I hate it for these reasons:
PGI claimed for reasons for putting it in:
1 -increase mech and build diversity that are played
2 -improve player's ability to choose those mechs and builds
3 -provide a mechanism to transition from the 3 mech to single mech model
4 -drastically reduce quirks
See original PTS:
https://mwomercs.com...c-test-session/
The revamp of the Skill Tree has been designed with a number of core principles:
• Empower players with the ability to customize their 'Mechs performance characteristics according to their own desires and goals.
• Promote greater build and 'Mech diversity on the battlefield by enabling broader control over specialized roles.
• Transition from a variant-wide Skill Tree to an individual 'Mech Skill Tree, allowing for duplicate versions of the same variant to serve different roles with different Skill configurations.
• Facilitate a drastic reduction of inherent 'Mech Quirks.
And yet, only one of these goals is achieved. 1 out of four aint bad for PGI but in any other realm of analysis it would be pretty indicative of a piss poor design.
Improved diversity and choice? Seriously? You provide an advancing percentage based system and expected it to somehow encourage folks not to take advantage of a mechs inherent features to min/max those percentages? Hey PGI! Ya know why there have been several threads about why the Cataphract and the Atlas and the Orion, etc. ought to take advantage of the Survival branch? Because you gave those mechs bonus armor and thus it behooves the player to...how did you put it in the Q&A: to build the mech in accordance with the puzzle defined by the quirks.
"Quirked ‘Mechs acting more as puzzles then avenues of personal customization. With often only loadouts that fully optimize around a ‘Mechs given quirks able to be considered in a “balanced” state, while loadouts which ignore, or do not care to customize into the very ridged quirks often massively underperforming loadouts that play exclusively to pre-canned quirks."
You identified this as a problem that the skills tree would fix! The skills tree however practically demands that one put the puzzle together as the quirks dictate! Why...WHY! Would any player willingly choose NOT to maximize those armor bonuses with the increased percentages that your system provides? Did you really think a player would think..."ya know what a Cataphract needs? A maxed SRM node path instead of that armor since its so week in the SRM area I will use the tree to improve it". Gessuz.
So there is 2 of the 4. As the the 3rd failure...now don't get me wrong here...I'm happy you blew it on the mechs I care about, but the fact that at some point in this system's roll out, when you decided NOT to nerf mechs nearly as much as you had threatened did it never occur to you that if we cant actually "drastically" reduce "overall" quirks with this system (this is something at least Russ realized in December since he was back pedaling away from the "quirks removed" mechcon presentation almost immediately on twitter) that maybe the "overall" system wasn't going to work?
Sigh.
At least we did make it to the 1 mech model. So I guess that's a rousing success given the history around here?
Edited by Bud Crue, 21 May 2017 - 04:50 AM.