Bud Crue, on 17 December 2016 - 08:56 PM, said:
Bandaid while they work, indeed. These are the same folks who continue to refer to CW as "end game content". Who as late as Q2 of this year were calling Phase 3 the end of substantive development of the CW mode with only incremental improvements needed from here on out (see April 1st town hall), because the mode was where they wanted it. Did any of that end up being true? I'll believe they are "working on it" when that work is actually reflected in an effort to fix the game. Mantis (see his post above) and others may believe that PGI in its omniscient efficiency has already perfected the game, but objective reality and 10 seconds of goggle searching will show to even the most ignorant of observers that time and time again actual play PROVES that this mode is not even remotely balanced, let alone stable or perfect. As long as the basic premise of the mode allows and even encourages the best players to follow and take full advantage of the meta to the detriment of the rest of the population then this mode will be dominated by that behavior. It should thus not be a shock to anyone that the best players go to the tech with the best mechs or that which provides some other significant advantage (like, say a large tonnage advantage). Trying to manipulate that sort of stuff is an obvious bandaid, yes. But what have they done since phase 1 to suggest that they are working on an actual cure for that wound which requires one to keep changing those bandaids?
I said it earlier but there are other ways than only tech related balancing by which to actually balance CW (and quite vital to the game mode as a whole). You said it yourself, as has Russ and have many others here, not only is there a tech disparity, but more importantly you have a skill balancing issue currently, augmented by a coinciding mech release. This just inflates the problem of the tech differential.
Flip the tables, and field us (I'm in this group for CW) newbs with only a small contingency of skilled veterans to try and lead them on the clan side with the superior tech, versus the vast majority of the good players in the game with the admittedly inferior, to some degree IS tech, and we all know what happens there... the clans get handily defeated in short order. This quick thought experiment gets us to brass tacks about the deeper issue at hand in CW.
The real answer to balancing the game mode of CW is to spread the talent around and give the good pilots a reason to ground themselves to a House or Clan for decent amounts of time at a stretch for more individual reasons as opposed to the tech itself. The contract system is the best opportunity to do this. Differentiate the contracts offered between the houses/clans that offer certain advantages to actually maintaining allegiance to those factions on both sides of the war, regardless of ability to take planets. Each house has it's own contract as does each individual clan within the IS/clan conflict. Perhaps to include not only cbill, mc and premium time as the differentiating points between contracts, but also include a percentage reduction in that faction's deckals, lore associated camo's or better yet, often associated mechs, while employed or loyal to said faction.
Going after balancing the game of CW within MWO by default is coming up with an effective way to balance the population of skilled and unskilled players together across both buckets. Using the faction layer contracts to differentiate and add personality to each faction will help spread people back out across the greater conflict of IS vs Clan.
This is what really needs to be addressed to make CW a good mode overall, and 4.2 should be the contract revamp.
11
