34 replies to this topic

[unwary]

Basically, remove the 75% free ammo mechanic. Right now this is too easy to exploit by simply adding in 1 ton of ammo for every 3 tons I intend to use. Say I'm an Atlas Artemis LRM boat and I plan to use 2000 LRMS. Thats 2000/180 =~ 11 tons. That means I need to load up 15 tons of LRM ammo and I'll be able to go in match after match with 2025 free LRMs. You can do the same with as a gauss cat, ultra ac5 cataphract, streak cat, and so on.

Replace this with a new system designed where you must buy ammo pods instead of the actual ammo. The ammo pods have a higher initial cost, you always get to keep to it, and are free to move the pods to another mech if you want .

The ammo pods never need to rebought when you run out of ammo. But when you run out of ammo, you need to refill them. So there are 2 separate costs, one for the initial installation of the ammo pods and the other to refill them based on ammo type.

Say I'm making a gausscat and want to have 8 tons of ammo. So I buy 8 gauss ammo pods for a cost of 160,000 cbills (one-time investment). I go into a fight and miraculously fire off all 80 of it. Now it's time to rearm. Based on the current system, it costs 5,000 (20,000*0.25) cbills to get 1 ton of gauss ammo, I so pay 8*5,000=40,000 cbills to refill all my gauss ammo pods.

The key point is to have the refill cost scaled to the current cost per ton of ammo for the weapon type.

This keeps the rearm costs inline with want the devs planned and stops people from exploiting the current design to get free ammo.

[Ceribus]

I agree completely, lower reload costs to 25% of purchase cost instead of magically refilling 75% of the ammo and making them pay to reload 25% of the ammo

Edited by Ceribus, 22 November 2012 - 07:11 AM.

[EndoDrake 263]

I agree. In theory, the 'free rearm' is a nice feature - but in practice, it's a way, way too easy system to 'game'. Adding a ton or three extra ammo in return for never having to rearm again? Yes please!

Alternatively, I'd suggest making it so that the '75% free rearm' only happens when a player's account has under a certain amount of C-bills remaining - this'd bring it closer to the original intent, not leaving a player poor on his luck completely destitute. If you have the money, though, you'd best be ready to PAY for all those Artemis-enabled LRMs.

[JudgeDeathCZ]

And if i load up 11 ton of artemis LRM amoo then i have to pay 60k*11=660k vs 180k from win match...never gonna happen bcuz players will never do any progress

[unwary]

JudgeDeathCZ, on 22 November 2012 - 07:21 AM, said:

And if i load up 11 ton of artemis LRM amoo then i have to pay 60k*11=660k vs 180k from win match...never gonna happen bcuz players will never do any progress

You failed to read. I meant you need to pay the current scaled cost of 25% per ammo ton. For Artemis LRMs, that would be 15,000 per ton (25% of 60,000). So that 660k is actually 15,000*11=165,000 cbills. You still pay the high initial cost of installing the ammo but the rearming costs is still the same. It sticks with the current economy system has.

[RedHairDave]

does anyone run lrm's anymore anyway?

[DrKippy]

Maybe just lowering the % would work better.

You get 25% back instead of 75%. Far more incentive to actually reload. Enough to try to join the fight if you're actually that strapped for cash...

Though, I honestly feel like the reload/rearm model will go through a major overhaul at some point. Maybe not even anytime soon, but some day. It's pretty easy to see we'll get to a point where you run a particular variant just to generate C-Bills, and then take out your big upgraded ammo-laden berserker to lay waste when you feel like it.

Though, maybe that's intended. I dunno. It feels a bit punishing to larger Mechs, but, again, maybe that's intended. I'm interested in how people feel about it after a year of play and after everyone has figured out how to min/max their income best.

[Gaulwa]

No, any "free" rearm only encourage people to run in batle with sub-par Mechs, penalising the team.
I believe:
armour repair should cost next to nothing
All mechs should be repaired to 100% to be allowed in battle
rearming should always cost money

Therefore, I like this suggestion.

[JudgeDeathCZ]

And if i load up ammo for more money than i can pay for?Especially for some assault LRM boats(see kraken/bane 100toner with 8xLRM15.It must eat a sh1tload of ammo)

[Jabilac]

Ceribus, on 22 November 2012 - 07:10 AM, said:

I agree completely, lower reload costs to 25% of purchase cost instead of magically refilling 75% of the ammo and making them pay to reload 25% of the ammo

EndoDrake 263, on 22 November 2012 - 07:15 AM, said:

I agree. In theory, the 'free rearm' is a nice feature - but in practice, it's a way, way too easy system to 'game'. Adding a ton or three extra ammo in return for never having to rearm again? Yes please!

Alternatively, I'd suggest making it so that the '75% free rearm' only happens when a player's account has under a certain amount of C-bills remaining - this'd bring it closer to the original intent, not leaving a player poor on his luck completely destitute. If you have the money, though, you'd best be ready to PAY for all those Artemis-enabled LRMs.

I think a merge of these ideas would make the most sense.

Ammo reload costs are at 25% of original purchase price and 75% free re-arm happens when players c-bills total is below a set amount.

[Corvus Antaka]

please do this.

[Skyfaller]

unwary, on 22 November 2012 - 07:04 AM, said:

Basically, remove the 75% free ammo mechanic. Right now this is too easy to exploit by simply adding in 1 ton of ammo for every 3 tons I intend to use. Say I'm an Atlas Artemis LRM boat and I plan to use 2000 LRMS. Thats 2000/180 =~ 11 tons. That means I need to load up 15 tons of LRM ammo and I'll be able to go in match after match with 2025 free LRMs. You can do the same with as a gauss cat, ultra ac5 cataphract, streak cat, and so on.

Replace this with a new system designed where you must buy ammo pods instead of the actual ammo. The ammo pods have a higher initial cost, you always get to keep to it, and are free to move the pods to another mech if you want .

The ammo pods never need to rebought when you run out of ammo. But when you run out of ammo, you need to refill them. So there are 2 separate costs, one for the initial installation of the ammo pods and the other to refill them based on ammo type.

Say I'm making a gausscat and want to have 8 tons of ammo. So I buy 8 gauss ammo pods for a cost of 160,000 cbills (one-time investment). I go into a fight and miraculously fire off all 80 of it. Now it's time to rearm. Based on the current system, it costs 5,000 (20,000*0.25) cbills to get 1 ton of gauss ammo, I so pay 8*5,000=40,000 cbills to refill all my gauss ammo pods.

The key point is to have the refill cost scaled to the current cost per ton of ammo for the weapon type.

This keeps the rearm costs inline with want the devs planned and stops people from exploiting the current design to get free ammo.

The problem with the free re-arm is that the ammo costs are ridiculously expensive compared to the rewards from a won or lost map no matter the performance of the player.

For example, the Catapult A1 is a pure ammo-based mech. If you choose to be LRM support you need a LOT of missiles since more than half of them will miss (lock loss, terrain/buildings,etc). If you choose to be short range combatant the SRM's are expended at a very fast rate and the SSRM's are really expensive and expended rather quickly.

Artemis (practically mandatory for any missile boat) doubles the price of ammo.

Right now for example, my LRM CatA1 would need to spend 130k cbills to refill its ammo @1080 missiles. In almost every game I run out of them and do avg 500 to 1000 damage but get only 1 or 2 kills at best but 6 to 8 assists. The missile warning message is a blessing in disguise as you have no idea how many ppc/gauss mechs i force to hide just by firing one launcher at them.


What the devs need to do is simply increase the cost of the launchers a LOT and reduce the ammo costs so they are very cheap. That way players do 'grind' for their weapon of choice and pay dearly for it... while the ammo is available in non-crippling cbill costs.

[ExAstris]

I'm OK with changing the mechanic of giving the bottom 75% for free to one in which we pay for every shot. But the total price for a reload can not stay as high as it is now.

Currently we're being asked to choose between profit and ammo-based mechs. Its fine to make us pay a few c-bills to reload our mechs, but it shouldn't cost me 4x more than it cost to rebuild my mech from scratch just to get the ammo for the next round. The absolute max I should ever pay for ammunition is around 25k c-bills. Thats a full 1/3 of a loss payout and in conjunction with mech repairs will cut the profit margin to almost nill. Even asking that much for ammo is problematic though because that is still a huge encouragement to run an energy mech as I could up my profits by 10-30% just by swapping to one.

I shouldn't be making choices between weapon types I take and what profit I want. I am perfectly OK with increasing repair costs to compensation, such that average repair bills go from 20-40k to 30-60k, but then reduce ammo reload cost to a maximum of 10k or so instead of the unlimited cost it currently is to top off (which for even my non-Artemis SRM boats is up to 54k, and for Artemis mechs runs to 120k).

[CrowTRobot]

I still turned a profit when I was running an LRM boat with 1600 LRMs and regularly expending them all every round.

[unwary]

ExAstris, on 22 November 2012 - 11:02 AM, said:

I'm OK with changing the mechanic of giving the bottom 75% for free to one in which we pay for every shot. But the total price for a reload can not stay as high as it is now.
....
I shouldn't be making choices between weapon types I take and what profit I want. I am perfectly OK with increasing repair costs to compensation, such that average repair bills go from 20-40k to 30-60k, but then reduce ammo reload cost to a maximum of 10k or so instead of the unlimited cost it currently is to top off (which for even my non-Artemis SRM boats is up to 54k, and for Artemis mechs runs to 120k).

The price of using the latest and greatest high tech is the high price that comes with it. However, people are getting around this by putting more ammo than they plan to use. Say you usually only use 500 ssrm2. Then you slap 7 tons of ssrm2 ammo then use the 75% free ammo return to always play with 525 ssrm2's. No more paying to rearm.

What I am suggesting is for the devs to find a new way that mimics the costs savings of the 75% free ammo refill but still force players to pay for the remaining 25% cost to get them battle ready.

Edited by unwary, 22 November 2012 - 11:54 AM.

[_Rorschach_]

Cost is a terrible balancing mechanism. It just leads to either frustration (for players that need to grind that cash), farming/bots (for players that don't want the grind and don't care if they ruin the game) or a Pay2Win situation (where players with more money can run their best loadouts more often than those with less money).

For one time cost it is thoroughly acceptable though (imo). You spend your time/money, you get your reward. Done. For rearm/repair it can be a huge problem. Now repair costs are - to an extent - the same for every kind of mech. They are a bit more punishing to heavier types and one's running the latest and greatest in engines and upgrades, but they are certainly manageable and basically never leave you with a loss.

Now ammo costs, they are a different kind of beast entirely. They can vary extremely widely from 0 to several hundreds of thousands of C-bills. How the heck do you balance that? The only ways I see are either free ammo (the free refill to 75% is kind of acceptable but certainly not optimal. If you want maximum performance from your mech every time you basically have to sell MC-bought mechs for C-bills, which is WAY to close to Pay2Win WoT Gold Ammo for my taste) or dirt cheap ammo. Even a boat with 10 to 15 tons of Artemis LRMs should never pay more than 1/4 to 1/3 of it's repair cost for a rearm. If the free rearm is removed (or the percentage reduced) ammo has to get A LOT cheaper. As in by a factor of 30 to 100.

[Spirit of the Wolf]

100% Agreed.

I almost always use the free rearm, because it is prohibitively expensive to do anything else, except on the smallest of mechs.

Even the jenner build would be terrible if you had to pay for all of those SSRMs every match.

The problem here is mostly that it was not thought out ahead of time.

On the other hand, I'd be willing to bet my founder's hunchie that PGI is already working on a solution to this. (Whether or not the player base will like it though, is a horse of a different color.)

[Doomstryke]

Could just make it so you can salvage parts and ammo or use the salvaged parts bonus as credit towards ammo instead of c-bills? That could help ballance this a bit for those that aren't running founders tags and make the extra 100k per match over non founders. while still forcing you to play properly to keep your re-arm costs down. If you die quick you got all your ammo anyways and if you help properly you get to salvage your ammo /parts costs. Kinda like old mech commander back in the day

[Asmosis]

If ammo prices were actually balanced it'd make sense, but they're not.

What they are in TT has absolutely NO bearing on a live FPS game. one ton of atremis lrm ammo is as good as 1 ton of ac5 ammo etc. having some weapons cost 10x as much to run when they are about as effective makes no sense without the 75% reload.

And thats the balancing point. Ballistics generally need 100% ammo load for the match, missile boats dont.

Besides, if you do this for ammo you have to do this for armor, items and structure(lol) as well.

Edited by Asmosis, 22 November 2012 - 08:26 PM.

[ExAstris]

unwary, on 22 November 2012 - 11:52 AM, said:

The price of using the latest and greatest high tech is the high price that comes with it. However, people are getting around this by putting more ammo than they plan to use. Say you usually only use 500 ssrm2. Then you slap 7 tons of ssrm2 ammo then use the 75% free ammo return to always play with 525 ssrm2's. No more paying to rearm.

What I am suggesting is for the devs to find a new way that mimics the costs savings of the 75% free ammo refill but still force players to pay for the remaining 25% cost to get them battle ready.

Your position breaks down in multiple ways. A mech armed with the latest and greatest everything, but is a laser boat, still pays a pitance in repair fees compared to a mech topping off even a moderate amount of missile ammunition. So not even tech, by itself, is really hurting repair costs all that much in game. Its just ammo, and at that, mostly just ammo for missiles.

And the missile boats don't get off "free" by loading extra ammo so that they don't have to pay for the missiles. While it is true that ammo based mechs can do this to 'get off' the c-bill hook and get the same net profits for the same performance that energy boats are, they do not get off the loadout penalty of having to dedicate anywhere from 1-3 extra tons and crits just to ammo, making them less effective.




As has been noted, making ammo costs very high at all is just a terrible idea. My previous off-handed comment of an absolute max of 25k was even way to high. Thats still far too much profit being chewed up by weapon selection. Net profit should not be effected by much more than 5-10% in even the most extreme cases. Any more than that and you have an unintended systemic level incentive to utelize only 1/3 of the game's weapon selection. Thats hardly in the spirit of a game that prides itself on customization and options.

So make us pay for every shot, the 75% free business is silly (though it might be a cool feature of specific contracts when faction warfare rolls around). But when you do make us pay for every shot, make it so that even a 2k Artemis LRM boat only has to cough up 10k c-bills to completely refill.

This could be done by adjusting all reload prices so that every ton of ammo costs no more than 1k c-bills each to rearm, or you could just put an arbitrary cap at 10k c-bills for rearm (buyers in bulk get discounts).