150 replies to this topic

[Distratus]

soapyfrog, on 25 December 2012 - 11:21 AM, said:

I don't see the problem with this. This game should be about mechs fighting each other. The primary mission in any match, any game mode, should be to destroy the other team. The victory conditions of resource victory or base capping should only be resorted to if the other team refuses to fight.

I know it's about mechs fighting each other, my point was that Conquest as it is is pretty lackluster - including the payout for capping. Also, my point before was about reducing the capture points to 3, instead of 5, and with that combat would be more inevitable. With having 5 capture points it's a bit too thinned out, especially with match perma death, and I think that would be more suited to the traditional respawn mechanism found in BF42 so they can keep the map stocked full of players till the end. Just to note, I'm not a fan of mechs respawning.

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The objectives exist to FORCE COMBAT. If you aren't getting to grips with the enemy then you are doing it wrong.

I don't need to get to grips because I'm not doing it wrong, my point entirely before was to reduce capture points to encourage MORE combat and not have it spread out all over the place in 5 different locations.

[Thirdstar]

Yokaiko, on 25 December 2012 - 12:33 PM, said:

They should put assault mode back like it was and put in a deathmatch mode where there are no bases, you spawn randomly on the map with your team and go from there.

The issue with that is those times when the last remaining light plays hide and go seek (specially with ECM). Maybe TDM can simply have a shorter match timer.

[Yokaiko]

Thirdstar, on 25 December 2012 - 12:46 PM, said:

The issue with that is those times when the last remaining light plays hide and go seek (specially with ECM). Maybe TDM can simply have a shorter match timer.

That is what the timer is for after all.

[xxx WreckinBallRaj xxx]

They should have just made Assault a baseless TDM with a timer, then made Conquest. Instead we now got 2 crappy modes with bases that no one cares about. It's still just a big boxing arena, you may as well have made a flat TDM arena with no bases at all.

[Wintersdark]

meteorol, on 25 December 2012 - 11:43 AM, said:

Can someone name one game which has a conquest mode on tiny maps, 8vs8 without respawn besides MW:O?
I can't think of a single one (feel free to correct me if i'm wrong). Why is noone playing conquest on dust2 in CS without respawn?
Because it doesn't work.
Do you think all the games with conquest mode are using respawn because they are games for idiots who are not able to use some kind of tactic? Nope. They use respawn because the conquest mode needs respawn to work.

No, it definitely does not require respawn to work. BF style conquest does, but that's a different game, and a different style of battle. BF, like most shooters, is designed around respawns. Respawns in this would - as with assault - really wreck MWO gameplay. If you can die freely, there's no reason for caution. With no reason for caution, no penalty for death beyond starting at base again, a very fundamental cornerstone of MWO gameplay suddenly vanishes.

Currently, even a mech stripped of weaponry is valuable to a Conquest map. In a respawn game, that pilot will suicide as quickly as possible; or even just a pilot who's exhausted his ammo, or taken moderate damage.

BF, and other shooters, are very different: There is no real loss of performance due to damage taken. You don't loose weapons, and ammo is refillable in the match.

Without that... Mech builds suddenly shift dramatically. Nobody takes more than minimum ammo, and instead packs on more weaponry. Difficult choice between survivability and offense? Far less difficult. Go offense; because if you die, you just respawn. Obviously, dying can push you off a base, but you can take it back.

In no case should suiciding be a viable gameplay strategy.

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Devalue one resource (player lives) in order to force the player to win by controlling the other resource (bases). This doesn't work if the players can easily win by getting as few as 8 kills. Right now, winning by killing the enemy is like 3 times faster than winning through bases, which is the total opposite of what a conquest mode actually should be. Right now, conquest mode is nothing more than TDM.

If they drastically increase the benefits of basecaping in order to make the players cap bases, it will result in 16 guys not shooting each other, running circles over the map to make the most profit (which will suck aswell).

There is nothing wrong with being against respawns in MW:O in general, but without respawns you wont get a working conquest mode in the current game environment. (Atleast not a conquest mode like we are knowing it).

No respawn conquest would need huge maps and number of players to work, but since the devs can't even fix the netcode for tiny maps and 16 players, we will never see this.

Or, they could increase the rate that points accrue at, a much simpler solution. They deliberately started with Conquest wins being slow for a fairly obvious reason: They want alternative victory conditions, but they absolutely do not want the non-combat win to be the fastest and easiest way to win - that leads to crappy gameplay. So, they err on the side of caution, and have the Conquest win fairly slow. People still get good battles, and the Dev's can see how things play out and make adjustments more gradually without turning Conquest into a game where everyone deliberately avoids combat.

A broken battle mode that defaults to deathmatch is much better than one that defaults to hide and seek.

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I'm a Battlefield player from the first minute (started with the BF1942 demo) and this is simply not true. An average conquest match in Battlefield lasts 30 min up to 1 hour or more (depending on the server settings). Bases switching their "owners" several times per match. (Unless one team is really alot better, then the baseraping will start).

This is not BF, and good lord, we don't need 30 minute+ matches. This is a very different game.

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An average conquest match in MW:O lasts about 3-5 minutes, often the bases dont even switch 1 single time.
The conquest mode plays nowhere near like any version of Battlefield. Not even close.

Nor should they. MWO matches are deliberately short. In fact, they've been lengthened dramatically from their TT ideals.


You have to understand, being that this is still Beta, they are releasing new gameplay modes in a fun and playable state (because simply fighting is always fun!) but not in the finished state and tuning as they go. At no point did they say Conquest is as it shall be, or that it was released in it's final form.

[Thirdstar]

Wintersdark, on 25 December 2012 - 01:43 PM, said:

If you can die freely, there's no reason for caution. With no reason for caution, no penalty for death beyond starting at base again, a very fundamental cornerstone of MWO gameplay suddenly vanishes.

You make some good points but I would like to make an observation. Games like Battlefield and it's brethren have a ticket system in regards to respawn with very real consequences to dying to too often. Every respawn takes a certain number of tickets, run out of tickets and you run out of respawns and the other team wins. I don't see why we can't have a similar system using BV in MWO, weighted by mech classes and weights. Get the Jenner blown up? not too bad, few BVs lost. Get that Atlas blown up? Oh boy you practically handed a win to the other team. That's AFTER they fix the netcode and put knockdown back in of course (I hasten to add )

Edited by Thirdstar, 25 December 2012 - 01:59 PM.

[meteorol]

Wintersdark, on 25 December 2012 - 01:43 PM, said:

Without that... Mech builds suddenly shift dramatically. Nobody takes more than minimum ammo, and instead packs on more weaponry. Difficult choice between survivability and offense? Far less difficult. Go offense; because if you die, you just respawn. Obviously, dying can push you off a base, but you can take it back.

In no case should suiciding be a viable gameplay strategy.

No game using conquest mode gives you the respawn for free.
Every single respawn you have gives the enemy a ticket advantage, which means every death hurts your team. Given the low player environment MW:O is using, deaths would have to be pretty expensive, but not so expensive they win the game alone.

Moreover many guys seem to think everyone talks about instant respawn. No. Noone does. MW:O would need a respawn timer which is drastically higher than the 20 seconds BF is using on default. Im talking about something like 2 minutes.

Its all about punishing the death hard enough to force players to avoid dying, but not make killing the number one win condition.

As you said correctly, only BF style conquest needs respawn.

But BF defined what conquest mode is.

Every single game using the term "conquest mode" is using the BF style conquest mode.

Thats the problem, PGI created something that doesn't fit the term "conquest mode" like it is used in games since 10 years or something. They created a new gamemode (TDM with second win condition), and called it conquest, hence guys expected a conquest mode like everyone knows it. Which we will never have without respawns.

Right now we have TDM with a second win condition. Reducing the amount of tickets needed wont chance it. Killing the enemy team can bring the win in like 4 minutes. Players will always choose the fastest way to win the battle. If killing is faster (and gives more money) than caping, they will always kill. Do you really think lowering the tickets in order to make the game end in 5 minutes by tickets is the right way to go? We will still have TDM with a second win condition, which is only tighter than it was before.


You are right, TDM with second win condition doesn't need respawn. The gamemode MW:O is using right now doesn't really need respawn. But the gamemode MW:O is using doesn't fit the term "conquest mode" how it is used since conquest mode was invented. No game using the term "conquest mode" is using killing as win condition.

Thats what i said earlier: We wont have a conquest mode like we know it without respawn. We can have every kind of deathmatch with some variants in win condition and call it conquest, but in the core it will still be deathmatch.

[shotokan5]

I will be honest with you at first I thought that this mode was stupid and a waste of time. After going over the rules and the true objectives, well why not play as it says. The more I played by the rules the more interesting it became. Slowly I began to find it interesting then finally I understood what this is about. Not just killing but about control of the map area. What is Mech in the end? About planet conquest sectors gained and lost. When the clan's come that will be even more important. This would be the first step in moving to the final game. who controls the Inner Sphere? Its not just about points and kills it is about control of areas in space. Now that I understand this its sort of fun and more interesting than who has the most firepower on a mech. I personally think and maybe I'm wrong but in one form or another this is how the game will be played. believe it or not. You don't get a second chance in real war to come back from the dead as in re-spawn. it seems that at this point most have not looked at the rules and played by them. My last point is about ECM. Wow what a huge selection of mechs we have. The answer is only a few can have it. In battle to be seen is to be dead or lucky. LOS. line of site. If I look for it and figure where it will probably be, It can be seen and killed. Many matches started out with lots of little and one big ECM mechs and been destroyed very quickly. So what is the problem? None. People and cats hate change. You better get used to it because it has not even started yet. Huge change is coming and not just the clan's. It will be for who or what controls the Inner Sphere. I could be wrong but who knows even the developers?

[VictimEN]

I have to agree that the conquest mode is pretty disappointing so far. Most of my games in it have ended on kills, not points. Getting to 750 points takes a pretty long time as well, so it's very feasible to ignore the map mode in favor of killing mechs early on and then safely transition to points based play if the other team isn't killed easily. Finally, the structure of the game mode generally puts the losing team into a position where they only want to run away and cap uncontested points which prolongs the game significantly while generally not changing the outcome, as opposed to assault which forces either last ditch defenses or base races which end the game quickly.

Cutting down on the capture amount might help. Then there wouldn't be as much time to catch up if a team sacrificed points to ambush some enemies with their full team, so getting some kills and trying to snowball the game wouldn't work quite as well.

The player rewards don't really encourage objective based play either, since damage, assists, and kills all provide more XP and credits than going for a point. Granted, much the same point could be made about assault and its lack of partial rewards for base pressure.

I mostly played WoW before the linked servers for pvp, so I didn't see that much spawn farming. If we had a dominant team, it was generally way better end the match with a quick 5 cap and then requeue with everyone wanting to play again then to prolong the game. With the diminishing returns on kills, keeping the match going to farm kills was generally a bad idea in terms of rewards anyway. So I don't necessarily see respawns as leading directly to degenerate gameplay.

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Its not just about points and kills it is about control of areas in space.

And, under the current Conquest logic, the best way to control space is to kill two lances of mechs first, and then worry about the areas later.

Edited by VictimEN, 26 December 2012 - 09:01 AM.

[Steel Talon]

meteorol, on 25 December 2012 - 11:47 PM, said:

No game using conquest mode gives you the respawn for free.
Every single respawn you have gives the enemy a ticket advantage, which means every death hurts your team. Given the low player environment MW:O is using, deaths would have to be pretty expensive, but not so expensive they win the game alone.

This!
Especially project reality mod for BF2 takes conquest even more far by limiting respawn locations & adding ticket loss for different vehicles, so u can suicide rush & kill 6 infantry with tank but if tank cost 25 tick u still loose more.

Respawn = brainless mode where death has no meaning --> PLZ STOP PLAYING COD !!!

[Mikhalio]

Conquest mode:

- a strategic game where you have limited units, and you must optimize them to capture key points while limiting losses.

This is not COD, this is not Tribes, this is not Hawken.
If you can not play this game, and be smart with your 1 unit; I suggest all 3 other games for you.