28 replies to this topic

[Trog16]

Hello all,

Long time lurker, first time poster. Getting SO Excited about this game, made the front page my home page for booting up. Anyways enough fan boy stuff

I tried a forum search for this but my forumsearchFU is not strong, never has been, so I apologize if this has already been talked about, but how long will battles take?

I play World of Tanks quite a bit right now, and really like the 15 minute timed battle set up. No one can camp forever, yet there is time to play defensively and see the battle ebb and flow.

Just wondering if anything has been said, and or what the community thinks. Also are there multiple battle modes? Capture and control, annihilation, Pure Attack, Pure Defense, King of the Hill. . . and would the battle time change based on that feature?

Trog

[ReaperKane]

Battle Time of 15 to 20 minutes per round would be nice for a pure team death match.
For the other planned game-modes i'm not sure if it could work.

[Nik Van Rhijn]

Devs are aiming for about 20 min so far.

[Felix Dante]

I normally hate time limits of any sort on games I play.

However...I can see the need for a basic time limit on each game.
At least 15 minutes is a good start.

Less for more specific game ideas, more for big important battles. Never less than...say 5 minutes, or more than 20 or 30 minutes max.

The main thing to think about, is that you don't want to have no time limits on matches. As a single game might end up going for hours in certain types of terrain, and/or the factor of people having to drop out of a battle due to it having taken too long to play.

You also don't want matches ending so early that some of the player's never end up seeing each other either, or only get to fire a few shots before time runs out.

[Thorolf Kylesson]

I Think time limits are good for certain scenarios where you have to get to, kill, destroy an abjective before a certain time. I believe that most will be policed on thier own. I for one am not going to sit online for hours waiting for some one to fall into an ambush. Nor do I think maps will be so big that it would an hour of wondering just to find your adversary.

[SideSt3p]

I'm hoping 20-30mins. When you get into hour long games that gets a bit depressing (and boring) but shorter then 15mins I feel like the game hasn't had a chance to evolve enough.

I'm just excited for Beta in hopefully a few months. We'll just have to wait and see

[Victor Morson]

I'm really hoping the game time that's maximum is at least an hour, with the average game being the 35-40 minute mark. MechWarrior has always been a game about positioning, harassment, pushing in.. forcing battles to conclude that fast could turn the entire affair into a blitzing gun fest that would let the entire thing down, in particular with 12 players. It'd give you no other option than advance, focus fire, repeat.

In the past it takes 15 minutes just to get out of the recon and harassment phase and into the actual "full company contact" period.

Edited by Victor Morson, 13 April 2012 - 11:30 AM.

[stun]

Victor Morson, on 13 April 2012 - 11:30 AM, said:

I'm really hoping the game time that's maximum is at least an hour, with the average game being the 35-40 minute mark. MechWarrior has always been a game about positioning, harassment, pushing in.. forcing battles to conclude that fast could turn the entire affair into a blitzing gun fest that would let the entire thing down, in particular with 12 players. It'd give you no other option than advance, focus fire, repeat.

In the past it takes 15 minutes just to get out of the recon and harassment phase and into the actual "full company contact" period.

A one hour time frame is nice, but what about when the last guy left has a really fast mech and keeps running away? suppose their team is somehow winning (points/scorewise?). We have all seen this happen before.

[Dragorath]

5 mnutes would be for sure to short, maybe for an one vs one match, but only there so short, but why not as long as it takes like WoW. The characters respawned in WoW here they won't. Furthermore a lot of tactical gamplay can take some time like hit and run tactics. I would be mad if this doesn't work. My favourite way with small fast Mechs, where you can out-maneuvre other players.
Or 20 minutes should be fair. Some matches will be over sooner than this.

Edited by Dragorath, 13 April 2012 - 12:27 PM.

[osito]

I haven't seen any of their maps, so i can't say how long the time limit should be. I do believe their should be a time limit for this game. This is due to how i believe they are going to run their battles. If i remember right their big planet conquests will have multiple teams from the factions involved in team battles. So say like 50 battles(i.e) So there will be 50 12vs 12 fights and the faction with the most wins gets control of the planet. Until it is contested again. I think they will give us a decent map to work with that we can use all sorts of tactics but can have a time limit without destroying the feel of mechwarrior.

[Gigaton]

Trog16, on 13 April 2012 - 10:01 AM, said:

I play World of Tanks quite a bit right now, and really like the 15 minute timed battle set up. No one can camp forever, yet there is time to play defensively and see the battle ebb and flow.

The avg. battle duration is nowhere close to 15 mins in WoT though. You can check your avg. with the WoT dossier tool. From the polls I have seen, about 4-5 mins is the global avg. duration. Mine is bit less than that, since I'm quite rushy (IIRC, bit over 3 mins).

Depending what kind of fire-power to protection ratio and how big maps MW:O has that could go up. WoT is 15-15 with about 1.5kmx1.5km maps or so (some are bigger, some are smaller), 1-on-1 fights between same tier tanks normally take at least 30-40 secs or so at higher tiers.

With universal ~10 second reloads and canon damage/heat and 5kmx5km maps, I could see MW:O have about 10+ minute battles (maybe even 20+ mins if both sides are extremely cautious, and if game allows it), with most time spent on moving.

For the record, an Atlas that is not delayed by terrain or enemy harrasment can run 9 kilometers in 10 mins.

Edited by Gigaton, 13 April 2012 - 01:54 PM.

[Victor Morson]

stun, on 13 April 2012 - 12:11 PM, said:

A one hour time frame is nice, but what about when the last guy left has a really fast mech and keeps running away? suppose their team is somehow winning (points/scorewise?). We have all seen this happen before.

It's a legitimate issue to bring up. I'd like to think that commander abilities would be a huge step in fixing that, using the radar ping to narrow down his position and stomp him out, honestly.

Outside of objective-based play, there's unfortunately little that can be done about it ; I think reducing the match time drastically is definitely the wrong step, though. Because that will force them to shrink the map sizes and flush all of the awesome work they've done on the tactical stuff. 'mech battles take time, and positioning takes even longer.

A lot of what sets MechWarrior apart from a normal FPS is the "calm before the storm," where you are positioning and scanning and moving to terrain and such. Without this phase all you'll have is two teams smashing into each other and it'd really dumb the experience down.

Having a set "win condition" other than total destruction of the enemy team (say, 80% damage) could really help this out though.

Edited by Victor Morson, 13 April 2012 - 01:16 PM.

[Gun Bear]

Gigaton, on 13 April 2012 - 01:12 PM, said:

The avg. battle duration is nowhere close to 15 mins in WoT though. You can check your avg. with the WoT dossier tool. From the polls I have seen, about 4-5 mins is the global avg. duration. Mine is bit less than that, since I'm quite rushy (IIRC, bit over 3 mins).

Depending what kind of fire-power to protection ratio and how big maps MW:O has that could go up. WoT is 15-15 with about 1.5kmx1.5km maps or so (some are bigger, some are smaller), 1-on-1 fights between same tier tanks normally take at least 30-40 secs or so at higher tiers.

With universal ~10 second reloads and canon damage/heat and 5kmx5km maps, I could see MW:O have about 10+ minute battles (maybe even 20+ mins if both sides are extremely cautious, and if game allows it), with most time spent on moving.

For the record, an Atlas that is not delayed by terrain or enemy harrasment can run 9 kilometers in 10 mins.

I don't think World of Tanks logic can be applied to Mechwarrior so easily. It should take 2-3 minutes for two good pilots in similar 'Mechs to duel, if not longer. That is a straight up 1 on 1 duel though, it almost never happens because someone else will jump in on either side of the fight eventually.

[eZZip]

Gigaton, on 13 April 2012 - 01:12 PM, said:

The avg. battle duration is nowhere close to 15 mins in WoT though. You can check your avg. with the WoT dossier tool. From the polls I have seen, about 4-5 mins is the global avg. duration. Mine is bit less than that, since I'm quite rushy (IIRC, bit over 3 mins).

I can't see games being that short in WoT, especially in higher tiers where everybody moves at a crawl.

Gun Bear, on 13 April 2012 - 03:29 PM, said:

I don't think World of Tanks logic can be applied to Mechwarrior so easily. It should take 2-3 minutes for two good pilots in similar 'Mechs to duel, if not longer.

I personally hope that most duels would last less than 2 minutes (assuming decent aiming and maneuvering abilities). I can't imagine how a duel could last hours as described in a few source materials for some famous pilots, IIRC.

stun, on 13 April 2012 - 12:11 PM, said:

A one hour time frame is nice, but what about when the last guy left has a really fast mech and keeps running away? suppose their team is somehow winning (points/scorewise?). We have all seen this happen before.

With multiple players alive on the other team, they should be able to intercept him (one guy follows while another goes to where the enemy will likely run to). An hour is probably too long, though, and there should definitely be some other victory condition if the maps are really large (notice games like TF2 (in arena mode) and WoT have a capture point).

[Gigaton]

Gun Bear, on 13 April 2012 - 03:29 PM, said:

I don't think World of Tanks logic can be applied to Mechwarrior so easily. It should take 2-3 minutes for two good pilots in similar 'Mechs to duel, if not longer.

Just trying to illustrate ratio of damage output to staying power. In the WoT example I was assuming no pulling back for cover, no retreating, no non-penetrating hits, no misses and so forth.

Assuming TT DPS and armour values stay as they are for MW:O, it theoretically takes under 30 secs for Jenner to destroy every single point of armour and internal structure on another Jenner. For Atlas vs. Atlas it's 55 secs. Obviously, this degree of damage is not really needed to take out a 'mech.

eZZip, on 13 April 2012 - 04:05 PM, said:

I can't see games being that short in WoT, especially in higher tiers where everybody moves at a crawl.

Yeah I know. The games sometimes feel really long so it's surprising how short they really are ultimately. Just checked mine, it's 3 mins 46 secs. You can check yours too here: http://wot-dossier.appspot.com/

Edited by Gigaton, 13 April 2012 - 04:19 PM.

[Russolini]

Having played world of tanks for the last year or so........ I kept saying man I would love to see mechwarrior do something like this. Low and behold we are almost there. Depending on how experience is awarded I'm thinking you won't want hour long games. For the more hardcore players I think there will be different modes, again much like WOT, that will allow for the more tactical groups to play as a Star and not a bunch of individuals thrown together. Remember a large portion of the player base will be queuing up to play a few games and be done for the night and they will want to earn cbills and experience so they can progress.

WOT is a pretty good model albeit frustrating when you just want to play your higher tier tank on an non premium membership.

WOT is pretty darn successful and when something is successful you see many imitators (not a bad thing) World of Warcraft is a great example.

All speculation on my part

I think 15-20 minute battles for the random player is about right. For the guild/clans that are out there, it's not nearly enough time. I think we will see both.

[Aegis Kleais]

Deathmatch ~20mins, Dropship ~ 1 hour.

[Yeach]

Not interested in the buildup to the contact and combat (can we call it foreplay?)
I would be more interesting to know how quick combat is...

That is in a straight-out fight with "shooting" how quick a mech lasts.
I am thinking more like 2 to 10 mins. (4 on 4)

[MagnusEffect]

I'm okay with time limits as long as I can keep my mech even if my team loses at the end of the round, but I'm still alive and kicking. I shouldn't be punished just because my team decided to hurry up and get dead.

From what I can tell, the devs are smart enough to realize the value of this. I'm confident they will work something out that is fair.

Edited by MagnusEffect, 13 April 2012 - 05:27 PM.

[Rejarial Galatan]

I honestly hate imposing time limits on fights. I play Battlefield 3 on the Conquest mode ALOT. And how it works there is, you have from 3 to 5 objectives depending on map type. These are basically flags. Once your team has over 50% in their control the enemy starts bleeding tickets, and for every respawn a team takes not counting revival by assault kit players witht a defib gadget they lose a ticket. MOST battles on well matched teams take about 30 minutes give or take. Some take far less 10 minutes or shorter, some take far far longer. Longest match I was in was about an hour or so. everyone turtled and both teams had 1 objective with the middle not taken. ANYWAY a way this could apply to MW:O is have a set of objectives say like 3 or 4 and first team to take em all and hold for a few minutes wins OR give each team 300 tickets each, make em go for 3-5 objectives ala BF3 and first team to be drained to 0 tickets loses. I only offer this up as a way to have decent half hour or so matches on well balanced teams. Again, only suggesting XD