1169 replies to this topic

[Cato Zilks]

Horseman, on 07 August 2018 - 10:22 PM, said:

Which is also one of the reasons faction-restricted events are a bad idea, and why for the purpose of inter-faction event the existing loyalties should be mapped to one side or the other rather than having to be broken to participate...

which is why I keep asking Paul if the teams are malleable or if Clan and IS are hardcoded as the only teams beyond faction. (Right now (normally) all IS factions are on the IS team, but if factions can cross over to other "teams" without changing techbase, we could do some very interesting things in this gamemode.)

[Horseman]

GBxGhostRyder, on 07 August 2018 - 10:00 PM, said:

#2 To make battle time longer per player per battle in FP and MWO I would suggest doubling the armor on all mechs and adjust ammo for weapons as needed.

They already did that before.

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The reason I say this is a lot of MWO weapons are boated per mech and the combined firepower of just a few mechs can easily kill one mech under 2 minutes in a battle which makes a lot of players say WOW why do I play a game I die so fast and I learn so little per battle as in skills?

If they facetank too much, the enemy will punish them for their mistake. This is normal and should be a learning experience ("DON'T FACETANK") if the first question they ask is - as it should logically be - "why do I die so fast and what can I do to avoid it?", not "y dosnt geam gib me god mode".

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P.S I really would like to play Solaris but its just to unbalanced game play for me could you just make it 4 divisions? (lights-mediums-heavy's-assaults) no mixing mechs in divisions and let us play any mech in the four divisions we own in our mechbays?

Awesome vs Annihilator, who wins?
Nobody who brings up tonnage bracket divisions (or weight class divisions, as in this case) ever considers how much more imbalanced it would be then than it already is. The existing division system clearly started that way and was then adjusted based on relative mech performance.

[BearFlag]

The greatest enemy of the respawn game is unchanged since public release. Player experience has not been addressed or mitigated, but it has been abundantly acknowledged. Blowouts that extend over 48 mechs drive the 95% away. Carnage at double QP rates.

There are a lot of great ideas here - and I have not read them all. But as a tech (including programming) of 35+ years, I read some suggestions and instantly recognize the programming investment far exceeds PGI's resources for "let's give FW some attention."

In my opinion, player experience in FW is paramount. It must be improved. There is no magic bullet in the absence of matchmaking, but mitigation is not only possible, but programmatically low hanging fruit.

In wargame design "automatic victory" is used to truncate "blowout" conditions. Operation Barbarosa is one of the most simulated campaigns. Most 1941 iterations will conclude with the fall of Moscow and Leningrad. It is not extended to mopping up each and every one of 50 depleted and under-supplied Soviet divisions. Such an extension makes for a pointless, boring and frustrating game conclusion. Yet CW/FW does exactly that. It takes you out of the competitive phase into the ridiculously foregone conclusion phase of the game.

The mitigation, not solution, is to implement automatic victory. In FW the calculus might be something like this ... if the kill spread reaches 16, AV is declared. The losing side gets a "Mission Aborted" summary, the winning side gets a "Enemy Withdraws" summary screen. "Kills" here means actual kills, not deaths by eject, overheat, OOB. Naturally, the winning side would get some bonus for having achieved AV. The game is chopped short of total slaughter and spawn camping and everyone re-queues.

Game play needs to improve and this is probably one of the most programming-cheap ways to do it short of a hundred expensive (but very good) ideas.

[Eisenhorne]

I kinda like the idea of allowing a team that is obviously losing to retreat. If one side has a 18 kills lead (1.5 waves), then the other team gets an "extraction point" dropped, like the extraction point in scouting. If half the losing team stands on the retreat point, then the mission ends, and they have withdrawn. This would allow teams that want to fight it out to keep going, and would prevent teams from having a single guy decide to end the fight early.

Along with this though would have to be a sizeable cbill / loyalty point reward to the winning team, to make up for the lack of points they'd get through kills. Otherwise, they'll just get clever in suiciding their mechs to keep the gap lower, kinda like how you have to be careful not to stand in the domination circle while you're farming kills.

* edit - you could actually make it like a 12 point lead as the threshold. Yes, I know that that could be a single bad wave in a siege mode attack, but I've never seen a team come back from a 0-12 first wave. 3-12? Sure, comebacks happen. But 0-12, you're not winning that one.

Edited by Eisenhorne, 07 August 2018 - 11:23 PM.

[ibins]

Enable Faction Play for the lobby or give us another possibility to schedule machtes 12 vs 12. Think that would bring a lot of teams back and would lead to some great vids on Twitch and YouTube. Free marketing for more population and maybe it will help for balancing as well. Teams will find very fast, which side, mechs and weapons are at the top or bottom of the balancing

EDIT: BTW: Great Davion/Kurita mini event! THX! Had a lot of fun!

Edited by ibins, 07 August 2018 - 11:49 PM.

[B0oN]

Would it be possible seeding an approximate playerstrenght from Jarl´s List, counterchecked with QP/FP stats, to gauge player capabilities and help creating more balanced teams out of the 1 playerbucket available ?

[Kurbeks]

MischiefSC, on 07 August 2018 - 06:09 PM, said:

As stated before we need an Elo/player ranking for FW. Seed it from QP, whatever, doesn't matter. Have relative team ranking affect payout. So good teams make more fighting each other and less farming pugs. Pugs make way more if they put the effort into making a good fight vs good teams - ideally as much or more than they would make playing vs other pugs.

Need ELO/PSR for everything. Currently now as all players are Tier 1, stomps are happening in more than half games.

[Yushi]

Read about podcast and so on. they are not adequate. project will go dieing. they will go look for new job. they deserve it.

[Imperius]

Adding PVE elements into FP as in adding AI opponents is the only way you’d save FP and now the ghost town known as Solaris. Obviously this is a blue sky post so I have no reason to expand on the details.

[50 50]

Cato Zilks, on 07 August 2018 - 10:23 PM, said:

I am 100% with you on wanting to bring back the forum warrior space nerd politics aspect that we had going on years ago. Inter-faction ****-talking is at an unacceptably low level. I don't think that creating fewer teams and having a large scrum or creating many smaller buckets is going to bring us back to the glory days. Our population is currently too small to handle lots of queues, but we want to fight for individuated factions and to take planets for our faction. And if we do keep it within one bucket, as you say you want, then we are just doing what we are doing now, but with fewer factions.

Creating more queues is definitely something to be avoided. I am strongly in favour of merging scouting with the invasion queue and even removing the quick play group queue to make Faction Play the 'group mode'.

To have each faction represented individually is not practical as it would be difficult for players to form the full teams required by the match maker. We have 13 factions. It's too many.
It therefore makes sense to look at combining a few factions into a single side not only to help with team creation but also to allow for more factions to be introduced without creating more sides in the conflict.
The Clans are the obvious target as there are 7 at the moment with what... another 20 waiting in the wings?
Therefore dividing the different clans into their respective Warden or Crusader sides works nicely because it's only two sides in the conflict but it allows for that possibility of more factions to be added to either side.

Consider this:

What if the Quick Play Group Queue had a limitation on the teams that required all players in the team to be from a single faction? Assume for a moment that at any point in a 24 hour / 7 day period that there are enough players for a full team in each faction.156 players for the 13 factions we currently have. Suddenly we have a single queue where from one match to the next we see one faction fighting another and the potential to have a Clan or IS opponent.
All that would be missing from that would be a way to tally up the victories for our faction and apply them in some fashion.

I've suggested 8 sides to bring the number of players down and make getting a full team a bit easier.

The other obvious solution to the population problem (At least to me) which also tackles several points is to allow matches for smaller team sizes. Would it not be sensible to allow battles to occur as 4v4, 8v8 as well as 12v12? Surely that is just a tweak to the match maker and limiting groups to a lance.
Would that not instantly allow games to happen and suddenly multiply the variety of the mode?
And without splitting the queue as well. We can add Scouting in and combine a queue.
I don't see how that in anyway would be bad for the mode.

Cato Zilks, on 07 August 2018 - 10:23 PM, said:

Lets say that Steiner-Davion **** gets real on the forums, the devs can say "cool, civil war starts next weekend and lasts for a week." So for that week we have regular Clan v IS, and Steiner and Davion have a side conflict. Sure this will take people from the main front and IS will likely lose some worlds... but thats what you get. These kinds of side conflicts are there to draw our lore-nerds back into FW and net increase the FW population. I would hope that this would not only balance, but also increase the activity in the main queue.

We can rely on the events to create the conflicts but that requires manual effort.
It really needs to be able to maintain itself and let the players write the story in the game... talk it up outside of it.
That's where I see a need to significantly alter the map from it's current form and not use borders.

Edited by 50 50, 08 August 2018 - 04:42 AM.

[Imperius]

Removing Group Queue to force people to play Faction Play will just have althe negative effect of making people quit the game.

[Vellron2005]

I must admit, I did not read all the 18 pages of posts here, but what I have read, and can gather from this is that very little people have thought this through, and have understood what FP needs to be.

I get all the beef about the mechanics of fighting, and the maps and the balance and yada yada, longtom yada..

But.. where is the Immersion? Where is the Faction distinction? Where is the economy? Where are all the cool things that make you feel taking that particular planet will actually MEAN SOMETHING?

If Kurita Vs Davion, Tukayyid, and similar events have shown us anything, it's that it doesn't matter how bad the maps are, doesn't matter how OP that mech is or how many times you get stuck attacking vs. defending..

If you give people a purpose, a story, a reason to do something - they will que up in troves to do it.

If your faction affiliation determined your mech Cbill and MC prices, if how many planets your faction holds determined your earnings in Quick Play, if it mattered that THAT particular planet be attacked, and not that other one.. And if you felt it in your heart that THAT faction is the right one for you, that it is where you should be, for it's ideals, it's mech availability, it's prices, or simply cose' you like what the faction stands for..

Faction Play ques would be full non-stop.

I think that THESE are the things we absolutely MUST consider if there is ever to be a successful Faction Play.

Edited by Vellron2005, 08 August 2018 - 04:58 AM.

[Imperius]

Let’s be 100% real. Until we know who PGI’s target demographic is. We can’t even really begin to give suggestions on what’s needed because we have no idea who they are trying to pander to.

[Vellron2005]

Imperius, on 08 August 2018 - 05:07 AM, said:

Let’s be 100% real. Until we know who PGI’s target demographic is. We can’t even really begin to give suggestions on what’s needed because we have no idea who they are trying to pander to.

I don't think they are tying to pander to anyone per-Se.

I think it's more of a "plug the holes in the boat until we reach land (MW5:Mercs)" kinda thing

[Imperius]

Vellron2005, on 08 August 2018 - 05:28 AM, said:

I don't think they are tying to pander to anyone per-Se.

I think it's more of a "plug the holes in the boat until we reach land (MW5:Mercs)" kinda thing

Without that information this is a waste of time because there is no direction or targeted goal.

[Eisenhorne]

Vellron2005, they have explicitly stated that changes like that (where planets held affect the costs of things, give other rewards) is not possible at this time. So it's more about suggesting things that CAN be done instead of what we would like it to be. I have fun with FP as it is now, but it could be tweaked with minor changes to make it even better. It won't be what we wanted in the first place, but it can still be fun.

[Fuerchtenichts]

Imperius, on 08 August 2018 - 05:07 AM, said:

Let’s be 100% real. Until we know who PGI’s target demographic is. We can’t even really begin to give suggestions on what’s needed because we have no idea who they are trying to pander to.

Hey you obviously want to buy Mechwarrior 5.



Do you know what PGIs plan on this game is?

[Danjo San]

The hardcore Loyalists, like myself, who maxed out the rewards, need more love.
Repeating the ladder over and over again would be nice. Adding more Levels would be even sweeter!

Also more IS vs. IS

Thx

[Ivor]

There are 20 pages here and I'm afraid I don't have quite enough time to go through what I'm sure are some very well thought out ideas, so please forgive me if I repeat any ideas here.

Right now FP to me feels a bit like QP but with 4 mechs and an additional mode. I hear a lot of gripes about base/gen rushes (going to call this playing the objective going forward) vs killing mechs (going to call this skirmishing going forward). I hear a lot from skirmishers saying that they're here to kill mechs. Personally, I'm here to pilot a mech. I actually enjoy tactical thinking and I don't think every match needs to turn into a skirmish. Otherwise, why even have objectives. I think one of the major things that can be done is to increase incentives to actually play the objective, which would add some variety to the game mode without having to make any structural changes. Additionally, this adds more variety to tactics. Some of the better skirmishing teams no bring their big mechs to the fight and gripe when they get outmaneuvered for the objective (IE incursion). TBH, when playing the objective, sometimes it's too easy. A 5-minute game isn't' the most fun for us either. I say acknowledge BOTH playstyles. Make objectives more incentivized than killing (because for the most part, you still have to go through mechs) But also make them more difficult so the opposing team has time to correct and react (because dunks are no fun just like stomps are no fun). To accomplish this I would propose

• Introduce c-bill/XP rewards to objectives
  
• Introduce or increase objective completion (game end) rewards (C-bill/XP)
  
• Increase objective difficulty to the point where you HAVE to work objective from the start rather than kill mechs THEN objective (may not be applicable to all modes)

While the population of Solaris seems somewhat limited and admittedly I'm not an avid Solaris player, I would consider that project a success. I think it was well done and introduced a lot of great systems and ideas. I would like to see some of these implemented in FP, which would make it more transparent. Some of these ports may be problematic, and I realize some of them may be a bit complex/new structure.

• A teams/players in queue counter
  
• Launch cycles (next match drops in 3 minutes or w/e)
  
• A skill system beyond leaderboard (which really only seems to priorities KMD, which penalizes great players who may not have as much time to invest.
  
• A team skill value (either an average or sum of pilot skill values) to be matched to other teams in queue
  
• Factions could work more like the sponsors - reset faction level for each season, different factions have different rewards (-10% cost for certain things, additional c-bill rewards, additional XP rewards, etc.)
  
• Discreet seasons - more predictability is better

The next set may be a bit more pie in the sky as they deal with more structural changes, which I think would really add to the flavor and uniqueness of FP

• unit coffers/assets - I would love to see a use for C-bills. I know repair/refit has a lot of potential problems, but being able to contribute c-bills for a match bonus would be cool (Kind of like the original Battlefront 2 bonuses) Right now, there's really no point to having a c-bill coffer other than to limit pilot recruitment.
  
• unit mechs/items - an inventory of items/mechs owned by the unit which can be lent/gifted to pilots. This one is totally a pie in the sky idea, but it would make onboarding new players easier if the unit had some mechs (and especially engines) to gift/lend.
  
• Planet benefits - Planets should provide more benefit than just MC to a single unit (usually one of just a few units). After a number of seasons, they may be data around which planets tend to change hands more. Those should perhaps have better, faction-wide rewards. Giving rewards to each planet would also give some meaning to the voting system. Right now, it doesn't seem to matter which planet you vote for.
  
• The voting system seems a bit opaque. Perhaps a total votes counter?
  
• Make conflict phases about one planet at a time (probably accompanied by a shorter conflict window), or allow teams to choose which planet to drop on (this would cause a population split though, which I think isn't ideal). Planets should have a limited map selection (A cold planet would have Boreal/Alpine maps only for example), which again, would make voting at least seem to have more of an effect.
  
• If possible, each conflict planet should have its own capture bar. An all-or-nothing multiple planet cap is a bit off-putting and sometimes seems like your effort isn't worth it.

[Imperius]

Fuerchtenichts, on 08 August 2018 - 06:18 AM, said:

Hey you obviously want to buy Mechwarrior 5.



Do you know what PGIs plan on this game is?

Not pvp players so actually yes I do want it. It will be void of these issues and discussions.