XP After Missions

[Ballacraine]

It seems that all MWs receive the same XP after a mission.
I think that is simplistic.
Could it not be related to damage dealt or even damage received for each MW?

Or is that difficult to implement?

:0/

 

[Ballacraine]

Thinking about it, perhaps I should have posted this under 'Suggestions' ?
If that is the case, perhaps a mod would be kind enough to move it there please?

 

[Rifter]

No the current system is the best. If they did it your way how would scouts gain XP? they are the ones allowing your other mechs to see targets and do damage and get kills but often do little to no damage themselves.

 

[Spad]

Some answers I took in another thread (doesn(t know how to link a thread) :

It absolutely was. Incentivizing non-shooting actions (spotting, evasion, tanking, etc.) means that you're not having to grind out kills on all your mechwarriors just to keep them advancing.

I think it was. I don't like having to pass on a turn because another character really needs the arbitrary EXP awarded by delivering the killing blow. Kinda silly if one person can deliver 99% of the damage and someone else gets the last 1% but gets all the credit.

Also, if it wasn't this way your spotters and sensor lockers would get left in the dust.

Yes. A thousand times yes.

Otherwise objective missions like escort, recovery, and assassination would turn into regular deathmatch as you tried to maximize EXP. Players who played the objective like a good mercenary would be punished with less experience.

You are there on the planet to do a mission. You do the mission as best you can, and get EXP for it. If you want to be more efficient at getting EXP, then you get more efficient at doing the missions. That's how it should be!

I think so. That way pilots can be focused on roles and not kill farming. My scouts w/sensor lock should not lose out by spotting targets for the missile boats.

Yeah, I always prefer fully shared XP over per kill stuff. You're supposed to be working as a team, not having your group each try to kill steal each other for gains.

If it were per kill, then you'd be constantly trying to set up kill shots with specific characters, and your more support oriented characters (ones focusing on scanning and scoring knockdowns) would fall far behind. Plus it never makes sense for one person to do that last tick of damage and suddenly get all the reward for it.

Some games do use a percentage based system. So if one person does 90% of the damage and another does the last 10%, the XP gained is split in the same manner. But that still leads to massive imbalance between party members. You'll have the damage dealers shooting up levels while the tanks and healers get nothing. That's perhaps "realistic" (as if gaming is realistic to begin with), but it's not good for gameplay value.

Who did more to "kill" the enemy mech? The guy who stripped off the armor and half the internal structure or the guy who one laser finished the mech off?

 

[Ballacraine]

Yeah, but as I implied in my opening, it doesn't just have to be damage dealt.
I think it should be related to experience gained in combat, be that tactical, or even learning from getting beat up.

:0/

 

[Wanderer2142]

The issue in general with having xp gained from individual actions, is that you end up gaming the system by maximizing some particular actions being taken.

That is to say, the equivalent of leaving an enemy mech up with one ML, intentionally showing an armored side for the ML to shoot at, rinse and repeat until all armor is gone, and then finally core out the target to finish the mission.

Or firing MLs at max range with a spotter, where your chance to hit is abysmal, but you're still generating 'spotting' xp for the spotter.

We're supposed to be streamlining from the tabletop, not adding more ways for the players to waste their time. This was done by equalizing mechwarrior xp, so you don't have to stall on taking a mission because you have extremely unbalanced pilots. Also reduces the amount of pilot micromanagement you're doing by having pilots flip mechs depending on who needed more xp when.

In a more philosophical sense: what is determined to be more 'valuable' for 'experience', and why? Usually get into chicken and egg arguments over what actions ought to be more valuable than what, because very little can be achieved in a vacuum in this game. No LoS = no indirect fire, lack of weapons = lack of dead enemy mechs, and so on and so forth.

 

[Ballacraine]

OK then.
Maybe it is better just to keep it simplistic & balanced.

 

[CarpeMortis]

Yeah, but as I implied in my opening, it doesn't just have to be damage dealt.
I think it should be related to experience gained in combat, be that tactical, or even learning from getting beat up.

:0/

The game is already very complicated, with significant moving parts. A quick perusal of the forums show us that a good deal of the systems are confusing for new players. I'm willing to bet dollars to doughnuts, that the decision to us this XP system was at least partially because it was effective and simple. The devs didn't want to have to explain to the users how a more complicated system would work, let alone balance that system.

For example, a primary role of a scout in this game is to spot for long range fire. But the very core of the spotting system is that units share "vision" so if you have 2 scouts who can "see" how do you determine who should get the XP?

Another common role is that of the Tank. But the AI likes to focus on damaged units, so if you have 2 tanks, and one take more damage early on, they will continue to take the majority of fire until they die, or are moved out of LOS. So now your other Tank is out some XP.

There are plenty more scenarios where the logic gets fuzzy

None of this is insurmountable, but all of them are complicated, and there is rarely an obvious elegant solution. HBS decided their resources would be better spent on other parts of the game.

 

[Ballacraine]

Eloquently put.