75 replies to this topic

[TK Romero]

Since the topic of value for the Stryker pack is mentioned and I'm sure others have commented in a similar fashion. I feel that $20 USD is a bit much. I'm uncertain if there are many people in the community who would use the normal variant if they have a special version that gives more C-Bills. The addition of saving loadouts for a chassis kind of also makes having more than one mech for different builds not as much of a necessity as before. Even if people are selling the normal variant for extra mech bays.

I, personally, would say that for two special variant mechs that are already modeled in the game, the cosmetics, and additional items, $10 would have been the right spot for that. Additional items are a good incentive for being an early adopter and providing the GSP to fully skill out the included mechs. (Which is being done in this pack and is an open arm welcome.)

I do like the bolt on specific models being made for the Dragon and Thunderbolt. Adds that extra flair while also making it optional to equip the cosmetics or not. I'm hoping the Dragon will have the high energy hardpoints for the left and right torsos to make it an excellent PPC peeker.

I'll be skipping the Stryker Pack and buying the normal variants once they are available for C-bills.

[nuttyrat]

InnerSphereNews, on 24 February 2021 - 05:17 PM, said:

- With Community Help (nuttryrat) We Gave Away 2 Razer Huntsman V2 - Analog Keyboards and a bunch of Huntsmen Hero ‘Mechs!

Who is this nuttryrat guy you speak of ?? he seems like a cool dude

Edited by nuttyrat, 25 February 2021 - 01:43 PM.

[Tesunie]

Monke-, on 24 February 2021 - 05:34 PM, said:

Unless you're counting all variant requests this is incorrect according to this thread: https://mwomercs.com...d-speculation1/

"It's not a Dragon, it's a Grand Dragon." (A rough quote from one of the novels.)

In lore, the Grand Dragon may have just been a variant of the Dragon, but was often viewed and seen as a "completely different mech" from a standard Dragon. It also had slightly different appearances from what I recall. (A slightly more domed head component.)

https://www.sarna.ne...ki/Grand_Dragon

FYI: I'm only poking a little fun with "technicalities". By all accounts, it is a variant of the Dragon.

[Far Reach]

Remove that AMS money incentive and watch it never be used again.

MWO players: We hate LURMS.
Also MWO players: We hate AMS too.

These updates are appreciated, but I get the feeling you're preaching to a near empty room.

[Andrzej Lechrenski]

Far Reach, on 25 February 2021 - 02:48 PM, said:

Remove that AMS money incentive and watch it never be used again.

MWO players: We hate LURMS.
Also MWO players: We hate AMS too.

These updates are appreciated, but I get the feeling you're preaching to a near empty room.

People think that bringing a single AMS is useless (Which is wrong. They demolish ATMs) and therefore don't bring it. So you end up with a whole team of people without AMS, whining about lurms, when, instead, if even half of them had as much sense in their head as complaints in their mouth, they would have enough AMS to deal with their lurm "problem". It's annoying. And even people who should know better still complain instead of just doing something to fix it.

[FupDup]

A good approach that avoids the pitfalls of both power creep and redundancy would be to try to look for things that fill entirely new roles rather than upgraded or downgraded versions of existing things. For example, the IS has a complete lack of mass-energy-hardpoint mechs (Raptor, Kommodo, Black Hawk KU...). Or IS Omnimechs in general really.

Edited by FupDup, 25 February 2021 - 04:40 PM.

[MrFatBard]

it would be nice to have the validating patch not take so long just throwing it out there

[Daeron Katz]

Lockheed_, on 25 February 2021 - 04:05 PM, said:

yes we want more power because with 800+ mech variants the majority is not really fun. it has been a topic coming up again and again, that reducing mech agility and nerfing every fun mech into the ground is not the way to go. instead lift up mechs who are underpowered, unfun and bad. Honestly what I am hearing from the recent dev vlog about the balance changes and now this statement I can only picture the balance and quirk changes to become another disaster. There's no point in all this "we are listening to the community talk" while it seems that you only trust the community very selectively.

Hey Lockheed, you're making assumptions. Acknowledging that power creep is a thing doesn't mean that we're not going to increase the viability of underperforming mechs. Ignoring power creep though can totally trash the game. Balance is still a thing, but we're also not operating under the same guidelines as we were a few years ago. Matt and I are very much looking forward to changing things up as much as possible, with weapon balance, mech balance, and so on.

Also, in terms of listening to the community, we are. Do you understand that the community contradicts itself on every single topic? Listening to the community to most people means "listen to me". Yes, we are being selective as to what we do with the input we receive, as we literally can't do what everyone wants (because of said contradictions). So, we look at the feedback, we look at where the feedback is coming from, we do internal passes to see what can or cannot be done technically or otherwise, we look at our resources available, we look at the time we have, and we make our decisions based on all of that.

[account redo v1]

Daeron Katz, on 25 February 2021 - 07:38 PM, said:

Hey Lockheed, you're making assumptions. Acknowledging that power creep is a thing doesn't mean that we're not going to increase the viability of underperforming mechs. Ignoring power creep though can totally trash the game. Balance is still a thing, but we're also not operating under the same guidelines as we were a few years ago. Matt and I are very much looking forward to changing things up as much as possible, with weapon balance, mech balance, and so on.

Also, in terms of listening to the community, we are. Do you understand that the community contradicts itself on every single topic? Listening to the community to most people means "listen to me". Yes, we are being selective as to what we do with the input we receive, as we literally can't do what everyone wants (because of said contradictions). So, we look at the feedback, we look at where the feedback is coming from, we do internal passes to see what can or cannot be done technically or otherwise, we look at our resources available, we look at the time we have, and we make our decisions based on all of that.

I understand that, but you can give the viper-b viper a heat dissipation quirk right? Maybe... 10%? I'm being more reasonable than...

Edited by account redo v1, 25 February 2021 - 08:28 PM.

[Heavy Money]

Daeron Katz, on 25 February 2021 - 07:38 PM, said:

Hey Lockheed, you're making assumptions. Acknowledging that power creep is a thing doesn't mean that we're not going to increase the viability of underperforming mechs. Ignoring power creep though can totally trash the game. Balance is still a thing, but we're also not operating under the same guidelines as we were a few years ago. Matt and I are very much looking forward to changing things up as much as possible, with weapon balance, mech balance, and so on.

Also, in terms of listening to the community, we are. Do you understand that the community contradicts itself on every single topic? Listening to the community to most people means "listen to me". Yes, we are being selective as to what we do with the input we receive, as we literally can't do what everyone wants (because of said contradictions). So, we look at the feedback, we look at where the feedback is coming from, we do internal passes to see what can or cannot be done technically or otherwise, we look at our resources available, we look at the time we have, and we make our decisions based on all of that.

I think its great that you are watching for power creep. While looking to balance these mechs, please keep the wider context in mind too! Lots of Heavy mechs, especially Inner Sphere ones, are rather weak at the moment. Or can't do anything another doesn't do better, or have lots of redundant variants. The existing Thunderbolts and Dragons are all on the weak side, except the Triple UAC2 dakka Dragon-5N which is solid, but kind of whacky due to all its firepower being in one arm. If these new mechs are balanced to be internally consistent with their other existing variants, they are going to be weak. They should be balanced to be on par with good heavy mechs!

Which mechs are good? Well that's tougher to nail down because there's a lot of chassis that have one very nice build, and then all their other builds and variants are mediocre or bad. It might be worth doing a wider discussion of mech strength and try to establish which need help in general, and also establish just what performance level things are supposed to be at (Grimmechs is the closest thing we have to a power list and could be a good place to start. But it is incomplete and based on a certain type of comp play.)

Its difficult to have a discussion about balance when we don't know what point we're trying to balance around. Unless we establish that up front, all new releases and quirk changes are going to be blind shots.

For example, if we knew that we wanted the standard for Medium Range IS heavy mechs to be the Catapult-K2, then its easy to let the community do the rest of the hard work of figuring out just what quirks would make any particular mech be about on that power level (in the context of the other mech's differences and foibles.) It wouldn't be a perfect system, but it'd be pretty good, and I think satisfy most people.

Edited by Heavy Money, 25 February 2021 - 09:33 PM.

[Eurystheus]

I like the night maps. Right now Caustic Valley is one of my favorites because it is dark. Dark map with ECM, lots of fun.

[Blechreiz]

Andrzej Lechrenski, on 25 February 2021 - 03:00 PM, said:

People think that bringing a single AMS is useless (Which is wrong. They demolish ATMs) and therefore don't bring it. So you end up with a whole team of people without AMS, whining about lurms, when, instead, if even half of them had as much sense in their head as complaints in their mouth, they would have enough AMS to deal with their lurm "problem". It's annoying. And even people who should know better still complain instead of just doing something to fix it.

This is pretty much a perfect summary of the whole AMS/LRM dilemma.

And, as you said, it's particularly annoying that people who should know better jump on the bandwagon.

[Anomalocaris]

Daeron Katz, on 25 February 2021 - 07:38 PM, said:

Matt and I are very much looking forward to changing things up as much as possible, with weapon balance, mech balance, and so on.

Also, in terms of listening to the community, we are. Do you understand that the community contradicts itself on every single topic?

These 2 statements should scare the living **** out of anyone who is interested in this game.

This is what PGI thinks of you, the playerbase.

Just think about the net effect of so many of the past balance changes these same folks have made, even when clearly warned of them ahead of time....

I'm starting to kinda like that Daeron is working for PGI now. Hasn't changed PGI's poor decision making process, but he says the quiet part out loud so that players really know what they're thinking. Only way that used to happen was when Russ had a few shots before speaking.

[Aidan Crenshaw]

Anomalocaris, on 26 February 2021 - 04:35 AM, said:

These 2 statements should scare the living **** out of anyone who is interested in this game.

This is what PGI thinks of you, the playerbase.

Y tho? This is obvious for anyone who happens to read any random thread on the forums. I bet you are familiar with the Intel Gathering: Weapons Balance Pass 1
and if not, give it a read. It's a good example for what Daeron stated. Also, quoting out of context is rude.

[Anomalocaris]

Aidan Crenshaw, on 26 February 2021 - 05:49 AM, said:

Y tho? This is obvious for anyone who happens to read any random thread on the forums. I bet you are familiar with the Intel Gathering: Weapons Balance Pass 1
and if not, give it a read. It's a good example for what Daeron stated. Also, quoting out of context is rude.

1. Because PGI tends to **** things up when they make changes on their own. Repeatedly. Even when given turnkey solutions to things they change critical factors that end up making things worse. Mainly because they don't understand how their game is played. Yet they want to change things as much as possible. Kek

2. They claim they're listening to the community. But the community is in contradiction. Which means they can make whatever changes their staff thinks are good (which usually aren't, because they don't play the game, or play it well) and then claim _we_, the community, wanted it. It's happened before.

Didn't quote out of context. The first sentence was a summary of what they want to do. The second was the most important takeaway from that paragraph. Nothing else that followed changed the import of that first sentence. "Let me be clear", for a PR guy Daeron needs a little training...but I'd rather have him just come out and say the truth like he did, then hide PGI's feelings about the community.

[The6thMessenger]

Anomalocaris, on 26 February 2021 - 06:43 AM, said:

1. Because PGI tends to **** things up when they make changes on their own. Repeatedly. Even when given turnkey solutions to things they change critical factors that end up making things worse. Mainly because they don't understand how their game is played. Yet they want to change things as much as possible. Kek

2. They claim they're listening to the community. But the community is in contradiction. Which means they can make whatever changes their staff thinks are good (which usually aren't, because they don't play the game, or play it well) and then claim _we_, the community, wanted it.

It's happened before.

[TheCaptainJZ]

Just because PGI doesn't do something a particular way doesn't mean your feedback was not considered. It just wasn't the only feedback considered, nor should it be. Ideally, a developer should make decisions that are more middle-of-the-road.

[Xaius]

I don't know how likely it will be for us to get this change, but if issues with invisible walls get fixed I would be ecstatic.
It always sucks thinking you are about to snipe an enemy with erppcs just to hit a wall and wait 10 seconds to cool down.

[The6thMessenger]

TheCaptainJZ, on 26 February 2021 - 10:25 AM, said:

Just because PGI doesn't do something a particular way doesn't mean your feedback was not considered. It just wasn't the only feedback considered, nor should it be. Ideally, a developer should make decisions that are more middle-of-the-road.

I'm well aware of it. I have criticisms of the Gulag as well, it reeks of adherence to higher play, instead of catering to the masses. And hell, they admitted that it's not what everyone would want, IIRC.

Personally, I would like a rework of weapons, the LBXs frontloading damage while retaining DPS, UACs have no jam but longer cooldown but now burstfired -- yes even the UACs. The CACs doing splash-damage single-slug, and so on.

But if I had a choice of getting ANTYHING at all, it would be the Gulag changes, because all I want is for the game to be better. This baby-steps approach, again, just shows lack of commitment, that they aren't willing to take risks. How bad would the balance of educated people be? Hell, they know the game better, when the people that has the say in balance changes barely even play the game.

"Oh, and they don't want to get the game better, they that have a stake in this that have the vested interest to keep the players happy?"

I know nobody have said it yet, but I can see where this is going and let me stop you right there. One just needs to look back at how PGI did with MWO and MW5, so regardless of the intent, we all know how stupid they can get. And the MW5? The strings of deal that kept it out of other stores, yeah they don't care about us. They don't need us happy, they need us stupid enough to give them money.

And that circles back to "lack of commitment", that they are only willing to do something so long as it doesn't cost them. Could have just made a PTS, then tested the big changes, but no lets just baby-steps live because they can't be bothered.

Edited by The6thMessenger, 26 February 2021 - 04:15 PM.

[TheCaptainJZ]

The6thMessenger, on 26 February 2021 - 04:08 PM, said:

This baby-steps approach, again, just shows lack of commitment, that they aren't willing to take risks.

Yes, I agree PGI has done too little too slowly, but this time around, I also recognize that this is the first time that Daeron and Matt have "been in charge" of balance so I can understand their hesitance to make widescale changes. If they do a class of weapons each month--and actually maintain monthly changes--I think that would be an acceptable approach. In the past, absolutely, PGI has failed to do this, but I think these two are more receptive to what the players are saying more than Paul and team were in the past. As for MW5? Think that always came down financial constraints. MWO too in a number of ways (mainly, not enough people to deliver content, or not an efficient enough operation).