23 replies to this topic

[Lupus Aurelius]

So, in the old system, you wanted Advanced Zoom, you bought the module and plugged it in. But now, you have to unlock Sensor Range 1 and Targeting Info Gathering 1&2 to be able to unlock it, forcing you to spend 3 nodes you may not want to get it!

And what logical sense is behind having to get 4 Target Info Gathering nodes in order to unlock Radar Dep 1 ?!?!?!?!?! What the hell does Hill Clinb have anything to do with Heat Containment or Cool Run ?!?!?!?! But I have to burn more nodes I don't want to even unlock the 1st level of those!

And it's not the only one, most of the other skills you may want to unlock, you have to burn nodes to get to them. This is ridiculous.

Heat skills should not require you to unlock cooldown skills to get. This should have been set up similar to the old skill system, in straight chains of a specific skill group.

Not to mention (91 nodes) x (number of mechs owned) takes way too much time from gameplay.

Fire the moron that came up with this system.

Edited by Lupus Aurelius, 16 May 2017 - 12:27 PM.

[FupDup]

This criticism has been made a gazillion times since the first Skill Tree PTS.

PGI is very adamant about not changing it. They think that "skill gating" removes min-maxing meta from the equation...without realizing that a skill tree with any customization will always have min-maxing no matter what. All they're doing is making the optimal build path a bit more obfuscated. That's about it. The min-max meta is still there.

[Jay Leon Hart]

This is why we have a feedback forum and had 3 (technically 2) different PTS versions for the Skill Tree. Also, PGI has stated in a few of their Skill Tree response Q&As that they don't want a linear tree.

[Angel of Annihilation]

Jay Leon Hart, on 16 May 2017 - 12:00 PM, said:

This is why we have a feedback forum and had 3 (technically 2) different PTS versions for the Skill Tree. Also, PGI has stated in a few of their Skill Tree response Q&As that they don't want a linear tree.

And it is always this. PGI wants, PGI wants. It is ever so rarely what the players want because you know...the Island.

[Jay Leon Hart]

Viktor Drake, on 16 May 2017 - 12:36 PM, said:

And it is always this. PGI wants, PGI wants. It is ever so rarely what the players want because you know...the Island.

Also because the players never agree on anything.
See: module refund.
Why would they listen to us, when we can't listen to each other?
I agree in principle, but PGI will do what they want because they can, all we can do is try and help them steer away form the icebergs.

[William Mountbank]

FupDup, on 16 May 2017 - 12:00 PM, said:

The min-max meta is still there.

I dunno, it kind of feels like Mechwarrior is min-maxing at its heart, and the only solution PGI has to 'combat' what is a natural aspect of the game is by restricting player choice.

[FupDup]

William Mountbank, on 16 May 2017 - 01:45 PM, said:

I dunno, it kind of feels like Mechwarrior is min-maxing at its heart, and the only solution PGI has to 'combat' what is a natural aspect of the game is by restricting player choice.

That's basically the part that PGI is forgetting about during this whole affair. Heck, they even supposedly want us to min-max as they've said in the Q&A ("player choice" being one of the chief goals of the entire Skill Tree 1.0) yet they also take a strong stance against said min-maxing.

They don't seem to realize that the entire point of allowing us to choose our own skills is so that we CAN min-max the tree to suit our desires. If they didn't want us to do that they should've just kept a global tree and replaced Pinpoint with something useful.

[sycocys]

The point of it is to force you to make some concessions to get to the higher power/more useful nodes.

[FupDup]

sycocys, on 16 May 2017 - 02:27 PM, said:

The point of it is to force you to make some concessions to get to the higher power/more useful nodes.

The "concession" is supposed to be that spending SP on Skill A means you can't spend those SP on Skill B. It's the same concept as spending 1 ton on a Medium Laser means I can't spend that 1 ton on a Double Heatsink. Opportunity cost.

Beyond that, if PGI "has to" use skill gating to make people actually use things like Hill Climb, that should be a gigantic red warning light that Hill Climb and other skills need to be improved so that they're worth their SP investment. Skill gating does not address the disease, it just addresses the symptoms.

Edited by FupDup, 16 May 2017 - 02:30 PM.

[Lupus Aurelius]

sycocys, on 16 May 2017 - 02:27 PM, said:

The point of it is to force you to make some concessions to get to the higher power/more useful nodes.

Making choices/concessions is one thing. The node limit does that fairly well. It's requiring people to take skills that have no relation to what they are trying to set up. Hill Clinb has nothing to do with Heat Containment or Cool Run. Now, if they required you to have Heat containment completed before you could do Cool Run, that would make sense.

The problem is that skills you may have no use for are being forced to be picked to get the ones you want, and that they have NO RELATION to what you are trying to build, and reducing the numbers of nodes that are viable for that function.

[Lightfoot]

So the problem is they put the Skills no one ever used at the top and the ones you want at the bottom. There choice, but it means that players will never use 3 of the Skill Trees at all. There is no need for those Skills no one ever took and if you can't get to the ones you need you just won't use 3-4 of the Skill Trees so they might as well not be there at all.

It's just not balanced and the old method of Skilling a mech was. You have to offer some of the top Skills at the top of all the trees. Maybe not the full level, but something to make the Skilling interesting. Hey, I said this in the Test versions too.

[WrathOfDeadguy]

Torso yaw range gating for chassis agility skills... for the Urbie!

Yeah, there's some skill gating silliness. There was before too, though, and the percentage of total grind time invested in useless crap was much higher. Two nodes out of 91 into pointless yaw range buffs for Urbie doesn't hurt as much as the Twist X investment gating off Tweak.

Or... y'know, Pinpoint. That useless grindwall was gating off the double basic bonus, FFS. That and startup both... things nobody would ever have taken but for what lay on the other side of 'em. Yeah, there are still startup gates in the way of more useful stuff... but a much, much smaller relative investment. It's an overall improvement- better, even if not all the way better.

[MrJeffers]

Jay Leon Hart, on 16 May 2017 - 12:43 PM, said:

Also because the players never agree on anything.
See: module refund.
Why would they listen to us, when we can't listen to each other?
I agree in principle, but PGI will do what they want because they can, all we can do is try and help them steer away form the icebergs.

Nobody had a problem with getting C-Bills back for modules. The problem was people who didn't have enough modules to cover the C-bill costs of re-specing their mechs in the new system.

PGI fixed that with the HSP points for existing mech skill unlocks that eliminated the need to spend C-bills to get your skills back. There was zero reason to not refund the C-bills for modules still, except PGI thought that huge influx of C-bills without in immediate C-Bill sink was going to... I don't know what. Destroy the economy.

Fact is, that huge influx of C-Bills would have been used to by single mechs that people wanted but didn't buy because of the rule of three, and would also be spent in the 100's of millions on the new tech and LFE's that are coming out soon.

Edited by MrJeffers, 16 May 2017 - 05:26 PM.

[Tripzter]

The problem is people expect to get 100% and more of what they had before..

[Mawai]

sycocys, on 16 May 2017 - 02:27 PM, said:

The point of it is to force you to make some concessions to get to the higher power/more useful nodes.

True. However, it could have been designed such that the higher or more useful nodes just cost more. By having a more convoluted tree, it accomplishes something similar in that the higher nodes DO cost more but you may get something else less useful or desired for those expenses.

For example, someone complained about having to spend 3 skill points on target info gathering and sensor boost to get advanced zoom. True. However, would a linear tree in which advanced zoom by itself costs 4 or 5 skill points be a preferable alternative?

Or speed tweak for example, they could design a linear speed tweak line in which the first level cost 1, then 2 ... all the way to 5 so that the total cost in skill points for all the levels of speed tweak would be 15. No skill points spent on other stuff that way but it costs about the same as unlocking all the speed tweak nodes in the current tree.

PGI took the design decision to make some of the more desirable nodes cost more skill points to obtain. This could have been done in a linear format or in the current format. I think a pure linear format would be easier to understand but there would also likely be somewhat less variety and would probably be easier for folks to min/max. The current skill tree lets you aim for your preferred primary capabilities ... say heat capacity/dissipation, radar derp, improved uavs and laser skills ... or maybe improved armor/struc, improved mobility, heat cap/diss, weapons.

One common tree is likely to be heat cap/dissipation unless you are using an all ballistic build but then do you max these out at 15% or is 10% good enough? You can save a few skill points to spend on another tree.

There are lots of folks discussing standard best build skill trees but I honestly think the best build will vary depending on mech/loadout/playstyle and personal preference so I expect to see some variety coming from the new tree.

[sycocys]

Don't get me wrong, I think the node tree is dumb af - that was just their intention of the design.

Also a 91 point cap doesn't really limit many mechs in any real meaninful way (especially if you don't have JJ or ECM).
--- It also doesn't do jack to reel in the power creep created by the overbuffed skill tree (x2 nonsense) + module system as you can pretty easily get 90% of the way back to the same silliness we had before the tree.

Yes poor choices in stuff no one used before are still poor choices, the only way they'd ever get anyone to use them is to require you to use them for the stuff you actually prefer to use. It won't take long and the skill tree specs will devolve to 40-50+ in weapons, 20 in sensors, 10 in mobility, 10-15 in systems, and a few in aux for people that want extra consumables.

Survival will be largely ignored because they refuse to do anything to reel in the power creep of the weapons buffs or the weapons in general to account for people aiming and not rolling dice. Focus fire will still annihilate even full survival node like it was nothing, so that will be were things head right back to once folks are done goofing around with it.

Overall its just meh, a lot of dress up and wasted manhours to create something that is pretty much exactly the same thing the game had before but with a much uglier interface.

[Devils Advocate]

It's by design. Advanced zoom shouldn't cost 1 point, it should cost 4, so you have to plug in 4 points. You aren't getting the most out of all three of the points leading up to advanced zoom? Life is hard, but 3 skill points will not break your build. A single skill point on this tree is virtually meaningless.

[sycocys]

Devils Advocate, on 16 May 2017 - 06:11 PM, said:

It's by design. Advanced zoom shouldn't cost 1 point, it should cost 4, so you have to plug in 4 points. You aren't getting the most out of all three of the points leading up to advanced zoom? Life is hard, but 3 skill points will not break your build. A single skill point on this tree is virtually meaningless.

Well the other thing to their argument, which they haven't touched on - is you can't balance the cost or power of the **** nodes now because players are forced to take them to get to the ones they want.

You also can't effectively increase the cost/cost to level or power level of the nodes people actually want for balance because people have to go through a line of **** they don't want.

The old setup with points costs and take what you want with x amount of points would have saved probably several hundred manhours and accomplished the same exact thing while actually having a possibility of being balancable at least to some degree.

[Lightfoot]

Well you just don't use 3 or 4 of the Skill trees. You don't take the really worthless stuff if it does you no good. I also can't figure out why if I have 10 range nodes LRMs are 953 meters. It just seems cheap since who needs 1000 meter LRMs anyway, but at the same time LRMs are no better in direct-fire battles which would seem to be a logical trade-off for the range nerf.

Anyway, they shouldn't make a Skill Tree that is in effect missing 3 or 4 of them.

[Mystere]

FupDup, on 16 May 2017 - 12:00 PM, said:

This criticism has been made a gazillion times since the first Skill Tree PTS.

PGI is very adamant about not changing it. They think that "skill gating" removes min-maxing meta from the equation...without realizing that a skill tree with any customization will always have min-maxing no matter what. All they're doing is making the optimal build path a bit more obfuscated. That's about it. The min-max meta is still there.

Which would have been all in vain once the copy-and-pasta crowd get started in full swing.