953 replies to this topic

[Dee Eight]

Cara Carcass, on 18 May 2017 - 06:19 AM, said:

And the GSP are useless since mechs are mastered and HSP are available, meaning he has to grind 125 new mechs to use the GPS he got.

Except its not. Having a large sum of GSP means you precisely get to SKIP the grind portion of future mech purchases until you've used up that GSP refund pool. I got over 6600 GSP in my refund. that's 72 mechs. I'm set for the next year at least. No grind. Instantly tune them to suit whatever build i want to run on them.

[Dee Eight]

Arkhangel, on 18 May 2017 - 06:52 AM, said:

Actually, you don't, if you took the time to notice the web between points. I've managed to get all range, CD, heat, and laser duration without even touching velocity.

Same. I bought a SINGLe black knight, used my GSP pool to instant-node it out to suit the build as I configured it, and basically did the same taking all the heat, cooldown and range nodes and also skipped the velocity ones even though I mounted a pair of ER PPCs (because they weren't going to do anything for the lasers on it).

[thraadash]

You know, I don't get how this will be a less of a grind for new players.

In the old system, you needed around 36K+ xp in order to get to Elite for a new mech. And that's all you really needed unless you absolutely needed that extra slot.

In this current system, in order to use all 91 nodes, you need 72K + xp. And you don't even get anywhere near the old system's bonuses.

It's true, you needed to to skill 3 mechs in order to get the bonuses, so you choose the 3 mechs you prefer more than the others and then grind them.

A total of 100K+ XP.

If you compare having to skill 3 mechs in the current system, that's around 210K+ XP.


True, it's catered for people who like a single variant of the entire chassis line and just want to focus on that.

But, what about the rest of us who might like 3 or more variants? Or bought the more recent mech packs?

I'm not even going to mention the horror grind people who want duplicates of the same variant have to go through.

It's as though whoever thought up the system was catering it to a specific typeset of player and not to players in general.


My 2 cents worth. I'm just a little mortified thinking about the grinding for my 3 Javelins, 3 Uziels, 3 Annhilators and 3 Madcat II's.

Edit: (Did I mention that it'll probably take an average player without Premium time around 90-100 rounds in order to fully node a single mech?)

Edited by thraadash, 18 May 2017 - 07:03 AM.

[GweNTLeR]

Hello PGI.
A bit of constructive feedback.
Just a quick thought on High Explosive skill nodes.
All it brings to a IS piloting SRM - at maximum 1.4% damage increase VS structure (according to my calculations (3*0.0714+2*0.3333+1*0.595)*0.42*(0.1725-0.15)=0.0139 ) and 1 less crit to destroy clan UAC/AC/LB 20. AND THAT'S IT.
On the other side, players playing LRM/ streaks/ clan SRM do benefit from this node much more - they need 1 less crit for almost all the components to be destroyed.
I think it would be a good idea to boost this skill node (just a bit) OR replace it with Critical chance one for balancing.

[HuntingU]

I agree with #previouspost. MWO feels broken!

[Horseman]

Cara Carcass, on 18 May 2017 - 06:19 AM, said:

And the GSP are useless since mechs are mastered and HSP are available, meaning he has to grind 125 new mechs to use the GPS he got.

More or less. Just trying to point him in the right direction, since HXP aren't it.

thraadash, on 18 May 2017 - 07:00 AM, said:

True, it's catered for people who like a single variant of the entire chassis line and just want to focus on that.
But, what about the rest of us who might like 3 or more variants? Or bought the more recent mech packs?
I'm not even going to mention the horror grind people who want duplicates of the same variant have to go through.
It's as though whoever thought up the system was catering it to a specific typeset of player and not to players in general

Or as if user experience was not even considered a factor to begin with.

[Steinkrieg]

Thoughts after a second night of play:

1. boatsBoatsBOATS - meta is or will be by the end of the week boating a particular weapon system, combined with erppc/gauss. This lets the player invest as little as possible in the weapon tree (usually between 30 and 40 SP), which allows the player to then spread out the remaining SP to give their mech an edge. What am I saying? Not to give it an edge, but to try to get it back to the performance that it had pre-patch.

2. Certain mechs are as good or better than before. From personal experience, the following mechs feel like they perform better than before - Huntsman cSRM / cSSRM boats, Marauder IIC, Marauder IIC Scorch (brawl spec), Ebon Jaguar laser boats, Summoner ERPPC boats, LInebacker Redline SRM boats, Highlander Heavy Metal, Warhawk ERPPC boats, Hellbringer ERPPC and Laser boats, Timberwolf Laser boats, Jagermech ballistic boats.

3. Certain mechs are less viable than before. Tested - Kodiak Spirit Bear, Dragon Fang.

4. After a few spec outs, the player can create a basic template in their mind or with a skill tree builder for what they want and apply it most of their mechs to speed spec outs. It takes me about 2 minutes to spec out a mech now. What would be nice would to be able to save skill tree templates so all you have to do it select from one of your saved templates and apply it to the unskilled mech. Oh, I want to make this mech into a laser boat? Click saved templates button. Selection box of saved templates pops up. Select saved template. Apply laser boat template, save. Done. Specced out a mech in 5 seconds or less. Weeeeeeee, that wasn't bad. I really hope PGI implements something like this.

5. While it feels like there is an overall TTK increase, because of the desync benefitting some mechs, and the massive benefit of boating a particular weapon system, certain mechs have the ability to decrease their old TTK. See above item 2 for some mechs that can do this.

6. If PGI's goal was to increase diverse loadouts, promote experimentation, and decrease boats, they have failed. Utterly. If you want to significantly increase your chance to win, you will be boating in the vast majority of your builds.

---

I'm going to be trying out some other mechs tonight, and I'll give my impressions tomorrow as well. While I am having fun, so much of this just feels wrong, and I have to chuckle at the irony of the situation that PGI has accomplished the exact opposite of what they wanted to achieve.

[MovinTarget]

I will agree that it won't bring build diversity, but boaters gonna boat. Unless you force people to diversify. they will boat, you cannot dangle a carrot on that one.

I get the boating argument save for the mechs stuck with literally no option but to boat.

[NocturnalBeast]

HuntingU, on 18 May 2017 - 07:04 AM, said:

I agree with #previouspost. MWO feels broken!

There, this is the correct way to express you opinion.

MovinTarget, on 18 May 2017 - 08:49 AM, said:

I will agree that it won't bring build diversity, but boaters gonna boat. Unless you force people to diversify. they will boat, you cannot dangle a carrot on that one.

I get the boating argument save for the mechs stuck with literally no option but to boat.

People will boat regardless, unless PGI removes all buffs / nerfs / quirks and no longer allows us to customize our mechs. Even then, people will just stack their teams with the best mechs, unless there are massive restrictions (or they do like other games, and just ban overly powerful Mechs except for in a "free" or "wild" game mode).

Edited by Ed Steele, 18 May 2017 - 08:53 AM.

[Rhaezor]

This tree is a complication most didnt ask for. especially for those with hundreds of mechs having to do everything again. So I understand those who say they will quit and curse. It is understandable. (I also usually get 10 more games with terrible players and then 10 with good idk why.)

I do think though, maybe we can think of all this in a dif way. Slowly assign SP to a mech like, once a week, it wont be so boring and can be a reason to visit our mechs again. The tree is interesting and doesnt SEEM to break balance that much from how it was. (the visual could improve greatly though)

And for new players this new system probably is better.
Its not perfect, we dont get to see the actual effects of the tree without actually spending the points and go testing, but we all had ridiculous amounts of XP we would never use anyway, I cant agree with the +cbills though.

But that's probably cause some people have more cbill they can ever use.
But in this case PGI, if you want to find place to drop millions of cbills, you just have to have some cosmetics for cbills, its that easy.

My point is: dropping with a mech without SP assigned doesnt mean we'll lose at all.

Edited by ShinRazor, 18 May 2017 - 09:22 AM.

[ExoForce]

No thanks, I dont have time or will to go through this...

Thanks to all fabulous warriors for great times. It was an honour to fight with/againt You.

[Ishishi]

Somehow i dont feel the urge to play Mechwarrior Online today..

Just realized that the only thing that kept me playing was mastering different mechs and see how good they are fully mastered.

Now i can just buy one, spend all my GSP on it and thats it.

(Edit: Well, could have done that before with GXP but i always thought i need them for something)

Edited by Ishishi, 18 May 2017 - 09:23 AM.

[NocturnalBeast]

ShinRazor, on 18 May 2017 - 09:14 AM, said:

This tree is a complication most didnt ask for.

How do you know that "most" didn't ask for this? Actually, as I said before this is a feature that was promised and was intended to be in the game from the beginning. I can only speak for myself, but I like it.

Also, I had ignorantly made a post earlier about having to waste all my C-Bills to re-master my Mechs, but now I realize that I had just failed to notice the Historic SP that most of my mechs had.

[Genesis23]

downloaded the patch today, played one round in my beloved SDR-5K(C), the first mech i ever played and bought, and yeah... i logged out and instantly asked for a refund for the preordered civil war package. shame what they did to the game and i am glad i didnt invest more money in it. reason for my disappointment? to use the 5k as just one single example: its 50% energy cooldown made it at least somehow usable, now the maximum you can get is about 32%, which is a joke and a bad one at that.

of course you could argue "but Genesis, you may have quite a bit of energy cooldown but you get more armor n stuff" and you would be right. but guess what an allready surprisingly sturdy but hopelessly undergunned mech doesnt need more of, and what it needs to be at least somewhat viable... because seriously, if my spider can tank ridiculous amounts of damage then something is wrong here.

and as mentioned, that was just one example. cant be bothered continuing under these circumstances - or only at times where im really bored and im really hating mysef.

Edited by Genesis23, 19 May 2017 - 03:17 AM.

[TheLuc]

Okay so I did try very hard to like the new skill tree but more I use it, less I like it. I do understand how it works and all but it doesn't the game any better.

Is the HBS Battletech out yet ?

[CMJ]

First, Kudos to the teams for putting all of the hard work and time into this. It is evident that the beta testing was done as well, and feedback was initially taken.

Here are a couple of direct problems, most of which you have heard echoed earlier. Instead of just echoing the problems I will also suggest strong fix actions for all of the ones listed.

1) Massive numbers of clicks to regain viable operability of mechs, particularly when tens or even hundreds of mechs are involved. Even 10 mechs, fully specced out, would be 910 clicks.
Suggested Fix: Each mech should have a templated fix for general gameplay - scout, missile, defense, etc. Each would be tailored to whether that mech has jump jets. This way, it would be dependent upon STYLE of PLAY and mech choice to fill all of those choices out. After that is done, THEN they can go back in and be as detailed as they want, clicking only 5-6 times per mech versus 91. KISS = User Appreciation.

2) The trees are nice, but the active/inactive pieces are extremely frustrating. If you pay for a node, you should be able to turn it on or off as you WANT, and it shouldn't turn everything off after it. For example, with Clan mechs in the armor structure tree, imagine a stormcrow pilot looking at this - the mech doesn't have jump, and doesn't have AMS. But, he must either choose shock absorbance for falling from a jump or AMS overload to advance the tree. Neither are wanted or needed. Unfortunately, if you choose to de-activate the shock absorbance 1 node after choosing everything down to armor hardening 2 on the left side, it all de-activates with it. This should not happen.
Suggested Fix:Simply make the nodes non-dependent once you have purchased them. This will encourage more purchasing of nodes, and will enable the process of node choice to the 91 possible active ones to be more user friendly, and a better experience overall.

[Blockpirat]

You may the remember the Skill Tree Survey I posted here, as well as in General Discussion, the German section of the forums and on /r/OutreachHPG.

The Survey has been active for 30 hours, with almost 500 responses. Since activity has been winding down, I've decided to close the survey and publish the results.

Here are the visualisations auto-generated by Google (please be aware that the year 2016 was duplicated by mistake - this is only an issue in the diagram, not in the raw data):
https://docs.google....g/viewanalytics

And here, especially for our spreadsheet warriors, is the raw data. I am looking forward to any conclusions one might draw from it:
https://docs.google....t#gid=345765850

EDIT:

For some reason Google doesn't show the descriptions for the 1 to 5 scales:

Question 1 asked people to rate the Skill Tree from very bad to very good (1 to 5)

The Mech build question ranged from "casual, unconventional, fun- or lore-oriented" (1) to "optimized, min-maxed, competitive" (5)

Edited by Blockpirat, 18 May 2017 - 10:36 AM.

[PirateLincoln]

I just realized how screwed I'm getting on the new skill system.
The old system forced me to waste a great deal of time leveling up variants that I never wanted to use and will never use again, so that I could fully level up the variant I actually did want to use.

Now, all of those skill points are stuck, tied to those 'mechs that I no longer own, that I never wanted to own, and that I'm not going to own again (because it would take absolutely forever to grind out the hundreds of millions of C-bills necessary).

AWESOME!

Edited by PirateLincoln, 18 May 2017 - 10:33 AM.

[process]

PirateLincoln, on 18 May 2017 - 10:32 AM, said:

I just realized how screwed I'm getting on the new skill system.
The old system forced me to waste a great deal of time leveling up variants that I never wanted to use and will never use again, so that I could fully level up the variant I actually did want to use.

Now, all of those skill points are stuck, tied to those 'mechs that I no longer own, that I never wanted to own, and that I'm not going to own again (because it would take absolutely forever to grind out the hundreds of millions of C-bills necessary).

AWESOME!

Yeah, it would have been nice if there was a single pool of HSP per chassis, instead of per variant, to help us downsize.

[AnTi90d]

Blockpirat, on 18 May 2017 - 10:22 AM, said:

Here are the visualisations auto-generated by Google (please be aware that the year 2016 was duplicated by mistake - this is only an issue in the diagram, not in the raw data):
https://docs.google....g/viewanalytics

EDIT:

For some reason Google doesn't show the descriptions for the 1 to 5 scales:

Question 1 asked people to rate the Skill Tree from very bad to very good (1 to 5)

The Mech build question ranged from "casual, unconventional, fun- or lore-oriented" (1) to "optimized, min-maxed, competitive" (5)

I was just about to ask what the values were, quoted you and saw the EDIT in the quote.

---

Yeah.. that looks like a great decision. I'm sure it will positively affect Old Player Retention, New Player Retention and Player Spending, positively. /s


I've seen more screenshots of people proving that they cancelled their pre-orders from this debacle than all other PGI debacles in the past year and a half.

I almost wish I had a microphone hidden in their office so I could listen to them rage at the players for not embracing the Skill Maze. (If only they had actually read the threads in the PTS forums that were warning them of this outcome. Some like it, most hate it.. which seems like a net loss for the company.)