25 replies to this topic

[Crockdaddy]

instead of putting in unasked and largely un-needed resources into GH 2.0 and yet more balancing .... can you please work on increasing the depth of game play? The leaderboards were a nice start. The Long Tom while ultimately didn't work was something new and the scout mode with intel was new. I won't complain about that. Re-working the two choke point maps and adding game play depth which compels us to want to spend time in Faction Play and to care about our factions seems important and would help retain long time spenders in this game. Putting time and effort into GH 2.0 and so much extra effort into an entire new balance system I don't believe is a good use of resources at this time. I know whats done is done and I think GH 2.0 may be interesting but my experience with major balance adjustments with this game are largely negative, time consuming for PGI and resource intensive based on past updates.

[DarklightCA]

Taking a example from the World of Tanks gamemode stronghold. PGI could create a new section on the client that allows units to build/manage a unit stronghold which provides unique benefits as you build it up like a example of a 20% c-bill boost applied to all members of that Unit for a max level stronghold.

In order to build up your stronghold you have to capture planets and they would generate a new income called resources instead of the MC that can only be applied to building up your stronghold (also removing the planet cap). To create a bigger Unit vs Unit impact you could also make it so if another Unit conquers a planet belonging to another Unit that they get extra resources put in their coffers and the Unit that lost their planet loses some of their progress on their stronghold (takes damage).

A trailer for what exactly I am talking about.

[Crockdaddy]

DarklightCA, on 15 September 2016 - 02:44 PM, said:

Taking a example from the World of Tanks gamemode stronghold. PGI could create a new section on the client that allows units to build/manage a unit stronghold which provides unique benefits as you build it up like a example of a 20% c-bill boost applied to all members of that Unit for a max level stronghold.

In order to build up your stronghold you have to capture planets and they would generate a new income called resources instead of the MC that can only be applied to building up your stronghold (also removing the planet cap). To create a bigger Unit vs Unit impact you could also make it so if another Unit conquers a planet belonging to another Unit that they get extra resources put in their coffers and the Unit that lost their planet loses some of their progress on their stronghold (takes damage).

A trailer for what exactly I am talking about.

This is kinda what I mean. Instead of simply another Arena for shooting (I could live with an improved arena with adjusted game modes in terms of Faction Play), add something interesting. I don't want more mechs right now or more balance or prettier looking things. I want deeper game play. Something BattleTechish ... something which besides my used up nostalgia to spend another few hundred dollars here. I can live with some of the decisions currently being made but I need a roadmap because right now I am in the camp hoping this game folds up into some other publisher to be re-made a few years down the road rather than being more patient with PGI.

[Tavious Grimm]

Crockdaddy, I think there are PLENTY of us in that camp. Let a AAA crew try their hand at this. There are plenty out there.

[MischiefSC]

I was watching some Bannerlord gameplay and it got me thinking - you need choke points of some sort to force an engagement if you're going to have victory objectives other than kills.

So siege warfare - you can try to destroy key points in the city or kill all the defenders. There are numerous choke points to get in but each has a different set of advantages and disadvantages. Smash the gate, risky but an easy way to get a lot of troops in. Ladders let you disperse and avoid being pinned down but are vulnerable. Siege towers are slow and obvious and don't move a lot of troops in at once but are safe. A good strat probably has all 3 - siege tower right into the bulk of enemy archers to draw fire while you put Ladders on another wall. Once that's all going take a ram to the gate and hopefully the defenders will be spread too thin to pile on the murder holes.

There's a great layer of strategy and tactics both for attack and defense and the there's not just one or two good approaches.

That's the problem - you need choke points, defense needs defensible. You need more than 2 approaches to enter that can be defended from 1 point and conversely getting faked out on 1 wave shouldn't lead to a gen wipe.

[Deathlike]

I feel like this is Lostech, and it's not for a lack of rediscovering it.

[MischiefSC]

Existing FW is still better than QP. Part of the problem is how low our standards are.

Punching dinos, primitive plus and The Center is more engaging and most of it doesn't work. Construction Table OP? Really?

However bouncing over a vast landscape on a Beezlbufo named Mr. Hoppy for hours is amazing. Still a better love story than twilight and more creative gameplay than Invasion.

Edited by MischiefSC, 15 September 2016 - 05:54 PM.

[Kin3ticX]

they are going to waste all that time on GH2 only to shitcan it in the end

[Deathlike]

MischiefSC, on 15 September 2016 - 05:51 PM, said:

Existing FW is still better than QP. Part of the problem is how low our standards are.

It's not about "our standards" (although some would praise PGI regardless of the situation - some people standards are non-existant), but more about PGI's standards (or lack thereof).

Edited by Deathlike, 15 September 2016 - 05:55 PM.

[MischiefSC]

Deathlike, on 15 September 2016 - 05:54 PM, said:

It's not about "our standards" (although some would praise PGI regardless of the situation - some people standards are non-existant), but more about PGI's standards (or lack thereof).

They make the game we pay them to make. You can hate all you want, the moment you buy a mech pack you vote "love it, gimme more of the same".

We've done it for years saying "it'll be fixed next patch and the Night Gyr will be OP as a KDK3 was" and so...

We get the same.

[Tavious Grimm]

You know what would make things interesting....underwater or outer space encounters. I KNOW it wouldn't happen though. But think of it..Your Jumpship has arrived in enemy territory, along the spine of the invader class ship a Union class Drop ship detaches and makes a hard g burn for its intended target. A system Recharge Station. We already have 'space' map HPG relay...repurpose it or make a newer version showing a recharge station and say the objective is securing it to recharge the jump ship and control of the system. I know...pure fantasy. But just imagine....

[Conreg]

Ok. Heck. I'll log in to the forums, just to offer my agreement with the point made by Crock.


I agree with Crock.





Ever since the previous glorious season of MRBC, I've had no desire to play MWO.

The chief reason is I am just not interested in a whole new balance act that does not change the core game play. We have been begging for real game play for years. CW was OK at first... but then it never got better.

Why would I be excited now? The only changes coming just require going through 200+ mechs and changing things from what used to work best to what works best now. Good players will still win. Pugs will still whine, and there is little else to it.

The actual immersion in this game practically peaked in the days of 8v8. "Look guys, there is FOUR davions on the other team! LETS GET EM!"

<Die fedrats!>

And then they would be all like

<Die snakes!>

*sigh*

Then the mercs would show up. Man those guys were cool.

I guess now we could still do all that, but people hop around in CW just looking for matches so even faction tags are meaningless. I can't even tell who I'm supposed to hate and kill. Its... red vs. blue.

[Kin3ticX]

If you dig up Russ's tweets about phase 3 he really thought it was going to be good

https://twitter.com/...829245914054656

https://twitter.com/...663374911737856

Not everyone is going to like something but its obvious phase 3 choked itself out. Not only did mercstar's key people take a break but also other major hubs turned into near ghost towns.

Well, atleast they are doing something about it even though we are going to have to wait even longer. They didn't piecemeal anything to CW from early summer 15 all the way to April 16. Now we have to wait even longer for what should have been nailed down April.

People were already saying 10 factions was too many including myself way back when CW was still going fairly strong yet a few factions like Marik and Liao were basically ceremonial.

Edited by Kin3ticX, 15 September 2016 - 07:55 PM.

[Crockdaddy]

MischiefSC, on 15 September 2016 - 05:51 PM, said:

Existing FW is still better than QP. Part of the problem is how low our standards are.

Punching dinos, primitive plus and The Center is more engaging and most of it doesn't work. Construction Table OP? Really?

However bouncing over a vast landscape on a Beezlbufo named Mr. Hoppy for hours is amazing. Still a better love story than twilight and more creative gameplay than Invasion.

THIS. I played with Conreg and about 20 others in ARK Primitive Plus Server 8 , 10, uh maybe a few others. I put about 300 hours of incredibly buggy game play in ... but it was IMMERSIVE. This was on top of the 1400 hours I put in last year. I made myself stop playing just to break the addiction cycle. I am not saying make MWO into ARK or even BF 1 ... which I played to Rank 44 during the Beta ... but take a hard look and see what is going right. Steal some ideas. Mock up thoughts. Talk about it. I'd be all for GH 2.0 if I thought it might stick and improve the overall game in some direction but as Kine3cx alluded to ... we know that very likely all this effort into GH 2.0 likely won't stick or will require some incredible amount of balancing act that will take forever to do.

Stay focused PGI ... make the game deeper and more meaningful. You have an amazing IP with a crazy dedicated following. You have another 3 years before Star Citizen comes out and nearly the entire MWO community leaves... I suggest you get to work

[Kael Posavatz]

The last major patch for CW prior to Phase III was in June '15 with the introduction of Vitric Forge.

After that was the 'Great Rebalancing' that ended up as the 'sort of okay rebalancing' when Info-Warfare fell through the floor and the mad dash to great ready for Steam.

A lot of people were hanging on for Phase III.

Lo and behold, Phase III touched actual gameplay not at all (except to bring in the forever cursable Long Tom). And people stopped playing.

Now we're looking at the end of the year to implement changes from the first roundtable (5 months), and we haven't even had a sit-down on all the other issues.

Oh, and Energy Draw which was nice and simple to begin with but has been turning into an increasingly complex grotesque. At this point I'm not sure which would be worse, deep-sixing it along with the lost time, or actually implementing it.

[Aleksandr Sergeyevich Kerensky]

I hate the defensive aspect of FW.. The choke points are horrid! Those walls are like a trillion miles high!

Could PGI please implement 8v8 FW to be played on the maps used in QP? Maybe something like scouting... But instead of info gathering... We dismantle (or reinforce) a planets defensive capability?

With max defensive capability, they are fully reinforced like they are now... And with minimum defensive capability, there are no gates or turrets?

Edit: played with weight restrictions similar (not necessarily equal to, but at least somewhat comparable) to QP so assaults and heavy players can play in this mode.

Edited by Aleksandr Sergeyevich Kerensky, 15 September 2016 - 08:43 PM.

[Kin3ticX]

https://twitter.com/...198559115464704

I must have caught Russ in a bad mood here....this also goes back farther than I originally thought

Anyways, going back that far there was lots of resistance to any idea to reduce the buckets.


and lol, the first lore nerd is like "Wolf and Falcon would never be allies"

WELL GUESS WHAT SON, ITS HAPPENING

Edited by Kin3ticX, 15 September 2016 - 09:24 PM.

[Deathlike]

Kin3ticX, on 15 September 2016 - 09:19 PM, said:

https://twitter.com/...198559115464704

I must have caught Russ in a bad mood here....this also goes back farther than I originally thought

Anyways, going back that far there was lots of resistance to any idea to reduce the buckets.


and lol, the first lore nerd is like "Wolf and Falcon would never be allies"

WELL GUESS WHAT SON, ITS HAPPENING

They say it was a position @ the time.

[Crockdaddy]

Kin3ticX, on 15 September 2016 - 09:19 PM, said:

https://twitter.com/...198559115464704

I must have caught Russ in a bad mood here....this also goes back farther than I originally thought

Anyways, going back that far there was lots of resistance to any idea to reduce the buckets.


and lol, the first lore nerd is like "Wolf and Falcon would never be allies"

WELL GUESS WHAT SON, ITS HAPPENING

First, if the game is a bit shallow ... IE more shoot'em up then it would seem to me to be very important to get folks into matches quickly with as little wait time as possible. FP doesn't do that with the current bucket system. I have whole heartedly agreed for a long time now the current number of buckets is unwieldy and doesn't work. NS moved out of Kurita almost entirely for the simple premise to find fights in a timely manner. Reduce the buckets to improve the game play aspect because I get it ... making a deeper game is hard, especially for a small studio. So lets at least get a shooter going that gets us into these matches faster.

[MischiefSC]

Deathlike, on 15 September 2016 - 11:04 PM, said:

They say it was a position @ the time.

Factions are what makes FW. Without all 10 factions you're burning immersion for nothing.

To go back to Ark, Parasaurs could be removed and gameplay would still work. He'll I could delete all but 4 or 5 dinos and just add their abilities to other dinos. I could shrink the map, remove the areas that don't have a lot of spawns, I could pull a lot out of Ark and still have it play. You could say "it would be easier, faster to play and easier for players to find each other".

If Ark was unfun and nobody played and servers only had 6 people on them maybe that would be a decision to make while you're wrapping it up to close but in no way is that a better game.

Same thing. It doesn't matter if you play in Liao, many did.

They played against Davion and with Marik. They were part of the game and an active one. They kept hundreds and at times a thousand Davion players entertained. If you were not directly involved in that drama you didn't see it but it was there.

If holding and taking planets had purpose and factions had dynamic alliances, if there were different scales of engagement you'd have the depth to draw players in to populate the game. If we had the depth and logistics that were in the CW originally pitched you'd have plenty of people.

With dynamic alliances you'd have had no population issues, players would move to where the action was while still being their own faction. Let factions actively hire mercs, etc.

More depth. Even if you never tame a Megalodon all the deep sea content is there, other people play it then play with/against you. THAT is where depth and immersion comes from. Reducing "buckets" just cements failure into the games design. It lowers the standard. "Buckets" was never, ever the issue. Never a problem, never responsible for for ghost drops. In Tukayyid with 500 players in 1 queue there were ghost drops and long delays.

The problem is uncompelling gameplay and bad design. Ripping content out, removing depth and the frail shreds of purpose and identity it had won't fix **** all anything.

It's the embrace of failure and trying to keep expectations in free fall so we will accept what little we're given.