Ladies and Gentlemen,
The purpose of this post is to have the multiplayer community discuss how stock mechs should be priced. The intent is to provide the Devs with our view of what each stock mech should be worth in order to have a more balanced system for our multiplayer lances. In general I believe it is safe to say there is a consensus that several of the stock mechs are either under priced or over priced. As such this creates an unbalance in the multiplayer arena that is unobserved in the single player experience.
We will need to work together to provide a price list that we see as accurate in our experience. However, that is just the beginning. Those of us in the multiplayer community are quite aware that we are in the minority of players. For HBS/Paradox to invest time into changes we need to put some extra effort into this task to relieve the Devs of as much extra work as we can. Even with that, we must accept that they may not chose to invest the development time to make the changes. We are hopeful, and will will try our best improve a game that we very much enjoy.
Things we must consider:
1) How should a mech be priced?
2) Will the price negatively effect the single player game? (Spoiler alert: if this is a yes, it's not the right price)
This next one is big so, it gets some space:
3) Once the prices have changed, the stock lances for each game category need to be changed. That body of work is in fact one of the major reasons the Devs haven't devoted time to it. Creating new lances that fit the new prices is a huge chuck of time.
How to tackle these issues:
1) We've got to come up with a logical way to price the mechs. We need to give the Devs a solid reason why a mech costs what it does. (We may find that our pricing method produces mechs that still cost more or cost less than we feel they should. And if that happens we'll have to re-address our method or even the entire approach.)
2) We may have to do some play testing. And we aren't likely to have a beta build that will have these prices in game. We'll have to track it with pen and paper to see if we made the default difficulty of the game greater that it should be for the average player.
3) And this is the real kicker. At first you may think that we as a community can design amazingly good lances. But should we? One thing we cannot do is design lances that are based around a specific meta. Let me use my own favorite lance, Red Dawn, as an example.
The basic Red Dawn lance, as it was first desigened, was 2x WVR-6R. 2xJR7-D. This is not a lance you would hand to a new player and expect them to do well. In fact they may be better off with one of the other stock lances. The game has changed since I put this lance together. For the most part, I don't use it anymore. Jenners run too hot. Wolverine 6Rs lack firepower. Without the context of how to play the lance, a new player will be picked a part by an experienced player and may not even understand why. So if this was a stock lance, it would be considered horrible and to be avoided.
Any "Stock" lance needs to fall into the following guidelines.
1) It shouldn't have a "Gimmick" or "Meta" that may erode as the game changes or requires a short brief on how it should be used.
2) All of the mechs should be featured in the stock lances, even if we as a community feel it's a bad mech. Therefore, a stock lance shouldn't have more than one of the same type. (e.g. double Jenner or one HBK-4P and one HBK-4G) Every stock mech needs to be in at least one of the lances.
3)These should be lances that a new player uses and then learns how to improve on. Not lances you would expect to see in tournament play.
After all that, why are we making the lances? Because the time involved is time away from all of the other development in the game. We need to do this pro bono or it's not going to get done at all.
This is the proposal and I will end this post here. I will add my thoughts on this in another post.
IF we come to a consensus on how to price and what that price should be, it has no discernible impact on single player and we produce a list of the stock lances required we can then present the full proposal to the Devs.
The purpose of this post is to have the multiplayer community discuss how stock mechs should be priced. The intent is to provide the Devs with our view of what each stock mech should be worth in order to have a more balanced system for our multiplayer lances. In general I believe it is safe to say there is a consensus that several of the stock mechs are either under priced or over priced. As such this creates an unbalance in the multiplayer arena that is unobserved in the single player experience.
We will need to work together to provide a price list that we see as accurate in our experience. However, that is just the beginning. Those of us in the multiplayer community are quite aware that we are in the minority of players. For HBS/Paradox to invest time into changes we need to put some extra effort into this task to relieve the Devs of as much extra work as we can. Even with that, we must accept that they may not chose to invest the development time to make the changes. We are hopeful, and will will try our best improve a game that we very much enjoy.
Things we must consider:
1) How should a mech be priced?
2) Will the price negatively effect the single player game? (Spoiler alert: if this is a yes, it's not the right price)
This next one is big so, it gets some space:
3) Once the prices have changed, the stock lances for each game category need to be changed. That body of work is in fact one of the major reasons the Devs haven't devoted time to it. Creating new lances that fit the new prices is a huge chuck of time.
How to tackle these issues:
1) We've got to come up with a logical way to price the mechs. We need to give the Devs a solid reason why a mech costs what it does. (We may find that our pricing method produces mechs that still cost more or cost less than we feel they should. And if that happens we'll have to re-address our method or even the entire approach.)
2) We may have to do some play testing. And we aren't likely to have a beta build that will have these prices in game. We'll have to track it with pen and paper to see if we made the default difficulty of the game greater that it should be for the average player.
3) And this is the real kicker. At first you may think that we as a community can design amazingly good lances. But should we? One thing we cannot do is design lances that are based around a specific meta. Let me use my own favorite lance, Red Dawn, as an example.
The basic Red Dawn lance, as it was first desigened, was 2x WVR-6R. 2xJR7-D. This is not a lance you would hand to a new player and expect them to do well. In fact they may be better off with one of the other stock lances. The game has changed since I put this lance together. For the most part, I don't use it anymore. Jenners run too hot. Wolverine 6Rs lack firepower. Without the context of how to play the lance, a new player will be picked a part by an experienced player and may not even understand why. So if this was a stock lance, it would be considered horrible and to be avoided.
Any "Stock" lance needs to fall into the following guidelines.
1) It shouldn't have a "Gimmick" or "Meta" that may erode as the game changes or requires a short brief on how it should be used.
2) All of the mechs should be featured in the stock lances, even if we as a community feel it's a bad mech. Therefore, a stock lance shouldn't have more than one of the same type. (e.g. double Jenner or one HBK-4P and one HBK-4G) Every stock mech needs to be in at least one of the lances.
3)These should be lances that a new player uses and then learns how to improve on. Not lances you would expect to see in tournament play.
After all that, why are we making the lances? Because the time involved is time away from all of the other development in the game. We need to do this pro bono or it's not going to get done at all.
This is the proposal and I will end this post here. I will add my thoughts on this in another post.
IF we come to a consensus on how to price and what that price should be, it has no discernible impact on single player and we produce a list of the stock lances required we can then present the full proposal to the Devs.
