252 replies to this topic

[MrHail]

Just an idea:



This idea can be applied to all the trees.
It's an idea that is based on choice and diminishing returns.
These 2 should always go in a skill tree imo.

You have to chose what you get and if you go all the way to the bottom you spend a lot of points.
Maybe you guys can come up with better choices or better numbers but everything can be improved.

This idea has been taken from other people on the forum plus other games like WOW or League which use similar systems.

Edited by MrHail, 10 February 2017 - 04:15 AM.

[TWIAFU]

Bombast, on 10 February 2017 - 04:08 AM, said:

I'll give it a shot.

Thanks though, this whole thing has reminded me I need to keep spamming Russ's twitter feed with requests to fix the CIcada's engine cap. Not that anyone has responded to me so far... Maybe I should go full Trump.

Never go full ****** your first time out, save that for the professional.

[LordNothing]

alright here is my real beef. most of my mechs are mastered. i am 12 mechs from mastering every mech in the game, excluding heroes i dont currently own (and probibly wont), and mechs that havent come out for cbills yet. i expect to have them all done by patch day. i have followed the 3 mech rule to get this done and ground those trees into the dust. the xp cost to master is now roughly 3x higher than it was, reflecting that we no longer need to buy all 3 to get er dun. however i did buy all 3, and i think i should be able to take those mechs all the way to the end of the skill tree with the exp currently owned. i kind of think there needs to be a bonus multiplier on refunded xp, so that players that mastered multiple variants get enough xp to master their mechs again. just multiply their refund xp by number of variants owned.

you might keep people buying mech packs if there are in-game bonuses for owning multiple varients. like 25% per additional varient. so buy a mech for cbills, and earn xp at the usual rate. buy a standard pack, you get an extra 50% since you now own 2 additional varients. if you bought a hero and reinforcements, this goes up to 125%. this should keep the grind down for people who buy in, the very whales that keep the game afloat.

cbills is a different matter as those reflect the module cost, so if you are like me and rotate the same set of modules, you would still need to pay the cbill fees, as opposed to people who have modules in everything they own who would get ample refunds. this of course poses a new problem, lots of whales are claiming to need in excess of 2 billion cbills to regain their mastery. this cost really needs to come down, a lot. its a new wall to mastery which just wasnt there before, as modules could be moved about. loosing that ability makes the grind that more difficult. its like receiving a pile of work to do. this doesn't even feel like a game any more, its a full time job.

[Stone Wall]

PGI,

Have you played MechWarrior before? Skill trees are not MechWarrior.

[meteorol]

SeventhSL, on 10 February 2017 - 03:11 AM, said:

I see what your saying about keeping variants and swapping modules. I keep variants, I even have more than one of several variants and I use to swap modules all the time too. 3 modules between 6 mechs? Sure if all your different mechs are essentially the same build on a different chassis but I have found that in practice that is not how it works.

Most mechs are 4 modules and different variants means different weapons so different modules. A Dakka build vs a laser vomit build will cost you 6 mil in weapon modules. An LRM build will cost you another 6 mil in weapon modules plus 6 mil for target decay. Don't need radar dep for scout missions or ECM mechs another 6 mil. If you want to have optimal modules on your different mechs it really starts to add up in CBill and GXP grind to unlock them.

While this is certainly true, module costs diminish greatly over time as you add up more modules. I could, for example, right now, buy 30 mechs without having to add even one single module, because i already own all modules i would use on that mech anyway and can swap them. At a certain point, once a player found his favorite weapons and got the important "passive" modules like seismic and radar derp, module costs basically went down to a flat 0 if you swapped them.

Which plenty of people did, i would imagine. As i mentioned earlier in this thread, i'm not really hit by those 9.1 million per mech, because i'm sitting on 450m cbills before module refunds and i can easily pay it. It's obvious though that there will be plenty of players who can't.

SeventhSL, on 10 February 2017 - 03:11 AM, said:

The new system in way easier on new players.

That is true. The problem is that this playerbase consist of mostly players that already made their financial decisions (both cbills and real money) under the premise that they could swap modules between mechs. You can't really blame people for switching modules under the current system, because that is something PGI allowed and made part of this game.

While it hits new players way less hard, it punishes people decided to swap modules under the current system and went for many mechs with few modules (compared to less mechs with more modules), a decision that was perfectly viable, and by no means unusual.

IMO, the costs have to be dealt with in a way that people who had mastered their mechs under the old system are able to master them under the new system aswell, without going through a massive grind aswell.

[Dthamilaye]

Skill tree is ok idea in general.

However, I have about 100 mastered mechs now. I own around 20 modules, which I transfer from mech to mech. I have some multiples of weapon modules and 2 radar derps and seismics.

When the new system hits, I definitely will not grind 900 million credits and 7,8 million XP to get my mechs just back to a state where they are now.

Well, I do not necessarily need to re-master all of them, but still, even half the amount will be too much.

Edited by Dthamilaye, 10 February 2017 - 05:39 AM.

[Kdogg788]

MrHail, on 10 February 2017 - 04:13 AM, said:

Just an idea:



This idea can be applied to all the trees.
It's an idea that is based on choice and diminishing returns.
These 2 should always go in a skill tree imo.

You have to chose what you get and if you go all the way to the bottom you spend a lot of points.
Maybe you guys can come up with better choices or better numbers but everything can be improved.

This idea has been taken from other people on the forum plus other games like WOW or League which use similar systems.

This makes a lot of sense and is essentially how the skill system in Borderlands 2 works. Each point you put on something gives you less of a return as you continually add to it.

This whole situation also really gives a kick to the pants to anyone who converted their mech XP to GXP to transfer to something else thinking they won't need that XP there.

-k

[TamCoan]

At current calculation it will cost 1.35 BILLION cbills to respec my fully mastered 150+ mechs. I have been playing this game since before Pheonix pack was released. That simple pricepoint alone will cause me to walk away. I have no problem grinding out exp to unlock skillpoints. But adding on the 1.35 billion cbill penalty on top of it breaks it. As Bishop states so well, no one buys modules for each and every mech in their garage. Most, myself included, have enough to throw onto a few lances for GW and swap between games.

Drop the cbill tax and then we can talk.

[rolly]

So in the end this is really isn't new content. This is just another one step forwards/two steps backwards and another form of XP and C-bill sink? It seems to me that there isn't anything really new other than appearance of "customization".

I can't believe we waited so long for this to come out.

Edited by rolly, 10 February 2017 - 06:53 AM.

[TamCoan]

LordNothing, on 10 February 2017 - 04:15 AM, said:

this doesn't even feel like a game any more, its a full time job.

This, spot on. I will not do this.

[Wintersdark]

Dee Eight, on 10 February 2017 - 12:48 AM, said:

Not enough customization ? This is my mastered bushwacker X2... I run it with 3 MGs, 3 Streak-2s, 2 Medium lasers, AMS, BAP. Modules are seismic, radar dep, and streak cooldown and range. That's 18 million in modules and I only own single examples of the seismic and streak weapon modules.



And this is the same mech under the new skill tree....





More agility all around, better structure & armor, and the equivalent of an improved streak range module, AMS overload, seismic, 360 target retention, sensor range, target decay, target info gathering, speed retention, hill climb, shock absorbtion, gyros and UAV improvements. All for 9.1 million cbills.

Yeah...totally not enough customization there at all.

The problem here is that while that looks heavily customized, it's not really.

90% of that will be exactly the same on every mech on the field; and in fact a huge chunk of that exists right now due to the current mech skills anyways.

But even ignoring what's currently "standard" and becomes "customization", as everyone is going to take the same baseline skills, basically only which weapon skills someone takes "differentiates" their build.

That's pretty much false customization.

MrHail, on 10 February 2017 - 04:13 AM, said:

Just an idea:



This idea can be applied to all the trees.
It's an idea that is based on choice and diminishing returns.
These 2 should always go in a skill tree imo.

You have to chose what you get and if you go all the way to the bottom you spend a lot of points.
Maybe you guys can come up with better choices or better numbers but everything can be improved.

This idea has been taken from other people on the forum plus other games like WOW or League which use similar systems.

Yeah, I'd be happy with this. I'd even argue that extending the trees substantially in this model would be a good idea, so while there is diminishing returns people can focus more on something specific if they wish without making it a "must do" that simply extending the current skill trees would accomplish.

[KingCobra]

Russ and PGI I hope you read this thread first off MWO never needed skill trees it was a colossal waste of time developing it most would have rather had new maps or game modes.

MechWarrior-Battletech never needed skill trees so why don't you just get smart and dump the whole skill tree garbage and get back to doing what you do best making new maps and trying to make new exciting game modes.

[Kdogg788]

I am truly shocked that there is no differentiation in the skill tree between mech chassis and variants or at the VERY LEAST, between weight classes.

-k

[METAL SEPARATOR]

Where is that skill tree ffs??

[Kdogg788]

It's on the PTS test server at the moment. You should see it as a launch option in the standalone client.

-k

[Mystere]

rolly, on 10 February 2017 - 06:53 AM, said:

So in the end this is really isn't new content. This is just another one step forwards/two steps backwards and another form of XP and C-bill sink? It seems to me that there isn't anything really new other than appearance of "customization".

I can't believe we waited so long for this to come out.

Well, what did you really expect? This game just has the appearance of being "A BattleTech Game".

...

<runs for the hills>

KingCobra, on 10 February 2017 - 08:03 AM, said:

MechWarrior-Battletech never needed skill trees so why don't you just get smart and dump the whole skill tree garbage ...

I am beginning to like this idea. Seriously.

[SeventhSL]

Ok now I think I'm starting to get it.

I have 65 fully mastered and equipped mechs. I spent my CBills on modules so no need to swap. When they compensate, the modules on each mech will more than cover the Respec so I'll actually be floating in CBills. I kept playing each mech after it was mastered so the historical XP plus GXP refund should be close enough to respec everything. So for me no big impact just the fun of customising each mech.

Now If instead of buying modules for my mechs I bought more mechs and swapped modules then I'd have 150+ mechs and nowhere near enough compensation to get all those mechs back to a state where each one was fully tooled if and when I chose to play it. So there is a big impact to the playability of my mech collection.

So new players win because they will get a fully tooled mech and drop deck faster and without having to grind variants they are not interested in. Players like myself who have smaller select collections, with money spent on modules and playtime split between fewer mechs, will win because compensation combined with the XP currently going to waste on mastered mechs will cover the respec.

Pokemech collectors (nothing wrong with that) get screwed over because, while they receive exact compensation for the CBill and XP actually earned through game play, they do in fact lose a lot of playability of their collections. They are then forced to rationalise their collections or just play a lot of their mechs without them being fully tooled.

Ok me personally I'd give the players two choices of compensation. The first being CBill/XP refund as per their current mechanism. The second being a free respec of each owned mech to the value of the current skill unlocks for that mech. So a fully mastered mech would get 91 free respec points for that specific mech, If the owned mech isn't fully mastered then clearly you are going to get less free respec points for said mech.

At least I now get why some people are fuming about compensation and repec.

Edited by SeventhSL, 10 February 2017 - 09:27 AM.

[METAL SEPARATOR]

Kdogg788, on 10 February 2017 - 08:42 AM, said:

It's on the PTS test server at the moment. You should see it as a launch option in the standalone client.

-k

Oh, I don't have it. Steam version. Thanks for clarification.

[Acehilator]

I have no idea what drives that man to post stuff like this:


https://twitter.com/...756693252706304

[Coolant]

Zergling, on 09 February 2017 - 10:05 PM, said:

Honestly, I agree with the criticisms here, but I hope they don't shelve it, because as bad as the whole thing is and how it completely fails to achieve its goals of 'choice and diversity', it just might make the game a little less stagnant.

Like, it will shift the meta in some direction, but most players will adapt as they always do. I guess the one benefit of the whole thing will be increased TTK due to everyone running the survival tree.

However, I would like them to reduce the costs (and dump respec cost entirely) before it is released to the live server.

This is exactly how I feel. What's gonna end up happening is that a few vocal peeps (and mostly the same that always complain about everything) are gonna cause PGI to shelve the whole system and we won't see it another year or longer. It breaths fresh life into the game and it's not often we can say that a patch offers legitimate new content rather than just new mechs or a polishing. They can tweak it, but don't be so overly critical that they lock this away in a vault somewhere collecting dust.