90 replies to this topic

[Taizan]

ollo, on 16 December 2012 - 06:12 AM, said:

Based on what? Since you seem to know the coming mechanics and what will be awarded how, why not share this info with us?

This is based on "what they've said" in that they want to increase the reward for teamplay in the match.

From the command chair section (did't even have to search!):
http://mwomercs.com/...0-into-the-lab/

Quote

We're taking a look at CB/EXP rewards, focusing on rewarding teamplay above all else. This means a reduction in kill/assist/damage done rewarding, and an increase in holding resources points. With a new mode, comes a new way to launch into matches.

[PoLaR]

I'll take less rewards over lessening the AFK percentage per game.

It's pretty rare to have a full game these days.

Farmers and Afk's can go to hell

Edited by PoLaR, 16 December 2012 - 06:27 AM.

[Volume]

elbloom, on 16 December 2012 - 06:19 AM, said:

If you rock the enemys world so much, why worry about damage-based rewards when you don´t suck ?

Because any new player picking the game up is going to "suck" and they shouldn't be punished for learning the game in real matches, since there's nowhere else to do it. No custom servers, no tutorials, no training modes, no practice against bots, just joining a real match with one of four gimped 'Mechs that they can't customize or earn XP in. At least they don't have to repair it, because they won't be earning enough to repair/rearm a 'Mech once they manage to purchase one, due to earning based upon performance, and not knowing how to play well, let alone even being able to perform optimally in a stock 'mech vs S-tier equipment.

PoLaR, on 16 December 2012 - 06:27 AM, said:

I'll take less rewards over lessening the AFK percentage per game.

It's pretty rare to have a full game these days.

Farmers and Afk's can go to hell

I agree, I'm just saying it doesn't have to be one-or-the-other. We could have real players and some decent rewards if they had a better anti-AFK/leaver/farmer system in place.

Edited by Volume, 16 December 2012 - 06:30 AM.

[Rasilon]

How about part of the reward being an amount that accumulates during the match based on either proximity to enemy, or at least line of sight to them?

[Belorion]

I am for the removal of the big bonus at the end. Its the only way to combat afk farming.

Edited by Belorion, 16 December 2012 - 07:03 AM.

[Razegerogero]

Well, those of you who are concerned of the necessity of scoring good damages and kills to get the win/loss bonus, have you considered what AFK stands for?

Most AFK players can simply be detected by no movement or other input from the player. So if you just come in, minimize the game and do your home work as it runs, you'll not be moving as such you can be flagged as AFK. Of course, I wouldn't know what the developers are going to do to counter it, but it's also possible to just use two computers and have the WASD jammed down of the one with the game on. But such simple workarounds are very easy to counter; In fact, there's been considerable effort to pick apart a bot and an actual human player, both in game studios and in academia. Nowadays, those methods are very good and basically never give false positives, while false negatives too are quite rare.

Edited by Razegerogero, 16 December 2012 - 06:44 AM.

[Chrithu]

Volume, on 16 December 2012 - 04:44 AM, said:

Honestly, I see a lot of problems with this. If everything is performance-based (since it won't be just for showing up) this punishes people who enter the match and end up having to deal with a hud bug.

Seriously: When will people get that it is generally a very bad idea to account for bugs that ought to be fixed when changing/fixing other parts of the game.

In this special case there is no harm in just forgetting about the bug when fixing the reward system. Why? Because everybody is hit by that bloody bug on a pretty equal basis. So no one really loses anything from it.

[Czardread]

i prefer losing money to bugs than losing my fun to afkers and farmers.

Today i hit the bottom of afk hating. after a match with 3 afk's in trial mechs (2 assaults and one medium), and blowing 2 afks in the next 2 matches, in the fourth match, i had an afk deciding to shoot me BACK.

clarifying, after 2 full minutes in the match with the NOT moving and NOT responding, i shoot once on it's leg. 1 minute later, nothing.
Then i decided to ruin the ******* by blowing all his components, after the leg and half its ST, he THEN decided to play, by shooting me exclusively.

ok, i will be the FIRST to admit my unesportive behaviour of teamkilling afks, but my hatred for these game ruiners went beyond bearable (i PUG out of necessity, don't have time to dedicate myself to a merc group and TS seens like a ghost town nowadays). to have these idiots being so SOB to want to afk AND shoot back was the end of it.

instead of ironicly saying he finally decided to join and return to the fray in my dragon, i should've finish shooting down the SOB instead of allowing hin to take a leg and my rear armor with him.

oh, and just for the record, YEAH, i prefer to be an ******* that shoots bigger ******** than the imbecile being passively screwed by then.

[Belkor]

ollo, on 16 December 2012 - 06:12 AM, said:

Based on what? Since you seem to know the coming mechanics and what will be awarded how, why not share this info with us?

My fear is, that since the devs have occasionally absolutely no idea what they are doing, that this might be one of these occasions that will end up spoiling the fun for even more people. E.g. for players that are still learning and will die first. One of the main things they have to change when introducing this, is awards for damage taken, which no one has heard about yet.

Rewarding for damage taken is completely stupid. Anyone can just sit there, do nothing, and take damage. If you are still learning and die first, then you will learn to not die first. Why would you reward dying first/dying quickly/suiciding? Players that don't contribute a single point of damage or cap shouldn't be rewarded at all.

Edited by Belkor, 16 December 2012 - 07:02 AM.

[Ghogiel]

What I hope is that I'll be grinding noobs into the dirt before they hardly get shots off, knowing they now get even less all for their efforts.

All the while good players will be making MINT because they usually take top score and most kills.

[Belorion]

Our corp members who get the HUD bug still generally do well in the match. Smells like an excuse to me. If for whatever reason you do not participate in the match, you don't get to share in the rewards. Sounds fair to me. The great failing of the schools, and youth sports programs is to stress overly much that everyone is a winner. Not everyone is a winner. You have losers. The better lesson would have been how to be a good loser, and how to be a good winner.

[Raso]

elbloom, on 16 December 2012 - 06:19 AM, said:

If you rock the enemys world so much, why worry about damage-based rewards when you don´t suck ?

Because damage, kills and caps are not the only metric by which one's skill is judged.

There are lights who don't have the most impressive fire power in the world who spend their time actually scouting and relaying tactical information and who are often punished for their service with low to average damage and badly beaten mechs. There are fast mediums who run aggressive recon who get caps while dealing minimal damage to enemy units. There are LRM and AC units who lay down suppressive fire that high hgih ammo costs but low to average damage.

There are a myriad different variables that can't be tracked numerically which can still play a huge roll in contributing to a win and I question how this new model will affect those people. I also question if this will affect people's decision to play those roles.

[Belorion]

Presumably the spotting bonus is going up. I do a lot of scouting and am all for the rewards based scheme. Plus even if the scouts are a little lighter on the rewards, they also have the smallest repair bills.

[Xenoid]

I agree with many of the points made here. It will be a trick to balance minimizing AFKs while still allowing active participants to be rewarded. But as mentioned previously, not every player inflicts large amounts of damage. The brawlers may, as well as LRM boats that are directly involved in a fight. But the scout, or the mech that volunteered to stay at the base to guard against a quick cap, will inflict little to no damage. These are but a few examples.

Maybe PGI has some way of detecting keystrokes or something during gameplay. I would guess during an average match the keyboard/mouse is used hundreds of times, while AFK usage would be zero or close to it.

[Joseph Mallan]

No matter the reason for it. Whether I am AFK or crash to Desktop from launch. I deserve no xp. If I participate for a while then AFK or Crash I deserve XP for my participation only. This is a tough love fix. I approve.

[Raso]

There is also the case to be made that some times you cause a lot of damage but don't accomplish anything by it. Some times people fire indiscriminately at low priority targets or spread their damage all over a target with out a car in the world while there is serious work to be done elsewhere.

Dealing damage doesn't mean you're helping just like not dealing damage does not mean you are not helping.

Joseph Mallan, on 16 December 2012 - 07:44 AM, said:

No matter the reason for it. Whether I am AFK or crash to Desktop from launch. I deserve no xp. If I participate for a while then AFK or Crash I deserve XP for my participation only. This is a tough love fix. I approve.

Then if you crash to desktop or have a connection issue and disconnect your mech should be immediately available upon your return to the game. Glitches will always happen but there is no reason to punish people for them.

Edited by Raso, 16 December 2012 - 07:48 AM.

[DogmeatX]

Damage is not the be all and end all measurement of contribution. There have already been at least two posts explaining why.. it's a pity some people can't seem to see beyond that.

It is not just newbie players who could end up worse off because of that. Example: your team is pushing up and about to get into a fight then your base cap goes off. You can "volunteer" to turn around and head back and risk basically turning up/chasing off the quick capper and run around near base keeping them away, then end up with next to no damage done at the end of the match.

Should you have got next to no reward for that? Because if you thought "meh I'm not going to turn around I get more reward for staying here and shooting stuff.." you could have lost the match because nobody else turned around either.

That's not actually an uncommon scenario and it's not just down to newbies.

Everyone is just guessing still though, that's all well and good they explain taking the rewards away to combat AFK'ers but why was there no mention of what will replace it..? Whatever it is I just hope it doesn't end up taking away things like the above.

Edited by DogmeatX, 16 December 2012 - 07:53 AM.

[Belorion]

Bonus for tag and narc. Bonus for targeting an enemy. Bonus for time on cap. Bonus for time stopping cap. There are plenty of bonuses for non-brawler types.

If its worth doing there is a way they can give a bonus for it.

There are already bonuses for many things that are not damaged related.

Edited by Belorion, 16 December 2012 - 07:55 AM.

[Sevaradan]

Volume, on 16 December 2012 - 04:44 AM, said:

Honestly, I see a lot of problems with this. If everything is performance-based (since it won't be just for showing up) this punishes people who enter the match and end up having to deal with a hud bug. Obviously it adversely affects player performance, and therefore will affect their pay. I do like performance based rewards, and it is a good way to stop rewarding AFK players, but when the game is so unstable that players cannot perform to the best of their ability, either due to FPS issues, or more glaring flaws like not even being able to see their heat meter or armor and such, they shouldn't lose money. Sure they aren't able to help their team as much, but it's not their fault they crashed to desktop or whatever. Spotting, assists, kills, damage done, etc, should all be much higher, but how can you differentiate between the total damage done of an afk player, a player who has a bad game (gets cored without doing much damage), or a player who is the victim of sync-drop eight-mans (sometimes get focused down before getting barely any damage off)?

Especially for new players, I think this might make things difficult for them. I know they're getting a 25-match C-Bill bonus, but if it's a bonus of a lower total, how does that help them? I'm concerned because obviously the damage potential of a trial 'Mech does not match up with 'real' 'Mechs...How can a new player be competitive in damage done compared to 36SRM cats? I know I just got 420 damage done in a game with my Commando that has nothing on it except a large laser and ECM, so technically I know the damage *potential* for any 'Mech can be decent, but it was mostly because people just ignored me and I got to blast their backs. Most players won't have that experience, let alone new players, and if they need to perform really well to get anywhere because the "played match" bonus is mostly gone, then they aren't going to be sticking around.

Not trolling, not complaining, just a real concern.

who cares if it affects ctds/4 fps etc they didn't contribute to the match any more than an afk farmer

[Belorion]

M A L I C E, on 16 December 2012 - 08:08 AM, said:

This is just touching on one of my concerns. There're many other scenarios just like this one where your participation in the match won't net you either good damage, good kills, or spotting, but you still contributed a necessary role in the match.

And interestingly, no one here has responded to these concerns because there is frankly no defense. Going to a fully performacne based appraoch is simply a terrible idea.

The final fact of the matter is that PGI is simply incompetent and is incapable or unwilling to actually program an AFK detection system and leave the per-match rewards in place. An AFK detection system would fully solve the issue while leaving the cbill rewards in the optimal condition for the current state of the game.

Removing the per-match reward is simply lazy incompetence on the part of PGI and the community here shold be ashamed for defending it. It will merely make this game EVEN LESS attractive to new players, and everyone overall that isn't a brawler.

It's simply an idiotic choice.

I am sorry... can you give a specific example. Its hard to address such a vague and sweeping statement. I gave an equal "If its worth doing there is a way to give a bonus on it". If you want a specific way to do so, you will have to give me a specific means of helping that won't be rewarded.