Rovertoo, on 02 October 2017 - 09:47 AM, said:
I feel that, functionally, nerfing the few overperformers instead of buffing everything else is a pretty clear decision. Ive never understood the mentality of buffing everything, that just leads to a crazy arms race, and eventually wed have to buff armor values again and well be back where we started but with bigger numbers. Like, either way leads to balance I guess, but buffing everything is a hugely longer race.
It is no longer possible to nerf these 'overperformers'. We had a chance to nerf overperformers, about several years ago when Origins IIC just came out. But it's 2017 now.
See, the biggest problem of nerfing 'overperformers' is that:
1) Human psychology does not like to get things nerfed.
2) Power gap is wayyy too huge.
3) The balance has been stuck for wayyy too long.
4) TT/Lore's inherent power creeping issues.
5) PGI has been nerfing/buffing wrong stuffs.
So, people do not like their toys nerfed. Fair enough. Sometimes you have to make hard decisions. People will whine and cry but they will eventually get over it..... for normal circumstance. Unfortunately MWO situation is anything but normal circumstance.
You must understand this game has been suffering massive nerfing trend
over several years now ever since first quirks were introduced. PGI has been diligently reducing quirks on mechs every single time new patch is introduced, and hardly any new buffs were introduced. People can get over nerfing several mechs, but
no way people can move on nerfing entire IS mechs for several years. It is no longer possible to expect people to get over when you keep throwing rocks at them.
People will eventually piss off enough and they will stop spending money and move on to other shiny games, which has been happening on MWO for about 2 years now, with recently we just lost 1/3 of total active player population in just about 3 months (the fact that a lot of people trying to sell off their MWO accounts on certain site does not paint bright picture either. By the way selling your account is against TOS and it is not really ethical so please don't do this even if you hate PGI)
Right now PGI really cannot afford to piss off players further.... and games like PUBG is literally siphoning a lot of F2P players. I am afraid we may be lose more than half of total active players at the end of the year compared to last year if this trend continues.
And we have second problem, is that power gap is way too huge. Let's look at the some random weapons for IS and Clan, for instance, UAC2.
C-UAC2 = 2 slots, 5 tons.
IS-UAC2 = 3 slots, 7 tons.
Clan UAC2 takes 33% less space AND 30% less tonnage. And then we consider XL engine (IS most likely forced to use Light engine instead) and endo/ferro slot differences... in the end we are looking at about 40%~50% tonnage deficient.
The fact is, for instance, Hunche IIC can carry quad UAC2 and moves about 80kph. Jager, with max XL engine (not even Light engine), with a lot of armor stripped, with all of the upgrades can take quad UAC2, but has to compromise with ammo counts. And it's already 15 tons heavier! The fact is you need at least 70ton Cataphract to pull off quad UAC2, with still slower than Hunche IIC.
Hunche IIC is 50 ton mech, CAT is 70 ton mech. That indeed is 40%~50% tonnage deficient right there.
So, in order to nerf this 'overperformer', we need massive, I mean actually massive negative quirks. Like -33% ballistic cooldown and massive 33% heat penalty on ballistic weapons, for example. That would bring down dps of Hunchie IIC to typical IS medium mech. OH WAIT, it probably still has bigger alpha strike though... but let's forget about alpha damage for a sec.
Imagine how people would react that after 3 years of non-change, suddenly they are seeing
BIG RED "-33% ballistic cooldown" and "+33% Heat generation" negative quirks.
Nevermind talking about salt meme, I bet there
will be some people trying to pull off lawsuits against PGI if this happens. This would not happen if these negative quirks were introduced when the mech came out on 3 years ago. But right now it's 2017, not 2014. People are way too used to Hunche IICs overperformance.
And TT/Lore do not help either. The progressing timeline is literally power creep itself. Clans were extreme power creep, and eventually current guys who are taking care of TT realized it is just impossible to actually balance Clans vs IS unless they aim for 1:1 balancing, so it seems they threw away asymmetrical balancing and another round of huge power creep was/is introduced. Basically, adding mechs from late timeline is power creep itself. There is really no way around it except preemptively nerf the mechs which really piss off people (see how they reacted to Nightstar's arms?)
And finally, PGI itself is really incompetent at balancing the game. Like buffing Clan double heatsinks, mech re-scaling, blanket buffs/nerfs... Skill Tree is probably the last straw to many IS players when they see their mechs' quirks are
AGAIN nerfed for no reasons whatsoever.
A lot of wrong hings have been nerfed, for too long, and for wrong directions. I am afraid nerfing stuffs to balance this game is actually no longer possible without occurring massive loss of playerbase at this point.