322 replies to this topic

[ccrider]

Johnathan Tanner, on 22 January 2018 - 07:57 AM, said:

(warning long post on serious note)

This thread is not unique in the FP section anymore. Pretty much all threads go this way here these days. I mean besides the comedy gold of Marcus and his message of PAWG.

Go back about 20 months in this section, Its full of unit rivalry's and ACTUAL faction war stuff. Since having our mode gutted to just the skeleton of what we had in phase 2 tho, There is literally almost nothing to talk about. FP veterans are bored and generally pessimistic about the future of the mode now.

I completely agree that the new player experience is truly awful these days. When I was new I had a faction TS to go to and network with people and learn stuff from. (These are mostly inactive now)

There used to be in every faction TS, These guys who were just kind of general drop callers who would take anybody willing fight. Those guys are mostly gone now, It takes alot of patience to herd cats day in day out. I did it for 2 years. And idk about the others, But my goals were more than just winning the match. I wanted to advance my factions goals overall. If at the end of an attack phase I could lean back in my chair and see a another dot turned purple, it made the frustration of listing to people tell me to shut up and that their lurm boat on grim portico was good after I called lazor vomit worth it.

Phase 3 was the turning point, single attack lanes were designed to limit the power projection of OG mercstar as were unit coffers being used to recruit new members. Both back fired spectacularly, with a single attack lane you could only engage 1 factions population and once the planet was blued out it usualy meant the majority of the fighting was over.

Unit coffers to recruit failed because it affected smaller units many of which were fairly casual and didnt have fat stacks of cbills sitting around while big and long established units had billions to burn.

The voting system failed because it gave power over the attack lane to hoards of pugs who would never attack a planet anyway, just defend and get wreked, Further denying factions the ability to advance there goals. It was also very easy to game the voting system, I know it happened during the BNB CGBI war. Scouting made it so small pop factions were wasting their time fighting high pop ones. You had to detail heavy hitting players to contest the scout queue taking them out of the main fight, Or ignore it and go for the pie slices and risk the bot controlled ggclose bomb oneshoting entire waves.


Wow typing this made me feel like a house Marik officer again, And I just realized how much Ive been typing.

TL;DR The new player experiance is broken because FP is broken at every level from neglect and apathy from the developer. Just have fun in your matches guys, We are literaly just playing quick play with respawns now.

John is depressingly correct. FP started out so promising. Ask him or Mischief or any of us from the Davion or Marik side about the first battle for Wazan. 72 straight hours of fighting with thousands of people coordinating units in a battle we still talk about over three years later. Ask about the wormhole or Kentares or literally any of hundreds of major conflicts people actually cared about. Search threads in Davion, where we were constantly getting crapped on by Kurita and then turned the insults into our faction identity. We didn't whine or cry, we fired back, got better and kept playing. Its sad reading the FP forums now, no real rivalries or reason to rally your people, just lots of threads like this refusing to take responsibility for our own failings at the game. We all had to learn to play with dropzones that had no dropshi cover and literally put your next mech in the path of the enemy attack. Of you died during a push, you would drop down in the center of that SAME push. Listen, I'm super relaxed in game, we play to win but fun comes first. If any of you would rather drop, have fun and make some friends, come to rodcbr1.teamspeak3.com and meet some great people and learn to enjoy the mode the way it is meant to be played; with friends, in a group, against other groups.

[Johnathan Tanner]

ccrider, on 22 January 2018 - 10:14 AM, said:

the wormhole

It was going so well...... until the snakes ****** us.

[Starwulfe]

Phoolan Devi, on 22 January 2018 - 08:10 AM, said:

Your flaw is you think you get 3x the reward but you are not! How much more damage do you think you make if 12 ppl are shooting one mech? It's really miniscule!

Let's see...damage on 12 mechs + obj: 500 damage, reward ~500k cbills and ~200LP
Hang out and kill 48 mechs: 2500-3k damage, 1.5M cbills, 1k LP
Absolutely worth it.

I'd rather end it early and move on, but until objectives are worth more, damage on stationary targets counts for something, you're nuts to not want to hang around a little longer for the increase.
The difference it makes over time is huge.

[Joshua McEvedy]

ccrider, on 22 January 2018 - 10:14 AM, said:

John is depressingly correct. FP started out so promising. Ask him or Mischief or any of us from the Davion or Marik side about the first battle for Wazan. 72 straight hours of fighting with thousands of people coordinating units in a battle we still talk about over three years later. Ask about the wormhole or Kentares or literally any of hundreds of major conflicts people actually cared about. Search threads in Davion, where we were constantly getting crapped on by Kurita and then turned the insults into our faction identity.

Those were epic days of yore, in which many of us actually took days off from work to fight in those mighty battles. They will never be forgotten as the game recedes from what it could have been.

Long live the purple pigeon! Long live the sunny sword!

Johnathan Tanner, on 22 January 2018 - 10:21 AM, said:

It was going so well...... until the snakes ****** us.

Indeed so.

[Lanisu]

As free to play filthy casual, the one thing that keeps me from faction play is also the thing that makes me want to do faction play. MECH BAYS!!! Seeing as how you only get 4 mechbays and you need four mechs of the same faction to play, if you didn't buy four IS or four clan mechs, you're gonna have to play faction play with trial mechs! Even then, if you didn't buy the correct combination of mechs to optimize the tonnage limit, you'll again be handicapped.

Ironically, the easiest way for a f2p player to get more mech bays is faction play but even then, you gotta play 10 probation matches where you're not making any progress towards those mechbay coupled with long queue times!

[naterist]

Lanisu, on 22 January 2018 - 10:53 AM, said:

As free to play filthy casual, the one thing that keeps me from faction play is also the thing that makes me want to do faction play. MECH BAYS!!! Seeing as how you only get 4 mechbays and you need four mechs of the same faction to play, if you didn't buy four IS or four clan mechs, you're gonna have to play faction play with trial mechs! Even then, if you didn't buy the correct combination of mechs to optimize the tonnage limit, you'll again be handicapped.

Ironically, the easiest way for a f2p player to get more mech bays is faction play but even then, you gotta play 10 probation matches where you're not making any progress towards those mechbay coupled with long queue times!

In that light, it is somewhat pay to win.

Just remember that everytime pgi hands out free mc, dont waste it on cosmetics. Buy mechbays until you have a needlesly excessive amount of them, then buy a few more.

Gotta learn budgeting if you want to make the most out of the f2p format.

[Johnathan Tanner]

Lanisu, on 22 January 2018 - 10:53 AM, said:

As free to play filthy casual, the one thing that keeps me from faction play is also the thing that makes me want to do faction play. MECH BAYS!!! Seeing as how you only get 4 mechbays and you need four mechs of the same faction to play, if you didn't buy four IS or four clan mechs, you're gonna have to play faction play with trial mechs! Even then, if you didn't buy the correct combination of mechs to optimize the tonnage limit, you'll again be handicapped.

Ironically, the easiest way for a f2p player to get more mech bays is faction play but even then, you gotta play 10 probation matches where you're not making any progress towards those mechbay coupled with long queue times!

To be honest, Grinding mechbays is a horribly inefficient way to go about it. PGI has a few half off mech bay sales a year, drop a mesily 20 bucks on mc and buy idk like a **** ton of mechbays then you pretty much set for a long time. And to be effective in fp 4 mechbays is really not gonna cut it.

You say tho that you only want to play FP to get swag. Its really not the intent of the existance of this mode I honestly think they should be removed, It sends the wrong message to new players. luckly tho most of the mechbays are fairly low on the loyalist tree.

[Lanisu]

naterist, on 22 January 2018 - 10:59 AM, said:

In that light, it is somewhat pay to win.

Just remember that everytime pgi hands out free mc, dont waste it on cosmetics. Buy mechbays until you have a needlesly excessive amount of them, then buy a few more.

Gotta learn budgeting if you want to make the most out of the f2p format.

I actually play this game for a while a few years ago and came back last week after I found out they updated the game so you no longer needed to buy 3 variants of the same mech to master it. It was impossible to master more then 2 mechs with only 4 mechbays without a ridiculous grind involving repeatedly buying and selling mechs but now I am actually able to have four mechs that arent gimped compared to other people's.

I was able to participate in the recent challenge event and got 100 mc out of it. Now I just gotta wait for the next event I guess.

[Lanisu]

Johnathan Tanner, on 22 January 2018 - 11:06 AM, said:

To be honest, Grinding mechbays is a horribly inefficient way to go about it. PGI has a few half off mech bay sales a year, drop a mesily 20 bucks on mc and buy idk like a **** ton of mechbays then you pretty much set for a long time. And to be effective in fp 4 mechbays is really not gonna cut it.

You say tho that you only want to play FP to get swag. Its really not the intent of the existance of this mode I honestly think they should be removed, It sends the wrong message to new players. luckly tho most of the mechbays are fairly low on the loyalist tree.

Getting mechbays is the short term goal. Once I have enough to get a decent roster of mechs, I would like the participate it faction play more seriously.

I do wish they would add some achievements that gave out few free mechbays from quick play at least. Something like end a game with a score of 500, get 50 wins etc. Basically encourage good play by rewarding you with mechbays and equip new players with the tools they need to do faction play.

Edited by Lanisu, 22 January 2018 - 11:25 AM.

[sub2000]

Lanisu, on 22 January 2018 - 10:53 AM, said:

As free to play filthy casual, the one thing that keeps me from faction play is also the thing that makes me want to do faction play. MECH BAYS!!! Seeing as how you only get 4 mechbays and you need four mechs of the same faction to play, if you didn't buy four IS or four clan mechs, you're gonna have to play faction play with trial mechs! Even then, if you didn't buy the correct combination of mechs to optimize the tonnage limit, you'll again be handicapped.

Ironically, the easiest way for a f2p player to get more mech bays is faction play but even then, you gotta play 10 probation matches where you're not making any progress towards those mechbay coupled with long queue times!

You can do scouting. Scouting is very rewarding on a win if you get damage and kills. You get 100+ loyalty points / +200k+ cbills for 5 min match. During events you have instantaneous drops and good chance to have a fair fight.
If Clan it is important to learn using jets, if IS look at the map and look for cover so not to get focused too quick. Of course coordinating mechs is important. Mixed Kites with brawlers== lost game.
Scouting pugging is quite OK.

[Johnathan Tanner]

Lanisu, on 22 January 2018 - 11:21 AM, said:

Getting mechbays is the short term goal. Once I have enough to get a decent roster of mechs, I would like the participate it faction play more seriously.

If you want to do it completely f2p, I suggest faction hopping. Grab the low hanging fruit and move on, I forget where the bays are on the tree but id say its not worth it just to grind rank 10 in a faction just to lose 25% every time you move. once you have about 8 bays you have enough for hot and cold map decks. After that you should be good to go.

[Lanisu]

sub2000, on 22 January 2018 - 11:24 AM, said:

You can do scouting. Scouting is very rewarding on a win if you get damage and kills. You get 100+ loyalty points / +200k+ cbills for 5 min match. During events you have instantaneous drops and good chance to have a fair fight.
If Clan it is important to learn using jets, if IS look at the map and look for cover so not to get focused too quick. Of course coordinating mechs is important. Mixed Kites with brawlers== lost game.
Scouting pugging is quite OK.

I still have a couple of probation matches to do before I can actually start earning loyalty points and have been queuing up for scouting. Most of the games I've played had my pug team going up against a pre made team of novas with flame throwers and we get rolled pretty hard.

What is the point of these probation matches anyway?

[Johnathan Tanner]

Lanisu, on 22 January 2018 - 11:32 AM, said:

What is the point of these probation matches anyway?

None, Its just more crap from phase 3 designed to **** on loyalist.

Grind those in scouting. much faster.

Edited by Johnathan Tanner, 22 January 2018 - 11:34 AM.

[Lanisu]

Johnathan Tanner, on 22 January 2018 - 11:27 AM, said:

If you want to do it completely f2p, I suggest faction hopping. Grab the low hanging fruit and move on, I forget where the bays are on the tree but id say its not worth it just to grind rank 10 in a faction just to lose 25% every time you move. once you have about 8 bays you have enough for hot and cold map decks. After that you should be good to go.

am I going to have to do another 10 probation matches every time i faction hop?

[Johnathan Tanner]

Lanisu, on 22 January 2018 - 11:45 AM, said:

am I going to have to do another 10 probation matches every time i faction hop?

Yes, and if you ever return to the same faction. Guess what, you gotta do em again.

[Lanisu]

Johnathan Tanner, on 22 January 2018 - 11:46 AM, said:

Yes, and if you ever return to the same faction. Guess what, you gotta do em again.

christ why!

[Johnathan Tanner]

Lanisu, on 22 January 2018 - 11:53 AM, said:

christ why!

We've all been pondering that for sometime.........

[TWIAFU]

Lanisu, on 22 January 2018 - 11:21 AM, said:

Getting mechbays is the short term goal. Once I have enough to get a decent roster of mechs, I would like the participate it faction play more seriously.

I do wish they would add some achievements that gave out few free mechbays from quick play at least. Something like end a game with a score of 500, get 50 wins etc. Basically encourage good play by rewarding you with mechbays and equip new players with the tools they need to do faction play.

This is not a bad idea.

I like it, this idea has merit.

Add ability to gain a couple Bay's via Achievements.

Good idea.

o7

[Leone]

Lanisu, on 22 January 2018 - 11:32 AM, said:

What is the point of these probation matches anyway?

The idea is that your faction wants to ensure your loyalty. If you just wanna bounce around, you should pick Mercenary, since they can, but each faction'll give you a ten match probation to make sure only the loyal sign up and stay there.

Yeah, hopping was alot easier back in the day. I remember getting eght mechbays in seven days with an event running at one point, but due to antics like that they added in the mercenary option and put a delay on faction hopping. I think the idea is, if you're impatient, you'll spend some cash on the game, otherwise you'll live through the roleplaying flavoured nerfs.

That said, go ahead an grab the rank two bay in each faction whilst testing out the mode. See which tech you wanna stick with, find a decent group to drop with, if you can.

~Leone.

[Windscape]

naterist, on 22 January 2018 - 10:59 AM, said:

Just remember that everytime pgi hands out free mc, dont waste it on cosmetics. Buy mechbays until you have a needlesly excessive amount of them, then buy a few more.

Gotta learn budgeting if you want to make the most out of the f2p format.

Can't reccomend this enough!