30 replies to this topic

[il1il]

MWO offers a gated power progression system, you must earn currency to buy a mech and then earn xp a form of currency to buy power in that mech. I have often heard people say that it takes too long to complete the progression cycle on a single mech and they can not complete all of their mechs (goals). But a good progression system should have room for further progression.

Other fps titles offer an achievement system where instead of gaining power with an item you unlock a cosmetic or some other desirable feature that does not poses direct power. Such as a new similar item (gun/hero/cosmetic). and often over much greater timeframes and difficult criteria.

I don't have a solution in mind but is this discussion being held in the right frame?

[Rondoe]

I just buy GSP's from the store to do all of my Mechs skills. Yes it takes way too long to earn xp's for each mech to skill up.

As far as a different progression system is concerned-I've no idea.

[John Bronco]

It's rigged.

[Ignatius Audene]

Pay 2 skip the grind is a main income for pgi.

[w0qj]

Hey, this game is one of the fairest and most 'flat' Free2Play game around!

Especially with these monthly free mech/mechbay + MC/Premium_Time and other goodies (!), one only need to spend time to grind for free stuff!

At least now you don't have to outright buy your very first mech of your own; free monthly mechs now!

And you can use virtual CBills to buy most of the (Standard Variant) mechs.
Only Hero mechs require MC, which can be grinded, and during Hero sales (there's one right now!).
And do not buy a Champion mech, unless there are major changes:
http://mwomercs.com/...uses-xp-bonuses

CBills is almost of no issues once you have enough favorite mechs tweaked to your liking;
many MWO veterans have hundreds of million CBills, as this author can also attest to.

As for the grind to level up your 91-point Skill Tree:

a) Suggest watching Baradul youtube videos dated 2018-2020 where he explains Skill Tree layout and its rationale, and how it fits into the mech playstyle.

b ) I myself always kickstart my new mech with 13 Skill points, all into Operations to max out the Heat_Containment, as these are of great help. Then you play to earn the rest of your Skill points to populate your Skill Tree; it helps you to learn to your mech to boot!

Do have fun skilling up your mech! Besides the MechBay, this is one other important aspect of this game to master!

Edited by w0qj, 01 August 2021 - 12:33 AM.

[Cerebus23]

yea let take our noob light or assault mechs into matches, do garbage damage have no tank no agility and drag that and EVERY team down for the next 20 to 40 ish matches until you get enough points in the key damage/tank trees to just make your mech preform to an non group nerfing level.



meanwhile you are flamed for being a drag on a team, and your ranking will tumble like a rock.


the entire idea you have to perk up your stompy robot to get decent is daft, team play only gets you sofar and not every team in the lowest tiers plays as a team, its often impressive how often they manage to pull that off.

[ScrapIron Prime]

Cerebus23, on 01 August 2021 - 04:42 AM, said:

yea let take our noob light or assault mechs into matches, do garbage damage have no tank no agility and drag that and EVERY team down for the next 20 to 40 ish matches until you get enough points in the key damage/tank trees to just make your mech preform to an non group nerfing level.

Now that’s just exaggeration. Yes, an unskilled mech will be a little slower, a little hotter, and have a few less percent armor and structure. But if you think 10% boost to structure or weapon cool down renders a mech into a potato, then you’re failing to take the PILOT into account… which is always the main factor.

other MMO’s separate players by level for good reason. The cleric on the raid needs a specific skill or the raid won’t work. But mechs don’t have that limitation. A skilled mech has maybe 10% more of something than an unskilled mech, but they can both do all the things. (With a few exceptions, such as carry multiple consumables or use seismic sensors.). The rest is pilot choices.

[Wid1046]

It would make more sense to link progression to aesthetics instead of performance. Make is so that new mechs can only use the default colours, mechs with slightly more xp can only be one solid colour, more can use two tones, and a mech with full xp can use all three.

This would still encourage people to pay for progression (so you don't look like a noob) and by putting extra emphasis on how mechs look it could even further encourage people to buy more camo patterns and colours. It would also make paid mechs (heroes or special variants) a better buy since they would come with better default colours and camo patterns.

With how poorly mechs perform without skills, it even makes gaining xp more difficult since you're more likely to burst into flames without the operations tree or be taken out of the fight earlier without either armor or mobility. Having mechs perform poorly when they are first purchased isn't fun and doesn't encourage people to try out/purchase new mechs.

[Napoleon_Blownapart]

it would add more imbalance but i would like an extra skill point per year for years played for veterans (played since beta)

[Cerebus23]

20 gsp with every mech would help also. you could lest flesh it out and get some key stuff for some builds ecm speed etc.


still would have a grind still would force you to make choices still would get people pay then suffer pug groups.

[w0qj]

How about Premium Time also gives (new) +50 GSP per month?

Napoleon_Blownapart, on 01 August 2021 - 08:00 AM, said:

it would add more imbalance but i would like an extra skill point per year for years played for veterans (played since beta)

[ThreeStooges]

The trees are crap plain and simple. I don't want range, I want cool down but guess I *HAVE* to get range twice. I don't want sensor range, I want adv zoom but guess I *HAVE* to take sensor range. Gated skills you *MUST* take to get the ones you want AND it's a very small percent not even a full 1% increase in a lot of nodes.

Even with all of some nodes when you look at the mouse over tool tip you get some thing like -.678 to heat or duration and wonder why you even bother to play the game when you max out cool down or heat gen and you don't even get a full 1%

Sadly you need that extra -657 off or 2% more heat just to run some mechs as best as possible or just hardly viable. And mech quirks are a joke. Velocity quirk doesn't do crap when your weapons paired give you 40-50% heat.

[Wildstreak]

The Skill System is still an RPG system, personally I would just see it gone.

I was surprised and let down to see they created a whole new version in MW5 complete with an issue that irritates many players.

[CFC Conky]

Cerebus23, on 01 August 2021 - 04:42 AM, said:

.l.



meanwhile you are flamed for being a drag on a team, and your ranking will tumble like a rock.


...

Ok, how often has this happened to you? I've seen and/or heard the occasional snarky remark in faction play, but that's a different level of the game where it's really important that one brings fully skilled mechs to a match.

In quickplay? I've hardly ever seen what you describe.

Besides, unskilled mechs are perhaps less effective, but by no means useless (I'm looking at you MCII-B, Sleipnir, and BAS-A/B ) .

Good hunting,
CFC Conky

Edited by CFC Conky, 01 August 2021 - 02:27 PM.

[Wid1046]

ScrapIron Prime, on 01 August 2021 - 05:26 AM, said:

Now that’s just exaggeration. Yes, an unskilled mech will be a little slower, a little hotter, and have a few less percent armor and structure. But if you think 10% boost to structure or weapon cool down renders a mech into a potato, then you’re failing to take the PILOT into account… which is always the main factor.

other MMO’s separate players by level for good reason. The cleric on the raid needs a specific skill or the raid won’t work. But mechs don’t have that limitation. A skilled mech has maybe 10% more of something than an unskilled mech, but they can both do all the things. (With a few exceptions, such as carry multiple consumables or use seismic sensors.). The rest is pilot choices.

Skills make far more of a difference than you seem to realize. Just looking at heat, heat gen can reduce how much heat you produce to 85% of normal for IS mechs, and heat dissipation increases how fast that heat disperses by 10%. Between just these two things your mech can increase it's sustained damage by 29.4% (for people bad at math the two don't just add together: (1/0.85)*1.1=1.294).

This means that four identical skilled mechs would be able to produce more sustained damage than 5 of the same unskilled mechs (and therefore an entire team of 12 skilled mechs would have a better sustained damage output than 15 unskilled mechs). This game snowballs hard, so having that kind of advantage or disadvantage is enormous.

And this is just taking into account two node types; it isn't including things like heat containment, cooldown, or any of the survival or mobility nodes. It also isn't taking into account how valuable things like missile spread, ammo capacity, radar dep, or the ECM nodes are. Yes, a person can still win in a unskilled mech, but it does put you at a significant disadvantage.

[CFC Conky]

Wid1046, on 01 August 2021 - 03:40 PM, said:

Skills make far more of a difference than you seem to realize. Just looking at heat, heat gen can reduce how much heat you produce to 85% of normal for IS mechs, and heat dissipation increases how fast that heat disperses by 10%. Between just these two things your mech can increase it's sustained damage by 29.4% (for people bad at math the two don't just add together: (1/0.85)*1.1=1.294).

This means that four identical skilled mechs would be able to produce more sustained damage than 5 of the same unskilled mechs (and therefore an entire team of 12 skilled mechs would have a better sustained damage output than 15 unskilled mechs). This game snowballs hard, so having that kind of advantage or disadvantage is enormous.

And this is just taking into account two node types; it isn't including things like heat containment, cooldown, or any of the survival or mobility nodes. It also isn't taking into account how valuable things like missile spread, ammo capacity, radar dep, or the ECM nodes are. Yes, a person can still win in a unskilled mech, but it does put you at a significant disadvantage.

I won’t argue the numbers because, well, yeah those are the numbers.
That said, MWO isn’t a linear game. There are too many variables in a given match that mitigate some of the advantages/disadvantages from the skill tree.

It’s usually worse for new players and this game has always had a steep learning curve. There have been lots of ideas discussed on how to make a better new player experience. Compared to when I started playing (spring 2017), the game is much more generous with rewards now, so that’s at least something.

Good hunting,
CFC Conky

[PocketYoda]

Just play without skills like i do.. a good 60% of my 300 mechs aren't skilled.. its just unachievable in a normal game lifetime.. I buy the odd GSP or get it free from packs and events but its some miserable and rare i tend to play unskilled on a lot of my more, what i consider useless mechs..

[Moldur]

Honestly I got so many skill points refunded from the system change when mastery went away, that I still have a giant surplus (1500+ points) as a rainy day fund, since I essentially got 3x the number of points as mechs that I actually play (the old mastery system required 3 variants of the same chassis to fully level the chassis and get all the skills).

The node system is kinda a lot, and I feel that it's too important to be glossed over, yet there are a few schools of thought and it's not discussed often to figure out how everyone "should" be building out their skill tree. It makes me wonder if some people are getting steamrolled and too much of that is because they build poor skill trees because they haven't looked at the most recent most meta way you're supposed to do it.

I wouldn't mind going to a simpler system like mastery without having to do it for 3 chassis.

[MechB Kotare]

I hate current skill tree. I wish it was reworked. Like...

Why do i need full mobility skill tree to run 86,2 on clan heavies. That should be their cannon speed. Also survival on some lights is op.

[Aidan Crenshaw]

MechB Kotare, on 01 August 2021 - 10:34 PM, said:

Why do i need full mobility skill tree to run 86,2 on clan heavies. That should be their cannon speed.

That's not quite accurate. Canon max. speeds are derived from TT running speeds. But those include the rounding of odd-numbers. Mechs with 3/5/7/9 walking MP are moving faster than they should. They should go 4.5/7.5/10.5/13.5, but since you can't go half hexes in TT, those numbers are rounded up and then the canon speeds were derived from those TT running speeds. MWO's approach is actually the correct one and sees a linear progression in weight/engine size.