41 replies to this topic

[Cer6erus]

So, this is just my opinion, and I would be curious to hear others as well.

I have played since closed beta, back when there were 8 mechs total, 8v8, and not a lot of people. While I have not played consistently over the years, I have done so and kept tabs on the game long enough to be experienced with all of the different metas to come and go.

To name a few:
UAC5's -> Jam bar -> worse jam bar
Dual Guass -> charge time + explosion
Jumpjets + PPFLD (ppc/ac5) -> velocity changes and JJ cockpit shake
Large laser/PPC stalker spam -> ghost heat
Dual AC20 -> ghost heat
Clan lasers on release-> range nerfs/duration nerfs (completely warranted, but worth mentioning)
PCC/Guass -> Linked ghost heat, what?
AC's/UAC's -> Extra heat for AC's, again, what?
Clan Laser vomit -> ghost heat cap. what?

The point of this is twofold. The first is that it is clear there is a general trend. A weapon system is popular, it gets brutally nerfed. People move on to another, it gets brutally nerfed, they change again, nerfed, then they are back to a similar/old system, for yet another nerf.

The second point is there is a reason for a meta to come about after a nerf. Pro/Comp players will ALWAYS find the best all around build to run at any given time/meta. That is a fact, its their job, they need to do so. Once they find their optimal builds, then come the tryhards like me. We swoop in and use that build for ourselves. We like to win, lets get every advantage we can get. Eventually, anyone who pays enough attention to the meta/wants to win/can afford to keep up the Cbill cost will adopt the meta as well. This leads to two things.
- Massive use of a style of build
- *generally* higher skill players using that build to great effect (I know you can pick holes in this point but you get the idea that generally the people running 'pro/tryhard' builds are the pros, tryhards, and Cbill rich who usually have more experience in the game and have higher skill levels.)

It only makes sense that then this build will seem disproportionately stronger in the general public's eye, leading to eventual nerfs. I know there are many cases where a build may need to be adjusted, but nearly all of the adjustments made have been on average, complete death warrants for the style of play. Which brings me to my final point...

There will always be a dominate meta, no matter what. Its impossible to balance a game 100% so that every build is viable. The problem at hand is that the nerfs are generally overblown and lead to a reduction in skill ceiling which can be applied to the game. This is bad. Examples...

UAC5's used to need a manual unjam to fire again, got removed. Less skill needed
Dual guass -> charge time. Less chance to twitch aim. Less skill needed
Jumpjets/PPFLD -> system of gameplay rewarding positioning and fast aim. Effectively removed. Less skill needed.
Large laser spam/PPC stalker meta -> This is one of the cases where this needed to go, but one can still argue that the build rewarded good aim/high risk reward. Less skill needed? I dont know
Dual AC20's -> ghost heat. -> Build that required great aim/torso twisting -> less skill needed (yes you can argue more skill needed to put 2 shots in a row on target, but gives less counter-play/torso twist options)
Clan lasers -> lets face it, clans were Pay To Win on release. That nerf was needed. I never had the chance to use them at the time, but when people say clans are OP, picture clans 2x stronger then they are now, without the crazy IS quirks/armor to keep them alive. This is why I laugh when people say clans are op when most never saw what it was like 'back in the day'. But they were nerfed in a way to still be VIABLE (range/damage/duration)
PPC/Guass. Needed good aim to pull off. build doesnt work if you can't focus components. Less skill needed.
AC's/UAC's. Everyone used them (what else to use?) -> nerf. No skill based arguments for here.
New clan laser tuning -> Laser vomit requires good aim and heat managements skills. Nerf. Less skill needed.
Also, Engine desync. Less mobility/torso twisting. Less skill needed

All I am saying is that there is a trend, in which nerfs are carried out in a way which do not lead to better/higher skill gameplay. No one needs to torso twist if you fire a 4 MLAS alpha with 1.2 second burn time. No need to use jumpjets/aim for components when PPFLD is being destroyed. The nerfs do nothing but promote 'w' plus 'mouse 1' gameplay, where the playing field is being 'leveled' so that everyone has a chance. 1/10ths of a second matter less and less when it starts to take 2-3 seconds to deal your damage between peaking from cover and going back to safety. At that rate anyone can return fire and go even on a trade. The act of raising TTK means that mistakes receive less punishment and good plays are not as rewarded. No one wants a turret match. All I am asking is once the new meta eventually emerges, please nerf it in a way that rewards skillful play instead of lowering the skill ceiling.

What are your thoughts on this?

[Johnathan Tanner]

Cer6erus, on 12 May 2018 - 07:48 PM, said:

What are your thoughts on this?

[Snowbluff]

Dunno. It seems to me that a lot of MWO players don't player a lot of shooters. Dexterity/mechanical "skill" should probably take a lower precedent over tactics and communication. Even then, the skill ceiling is high, as a good/better shot will have more efficacy than a poorer shooter.

Furthermore, in theory a big balance change should shake things up and create a new meta, because at least if the game isn't more balanced, it should feel like a fresh experience for the players. A lot of changes, like the engine desync and skill trees, did have a pretty significant effect on the game for the better.

EDIT: Some people even think the clan ghost heat nerf should go through simply because the cLaservom has been the standard for too long.

Edited by Snowbluff, 12 May 2018 - 08:05 PM.

[5th Fedcom Rat]

First of all, well done trying to catalog some of the history of nerfs in this game.

But I don't really buy the thrust of the main argument.

How did guass charge reduce skill? Every time I come back to this game from a break, I have to relearn the muscle memory for making those damn things fire when I want. And in every battle there's usually some point when I realize I'm not getting optimal DPS out of them because I misheard the charging sound or couldn't focus on the charge light.

I could certainly be persuaded that some of these changes made the game less fun, but I'm not sure they made the game any less "skillful".

For example, you can't tell me the poptart nerf wasn't warranted. That meta nearly single handedly drove away half of this game's player base in some of the most important early years. Jumping an assault mech up and down behind a bloody rock was not skillful. It was stupid and idiotic and led to static gameplay.

You also forgot to mention the first nerf to streak missiles via ECM. The dominance of streak cats in the very months after launch is WHY we got the broken ECM mechanics that we did. Streaks were, and always will be, the antithesis of skill in this game.

[Cer6erus]

It was really two arguments, but im not the best writer. A general reduction in skill (my opinion), and the fact that a new meta will always emerge and then (usually) be overnerfed. I just want to see nerfs that don't see everyone instantly shelve their old mech, or ones which (IMO) lead to a general skill reduction.

You are right though that the JJ meta was a bit crazy and needed a change, but I would still like the opportunity to pop tart and fire at the same time. It didn't need to go out the way it did.

[5th Fedcom Rat]

I'll in turn agree with you that I do miss the days of jump jet brawling in anything over 45 tons. That's more of an issue of weak hover jets rather than reticule shake, though.

Since we don't have auto-stabilizing crosshairs when going over rough terrain, we shouldn't suddenly have them in flight either. It makes sense that launching a 90 ton slab of steel into the air with rocket boosers should lead to some heavy shake.

[Bluttrunken]

Good aim, focusing components and twisting/spreading damage gives you advantages no matter which weapon system you are using and you exaggerate the "skill" needed for each of your examples. The point of most of the builds you mentioned was either alpha or pinpoint damage, you don't need superior aim to apply superior damage even if it helps(as with most other weapons). And Gauss taking more skill to use without charge? How can I take you serious after such a statement?

[Champion of Khorne Lord of Blood]

I've been talking about how PGI has been nerfing skill for awhile now. A recent post had mentioned how currently Div1 in Solaris is just W+M1 using highest DPS Annihilator build to beat your opponent. There's no torso twisting as you need to just keep your guns on the target.

Everything has been nerfed so many times in the name of "ttk" that the game has lost a lot of the nuance that made it a thinking man's shooter. Flanking and being sneaky has lost its use as armor and structure gets higher and damage gets lower, so you go on a flanking trip, sneak up behind an enemy, shoot him in the back, and he's only taken half damage and can just turn around and win by a DPS race.

There used to be so much stuff that people could do in this game and now it all sorta feels normalized, I can use UAC boats and it just spreads damage around over a duration, I can use lasers and it just spreads damage over a duration, I can use missiles and it spreads damage due to built in spread and also duration in some cases. All that changes is how long the duration is and how much damage is done over the duration.


What works out well is when there is a healthy meta and counter metas going on. In around 2015 or 2016 we had laser alphas, ballistic boating, and missile brawlers as an example. Ballistics had great range/damage/DPS for low heat and did great in general but laser alpha mechs could peek out and shoot them for high damage and get back behind cover before the ballistic builds could use their high DPS on them, then missile brawlers could charge laser builds and kill them with higher DPS and better damage:heat ratios. There were also poptarts around to basically do to laser builds what laser builds did to ballistic builds at the cost of putting out less overall damage. Also had light mechs that could flank enemy mechs and blast them.

[Cer6erus]

Guass charge is not a hard mechanic. Its very easy to use, hence me thinking it has a low ceiling to use properly. But the fact that you can not twitch aim on someone makes the guass rifle something that anyone can use. 1/10th of a second to aim and fire vs 1/2 a second is way more of a difference then if you add the charge mechanic side to both times.

[El Bandito]

Cer6erus, on 12 May 2018 - 07:48 PM, said:

C5's used to need a manual unjam to fire again, got removed. Less skill needed

Manual jam removal was exploited by those who had scripts, and programmable mouse. It is a good thing that manual jam removal is gone.

Cer6erus, on 12 May 2018 - 07:48 PM, said:

All I am asking is once the new meta eventually emerges, please nerf it in a way that rewards skillful play instead of lowering the skill ceiling.

Yes, instead of charge, lets reduce Gauss velocity to 700 m/s. That should take a lot of skill to use, and reward you if you pull it off. In fact, lets reduce velocity on all offending ballistic weapons, and increase duration on all offending lasers--cause that's how you increase skill ceiling.

Edited by El Bandito, 12 May 2018 - 09:18 PM.

[Champion of Khorne Lord of Blood]

Cer6erus, on 12 May 2018 - 08:50 PM, said:

Guass charge is not a hard mechanic. Its very easy to use, hence me thinking it has a low ceiling to use properly. But the fact that you can not twitch aim on someone makes the guass rifle something that anyone can use. 1/10th of a second to aim and fire vs 1/2 a second is way more of a difference then if you add the charge mechanic side to both times.

You may have a hard crowd on these forums with so many here thinking that twitch aim is no skill and "COD gameplay".

Not that I agree with their opinion.

[Angel of Annihilation]

What really bothers me about the nerfs and changes is the unintended consequences of the nerfs. For example, because the tactic of poptarting became popular, JJs became nearly unusable for tactical positioning an maneuver, Because boating UAC became popular, single UAC applications got reduced to uselessness, etc.

Additionally, many of the the problems that sprang up were never near as widespread as people liked to make out. Typically only a very skilled player could pull of truly successful poptarting to the level it was extremely strong and quite honestly, even Quad UAC/10 KDK-3s were easy to engage and take out once you knew what you were up against and played to their weakness.

The result has been as some people like to term, "The general Unfunning of the game". Additionally we are continually in this system of nerf, nerf some more and nerf again which make it even worse. I mean you spend time building out your mech, perfecting those build and getting good at using those build then PGI comes along and just dramatically changes how everything works so you back at the drawing board again. It just never stops and you can never count on anything being as fun as it once was.

So all I want is what I have wanted for a long time now and that is PGI to stop messing with stuff or if they have to mess with stuff, mess with it in a fashion that makes the game more fun or improves it in some what. I want to know that when I log in next week my collection of mechs is still going to be good and fun to play, not be nerfed to hell and back and performing like crap.

Honestly, they need to quit fixing **** that ain't broken.

Edited by Viktor Drake, 12 May 2018 - 10:32 PM.

[Nightbird]

The nerfs move the pros onto greener pastures, causing the rest of the playerbase to gradually move as well from a stale gameplay mechanic. Static meta is boring.

[Angel of Annihilation]

Nightbird, on 12 May 2018 - 10:38 PM, said:

The nerfs move the pros onto greener pastures, causing the rest of the playerbase to gradually move as well from a stale gameplay mechanic. Static meta is boring.

So in your case, having you favorite mech builds made obsolete requiring you to spend hours rebuilding your mechs so that you can enjoy playing them again, is preferable to having stable and balance gameplay?

As to what is boring, it isn't the meta, it is the lack of maps and game modes that challenge and shape that meta that is boring.

[El Bandito]

Viktor Drake, on 12 May 2018 - 10:58 PM, said:

So in your case, having you favorite mech builds made obsolete requiring you to spend hours rebuilding your mechs so that you can enjoy playing them again, is preferable to having stable and balance gameplay?

Stop being a drama queen. Rebuilding mechs is part of the fun of Mechwarrior series. Besides, a lot of laser vomit configs will still use the same skill tree so you are not really losing out on much.

Edited by El Bandito, 12 May 2018 - 11:31 PM.

[Champion of Khorne Lord of Blood]

El Bandito, on 12 May 2018 - 11:30 PM, said:

Stop being a drama queen. Rebuilding mechs is part of the fun of Mechwarrior series. Besides, a lot of laser vomit configs will still use the same skill tree so you are not really losing out on much.

Generally rebuilding mechs was fun in the mechwarrior series so that you could try out all the diverse and effective in different ways builds and playstyles that come with them. Quite a difference between MWO's rebuilding a mech because what you were using just got nerfed into the trash bin and now you're picking up the pieces putting together something that is very similar in playstyle but worse.

[El Bandito]

Champion of Khorne Lord of Blood, on 12 May 2018 - 11:48 PM, said:

Generally rebuilding mechs was fun in the mechwarrior series so that you could try out all the diverse and effective in different ways builds and playstyles that come with them. Quite a difference between MWO's rebuilding a mech because what you were using just got nerfed into the trash bin and now you're picking up the pieces putting together something that is very similar in playstyle but worse.

Nerfs/buffs are constant in MP only game. Besides, Russ has backed off from it, for now.

[Alexander of Macedon]

The real irony is that certain individuals at PGI are trying real hard to ride the esports train while at the same time constantly degrading the game in ways designed to make it unappealing to good players and audiences. If you nerf everything down into a grey mush where skill doesn't matter, you won't attract players on a "professional" level (for whatever that means with our population size lmao) because there's no room to develop or exercise skill, and won't attract audiences because it's boring to watch a game where skill doesn't matter and the action is slow.

There's a reason that CS, Starcraft, Halo 2, MOBAs, &c. were at the forefront of esports development. They're all games and game models which have high skill ceilings that reward dedication to practice and a wide range of abilities.

Like, ****, look at Riot's path of champion releases and reworks over the years in LoL. They started off with a bunch of heavily resource-limited characters who had really simple skills that did **** like give passive stat buffs, point-and-click autohit stuns, &c. Now they're doing releases and reworks with tooltips multiple paragraphs long for each ability, making characters that are much less resource-dependent, and changing old point-and-click skills & passive skills into skillshots (which require the player to aim, predicting the target's movement and accounting for travel time) and active procs which need certain conditions to occur.

They nerf and buff according to actual gameplay data (usually stuff like overall win/loss rates on individual characters, &c.), they make the skill ceiling on the game progressively higher, and it really shows. LoL, despite being a godawful cesspit, is one of the most popular games in the world, with a burgeoning audience and roster of professional teams even after years in which it could have gone stale. Any half-decent player can take any character and play them more effectively with a high level of skill. Even ones that get derided as braindead rightclickers still have interactions where skill and experience can drastically alter outcomes.

If PGI are really wanting to make MWO take off, they need to be making changes which reward high skill rather than trying to nerf everything that good players can use effectively. That's not a winnable game. Good players will always figure out the most effective builds. If you successfully nerf everything so heavily that it's all complete ****, good players will move on to other games.

[El Bandito]

Alexander of Macedon, on 13 May 2018 - 03:23 AM, said:

Like, ****, look at Riot's path of champion releases and reworks over the years in LoL. They started off with a bunch of heavily resource-limited characters who had really simple skills that did **** like give passive stat buffs, point-and-click autohit stuns, &c. Now they're doing releases and reworks with tooltips multiple paragraphs long for each ability, making characters that are much less resource-dependent, and changing old point-and-click skills & passive skills into skillshots (which require the player to aim, predicting the target's movement and accounting for travel time) and active procs which need certain conditions to occur.

They nerf and buff according to actual gameplay data (usually stuff like overall win/loss rates on individual characters, &c.), they make the skill ceiling on the game progressively higher, and it really shows.

Their constant re-tuning champions into higher skill based forms had lost older players such as me. I played LoL from early 2010, and I was far more content when older champions/items had simpler mechanics, as they were easier to memorize and easier to execute. Now with 120+ champions and 100+ items and having most of them tuned to high skill ceiling abilities, I can't keep up with memorizing all of their values, or executing them on time. I'm too old for all that. Which is why I stopped playing LoL from two years ago.

Edited by El Bandito, 13 May 2018 - 08:43 AM.

[Scyther]

OP, good post overall, though I disagree with a few points. For instance, I don't see poptarting (original version) as a 'more skill needed' approach. Stand behind a ridge, JJ on, aim, shoot, JJ off isn't a high skill maneuver to me, especially since it avoids all the skill in active combat positioning rather than 'find a good hiding spot with a wide field of fire'. Similar with dual gauss - managing the charge-up properly takes more skill than rapid aim. Same for dual AC/20 - killing people with a reliable PPFLD40 and plenty of time to torso twist between shots isn't as high skill as planting 2 staggered shots on the same section while managing a less conveniently timed twist.

I also disagree that 'high skill ceiling' is better. A game needs to be commercially viable. Commercially viable means appealing to a large enough audience. Large audience means game needs to be entertaining, challenging, and rewarding to a large and diverse player base... not just a small niche who like to compliment themselves on their superior pixel-warrior leet skillz.

However the notion of 'something will always be meta, the most exploitable combo will be exploited to the max' is 100% true. Nerfing everything that stands out until it all performs the same leads to posts like Mech TheDane's 'Unfunning of MWO'.

Clan and IS don't need to be perfectly balanced, although they should be close. Good games feature meaningful choices. "Buy Clan, fill with lasers and HS, shoot alpha twice, hide til heat drops, WIN" is not a meaningful choice and should be altered. However, "all weapons and mechs and combos have been nerfed into a tasteless blend without individual flavor" isn't terribly interesting either.

Edited by MadBadger, 13 May 2018 - 04:35 AM.