17 replies to this topic

[Sunstruck]

I think most of us would agree that more people would play CW if there was more to it than just Clan vs Inner Sphere.

Why not just make a simple second Inner Sphere vs Inner Sphere que, with Steiner / Davion / FRR vs. Kurita / Liao / Marik in a on going conflict.

[naterist]

Wouldnt that be swell.

[50 50]

Where possible we want to avoid splitting the queues and creating problems with wait times.
Having separate buckets while the population is low will impact that.
It might be something we can get back to IF we can get a significant increase in the overall population and subsequently a large chunk of that then active in Faction Play.

Right at the moment, I feel the better answer is to turn it into more of a free for all.
Stricter controls around groups so all players are from a single faction.
This allows us to simply match one faction against each other depending on who is available.
By doing this we allow IS vs IS, Clan vs Clan and Clan vs IS conflicts to occur within the one bucket which will provide some variety to the matches and also bring back some of that feeling of fighting for the faction you have chosen.

To further facilitate and improve the wait times, we should also give some flexibility to the match requirements and allow 4v4, 8v8 and 12v12 depending on who is available. This does mean restricting group sizes to a lance of 4 players, but it does not stop a large number of players from a single faction from potentially ending up in a 12 player team should any other single faction have enough players on as well.
Importantly, it gives the flexibility to still let a large group of players drop into matches as they can be split up to match against other opponents that might only have one or two lances formed.
It also provides another layer of variety as we are then in the situation where we might have a big full on 12v12 battle but could end up in a smaller conflict which will play out differently.

Right at the moment I feel the best answer is to get everyone fighting each other.
We can make a few small changes to the Tug of War and how we are recording the victories as well as looking into some new options on how the conflict works out.

I actually believe we could get back to a point where we could have the IS Succession Wars going on and have repeated Clan invasions.

[Zangief79]

They tried to do this just before the Tharkad event, and guess what, it killed faction warfare. There were almost no drops because the population of the game that plays FW is too low to support it.

[justcallme A S H]

Zangief79, on 12 December 2017 - 03:20 PM, said:

They tried to do this just before the Tharkad event, and guess what, it killed faction warfare. There were almost no drops because the population of the game that plays FW is too low to support it.

+1

The shortsighted suggestions that come out day after day never ceases to amaze me.

There isn't the population to support anything other than one bucket. This is because PGI killed FP with FP3.0 being totally out of line with what was/had been promised. 18 months ago, it worked - IS v IS was a thing. So was Clan v Clan.

Those days are long gone.

[DevlinCognito]

Ah the fun times ..

[Alexandra Hekmatyar]

House Marik, House Steiner and RaselHague vs House Liao, House Kurita and House Davion.
Bigger pool of people then just 1 vs 1 faction.

[xX PUG Xx]

As much as I would love to have IS vs IS again, I have to agree with ASH here. The population has dropped so much that inter-faction warfare is highly unlikely to be realistic...... however, the question is:

Would having IS vs IS being a possibility, as per 50/50's suggestion but minus the 4/8/12 stipulation for the moment, bring back many of those players/units that gave up due to the singular IS vs Clan combat?

[The Basilisk]

The interesting thing is that the overall population did not drop as much as the Fp players stopped playing the mode.

Thing is and always will be those that dropped out in hordes where those that wanted actual Factions with actual Faction Battletech Universe content.
And as long as this is not delivered and as long as the game stays nothing more than a demo framework without actual content...why would anybody play it save for one or two drops in QP for some bit of mech action and that is it.

[Joey Tankblaster]

This proposed change would certainly end in a situation of IS exclusively dropping against IS with Clans getting no drops.

[Marquis De Lafayette]

Would love to see it and it could work out if:

1. They did IS v. IS and Clan v. Clan at the same time and used the event system for it
2. Coded an alliance system. 1 v. 1 faction fights didn’t work for Invasion in the recent event...they barely worked for scouting even. This would involve work...so, as we have heard nothing about it, I am not holding my breath
3. Closed the main conflict for the duration of the event....just 2 main bukkits...instead of 1
4. Gave enough swag, loot, etc to ensure population

Without all 4 being done...it’s just a pipe dream.

[Holy Jackson]

You would need minimum 3 buckets (IS v IS, Clan v Clan, IS v Clan). Also you would need an indicator to see which bucket has a group in lobby so you know whethre to drop in the civil war bucket or the old bucket.

I know that we have a low population, but we often have cases with 2-3 groups on one side going into ghost drop land when no teams from the other side show up. This would prevent that. Also, all the whining would be about units instead of tech, so that's nice.

This would give a unit like MS (that can field multiple 12 mans) the ability to split up between buckets too.

I really think that even with the low popluation, 3 buckets (with a group in lobby indicator) would give you more fights.

also I believe that this would be perfectly possible with very little new code. Phase 3 programming did 95% of this in a weird and more complicated way.

[Holy Jackson]

This also gives units on the same side the ability to fight eachother.

[Spheroid]

You could very easily accomplish same techbase battles by simply adding a OR function to the search. This would eliminate all ghost drops caused by faction population imbalances and have no appreciable effect on wait times.

The problem of course is how one implements a I.S. vs I.S. slider. I would break out sub-sliders for each faction. However if you go this route the eight hour cycle clock and win tick rate would be problematic at current levels. I would up the win impact and eliminate the slider reset at ceasefire to compensate.

[Iron Buccaneer]

I would like to see them try 4v4 single drop for IS vs IS and Clan vs Clan. Make drop decks consisting of one of each weight class then matchmaker pics the best mech combination and assigns pilots to mechs from that drop deck to create the most balanced match. You could call it "Raid" mode.

If two factions have engaged in enough raids it might kick off a full scale war that uses the current system.

The one bucket for IS vs Clan could still exist in it's normal fashion. I think it could even be all siege and scouting all the time.

Designing for failure is what got us in this position in the first place. PGI needs to do something to give players more buy in or this mode is pretty much done.

Do I think PGI will do this. In short no.

[50 50]

Holy Jackson, on 13 December 2017 - 10:51 AM, said:

You would need minimum 3 buckets (IS v IS, Clan v Clan, IS v Clan). Also you would need an indicator to see which bucket has a group in lobby so you know whethre to drop in the civil war bucket or the old bucket.

I know that we have a low population, but we often have cases with 2-3 groups on one side going into ghost drop land when no teams from the other side show up. This would prevent that. Also, all the whining would be about units instead of tech, so that's nice.

This would give a unit like MS (that can field multiple 12 mans) the ability to split up between buckets too.

I really think that even with the low popluation, 3 buckets (with a group in lobby indicator) would give you more fights.

also I believe that this would be perfectly possible with very little new code. Phase 3 programming did 95% of this in a weird and more complicated way.

Unless you don't want to face certain opponents, we probably don't need to split the buckets at all.
Look at the existing QP group queue. If we applied a rule to that and said a team may only consist of players from a particular faction we would essentially have Faction Play where we could face any other opponent.

The problem that then starts to arise is that we now have too many factions.
There's 13 presently with every possibility of more to be added.
The clans are a big problem in this sense as there's 20ish different ones.
Few odd Inner Sphere options as well that might end up in the game.

Because this then starts to divide up the players, we have to look at other options to help facilitate matches within a reasonable timeframe.
Reducing group size and providing flexibility for team size is one option.
We have seen how easy it is to mix and match the buckets with the event system we now have so having certain 'alliances' for teams would pool players from different factions and help a bit and be a different option.
It might be that the clan forces are simly 'the clan' and function as a single entity in terms of putting a team together while the IS houses function as their own entities. Another option to think over.
That would reduce it to 7 sides and therefore 7 different possible teams.
I would suggest changing the mercenary contracts to just be an IS thing in this scenario as essentially pooling all of the Clan Loyalists in one 'team' kind of makes them mercenary in nature. That's more of a population balance question though.

Changing the system like this would mean changing the way we think about the map and how the conflicts between the factions are worked out. But right at this point, that is probably a good thing to do anyway.

Edited by 50 50, 14 December 2017 - 03:00 PM.

[justcallme A S H]

The Basilisk, on 13 December 2017 - 02:18 AM, said:

The interesting thing is that the overall population did not drop as much as the Fp players stopped playing the mode.

Thing is and always will be those that dropped out in hordes where those that wanted actual Factions with actual Faction Battletech Universe content.
And as long as this is not delivered and as long as the game stays nothing more than a demo framework without actual content...why would anybody play it save for one or two drops in QP for some bit of mech action and that is it.

MWO population the last 12 months has dropped 25%. That is massive.

FP population has been at all all time low since FP3.0 (Russ's grand failure), which was well over 18 months ago now. So a further 25% drop (or more) on a already low population is going to be heavily felt.

Last time I looked there was over 3,500 people with over 100 games played since Season 2 started. Given there is only 28,000 overall in QP right now, that's pretty reasonable.

[Black Ivan]

MWO has dropped population, CW even more. There is not the playerbase to support more than we actually have, and the number I guess is still decreasing every month due to "reasons"