5 replies to this topic

[banlish]

Two suggestions. Short term and LONG term.

1. Adjusting payouts to reward participatio This should be able to be done without much coding.

I've played roughly 50 games in the last two days. In almost 68% of them (yes 34 matches worth) either my own side or the enemy side had AFK players. Unsurprisingly the majority of these players were in trial mechs or founders mechs without repair costs.


Everyone knows the reasons, so I'm going to try to avoid a giant wall of txt to try to get to the meat of the matter.

Lets think of this as a way of active vrs inactive.

If I am active in a match and get 7 assists AND 6 kills. That gives me a total of 7,000 + 12,000. Throw on some random things like a base cap and damage and I might get another 15,000 cbills for a total of 32,000 cbills. Add that with winning the match and I'm just about at 160,000 to 180,000 cbills per match (which has been my typical average, probably a bit low compared to others that play a ton more).

However the afker, who does nothing but setup a script to log his character on, select a trail mech and press 'launch'. Has earned 60,000 cbills per match, since he/she was able to run the bot all night at say 5 matches per hour, or 300,000 cbillls they now have 3 million cbills that were unearned yet they still have access to.

See the problem here?

We don't need a system of typing in codes or whatever, we need simple tools like adjusting the pay scale a bit more.

If just BEING in the match lets me get anywhere from 60k to 140k cbills for doing NOTHING then we're going back to the 'everyone gets an award' mentality our society is falling into these days.

Don't reward SHOWING up, rewards DOING SOMETHING. Make kills 10k vs 2k, make an active base cap 20k vs 5k, Make DAMAGE worth 3x what it is currently.

What I'm trying to say is, make DOING ANYTHING OTHER THEN LOGGING INTO THE GAME WITH A SCRIPT worth more then

2. Add in a report feature - This would take more coding and would be a longer term solution.


If you don't have the resources or the means to police the subscriber base, let the subscribers police themselves.

Enable it so only at the END of a match can someone report on someone on THEIR team or the ENEMY team. People running in and dying in a fire, should be report-able however if someone reports everyone under the sun the system should simply not accept their inputs anymore.

If people report people that are actually doing things wrong AND doing it consistently well, reward them, give them a special skin or camo that SHOWS they actually give a crap about the game and are making sure when they push that report button they are actually doing a service to the community.


I've been playing games for just shy of 25 years, the first game I picked up in 1988 in a hobby store was Battletech, my first pc game I bought a computer for was Mechwarrior. I really care about what happens to this game and hope that a well thought out solution that take a minimum of resources from the devs will be well received and not censored to heck and back.

[weevil]

I agree with the sentiment. Participation, and particularly contribution should be rewarded more strongly. There should be medals for strong contributors, and maybe additional bonuses for getting a certain number of each medal.

BUT, I also think a large number of these discos / idles are due to bugs. I know when I'm dropping in a group of 4, about half of the time at least one member will have a showstopper bug. Either CTD, or blackscreen.

For the moment I'm giving discos the benefit of the doubt. Even though I'm sure some of them are exploiters, hopefully it's only a smallish percentage.

[auston]

I agree that this will help.. but playing with friends on mumble has shown me that a large % of afk'rs are people who bugged out. I would love to see this game succeed for it has gained a structure that has the potential. Hopefully the funding we the fans are giving it is going to the people working on the game ...

[Naeron66]

It should be pretty easy to solve the issue.

There is an issue with people farming in ways that negatively impact their team, we have all seen the mechs firing at the sky until their heat buildup destroys them, we have all seen players quit the match 3 seconds after it starts. At the moment they will receive the set win/loss rewards when the match finishes.

PGI have stated that they will deal with such problems if tickets are raised, but that means PGI will need to spend the time investigating each report and dealing with the problem.

A better solution is to make such methods of farming uneconomic in the first place, that means less people will do it and PGI will have to deal with fewer reports.

They need to change the reward system, that's all and its not a huge change. People who DC won't be penalised that much but people can't exploit farm as they do know. The system below would make it more expensive if you CTD early in a match though.

The same type of approach can be applied to the c-bill reward and the xp reward. For now I will only suggest how PGI could change the c-bill reward.

Alter the set awards for win/loss to be based on performance.

Win/loss reward starts at 0
For Damage done apply a multiplier of 2.5k for Lights, 2k for mediums, 1.5k for heavies and 1k for assaults. Add this amount to the win/loss reward.
For Spot assist, Kill assist, Cap assist and kills multiply the award by 5. Add this to the win/loss reward.

Limit the Win/loss C-Bill reward to 100k/75k respectively (as now).

This approach means that a minimum contribution to the battle gets you the base reward you get now, anything above that is still rewarded in the current way. AFK, heat suicide, rush suicide, out of bounds suicide all drastically reduce income to near 0. As this system is about income rather than costs it can apply to trial mechs and non-trial mechs equally.

So a Light that does 32 damage and gets 2 spot assists gets 100k on a win. An assault would need 80 damage plus two assists. Someone who AFKs might get 10-20k for spot assists if they are lucky. Someone who overheat suicides straight away gets 0 income for the win/loss, pretty much all they can hope for is a Cap win reward.

This approach of simply limiting the reward rather than doing something like multiplying the normal amount by .75 if you lose does not penalise an unlucky game as much as it would otherwise. If the light above wanders into the main enemy force and does 10 damage before dying they still get 25k on a loss or win, a single spot assist adds another 10k. They would only need 26 damage and 1 assist to get 75k which is the same as the loss reward that we get now and not a huge amount less than the win reward.

The benefit of this system is that it is much easier to tweak. If people are not getting enough out on losses then they could increase the multipliers for the amount applied to a loss reward but keep the limit at 75k , A light that only managed 10 damage could then get 40k added to the reward rather than 25 using the numbers above. Other possibilities include changing how much each element is multiplied by (either up or down) for both a win and a loss.

The downside of this is that an unopposed base cap rush would get very little reward. The 2.5k for a Cap assist only gives you 12.5k as the win game reward with the numbers proposed above (of course they could just change the multiplier for that single element). Of course some people might feel that discouraging that tactic as a way gaining c-bills/xp is not a disadvantage.

Just to reiterate the numbers I use for the multipliers above are just suggestions, its more the general idea of implementing this I would like to focus on.

[TheDitto]

Easy - change the location of the Launch button on the display. Make it random

Seriously, as much as I understand the "benefit of the doubt" argument, I do agree with the report option or other such options in the long run. Heck, even if I disconnected, I wouldn't complain about not getting any C-Bills or such as a result, hey I disconnected!! Whatever the reason, I didn't contribute, so intentional or not .. it shouldn't be rewarded.

[sycocys]

Just add a launch confirmation pop up that appears in randoms spots. Bots are nuked.


Most dc's at the start of a match are far more likely due to people happening upon a bug than malicious intent. (Liek zomg this IS a beta?)

Locking an overheated mech for a longer period - say 45 mins - 1 hour would grind any manual farming in that method to a halt. Going o.b. results in a 0 gain suicide already, and there's really nothing that can be done about suicide rushes but to use the intel you gain and take advantage of the distraction - kamikaze attacks are a legitimate attack strategy.

I still think rewards should be re-worked some, as well as the mechanics for them (spot assists has a very spotty mechanic for instance), as well as new ones added.

Edited by sycocys, 04 December 2012 - 06:43 AM.