131 replies to this topic

[Jay Leon Hart]

MischiefSC, on 14 May 2018 - 12:37 PM, said:

I also notice that nobody ever mentions the rest of the Clan balance stuff. Clan pilots were drastically better than IS pilots 1 for 1. They also had no real control outside of the highest ranks over what mech they brought or loadout. I don't see people saying 'Only the top 10% of players on the leaderboard should get to play Clans to represent higher Clan skill' and 'Clans should get their mech loadouts and choices decided by the matchmaker every match'.

The tears would be glorious!

[process]

Now I wish we had a version of Counterstrike's gun game mod.

[Jay Leon Hart]

process, on 14 May 2018 - 12:44 PM, said:

Now I wish we had a version of Counterstrike's gun game mod.

I only played that in Call of Duty (I want to say Black Ops or Black Ops II?) and it was very fun indeed. Not "play every match" sort of fun, but "once in a while, for the novelty" fun, like the Assault game mode in Smite (one lane, random characters for everybody, no returning to base w/o dying).

[Zibmo]

MischiefSC, on 14 May 2018 - 12:37 PM, said:

And they were always **** and never, ever worked in PvP without a bunch of house rules.

Because as IS I would take your BV in vehicles and infantry and obliterate your Clan deck, or as Clans I would take LPL Warhawks with the LRM10 dropped for more DHS and Piranhas and obliterate 2x my BV in IS mechs.

Zel didn't even work in the lore, it's 100% worthless and irrelevant in a PvP game. Our accuracy isn't determined by a dice roll on random hit locations either.

Bluntly the imbalanced tech in TT only worked in the books because of plot armor. It was designed for PvE, player run campaigns against NPCs managed by the GM who were designed to lose; either Clan enemies who were incredibly stupid and were there to get killed by the players so the players could loot Clan tech and then play as IS guys with Clan tech or to provide expendable hordes of IS scrubs (which is essentially how the MW4 title handled it) so the players could feel like it was them being all BA and killing piles of enemies and not just utterly broken balance.

For PvP it was horrible and absolute **** without it being a match between two friends who made a ton of rules to try and balance the match in spite of utter and complete **** design.

Which is why the whole game universe was nuked with Jihad and Wars of Reaving to make IS and Clans largely the same and everyone with the same tech.

This is a PvP team based FPS. Even with 3025 tech all around it needed a ton of changes to be viable. All the horrible, broken, Mary Sue and plot armor stupidity that the Clans introduced turned into joke worthy cluster **** sort of bad and needed fixed.

First Person Shooter. Every player needs to have the potential to provide the same contribution as every other. Maybe not in the same role, but comparable. If balance is bad players will gravitate to what gives them the biggest personal advantage. You also can not control player population to force 60+% of players to play expendable IS who can only win by burying the Clans under a pile of dead IS mechs.

I also notice that nobody ever mentions the rest of the Clan balance stuff. Clan pilots were drastically better than IS pilots 1 for 1. They also had no real control outside of the highest ranks over what mech they brought or loadout. I don't see people saying 'Only the top 10% of players on the leaderboard should get to play Clans to represent higher Clan skill' and 'Clans should get their mech loadouts and choices decided by the matchmaker every match'.

No, this is always the same. 'Clans should be totally OP so I can play them and get to pretend it's my skill, not broken balance, that helps me get kills and damage' which is then masked by (every single time) except I play IS all the time too! Because I love the challenge!' which has never, ever, at any point, been said by someone who actually played IS all the time vs Clans in those broken environments without the ability to then loot Clan mechs and gear to use for themselves.

I don't like playing "teh gimp", but I tend to play IS. Why? Because I think the worst thing to happen to Battletech was the creation of the Clans. Why? Because genetically engineered supermen raised in vats under 500 years since the diaspora, after finding so many habitable worlds which are superior to their progenitors is ridiculous. So, I play IS because I like to pretend I'm actually a pilot in the Battletech universe.

And, for the record, I DID only play IS when the Clans were released. I still prefer them. My favorite mechs are mediums, and the Clan versions of mediums are bland and lackluster. Not weak, necessarily. They just don't grab me. A Clan version of a Cicada might make me want to play, but that's such a niche mech as it is I can't envision PGI spending any time doing so.

Clan mechs are powerful and a bit boring. To me. And, for the record, this is my Clan account and I still mainly play Cicada and Bushwhacker on it. I have about 100 mechs on this account, 6 of which are IS. And those are the ones I tend to play. Not because they are more powerful. Because I'm better in them. I feel them.

[GBxGhostRyder]

mistlynx4life, on 14 May 2018 - 05:49 AM, said:

Everybody's talking about game balance like it's a thing MWO can achieve. There are so many variables in play - and one is patches a few times a year that drastically change gameplay - that it's just not possible. Maybe other games with other companies do it. Not MWO. It's perpetually unfinished. If every weapon did the same amount of damage and every 'mech had the same quirks and armor and hardpoints and every player had played for the exact same amount of time and every map was completely symmetrical and drop team composition was exactly the same on either side... you'd still have some folks using controllers or stepping on each other in the first few seconds of a match or launching LRMs within minimal range or driving Assaults to Epsilon or making a silly YouTube video. You can't balance that. If what you're looking for is: I want my chances of winning a match to be as equal as everybody else's, then congratulations! That's true right now! You, yourself, might have to engage in a Tactical Death with your 'mech or sacrifice damage for a good squirrel but your chances are as equal as they can ever be. In QuickPlay. I don't mess with FP/GP or Solaris, lol.

If the latest buffs/nerfs don't make the game fun anymore, please just... like... don't play. Take a break. We all understand.

::considers adding balance to his sigblock::
/takesbreak

I don't want balance its close enough I WANT MY ARMOR TO ACTULY WORK like a mechs armor should be where it like takes so decient damage.

And fix the MM in QP so many lopsided battles skill wise fix FP issues and for gosh sakes fix S7 its horribly balanced LOLOLOL a fragging assault fighting a piranha is so lame.

[Asym]

Jay Leon Hart, on 14 May 2018 - 12:24 PM, said:

There's your mistake, thinking BattleTech means "IS vs Clans"

That is only a small section of BattleTech. There was life before the Clans. There was life "after" the Clans. There was co-existence (of a fashion) with the Clans. BattleTech is not IS vs Clan, that is a falsehood.

Yes, in dream land where more people want to play the "cannon fodder" than the "super humans" I'm quite sure asymmetrical balance would work nicely. However, this is the real world, where people play games to have fun and losing more than winning is, generally speaking, less fun.

So, in a game like MWO (which is not IS vs Clans), 1:1 balance is something to strive for as every player needs to be able to compete on a fundamental gameplay level.

I wonder what is more important if you are cannon fodder? I'm a potato and get farmed every so often.....I play for MC or rewards; not the leader board or bragging rights...

I wonder if the "rewards" were great enough for the IS side, being higher in numbers and lower in tech, if that would compensate for the disparity? In other words, they get paid at a much higher rate than the clans....?

[Alexander of Macedon]

Jay Leon Hart, on 14 May 2018 - 12:48 PM, said:

I only played that in Call of Duty (I want to say Black Ops or Black Ops II?) and it was very fun indeed. Not "play every match" sort of fun, but "once in a while, for the novelty" fun, like the Assault game mode in Smite (one lane, random characters for everybody, no returning to base w/o dying).

The original mod was much better. The CoD knockoff and the ****** version Valve added to CS:GO were both awful and missed the point entirely, what with how the gun orders were arranged.

In GG you started with the AWP and worked your way all the way down in (roughly) descending order of effectiveness, not some ******** **** like "oh lol get kills with all the pistols to unlock real guns". IIRC I think they also ditched knife kills stealing levels instead of just leveling you up, which was half the fun of the mod.

And yeah, I'm still ******* salty about the shitstains who nicked the mod for CoD claiming that it was an original creation of their team. One more reason to despise that awful series.

[Jay Leon Hart]

Asym, on 14 May 2018 - 02:27 PM, said:

I wonder what is more important if you are cannon fodder? I'm a potato and get farmed every so often.....I play for MC or rewards; not the leader board or bragging rights...

I wonder if the "rewards" were great enough for the IS side, being higher in numbers and lower in tech, if that would compensate for the disparity? In other words, they get paid at a much higher rate than the clans....?

In your scenario, IS tech would also be cheaper than Clan tech, so newer players would gravitate to IS tech (as they tend to here, because it costs less initially), whereas most veteran players would move on to the better Clan tech. So, not only would IS giving better rewards only be used to stop using IS tech in the first place, but eventually it would be veteran players with the between Clan tech vs newer players in the inferior IS tech, until new players stopped playing altogether.

If you had to grind something unfun (playing IS) to get something fun (playing Clan), why would the average FPS fan bother playing the unfun part once they got the fun part?

[process]

Alexander of Macedon, on 14 May 2018 - 02:29 PM, said:

The original mod was much better. The CoD knockoff and the ****** version Valve added to CS:GO were both awful and missed the point entirely, what with how the gun orders were arranged.

In GG you started with the AWP and worked your way all the way down in (roughly) descending order of effectiveness, not some ******** **** like "oh lol get kills with all the pistols to unlock real guns". IIRC I think they also ditched knife kills stealing levels instead of just leveling you up, which was half the fun of the mod.

And yeah, I'm still ******* salty about the shitstains who nicked the mod for CoD claiming that it was an original creation of their team. One more reason to despise that awful series.

I only played it on CS:S maybe 10 years ago. There was one version where you started with a Glock, went up through AWP, and ended with a grenade and/or knife kill. There was also the reverse where you started with AWP, as well as a version where you went back and forth both ways. I think my favorite was the low gravity version on an imported Hang 'Em High map from Halo.

Knife kill or die trying.

[VonBruinwald]

Mystere, on 14 May 2018 - 10:36 AM, said:

Design decisions made early in the development of a game based on a well-established IP usually already give great clues on the problems that lie ahead

Jay Leon Hart, on 14 May 2018 - 09:53 AM, said:

don't forget, the universe was nuked to end Clan powercreep.

We begged for clan tech in MWO.

And we're begging for it in HBS Battletech.

We're victims of our own desire for an unfair advantage.

[Mcgral18]

Bud Crue, on 14 May 2018 - 07:15 AM, said:

So just wtf is balance if PGI can’t define it, can’t consistently explain why they need nerf after nerf for nearly a year to get it better than their claimed 8%? At this point I have no idea what they are balancing. In the current state of the game I play less than a third of my 200 plus mechs regularly including most of my supposed OP Clan laser vomit mechs. Why? Because as far as I can tell that third are better than the other 2/3s. Be it by comparative weight class, tech, relative to other mechs period. So is that balanced? No? Maybe? I have no idea, but it seems pretty ****ing clear that neither does PGI.

Their position at the time was that is was balanced

Pray they do not change their position again.

[Alpha087]

VonBruinwald, on 14 May 2018 - 03:37 PM, said:

We begged for clan tech in MWO.

And we're begging for it in HBS Battletech.

We're victims of our own desire for an unfair advantage.

HBS Battletech is primarily a single player game with what is really just a tacked on multiplayer mode. In a single player game, clan tech being overpowered is a lot easier to "balance". In a single player game, you're able to play around with different builds and construct "for fun" loadouts or lore-friendly loadouts. There is no real need to think about a meta in most cases.

MWO is a multiplayer, PvP-only game and is thus doomed to suffer the fate of all competitive multiplayer only games. A meta is discovered by the community and you either use it or you lose, with only a few exceptions of higher than average player skill and teamwork being able to bypass it.

[FupDup]

mistlynx4life, on 14 May 2018 - 05:49 AM, said:

If what you're looking for is: I want my chances of winning a match to be as equal as everybody else's, then congratulations! That's true right now!

No, that's not true right now. Some mechs and weapons inherently provide higher chances of winning than others.

[mistlynx4life]

FupDup, on 14 May 2018 - 04:30 PM, said:

No, that's not true right now. Some mechs and weapons inherently provide higher chances of winning than others.

That may be true but we all have the same opportunity to purchase and field them. That we would chose something else is on us as players.

What 'mechs and weapons inherently provide higher chances of winning in a randomized map/mode context with eleven other teammates who's builds and relative skill levels you don't know beforehand? Maybe some things have an edge in damage or something but that's not always the way to win - though admittedly it's the safer bet. I'm seriously curious. I play pretty casually now, almost a thousand hours in, and I don't really feel like there are any builds that are super advantageous.

[El Bandito]

Stridercal, on 14 May 2018 - 10:15 AM, said:

Zellbrigen. Weight limits. Binary vs company. There were always options...

PGI can never make those work.

Zellbrigen cannot be enforced in current gameplay. Just can't. Not unless they forcfully lock down your weapons most of the time--and that's not fun.

We already use weight limit in FP, and it was not ideal. If we revert all tech to canon level then Clanners will have only around 180 tons to work with, assuming the match will be 12v12. They can't even bring an Assault, so people will complain.

Binary vs. company sounds good on paper but that is a nightmare to balance. Even big companies like Blizzard dare not to use uneven participants per team.

[Mystere]

El Bandito, on 14 May 2018 - 05:16 PM, said:

Zellbrigen cannot be enforced in current gameplay.

It can be simulated by, for example, giving Clans individualistic sensors and equipment while the IS can be given team-oriented ones (like we have now).

El Bandito, on 14 May 2018 - 05:16 PM, said:

We already use weight limit in FP, and it was not ideal. If we revert all tech to canon level then Clanners will have only around 180 tons to work with, assuming the match will be 12v12. They can't even bring an Assault, so people will complain.

Binary vs. company sounds good on paper but that is a nightmare to balance. Even big companies like Blizzard dare not to use uneven participants per team.

Because, again, we have arenas.

Set up drops as actual battles with force compositions tailored for the fight at hand. Have reinforcements, player-deployed but not player-controlled defensive and/or offensive assets, for either or both sides.

And I haven't even started with the requirement for planetary and Inner Sphere-wide campaign systems.

But in the end, yes, you are right:

El Bandito, on 14 May 2018 - 05:16 PM, said:

PGI can never make those work.

Edited by Mystere, 14 May 2018 - 05:30 PM.

[50 50]

mistlynx4life, on 14 May 2018 - 08:07 AM, said:

So... should the balance be attempted/achieved in Faction Play and let QuickPlay just be the unbalanced free-for-all then? Intriguing thought. You can't have both.

Might be able to.
An interesting comment was made with the release of Solaris (though I'm having trouble finding it now).
It was about how certain weapons would behave differently in Solaris than the other modes.
This suggests that we might be able to have some different rule sets in the different modes.
That could be very confusing for players mind you.

MadBadger, on 14 May 2018 - 08:39 AM, said:

As the population decreases, the matchmaking gets worse, which leads to lower pop, which leads to worse MM... it's hard to see why they wouldn't address this most glaring effect on gameplay. PGI decision making works in mysterious ways.

Match making would be better if the limited population wasn't so divided over so many areas.
There is something like 20 different queues we can join now.
Plus the 3 different servers.
Back at the start when everyone was on NA it was matches galore.
But now we are spread over 3 servers and players do not often use all three, the player pool is divided at that level as well.

Jay Leon Hart, on 14 May 2018 - 09:48 AM, said:

Except this isn't TT or a strategy game, it's an FPS where 1 player controls 1 'mech on equal numbered teams. As such, balance needs to come first, lore second.

Even then, it doesn't have to be equal balance.
A scissors/paper/rock approach creates different dynamics.

[mistlynx4life]

50 50, on 14 May 2018 - 07:42 PM, said:

An interesting comment was made with the release of Solaris (though I'm having trouble finding it now).It was about how certain weapons would behave differently in Solaris than the other modes.This suggests that we might be able to have some different rule sets in the different modes.That could be very confusing for players mind you.

That's true enough. Flamers, I think, and then the lack of consumables. I'm not sure if there were other changes. But at that point you'd be asking for three times as much 'balance' so it feels like putting all our eggs in one basket might be more efficient. Simply being able to say "The focus is Faction Play. QuickPlay is a free-for-all that you may enjoy, or not." - That'd be a step in the right direction (focusing on one component, I mean).

[PocketYoda]

[redacted]

[Bud Crue]

mistlynx4life, on 14 May 2018 - 05:09 PM, said:

That may be true but we all have the same opportunity to purchase and field them. That we would chose something else is on us as players.

What 'mechs and weapons inherently provide higher chances of winning in a randomized map/mode context with eleven other teammates who's builds and relative skill levels you don't know beforehand? Maybe some things have an edge in damage or something but that's not always the way to win - though admittedly it's the safer bet. I'm seriously curious. I play pretty casually now, almost a thousand hours in, and I don't really feel like there are any builds that are super advantageous.

If that last part were true, then we wouldn't see nearly exclusive playing of Piranhas and the other MG boats over virtually all other clan lights. We wouldn't see people taking 2HGR assaults on the IS side instead of Awesomes or Zeuses. We wouldn't see the MKII-B dominating instead of the Kodiak 3.

There are clearly superior mechs in this game and clearly superior builds for those mechs.

To pretend otherwise is to impose a fiction upon what we all see every day. Someone asks: "what do I take in CW?" "What is the best mech for X", or whatever and there are clear and recognizable answers that we as players will all be able to answer with little debate. It is only PGI that pretends otherwise (See Chris's comments a few months back regarding the Timberwolf or the MKII).