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This post is rather extensive, so I'll give you an overview of what topics are addressed right here at the start.
The first part will discuss why the farming is occurring, i.e. the motivation of farmers/bots. After that I'll explain the game mechanics that make farming possible at all. Finally I'll present a number of suggestions how the issue could be dealt with.
So let's start of with the Why:
The simple answer is MONEY. By which I mean C-bills. The farmers feel they either gain too little profit each match to afford all the mechs and equipment they want in the amount of time they are willing to spend to get it without buying MCs or that rearm/repair costs are too high so they have to farm to be able to run their 'serious play' mechs for any length of time.
Personally I think the amount of credits gained in a match is pretty much ok right now. I mostly play solo with pretty tricked out heavy mechs and even in matches where our side gets steamrolled and I end up horribly shot up and cored I walk away with about 70k C-bills after repairs. Take away my bonuses and it's still around 30k.
Even if I decided to auto-rearm (which I don't, I just add one or two additional tons of ammo to offset the 25% loss due to free refill) I'd still break even in an absolute worst case scenario. From a good match I walk away with up to a quarter million within 10 minutes time. The only MC I spent so far were on an additional mech bay (still can't decide if I want a Cent 9D or a Cat C4 in there). But ofc that's personal experience and opinion.
I don't run any LRM boats (or any mech using LRMs for that matter) so I can not speak to the rearm cost for those firing in excess of 1000 missiles a match. From the little bit of math I did on that I can see that it could be a real money drain. So maybe either LRM ammo costs need to be reduced or auto-rearm set to off by default so people don't accidentally burn holes in their pockets.
Now let's take a look at the How:
There's two types of income in MWO. Individual rewards and group rewards.
Individual rewards are earned by causing damage to the enemy, spotting assists, component destruction, kill assists, kills and capture assists. They are calculated individually for each pilot.
Group rewards are win/loss/tie and capture rewards. They are the same for every player on a team. A player that is afk will obviously gain none of the individual rewards. Similarly a bot doesn't either, but they might once there are more advanced macros out there (You know they will appear. Even just randomly spamming 'R' while running circles into the ground might earn you a spotting assist once in a while).
So the farmers either use cheap custom mechs to keep repair costs at a minimum or trial mechs, so they gain the most profit from the rewards they gain without needing to participate: The group rewards.
Another variant is suicide farming. In that case the player is actually playing, but not to the benefit of his team. It works like this: Use a trial light or a custom Commando stripped of all armor and with deactivated auto-rearm/repair, run straight into the middle of the enemy team, stand still, die, earn full match rewards and maybe even some spotting/damage/kill assist money.
Why isn't this method of farming more popular? The mech is then locked until the match ends, which means it can't be done continuously. It requires the player to actually do something (even if it's just holding 'W'). The whole point of farming is to gain C-bills with the least amount of work. So I don't really consider suicide farming a problem.
Now we come to the part where we think about Solutions:
We can go two basic directions here. Take away the motivation to farm/bot or take away the ability to do so.
Taking away the motivation can be achieved in a number of ways. Increased rewards, decreased repair and rearm bills, decreased mech and equipment cost, free C-bills, free mechs, ...
Basically they all boil down to one thing: cut down the time required to earn stuff. While the economy might not be perfect (LRM rearm) I already mentioned that I think it's already pretty decent. So I don't see a whole lot that can be done on that front. Also there are two fundamental problems with this approach:
The devs need to make money. They have kids to feed and rent to pay. The game may be F2P but if they give away to much stuff for free or next to nothing, it'll go from free_to-play to simply not-play because they'll have to shut it down.
Further as long as there is ANYTHING in the game that you have to earn, ANY amount of time you need to spend, there's always going to be farmers and bots to circumvent even that amount of work.
So the other approach is to take away the means to farm. There's also a number of ways to achieve this:
AFK/bot/suicide farming detection - basically trying to find out if a player is doing one of these things and taking countermeasures. That can include server side analysis of the players input, hit percentage, movement patterns, ... or community driven detection with player ratings, reporting, vote kicking, ...
Captchas or a similar mechanic - automatic kicking/revoking of rewards for players that don't successfully complete the Captcha at the start of the match. Might be quite annoying to honest players after a while. Not my favorite.
Taking away group rewards entirely and boosting individual rewards so the gains stay at the same level overall. While more advanced bots might still make some profit here and there and suicide farmers would receive some pay it would make them largely ineffective. Just playing the game to the best of your abilities would net you a lot more than running a bot.
So finally I'd like to ask you to fill out the polls and voice your opinions on the issue. The more attention this gathers the sooner we might just see some measures to fix it!
Good hunting,
Alex/pack.wolf
edit: When writing the text about match rewards I forgot about salvage. Imo salvage money should be divided somehow based on XP earned/damage dealt so again afk players or bots don't profit from it, but active players do. This might be a tough one though, because of the different roles different weight classes play and the different amounts of dmg/XP they achieve in a match.
Edited by pack wolf, 15 November 2012 - 06:59 AM.
) is the cost of armor versus internals. My repair costs usually have (unupgraded) armor costing roughly 75-80 times as much to repair as (unupgraded) internals. This baffles me. it costs 75 times as much to bolt a plate on, then it does to repair much more delicate and complex structures. But, even ignoring the "common sense/reality" that could be applied to that (because I do believe that game balance trumps "reality" every time) it discourages a pilot from piloting well. It says "sure, you can twist, turn, and take those shots on your armored parts to stay alive longer, but we'll punish you for it later" instead of making the external armor cheaper to repair, and "punishing" someone for having their internals blown apart. It shouldn't cost as much for my atlas to repair it armor as it does to repair it's gauss, and two ER large lasers, XL engine and all internal damages. But, almost every fight, the cost for armor, and the cost for structure and "items" is almost identical. usually within about 5K c-bills of each other.
