81 replies to this topic

[Mason Grimm]

Shrinkmaster, on 07 November 2012 - 11:14 PM, said:

a rating system is almost non-existant, except for a "like" button which does not reflect the actual strength of a build.

i really hope this gets fixed, so i can recommend this page to my friends who are new to the game. if it stays in it current state you have to be an experienced player already to distinguish between viable and horrible builds by yourself.

How to use the Rating System on MechSpecs.com

[Shrinkmaster]

thanks for posting this link but my point still stands.

my problem is that people like builds because they think they are cool and not because they are actually viable for a new and/or competetive gamer.

maybe you should include a recommended builds section for builds which are often seen in actual gameplay.

Edited by Shrinkmaster, 08 November 2012 - 12:52 PM.

[Mason Grimm]

I would think most, if not all, of these builds ARE seen in actual game play.

Whether they are viable or not is up to the actual player. For instance I run around in a 6ML build Jenner with AMS and am able to handle the heat and still be "competitive" while a friend of mine runs his without the AMS so he can add extra HS and for him that is competitive.

There is no secret formula to making a "competitive build" other than what works best for you.

HOWEVER... That being said.

We have now added an option to rate builds (hopefully that you have tried) and another option to filter the list of all the builds in a section based on their average cumulative ratings. Essentially displaying the highest rated builds first so that you scan the more popular (and hopefully effective) builds out there.

[Hovertank]

Great site. Thanks to the administrator ($$$) and the contributors. I'll be putting a couple of my builds up there shortly.

Took me all of 30 seconds to register. I can't believe the amount of lazy little whiners on this forum...

[Mason Grimm]

Hovertank, on 09 November 2012 - 02:01 PM, said:

Great site. Thanks to the administrator ($$$) and the contributors. I'll be putting a couple of my builds up there shortly.

Took me all of 30 seconds to register. I can't believe the amount of lazy little whiners on this forum...

You are welcome man. Glad you found it useful. You didn't HAVE to register but it's nice to see people wanting to be a part of the community at large.

[Gereinath Hunter]

I personally don't like the attitude a site like this promotes, in the same vein that other sites of its ilk did for other games. To a degree, disassembling a game into the pure meta is necessary to be the best of the best, but to cut out a personal build and post it for all to copy only serves to take the creation and experimentation element out of Mechwarrior and replace it with "Well let me just go look up the max output build for [role] real quick to fill out this lance..." You can argue that it 'can give ideas' or 'spur discussion' to or against certain builds, but in the end the result will ultimately be the same: "Is this the best X for Y?"

It's a site meant for players who can't already create their own builds, their own concepts, or appeal to their own play styles and instead have to outsource to "someone who knows the game better." At that point, all you're going to get is a handful of unskilled pilots utilizing some min/max'd build they barely know how to control. They learn nothing about the game, nor where they're failing as a player or how to correct the things that are giving them issues, they just switch to a different min/max build, tossing things at the wall to see what sticks.

The most useful resources for do-it-yourself types can be found over in the guides section of this forum, that's essentially all the meta you really need to get down to planning out a mech. My advice to players? Instead of running off to find "the best/hottest/most amazing builds," work on something you can actually PILOT and is comfortable to YOU, and does what YOU want it to do. Align yourself with a mercenary unit and learn from them if you need to; any unit worth their salt will already have personalized builds anyhow.

-Gereinath

[Mason Grimm]

Gereinath Hunter, on 09 November 2012 - 09:10 PM, said:

I personally don't like the attitude a site like this promotes, in the same vein that other sites of its ilk did for other games. To a degree, disassembling a game into the pure meta is necessary to be the best of the best, but to cut out a personal build and post it for all to copy only serves to take the creation and experimentation element out of Mechwarrior and replace it with "Well let me just go look up the max output build for [role] real quick to fill out this lance..." You can argue that it 'can give ideas' or 'spur discussion' to or against certain builds, but in the end the result will ultimately be the same: "Is this the best X for Y?"

It's a site meant for players who can't already create their own builds, their own concepts, or appeal to their own play styles and instead have to outsource to "someone who knows the game better." At that point, all you're going to get is a handful of unskilled pilots utilizing some min/max'd build they barely know how to control. They learn nothing about the game, nor where they're failing as a player or how to correct the things that are giving them issues, they just switch to a different min/max build, tossing things at the wall to see what sticks.

The most useful resources for do-it-yourself types can be found over in the guides section of this forum, that's essentially all the meta you really need to get down to planning out a mech. My advice to players? Instead of running off to find "the best/hottest/most amazing builds," work on something you can actually PILOT and is comfortable to YOU, and does what YOU want it to do. Align yourself with a mercenary unit and learn from them if you need to; any unit worth their salt will already have personalized builds anyhow.

-Gereinath

So we shouldn't expect to see you any time soon then?

[Vactus]

Gereinath Hunter, on 09 November 2012 - 09:10 PM, said:

I personally don't like the attitude a site like this promotes, in the same vein that other sites of its ilk did for other games. To a degree, disassembling a game into the pure meta is necessary to be the best of the best, but to cut out a personal build and post it for all to copy only serves to take the creation and experimentation element out of Mechwarrior and replace it with "Well let me just go look up the max output build for [role] real quick to fill out this lance..." You can argue that it 'can give ideas' or 'spur discussion' to or against certain builds, but in the end the result will ultimately be the same: "Is this the best X for Y?"

It's a site meant for players who can't already create their own builds, their own concepts, or appeal to their own play styles and instead have to outsource to "someone who knows the game better." At that point, all you're going to get is a handful of unskilled pilots utilizing some min/max'd build they barely know how to control. They learn nothing about the game, nor where they're failing as a player or how to correct the things that are giving them issues, they just switch to a different min/max build, tossing things at the wall to see what sticks.

The most useful resources for do-it-yourself types can be found over in the guides section of this forum, that's essentially all the meta you really need to get down to planning out a mech. My advice to players? Instead of running off to find "the best/hottest/most amazing builds," work on something you can actually PILOT and is comfortable to YOU, and does what YOU want it to do. Align yourself with a mercenary unit and learn from them if you need to; any unit worth their salt will already have personalized builds anyhow.

-Gereinath

Apparently you haven't seen some of the builds there then because there are plenty of builds that aren't 'Best of the Best'. A quick glance would tell you that. Also, targetting someone gives me plenty of information on someone else's build. True experimentation happened at the start of CB and a little bit hits every time something changes, but honestly, most of the builds are known and out there already.

[PapaKilo]

Most people want to run the best, most useful builds. That's whether they're a newbie or a veteran.

And sites like MechSpecs can certainly provide people with effective starting points for personal builds. I know I've had quite a few that started with something someone else came up with and I ended up adding my own flourishes to them.

Sorry it doesn't appeal to you, Gereinath. But there are many players that it helps, and that's why we keep it going.

And those personalized builds the mercenary units run? They're the same "best/hottest" builds we have on MechSpecs, just from a different source. Funny that you should recommend those...

[Gereinath Hunter]

PapaKilo, on 09 November 2012 - 09:59 PM, said:

And those personalized builds the mercenary units run? They're the same "best/hottest" builds we have on MechSpecs, just from a different source. Funny that you should recommend those...

You will never see a Hunter Weapon or Hunter lance build up there. Ever.

Vactus, on 09 November 2012 - 09:48 PM, said:

Apparently you haven't seen some of the builds there then because there are plenty of builds that aren't 'Best of the Best'. A quick glance would tell you that. Also, targetting someone gives me plenty of information on someone else's build. True experimentation happened at the start of CB and a little bit hits every time something changes, but honestly, most of the builds are known and out there already.

I wasn't critiquing the content of the site itself. Just by reading this thread already I understand what you're referring to. What I was talking about was the general stigma surrounding meta sites in general where they are eventually treated like the end-all be-all to competitive play.

Also, targeting someone merely shows you their weapons loadout. You can infer a lot from that, but the details around the weapons alter the way a mech feels and plays.

-Gereinath

[Vactus]

Gereinath Hunter, on 09 November 2012 - 10:54 PM, said:

You will never see a Hunter Weapon or Hunter lance build up there. Ever.



I wasn't critiquing the content of the site itself. Just by reading this thread already I understand what you're referring to. What I was talking about was the general stigma surrounding meta sites in general where they are eventually treated like the end-all be-all to competitive play.

Also, targeting someone merely shows you their weapons loadout. You can infer a lot from that, but the details around the weapons alter the way a mech feels and plays.

-Gereinath

Then you must run some very interesting builds for them to never be up there.

As to the second part: Human nature. Sure, humans are great at innovating, but for the most part humanity is lazy and will just use what someone else has already derived. I can understand your dislike of such sites, but they'll never go away. Usually the best sites are treated like that, but there is a reason, because what they say or suggest works for whatever game/environment they're discussing. You may make a build that isn't min/max and beat the living crap out of people, but a min/max build is going, on average, beat someone with your build. Skill being equal, the min/max build will win. A sub-optimal build will usually only win if they heavily out skill their opponent.

Then again this is a team game and you don't have to min/max everything.

Upside: Some mechs can only min/max a little. Jenners are very limited in their 'best of...' configs. Atlas on other hand has a lot of great configs out there.

Edit: Like I said before, most of the innovation and experimenting has already happened. Now people are tweaking as things change.

Edited by Vactus, 09 November 2012 - 11:12 PM.

[Gereinath Hunter]

Personally I'd be more interested in seeing organized lance compositions.

-Gereinath

Edit: Preferably those that don't contain 12x LRM20.

Edited by Gereinath Hunter, 09 November 2012 - 11:20 PM.

[Vactus]

When we can get better CnC and Phase 3 matchmaking, I'm sure that'll happen. However, until they put in more of the game, it's kind of pointless. Might be possible after phase 2, but with PuGs involved it's hard to test actual team vs team mechanics. So here's hoping in the near future we can work on that as well.

Mason, we need a lance section once we get more MWO available to us.

[Mason Grimm]

When competitive play begins, and I mean real competitive play not just pug stomping or random drops, we can set up a section that will allow for this for sure since it IS part of min/maxing things just on a different scale.

[Morgana]

I guess I never viewed the site with "attitude". The reason I went there wasn't to get the "best" build, but to see what kind of builds are possible without spending hours/days configuing each and every one. (free premium time wasted to trial testing mechs, ugh)IMO, there isn't any one "best" build. Different roles demand different builds. It also depends on what kind of team support you have. Can you count on your lance mates to execute their roles? (we hope so anyway). The first Mech I built, I built on my own, and found it quite viable, enough to post it on their website in fact. The second mech, yes, I started with a build from that site, but tweaked it to my personal play style. So I guess the "attitude" suggestion failed on me. I will add though, that by having the opportunity to examine actual builds, that I now understand the mechanics of the mech in greater depth.

[Mason Grimm]

^ Which is exactly one of the things we had hoped to accomplish.

It's a place for people to go and discuss the mechanics and dynamics of mechs other than this site, which tends to cater more towards new players with essential guides and things like that.

Think of it as this sub-forum, on steroids.

[Aware]

My build even tells you how to kill it.

[Elizander]

Perhaps builds can be further tagged as 'economy' or 'wallet-bleeder' in terms of costs for another 2 different categories which would be 'low maintenance' and 'high maintenance'.

A new player buying a stock mech will be limited in c-bills and some want to do some quick custom work to make a base variant workable without breaking the bank. Some players also don't want to build their favorite farming mech into a c-bill sink. Adding such categories to the builds will allow people to go:

"I want a budget build to make leveling my (xxx) variant easier but nothing too expensive cause I'm gonna sell it when I'm done anyway"

or

"I want to get the most effective build that I can for my favorite mech but I don't want repairs to be unmanageable."

or

"Screw building and maintenance costs. I want the most bad*** mech I can get!"

So you'd end up with perhaps 3 tags per build: [Build Cost] [Maintenance Cost] [Role] so maybe you can look for [Economy] [Low Maintenance] [Direct Fire Support] or something like that.

Edited by Elizander, 13 November 2012 - 11:03 PM.

[Mason Grimm]

People can already do this to an extent with the "TAGS" feature (at the bottom of a post). You can then search for things within that TAG grouping.

Adding multiple prefixes was something I tried in the beginning and it cluttered things up far too much.

As for cost; some people add the cost to the build template themselves however I suppose I can input it in there myself.

[Mason Grimm]

Looks like a lot of the build combinations have been submitted.

Hopefully next week we get a new mech to play with and see how well we can work with that!