25 replies to this topic

[Pjwned]

Problem #1: The mech skill tree is bad. It's just bad, it's terribly designed, it's a nightmare to deal with even after some adjustments to make it less bad...it's just bad.

Problem #2: Time to kill is overall too low because of all the crazy power creep from so many different things, including the bonuses from the mech skill tree, and it is a ****ing problem.

Now, I'm not one of those idiots who whines about getting caught alone by light mechs in a 50 KPH assault mech, or somebody who whines about getting horribly destroyed in seconds by focus fire from several enemy mechs, but TTK is still a problem and it needs to be at least partially addressed.

Problem #3: Convergence as it is now heavily exacerbates the problem with TTK, as well as creating its own problems like the need for stupid systems like ghost heat and just overall having a negative effect on the overall metagame for a very long time.

The solution: Pilots who want to benefit from their mech's skill tree efficiencies can choose to do so during battle at the cost of weapon accuracy and/or convergence.

The idea is still mostly a rough draft, but basically if you want your mech to benefit from its mech skill tree efficiencies like Cool Run, Twist X, Speed Tweak, Fast Fire, etc then you would activate an overclock mode at the cost of weapon accuracy. There would be some form of crosshair wavering or cone of fire or something to make weapons less accurate, but I haven't thought of the exact details on that since the details can easily be discussed later instead of proposing a whole bunch of crap right at once; I would probably just defer to people who have already made other topics about cone of fire and such.

I'm not exactly sure how the activation/deactivation mechanics would work in a match, but I figure having your mech go offline for a couple seconds (at most) to adjust would work fine. In order to avoid some serious annoyance we could have mechs start a match in overclock mode (because I assume everybody would want to at least be moving faster at the start) and allow them to deactivate overclock freely 1 time...or maybe just avoid the whole issue by allowing instant activation/deactivation or something; in short details to be determined.

I know that some people really disliked the mech skill tree efficiency nerfs a while ago, and while I certainly don't miss that crap (with the mech skill tree in its current state anyways) I was thinking that perhaps players could have those un-nerfed efficiencies back if they chose to overclock the mech even further, but in exchange for losing perfect weapon convergence as well as having less accurate weapons. I'm not sure about the details for the loss of convergence either, but as a preliminary idea I figure that weapons could be set to converge at 2500m away (in this super overclocked mode) to more or less simulate firing in a straight line; again the details could be ironed out later.

I'm aware that this idea kind of encroaches on MASC territory a bit, but I don't think it would be very hard to make overclock and MASC work well enough together, and if we want to keep the mech tree efficiencies around then (in my strong opinion) we need to do something to add some sort of cost for having them.

The whole idea here is to address (at least partially) multiple problems by changing how exactly the mech tree benefits players' mechs in a reasonable & interesting way that makes at least some sense. With this idea the mech tree is also much less of a pain in the ***, outdated, burdensome piece of crap blemish on the game, and even though I would still prefer to have the mech tree simply removed this is a good alternative to make the mech skill tree actually somewhat good instead of irredeemably terrible.

[Darian DelFord]

Throw out the current tree...and make a pilot specialization tree... so you can specialize YOUR mech the way YOU want it to be.

If you want the ability for more armor.... fine...... but it will cost you something in the weapons or speed depeartment

Done

[InspectorG]

Pjwned, on 06 August 2016 - 01:20 PM, said:

Problem #2: Time to kill is overall too low because of all the crazy power creep from so many different things, including the bonuses from the mech skill tree, and it is a ****ing problem.

Yes, the skill tree is prety pointless and was recently nerfed.

But 'PROBLEM #2' is not what you think.

The real TTK 'problem' is expressed best by high level players that show how coordinated and called shots with good unit movement can drop about any mech quickly.

Supposedly, 'Ghost Heat 2.0' will fix this..

IMO, far as the skill tree goes, it should be a mutually exclusive set of choices where you can max one niche or be a generalist in say 2 or 3.
Similar to Phantasy Star Online 2.

[Levi Porphyrogenitus]

@OP: It's good to see creative thinking, but I don't think your conclusions are optimal, or even really all that great an improvement over what we have now.

Ultimately, it doesn't address either of the two big problems currently: terrible skill system, and the ability to dump way too much damage into single specific components all at once.

For the former problem, a complete rework in necessary. We've been asking for one for years, and PGI has indicated that it wants to do one for much of that time, but nothing has actually happened. We need, at minimum, to have the defunct skills replaced with useful ones. Better, though, would be variant-specific trees. Pick a tree (say, Recon or Brawler), then pick choices within that tree (mutually exclusive ones). This allows for far deeper and more individualized customization of each variant for each pilot. Preferably, this would accompany a hardpoint pass, an armor cap rework (based on stock plus extra), and a module slot rework, helping to make each variant far more unique distinctive than many of them are now.

For the latter problem, there are two approaches. The first is to make the overall environment less hostile. 4v4 or 8v8 would accomplish this without any other changes really being necessary, though any 12v12 format would still see problems. The second is to address specific problems, for instance, the ability to dump massive damage into a single point all at once. The power draw mechanic may well reduce that specific problem, but there are other issues that contribute to the overall excess of damage output currently afflicting MWO. For one, we lack a real heat system with actual scaling penalties. For another, fire rates have been boosted by as much as 3-4x over what they really should be.

If PGI fixed the maximum heat capacity at 40, and added a second or two to every weapon's cooldown, as well as imposing scaling heat penalties (speed, agility, precision, etc. could all be affected), then I think pretty much everything would be solved, or if not outright fixed, made so that value iteration could arrive at a good end result relatively quickly.

[Pjwned]

InspectorG, on 06 August 2016 - 02:08 PM, said:

Yes, the skill tree is prety pointless and was recently nerfed.

But 'PROBLEM #2' is not what you think.

The real TTK 'problem' is expressed best by high level players that show how coordinated and called shots with good unit movement can drop about any mech quickly.

Supposedly, 'Ghost Heat 2.0' will fix this..

That's not actually a problem though, you shouldn't expect to live through coordinated focus fire and trying to limit that is stupid.

I don't understand how people completely ignore the power creep from so many other things like weapon modules, a ridiculous mess of quirks on everything, and--like I said--the mech tree as well, only to conclude that "oh yeah if you take focus fire from several enemy mechs you'll probably get destroyed and that's a BIG PROBLEM"...sigh.

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IMO, far as the skill tree goes, it should be a mutually exclusive set of choices where you can max one niche or be a generalist in say 2 or 3.
Similar to Phantasy Star Online 2.

The thing is that part of the goal is to not have something that you always want to grind for on every single mech, and that idea doesn't really accomplish that. Not saying it's terrible or anything and it would probably be an improvement, but I don't like it as much.

Darian DelFord, on 06 August 2016 - 01:29 PM, said:

Throw out the current tree...and make a pilot specialization tree... so you can specialize YOUR mech the way YOU want it to be.

If you want the ability for more armor.... fine...... but it will cost you something in the weapons or speed depeartment

Done

That's a decent alternative too, I was just trying to work something out that didn't completely replace the skill tree as is since PGI is obviously so reluctant to change it.

[Darian DelFord]

Pjwned, on 06 August 2016 - 02:50 PM, said:

That's a decent alternative too, I was just trying to work something out that didn't completely replace the skill tree as is since PGI is obviously so reluctant to change it.

If done right the new tree could actually add a bit of depth to the game that is sorely needed.

[Johnny Z]

This may not be entirely on topic, but something did come to the top for me.

Having mech based skills does deter players buying new mechs because they have to grind that mechs skill tree. Where if they didn't have any grind maybe they would buy a mech more easily.

The grind in this game is so tiny this above observation is really irrelevant but if the grind was massive, maybe not.

Other than that, the current skill tree is excellent design on the balance side. Really bad on the immersive/credit/logic side. Maybe some kind of multi layer skill tree is needed. Some for mechs and others for pilot or what ever.

Edited by Johnny Z, 06 August 2016 - 03:37 PM.

[Gamuray]

I'm not sure why anyone wants a random chance to hit or not hit... just make weapons fire straight out of their barrels instead of having hip and shoulder weapons magically shooting the same spot. TTK immediately goes down as people have to separately aim differently placed weapons in order to gain accuracy. And it then allows varied builds to be more effective since face time may not be long enough to bother with more of the same type of gun.

Skill tree though? Meh! I guess it just needs to be... oh I don't know... how about a tree!? A tree! With branches and leaves! And please... at least make it so you need 3 of a class to elite and 3 of a chassis to master... completely backwards as it is now.

Johnny Z, on 06 August 2016 - 03:36 PM, said:

This may not be entirely on topic, but something did come to the top for me.

Having mech based skills does deter players buying new mechs because they have to grind that mechs skill tree. Where if they didn't have any grind maybe they would buy a mech more easily.

The grind in this game is so tiny this above observation is really irrelevant but if the grind was massive, maybe not.

Other than that, the current skill tree is excellent design on the balance side. Really bad on the immersive/credit/logic side. Maybe some kind of multi layer skill tree is needed. Some for mechs and others for pilot or what ever.

I wouldn't say the grind is tiny. 8 hours of free-to-play matches gets you approximately... one light mech.. WITHOUT an xl engine. Not tiny. It's noticeable, especially when you start getting in MODULES. *shudder* ..Overpriced junk. Still haven't bought one, and I've been playing since initial release (shush, I don't care that it's not beta, I watched it when it was!)

Edited by Gamuray, 06 August 2016 - 03:54 PM.

[Darian DelFord]

Gamuray, on 06 August 2016 - 03:54 PM, said:

I wouldn't say the grind is tiny. 8 hours of free-to-play matches gets you approximately... one light mech.. WITHOUT an xl engine. Not tiny. It's noticeable, especially when you start getting in MODULES. *shudder* ..Overpriced junk. Still haven't bought one, and I've been playing since initial release (shush, I don't care that it's not beta, I watched it when it was!)

8 hours is not a grind.....

Now the original Everquest...... THAT was a grind. MWO really does not have a grind... especially if you pick up some free MC and use premium time wisely... you can QUICKLY make a ton of C-bills

[Dino Might]

Every skill tree choice should be a sidegrade, not an upgrade. Every weapon module should have drawbacks. You want more range? Take more heat. You want better cooldown, get less range. These should all be methods for specializing mechs but not making them outright better than their counterparts in all situations. It would add much more variety to the game and make the combat a lot more interesting as different players work to their particular advantages, and you never know what someone else is running. You could actually increase the info part of info warfare by allowing some mechs to see all the modules and skill tree upgrades an enemy mech has (not list, but rather a polar graph with different radii magnitudes for "armor, firepower, speed, electronics, etc." and you get the default mech stats vs the targeted mech stats overlayed (I can't find an example, but it's a fairly common polar graph with multiple axes for each characteristic, and the distance the graph goes out in a particular axis is the strength of that particular characteristic).

[Dale Grible]

InspectorG, on 06 August 2016 - 02:08 PM, said:

Yes, the skill tree is prety pointless and was recently nerfed.

But 'PROBLEM #2' is not what you think.

The real TTK 'problem' is expressed best by high level players that show how coordinated and called shots with good unit movement can drop about any mech quickly.

Supposedly, 'Ghost Heat 2.0' will fix this..

IMO, far as the skill tree goes, it should be a mutually exclusive set of choices where you can max one niche or be a generalist in say 2 or 3.
Similar to Phantasy Star Online 2.

Thats is not the problem. Yes in FW as a solo merc dropping with davion merc team i was quite impressed at the command/ leadership of the drop commander. Great utlization of teamwork and focus fire.

However, that being said, FW is a ghost town. A umajority of QP matches are not called. If they are its "hey lets go thru d5 e6" or "group up". 3/4 of matches nobody says nuthin. So its not great drop calling.

Im with guys who say hardppint inflation and 8v8 went 12 v12.

Atlas didnt need "toughness" quirks b4 clans and king crab. Once boating ACs came along, it was lights out but now atlas is "tough" and can take hits due to escalation. Lights use to have 4-5 hardpoints. Now they get 6-8.

8v8 goin 12v12.....no brainer

[Pjwned]

Darian DelFord, on 06 August 2016 - 03:26 PM, said:

If done right the new tree could actually add a bit of depth to the game that is sorely needed.

Yeah I can see that, I just really don't want to see a skill tree for pilots that ends up being a far worse grind than what it's replacing, but as long as it was done right then that wouldn't happen either.

Johnny Z, on 06 August 2016 - 03:36 PM, said:

This may not be entirely on topic, but something did come to the top for me.

Having mech based skills does deter players buying new mechs because they have to grind that mechs skill tree. Where if they didn't have any grind maybe they would buy a mech more easily.

The grind in this game is so tiny this above observation is really irrelevant but if the grind was massive, maybe not.

Other than that, the current skill tree is excellent design on the balance side. Really bad on the immersive/credit/logic side. Maybe some kind of multi layer skill tree is needed. Some for mechs and others for pilot or what ever.

Darian DelFord, on 06 August 2016 - 03:57 PM, said:

8 hours is not a grind.....

Now the original Everquest...... THAT was a grind. MWO really does not have a grind... especially if you pick up some free MC and use premium time wisely... you can QUICKLY make a ton of C-bills

The grind is really not tiny, it's definitely noticeable and it's annoying and there have been a lot of complaints over time about it from various people. Maybe if it wasn't such an absolute drag to grind out 3 variants to play sub-par matches with your gimped mech then it wouldn't be as bad, and maybe if this game had some more decent content to make the crappy grind less noticeable that might make it not as bad too, but with the way it is now the grind sucks and it majorly gets in the way of having fun; which is partly why I suggest changing (or removing) the mech skill tree.

Edited by Pjwned, 06 August 2016 - 10:53 PM.

[Pjwned]

Levi Porphyrogenitus, on 06 August 2016 - 02:34 PM, said:

For the former problem, a complete rework in necessary. We've been asking for one for years, and PGI has indicated that it wants to do one for much of that time, but nothing has actually happened. We need, at minimum, to have the defunct skills replaced with useful ones. Better, though, would be variant-specific trees. Pick a tree (say, Recon or Brawler), then pick choices within that tree (mutually exclusive ones). This allows for far deeper and more individualized customization of each variant for each pilot. Preferably, this would accompany a hardpoint pass, an armor cap rework (based on stock plus extra), and a module slot rework, helping to make each variant far more unique distinctive than many of them are now.

Like I said I would rather just have the skill tree be removed honestly, but if PGI wanted to do something relatively quick & dirty then this would work reasonably well and be a damn sight better than what we have now.

I don't know how hard my idea would be to implement from a technical standpoint, but from a design standpoint it's fairly simple and it makes what we have now much less of a clunky piece of crap.

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For the latter problem, there are two approaches. The first is to make the overall environment less hostile. 4v4 or 8v8 would accomplish this without any other changes really being necessary, though any 12v12 format would still see problems.

I think more 4v4 and 8v8 match formats should happen whether or not something like my idea was implemented honestly, but that would be because of other separate, remaining issues that wouldn't be fully addressed just by changing the mech skill tree.

Quote

The second is to address specific problems, for instance, the ability to dump massive damage into a single point all at once.

That is at least partially addressed though, because you would be making a choice between overclocking your mech for more performance or dealing with stock efficiencies to keep your weapons more accurate.

I realize that more would need to be done afterwards to further address remaining problems, particularly convergence which would still need to be addressed further by other means, but I don't think it's correct to say the idea doesn't address "the ability to dump massive damage into a single point all at once," particularly if (for lack of a better term) super overlocking your mech essentially takes convergence out of the picture completely.

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The power draw mechanic may well reduce that specific problem, but there are other issues that contribute to the overall excess of damage output currently afflicting MWO.

I'm not really feeling hopeful about the power draw, it will probably just end up exactly like how info warfare did when that was being tested and then nothing will end up being done, but nobody knows for now I guess.

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For one, we lack a real heat system with actual scaling penalties. For another, fire rates have been boosted by as much as 3-4x over what they really should be.

If PGI fixed the maximum heat capacity at 40, and added a second or two to every weapon's cooldown, as well as imposing scaling heat penalties (speed, agility, precision, etc. could all be affected), then I think pretty much everything would be solved, or if not outright fixed, made so that value iteration could arrive at a good end result relatively quickly.

I think those ideas might be better suited for another discussion, but I will say that while I do partly agree with you as far as scaling heat penalties (to an extent), I don't really agree with slapping the maximum heat capacity down like that nor do I agree with increasing the cooldown on every weapon.

Gamuray, on 06 August 2016 - 03:54 PM, said:

I'm not sure why anyone wants a random chance to hit or not hit... just make weapons fire straight out of their barrels instead of having hip and shoulder weapons magically shooting the same spot. TTK immediately goes down as people have to separately aim differently placed weapons in order to gain accuracy. And it then allows varied builds to be more effective since face time may not be long enough to bother with more of the same type of gun.

The problem with doing that is convergence does have a place in this game, it just needs to not be as ridiculous as it is now. If you just completely remove convergence with no way to get it back then all that will do is make people use big weapons on big mechs with clustered hardpoints and that's it, everything else will be crap and people will quit in droves.

There's an important distinction between toning down convergence and removing it, and only the former makes any sense for the game.

[Kali Rinpoche]

Pretty sure Russ mentioned in the last town hall that skill tree was going to get reworked. Not sure if he said that was 4th quarter project or not.

[Pjwned]

Kali Rinpoche, on 06 August 2016 - 08:33 PM, said:

Pretty sure Russ mentioned in the last town hall that skill tree was going to get reworked. Not sure if he said that was 4th quarter project or not.

PGI has been saying they want to rework the mech skill tree for literally years and it hasn't happened, so I posted an idea on how to change it without completely reworking it.

Who knows what they have in mind too, if they have anything in mind at all which I doubt, so maybe they would like this idea.

[PhoenixFire55]

Convergence is a problem, but PGI already stated several times that they aren't going to change it because Reasons^TM.

Skill tree is an idiocy, the only reason its there is to force people to grind.
Soon^TM.

No matter what you do TTK won't be fine, because people with a clue will kill bads fast and efficient, ghost heat 2.0 won't change that.

[Pjwned]

PhoenixFire55, on 08 August 2016 - 12:56 AM, said:

Convergence is a problem, but PGI already stated several times that they aren't going to change it because Reasons^TM.

Their reasons they've given don't hold water though when considering other methods of addressing convergence.

I guess if PGI just doesn't want to change convergence because they like it the way it is then there's not much to do about it, but considering the stupid **** they have to do to compensate for convergence (see: ghost heat) that seems like a terrible position to have if that's what they think.

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Skill tree is an idiocy, the only reason its there is to force people to grind.
Soon^TM.

Hence a fairly simple idea to change it without too much effort to make it not such a grind while still being something that players would want to have available.

Quote

No matter what you do TTK won't be fine, because people with a clue will kill bads fast and efficient, ghost heat 2.0 won't change that.

If the only problem with TTK is when people play badly then it would no longer be a problem.

[PhoenixFire55]

Pjwned, on 08 August 2016 - 11:48 AM, said:

Their reasons they've given don't hold water though when considering other methods of addressing convergence.

I guess if PGI just doesn't want to change convergence because they like it the way it is then there's not much to do about it, but considering the stupid **** they have to do to compensate for convergence (see: ghost heat) that seems like a terrible position to have if that's what they think.

It might not be about what they want, because I doubt they can make any significant changes to a code they didn't make in the first place. But yeah, they don't want either simply coz they never put any real effort into MWO in the first place.

Pjwned, on 08 August 2016 - 11:48 AM, said:

If the only problem with TTK is when people play badly then it would no longer be a problem.

TTK in a 1v1 duel is perfectly fine. Everything else isn't anywhere near good measure for TTK because several mechs will always instagib one. And THAT is what people are whining about, that they go against multiple mechs and expect to live longer that 3 seconds, which is dumb.

[Pjwned]

PhoenixFire55, on 08 August 2016 - 12:33 PM, said:

It might not be about what they want, because I doubt they can make any significant changes to a code they didn't make in the first place. But yeah, they don't want either simply coz they never put any real effort into MWO in the first place.

That's not a valid excuse and it never will be.

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TTK in a 1v1 duel is perfectly fine. Everything else isn't anywhere near good measure for TTK because several mechs will always instagib one. And THAT is what people are whining about, that they go against multiple mechs and expect to live longer that 3 seconds, which is dumb.

1) A 1v1 duel is not a good measure for TTK because that's a different situation than actually being in a match, even if you find yourself in a 1v1 situation in a match, and it's not a black & white thing of 1v1 or getting focus fired.

2) The problem with TTK is not only due to getting focus fired, the problem comes from various issues that cause TTK to go down the toilet in nearly all situations. People apparently keep ignoring this no matter how many times I say it or what I say so I'm not going into depth about it again, but no getting focus fired by multiple mechs is not the only problem and it never was.

[PhoenixFire55]

Pjwned, on 08 August 2016 - 05:33 PM, said:

That's not a valid excuse and it never will be.

Not saying it is.

Pjwned, on 08 August 2016 - 05:33 PM, said:

1) A 1v1 duel is not a good measure for TTK because that's a different situation than actually being in a match, even if you find yourself in a 1v1 situation in a match, and it's not a black & white thing of 1v1 or getting focus fired.

2) The problem with TTK is not only due to getting focus fired, the problem comes from various issues that cause TTK to go down the toilet in nearly all situations. People apparently keep ignoring this no matter how many times I say it or what I say so I'm not going into depth about it again, but no getting focus fired by multiple mechs is not the only problem and it never was.

Lets just stop the sharade then. Either you define TTK and we talk about it or you stop pretending you understand exactly what TTK is. There is too much talk about TTK from people without a clue what they call TTK as is.

That said, you can blame convergence all you want, but when you poke into a line of 4-5 mechs your entire mech will be gone instantly, convergence or no convergence.