2 replies to this topic

[Taxxian]

Before you read you should watch the following Videos concerning IS XL Engines by Kanajashi and IS/Clan Balance by MechTheDane because I do not want to repeat all of their arguments.

• Faction Warfare Balance

PGI is trying for years to Balance IS vs Clan by adding Quirks, they got better with some patches and worse again with others but they were never where they need to be. Large parts of my Unit (12DG) stopped playing FW at all. We play our Clan Mechs in QuickPlay, we use them in the MRBC and we would want to use them in FW… but our Unit is Steiner… becoming Mercs would cost us members and staying Steiner makes members leave to, the ones that want to play Faction Warfare and win…

Expecting to get Clan/IS balance fixed next patch is nothing short of delusional… it has been tried very often since Clan release so there is only one simple solution:
Let’s just allow us to use the opposing factions Mechs to some degree! Maybe 1 per 5 Ranks in FW…
That would make people crave for a higher rank much more than now and PGI could address balancing without pressure of Clan players not finding a match and IS players feeling treated badly.

• IS XL Engine

The single biggest Problem of IS Mechs is the fragility of their XL Engine. But that’s lore… or is it not? Not really because in the Battletech Board Game the durability difference between Standard and Clan XL is bigger than between Clan XL and IS XL, whereas in MWO it is almost nonexistent. You die when you lose 3 Engine Crit Slots: Standard has 6, ClanXL 10 and ISXL 12. Since Engines are indestructible we can only loose those “shielding slots” by losing torsos… That alone makes ClanXL so much more powerful. Since PGI already broke lore by making Engines uncritable, they can just set the amount of shielding that can be lost without exploding to 4.

IS Mechs no longer explode when losing a Side-Torso… problem solved more balance achieved!
IS Mechs will still have many downsides like:

• more Endo slots
  
• more Ferro slots
  
• less effective Ferro
  
• IS Weaponry
  
• No Targetting Computers

• OmniMech Limitations

The first Idea to balance out Clan/IS seemed to me that they put limitations like locked Endo/Ferro/Engine and locked equipment on Omnimechs. But that is imho not a useful idea… many of the Omnimechs are basically unaffected because Stormcrow and Ebon Jaguar already have the optimal configuration, and in the Timber Wolf we can swap Omnipods to get rid of locked equipment… Other Omnimechs like Summoner had a really bad configuration so PGI needed to “counter-balance” their balancing by adding tons of quirks to them… That really makes no sense!

What bad can happen if we just get rid of those limititations? We could choose from a larger pool of competitive chassis and some clan OmniMechs would be buffed… But the best Clan Medium is already a Clan Battlemech (HBK IIC), TimberWolf and EbonJag can’t get much better and the DireWolf would be greatly buffed but still unable to surpass the high mounts of the Kodiak and the perfect geometry of the Marauder IIC.
If PGI never implemented those limitations the Kodiak would have never surprised them this much and they could have started to really think about balancing much earlier… I bet they are sitting in their offices right now staring at statistical data, getting gray hair and wondering what to do about the Marauder IIC… what a surprise again!
What is the real benefit of having an OmniMech? They release 7 versions of all Battlemech Chassis. Having more than 7 Energy or 4 Ballastic HPs is in most cases completely useless and at least one of those Battlemechs will have all the hardpoints we need. Omnis had merit when there was only 3 variants per chassis, now we have 7…
The speed of the Omnis is derived from Battletech Hexfields: there were only 5 speeds in BT, most Mechs went 3 to 7 hexes per turn… translating this into a game without hexes and only for one faction makes no sense whatsoever…

4 Balancing DPS and Range vs Structure

This does not work… Imagine a 1 vs 1 Mech BlueOneIS against Mech RedOneClan lets consider this balanced because IS has more structure and Clan more DPS/Range….
Now we make it a 2 vs 2 and add a Clan Mech on each side:

• BlueOne IS and BlueTwoClan shoot at RedOneClan
  
• RedOneClan and RedTwoClan shoot at BlueTwoClan because it dies easier
  
• BlueTwoClan dies first because it faces two Clan Mechs
  
• RedOneClan and RedTwoClan shoot at BlueOneIS
  
• RedOneClan dies second

Now its 1 vs 1, but BlueOneIS is already damaged and RedTwoClan is fresh… so if it was balanced in the first example, now Blue does not stand a chance….

I know this is only one example of one type of fight, but it shows that given correct focus fire, DPS always wins over structure if you just make the teams big enough…

5 HUD

A: Oh it is going to be night soon…
B: How many minutes of daylight do we have left?
A: How can I know, Battlemechs have no clocks…
B: Damn, do you have a Seismic Sensor?
A: How can I know, my HUD has no indicator for that…
B: Damn… oh your Side Torso is open, has your Gauss Rifle been hit?
A: How can I know………
And so on…

6 Drop Deck for QuickPlay

Why do we have to drop on Polar Highlands in a DireWolf? We either slow the team down big time, or we die to Light Mechs while we venture alone 500m behind our team…
Having the only Brawler in a Sniper-Game on Frozen City is absolutely no fun… you can’t cross the valley alone… just wait for the enemy to hopefully come to you…
Those and other alike problems can easily be solved by giving us Drop Decks for QuickPlay!
Just make a rule for those Drop Decks that all Mechs in it have to have the same weight and the Matchmaker will be fine… PGI can even sell us more Drop Decks… so it’s a WIN-WIN situation^^
We just look at the map, the gamemode and wait for 10s so the dropleader can tell us what he wants to do. Then we choose one of our 4 Mechs in the Dropdeck and the game can start!

7 Mixed Tech

I know its hard to swallow, but I read so many lore fanatics (and yes I read the books and I sometimes am one of them) write they hate MWO Balance and they will now go play MW4…
Did you know that MW4 has mixed Tech? You can slap every Weapon on every Mech and its fine… Clan Mechs and IS Mechs are simply equal…
Yes I know that’s not perfect, but its balanced! And that is the one most important feature of any competitive shooter….
You could even add a “Technology overhaul” Button to is Mechs giving the Clan Ferro and Endo… There are so many examples in the Books, where IS Mechs are refitted with Clan technology or IS Pilots using Clan Mechs…

8 Balance

I hate it myself but the best balance is achieved by giving all players the same abilities only with different names and colors… true, that is boring… but having too many differences between factions/classes/mechs/whatever makes it simply impossible to balance.
PGI needs to reach a point where Quirks only compensate for bad geometry and maybe lack of hardpoints… everything else must be balanced another way…

Edited by Taxxian, 19 December 2016 - 06:44 AM.

[Mcgral18]

Those videos are nothing new, and they're also lacking necessary buffs.
Regardless of if you change the isXL, the STD needs buffing.
It competes presently with the cXL, and it's a laughable choice.
I've been suggesting XL normalization for well over a year.

1.
That's a shite solution for Faction balance. You should balance the tech, rather than homogenize FW to only be the top percentage of robots.
Fix the XL, you fix the majority of the tech imbalance. Weapon balance, while not perfect, is far better than the engine balance.

2.
In MWO, Crit slots mean nothing in engines. It's SidesToDie which determines that.
0 for STDs
1 for isXLs
2 for cXLs

Change that one number, change the balance


3.
Keep engines locked, allow smaller changes
As much as I'd love a XL375 on Mr Gargles, it is part of their flavour.
Give him Endo and drop some heatsinks, you can carry a Ballistic effectively


4.
That's not true
You just need enough. The old BJ being an example, with doubled structure and not laughable firepower (Hunch 4SP)
isXL is part of this, and is solved above

5.
Yeah
Crits are RNGeesus incarnate
There's no indication until destruction

7.
No

Just no
Balance, don't leave things shite because you don't want to do .XML edits

8.
No, just no

Balance!
It's not that hard!
I could do a better job than our Balance Overlord given a month, with weekly patches.

[Johnny Z]

Well so much effort has been put into keeping the Clantech advantage by some, and now others want to ruin the defining characteristics of some of the factions by making it all mixed tech. Its like rewarding one fail with another fail, or explaining one fail away with yet another fail.

Quick play already has mixed tech, is it to much to expect that faction character be maintained in faction play?

Its not realistic that the various faction would produce or even field enemy faction equipment except in a limited way, which explains quickplay mixed tech well enough but not faction play mixed tech well enough.

Mixed tech would in effect, as it stands with the Clantech advantage, be forcing some factions to actually use enemy faction tech to be able to compete. This isn't right even if this is a video game. This point clearly shows how damaging mixed tech in fp would be to the entire fiction and narrative.

One of the main reasons for balanced gameplay is so everyone doesn't end up piloting the exact same mechs at the top end rendering a large part of the mech catalog/game content garbage. Mixed tech would be a move in this direction.

So while I personally understand some wanting mixed tech totally, I don't think rewarding the failed balanced gameplay, for what ever reason is a good way to go.

This may be the hardest game to balance ever made, and when I say "fail" its a harsh word because the balance people are having to pander to a lot of man baby's demanding easy mode instead of just doing the hard choices for balance. The results are the same though.

Balance is super close and the efforts by the balance people are appreciated. Its a huge task really.

Edited by Johnny Z, 19 December 2016 - 07:48 AM.