62 replies to this topic

[Lukoi Banacek]

I have 274 mechs with about 180-190 mastered. I have enough exp via all sources to remaster 181, but only if at optimal disbursement (24.8 mil) which of course I am not. Realistically, I can expect to remaster about 120-130 of these mechs.

I have enough cash after modules are cashed for only 114 to be remastered (1.04 billion) but that requires me to use my 318 million in cash thats currently set aside for new mechs, mech components etc. Keep that money purely for mechlab as intended and I am down to only about 75 mechs get mastered.

Seems like a pretty unfair abuse of the time and cash I have invested in this game to be reset by over half of my inventory tbh.

PGI either rethink these values or perhaps....GRANDFATHER ALREADY MASTERED MECHS IN FOLKS' INVENTORIES.

Imposing further grind, making people regrind etc is a surefire way to drive off much of your core audience.

While I have some other mild concerns about the design, overall, I can appreciate where it is going...but this impact above is going burn bridges you cannot possible mend if the values are left as is.

Recommendation:
Grandfather already mastered mechs with 91 SP and 9.1mil in ghost cash
Or
Redo the costs
Or
Lump all HXP into one mega pool in conjunction with reduced c bill costs.

Costing us our mechlab money to cover down on "leveling" costs in addition to regrinding exp to previously mastered mechs is just poor design overall.

[Flying Blind]

Agreed, it's really expensive

[Dee Eight]

Spend less time in the PTS and more in the real server and you'll have more cbills and xp/gxp when the patch happens. Also other than the "master" symbol and ego stroking.... do you REALLY need to master 91 nodes on every mech ? Just how much do you need to do to a pirate's bane or a cheetah ?

[FupDup]

Dee Eight, on 09 February 2017 - 12:48 PM, said:

Spend less time in the PTS and more in the real server and you'll have more cbills and xp/gxp when the patch happens. Also other than the "master" symbol and ego stroking.... do you REALLY need to master 91 nodes on every mech ? Just how much do you need to do to a pirate's bane or a cheetah ?

The point of mastering a mech is to make it perform at its peak level. Otherwise, it's like buying a 75-ton mech but only using up 70 of those tons.

[Claw Hammer]

I have to say I agree. Having played MWO since founder but with reasonably limited time to do so I set myself the goal of mastering each mech chassis type. In order to do that under the old system I had to buy 3 mechs of each chassis type then master them all. Along the way I've not spent that much on modules buying maybe 6 (plus the givens from various packs) and spent the millions of CBills earned on new chassis as and when. Now when the new scheme comes in I'm left with hundreds of mastered chassis worth of HXP but very little CBills to do anything with them.

Surely a better way would be create a formula along the lines of the first 50K HXP per chassis are free CBills to unlock and the rest you have to pay for?

[Roughneck45]

The c-bill cost is the problem here.

For every mech you master the cbill costs of nodes for other variants should be reduced by a third. 9 mil for the first, 6 mil for the second, 4 mil for the third, etc.

Getting rid of the 3 mech requirment is good. No upside to having multiple variants is bad.

[Lukoi Banacek]

Roughneck45, on 09 February 2017 - 01:06 PM, said:

The c-bill cost is the problem here.

For every mech you master the cbill costs of nodes for other variants should be reduced by a third. 9 mil for the first, 6 mil for the second, 4 mil for the third, etc.

Getting rid of the 3 mech requirment is good. No upside to having multiple variants is bad.

I would agree that it is the more serious component of the problem. Gotta say, a reduced cost by owning other mech variants in that chassis would be a smart compromise. It would reward the pokenech types for their time/cash investments in the game and incentivize some folks to try other variants that arent necessarily best in class.

[Roughneck45]

Lukoi Banacek, on 09 February 2017 - 01:17 PM, said:

I would agree that it is the more serious component of the problem. Gotta say, a reduced cost by owning other mech variants in that chassis would be a smart compromise. It would reward the pokenech types for their time/cash investments in the game and incentivize some folks to try other variants that arent necessarily best in class.

Yup

Were in the same boat. I've got 330 and my first feeling was I've been swindled buying 3 mechs all these years.

Edited by Roughneck45, 09 February 2017 - 01:22 PM.

[Lukoi Banacek]

My first fear was that PGI cannot do simple math. Worse still, they can and think this massive f-u to peoples' time and cash investments was going to not get immediately figured out. Hopefully its not the latter, and they merely misunderstood just how negative an impact this would have. Mistakes can be fixed, malfeasence is a cancer though.

[ProfessorD]

The CBill cost for skill nodes is a much bigger problem for new people than rich veterans.

Previously, you optimized each mech in two stages:
1. Earn XP, then fill out the Skill Tree.
2. Earn CBills, then buy modules.

New, CBill poor players would be vastly better off using their CBills to buy more mechs, rather than modules. Under the old system, the penalty for doing that was smaller - new, CBill poor players could still fill out their Skill Tree for each variant without having to spend any CBills at all. This gave them a relatively low cost way to start closing the gap in mech performance between their shiny new mechs and a veteran's mastered ones. PGI will be taking that away if they implement this new skill tree system, and I believe they're going to make it even slower and harder for new players to initially make progress on their mechs.



You could actually divide the old development process of a mech into 5 stages, if you wanted to be very detailed.
1. Use MC to buy the Mech Bay.
2. Use CBills or MC to buy the Mech.
3. Use Cbills to customize the Mech.
4. Use XP to fill out the Skill Tree.
5. Use GXP and CBills to buy modules.


In the current PTS, it's just 4 stages.
1. Use MC to buy the Mech Bay.
2. Use CBills or MC to buy the Mech.
3. Use CBills to customize the Mech.
4. Use CBills and XP to fill out the Skill Tree.

Notice that there's no break in the draining of CBills. You have to spend some at every stage after getting the Mech Bay. I think we're going to find that the ability to make some progress and improve their mechs, without having to spend CBills, was really beneficial to new players, and we're going to miss that.

[Natred]

The original skill tree was meant to be off mech exp not cbills! This is just a play to get more people to spend monry on this game. Like the mech packs and mc is not enough...

[Lukoi Banacek]

The cost rate PGI is utilizing fails to take into consideration that people saved money by swapping modules (and in some cases engines and other equipment). Now the cbills are sunk into SP that cannot be swapped between mechs. Badly thought out.

If you were space poor you sacrificed a little time to maoe the swaps, if you wanted to always field an optimized mech. You would suffer thru this until you earned enough disposable income to buy more modules. A fair trade that incentivized you to grind the cbills but without a performance penalty on top of things.

Now if you are space poor you will just have to grind for cbills while playing an unoptimized mech or playing a previously optimized mech, killing the variety/discovery fun inherent to new chassis. Bad game flow really.

[Natred]

84 mechs 744400000 cbills ontop of what it costs for engines and weapons. Feel sorry for new players.. im curious with all of pgi employes with tier 3 and 4 how the hell they have enough cbills to get mechs mastered.. they must have like two mechs with enough exp to full upgrade..

I have over 2000 wins averaging 183,000 a match, i dont understand how they can look at thoughs numbers and think for the average player who maybe plays 10 to 20 matchs a week is ok.

Im tier one prolly an above average player. I totally feel sorry for the players who are not that good and have to earn every penny of cbills to even have a chance.

So they have a match making system that puts people with fully mastered mechs against other people with fully mastered mechs? Most likely not and definately not for the pts.

Edited by Natred, 09 February 2017 - 01:52 PM.

[Lukoi Banacek]

Natred, on 09 February 2017 - 01:45 PM, said:

84 mechs 744400000 cbills ontop of what it costs for engines and weapons. Feel sorry for new players.. im curious with all of pgi employes with tier 3 and 4 how the hell they have enough cbills to get mechs mastered.. they must have like two mechs with enough exp to full upgrade..

I have over 2000 wins averaging 183,000 a match, i dont understand how they can look at thoughs numbers and think for the average player who maybe plays 10 to 20 matchs a week is ok.

Well to be fair, I am sure they can just go into a data file and plus up their cash and xp as required. I doubt most people at PGI actually grind this game and focus on the combat feel if the gam3 by jumping in, shooting some stuff and then popping out to tweak things. If you consider this present situation and the relative abortion known as the new player experience, it nakes sense that they skip the work related part of grinding the game and just experiment, tinker with builds and ahoot stuff.

[Natred]

I would like to see them actually put the time in the game griding matches. Pgi hear this you need to grind this game out and start at the bottom. Like to see a contest out of pgi members who make new accounts and grind to atleast tier 2 or 3.

Fyi cheating cbills or experience by editing your data file is *÷>!&@

If you do this no wonder your at a disconnect from your player base.

Edited by Natred, 09 February 2017 - 01:57 PM.

[Lukoi Banacek]

Natred, on 09 February 2017 - 01:54 PM, said:

I would like to see them actually put the time in the game griding matches. Pgi hear this you need to grind this game out and start at the bottom. Like to see a contest out of pgi members who make new accounts and grind to atleast tier 2 or 3.

Fyi cheating cbills or experience by editing your data file is *÷>!&@

If you do this no wonder your at a disconnect from your player base.

Cheating the grind to sample the mechanics I caj understand but I agree, experiencing the grind to have a touchpoint with the playerbase is just as important.

[Corduroy Rab]

I am no fan of the new system. However, if they insist they should make historic xp be able to unlock skill nodes without c-bills on its respective mech. Additionally, the amount of historic xp should be proportionate to the current spent and unspent xp on each mech. If you had an elited mech before you should have one now too.

You could say this wouldn't work because of the elimination of mech modules, frankly, I think they should refund them anyhow. Let the players have a windfall maybe they will buy some more mechs - and mech bays. At the very least it will create some good will and allow them to have some cash for respecs.

Maybe I'm naive, I don't know.

[Jericho Jones]

I do not believe That "Mastering a Mech" Means the same thing under the new system as it did under the old.

The days of the "jack of all trades" are numbered. Mechs will now have to be much more specialized in what they can do well. For instance, You might have one catapult c1 built for assault missions that maximizes weapons ranges and fire power. You might have a second optimized for a scouting and infiltration role that maximizes sensor and mobility tweaks. and yet a third built for brawling that maximizes armor and damage at the cost of range and sensor skills.

We used to make these kinds of changes on the fly by adjusting load outs between matches. I don't see that happening any more. Im not sure weather that's good or bad, but it is dfferent.

[Quaelgeist]

What about Respec Tokens or something like that?
It could be usable once, enabling players to completely respec a mech for free. You could win it in special events.
And once the Skill system goes live, everyone gets a special token for every completely mastered mech. (And these tokens are only usable for that one mech, they are intended for. So the initial transitioning would be smoother).
Experimentation with mech builds will still be hurting in the long run, though.

[Admiral Brad]

I too feel that that the cost of nodes will hurt new players. For every 150k you earn you get about 1500xp (based on my averages). That's a profit of 50k per match and over 91 matches you would be able to master a single mech and accrue 4.5 million c-bills assuming you did not tweak a thing. That is a pretty good c-bill sink they have designed, but it prevents new users from learning as c-bills are required to buy mechs and gear to fiddle with. I am personally think that the only pay nodes should be the old module nodes (including weapon nodes). This would produce a a c-bills sink but at least allow newer players to get some benefits without dumping everything into one mech.