16 replies to this topic

[El Bandito]

If you look through War History, you will see ALL recent conflicts ended up in a draw. FP rank-up rewards are pitiful as is; a good possibility of capturing planets would be decent incentive to grind FP matches instead. Currently PGI is keeping planet capture threshold absurdly high, and only lower it to acceptable levels during FP events. It is like they are intentionally trolling us with nigh unreachable prizes.

I already sent tweet to Russ & co about it but I would like to make a poll and see if others feel the same. So what do you think?

[BigScwerl]

I hear you. I wonder if It has much to do with the new found "Balance" affecting PUG matches. We (bacon) have been getting plenty of matches and wins on the IS side, But the bar seems sluggish for either side.

[Nightbird]

It's better this way (ties), prevents stacking to move the bar and kill the queue.

MC earning should never have been tied to planets in the first place.

[Spheroid]

FP is a single front two-sided conflict biased towards parity. Of course its going to be stagnant. No opportunity for significant local victories can manifest because all players are thrown into the same potato blender and those results are globally balanced instead of locally and dynamically.

Bringing back separate fronts is not hard. The population cannot handle thirteen factions worth of simultaneous conflict. Who said the conflict had to be simultaneous? Resolve battles in sequence with the available players in queue until the required turns are satisfied for all factions. Each faction's number of turns would be reapportioned at the completion of all factions required battles based on number of active players during that time period. Rinse and repeat.

The second issue is the continued existence of the eight hour clock. Why the reset? The reset needs to go. If you do not remove the clock but want more slider movement you simply concentrate player activity into the limited window before ceasefire. Players in disadvantaged time zones will be locked out. Pacific time would dominate both Central and Eastern in the ultimate outcome of North American primetime.

Edited by Spheroid, 29 October 2018 - 10:47 AM.

[Marquis De Lafayette]

In principle I want to vote “yes”....but as it would probably just bring back stacking and also gen rushing....I have to vote “no”. Right now PGI is giving out MC through these events like a grandma gives out candy to her grandkids. Generously...... Planetary MC is really peanuts by comparison, but planetary MC can probably still tempt some folks to salt inducing behavior that kills queues and wastes people’s time. Right now what (limited) fights we have can be (mostly) pretty decent. So I am a bit hesitant to vote for something that can change that.

Edited by Marquis De Lafayette, 29 October 2018 - 10:42 AM.

[Throe]

[delete by user]

Edited by Throe, 08 November 2018 - 03:28 PM.

[Spheroid]

@Marquis: Those behaviors are brought about by time pressures not greed. If they simply fixed the clock we would not see that except perhaps for the last 30 minutes of a battle that might have taken a week or more. The planet ownership check can stay eight hours but the capture status should be persistent pending an ownership check.

Edited by Spheroid, 29 October 2018 - 11:08 AM.

[justcallme A S H]

El Bandito, on 28 October 2018 - 10:36 PM, said:

If you look through War History, you will see ALL recent conflicts ended up in a draw.

It's been like that for well over 12 months, 18 months even. Only 10-20% of phases resulted in anyone capping planets and so on. Nothing PGI haven't been told, was one of the issues noted in the latest feedback gathering etc.

This was largely due to PGI letting mercs chop/change side whenever they want which has brought with it a whole myriad of problems.

End of the day MC and Planets resulted in, most units, just gen rushing to get planet tags and the MC. Nothing enjoyable comes from that. It's actually interesting the amount of rushing has died down a little and matches actually get played out.

Edited by justcallme A S H, 29 October 2018 - 12:51 PM.

[Nightbird]

Oh, don't get me wrong, I would prefer that objectives get added in. I just don't like the Tug of War. I would like it more if say.. after 50 victories, your side gets a planet. Winning allows your side to get planets faster, but even the losing side will get planets as they accumulate wins.

This reduces the stacking effect.

As for MC, just make it so that 100LP = 1MC earned. Will get more people into FP and without bloating zerg units. Want to earn more MC? Just fight it out.

Edited by Nightbird, 29 October 2018 - 12:53 PM.

[Wing 0]

Nightbird, on 29 October 2018 - 08:52 AM, said:

It's better this way (ties), prevents stacking to move the bar and kill the queue.

MC earning should never have been tied to planets in the first place.

I hate ACE's tug of war system. Problem we had was that we allowed certain units (Bombadill's Unit) to propose a tug of war function and his unit is nowhere to be found playing Faction Play. I remembered who's unit that proposed that idea back in the day at FP Round Table Meeting and yeah, definitely want to kill those idiots if given a chance. They Sabotaged FP in a certain degree and PGI hasnt had the brains to figure that out yet. The old system did work fine. It would've worked in Phase 4 with adjustments on buckets no problem. What we have right now IS a sad joke.

I'd rather play back in Phase 1 or 2 when it was all Siege and Counter-Attack. Quick Play maps should never been put into FP. The so-called Variety is a joke. Our player base for FP got lower thanks to that fiasco. If im switching sides along with the people im playing with because were getting ghost drops, there is a problem there. We've dealt with many idiots camping in their own spawn while they are losing, never learn to get better and they take **** builds and call us hackers in game. I call them weaklings.

Definitely 100% agreed with ya on the MC earnings. It should've been rewarding some degree of MC to players who participate in the mode regardless if they win or lose. There are FTP games that do reward players with an active participation rewards after every 12 hour time period.

justcallme A S H, on 29 October 2018 - 12:41 PM, said:

It's been like that for well over 12 months, 18 months even. Only 10-20% of phases resulted in anyone capping planets and so on. Nothing PGI haven't been told, was one of the issues noted in the latest feedback gathering etc.

This was largely due to PGI letting mercs chop/change side whenever they want which has brought with it a whole myriad of problems.

End of the day MC and Planets resulted in, most units, just gen rushing to get planet tags and the MC. Nothing enjoyable comes from that. It's actually interesting the amount of rushing has died down a little and matches actually get played out.

Thank the idiots who don't play the game anymore for that. They killed the mode.

Edited by Wing 0, 29 October 2018 - 12:57 PM.

[Spheroid]

@Wing: I am okay with an objective mode based on defense but siege is so immobile. Its just one team marching into the killbox of another on at least three maps: Hellbore, Sulphurous and Emerald.

Why not another objective mode that promotes more movement than sitting inside a prepared killbox like an asymmetrical version of incursion or attacking a grounded dropship? Is it siege mode itself that you enjoy or the maps? We had those maps available for the discontinued counter-attack mode. Did counter attack play better than siege on those maps in your opinion?

[Throe]

[delete by user]

Edited by Throe, 08 November 2018 - 03:28 PM.

[Wing 0]

Spheroid, on 29 October 2018 - 01:06 PM, said:

@Wing: I am okay with an objective mode based on defense but siege is so immobile. Its just one team marching into the killbox of another on at least three maps: Hellbore, Sulphurous and Emerald.

Why not another objective mode that promotes more movement than sitting inside a prepared killbox like an asymmetrical version of incursion or attacking a grounded dropship? Is it siege mode itself that you enjoy or the maps? We had those maps available for the discontinued counter-attack mode. Did counter attack play better than siege on those maps in your opinion?

Some of the maps were designed poorly by people at PGI who don't see the larger picture like many of us here have. When you are playing against Comp teams or teams who know how to play and defend the main gun, it don't matter regardless of chokepoints or not. You have to learn to take your game up a notch. That's siege for ya. There will always be one or two unlucky souls who will die at the gate right off the bat. Most of the time that can be avoided if that group plays as a team. Go through the gates in a single file line, you die. Go in all at once, you have a chance.

Counter-Attack Mode was a bit of both Skirmish and Objective based. Counter-Attacking team had to get a kill lead or destroy all enemy mechs plus the enemy's command center had to be destroyed before time ran out. if they had killed all mechs but didn't kill the Command Center, they would lose. Gates were also opened right off the bat in that part of the game. That mode only needed several adjustments made for both sides and it would been where both teams had to do something regardless of what the map was. However; PGI didn't want to look over ideas for adjustments and they threw that mode away very quickly.

PGI should've been making maps specifically for Counter Attack mode and it would've made it an enjoyable mode instead of simply using existing siege maps that we all know don't work. There wouldn't be any choke points and so on etc. kills + objectives on both teams.

Reason many including myself do not like incursion at all is because of how exploitive it is. Teams who avoid fighting enemy teams and just gen rush right off the bat and end the game in under 5 minutes is not something I want to see in Faction play match especially with how the queues are going on right now. If there was a time limit to where bases couldn't take any damage after a certain amount of time lets say 15 minutes of game play, then yes. We would get some good action going for a bit before the bases were open for damage. Of course the buildings would have to be more longer lasting than what they are now too. That mode shouldn't be in FP unless those ideas were put in play but you never know if PGI don't bother to take this feed back very seriously.

[justcallme A S H]

Throe, on 29 October 2018 - 01:31 PM, said:

This honestly could be pointed to as a reason why the devs seem to ignore good suggestions so often. It's difficult to predict what will happen as a result of any given change with 100% certainty, although it's easy to look back and say it was a bad idea.

Hmmm. It is pretty easy to say what a reaction will be to a change in many cases. Especially FP because it is not hard to get it right, which may seem odd to some, but it truly is not.

The one of the bigger problems has been the 2 round tables. They did not achieve much and unfortunately, I believe, the wrong people (overall) attended. They were also not prepared enough in their material and outcomes and also went off on massive tangents with some amazingly impossible pie-in-the-sky ideas that ultimately were misinterpreted.

The other way to look at it - from example - patch notes. The educated part of the player base can simply tell by looking at then what effects will come along as a result in almost all instances. I know I can simply read them and know the affects they are going to have. Sometimes a little niche appears here/there but that is generally rare.

The same approach could have been done for FP however we were just dumped with a patches - Long Tom, Broken ToW and many others. If the ideas were discussed and scrutenised we would, potentially, have not been in this position.

That does come back to PGI listening to the right people though and often that is where the issue arises. The wrong people are consulted and/or listened too. Quite often those people or areas of the community are the lesser skilled ones or ones that don't even play the modes/game to a level that you could consider barely adequate... Now if you don't understand the game enough yourself to be able to play it to a reasonable level, how can you possibly be commenting on the mechanics of it? It is like a 1st year apprentice telling a 10yr qualified tradesman how he should be doing the job.

[Extra Guac]

"Yes" is really the only correct answer.

Planetary conflicts are dead... they should fix it, or just remove the mechanic from the game until it can be replaced.

If gen rushing is the problem it would be pretty easy to add more turrets or buff the gens. I think they are just too busy developing bolt-ons tbh.

[Tarl Cabot]

I also want to say Yes but not with the 3% per drop, and certainly not with 4 planets/side up for the taking on a 8 hour timer.

Right now, it is 27 out of 30 wins per side or 90%. If nothing was changed but the number needed to win, change it to 80% or 24 out of 30.

If the 8-hour window was removed, then increase the 3% per win to either 1% to 2% per win and still set it at 80% and the attacker need to keep it at or above 80% for 30 minutes without it dropping below 80%. And change 4 planets/side to 3 or 2 planets/side.

Or any of the above, but going back to the previous seasons I do not see working, or I should say, it would only work for the side that actually mounts an assault while the wannabes only drops on defense.

The one thing PGI has NOT done is different factions vs different factions. It has only been Clan vs IS, or one specific faction vs another specific faction, which is likely a coding issue that is not easily resolved by PGI, sadly.

Edited by Tarl Cabot, 29 October 2018 - 06:50 PM.

[Throe]

[delete by user]

Edited by Throe, 08 November 2018 - 03:27 PM.