SuperFunkTron, on 12 March 2017 - 06:14 PM, said:
There are a lot of points to address but I'll keep it to just a few as this has been argued to death.
-Abilities and filler nodes: They intentionally put the most desired nodes at the bottom so that they would require greater investment. That is a means to prevent people from cherry picking all the best abilities and making overpowered machines. As nice as it would be to have full ECM or radar deprivation, Seismic, maxed out weapons, speed tweak, amazing heat efficiency and great info tech, it leads to a stale game when every mech becomes overly capable.
You are conflating the fact of navigating a tree with investment.
You could have a 4 trees with 5 nodes each and each node be worth 10 SP and you give people a maximum of 30 SP to use that produces choice or you could have 10000 nodes each worth 1 point and give a user 1000 SP. which would you prefer? Actually which am I arguing for and why may be the better question.
As Chris said the tree is that fashion because that is what they want to do, they want to make the 'investment' look like a tree traversal game. I want to to play mechwarrior not tree traversal game. I find it difficult to understand why playing a tree traversal game excites anyone. the intermediate node are virtually valueless that is why I said that they might as well not have anything in the intermediate nodes. hence in the mobility nodes they had arm pitch and speed which was complete and utter bullsh1t
The could make the tree much more streamlined. What they have also not explained is how a new player going to get value out of this. If you were a beginner and needed your mech to be better to compete what would you advise with 10 SP. The old system win a match and you get cool run of 5% here win a match and you start on which tree what does it do for you basically SFA so a beginner is traversing a tree with mostly filler, to get to a point where he can avoid lurms. 5 nodes get him 20% and it is not clear that 20% does than much of him as a beginner.
the pain for me is that I will make the choice I understand what I want I know what filler I can avoid it is just a waste of my time when I could be playing.
SuperFunkTron, on 12 March 2017 - 06:14 PM, said:
-Size of trees vs. linear nodes. I understand the thought with linear trees and trees that require higher costs for better nodes and even the case for compression of nodes so that there are fewer nodes with a larger benefit. It's nice to see more impact from a single node purchase than having to buy more upgrades in smaller quantities. Your claim of insignificant percentages I feel lacks context. Despite this, I find the larger tree creates more of a spectrum than binary features. Some numbers are small (>1%), but if you consider what they apply to, they tend to be appropriate.
Of course, many players will be maxing out certain abilities on most of their mechs, which is fine. However, there are many players who will actually not prioritize certain "prime abilities" because they don't feel the cost is worth it. They can gain a portion of an ability without having to fully master it. That is what I like about the larger tree. It allows players to choose how far they upgrade on a spectrum, with some variation of the paths they choose to get to those final values. Granted, some trees don't offer much variation in arriving at certain prime abilities at the bottom of the tree, but having the freedom to be able to gain some degree of an ability is really nice.
Those who are looking to max out abilities won't understand it, but there are players who choose to complete only a portion of many of the trees because they feel that a certain amount of an ability is sufficient to their needs and thus have more nodes to place in other places.
You can have that but I fear that I am repeating myself there are 330 nodes and 91 nodes you need to choose multiply that by 80 mechs (if you have the cash).
Even if you have a new mech you would clear not spend the point 1 point at a time as it make little sense. You are talking about beyond the no brainer, 1% improvements per node and a maximum of 5% in places please!!!. Now I accept that is to nerf thing to increase time to kill but please are you going to make such granular choices. In the main it make sense to min max much of these features.
For example speed tweek for a mech going over 120Kmph may be not a big deal even at 7.5% but acceleration at 50% is really key. straight line speed is not that important in MWO unless you are a light and then the tweak whislt nice is not as important unless you are really slow. So a DWF may actually want speed tweak but a KDK may skip it. the granularity in many cases is meh and unnecessary
SuperFunkTron, on 12 March 2017 - 06:14 PM, said:
-tree coherence: I've been seeing a lot of posts saying that these trees are incoherent and it is making me wonder if I'm autistic because they make sense to me. Highly desirable nodes are at the bottom. A variety of related upgrades are above that. The upgrades closer to the top are used as a means to offer some buffs to a mech specializing in that tree while the highly desirable nodes at the bottom are elite upgrades for that field. It prevents a mech from accumulating an excess of elite upgrades and creating balance disturbances by becoming overpowered.
I could be wrong, but that sounds like a coherent layout with a well defined goal. I do concede that some of those earlier abilities could be made better, and I'm even sure that PGI would like to hear what those replacement suggestions are so that they can improve upon the tree.
The coherency issue I agree if you wanted to put blocks in the way of desirable nodes you can do two thing you can put fillers in the way or you could put the price up. What PGI has done has put fillers in the way and many of the fillers do not make sense and I even think that Chris actually used the term fillers. They basically said what is it that people would find useful and lets make it difficult to get. Ok what can we put in the way.
So lets take the beginner again he getting lurmed to death so he know needs Radar Dep to help him break lock however on the way he get target decay which promote lurming is that coherent? is that what they are trying to promote? So on top of the filler there is also the lack of awareness of what they are promoting
SuperFunkTron, on 12 March 2017 - 06:14 PM, said:
We could really have an endless discussion about the different facets of this situation but there's no point to it. I believe that a simple, linear tree system allowed for balance, that it would have been the type of tree we ended up with. I am sure that a lot of thought and consideration was put into trying to find out the simplest way to implement a tree while accounting for all of the balance issues that could arise and find that there is a lot of sense in these trees (even with its admitted short comings). This won't be the end of the tree's development, but offers a step in the right direction and a system that improves on the status quo. Not everyone will see it that way, but a lot is being done both blatantly and subtly and I'm confident that PGI is neither using this to kill the game off nor to harm it.
As I have said previously we could have had a weekend of suspending the live server and replacing it with PTS2.5 and playing 12 v12 games and giving everyone 50M C bills for playing 25 games. That would have been a good shake down and I would have been happy if people turned around and said yeah that worked. We have a small community and PGI has a hard time engaging people to test stuff which is why we have 4 v 4s. 4 v4 are pretty much brawls there is very little in the way of ranged engagement because it make little sense even scouting which is 4 v 4 taking a raven 3L with ER large Lasers is not a good call.
In fairness you are correct, we are smart people, any change is assimilated like the Borg and have unintended consequences The more complexity the more complex the interaction the harder it is to unplck which is partly where I am coming from and indeed why PGI have had the issues they have throughout the game Once this goes live if you have to make major changes then it is a real sh1Tstorm. PGI have broken people that pay big dollars, economy, yes the ones that pay the bills essentially, before you even talk about the other changes. I understand that there needs to be a rebalancing fr the new tech since the old IS tech has been made have some equivalence or more appropriately the Clan weapons have had clunky nerfs. Now if someone was clever they would have advanced the timeline to 3060s and then introduce the clans but they didn't and again this was due to a lack of insight and testing. I feel that PGI are kind of blinkered and that is why I rail at this. it is poor engineering.
Lastly we have both spent to long crafting forum posts and not enough playing the game that clear we are both passionate about. (The whole debate felt like Brexit or Trump versus Clinton at times)
I respect your view point even though I do not agree with it. I am still open to be persuaded, but at the moment I don't see it. However, much as I have argued against it i will still be playing on 21st March and beyond and I trust if I ever get good enough I will see you either with a red or blue dorito
18
