Sure they could have clan mechs vs inner sphere mechs at a ratio of 1:2, that might be fair-ish.
Hubis
1662
Yeah, the inclusion of Clan tech is going to break the already tenuous balance of the game as is.
Been playing more during the winter break and one thing I’ve seen that seems pretty clear: if one side has ECM, and the other doesn’t, the side without ECM loses. Pretty much, that’s it. If both sides have ECM, it’s pretty variable, but every single time I’ve been on a team without ECM we’ve lost to a team with ECM. I don’t think I can recall being on a team without ECM facing another non-ECM team, not more than literally once.
pg1
1664
While I don’t agree it’s a 100% black and white result regarding if your team has ECM or not, I do think it’s a major gameplay issue at the moment. I think 8 vs 8 has been ruined due to ECM. No one wants to play a version of MWO where you are reduced to a few choices (ECM mechs basically) if you want to play your best. PUG games are still full of variety but that’s because it’s more about fun, and working on your next mech than winning at all costs. Since I almost always play 4 man group we can often overcome an ECM deficit but I think solo queue or 8 groups suffer much more.
I’m sure it’s possible, but I’ve yet to see a four man without ECM; either that, or the non-ECM four man teams are getting trounced, too. Virtually every match that doesn’t have ECM on my side goes the same way–we turn the corner (or they come around the corner) into the entire enemy team which shreds us in seconds.
I finally got a Commando with ECM and it’s kind of fun tooling around helping shield the big boys, but it’s hardly thrilling.
Hubis
1666
The problem is, the combination of SSRM2’s being so damn effective and ECM completely blocking missile locks within range (instead of just making a lock harder to get) means that light/medium fights come down to (1) who has the most ECM, and (2) who has the most streaks. If you don’t have (1) then (2) doesn’t matter, but if you’ve got (1) then you might as well have (2) and you’ll be unbeatable.
Of course, this only really applies to light-weight violence; however, if you take out the enemy lights, then you’re in a much better position to either win the recon war, or get/respond to back-caps more effectively.
Timex
1667
The biggest issue right now is that they removed knock-downs, due to the physics being weird… and the netcode being crappy.
This, combined with some kind of weirdness with the raven’s hitboxes, makes the Raven 3L far tougher than it should be.
In the past, you had to actually have some degree of skill to pilot light mechs, because if you ran into other mechs you fell over, and then you died.
When they removed that mechanic, the light mechs became orders of magnitude stronger than they should be… to the extent that I’ve largely abandoned playing light mechs, since it’s so easy compared to playing “real” mechs. It feels cheap.
Once knockdowns come back, you’re gonna see a lot of folks screaming bloody murder, because their terrible piloting will make them fall down… a lot.
pg1
1668
That’s a big part of it but the thing is we don’t know when these fixes will be coming. MWO is quite hard to balance as it’s under heavy development. I don’t think the MWO netcode is ever going to compete with the best games since they seem to prefer using server side hit detection. One thing that continues to surprise me is the lack of any server regions. I hate how developers always put servers local to themselves which makes it very hard for them to test or appreciate higher latency in their games.
I like MWO, in general, but there’s no way I’d put any money into beyond what I put in for the Founders thing a long time ago. It’s maybe 80% there, but that last 20% is a bitch.
pg1
1670
I can respect that and agree with it mostly. I put in $50 but I doubt I’ll put in more until I see progress on certain fronts. I do have some faith in PGI but I can tell it’s likely to be slow going unless they surprise us with a big community warfare release. The fact they are already implementing ELO and drastically reduced the newbie grind are huge pluses to me because it tells me they understand enough to make important decisions to move MWO forward. They’ll do it their own way and their own pace but I think they’ll come around on most issues eventually. I can’t say the same for most developers. Tribes Ascend never got around to real match making or making the grind as easy as it is now in MWO for newbies.
I haven’t been playing much the last week as my premium time ran out and I got a new Nook. So instead I’ve been reading Battletech books as I never have read any before. Only read the Decision at Thunder Rift so far but it is interesting to see how similar combat between the game and the book are. The book already has me wishing for more complexities in the game however. I forgot which mech it was but one mech had a turret on it, which has me imagining a mech with 3 crosshairs instead of just two. I feel like more details like that would be great for MWO.
I have a bookshelf of Battletech paperbacks, purchased en masse on eBay some years ago. I really like the fiction, at least, up until the Dark Age stuff which I never really got into.
Enidigm
1672
Clan tech and free-to-play goes together like peanut butter and chocolate. One of the reasons Mercenaries was the best of the old PC games was that it added an economic component to balancing success in a mission, and the lore itself is chocked full of endless references about this or that being too expensive to maintain. They can add Clan tech but then make maintaining it an endless C-bill sink; and there’s your official, for pay, cheat code.
Hubis
1673
That’s… not how you make a good FTP game.
Agreed they cannot simply balance clan tech by c-bill and MC cost. If they want to stick to canon they need to keep clan and inner sphere tech separated somehow. Otherwise they need to seriously nerf clan tech so that it is just a gentle upgrade from inner sphere and then make it generally available. I prefer the first option, but it seems like a difficult problem to tackle with the game in it’s current format.
pg1
1675
Especially now that RNR is gone it seems like clan tech will be even more powerful. They need a mechanism that implements scarcity in an interesting way. A good example is how current 8 mans are played. The most two used mechs by far are the AS7-D-DC and RVN-3L, if you want to win that’ll be the basis of your team. In most 8s I’ve played they were by far the largest two represented mechs used. Yet hardly anyone plays 8s anymore because it’s so boring and monotonous. MWO needs better balance and some way to get people to use more mechs and weapons in serious play. The for fun non-serious play is OK at the moment but I don’t think MWO works in competitive play at all (which you’d expect CW to be mostly).
World of Tanks has a similar issue in that people often gravitate towards higher-tier, more powerful tanks, but they more or less solved that by taking tank tiers into account in building matches, as well as making more powerful tanks more expensive to run. MWO has no economic disincentive to run 100 ton assault mechs, and no real balancing based on tonnage it seems (might be there, if so, I can’t tell). So, yeah, you see more Atlases than you’d ever see in the Inner Sphere of lore.
Janster
1677
The matchups do match heavy for heavy, the tonnage is supposed to be the same
pg1
1678
MWO currently matches up weight classes in regular games (non-8v8). That works OK in non-serious play. I’ll use an example from another game because it’s very clear there. In Tribes Ascend a good sniper can utterly dominate on defense. In competitive play they are limited 1 sniper per team of 7, so they are somewhat contained but still fairly dominate. In public play you can have a whole team full of snipers which leads to a huge defensive stack that’s near impossible to break. This is bad for lots of reasons not the least of which is competitive rulesets are very different from regular play. How can you balance a game for two different rulesets?
The point is, in my experience using limits to balance is horrid usually. If the game was actually balanced you wouldn’t need hard limits to force variety. I don’t care if it’s tonnage, battle value, or weight classes, limits just feel like a way to hide balance issues and stop everyone from using optimal choices. Now I’m not saying it can’t work but I have huge doubts in a multiplayer PC FPS. In single player, co-op or non-serious play it’s fine but in a competitive FPS? I’m all for certain mechs to be more powerful in certain situations but role warfare needs to remain important and promote variety naturally.
What I’m afraid of is if you match up based on tonnage, yeah it’ll be balanced overall but you end up with the player in the AS7-D-DC being critical to his team compared to say some guy stuck in a Commando because that’s the only tonnage left. I’ve already stopped playing 8s because people want you to run a RVN-3L or AS7-D-DC (neither of which I have yet) and we currently have no limits. Slapping on a limit will enable me to run my HBKs and be more useful since the other team has the same limits but I’ll be like a handicapped mech on my team. Who wants to race a Toyota when there’s a Ferrari? This gets even worse with clan mechs. Just looking at Sarna and using BVs I saw for example a Daishi can be worth over 3,000 while a Commando might be around 500.
Public play and competitive play are popular opposites and I feel like MWO is balanced with public play in mind currently. Limits won’t fix competitive play but it will make it work better. Maybe this isn’t an issue but I feel balance is the key not limits. I just can’t wrap my head around how they can fix these issues. Who wants to be the guy stuck in the mech 1/6 the BV of another one? External factors or incentives like economics, faction points, clan honor or community warfare design could do the trick I think but these systems don’t exist (they just removed RNR) and all we have is a simple deathmatch game.
Ah, I see; thanks. I guess it appears wonky because of the over population of Atlases, and the seeming lack of any need for variety really. I think it’d be more interesting if there were reasons for heavy vs medium vs light 'mechs, but then, I feel the same way about WoT, where there’s no inherent drawbacks to heavy tanks really. I just remember in other BattleTech games seeing an Atlas was a Big Deal.
pg1
1680
http://mwomercs.com/forums/topic/88023-on-mech-diversity/
That’s some guys keeping tabbings on mechs for some stats. Basic break down seems to be around -
15-20% light
15-20% medium
25-35% heavy
30-40% assault (even with almost no Awesomes seen!)
15% trial and ECM mechs
very few hero mechs
