49 replies to this topic

[Mechwarrior1441491]

There are plenty of games which have progressive objectives. ie. Blow up watch towers. Progress to gate. Destroy gate to gain access to base. Find HQ room. Destroy HQ equipment.

There are ways to force objective play and ways to make objectives optional and up to the players if they want to include them in their battle plans. Do you advance and make the battle occur around the ammo dumps you need to destroy or do you hunker down in the city and bypass them altogether?

[Moochachoo]

Prototelis, on 11 June 2018 - 12:42 PM, said:

Yah, and ticket respawns would only lead to coordinated groups mashing the same potatos over and over until you need to complete the objective to win.

Lol, so here we are back to square one.

Focus targeting one or two players would be significantly slower than actually capping, not to mention if we did have a respawn system, everyone would be spread out most of the time, with some people in the front, and new respawns coming in to reinforce, or take other objectives.

[Wil McCullough]

Current modes in mwo don't lend themselves well to objective based gameplay. Other than skirmish.

In an environment without respawns, removing your opponent's pieces from the board is the most effective way to win matches. By far.

Bear in mind there is no resource management in mwo, plus objectives are a 0 or 100% kinda deal. ALMOST finishing a base cap in assault has no effect. Finish capturing a base and the game is over. If this was a ticket based game like mwll, percentage of base cap could be tied with progressively negative effects to the capped team - less ticket generation maybe. Bases could also "heal" over time when uncapped (defended) to remove negative effects.

Unfortunately, mwo is a minimally viable product.

You play mwo like mwll or team fortress, you're gonna lose. Hard.

Even in games like total war, with siege battles having an objective.of capturing and holding the settlement's "town square", playing the "objective" is a failing strategy because you have no respawns and will lose in detail if you split your forces. If the most effective way to win a match in a game involving potentially THOUSANDS of non-respawnable units, is to murderball, it's only going to be more effective 12v12.

Edited by Wil McCullough, 11 June 2018 - 07:33 PM.

[Prototelis]

Moochachoo, on 11 June 2018 - 06:43 PM, said:

Focus targeting one or two players would be significantly slower than actually capping, not to mention if we did have a respawn system, everyone would be spread out most of the time, with some people in the front, and new respawns coming in to reinforce, or take other objectives.

Doubt it dude. All these modes devolve into farming.

Edited by Prototelis, 11 June 2018 - 07:19 PM.

[SFC174]

Brain Cancer, on 11 June 2018 - 04:31 PM, said:

Objective-based play would literally have to act as a bonus to combat action rewards (immediately, not a flat boost at the end) to work properly. That's why most modes are "kill first, cap later" now- it's far easier to gun down your enemy robots, then if you wanna pick up them bonuses, why you'll get them at the end regardless.

Imagine if Alpha/Beta on Domination were further out and in relatively protected (from being sniped) areas- but each one destroyed while you still have either your own Alpha or Beta would give your team a 10% bonus to Exp/C-bills earned by combat actions from that point on. Losing both on both sides would result in no bonuses for anyone, so you'd want to not only keep the circle in play, but protect at least one of your Alpha/Beta bases while attempting to destroy your opponent's ASAP.

Or Assault had locations near the base that if capped first would provide similar bonuses (like a generator, ammo dump, etc), meaning again, you'd have people wanting those objectives ASAP, because it'd mean the rest of the game became more rewarding. On Incursion, it's a gimme- the more base bits you blow up relative to your opponent, the more those enemy robots are worth shooting!

All modes are about killing robots. Therefore, objectives should make killing robots more rewarding if you do them first.

Go one further. Instead of just a c-bill/xp reward, it objectives could offer combat boosts. 5% better heat dissipation, 10% better cooldown, etc. Or even a 1 time 10% armor repair. I'm just spitballing, as any of these things would take a lot of balancing, but it would at least let teams decide if capping objectives (splitting up team, etc.) would offer a return on investment worthy of the risk of losing mechs early.

I don't hold out any hope for such an objective based boost system. This is PGI after all, but it would make things interesting.

[Haipyng]

SFC174, on 10 June 2018 - 06:47 PM, said:

I've seen you say this several times, yet you continually ignore the fact that if both teams defend their base, there is no combat. Without asymmetric modes (one team attacks/one team defends), teams aren't motivated to do anything (see Assault on Frozen City, for example).

Yes, you can send a lance to probe the enemy base while the rest of your team defends, but if the other team is defending, they kill that lance and then come roll your base.

If both teams are robots and their only trigger is being attacked, then yes both teams would sit and defend their bases.

This sort of play makes roles like scouts actually useful in standard play again. Knowing where the enemy is and what they are doing becomes useful information, since they may actually do something other than head to the middle of the map to duke it out.

Even today a light can sometimes go to cap and the entire Opfor will let him. None of their lights can be bothered to head back and chase them off or even fire an ERLL into the cap. Yesterday on an incursion map I walked an assault mech into their base completely unchallenged and undamaged and killed three of their four trucks, and not one player came back to challenge me. They just continued their race to the right that let me walk right into their base.

I don't know. Everyone assumes the only objective is to meet in the middle and skirmish it out. Most of the time that is what we do. The game is what we make of it. People shouldn't be all mad when someone chooses to play a map objective and they can't manage to counter the move without taking a few people off of their deathball.

[ManicDan]

Mechwarrior1441491, on 11 June 2018 - 02:47 PM, said:

There should be objective modes where they are more optional than necessary. Destroying supply dumps or raiding a warehouse for extra bonuses at the end of the map, but the main goal is to destroy the opposition.

Sides totally eliminating the other weren't really the norm and during the Succession wars the act of letting really damaged mechs leave the field of battle was common place as you'd want that courtesy returned to you on a later date. With so many Mercenaries in use, the act of outright murder for the sake of killing seems to be taboo in Btech.

I like this a lot.
Something simple like having lights destroy a jamming tower gives the whole team a permanent UAV. It wont end the match, but sure helps you win. And its important enough that you might want to keep an eye on your own.

Some game modes just might need a slight tweak, like Domination should give 1 point per second for each additional mech you have in the center more than the enemy, and with enough points gained you win, or earn some competitive advantage.

And some maps might need to be rebalanced so its not a 10k run between objectives, such as Assault in the Polar Highlands.

[Mystere]

Prototelis, on 11 June 2018 - 07:19 PM, said:

Doubt it dude. All these modes devolve into farming.

Eliminate all stats except wins/losses. That'll be the end of farming.

[Spheroid]

@Mystere: You have not thought out your response. People are not so much stat farming as damage farming as means to higher c-bill earnings.

Payout previously WAS linked to victory and it predictably lead it automated Chinese style script farming. You under no circumstances want to incentivize that again. I am pretty sure I dropped with some form of primitive bot during the past year whose movements and near zero score I find hard to believe of a sentient organism.

Also people routinely post on these forums that they have losing streaks upward of ten matches. If you force them to endure that without XP or c-bill compensation you will crater this game's population even further.

[Mystere]

Spheroid, on 15 June 2018 - 08:39 AM, said:

@Mystere: You have not thought out your response. People are not so much stat farming as damage farming as means to higher c-bill earnings.

Payout previously WAS linked to victory and it predictably lead it automated Chinese style script farming. You under no circumstances want to incentivize that again. I am pretty sure I dropped with some form of primitive bot during the past year whose movements and near zero score I find hard to believe of a sentient organism.

Such a bot is easy to detect. But if PGI needs help in that area, they can always hire and pay me my off-hours rate. My free time ain't cheap, though.

Edited by Mystere, 15 June 2018 - 04:50 PM.