43 replies to this topic

[C E Dwyer]

In the short film clip it did mention some options are not available for some mechs.

Can only assume that good mechs like the Kodiak, Night Gyr, Hunchback IIC, Arctic Cheetah etc

Will get far less usable hexagons to open than mechs like

Victor, Orion, Phoenix Hawk, Spider

Or each mech has a different base line, where the old quirks are 'hidden' in the base stats.

If every Mech has exactly the same base line per weight class or even tonnage, before the skill trees are used this could be a disaster.

I mean what would you pilot, an unquirked Kodiak or an unquirked Atlas, yeah I thought so, as its the current quirks that makes the Atlas viable as a tank, this will have an impact on F.W obviously, no matter how much work and how good it might become.

If PGI have realised this, and each chassis is getting a different base line for a degree of balance, then it could be an outstanding system.

But well past experiences..I hope HBS battle tech goes live before this comes in and they haven't.

[Bud Crue]

Anyone else sick of the modus operandi of PGI of teasing their customers with this stuff, when it would take an intern maybe an hour or two tops to just write out a nice summary...or heaven forbid just hang out on the forums for the afternoon and answer questions?

[Angel of Annihilation]

It kind of looks like they are going to have different trees for each mech so for example, a bad mech might gain a 5% energy heat reduction over 2-3 skill for a total of 15% reduction to energy heat generation while a good mech wouldn't have any option to gain heat reduction skills. This way the bad mechs will still have significant quirks while the good mechs will only have minor things.

My worry isn't about how the mechs will balance out once you get your 75 skill points invested, my worry is the balance of mechs while your trying to get those 75 skill points invested. At 10,000 XP per skill point, it is going to take a long time for a mech that is currently heavily quirked, something like the Orion, to get enough skills to re-quirk itself and match up to a mech that is currently powerful without quirks, say something like a Timber Wolf. Even if the Orion catches up to the Timber Wolf at 75 skill points, grinding 750,000 XP is a long, long time period for the Timber Wolf to be dominant.

Honestly the grind is my biggest complaint about the new system. I absolutely adore the idea of customization and I think it can work great but that customization needs to take place relatively quickly so that each chassis reaches competitiveness in a reasonable time frame. I would support maybe 1,000 XP per skill point but 10,000 XP per skill point is going to completely cripple alot of mechs for a long, long time while they scrap together enough skill points to be able to compete against the better mechs in the game that don't need skill points to excel.

[guy0320]

Bud Crue, on 05 December 2016 - 03:54 PM, said:

Anyone else sick of the modus operandi of PGI of teasing their customers with this stuff, when it would take an intern maybe an hour or two tops to just write out a nice summary...or heaven forbid just hang out on the forums for the afternoon and answer questions?

It actually honestly appears as though PGI has no clue what they are going to do with this systems or how they are going to balance it. Due to the spaghetti code of the base game systems and PGI's lack of competent programmers, the only way they were probably even able to implement this system is by having to rip the module and quirk systems out of the code entirely and replace them with the new skill tree. I think that when PGI announced that the skill tree redo would be presented at mechcon in the late summer/early fall, the engineers had just figured out how to implement the underlying code to make it possible. They have probably been working on the new UI that accompanies it for the last couple of months, and they are only now realizing how huge of an impact ripping the quirk system out of the game will have. The balance overlords are probably only now starting to look it over and brainstorm how to balance out this new monstrosity of a system that they have created.

PGI basically just nuked all past mech balancing efforts and have to start over from scratch using this new system, and must figure out a way to balance over 250 variants within this new system in a period of 2 months. Based on what we know about our balancing overlords, I am not optimistic about the implementation.

Edited by guy0320, 05 December 2016 - 04:27 PM.