Mechwarrior Meme Thread!

Noesis, on 24 May 2013 - 06:17 AM, said:

Spoiler

The following content is spoilertagged as it's not in meme form, and it's quite verbose - so it's not really fully appropriate to this thread. If you click on it you agree not to complain about the rebuilding of the Great Text Wall of China. You can just skip it otherwise.

Spoiler

When I drop alone I usually end up with really bad PuGs on my team and moderate players on the other team, but it's quite playable. When I drop with my corps mates, our combined ELO is so damn high that we get nonstop games of whatever cheese is popular at the moment. There's a very high caprace rate, and while previously we saw PPC spam, we're now seeing LRM spam. We still end up winning slightly more than half the time, but it sure doesn't feel fun to see a particular system played out over and over and over again in 10 matches in a row, even if we win. Especially if it's systems against which little defense is possible - CT homing streaks, 80 degree missiles, 3-hit kills with boated sniping weapons...

Our unwillingness in general as a Corps to use any of the exploited weapons makes for rather strange games, where we fight groups of LRM boats with medium lasers and win. Good players equipped with cheese are basically unkillable.

We ran into a group of people from a rather large corp earlier. Some random guy we met basically called us out at the start, and they responded by declaring their identity. They then proceeded to spam LRMs, which is hardly a recommendation for the group.. especially when they got annihilated. At the end, the people on our side revealed they were from the same corp, and declared the reason for our victory was them. Of course, the fact that the three of us from the same corp had 50%+ more combined damage (even when using only lasers and ballistics) than the 4 of them plus the pug following us around was irrelevant to them.

It took about 3 seconds to connect the dots and realise that was an attempt to sync drop, and 6 out of 8 of them had LRM boat builds, the others were lights. They just got split up by the matchmaker... but they would pretty much have been happily PuG farming otherwise.

There's nothing inherently illegal about things like boating cheese or broken weapons, and a valid (in my opinion only) argument can be made that the real fault lies at the hands of the balance department for allowing weapons to be broken in the first place. Should all weapons be equally balanced, there makes no difference if you boat or not, other than perhaps range compatibility - using PPCs together with Small Lasers makes little sense for instance. However, should a weapon have, say, a theoretical +10% advantage, carrying five of those weapons increases the advantage to 110%^5, or 160%, over a build that doesn't have any of them. 2 of these boats means that 3 players of equal skill will be nearly evenly matched with them, which leads to very broken results. It's also why when we meet players that carry cheese builds, using a good counterstrategy often works because ELO would not allow players of equal skill to us to match us if they cheese, since they would already be at a higher ELO class.

A lot of complaints about boating do not understand this fact. Boating amplifies any weapon balance issue, but it does not cause them, it is poor balancing of the numbers behind individual weapons that allows for unbalanced weapons to snowball their advantage into an insurmountable 'cheese' when boated. This also works two ways. In amplification of strengths, it also amplifies weaknesses, and the utterly crap performance of the 6 machine gun Jagermech prior to the recent patch shows this quite well. Should you run into one of them in an organised group, you can bet that the pilot of that machine will likely be superior to you if you're allowed to match against something gimped that bad.

Seeing how PPCs' cooldown was increased from 3 to 4 seconds, that was a 33% increase in timing, or a 33% decrease in damage. The developers balance very rarely, so it is a safe bet that they felt the imbalance of the PPC was at least 20% off other weapons... if not 30-40%. 120%^6 in a 6 PPC stalker is... 299%, so one of those is at least 3 times the strength of an equivalent Stalker build. That kind of imbalance throws the game completely out of whack.

Running the weapon damages, the cooldown, the heat generation.. it is entirely possible to come up with simple indices that describe the power of a weapon relative to others that account for weight, heat, damage and so on. Combination of an index that tracks alpha damage will account for alpha-type weapons, with an index that tracks sustained fire will account for use of sustained fire weapons. With a damage per shot (weight and heat corrected) value and a damage per second (weight and heat corrected) value, you have an excellent standpoint to measure the exact potential of all weapons used in these contexts... and from there, you have an initial 'ideal' value from which you can balance gameplay. You also have current values. Balancing should then proceed with daily or even half-daily updates, that tweak cooldown, heat and ammo to push the values from current values towards ideal values incrementally, and at the same time, you can track the % utilisation of the weapon types by players and their performance in terms of damage dealt total, and how many times they contributed to kills/assists. Once all of the weapon types have very similar utilisation rates and contribute nearly equally to kills and damage on the whole, you have a perfectly balanced system. You need both empiric (the iterative balance changes) and theoretical (the ideal balance point prediction) to balance weaponry properly. The current approach is lacking the theoretical basis, and the empiric side is taking so long to execute we will be in 2014 before ideal balancing is complete. For all their faults, Diablo III and World of Warcraft have very finely balanced skills between and within classes... Blizzard is good at this, even if I dislike them for quite a few other things (like a completely hopeless D3 storyline for instance).

Now, to bring it back into relevance to the meme, since exploitation, sync dropping and other such... behaviour I don't like in gamers becomes far more common at the higher ELO classes (they're there because the tactics are unquestionably effective), I don't want my ELO to raise too much so that I can avoid these as much as possible. Truth be told, I don't believe it is any infraction of the rules, but I've enough of a beef against this kind of thing that I would rather not see it when I'm trying to have fun.

And while I dislike any utilisation of this, I can't exactly condemn people who do use it... it is just a case of different people having different motivations. Some play to win... and they have fun when they roll over the newer players repeatedly with unbalanced tactics or builds. Some like me play for the fight, and we have fun when we have very close fights with people of equal strength. Some among us would call it honour, chivalry and whatnot, though it's a bit too self-praising for my liking really. They may also call the exploiters people without honour or integrity, conversely. But I don't really agree with that per se. So far it's not against the rules, and who is anyone to judge others for a difference in opinion? We all have different priorities, different ways of having fun, and part of the way to make a good game is to make it such that as far as possible, the most people can have their fun without making it impossible for other people to have their fun. Only those behaviours that makes one guy happy at the expense of a whole lot of others like teamkilling and such are outlawed, and so far, if ELO keeps cheesers playing with other cheesers that's perfectly fine by me.

I just don't want my ELO to rise so that I don't have to have my fun screwed around by them having theirs. Is that fair?

Spoiler

Edited by Hayashi, 24 May 2013 - 10:43 AM.