37 replies to this topic

[razenWing]

The title is a little confusing, but basically, after the Black Friday Sales, I have increased my stock of "unskilled" mechs to ~35 now, which represents about 15% of my entire hanger.

As I stared at them, I am beginning to find an irony. I hate playing these mechs. For starter, most default mechs just feel underpowered compared to a fully 91-ed mechs. So there's always this growing sickening feeling of bringing a handicap everytime I drop.

And you know what happens when I get them to 91-ed? I dropped them and almost never play them again. so it's this vicious cycle where 15% of the mechs are being played, but painfully, while the other 85% just sits there. I used to think top tier meta losers are losers for never trying anything new. But then again, how much of a life do you think theb33f or proton has to level 500 mechs? And when I think about that, it really does make sense to just play few mechs that will kick @ss and retain your 20-1 kdr.

(Since you know, there's only 3 weapon group, with PGI's idea of making Barbie out of battlemechs instead of giving each mechs unique flavors. so what's the incentive of using... say... an EBJ if Hellbringer is better? But that's another broad topic for another day...)

---------------

As a result of this vicious cycle of grind and ditch, I am very tired of playing this game. I spent WAY more time on the peripheries attach to this game than actually playing it myself. I may spend 3 hours on twitch watching other people do dumb stuff on their battlemechs, and maybe just 15 min playing.

But...

This got me thinking... there has to be a better way right? And i realize, the whole stupidity started with the whole modules and skill trees. No I don't mean just 2.0 with the massive weird branching trees. I mean... even at 1.0 where you have to get 3 mechs and tier them 1 level at a time.

The concept is just incredibly stupid.


Let me explain. Say you want to build an ultra powerful computer right now. Does using it for 3-4 months make it better? If anything, because of the buildup of clutters, it runs worse than initial, right?

But you know what will make that comp run better? By noticing that there is still a slot in your case, and put a fan in, for example. So why isn't this done... in a practical and direct manner in MWO mech grinding?

Basically, ALL transactions should go through Cbills. None of this convoluted method of combo XP and cbill, and everyone is left with 500 million cbill sitting there for no raisen. (At least make a space adult entertainment venues to spent cbills, am I right?)

Basically, a mech will flat out carry module slots that you can purchase modules and upgrades for. If you have enough for a level 1 zoom lense, will... then buy and install a level 1 zoom lense. It's the module idea of gen 1, except much more expanded to scrap the entire XP and skill tree idea.

Basically, your basic mech, say... 15 mil. It's about 10 mil to fully geared, and maybe another 15-25 mil to fully moduled. It's direct. It puts Cbill into circulations. It fits real world expectations. That way, if I got the money, I can make my mech at 100% fighting efficiency at a blink of an eye. I am not pressured into this circle of grind and ditch. There's an actual logical reason to collect space currencies.

Players with a life won't have to go through an entire boring grind. You can sell more Cbill for real money, everybody wins.

But are there any incentives for playing ONE mech a really long time, like you HAVE to now? Yes, I always feel that's what colors and patterns are supposed to do. Obviously, not everything will be unlockable. You can still do MC purchases. But special cool patterns and/or colors (or hell, cockpit items, warhorns, etc etc that doesn't impact performances) should be XP unlocked. It's an incentive to keep playing one specific mech, and play it so well that you can unlock the special Hello Kitty Island Adventure Decal.

See, that to me makes sense.

You separate the "required" playtime separate from actual performances. I say that's pretty good.

[El Bandito]

PGI can entirely remove the whole skill tree system and focus on having player retention through good gameplay... yeah, not gonna happen.

[Asym]

The "Grind" is one of the reasons I don't play very much.... There are several solutions to this but PGI doesn't have the time or the skill for any of them. So, if you are paying for mechs: "You get what you pay for" I'm afraid....

Solution 1: mechs come combat ready and there is no grind. The Skill Tree then becomes an "enhancements" tree where you can "buff" or "add back in Quirks" to the mech.... Bonuses; not, simply getting back what you are suppose to have to begin with. I just see why PGI created the skill tree in the first place???

Solution 2: skill nodes in partial or complete packages in event rewards. Instead of stupid crap, create skill node packages: 25 nodes for weapons, or survival or...... Or, packages with "just skill nodes you can assign".... Make the events a great place to master new mechs.

Solution 3: Create a skill node market where you can buy them with MC.

OP, PGI will not change a darn thing..... They are praying for MW5 to "save them" and then merge the games.... A good many of us won't be there.... MWO is like Fallout 76: a great idea limited by people whom have limited goals instead of proactive, forward thinking entrepreneurs willing to involve the customers directly........

Good luck.

El Bandito, on 23 November 2018 - 06:36 AM, said:

PGI can entirely remove the whole skill tree system and focus on having player retention through good gameplay... yeah, not gonna happen.

Yeah, in what century could that ever be a possibility.

[Xeno Phalcon]

After awhile I feel like one of the loading screen tips should give optimistic life quotes and happy facts to help counter the growing desire to take a bath with a toaster that begins to build when grinding up new mechs.

[East Indy]

But — there's no reason why you must grind. You just want to grind.

Or, you think you want to. Question is: do you?

More than 230 'Mechs, yet since you're only leveling up, your actual play roster is no larger than the "meta" guys you reference. There's variety, I suppose, except that you sound like you're preoccupied with skill deficiencies all the time, and don't take time to really practice a chassis or build, because when you finally get a 'Mech on par you put it on the shelf.

Why? Is someone paying you to be and sound miserable? It's like this guy I used to play MWO with. We played WoW together, and he treated both games the same, like you — always stoically grinding something because, because, because I have no idea why, and I'm not sure he did, either.

I haven't put a red cent into MWO for nearly 3 years. I play about a hundred matches a month. I have a bunch of 'Mechs and rotate between 20-30 of them. Practically none of them are meta, as anyone who sees me in Quick Play can attest. If quirks or buffs oblige, I expand my choices.

Point is, I make it my business to enjoy the game or I don't play.

Re-examine your use of money and free time, man. Life's too short.

[LordNothing]

grind is not mechwarrior.

the abolishment of the 3 mech rule was good if you wanted a specific mech and it reduced the grind as you didnt have to level a bunch of ballast mechs. but if you were a pokemech player then mastering all your mechs was pretty easy under the old system. the new system was a grind multiplier for those players. leveling multiple variants is a total pita now. seeing that many pokemech players see more value in mech packs than most i kind of think it was bad buisness to punish them with more severe grind. really the only players that should affect are the freeloaders that never dropped a dime on this game.

pgi gave huge xp/cbill refunds for people who leveled under the old system, but i think that was only to silence players who knew they were going to get jacked under the new system. as those refund have diminished and im down to my last 300k gxp the prospects of me continuing to play the game when they are gone are somewhat abysmal now. no point farming cbills and mc when the only thing i could buy with those is more grind.

bonuses need to go up, premium time multipliers need to go up, and every mech you buy with cash should come with an xp bonus.

[razenWing]

East Indy, on 23 November 2018 - 07:10 AM, said:

But — there's no reason why you must grind. You just want to grind.

Or, you think you want to. Question is: do you?

More than 230 'Mechs, yet since you're only leveling up, your actual play roster is no larger than the "meta" guys you reference. There's variety, I suppose, except that you sound like you're preoccupied with skill deficiencies all the time, and don't take time to really practice a chassis or build, because when you finally get a 'Mech on par you put it on the shelf.

Why? Is someone paying you to be and sound miserable? It's like this guy I used to play MWO with. We played WoW together, and he treated both games the same, like you — always stoically grinding something because, because, because I have no idea why, and I'm not sure he did, either.

I haven't put a red cent into MWO for nearly 3 years. I play about a hundred matches a month. I have a bunch of 'Mechs and rotate between 20-30 of them. Practically none of them are meta, as anyone who sees me in Quick Play can attest. If quirks or buffs oblige, I expand my choices.

Point is, I make it my business to enjoy the game or I don't play.

Re-examine your use of money and free time, man. Life's too short.

There are min/max players. I want to bring all my mechs to 91-ed so I know what those mechs can do. And I think you got it reversed. I am not playing the handful of mechs that's meta. I am constantly playing "new" mechs per se, just constantly doing grind and ditch.

My case is that, mech performance shouldn't even be grind based. (I mean, ultimately if you need Cbill, that's grind in a way. But if you have money, you can always buy Cbill, so there's that)

Your incentives for playing a mech 50-100 times, beyond whether it's good, should be designs/patterns/decals/cockpit items and other cuteez.

With my proposed system, I can play the crap out of my EBJ-B Thunderchild, and get a pink Hello Kitty on it's side torso. But when I am bored of playing Thunderchild, I can play my guilty pleasure mech Kintaro 19 Pee Wee Pee Pee and not feel like wow... I gotta Pee Wee Pee Pee for 30 days before it's 100% capable.

(also, WoW is way different than this. WoW has a required grind because your CHARACTERS literally needs to be experienced. So it makes sense that the more they fight, the better than are. Your battlemechs... again, are more like your computers. Get a job, get paid, buy crap of Ebay, and BAM, better computers. Nothing usage related.)

Edited by razenWing, 23 November 2018 - 07:59 AM.

[Grus]

The fastest way i level up my mechs is FW.

[razenWing]

Grus, on 23 November 2018 - 08:33 AM, said:

The fastest way i level up my mechs is FW.

30 min per match, 10 min to find match, xp is shared and capped...

Nope. You can get equivalent amount of max you can get in FW in just 1/2 QP. But the point is whether more efficient grinding exists. It's that, grinding shouldn't exist... period.

[TheCaptainJZ]

The reason there's a grind is because this is a F2P title.
The grind used to be a lot worse.
A
Lot
Worse

4 free mechbays, you have to own 3 different variants to unlock the elite skill tree. No cadet bonus, so you had to use crappy trial mechs that were stock configurations only. I can't tell you how hard it was to get 3 Commandos at 2-3 mil cbills each and unlock the skills.

The problem the OP has, and indeed I think many players, is you have dozens and dozens of mechs. With so many mechs in the game now, there's many that overlap in functionality and general performance. There's no practical way PGI is going to be able to find a niche for each one even if they tried. Once you've got say 50 mechs, you don't need any more, functionally. You also have no need to level up more than one particular variant of a mech (great for clan mechs that can swap omnipods!)

What this amounts to is there's nothing left for a large chunk of the playerbase to achieve, and indeed, hasn't been for a couple years perhaps. Faction Play is the end game content, and it's really not all that great. There was a time when leveling up an Atlas was like "end game content," as laughable as that seems now.

[D V Devnull]

Hello there, razenWing... There's a couple extreme problems with how you want to change the game.


First, taking Mech Experience out of the equation would make it vulnerable to those blasted Government I.R.S. Services which would see the direct possibility of Real $$$ to what you have in your Mechs. Then you would be suffering loss through Income Taxes from your Real Life, reminiscent of things like Property Taxes and such. That would subsequently cause you to become unable to play MWO because you would have to concentrate more on getting enough Real $$$ to make up the self-induced deficit from trying to touch MWO in the first place. I really don't think you want this to happen to you.

Worse, in regard to that above issue, PGI would then also start having to deal with extra Taxes against their revenue. This would cause them to have to increase the Real $$$ prices that you would pay for Mech Packs and such. Such would ultimately result in less Sales for them, and reduce how long they could keep MWO alive by several magnitudes. I don't think you would want to lose MWO because it got taxed out of existence, now would you?


Now, the other giant issue with trying to remove Mech Experience is that it would create a Power Curve based more-or-less entirely on someone's (C-Bills) Wallet. If you then stack on the ability to purchase more (C-Bills) with (MC), you then have somebody who can fuel their pursuits with quick injections of extra (C-Bills) to their pool. Then stack on the ability to purchase (MC) with Real $$$, you end up in a "Pay To Win" situation where the person with the most Real $$$ to put into MWO could potentially always be near or at the top. MWO would then become less about Skill than it would your available Real $$$ resources. Oh sure, the Top-Skilled Players who didn't have so much spare Real $$$ would then have a real run for their funds and such on the battlefields. But, anyone without spare funds or high skills would end up totally crushed out of the game, and therefore leave just as quick as they arrived. That result would make the Community totally stagnant and unable to grow, which is something that everybody does not need. In fact, this route would cause it to end up totally collapsing, something about "Would the last person here please turn out the lights?"... Frankly, that thought irritates me to no end, as nobody needs that happening.

Given the above second issue, nobody needs that kind of problem happening if anything MechWarrior-based and/or BattleTech-based is going to catch on in the proverbial 'Public Eye', and therefore end up lasting for decades to come. Heck, look at what happened to the earlier MechWarrior-series games because there wasn't anybody to keep them current with the technology that they run on. I really don't think you want a game that was supposed to be "Free To Play" (and frankly, as free to enjoy as possible without killing PGI's ability to stay in business) to end up dying because a company such as PGI ended up unable to keep up it's internal code over the costs of doing so! And in case you're wondering, if people leave, then less are paying, and therefore the risk-versus-reward of upkeep on MWO increases towards untenable levels. Once it hits being untenable, then MWO would just disappear... Where would all your effort in this game be at that point?


Anywho, pardon me now while I go wander off to a totally different area of the MWO Forums, or perhaps even off to the battlefields. I do hope however that I have given you a good insight into why we can not wipe out the Mech Experience grind that gives you such a headache. To do so opens up a proverbial 'can of worms' in terms of problems with keeping MWO alive in general.


~Mr. D. V. "seeing the reasons that it's better to have to skill your Mechs, just like characters in other games" Devnull




(p.s.: While totally beside the heavy critical points I've presented above, I'm actually glad the Mech Experience Systems are there, as it causes me to spend time properly understanding the Mech Designs that I have built. Maybe it would help to try looking at it more as a learning experience than a grind, both in terms of your own Mech, as well as how it has to be handled against more powerful Mechs that others have already skilled?)

[Grus]

razenWing, on 23 November 2018 - 08:54 AM, said:

30 min per match, 10 min to find match, xp is shared and capped...

Nope. You can get equivalent amount of max you can get in FW in just 1/2 QP. But the point is whether more efficient grinding exists. It's that, grinding shouldn't exist... period.

Not really, in QP you have a small likelyhood of any teamwork, thus less survivability. That equals less time earning exp. In FW teamwork is high therefore so is surviveability (in comparison). Means better payout.

[Cato Phoenix]

I still have so many general skill points, XP, and general XP built up that I will probably not need to grind a mech at all until something new comes out.

My suggestion would be to play a lot in an old mech, try to build up GXP to just unlock your new ones.

[Spheroid]

LoL you complain about the slavery of grinding and then cause the very problem you are lamenting by purchasing more mechs!

FYI mech underutilization is caused by the number of mechs you own and the degree of their mediocrity/redundancy. It has nothing to do with any leveling backlog.

Also the only thing on sale this weekend are hero mechs and I guarantee you not all thirty-five of those mechs are meta. Taking a non-meta hero is as bad or worse than dropping unskilled. Step back and digest that hypocrisy.

[Grus]

Spheroid, on 23 November 2018 - 12:30 PM, said:

LoL you complain about the slavery of grinding and then cause the very problem you are lamenting by purchasing more mechs!

FYI mech underutilization is caused by the number of mechs you own and the degree of their mediocrity/redundancy. It has nothing to do with any leveling backlog.

Also the only thing on sale this weekend are hero mechs and I guarantee you not all thirty-five of those mechs are meta. Taking a non-meta hero is as bad or worse than dropping unskilled. Step back and digest that hypocrisy.

Yeah ! I mean its not like you buy a UV just to load 8 light mg for the lolz!... wait...

[razenWing]

Spheroid, on 23 November 2018 - 12:30 PM, said:

LoL you complain about the slavery of grinding and then cause the very problem you are lamenting by purchasing more mechs!

FYI mech underutilization is caused by the number of mechs you own and the degree of their mediocrity/redundancy. It has nothing to do with any leveling backlog.

Also the only thing on sale this weekend are hero mechs and I guarantee you not all thirty-five of those mechs are meta. Taking a non-meta hero is as bad or worse than dropping unskilled. Step back and digest that hypocrisy.

Ever come into mind that people just wanna try new things? Maybe you should learn the meaning of the word "hypocrisy" before throwing the word out like Halloween candies.

PS meta or no meta, grinding is stupid. grinding has nothing to do whether something exceptionally good or bad. If I like to teach surf on my magikarp, that has nothing to do with me needing to be level 100 to fight the Elite 4.

PS2 If the above rebuttal feels light, it's because it's hard to rebuke something that's so completely incoherently bad in your logic. Please rethink your use of language and thought process.

Grus, on 23 November 2018 - 12:45 PM, said:

Yeah ! I mean its not like you buy a UV just to load 8 light mg for the lolz!... wait...

No that's silly. 8 mg and 2 tags. That's true powa!

Edited by razenWing, 23 November 2018 - 01:04 PM.

[JediPanther]

The grind is why I don't buy or play new mechs. I just use my mechs that are already mastered with skills. Like my 400,000 xp K2. Sure I can go get a new-er or more ballistic slots mech but with the K2 I can just re-skill it to whatever build I want.

[Felbombling]

Here's what ya do to reduce the grind. Take advantage of the 2x XP daily bonus you have on those Mechs, along with anything else PGI throws at you [Double XP events, Free Premium time or convert free MC into Premium time, General XP whenever possible] and play your unskilled Mechs until you get a win. Drop that Mech and change immediately to another Mech that also has a daily 2x XP multiplier available. Rinse and repeat.

Take a laid back approach to leveling up your Mechs. It will happen in a fraction of the games you would otherwise play, were you to just pound a Mech game after game after game over the course of a weekend.

[Jay Leon Hart]

If the game feels like a grind, then it's no longer fun and you should probably stop playing, at least for a little while.

[Grus]

I want all the complainers about this "grind" to play Warthunder to BR 7.7 in tanks... then come back to this...