90 replies to this topic

[Kyrie]

Geaux Tiger, on 17 August 2012 - 06:17 PM, said:

I think the houses will be valid for you guys Kyrie. Though the amount of control you will have over them will be limited. The devs stated that only border planets and periphery worlds would be fought over and exchange hands (barring major canon battles). The "core" worlds of each house would be static and follow canon.

One thing I see with both your and pringle's assumptions is that both of you think that this will be a major territory control game dealing with the whole Inner Sphere. I think that assumption is incorrect given what the devs stated already. Sure there are plenty of worlds to change hand in the border Marches and periphery, but as far as having one house/clan/merc corp taking over huge swaths of area or changing canon I just do not think it is going to happen.

Now, as far as you guys in the house factions having major influence/control over other players within your faction, that again I just do not see happening. Maybe you get control of a lance or company and can influence to some degree what battles you want to fight sure. But actually being able to tell other players what they are going to do without their consent would be detrimental overall imo.

Edit: having a large degree of control over another player would be more the realm of merc companies, but even then it is dependent on how that company is organized.

I over-looked this -- and you are definitely right. I know that we wont have a "full" I.S. scale conflict, but it has been promised that there will be a batle-space we are going to fight in. And given the scale of what has been announced, it is safe to assume that we will have thousands of players. I am assuming then that there will be a very large battle space for us to play our conquest wars in; even accounting for the fact that it will be non-core worlds. Regardless -- my point is that I want that battle-space to be equally interesting for mercs and faction, and more importantly, I want it to be a shared battle-space.

Within these non-core worlds, I want there to be important assets that must be protected, and targets worth acquiring....with some element of depth, so its not just a one-dimensional line along the border.

[Kyrie]

Amechwarrior, on 17 August 2012 - 06:04 PM, said:

This is where I think the devs may have misjudged the audience a little. The core BT fans want to play as the houses, the known units, the Davions, Liao and Kuritas. Core fans want "TOTAL mechWARrior: Online" and I don't think this game is going in that direction. Not saying the metagame won't be fun or engaging for the hardcore audience, but unless they drastically increase the scope of CW on-top of throwing out the timeline, we won't see it.

You are worried about it becoming like WoT. Many posters on here are. I have not played it myself but it seems it does have some problems with grind and the pressure to always be playing. We don't even know how much like WoT our metagame will be. Posters just use it because its core gameplay is very similar. If House Wars was implemented in full like on the merc side you would either have too many people fighting over one slice of rock or too many rocks changing hands and suddenly you have the CapCon up in Kurita territory when the clans drop and messed up sync with the canon timeline. Whatever system you use, if faction warfare is just like or very similar to merc warfare what stops a massive merc unit from effectively becoming a new great house, or preventing a current house from being wiped off the map the same way a merc company can be?

Well, under the canon a lance is 4 mechs. A unit is three lances. What remains to be decided is what represents a Merc Corp? Is it one unit with three lances? That would place a cap at 12 members. Will a merc corp be able to consist of more than one unit? How many units? Will there be a limit? I believe that there will have to be some kind of limit on the size of a single merc group; but I am really not sure what that limit should be. My intuition suggests limiting it to the scale of a Prefecture/PDZ, three to four units.

In terms of the map mechanics, there would likely have to be a limit to the number of lances that can be deployed to a single planet; a cap per faction and a grand total cap. That would help alleviate the "zerg" effect. Assuming that there is a shared battle-space between mercs and faction players, the limit can be kept at per faction counting individual lances.

[Rhyshaelkan]

And here I was thinking this would be an exhaustive treatise on Community Warfare. Need more walls of text. If your long post is under 3000000 words it just scratches the surface. You are talking Community Warfare, put more effort into it!

[Kyrie]

Rhyshaelkan, on 17 August 2012 - 10:01 PM, said:

And here I was thinking this would be an exhaustive treatise on Community Warfare. Need more walls of text. If your long post is under 3000000 words it just scratches the surface. You are talking Community Warfare, put more effort into it!

LOL. I'm tryin', I'm tryin'. :-)

[Shadowstarr]

I see your fine post and raise you mine. http://mwomercs.com/...1513#entry51513



-SS

[Kyrie]

I knew I'd seen that post somewhere when I first logged into the forum! Thanks for the link, that is an awesome summary of the mechanics I had in mind for the original game. I'm hoping they implement it... I'm getting paranoid about what direction the dev's may go in implementing faction side community warfare. :-)

[Amechwarrior]

Kyrie, on 17 August 2012 - 09:50 PM, said:

Well, under the canon a lance is 4 mechs. A unit is three lances. What remains to be decided is what represents a Merc Corp? Is it one unit with three lances? That would place a cap at 12 members. Will a merc corp be able to consist of more than one unit? How many units? Will there be a limit? I believe that there will have to be some kind of limit on the size of a single merc group; but I am really not sure what that limit should be. My intuition suggests limiting it to the scale of a Prefecture/PDZ, three to four units.

This kind of planning completely ignores the fact that not everyone will be online every day or even once every week. I have played in a very large group in an online, match based game. We had a "big fight day" with another unit and we had about 4 or so teams running. On an average night 2-4 teams are going strong. However, my in game friends list is teamates only and is well over double those "big game day" numbers.

You can't just form a 12 player unit and call it full. I would guess you would need about 15-25 people to reliably field a 12 man drop once or twice a week for a few months. This is a guess at an average, not saying you can't get 12 highly motivated players on daily, but the normal group mix of leaders and regulars along with occasional players. That will completely mess up trying to "deploy troops" by the 12 man company unless you know exactly what groups can field full teams beforehand. The farther up the chain you scale this the crazier it gets. What if you are the highest rank and one of your middle officers gets put in a hospital? He cannot sign on to dish out his level of chips/units/whatever. No one under him is aware he will be gone long term and members don't want to veto him for just missing 24 hours. Things need to be kept flexible and I should not be causing a log-jam because I can't sign on.

We have no clue how big house or merc units can get. I am with you on it being a shared battlespace in some form. I would love to see mercs fill in short house units for a faction war round or a personal alliance between a house company and merc corp ends up with the house units giving their weekly/daily/whatever mission drops to fight on their merc buddies struggling planet. At the same time you must keep groups of similar size/skill/ambition similarly grouped enemies. Take any online game where a pug group goes against a premade, highly trained clan. Pugs get stomped, they don't have fun and the clanners feel bored. Like in PringlesPcants part2 OP, some separation of the player base will be necessary for the greater enjoyment of all. From the now old and probably outdated Devblog1 it looks like they did this by separating the occasional player in lone wolf, casuals teams to faction wars and hardcore players to merc units. Their will of course be a mixed bag of players in each segment but each CW type fits each general player type while not having to worry about the canon timeline.

[Kyrie]

Agreed, 12 is too few. Perhaps four unit max to a merc corp for 48...

[Adrienne Vorton]

Amechwarrior, on 17 August 2012 - 05:36 PM, said:

I just re-read devblog 1 and I think you are going in the wrong direction on this.

Its not mwosuccessionwars.com

It's mwomercs.com and I think this shows us the priorities of the developers. It is not about the clan invasion, house rivalries ending with reforming the star league. It is about creating and running your own company with "Billybob's Stompy Lasershow" on the bill of charge. The whole deal about jumpships, supplies, prefectures and how older sphere spanning 3rd party leagues did things back in the day don't apply to this games scope. A really big reason is, they don't want to mess with canon. Letting the focus fall on minor, non-canon merc companies lets the players and the developers run free of trying to juggle the reality of online games with the set-in-stone timeline of the universe.

The house faction wars as laid out in the devblog looks like a simpler mechanism for more casual type players. Planetary battles are ongoing, you can jump in any time, your contribution gets thrown in with everyone else and the faction with the most victories get the gold. You can gain ranks, heck if you get high enough maybe IGP will start sending you "orders" from Hanse_Davion@IGP via PM telling you where he would like your house unit to focus its players for the week(I think that would be fricken sweet). Most of us here now, are BT fans, we have favorite houses, once open beta hits people who know the canon will be a minority. The mass of players won't care what a Kurita is, they don't want to be told to follow orders by some guy they never even played with. They will want to get them and their friends to party up, fight robots and do it their way. We, the BT nerds want systems to run the houses, plan jump routes and do just about everything but actually dropping into combat. Grand planetary systems are ignoring the core game(fighting robots) for the metagame(excel spreadsheets and maps.) That's supposed to fluff the combat. Not the other way around.

The Faction battles play to this, 6 great house superfactions with an endless churn of online members to fight each other. They don't want the high level planetary drama/grind/dedication that comes with owning your own merc company, not yet. Those that grow to the challenge will seek it out by going merc. The fact that they are now playing "outside" of big canon events/units/factions means they can pursue as much glory as the game will allow.

A lot of posts on the forums focus on the grand schemes in the vein of a 5th succession war. I don't think that's the kind of game this will shape up to be. I am not saying the devs can't make an about face and turn it into such a game, but the media we have seen so far doesn't support that. Since CW has been put on hold, who knows what it will really look like.

this plus my commentary sums up my thoughts...dont get me wrong, i like the idea of grand scale universal battle...but the "player run economics, command structures " and all are really something, dedicated BT/ MW Fans would like...and f2p communities tend to not supports this... we really should not set our expectations too high... though, who knows, we can be even happier, the closer the game gets to our dreams

[Kyrie]

After reading Shadow Star's epic post outlining how MPBT: 3025 was going to work, all I can say is that I really think implementing that system would be all I ever wanted in a game. Obviously PGI has its own vision of how to develop the game, and we are going to see it -- all I can do is hope and pray that they put in sufficient depth to keep the game interesting at the "metagame" level.

[Morashtak]

Shadowstarr, on 17 August 2012 - 10:33 PM, said:

I see your fine post and raise you mine. http://mwomercs.com/...1513#entry51513



-SS

How did Loyalty Point decay play into this? The devs have stated (I'll find it if anyone wants to read it themselves) that a player's LPs will suffer a very slight decay rate for every time period they are away.

This decay rate could be very small for a low ranking player (i.e. "casual"), something along, or say, 0.01% per week. A slightly increasing sliding scale could be implemented so that it becomes more important for high ranks to keep hopping in their Mechs each day to keep their ranks - Something around 0.1% or even as high as 0.2% for the "<insert faction leader's rank> Right Hand".

This way very few people would have the time and energy to not only reach the top ranks but even fewer will keep up the effort to acquire the LPs needed to maintain that rank.

And in the log run as people suffer burn out and/or family and job responsibilities increase their character slips back down the ranks making room for new players on their way up.

[Kyrie]

Morashtak, on 18 August 2012 - 02:56 PM, said:

How did Loyalty Point decay play into this? The devs have stated (I'll find it if anyone wants to read it themselves) that a player's LPs will suffer a very slight decay rate for every time period they are away.

This decay rate could be very small for a low ranking player (i.e. "casual"), something along, or say, 0.01% per week. A slightly increasing sliding scale could be implemented so that it becomes more important for high ranks to keep hopping in their Mechs each day to keep their ranks - Something around 0.1% or even as high as 0.2% for the "<insert faction leader's rank> Right Hand".

This way very few people would have the time and energy to not only reach the top ranks but even fewer will keep up the effort to acquire the LPs needed to maintain that rank.

And in the log run as people suffer burn out and/or family and job responsibilities increase their character slips back down the ranks making room for new players on their way up.

In the EGA game they had a different mechanic entirely. Rank points and standing points (taking these two ideas together comprise PGI's idea of Loyalty Points). Neither of these decayed, however. Also, once a rank is earned under PGI's system, it is never taken away -- but to advance to the next rank you would have to earn back all the decayed points+missing points for new rank to advance.

The issue of inactivity was handled through the Chain of Command -- Unit COs would boot people from units who had not logged in a while, sending them to the "Reserves". When they returned, they coukd pickup exactly at where they left off with no penalty once they either rejoined their old unit, or joined a different House unit.

One interesting detail is that your rank in part depended on having a relevant command position. That is, your offically displayed rank was capped at Chu-sa, 3 stripes (highest possible grade-in-rank for Lt.Col). You still accumulated rank points, but you could not actually get that rank displayed until you had the appropriate position. A Unit CO position allowed you to reach Tai-sa (Colonel), a Prefecture CO could get up to Sho-sho (Brig. Gen), and the highest rank was reserved for HL/HXO and the District Commanders.

From the bits and pieces pieced together from the devblog and forum posts, it is less than clear if this will be adopted -- particularly since PGI has not committed themselves yet to really adopt a chain of command for the Houses. So we might indeed end up with a bunch of generals who have no command positions at all.

EDIT: Forgot to mention, one reason I want to see not only line command positions but also Staff positions is to allow for more people to have rank; and have it make sense. That is, there will be a very sharply limited number of CO and XO spots available; but we can multiply this by a factor of at least 5 by incorporating staff positions such as Recruiter/Trainer and Quartermaster.

Edited by Kyrie, 18 August 2012 - 03:54 PM.

[Kyrie]

After re-reading the MPBT: 3025 thread located here, the framework I am proposing would try to incorporate these key concepts:

1) Planetary hex combat system (hexes ... tasty, less filling! ).

2) Mobilizing/Demobilizing system for faction units. Let the House TO&E grow or shrink dynamically.

3) To the general framework of 3025, incorporate mercs with a "deep strike" capability as outlined in this thread; working directly for a House either on a Long-Term contract basis or without a commitment within the planetary hex combat system.

4) The rank table outlining abilities from 3025 would, I think, have to be reworked to add quite a bit to incorporate Staff positions. Given that there are over 10000 legendary founders alone, not even counting the two other classes of founders and the flood of F2P players, the canon TO&E simply doesn't have enough command slots to accommodate the potential growth in the game.

In a nutshell I think this would make for an awesome community warfare experience.

[Nik Van Rhijn]

I can't see a player cap on merc Corps working - we have a number of groups with 50+ members, several with 100+ members. Many of these will be spread over different time zones but I'm sure that they could field multiple companies for a special push.
I would love to see the planetary "hex" idea used rather than a single battle as the devs have said.

[Kyrie]

The issue of having to cap or not membership in a Merc Corp depends on too many factors that we really have no clue about. The first in my mind is whether there will be a unified battle space or separate zones for merc and faction players.

Separation allows for all kinds of weirdness, such as potentially having a merc corp be stronger than a House in scale. Integration would require some form of limitation. While I am not a fervent believer in following the BT canon in every single last detail, I do feel that staying true to the "spirit" behind it might make some sense here. It doesn't make sense to me that a single Merc Corp can be stronger than a Prefecture/PDZ of a House.

I am in favor of integration, as I am completely opposed to having separate "zones". By having separate zones, we allow for the possibility of perhaps having a WoT clanwars map system for mercs to resolve planet captures, requiring pre-arranged battle times and committing oneself to being online at a particular time. I went through that, and I can't describe how much I loathe the idea of having to schedule my time online based on a fixed schedule in the game as opposed to when I can actually play. I really want real-time battle resolution based on the efforts of those who are online as opposed to a tournament system.

[ReXspec]

Why the devs wouldn't implement something like this is beyond me. If the only interest is the merc part of the battletech universe, what is the point of putting house loyalties into the game? Or even identifying our selves to be sided with a certain house?

[Kyrie]

ReXspec,

In defense of the devs I can understand some of the qualms when contemplating systems like the one discussed in this thread and in the mpbt: 3025 thread. If I am reconstructing things correctly, reading tea leaves from the devblog and occasional posts by the devs scattered in the forums, they wanted to focus on having an open ended merc centered metagame. Particularly at the start of the game.

There are certain problems with adopting a more House-centric design approach. The first has to do with the canon: the House TO&E has been laid out, and that does impose certain limitations requiring careful thought. Adopting a House-centric warfare model also can bring problems with the canon in that obviously events in MWO would stop paralleling events in the canon. I feel that these problems are soluble, creating a more immersive and interesting final product -- but the dev team may disagree.

One of the key attractions of separating the battle space and focusing on a merc-centric meta game is that it will bypass most if not of all of the canon. Mercs were not really the focus of the overall canon; so they would have a lot more leeway to getting creative when implementing CW based on merc corps. By creating a separate battle zone that doesn't affect the faction space you can basically do whatever you want without dealing with thornier balance issues. It would also serve as a useful test-bed to gauge the community's acceptance of chain of commands within merc corps while contemplating what to really do with factions.

Under a merc-centered meta game you get to reverse what I assumed to be the normal pattern ending up with: Don't want anyone telling you what to do, join a House. Want to be involved in politics, chain of command, and so forth, join or form a Merc Corp. In EGA MPBT it was quite the reverse; joining a merc outfit meant greater freedom from politics while staying in a House you had to deal with it a lot more given the House-centered approach Kesmai took.

Implementing a House-centered design for warfare will invariably annoy canon-purists who would hate the fact that the online game would diverge dramatically from the "history" documented in the books. Implementing a strong chain of command system might drive away some of the "casual player" market segment.

However, from a business point of view, I would argue that creating more opportunities for immersion in the game would yield greater player participation in the game's store. One of the dirty secrets of F2P models is that a huge chunk of revenues come from a very small portion of the actual player base; and of that base its mostly repeat business from people way too obsessed with the game.

EDIT: For an interesting article on F2P revenue models, see here. While the executives' comments leave a lot to be desired, the community response is fascinating.

Edited by Kyrie, 20 August 2012 - 04:36 PM.

[Kyrie]

It occurs to me that I have not really explained why I think implementing a system such as this one or the MPBT: 3025 system would be a good idea for PGI. I posted the basic rational here. Since the discussion on CW is being split in different areas, I want to keep links going to key ideas throughout.

In summary (TL;DR;Didn't click on link) : Creating more opportunities for player immersion will enhance opportunities for "conversions" (getting players to pay for something; anything at all). More income for PGI is something I feel will be a Very Good Thing. :-)

[Kyrie]

[RESERVED: For a more detailed analysis of alternatives for player run factions]

EDIT: Had a duplicate link, forgot that I had already posted the link; removed it now.

Edited by Kyrie, 23 August 2012 - 01:37 AM.

[Kyrie]

[RESERVED: Index to Community Warfare Posts -- attempt to provide cross-referencing for key discussions as I have identified them]

First and foremost, this is the devblog for Community Warfare, located here.

A thread here indexing some key developer posts on the forums that shed significant light on what is known about the focus of Community Warfare to date. Thanks to Morashtak for compiling the links!

There are two large threads threads focused on Community Warfare in the General Discussion Forum:

PringlesPCant's massive thread advocating an implementation for Merc Corp's based loosely on the way Wargaming implemented Clan Wars in World of Tanks with several key changes proposed located here. My first post in this very long thread objecting to the general concept of pre-arranged battle zones is here with a rough description of the way it worked in EGA; in my second post I attempt to object to one of the assumptions of the entire Community Warfare mechanic, the separation of Mercs and Factions, located here. A followup post defending unified space for mercs and factions is here. And lastly I posted this in that thread to recap how EGA/3025 handled House to House wars. Summarizing: I object to any form of WoT Clan Wars on the grounds explained in those posts. :-)

This thread by Kyrie proposing an approach based more on MPBT (EGA) and MPBT: 3025 with changes designed to appeal more to an F2P crowd located here.

There is another thread located in Suggestions by WardenWolf proposing a system more in line with what is stated (at the moment) in the community warfare devblog, this thread is located here. Within that thread I attempt to debunk the idea that Factions must be implemented "loosely" for the sake of casual players. I explain in greater detail how it worked in a very difficult environment (EGA with high hourly access costs), located here; and a sort of summary of the threads discussing CW is here.

Found this interesting discussion in Suggestions, proposed by CocoaJin, outlining the idea of a Big Planet strategic layer for combat located here.

Found this interesting post located here that describes a possible merc planetary capture implementation by Aidan Kerensky.

And this is the original MPBT: 3025 design thread by Shadowstarr located here.
This is one of the most complete and fascinating threads to date; it outlines what appears to be a complete design document for the MPBT: 3025 project that died at the hands of EA. Given the precision and complexity of what is proposed there, lots of things would have to be changed to make it legally viable for this game. However, my concern is to get at the core of the concepts presented and abstract them into this game if at all possible.

EDIT LOG: Updated as of 8/31/2012 with new posts as I discover them. :-)

Edited by Kyrie, 31 August 2012 - 04:44 AM.