88 replies to this topic

[Alistair Winter]

As you may or may not know, 80% agreement in the community is the magic number that signifies consensus in the eyes of PGI. After reading through all these different threads, I'm starting to feel that there is a pattern in most of the feedback that I've been reading.

• Players want a more simple system.
  
  Regardless of how the tree is structured, people want more simplicity. Not 91 skills per mech, not a convoluted skill tree with hundreds of nodes. Fewer skill points, more significant benefits per node. Each upgrade should feel more impactful.
  
• Players don't like being forced to take random, unrelated skills.
  
  Taking a low level skill to reach a more valuable high level skill is one thing. But being forced to take a number of random, unrelated skills just to reach the ones you want is frustrating and boring. In other words, it's not a problem if we have to take acceleration skills before we can take speed tweak. But it sucks when we have to take 1% improved torso twist, 1% improved acceleration, 1% improved turn rate, 1% improved arm movement and 1% improved deceleration in order to get the skills we want. (It also makes the list of quirks for each mech really messy and hard to read)
  
• The base level of mobility is not quite good enough yet.
  
  The low deceleration is making it too hard to maneuver certain mechs, particularly light and medium mechs, but also heavy mechs with big engines and high top speed. Light mechs and medium mechs need better mobility in general. Especially 30-40 ton mechs are too clumsy for their size.
  
• A linear skill tree would be better.
  
  I am not really sure there is a consensus here, because there's a lot of different options being discussed. But I'll put it to the vote.

Sorry for starting another vote, but... without community managers leading the discussion, it's hard to get progression by participating in 50 different threads that each have only a handful of people discussing.

Edited by Alistair Winter, 05 March 2017 - 06:20 AM.

[C E Dwyer]

I was just about to make my own thread about what I think should happen, what I think will happen, what adjustments I feel need to be made to what's going to happen, and what is critical to the future of the game.

First off I think that a World of Warcraft system would be best, I think it's the direction P.G.I should have taken. It for a start looks better, and smarter, and the current system looks messy. no matter what system gets used, there will only be one way to fully optimise each mech, though both will give people other less optimised options.

I think that boat has sailed though and the end result of this will be another P.G.I sulky removal of it completely like before, or we have this, and changes need to be done to it still, to make it usable and reasonably well received.

I think each weight class needs a different set of nodes or at least values, armour with it's percent values are best used with assaults and heavies, agility is more useful in lights and mediums.

I think this should also extend across technologies, though for now I'm not going to put any finite opinions on how, as I doubt P.G.I will go even as far as to make separate values for each weight class, which I feel will be a badly lost opportunity.

So the only way I can see of making a balance across weights, which I think P.G.I might think is worth while.

Is to give weight classes different numbers of skill points, lights need more skills now to compensate for the engine decoupling and because P.G.I are using percentages as the governing factor in most cases, which effect survivability, lighter mechs get a diminished return on what they spend.

P.G.I must stop using their dogma of because we made it we must use it in the new system.

They must remove old module skills that are simply bad like hill climb and speed retention, this is one of the biggest contentions currently.

Now comes the big one the single thing I feel is going to be the deal breaker, that could well see an end to this game, if P.G.I don't see the value in what people are saying.

C-bill and MC costs must go from the skill tree completely( I know MC are currently gone in the build, but P.G.I must not put them back).

If P.G.I were to come up with the best skilling system ever in the history of online games, being made to pay c-bills as part of it the end result is still the same, a big loss in player numbers, and new player leaving after a couple of weeks.

New starting players are already strapped for C-bills it hurts them to find money to up grade weapons Endo Ferro, pay for XL engines, now they get hammered for extra costs, and when they make mistakes on the nodes, and they will they get hit with a further C-bill penalty.

Genuine Newbs will just give up, they will not be drawn into the game and want to spend money, they will feel forced to spend money and go somewhere else.

I am not one of those old players that likes to constantly fiddle with designs, I would be completely happy to play this game completely stock.

However there are many players in the game that enjoy tinkering and being able to customise mechs. For many, it's only this ability and the friends they've made keeping them playing.

P.G.I are now going to penalise these people for what is for them the biggest part of enjoying this game, buy making them pay more, this will not get them spending money buying MC to convert to C-bills this will drive many away from the game.

something P.G.I can't afford to be doing.

Whales, the collectors, while not as badly hit as the tinkerers they are still hit, I have every I.S assault fully mastered all but the bears and the MAD II's which I didn't buy for the clan assaults as well.

It's not much of an achievement, but it demonstrates years of support for this game and dedication, even from those of us that have been pretty toxic in our views.

It's taken away a source of pride, some will completely flip the bird at P.G.I some will stop spending money until they have remastered everything, some will just let those mechs sit and pixelate, and in the short, medium and long term effect P.G.I's income.

With added C-bill costs the impact will be greater than just having to regrind X.P

I could have just put down C-bill costs must go, but it needs to have a reason why they're bad, and it's critical that P.G.I see this understand this, and act in a positive way towards it by removing the cost from the grind

[Alistair Winter]

Cathy, on 05 March 2017 - 05:02 AM, said:

First off I think that a World of Warcraft system would be best, I think it's the direction P.G.I should have taken. It for a start looks better, and smarter, and the current system looks messy. no matter what system gets used, there will only be one way to fully optimise each mech, though both will give people other less optimised options.

Agreed. I am fine with other alternatives, but the standard linear RPG skill tree is probably the best.

Cathy, on 05 March 2017 - 05:02 AM, said:

I think each weight class needs a different set of nodes or at least values, armour with it's percent values are best used with assaults and heavies, agility is more useful in lights and mediums.

I really want as much freedom as possible. I'd love to be able to take a Wolfhound with significant base armor quirks, give it maximum survival skills and an STD engine and just be a light mech tank. I remember one time I was doing a 1v1 light duel in a solo queue skirmish match, and I came up against a Panther. I was so determined to leg it and leave it, but I didn't know about its insane leg armour quirks, so I almost died in the process of trying to leg it, and I was forced to retreat.

I love surprises like that, when things are not what they appear to be, and when light mechs can surprise you with survivability and heavy mechs can surprise you with their speed.

Cathy, on 05 March 2017 - 05:02 AM, said:

Now comes the big one the single thing I feel is going to be the deal breaker, that could well see an end to this game, if P.G.I don't see the value in what people are saying.
C-bill and MC costs must go from the skill tree completely( I know MC are currently gone in the build, but P.G.I must not put them back).
Genuine Newbs will just give up, they will not be drawn into the game and want to spend money, they will feel forced to spend money and go somewhere else.

You may be right about that. It could be that veterans are underestimating the detrimental effects of the C-bill costs, because it doesn't hit us as hard.

[Champion of Khorne Lord of Blood]

Self promoting my idea for potential community flagship design of what we want out of PTS3 linear skill tree.
https://mwomercs.com...hard-decisions/

[Alistair Winter]

Dakota1000, on 05 March 2017 - 05:15 AM, said:

Self promoting my idea for potential community flagship design of what we want out of PTS3 linear skill tree.
https://mwomercs.com...hard-decisions/

Heheh, go for it. Without any official threads made by community managers, we have 100 different threads with different ideas and everyone posting links to their own threads. It's inevitable in a situation like this.

[Reno Blade]

I am in for a simplification ... as long as we are not going to turn this into modern wow style (3 choices per tier) system.

Using vanilla WOW style tallent trees (where you can spec 31/0/20 with the 11, 21 and 31 being unlocked special skills) would be fine, but that 3 choices every 10 levels thing made the whole "talent tree" too simple for me.
The only problem in the vanilla wow trees were the fact that you always took the same talents with maybe 2-3 points variable.

I want to take choices where I have to balance between each aspect (defense, ofense, mobility, sensors...) and no options is a "must have" in >70% of the builds.
Ofc, having skills providing too less of an impact (e.g. 2% overall buff to something) would feel wasted, so total % of any buff should be at least 10% and up to 20% (e.g. 15% cooldown, 20% torso twist speed, 12% range...)

[Alistair Winter]

Reno Blade, on 05 March 2017 - 05:48 AM, said:

I am in for a simplification ... as long as we are not going to turn this into modern wow style (3 choices per tier) system.
Using vanilla WOW style tallent trees (where you can spec 31/0/20 with the 11, 21 and 31 being unlocked special skills) would be fine, but that 3 choices every 10 levels thing made the whole "talent tree" too simple for me.
The only problem in the vanilla wow trees were the fact that you always took the same talents with maybe 2-3 points variable.
I want to take choices where I have to balance between each aspect (defense, ofense, mobility, sensors...) and no options is a "must have" in >70% of the builds.
Ofc, having skills providing too less of an impact (e.g. 2% overall buff to something) would feel wasted, so total % of any buff should be at least 10% and up to 20% (e.g. 15% cooldown, 20% torso twist speed, 12% range...)

Honestly, I stopped playing WoW while the level cap was still level 60, so I have no idea what it's like now. The game has probably changed over 10+ years, so I suspect a direct comparison with WoW specifically may mean different things to different people.

I don't really remember talents at all.

[JaidenHaze]

I'm extremely dissatisfied with the current PTS build and right now i dont think there is a good way to make the current system "work". This is more or less my idea that i created in 5 minutes:

Spoiler

Its simply a less dense skill tree with linear progression. It fits one screen too

It gives you access to the things you "want" right away and gives you the choice of choosing different additional boni. The main difference: You can get a lot more 'weaker' boni with a point or get a very strong one. I also added a few fillers (lock up reduction and i'D rework the ppc jam to announce the enemy mech like "enemy spotted" over the command wheel).

Total points are up for discussion, probably around 30-35. Some values can be tweaked, for example Ammo for a total amount of 20% or adding the new "crit chance" reduction into lower and upper torso to make them more worthwhile pickup up if you want "defense".

Edited by JaidenHaze, 05 March 2017 - 06:01 AM.

[Alistair Winter]

I now realize I should have put another question in the poll. I should have asked how much people have tried the current build.

• Never tried it, only read what others have to say.
  
• Never tried it, only read the patch notes
  
• Barely tried it in testing grounds
  
• Tried it in both testing grounds and live matches
  
• Extensive testing in testing grounds + live matches

I'd love to hear how much you guys have tried the current build. Personally, I've tried it quite a lot in testing grounds, but I've not had a chance to have many live matches, because the wait time is absolutely brutal.

[Bud Crue]

I honestly am indifferent to the skills tree. PGI has beaten me down and I accept that whatever we end up with is going to be a general nerffing relative to the current live system in terms of functionality. Fine. If they can make such a system not such a clusterf**k in terms of the UI and ideally have more logical pathways/trees I will be as content as I think possible under the circumstances.

What I am very hostile too is the overall nerfing of mech that they are doing IN ADDITION TO that presented in the skills tree. It is unacceptable to me, and well rationale thought, that if you are trying to promote diversity and choice hurting the worst mechs in the game over and above the way you are affecting all mechs then you are guaranteeing that some mechs are NEVER going to be taken into the game accept as an act of self-flagellation. This is the opposite of encouraging diversity and player choice and if that is indeed the goal of the skills tree system (as stated) then the system is STUPID.

Which brings me to the movement profiles.
Can someone please explain to me the "role" of a slow/clumsy Locust? Is it "easily killed target"? Is that its role under the proposed system? If that is its assigned role, then I would like to change to "very good". But if that is NOT its intended role, then yeah, there is a problem with the movement profiles. I shant even get into what the movement profiles have done to some of my favorite mechs (Cataphract and Stalker to mention two). Apparently their assigned roles are "lumbering drunk" and "immobile turret". If these roles are intentional then everything is fine.

[Reno Blade]

Alistair Winter, on 05 March 2017 - 05:50 AM, said:

Honestly, I stopped playing WoW while the level cap was still level 60, so I have no idea what it's like now. The game has probably changed over 10+ years, so I suspect a direct comparison with WoW specifically may mean different things to different people.

I don't really remember talents at all.

so someone posted this current WOW tier based tree with 3 choices ever 15 levels:

Oberost, on 03 March 2017 - 03:28 AM, said:

I posted on another topic during the PTS1...

This is a tier based skill tree:

...

In this tree you can choose only one skill from each Tier, and every skill is balanced with the other skills from that Tier. The result is this:



If you balance things to be almost equal in usefulness you will have to make REAL choices, because picking one skill will prevent you from picking the other two useful skills on that Tier.

Do the skill trees different AT LEAST for each weight class and you'll have some more balance and variety.

Hell, you can even use hexagons instead of rectangles if this fits you better...

thats the one I dislike.

Now the vanilla trees looked like this (from google):
Mage lvl 60

or later
Death Knight lvl 80


As said, the biggest problem was that you usually did not have any "choice" to do to travel deeper, so most times you either did take few/31/few or 31/few/few or few/few/31 ...
later it just raised by 10 points as level cap was increased to 70, 80 and further... (i think currently it goes to 100 or 110 lvl).

In the end, they had to move to the 3-choices tiered list as the players either choose always the same (going to max one branch), or the inflation of % was just too high and they ran out of options to put into talents with balance in mind (how many skill points can push 5% crit/stamina/whatever...).

[Nik Reaper]

What structure should the skill system have?


Personally I would like a package deal kind of a deal going on, that is for example you have sensors 1 ,2 ,3 each costing more and more points, like 5 - 10 - 25 or anyway it's fair, rank 1 gives you radar derp and 1 rank of sensor range, rank 2 is rank 1 + seismic sensor rank 1, more sensor range and target retention rank 1 and sensors rank 3 gives everything sensor related or add even more sensor ranks till you cover everything

Same principle with other lines, it serves to compact the "traits" that are never worth taking in to traits you do want as a bonus, compacts the list and you could have side branches for special things that really specialize a weapons system, like gauss charge time and even a laser range for duration trade offs would be nice.

[Alistair Winter]

Nik Reaper, on 05 March 2017 - 06:51 AM, said:

Same principle with other lines, it serves to compact the "traits" that are never worth taking in to traits you do want as a bonus, compacts the list and you could have side branches for special things that really specialize a weapons system, like gauss charge time and even a laser range for duration trade offs would be nice.

I agree with this, although I would hope that certain specialty skills, such as extra ammunition and gauss charge time, would not necessarily be limited to people who already buried 50% of their skill points into the weapons tree.

This is my main worry with linear tree, it's that things that should be at the bottom end up on top. For example, imagine if the skills needed to be stealthy are only available after you max out scouting. This eliminates the stealth role for any non-scouts. Or imagine if the AMS skills are only available after you max out survival. This eliminates the elusive light mech with 2xAMS that relies on mobility rather than brute toughness to stay alive.

[ThePonyBoy]

Good conclusion by the OP. Summarizes the opinion of most players at the moment it seems after reading through the forums.

[Leroy the Walrus]

Cathy, on 05 March 2017 - 05:02 AM, said:

New starting players are already strapped for C-bills it hurts them to find money to up grade weapons Endo Ferro, pay for XL engines, now they get hammered for extra costs, and when they make mistakes on the nodes, and they will they get hit with a further C-bill penalty.

Genuine Newbs will just give up, they will not be drawn into the game and want to spend money, they will feel forced to spend money and go somewhere else.

...

However there are many players in the game that enjoy tinkering and being able to customise mechs. For many, it's only this ability and the friends they've made keeping them playing.

P.G.I are now going to penalise these people for what is for them the biggest part of enjoying this game, buy making them pay more, this will not get them spending money buying MC to convert to C-bills this will drive many away from the game.

I agree the "grind" has gotten out of hand in this game. It was one thing to grind c-bills for new equipment, and new mechs - at the end of it you got something new, you were grinding to get something fun. With the current skill tree, I don't feel like I'm grinding to get something new, I'm grinding just to make what I already have adequately workable. Coupled with the rather bland nature of the new skill tree, I'm not looking at my stable of mechs and saying "look at all the new builds I might try!" but rather triaging down to what I think will be the few most viable mechs/builds, skilling those, and letting the rest to rust.

I can definitely see newer players with a tighter c-bill budget making a few "bad" picks on mechs/skills, having them underperform, and just walking away rather than trying to grind for something new. Hell, I'm already thinking of cancelling my Roughneck preorder because the mech looks to be just "OK", and I don't think it'll be worth the grind to level-up the mediocre variants to the point of usability.

One suggestion I had, and made in another thread, was rather than making the skill-tree a grind for obligate upgrades, instead make it a +/- trade-off from nominal, i.e. to get better at one thing, you need to take a penalty in another. See Option 3 in the thread below.

https://mwomercs.com...age__mode__show

It would have 2 benefits - a mech would be viable, although not optimized, without skills, so new players or unleveled mechs aren't garbage until you grind millions of c-bills into them, and secondly, it would push real choices in the skill upgrades, to differentiate builds/roles (i.e. laser range comes at the costs of cool-down or some other attribute). Still betting PGI won't do it though, because the main goal of the new skills seems to be above all else the grind... more so than roles, interesting trade-offs, experimentation, diversity, any of it...

...just grind

[Leroy the Walrus]

Alistair Winter, on 05 March 2017 - 06:19 AM, said:

I now realize I should have put another question in the poll. I should have asked how much people have tried the current build.

• Never tried it, only read what others have to say.
  
• Never tried it, only read the patch notes
  
• Barely tried it in testing grounds
  
• Tried it in both testing grounds and live matches <------
  
• Extensive testing in testing grounds + live matches

I'd love to hear how much you guys have tried the current build. Personally, I've tried it quite a lot in testing grounds, but I've not had a chance to have many live matches, because the wait time is absolutely brutal.

I've done a mix of testing grounds and live - more live matches than testing grounds, actually. I even made a point to try the same mech/build with 0 skills, then skilled how I thought it should be, then re-skilled 10%-20% of the skills to adjust.

That being said, my experience falls pretty far short of "extensive", a few hours' worth of live matches, maybe. Also, the 4v4 setup, while needed for the low player volume, does tend to skew performance - there's just not that much firepower on the field at one time, so your survival time goes way up, even if you're positioned terribly.

[Alistair Winter]

50 votes in:

74% of voters agree that the skill system should be simpler, less convoluted and have fewer skill points per mech.

84% of voters agree that the skill tree should not force players to pick unrelated, random skills in order to unlock the most valuable skills.

32% of voters feel that the current baseline mobility is good enough. 40% of voters would like to see mobility buffs (with 30% voting for lighter mechs to get special attention).

Only 5% of the voters are happy with the current structure of the skill tree. More than 50% of the voters would like to see something more similar to linear RPG-style skill trees (and half of these voters want linear skill trees with some sort of tier-structure)

[Reno Blade]

I've added a radial skill tree to my original post here:
https://mwomercs.com...ranch-like-this

with the center starting point, you can use more than 3 roots.
I've sorted the nodes, so you can always get all nodes of a certain base-type and weapon-types are reachable by passing 1 or 2 nodes of 2-3 different base-types.

e.g. Energy can be reached after 1 node of cooldown/heat or 3xrange (please ignore the missing link lines) and Missile can be reached by 1 cooldown or 2 heat/velocity nodes.
only ballistics are left with 1 cooldown/range node, without direct connection to velocity.

Option 4
Radial starting point with skill types grouped next to each other (eg. heat between missiles and energy)

[J0anna]

I believe a skill system like eve online would be best,

1) you pick what you want with only a few skills requiring obtaining other skills

2) diminishing returns, either higher levels require more sp (preferred), or higher levels gain lower % improvement.

One example:
Laser Duration 1, reduces laser duration by 1% and costs 1 sp
Laser Duration 2, reduces laser duration by 1% and costs 2 sp
Laser Duration 3, reduces laser duration by 1% and costs 3 sp

So to get Laser Duration 3 would cost you 1+2+3 = 6sp for a 3% reduction

Or you could go:
Laser duration 1 reduces laser duration by 1% and costs 1 sp
Laser duration 2 reduces laser duration by 0.5% and costs 1 sp
Laser duration 3 reduces laser duration by 0.25% and costs 1 sp

so for 3 sp you would get 1.75% burn reduction.

[XX Sulla XX]

Would be nice if there was an option for or against decoupling engines.