pattonesque, on 21 September 2021 - 12:18 PM, said:
we love to limit which mechs people play don't we folks
maybe this is a thing that works in FP? But also, what will end up happening is "Faction X gets a mech that is very OP and Factions Y and Z do not" so everyone migrates to faction X. It's difficult enough to do with Clans/IS.
It gives players something to aspire to: salvaging their way (or earning enough money to buy their way) into the 'mech of their choice, then becoming an expert in that 'mech. It's intended to make special 'mechs special again, and rare 'mechs rare. If only 1 in 100 'mechs in the entire Inner Sphere is supposed to be an Assault 'mech, and only 1 in 100 Assault 'mechs is supposed to be an Atlas, then it looks really weird to get a drop with 12 Atlases (yes, this is Faction Play, but wasn't that supposed to be the end-goal of the entire game?).
That would be another part of an MMO: There are only X number of a particular 'mech in existence. Perhaps there are in-universe factories currently producing that 'mech, at which point the number might increase, while a raid on said factory might slow or stop that number increasing for a period of time (or permanently).
It's true: if you put in a fully functioning Dire Wolf, or Timber Wolf, back to full TT OP-ness, and then say "Only the Wolves can use them", then yeah: everyone will play Wolves. The trick is to have different options for different factions. Dire Wolves are Wolf and Smoke Jaguar, Kodiaks are Ghost Bear, Turkinas would be Jade Falcon, etc. Annihilators should only be Wolf's Dragoons, but barring adding them as a specific faction, they'd be Merc-only, since the Clans can't use their IS tech in FP.
A separate idea that still pushes the game in the direction of MMO is to split QP to be Clan vs IS as well. Each bucket fills independently, and whichever two buckets fill first, they get dumped against each other. This prevents long asymmetric queues like you get in FP when everyone wants to play on the same side, and mixes up the battles, from 10 v 10 Clan v Clan, to 10 v 12 Clan v IS, to 12 v 12 IS v IS. This allows the Clans to get some of their OP-ness back without the overall match balance being skewed too far to one side or the other. 10 v 12 has been a community request for a VERY long time.