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Pokey Dravon
OSG Planetary Operations
8871
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Posted - 2017.01.09 16:36:00 -
[1] - Quote
Function before Form.
Give me a mechanic or purpose that needs to be fulfilled that would only make sense if that mechanic or purpose was being fulfilled by a mech/MTAC.
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Pokey Dravon
OSG Planetary Operations
8873
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Posted - 2017.01.09 21:56:00 -
[2] - Quote
DeadlyAztec11 wrote:Pokey Dravon wrote:Function before Form.
Give me a mechanic or purpose that needs to be fulfilled that would only make sense if that mechanic or purpose was being fulfilled by a mech/MTAC.
I'm not necessarily pro-mech, but I'll play the Devil's advocate for the sake of the discussion. I imagine the mech to be a larger and more menacing vehicle which would do more things than an HAV. Not only would it have offensive capabilities, but it would be very mobile. It would be a moving spawn point and would have massive health. It would have the capability to have both anti air, anti personnel and anti ground vehicle. The real downside would be the massive cost and how large of a target it would be. If you brought out a mech and thought it would win you the game then the enemy team could bring out HAV's, turrets and anti MANPADS suddenly your giant mech is disintegrating on the ground and the battle just hot a lot costlier.
Balancing with ISK doesnt work. What you described was basically "It's does basically everything but that's OK because it's it's expensive" which is....Something I've heard before and it didn't end well for anyone.
The conversation should never be "We want mechs, let's think of a role for them to fill". It should be the other way around "So the ge design requires a role with these functions....What should that event of gameplay look like?"
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Pokey Dravon
OSG Planetary Operations
8879
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Posted - 2017.01.10 07:20:00 -
[3] - Quote
DeadlyAztec11 wrote:
I'll disagree with that point since a lot of weapons in Dust 514 were extremely redundant. For example, the regular rail rifle was superseded by the assault rail rifle in competitive play, then you had weapons like the burst Scrambler Pistol, sleek locus grenade and the Plasma Cannon. All were theoretically viable, but in practice they were all either redundant or so since specific nobody ever needed them ever. Myofibril stimulants were also pretty uneccessary until they were given the ability to increase jump height. Nova Knives were also redundant since technically their job was already fulfilled by the Breach Shotgun and the only thing that kept them relevant in the slightest was that there was never am advanced or prototype version of the Breach Shotgun.
I think the entire "practical" approach to equipment design is BS.
Anyways, the ISK thing would only be a secondary deterrent. The first and foremost deterrent would be that if the enemy team could knock out the mech with their counyerasures that continuously calling in mechs would be useless. At that point it would make much more sense to simply use smaller concentrations of forces to engage the enemy in multiple smaller engagements on the battlefield where it is more difficult for them to coordinate.
It's basically the reason we don't use zeppelins in war anymore. Having everyone shooting at one target kind of negates the purpose of it entirely. Only if the other team can successfully counter their countermeasures could the mech actually see a good use.
Well first of all, t he weapons in Dust were a complete mess in general so that's not really a good argument, because they should have never been that way in the first place.
Regardless I'll entertain the concept for the sake of discussion.
So there are a few things at work here. For one, many of the weapons were simply redundant because the system didn't really have proper support for potential uses. In your shotgun example, yes the shotgun is exceedingly good at killing things quickly at close range. Now if the radar system actually took gunfire into account, that's another variable to consider. Firing that shotgun lights you up to everyone in the immediate area, which may not be well suited for what you're trying to do. So the question comes "We want to give players the ability to perform a role that is similar to the shotgun (kill quickly in CQC) but we want them to be able to do it without setting off the radar, and with that comes some additional difficulty in that the range/charge mechanic prevents it from simply replacing the shotgun"
The Form that fits the Function in this case? Nova Knives. Close range, high damage like a shotgun, more difficult to use but you gain the added benefit of not popping up on radar when you use them. That's proper design.
What Dust got was "Errrr well we want knives so....put em in there. What are they for? Ehhhh welll.....they're not really better than a shotgun in any way so I guess people can use them for the novelty?" That's sloppy design and it leads to bad redundancies or horrible balance issues.
And is it OK to have some redundancies? Was the SMG the go to sidearm simply because it was reliable and generally more approachable for the average player? Sure. Was it clearly a better choice than the Scrambler Pistol for those people? Probably, that's why they're using the SMG. But I think we can agree that in the right hands (and I'll admit there were not a lot of them out there, but there were some) that Scrambler Pistol would decimate you much faster than an SMG ever could.
I think in cases like that, redundancy is fine as long as it's done carefully and sparingly. You can have easier to use weapons that do a really good job but is ultimately sub optimal compared to another weapon that requires much more skill to use. It gives players a means to enter a game and feel strong right away, but it also provides a reward for those who take the time and have the skill to master a more difficult but ultimately superior weapon (when used correctly)
Now where you really start to get shaky is when the general type of content starts to vary a lot between redundancies and that's where I start to take issue. We'll use the old classic example of HAVs because we all understand how ****** up they were. Aside from some stuff they could do in the Beta (which is honestly when HAVs were the best) HAVs could really only use used for 3 things
- Kill Infantry
- Kill Vehicles
- Kill Installations
And these were in most cases things infantry could do, but at a far lower efficiency. Blaster Tanks could also mow down infantry faster and with better efficiency than any guy with a rifle. Rail tanks could easily blow up other vehicles and installations far more quickly than any infantry with AV could. So now you have infantry guys scratching their head going "So basically I need to spec vehicles to deal with this stuff?". That's not fun for anyone involved.
And sure, you can go back and forth trying to balance countermeasures for each other them for days. You can build 3-4-5 part Rock Paper Scissors Lizard Spock countermeasure circles like Aeon mentioned...but then that just simply end up with a shallow self contained loop.
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Pokey Dravon
OSG Planetary Operations
8879
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Posted - 2017.01.10 07:22:00 -
[4] - Quote
And who knows, I may be alone in this, but I need more than that. Things should exist more more than just "Oh I use thing A to kill thing B and that's it". And I guess i get frustrated when people are looking for excuses to put Titans in the game instead of focusing on the meaningful gameplay first, and then figuring out what gun/vehicle/equipment/lizard works best for that role.
If you came to me and said:
"Ok so we need to get inside this base, but we need something to hack the main reactor to blow it up. But the outer wall has a hardened wall that you have to get past first, but to do that you need to clear the enemy out of an elevated position so you can get close enough to break through the gate. But the road to the gate has obstructions that cant and be destroyed and hinder large ground objects"
and I would say "Ok, so how do you you think a team should pull all of that off? What tools would they use?"
and you replied "Well....the infantry cant approach right away because of the enemie stationed at the gate, and we can't just drive a tank up because the obstructions were in the way. What if you used an MTAC which is a vehicle that can walk over the obstructions and take out the infantry posted above the door. Our infantry could then hack the console controlling the obstructions while the MTAC defends them from other infantry, which would allow the HAV to roll up within firing range of the gate. The infantry would need to also defend the MTAC from enemy HAVs while all of this is happening since the MTACs are weak to HAVs. Once the HAV breaks down the gate, the infantry can slip inside and hack another terminal to let their HAVs and MTACs in to cover them and each other while the infantry make the final push for the reactor core to hack and destroy it."
I would buy you a ******* drink, because that would be epic. And what's important there is that it doesnt REALLY matter what the tool is, just that it performs the function the scenario dictates. You could replace every instance of that with "T-Rex's with Lasers mounted to their backs" and it would still work. It would look ridiculous/awesome, but it would still work. And that's the point Im trying to make with putting Function before Form.
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Pokey Dravon
OSG Planetary Operations
8879
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Posted - 2017.01.10 07:44:00 -
[5] - Quote
Scheneighnay McBob wrote:DeadlyAztec11 wrote:Pokey Dravon wrote:Function before Form.
Give me a mechanic or purpose that needs to be fulfilled that would only make sense if that mechanic or purpose was being fulfilled by a mech/MTAC.
I'm not necessarily pro-mech, but I'll play the Devil's advocate for the sake of the discussion. I imagine the mech to be a larger and more menacing vehicle which would do more things than an HAV. Not only would it have offensive capabilities, but it would be very mobile. It would be a moving spawn point and would have massive health. It would have the capability to have both anti air, anti personnel and anti ground vehicle. The real downside would be the massive cost and how large of a target it would be. If you brought out a mech and thought it would win you the game then the enemy team could bring out HAV's, turrets and anti MANPADS suddenly your giant mech is disintegrating on the ground and the battle just hot a lot costlier. But mechs have a 1-man crew. IMO, the more crew members a vehicle can have, the more effective it should be with all of them. Honestly, mechs are a bad idea in general because vehicles are a force multiplier- any vehicle that can be effective with a single crew member is inherently OP because there's no downside to using them. If you have 7 people in a dropship, that's 7 people that could be fighting elsewhere. However, the dropship can potentially make those 7 people far more effective if they're coordinated. That wasn't the case with HAVs- an HAV could be effective with 1 person, and it made that 1 person far more effective with no need for coordination of any kind. That's why HAVs were so much better than any other vehicle. So, my main point: single-person vehicles (or vehicles which a single person can be effective in) must not be added unless they have a glaring weakness to counteract how much more effective they make a player. My idea: make an incredibly weak "pilot suit" which is required to operate single-person vehicles, and make some vehicles much more vulnerable to AV than vehicles that need actual crews. I'm saying make the pilot suit extremely weak so we don't have the pilot jumping out and gunning down AVers like they did sometimes in Dust.
See and this is exactly what I'm trying to avoid. This argument of "Oh well it should need this many people to do this but if the other thing has only this many people then it needs to be this but not too much of that so make the other thing weak and require only one person."
As soon as you lock yourself into a system where elements more or less have a singlular purpose of "Kill A, Be killed by B" the balance conversation will immediate degrade into something like this. We've seen it a million times throughout Dust's life and as you know.....the **** never worked right. When the only metric to measure something is its ability to kill and be killed by other elements (which are also as equally shallow), you're going to end up with a shallow gameplay and a endless balance problems, especially when dealing with something with the potential of being a really interesting support/utility element in the game design.
Having strengths and weaknesses to other elements is absolutely a good thing to have. Dont think I'm saying otherwise. But there needs to be more to it than that. If anything it helps? "Well MTACs are kinda UP against infantry this balance cycle, but they still cover rough terrain nobody's business. We just need to change up our MTAC strategy to deal with it for the time being and focus more on taking advantage of its other strengths." So even if a role seems weak against its predator that patch cycle, you don't feel like you're totally screwed because you still have other useful things you can do.
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Pokey Dravon
OSG Planetary Operations
8897
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Posted - 2017.01.15 03:06:00 -
[6] - Quote
McBob, I agree that vehicles had serious issues and I beleive the core problem was directly tied to the issues I was describing: Putting multiple vehicles in without a clear purpose for their existence. Leading to a shallow experience riddled with balance issues.
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Pokey Dravon
OSG Planetary Operations
8899
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Posted - 2017.01.16 04:31:00 -
[7] - Quote
Joel II X wrote:Pokey Dravon wrote:Function before Form.
Give me a mechanic or purpose that needs to be fulfilled that would only make sense if that mechanic or purpose was being fulfilled by a mech/MTAC.
Your going about it the wrong way. You think of a feature for the game first, then think about how it fits into the universe. Otherwise, one could argue about plenty of things in ANY game including eve on "Why would they have X if they have Y?" Anywho, mecha would be fun to use. They might be sort of a scout vehicle (good mobility, decent attack power, low eHP in comparison to other vehicles). A HAV would be a Sentinel. Also, I found it kind of dumb to have vehicle repair tools because you can call one in and send the other back, and you can't keep up with a vehicle to actively repair under attack. Give MTACs a support role to both infantry and vehicles. To support infantry, they could be fitted with a HMG with very low heat, but has terrible accuracy. In other words, keep the pressure up on enemies, but not become an unstoppable death machine upon deployment. Alternatively, they could be logistics and have vehicle repair tools similar to the focused where they could only focus on 1 or 2 targets, but repair at a decent rate, while logi vehicles would be the one that has plenty of beams, but poor repair rate. Sorry for the wall of text.
I think you're misreading my intention. Perhaps my later posts are more clear?
Either way, the mechanic should be determined before it's given a form. I think we are in agreement.
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Pokey Dravon
OSG Planetary Operations
8900
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Posted - 2017.01.16 05:24:00 -
[8] - Quote
Joel II X wrote:Pokey Dravon wrote:Joel II X wrote:Pokey Dravon wrote:Function before Form.
Give me a mechanic or purpose that needs to be fulfilled that would only make sense if that mechanic or purpose was being fulfilled by a mech/MTAC.
Your going about it the wrong way. You think of a feature for the game first, then think about how it fits into the universe. Otherwise, one could argue about plenty of things in ANY game including eve on "Why would they have X if they have Y?" Anywho, mecha would be fun to use. They might be sort of a scout vehicle (good mobility, decent attack power, low eHP in comparison to other vehicles). A HAV would be a Sentinel. Also, I found it kind of dumb to have vehicle repair tools because you can call one in and send the other back, and you can't keep up with a vehicle to actively repair under attack. Give MTACs a support role to both infantry and vehicles. To support infantry, they could be fitted with a HMG with very low heat, but has terrible accuracy. In other words, keep the pressure up on enemies, but not become an unstoppable death machine upon deployment. Alternatively, they could be logistics and have vehicle repair tools similar to the focused where they could only focus on 1 or 2 targets, but repair at a decent rate, while logi vehicles would be the one that has plenty of beams, but poor repair rate. Sorry for the wall of text. I think you're misreading my intention. Perhaps my later posts are more clear? Either way, the mechanic should be determined before it's given a form. I think we are in agreement. Haha sorry! I rarely read past the first page.
More amusing that you apologize for a wall of text considering the multi post novel I wrote later XD
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