VonBruinwald, on 18 July 2020 - 05:40 AM, said:
You hit it on the head, ClanTech is meant to be OP, it should never be introduced to a multiplayer game. You can't balance it and keep lore. And the the power-gamers will always complain that it doesn't follow lore when it's balanced, not that they'd ever follow the honour aspect of lore when it comes to winning a match. The problem with BV is it also takes into account pilot skill, we need a working PSR system for that!
I think I wouldn't go for a 1:1 copy of the BV system but it could very well be a basis. I think it would help in balanceing matches a lot if we have a system that takes the loadout of a mech into account.
While BV can hardly be ever fitting to everything and you can even min-max with it pretty hard and create low BV mechs that are killers its rather hard to do so.
I think such a system could generate more balanced matches without secrificing clantech on the altar of balance. More to that further down.
As for the pilots. Yes PSR needs further adjustments. I think damage is overweighted as well as wins. Personaly I would kick wins out the window because you hardly depend on the team you are dropped with for winning.
When the goal is to have a system that judges a single person in the team don't increase that persons standing on win an loose of a random team.
When you are the best player on the battlefield you should be rewarded accordingly and not be pushed or brought down by a random chance you have no influance over.
Just yesterday we had a match with two guys with 955 and 777 damage with them alone killing half the enemy team...guess what they lost because random people. Next best player in the team had 489 damage but there where also two with sub 100 and one with 0...and he wasn't AFK. F*** how do you manage that?
Anyway W/L with randoms...no kick it out. It dosn't work for a Personal Rating System (yes that would be PRS not PSR
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How engine crits are handles is a big issue, personally I think they should have moved away from the rule of 3 and made it percentage based. For each engine crit you have a 20% chance of destruction when that component is destroyed:
- XLs have a 60% chance of destruction (16% chance of surviving both ST losses)
- LFE/cXL's have a 40% chance (36% chance of surviving both ST losses)
It would make XLs more viable and lead to an increase in TTK as more mechs go zombie.
How about we kick side torso destruction completly out of the window and make it so that you cradualy performe worse?
I mean that is allready implemented just that IS XL gets more heat when a side torso is missing.
So Clans would still have the advantage that they get less heat from loosing a side torso loss but IS players could actualy field XL reactors at all. I think I have no IS mech anymore that hasn't been changed to LFE by now.
Another point that I could imagne is giveing IS some advantage instead. Like you can put more heatsinks into the reactor when using an XL reactor. You would still go boom faster then a clan mech but concidering the large double heatsinks....I might be tempted to use an XL when I can put more double heatsinks into it. That way I could actualy make more use of the tonnage I freed up by using an XL instead of haveing to use single heatsinks because I can not use the free tonnage meaningfull.
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The other issue is weapon damage, PGI dropped the ball on implementing clan tech and followed the classic mistake of thinking TT damage is damage per shot when it is actually DPS. If they had focused on implementing clan tech with a higher DPS instead of a higher alpha they could have stuck closer to lore. It would have also curbed the insane alpha clan mechs can boat. Arguably it would have fitted with lore better, the IS are sneaky backstabbers, they want high damage so they can spring an ambush and cripple the enemy in one shot. Clanners by comparison fight for honour in a face-to-face fight, they want dps so they can out damage the enemy in an extended engagement. This can actually be seen happening in the reverse in MWO, IS mechs with higher DPS have an edge in solaris where DPS is key, in quickplay peak-and-poke is the dominant style and favours the clans (so much for that clan honour; hiding behind a hill!).
I am quite on the oposite end. IIRC lore correct clansmen prefered harder, faster combat. I think there was even a mentioning of IS tactics to dry up clan supplies by haveing extended campaigns and fights because clanmechs usualy had very little ammunitions. Clan duells where allways short because the mechs had more firepower and better pilots.
Also the Batchall, where they used as few resources as possible, led to shorter campaigns.
In that regard I think IS would be the one that should be centered around extended battle durations while Clans would be hard hitting.
While my first idea would be to have clan weapons either produce more heat or have a lower firing rate so they would have a higher damage potential in a short timeframe, they would need to destroy their target in that short timeframe. Else the IS player could push in and kill them because they can put out a constant barage of damage.
Problem is that this would open up and entire can of problems like "How does the IS player survive that first attack?"
"How short should that timewindow be?" "Wouldn't that tose lore out the window in some way?"
I don't have a solution for that right now. I think there would have to be a lot of thinking and first of all a direction to be found.
Do we go with what the weapon tables tell us? That would mean that each clan equipment part on its own is supperior no matter what. That would mean that we need balance in teamsizes / BV / tonnage.
Do we go with the lore in regard of what I mentiond above and make battles more "themed" around IS doing long fights and clans short ones? In that case we would have to ignore weapon tables and make new values for everything.
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