12 replies to this topic

[Cy Mitchell]

One of the stated goals of the new Skill Tree is allow specific roles for Mechs in the game. This is a difficult task for a game based only around "Kill them fast before they kill you!" Adding to the problem is the fact that the only things that are properly rewarded in the game is damage dealing, killing and winning.

Many games have Skill Trees. Most use them to add an RPG element to the game where the players use the trees to enhance the role they want the character to play in the game. As MWO is primarily only a FPS and only truly has one goal for the Mechs to achieve it becomes a little more difficult to enhance the RPG aspect of the game.

Therefore, the only roles that may vary is the way you go about killing and surviving. Players have defined ways to play the game that can be considered player developed roles. Those would include:

Brawling
Skirmishing
Sniping
Assassins/Harassment
Damage Support

There are certain attributes (skills) that will enhance each of these roles.

Where the current Skill Tree fails (IMO) is by not making players make hard choices to tailor their Mechs to a specific role. The current Tree is simply too generous with Skill Points. It tries to counter that by adding a lot of skill nodes and making you choose less desirable nodes to eat up some of the excess Skill Points. Unfortunately this is ineffective and has led to frustration and resistance from some of the player base.

In my opinion, the Skill Tree should force hard choices. The trees should be more linear. Eliminate the trash skills and thereby reduce the number of Skill Nodes. Reduce the number of SP that can be invested drastically. Raise the cost for each SP if necessary.

And then, limit the number of individual Skill Trees where a player may invest his Skill Points to three(or so) of the current trees.

Want maximum Firepower for your Brawler? OK, but then you may have to pass on one or more of Survival or Sensors or Operations or Jump Jets or Auxiliary.

Want maximum Armor and Structure? OK, maybe you will have to take stock firepower or stock agility or stock cooling.

Want good jumping ability? OK, you have to sacrifice Mobility or Sensor or Auxiliary or Survival.

Want to be a great assassin? Well, you need stealth so the Sensor Tree is a must have and the Mobility tree will need a big investment. Firepower is important for the quick strike damage. You will have to sacrifice Operations, Jump Jets and Auxiliary.

This is the way you create and enhance roles. Many games do it successful by allowing a character to choose one or two paths or one or two branches of a skill tree. MWO simply allows too much freedom and too much access to everything good. Only by forcing choices will the Skill Tree succeed in enhancing certain roles for certain Mechs and players. As it stands right now, it is just a means to blanket enhance nearly every aspect of a Mechs performance.

I know some players will disagree with this. They simply want every Mech they play to be super powerful and want the Skill Tree for that reason. Others are FPS centric players and see no place in this game for RPG elements.

I can live with the Skill Tree as it stands right now but if you really want it to accomplish its stated goal and help to define Mech roles then it is not where it needs to be at this time.

Edit: After some very valid feedback from some people who do not want to be locked into specific roles and want to build a general all round Mech, I have given the idea some more thought. I still feel that it would be good if players had to make hard choices when enhancing their Mechs performance. Towards that end, I am presenting an idea that I offered up during PTS2. That would be the creation of an Elite Skill Node at the bottom of each Skill Tree. This node would be a type of Super node which would enhance all the nodes in that tree. For example, a final node that gives a 50% value increase to every node in the tree. The "OR" comes in when the player that wants to use this node would have to fully invest in the tree to get to the bottom of the tree AND would only be able to chose one Elite Skill Node for each Mech.

This would allow players to still have a a general build Mech or they could have a Mech that specializes in a role. Either way they could choose to enhance one specific aspect of performance to a greater degree but would not be limited to investing in only a couple ideas like the original idea above..

I would still like to see a bit more linearity in the tree and less Available Skill Points but the Elite Skill Node could be successfully added to the tree as it stands with a little tweaking of Skill Node values for the non-Elite nodes in the tree.

Edited by Rampage, 06 March 2017 - 05:25 AM.

[Champion of Khorne Lord of Blood]

I feel that "ors" should not be an artificial thing prescribed by roles, but rather we put many valuable skills in the tree and anyone would want just about all of them, but you only have the skill points for about 1/4th of the skills. This forces people to make their own roles if they choose to specialize, alternatively people could make generalist builds.

I go into full detail on my suggestions in my post here:
https://mwomercs.com...hard-decisions/

I think we're suggesting rather similar things.

[Cy Mitchell]

Yes, both our ideas limit enhancements and force sacrifices in one area to enhance another area. Your system allows a player to spread the SP around but not as get deep into the trees if they do that while my suggestion would let the player go "all in" on a few trees and have to sacrifice any enhancements in the remaining trees. With yours, a player could still specialize but might be tempted to just be less optimized at any one role. With mine the player would be forced to choose how he wants to play and just optimize for that.

If PGI is interested then maybe they can find some merit in one or a combination of our ideas and those of the other people that are posting feedback that have the same concerns.

Edited by Rampage, 05 March 2017 - 12:49 PM.

[Champion of Khorne Lord of Blood]

Rampage, on 05 March 2017 - 12:48 PM, said:

Yes, both our ideas limit enhancements and force sacrifices in one area to enhance another area. Your system allows a player to spread the SP around but not as get deep into the trees if they do that while my suggestion would let the player go "all in" on a few trees and have to sacrifice any enhancements in the remaining trees. With yours, a player could still specialize but might be tempted to just be less optimized at any one role. With mine the player would be forced to choose how he wants to play and just optimize for that.

If PGI is interested then maybe they can find some merit in one or a combination of our ideas and those of the other people that are posting feedback that have the same concerns.

I mostly limited it somewhat to make sure things don't get too crazy. If I went above 50% on the armor and structure boosts we'd really see people just being invincible, same with stuff like 50% cooldowns and other equally high boosts things just sorta start breaking after it gets too extreme.

So my tree compared to yours would be like going all in in both survival and firepower while in yours it would only have been half of each, basically.

[-MAC-]

Rampage, on 05 March 2017 - 12:31 PM, said:

One of the stated goals of the new Skill Tree is allow specific roles for Mechs in the game. This is a difficult task for a game based only around "Kill them fast before they kill you!" Adding to the problem is the fact that the only things that are properly rewarded in the game is damage dealing, killing and winning.

Many games have Skill Trees. Most use them to add an RPG element to the game where the players use the trees to enhance the role they want the character to play in the game. As MWO is primarily only a FPS and only truly has one goal for the Mechs to achieve it becomes a little more difficult to enhance the RPG aspect of the game.

Therefore, the only roles that may vary is the way you go about killing and surviving. Players have defined ways to play the game that can be considered player developed roles. Those would include:

Brawling
Skirmishing
Sniping
Assassins/Harassment
Damage Support

There are certain attributes (skills) that will enhance each of these roles.

Where the current Skill Tree fails (IMO) is by not making players make hard choices to tailor their Mechs to a specific role. The current Tree is simply too generous with Skill Points. It tries to counter that by adding a lot of skill nodes and making you choose less desirable nodes to eat up some of the excess Skill Points. Unfortunately this is ineffective and has led to frustration and resistance from some of the player base.

In my opinion, the Skill Tree should force hard choices. The trees should be more linear. Eliminate the trash skills and thereby reduce the number of Skill Nodes. Reduce the number of SP that can be invested drastically. Raise the cost for each SP if necessary.

And then, limit the number of individual Skill Trees where a player may invest his Skill Points to three(or so) of the current trees.

Want maximum Firepower for your Brawler? OK, but then you may have to pass on one or more of Survival or Sensors or Operations or Jump Jets or Auxiliary.

Want maximum Armor and Structure? OK, maybe you will have to take stock firepower or stock agility or stock cooling.

Want good jumping ability? OK, you have to sacrifice Mobility or Sensor or Auxiliary or Survival.

Want to be a great assassin? Well, you need stealth so the Sensor Tree is a must have and the Mobility tree will need a big investment. Firepower is important for the quick strike damage. You will have to sacrifice Operations, Jump Jets and Auxiliary.

This is the way you create and enhance roles. Many games do it successful by allowing a character to choose one or two paths or one or two branches of a skill tree. MWO simply allows too much freedom and too much access to everything good. Only by forcing choices will the Skill Tree succeed in enhancing certain roles for certain Mechs and players. As it stands right now, it is just a means to blanket enhance nearly every aspect of a Mechs performance.

I know some players will disagree with this. They simply want every Mech they play to be super powerful and want the Skill Tree for that reason. Others are FPS centric players and see no place in this game for RPG elements.

I can live with the Skill Tree as it stands right now but if you really want it to accomplish its stated goal and help to define Mech roles then it is not where it needs to be at this time.

So you want people to be forced into very narrow and defined roles and eliminate trying to build something well rounded...NO. JUST NO.

[Cy Mitchell]

Mechwarrior2470942, on 05 March 2017 - 01:12 PM, said:

So you want people to be forced into very narrow and defined roles and eliminate trying to build something well rounded...NO. JUST NO.

As I said, I am fine with the tree as it is. However, it does nothing to encourage roles. All it does is raise the level of nearly everything on every Mech. Relatively speaking, you could completely eliminate all Skill, quirk only the lowly Mechs and have exactly the same situation as you have with the Skill Tree when comparing Mech to Mech performance as a whole. All the tree does is provide enhancements for everything. That is not what they said they were trying to do.

[Alistair Winter]

My only objection to the idea that people have to make these "hard choices" is that I don't really like the idea that certain roles will just be off-limits. For example, what if the game forces my Highlander to be either extra fast or extra tough, based on the idea that you're either some sort of rapid striker or some sort of brawler? Well, suddenly, I can't give my Highlander the speed tweak it needs to get into range so I can brawl.

There are potentially many ways you can play this game and I would hate for PGI to limit these with "ors" that make some of my builds much harder to use, by mere coincidence of how PGI structured the skill tree.

[Skribs]

I think that creating roles is beyond the scope of a tree like PGI has given us, and they should just let our Mech loadout determine the roles.

I have never had any impression of being a sniper on my Atlas with MLs, SRMs, and AC20. I've never had the impression of being a brawler on my Cicada. I've never tried to be a scout on my Stalker. I've never tried to be indirect fire support on my Crab.

I'm pretty well capable of fleshing out a role with my personal piloting skills (as in, me as a player, not my character in-game) and my Mech's build.

[Cy Mitchell]

Based on feedback, I added another similar but more lenient idea that forces a choice to the bottom of the first post.

[Horseman]

The big issue is that the current design only has any measure of choice on the macro level - as in, how many SPs of your limited pool you invest to individual trees - with no limitations on the level of individual trees. That simultaneously overloads the player with too many options and manages to make them almost meaningless due to very low node values. Both could be fixed by buffing individual nodes and restricting how many can be purchased per tree - either through an SP cap or making some choices mutually exclusive. Ideally I think it would be best to only be able to pick one child node at any given time, so you have to decide what direction are you going to spec into.

I'm not particularly in favor of "elite nodes" as much as separate "specialty trees" interchangeable between certain chassis - you'd have the choice to either spec them or ignore them and invest the SPs into the general trees instead.

Edited by Horseman, 06 March 2017 - 06:48 AM.

[50 50]

I agree that there should be some harder choices about taking skill A or skill B.
But to limit one choice over another by removing access from it is not really needed.

Limit the maximum skill points.
If we had a maximum of around 40 or 50 then our choices are not only significant in terms of making each mech have different function if you chose to, but it is also going to halve the cost.

[Horseman]

50 50, on 07 March 2017 - 01:28 AM, said:

I agree that there should be some harder choices about taking skill A or skill B.
But to limit one choice over another by removing access from it is not really needed.

Too many choices with no consquence have a paralysing effect on a person's decision-making ability, trust me on that.
With multiple nodes that provide chunks of the same buff, you could still focus on maxing out a certain property and grabbing some "opportunity purchases" along the way - but you would only be able to fully max out one aspect of your offensive capability with perhaps one more you could bring up reasonably high.

50 50, on 07 March 2017 - 01:28 AM, said:

then our choices are not only significant in terms of making each mech have different function if you chose to, but it is also going to halve the cost.

Cost is just a number that can be adjusted. They could easily compensate for the increased impact of individual SPs by bumping up their costs.

[Almond Brown]

Mechwarrior2470942, on 05 March 2017 - 01:12 PM, said:

So you want people to be forced into very narrow and defined roles and eliminate trying to build something well rounded...NO. JUST NO.

Given that, in order to compete, everyone would just drive pure super skill focused GUNBOATS... Even now, you have to take some armor, as you can't Buff the absolute **** out of just your Guns, not enough available Module slots. With the new Skills, and some of the noted theories, it could be doable if "Cherry Picking" Skills were allowed despite increasing costs.

Meta cares not about costs, just pure DPS. So as noted above. ...NO. JUST NO.