84 replies to this topic

[HauptmanT]

Yeonne Greene, on 18 December 2016 - 12:41 PM, said:

Because that's still neither lore nor TT accurate. IS have a chance when it's 3 to 1 in lore. In TT, it's dependent entirely upon the fielded BV.

You want lore accurate, IS get three lances to one star. Then you can come back here and QQ about getting your 5 Kodiaks properly ROFLstomped by 12 Warhammers.

Which is why I said 2 stars.

10 v 12, without quirks, and proper clan tech, would be pretty darned balanced, IMO. Also you'd want lower dropdeck tonnage for clans on top of that, since no proper honerable Clanner goes as heavy as possible.

So what you would see in practice is more clan heavies (thor, loki, madcat, vulture) vs the occasional IS assaults mixed with heavies for a first drop. The way it should be.

Freebirths get to bring more tonnage and more bodies. If they still cant win matches, then you know it's because the clans are supposed to win!

[Deathlike]

Levi Porphyrogenitus, on 18 December 2016 - 12:52 PM, said:

Bandaids are an important part of first aid. You don't let your patient bleed to death while you search for the best treatment - you slap on a bandaid until you can get him to a hospital or whatever.

I'm pretty sure there are bandaid placeholders all over the place. Surgery's gonna happen in 2 to 3 [s]years[s] waits of 60 to 90 days... like universal healthcare or something.

I mean, having seen the work of our balance overlord, dealing with multiple amputations and cutting off the nose despite the face... we'll need multiple levels of plastic surgery to fix this.

It's gonna be great. It's gonna be huge.

Edited by Deathlike, 18 December 2016 - 01:04 PM.

[Y E O N N E]

HauptmanT, on 18 December 2016 - 12:58 PM, said:

Which is why I said 2 stars.

10 v 12, without quirks, and proper clan tech, would be pretty darned balanced, IMO. Also you'd want lower dropdeck tonnage for clans on top of that, since no proper honerable Clanner goes as heavy as possible.

So what you would see in practice is more clan heavies (thor, loki, madcat, vulture) vs the occasional IS assaults mixed with heavies for a first drop. The way it should be.

Freebirths get to bring more tonnage and more bodies. If they still cant win matches, then you know it's because the clans are supposed to win!

To be fair, the batchall was always a bit of a farce, and therefore inherently dishonorable when applied against the IS. The Clans knew damn-well that the IS had crap equipment and they never intentionally bid low enough that there was a reasonable chance of losing to them. They got tricked at Tukkayid, and that is the only reason Commstar won...by the skin off their teeth.

For 10 vs. 12 and full tech disparity, the appropriate tonnage would be more like 6 Battlemasters + 6 Warhammers vs. 12 Timberwolves in one drop.

[Vonbach]

QuantumButler, on 18 December 2016 - 07:53 AM, said:

It's almost like clantech is a 100% direct upgrade over IS and was never meant to be balanced and trying to do so was a fools' errand from day 1, really makes you think.

This. A thousand times this. Clan tech is direct upgrade from IS so IS needs something to compensate.

[Davers]

HauptmanT, on 18 December 2016 - 12:58 PM, said:

Which is why I said 2 stars.

10 v 12, without quirks, and proper clan tech, would be pretty darned balanced, IMO. Also you'd want lower dropdeck tonnage for clans on top of that, since no proper honerable Clanner goes as heavy as possible.

So what you would see in practice is more clan heavies (thor, loki, madcat, vulture) vs the occasional IS assaults mixed with heavies for a first drop. The way it should be.

Freebirths get to bring more tonnage and more bodies. If they still cant win matches, then you know it's because the clans are supposed to win!

10V12 without quirks and proper Clan tech is totally NOT balanced. Using BTTT values the IS would need to be 2-1. Don't you remember the test when it was Clan vs IS with no quirks and the Clans had a 90% win rate?

[Ghogiel]

10v12?

10v1 is more like it.

[Mcgral18]

Levi Porphyrogenitus, on 18 December 2016 - 12:52 PM, said:

Actually, my thinking on this topic has progressed. Now I really mean changes to STD, XL, and cXL engines. Any realistic long-term solution probably needs to do something with all three.

cXL seems like a fair baseline to me

Penalties, survivability being positives

[Levi Porphyrogenitus]

Mcgral18, on 18 December 2016 - 01:20 PM, said:

cXL seems like a fair baseline to me

Penalties, survivability being positives

My new favored system is as follows:

All engines only kill you on CT destruction. Maybe include heat and movement penalties for each ST that gets popped, but it's not super important to start. STD engines give a significant health boost to CT internals (their engine shielding is heavier and denser, and thus takes much more damage to destroy than that used in XLs). You want speed and/or firepower? Go XL. You want to be super tanky? Go STD. When LFEs show up, give them maybe half or a third of the health boost of a STD.

[Alan Davion]

HauptmanT, on 18 December 2016 - 12:58 PM, said:

Which is why I said 2 stars.

10 v 12, without quirks, and proper clan tech, would be pretty darned balanced, IMO. Also you'd want lower dropdeck tonnage for clans on top of that, since no proper honerable Clanner goes as heavy as possible.

Never going to happen.

I say this because supposedly, back before I actually got into the game, PGI attempted to implement the 12 IS v 10 Clan rule, and it completely and utterly f***** the match maker system up the wazoo. Supposedly you'd get matches of 12v4 12v6 or 12v8, or some other random number on the Clan side.

Never the 10 it was supposed to be.

So, the only way for there to be any kind of number disparity is for there to be a tonnage difference between the sides.

Which is how it was in the lore.

IS had resources out the wazoo and could out build the Clans. Creating mechs as fast, or faster than they lost them.

Clans had far less resources, and those resources were back on their homeworlds, several hundred light years away, so replacement mechs for losses incurred in battle took months to arrive where they were needed.

IS deserves to have higher tonnage numbers in CW/FW to reflect their overall larger resource base.

The whole deal with the Clans was doing more with less, i.e. the whole bidding thing, but we can't have that in this either.

So the best way to come close is to have Clans have less tonnage than the IS available.

Might also think about giving the Clans only 3 slots for their drop decks to further emphasize this.

Edited by Alan Davion, 18 December 2016 - 02:14 PM.

[Mawai]

DGTLDaemon, on 16 December 2016 - 10:30 PM, said:

And this is IMHO the biggest problem with their current balancing approach. Trying to balance two different techs is one thing, but telling players "hey, stop playing one side and switch to the other 'cause we don't like seeing so many players on one side" is just plain wrong

Lol ... you do realize that if no one plays the other side then the queue time goes to infinity right? ... since there is no one else to play.

What do you want PGI to do if the player base doesn't cooperate by evenly deciding to drop for clans and IS?

The only matchmaking solution would be something like ...

... enter a FW queue
... depending on the number of folks queued for clans and is you could end up in an ..
- is vs is match
- clan vs clan match
- clan vs is match
... and lore bedamnded as to whether the matches really make any sense depending on player affiliation

Other than that PGI has to use a club or nerf bat (since they don't want to increase rewards) to entice players to balance themselves out a bit.

Add to that the fact that clan tech > Is tech and you need to give a bone to anyone except IS diehards since most folks prefer to play on the winning side.

Which is actually ALSO why there are so many clan whiners out there ... folks love to have an advantage and see it as a "right" that shouldn't be taken away . Personally, I'd rather see the game balanced so that when you drop into a match the odds of winning are 50/50 from a mech point of view and the rest falls out to player skill and team strategy. A well organized IS team CAN beat a clan team ... but it isn't because of the mechs it is because of the play. Take identical teams with comparable play levels and the clan mechs have an advantage.

Why were most of the mechs used in Mechcon competition matches clan mechs?
Why do clan mechs win the light, medium, heavy and assault competitions?
Why are clans currently stomping in FW?

Hey, I have both clan and IS mechs ... I'm going back to leveling my MAD IICs ... but, in my opinion, I would like to see the mechs and tech more or less balanced and it isn't quite there yet.

[BearFlag]

These circular arguments about balance in FW are becoming tiresome.

You don't have balance unless it is applied dynamically at the match level. Period.

Drop deck tonnage is an old, tattered bandaid recycled every time something goes wrong in FW. Needed today? Yes, yet again. A solution? NO. It is a static "fix" to a dynamic problem.

12 v 10. Also static. Won't work.

Some have suggested dynamic drop decks. Maybe. How do you make it work? Have pilots scramble before the match to rearrange their drop deck? You might give players more drop decks so they could pre-build a 240 deck, a 250 deck. Maybe.

Other have suggested adjusting drop decks weights over a longer term based on what's happening on the strategic level. Still others say adjust reward dynamically based on roughly the same.

Sorry. No balance without a matchmaker. If there are tech differences, a matchmaker can take it into account. Skill difference, ditto. Without per match balancing, you will never have balance. And you will continue to see FW hobble along.

But FW presents a daunting problem for building a matchmaker/match-builder. You can't use a pilot pool approach like QP. There is no pool and not enough playing to form one. This is complicated even more by groups which have to be treated as a bloc. Until recently there was only one drop deck, so adjusting mechs was not possible. So while PSR, tech and team could be used to calculate disparity, there's not much in game as adjustment tools.

Weight is a good proxy for numbers and an OK method of balancing. Since we now have multiple drop decks, the decks could be treated a pool from which a matchmaker would draw to build the actual deck to go in. Weight buff the disadvantaged team. Possibly weight nerf the OP team. Not a comprehensive method, but better than none. And dynamic to condition.

Edited by BearFlag, 18 December 2016 - 02:42 PM.

[nehebkau]

Mystere, on 16 December 2016 - 06:14 PM, said:

Oh, please, don't even get me started.

On a more (somewhat) serious note, unless PGI starts showing the math they are using to determine how the they are "balancing" the two sides -- and the playerbase accepts it -- discussions like this will just never end.

Paul has a spreadsheet he drew on his etch-a-sketch.... I think (we could get some excellent photo-shops out of this I think)

Edited by nehebkau, 18 December 2016 - 03:08 PM.

[QuantumButler]

HauptmanT, on 18 December 2016 - 12:32 PM, said:

So why didnt they "balance" the way lore balanced it in BTTT.

That is Lance x3 vs. Star x2. 12 vs 10. No need for quirks, no need for breaking the rules, no need for nuttin. Clanners can have all the best stuff, like they are supposed to, and freebirth scum get to zerg with more numbers. It's lore friendly and balanced.

Because one side having fewer players is garbage game design, as evidenced by whenever your team gets even one Disconnect in FW on clan side making it basically impossible to win unless let alone 2?

Numerical superiority is far, far more important in MWO than any sort of clan tech gap, to make 10 v 12 turly balanced you'd have to give clans their actual full TT power back.

[FupDup]

Levi Porphyrogenitus, on 18 December 2016 - 12:52 PM, said:

Bandaids are an important part of first aid. You don't let your patient bleed to death while you search for the best treatment - you slap on a bandaid until you can get him to a hospital or whatever.

I don't see any sign of this "patient" being rushed to the hospital.

The bandaid isn't just being used as first aid, it's the only aid.

[Alan Davion]

QuantumButler, on 18 December 2016 - 03:19 PM, said:

Because one side having fewer players is garbage game design, as evidenced by whenever your team gets even one Disconnect in FW on clan side making it basically impossible to win unless let alone 2?

Numerical superiority is far, far more important in MWO than any sort of clan tech gap, to make 10 v 12 turly balanced you'd have to give clans their actual full TT power back.

Don't forget the TT BV system. Clans were way more expensive to field than IS, so the IS always had numerical superiority, but the Clans had the pure tech superiority.

[Y E O N N E]

QuantumButler, on 18 December 2016 - 03:19 PM, said:

to make 10 v 12 turly balanced you'd have to give clans their actual full TT power back.

That was his suggestion, man.

[QuantumButler]

Yeonne Greene, on 18 December 2016 - 05:09 PM, said:

That was his suggestion, man.

That wouldn't work though, consider the solo Q, you can't segregate it based on clan or IS, so what happens to the number of players on either side when you're working with any kind of mixed faction drops?

You just end up with clan mechs being infinitely superior so you have to hope the PGI RNG gives your team more clan mechs than the other.[and the good clan mechs too, not **** like the Mist Lynx]

Edited by QuantumButler, 18 December 2016 - 05:16 PM.

[Y E O N N E]

QuantumButler, on 18 December 2016 - 05:15 PM, said:

That wouldn't work though, consider the solo Q, you can't segregate it based on clan or IS, so what happens to the number of players on either side when you're working with any kind of mixed faction drops?

You just end up with clan mechs being infinitely superior so you have to hope the PGI RNG gives your team more clan mechs than the other.[and the good clan mechs too, not **** like the Mist Lynx]

I know it wouldn't work, I'm just pointing out what his suggestion was.

[Kanil]

Not to mention, if you somehow did balance 10v12, the average Clan player would get about 50% more kills than the average IS player, and since most of us are here to kill other robits, that's a pretty damn big incentive to not play as the dirty peasant class.

[GrimRiver]

Try scouting on IS side.

4x streakcrows+TAG&BAP all the time, everytime.

Even with good team mates you just can't counter 360m range on those streaks and with the help of TAG and BAP, IS ECM is almost useless.

Also compounded by the lack of open terrain to snipe them before they get to you too.

Clan side on scouting has a much much much higher rate of winning.

Simple fix: Reduce drop tonnage to 50 tons.