaker optimizations, but highlight of the game would be FW and Solaris, where these battle costs & repair mechanics would come to their full potential.

At that point I don't even know why would we still need QP; which could be replaced by Solaris as the new form of QP, and moving QP map rotation and battles into FW as primary game mode. But outside planetary conquest (current FW mode with no MM), these small battles we're having would just happen visibly on the map now with integrating the repair cycles and costs into everything together so it remains coherent.

This is what I actually envisioned what MWO could be when I first heared about the game, years ago. By now I know Russ is too stubborn to ever even consider a complete revamp of the game like this. It would even require less work than building a system of logistics and living universe in FW (that's what Star Citizen was trying to do and look where it got them), however just with ditching the balance ideas and let the overpowered mechs be overpowered, and giving us a reason to pilot X over Y and sell us Z because it creates new options, not just copy pasting same loadouts on a different looking chassis, everything would make so much more sense...

But one can dream, right?

Edited by NeoCodex, 26 July 2016 - 05:40 AM.

[Kaeb Odellas]

You will still have to balance the BV or cost to accurately reflect a mech's value on the battlefield, which isn't going to be any easier than what we have now. Plus, using R&R as a balancing metric effectively makes the game P2W, as people can just buy C-Bills.

[dervishx5]

Everyone just starts boating energy to save on rearm costs.

[NeoCodex]

I'm sure these problems could be sorted out, as I stated R&R would be a lot cheaper on lower battle value configurations. And every piece of equipment and weapon you put on your mech would affect your battle value, you could make a really cheap config of a normal chassis or slap some more exotic equipment on it with higher BV. This could be more easily balanced than tweaking stats of weapons and quirks, if something seems really too strong just increase it's BV and see how it goes; could also influence the game meta this way to not make it stale by changing values from time to time.

R&R does not create P2W. It actually decreases P2W aspect, because R&R for "uber" components would be much higher than the regular stuff, so even if you skipped phases and jumped to best gear at start, you could eventually thread on zero margin profit if you're not performing well with your "P2W" tech. And nobody ever buys c-bills because they're too damn expensive so that's not a valid argument.

As for boating lasers this could easily be solved by requiring them to service and upkeep just as rearming would. Expanding on that: you could also skip a few service cycles, but risking that the component will eventually fail where you will have to completely replace it.

Edited by NeoCodex, 26 July 2016 - 04:11 AM.

[Varvar86]

Repare & Rearm will make players:
1) grind more to keep CBL's coming to keep their mechs go. No one likes grind, you talking about MW player base, this is not new universe and majority of players here are old enough to have things to do in real life. Player base will go down.
2) keep their valuable mechs in mechbays because it's cheaper to run simpler mechs in order not to risk your income vs expenses. So it’s gonna be like 10 vatches on boring something to gring money and play 3 matches on favorite cool mech. Your idea will actually limit variability of mechs on battlefield and make it more P2W.

This is classic "more grind for the Grind God" f2p games. Do 100500 drops just because you need money to repare your "pink" mech. Nothing great I see here

Edited by Varvar86, 26 July 2016 - 04:19 AM.

[El Bandito]

We had R&R before, in beta. It didn't work out. Perhaps PGI implemented it faultily, like so many other things, or perhaps the system itself is just not suitable.

[KinLuu]

El Bandito, on 26 July 2016 - 04:17 AM, said:

We had R&R before, in beta. It didn't work out. Perhaps PGI implemented it faultily, like so many other things, or perhaps the system itself is just not suitable.

RNR only real function is to punish bad players. In beta it massively increased the gap between the farmers and the farmed.

In effect, it stalls process for bad players. This kills the game.

[NeoCodex]

Varvar86, on 26 July 2016 - 04:16 AM, said:

Repare & Rearm will make players:
1) grind more to keep CBL's coming to keep their mechs go. No one likes grind, you talking about MW player base, this is not new universe and majority of players here are old enough to have things to do in real life. Player base will go down.
2) keep their valuable mechs in mechbays because it's cheaper to run simpler mechs in order not to risk your income vs expenses. So it’s gonna be like 10 vatches on boring something to gring money and play 3 matches on favorite cool mech. Your idea will actually limit variability of mechs on battlefield and make it more P2W.

This is classic "more grind for the Grind God" f2p games. Do 100500 drops just because you need money to repare your "pink" mech. Nothing great I see here

Well.. maybe it wouldn't have to be as harsh as that.. We could try to find a right balance, make it playable. The cheaper options should be more appealing to newer players, there's plenty of us with millions of cbills with nothing to spend it on, by this point I would exclusively mostly run expensive stuff because I can afford it and it's cool.

KinLuu, on 26 July 2016 - 04:28 AM, said:

RNR only real function is to punish bad players. In beta it massively increased the gap between the farmers and the farmed.

In effect, it stalls process for bad players. This kills the game.

This is not how I was thinking of it: R&R would be there to stall bad players jumping into superior tech, thinking game is won by piloting expensive stuff. If you do bad in expensive stuff, you get punished with smaller income not because of R&R but because you were losing games because you depleted all of your BV with just 2 deaths of very expensive mechs, while you could have had more chances with more forgiving regular tech.

It's more of like a time gap for newer players, to give them something to look forward to ("one day i'll be able to afford to try the cool stuff) but both cool and regular stuff being competitive in terms of battle value in Solaris/FW, the expensive things are more of a fluff and gimmick, endgame schenanigans.

Edited by NeoCodex, 26 July 2016 - 04:35 AM.

[davoodoo]

Ah yes, repairs. System invented by f2p shooters for the 1 simple reason, to extort money.
We already had in mwo, you know what it was like?? 0 ams cause ammo, no ballistics cause ammo, very rare lrm becuase no ams or ecm, laserboats and free rotation everywhere...

Look you want to balance mechs around bv, fine, calculate bv and drop by that. But dont try to reintroduce upkeep again.

It will end badly like in every other game, look at wot, where single bad match in t10 at launch was earned again in single match with t6(popular farmer at time) when i was quitting merely 2 years later, 1 bad match with t10 could set me back 2 hours on t7(because they nerfed earnings on t5/t6).
Premium tanks though?? if you had 1 and premium, 1 match allowed you play 2 matches with t10 and be as wasteful as you want.

NeoCodex, on 26 July 2016 - 04:31 AM, said:

It's more of like a time gap for newer players, to give them something to look forward to ("one day i'll be able to afford to try the cool stuff).

Your logic is backwards...

It will be, **** i need to grind in this crap to get to actual stuff i want to play. Typical f2p ploy.

Edited by davoodoo, 26 July 2016 - 05:06 AM.

[NeoCodex]

Seems R&R is really unpopular.

Fine, no R&R then. The whole point was to introduce BV, R&R would play just a small part of that and is not really needed. I was just thinking it would add more depth to higher valued mechs. I mean, I really don't see a problem if costs are almost non existent for cheap mechs, but if everybody is so extremely opposed to this then might as well not put it in, make more harm than good because of simple community backlash. But just the battle value system at least instead of quirks, that would be something.

Edited by NeoCodex, 26 July 2016 - 05:23 AM.

[Nik Reaper]

Here is the bottom line, expensive equipment is better most of the time ( IS erppc.. yeah no.... ) and in good hands it is a force multiplayer , and those who can run it will play with friends that also can run it while ending in a + balance , and also they invest in the games, as I noticed while watching the streams of top players they all run premium time all the time, so as it is R&R is a bad thing.

I do kinda like the idea of balancing matchmaker by matching a variant of battle value and not weight ei. mech class , or at least I would like to see a season of it done that way to see if it would work or not.

I also would like to see R&R but in such a way that earnings in a game even with out premium is somehow consistent on a loss, but with a chance for great bonuses if you end alive and kinda healthy .. witch would still hurt gameplay as range outpocking and bad team play would again start being a thing...

Edited by Nik Reaper, 26 July 2016 - 05:23 AM.

[Baulven]

The only time repair and rearm would make sense is if faction play was a persistent map and you had repair depots to keep your mech in the game. Then I wouldn't make it cost chills but match score to fix your mech (objectives would need to be worth points.) That is the only time rearm and repair costs would be appropriate.

[mogs01gt]

Nik Reaper, on 26 July 2016 - 05:22 AM, said:

Here is the bottom line, expensive equipment is better most of the time ( IS erppc.. yeah no.... ) and in good hands it is a force multiplayer , and those who can run it will play with friends that also can run it while ending in a + balance , and also they invest in the games, as I noticed while watching the streams of top players they all run premium time all the time, so as it is R&R is a bad thing.
I do kinda like the idea of balancing matchmaker by matching a variant of battle value and not weight ei. mech class , or at least I would like to see a season of it done that way to see if it would work or not.
I also would like to see R&R but in such a way that earnings in a game even with out premium is somehow consistent on a loss, but with a chance for great bonuses if you end alive and kinda healthy .. witch would still hurt gameplay as range outpocking and bad team play would again start being a thing...

I would love to see some type of battle value because a locust shouldnt take up the same spot or value as a ACH or a Griffin.

[NeoCodex]

Let's just think about making Solaris with BV system as a testing ground. Can leave the rest as it is for now.

You would drop in a selected tier class of a mech with it's BV cost, and your score would be modified by the total BV combined of selected mech and it's equipment. The idea is to make all kinds of mechs viable in their own way, and ditch the clan/IS balance, add new weapons with higher BV cost just for the sake of making things new and fun

Edited by NeoCodex, 26 July 2016 - 05:37 AM.

[MeiSooHaityu]

R&R cost for chassis and equipment for balancing could possibly work in a MechWarrior 5 single player orientated title, but would be a disaster in a F2P multiplayer title like MWO.

It hurts new players with low amounts of C-Bills and mechs. They don't have the funds or assets to compete with veteran players with better mechs and higher income.

As i see it, it creates a steep cost of entry into the game for a new(er) player. They will be essentially cash poor and be forced to run trial mechs for a LONG time unless they buy Premium Time and MC.

Then there is the whole cutting of ammo based weapons to cut rearm cost (negating several IS chassis) and the high repair costs tied to Clan tech like default XL engined.

Just no. An online title like this with this type of F2P business model just isn't cut out for any type of cost "balancing".

[NeoCodex]

Just some examples:

Locust - 500 BV stock. With an XL engine and a "meta" setup it's BV would be let's say 1.000 (these are all approximate values for the sake of conversation). Slap on some Clan tech and a Light Fusion Engine on it and you can pop it to 2.000 BV.

Arctic Cheetah - 2.500 BV stock. With some modifications we could do like 3.000 BV (comparing to 2.000 Locust with full Clan equipment and LFE).

Victor / Timber Wolf would have a similiar scale. Thus meaning all Clan weapons keep their original stats; we go full range on ER lasers and 15 damage PPCs. Don't ask me how much BV difference would there be between the weight classes, that's a tough one but ideally it shouldn't be that huge since we want everything viable in a way.

But between piloting a stock Victor and a stock TW your Solaris score would be split almost in half.

But then you could say everyone will simply use the best equipment possible. However that's something that can be balanced with BV it just requires some testing.

Is there a reason anyone would still use IS lasers if you could mix them? Well I remember preferring them in MW4 because they ran a lot cooler. But it's probably unlikely anyone would use IS Gauss Rifle over 3 tons lighter Clan. Ok maybe better if we started without mixed tech and then figure out this later down the road, I just wanted to give an example how you could deck out a Locust from 500 to a 3000 BV monster if you wanted to, making it almost as good as something as ACH, but you would still be rewarded a bonus score modifier. Basically translation that you could play whatever the kitten you want, without worrying it's not "optimal"

To me, this would be an incredibly fun and diverse concept.

Edited by NeoCodex, 26 July 2016 - 05:47 AM.

[davoodoo]

I was thinking of something more among the lines of

locust 100
ach 150
chassis alone, 0 equipment in calculations(not even built in)

Now with full weaponry, xl engine, endo and ferro, maxed to the absolute possibility

locust 500-600 ach 1100-1300

Chassis alone cant be too costly cause stock mechs are in most cases unusable while equipment is what makes it effective.

Edited by davoodoo, 26 July 2016 - 05:47 AM.

[NeoCodex]

I think fully decked Locust with Clan tech would be

davoodoo, on 26 July 2016 - 05:41 AM, said:

I was thinking of something more among the lines of

locust 100
ach 150
chassis alone, 0 equipment in calculations(not even built in)

Now with full weaponry, xl engine, endo and ferro, maxed to the absolute possibility

locust 500-600 ach 1100-1300

Chassis alone cant be too costly cause stock mechs are in most cases unusable while equipment is what makes it effective.

I think fully Clan equipped Locust would score a bit closer to ACH, it still has much smaller hitbox and is faster, can pack same weapons it's just a little lighter on the punch.

Even for a full IS build adding an XL or LFE on a Locust should still dramatically increase it's BV (making even STD builds viable again, if you expand this thought further into heavies).

I mean, just imagine all kinds of different things and builds people would bring out on the battlefield.

Edited by NeoCodex, 26 July 2016 - 05:53 AM.

[Baulven]

NeoCodex, on 26 July 2016 - 05:37 AM, said:

Just some examples:

Locust - 500 BV stock. With an XL engine and a "meta" setup it's BV would be let's say 1.000 (these are all approximate values for the sake of conversation). Slap on some Clan tech and a Light Fusion Engine on it and you can pop it to 2.000 BV.

Arctic Cheetah - 2.500 BV stock. With some modifications we could do like 3.000 BV (comparing to 2.000 Locust with full Clan equipment and LFE).

Victor / Timber Wolf would have a similiar scale. Thus meaning all Clan weapons keep their original stats; we go full range on ER lasers and 15 damage PPCs. Don't ask me how much BV difference would there be between the weight classes, that's a tough one but ideally it shouldn't be that huge since we want everything viable in a way.

But between piloting a stock Victor and a stock TW your Solaris score would be split almost in half.

But then you could say everyone will simply use the best equipment possible. However that's something that can be balanced with BV it just requires some testing.

Is there a reason anyone would still use IS lasers if you could mix them? Well I remember preferring them in MW4 because they ran a lot cooler. But it's probably unlikely anyone would use IS Gauss Rifle over 3 tons lighter Clan. Ok maybe better if we started without mixed tech and then figure out this later down the road, I just wanted to give an example how you could deck out a Locust from 500 to a 3000 BV monster if you wanted to, making it almost as good as something as ACH, but you would still be rewarded a bonus score modifier. Basically translation that you could play whatever the kitten you want, without worrying it's not "optimal"

To me, this would be an incredibly fun and diverse concept.

So an entire star of locusts is needed to equal one stock cheetah? May I ask what you are smoking and where you get it from? There is no way in a skill based shooter this would work, because in fp you could simply swamp the enemy with pure attrition and come out on top.

[Alistair Winter]

This again? Ok, let me try to quickly rehash the old arguments.

• Saying that we had R&R before and that it doesn't work is like saying we had InfoTech before and it doesn't work. It's all about how you balance it.
  
• The key to having a working economy for a game like this is to make the costs for maintenance exponentially bigger as players grow wealthier. For example, if a player has 50 million C-bills and 100 fresh battlemechs in his hangar, then he needs to have a lot higher costs than a player with 1 million C-bills and 3 damaged battlemechs in his hangar. As you gather more and more resources, it should be increasingly difficult to keep them.
  
• In order to balance a game around economy, the economy needs to be self-regulating. E.g. if gauss rifles are too popular, then the demand for both gauss rifles and gauss rifle repair crews goes up. So both purchase and repairs become increasingly expensive for the most expensive weapons. (In real life, the guy who repairs a tank's engine isn't generally the same guy who repairs the cannon or the targeting system or the radio).
  
• You could balance weapons and mechs and equipment in addition to letting the market economy sort things out, of course. But you wouldn't need to worry so much about whether the LCT-3M is as good as the LCT-1V all the time.