knutliott

I'm at the point with AW that if there isn't something to do, I don't play. Having an event, even with a blah prize, is enough to get me to play (and therefore help populate the servers) and see if I can win something. I generally don't because I'm just not good enough to beat the truly dedicated people, but it's fun to have a goal. Right now I'm grinding repeatables in Enigma's Legacy. Once I'm done with whatever's on tap for today, I typically log off. That's at least party because the repeatables take too many missions to complete and so I'm tired of playing by the time I'm done, but it's also because once that goal is complete I have no ulterior motive for playing.

AW isn't really a twitch game. It's more important to have the ability to plan your next shot than it is to have fast reflexes that let you take snap shots. To do well in PvE, learn the maps. Learn where the bots are going to spawn (which changes depending on where the players are at any given time). Learn the routes that the bots drive after they've spawned. Then pick a spot where you can shoot them from the side or from behind, while ducking behind hard cover to break spotting while your gun reloads. There are very few occasions when it makes sense to "stare down" a bot while your gun is reloading - that's just giving the bot time to return fire, and bots have laser accuracy.

Honestly, the York isn't the proper comparison. That would be the DCA. (Which they do note in the announcement when discussing the Foka turret version.) Compared to the DCA, the York trades maneuverability for armor. For many people (me included) that makes it preferable because it makes it easier to play. But I'm just as devastating in the DCA because it spits out similar insane levels of damage. You just have to be more active about changing positions and pay closer attention to your situational awareness. Which is how you're going to play the Foka turret version, too. I don't buy the "short to mid range" fire support... no one self-spots while playing the DCA because it's too risky. When you get spotted (and you WILL get spotted) you're dead. So it's played as long range fire support or as a selective brawler... basically exactly how I see the Foka turret BVP M-80A being played, too. I never use the radar on the York, either. There are plenty of targets to be found... no sense making yourself even easier to see than you already are. I use the York as short to mid range fire support because it has enough armor to make that feasible.

No, I was saying that vehicle balance in PvE is worse than in PvP because they literally don't balance vehicles for PvE. PvE gets whatever happens to it when they balance for PvP. The ad-hoc team play in MW4 and MWO were both light years better than AW. Sure, there were bad players who were just going to be bad no matter what, but in general the teams worked together and helped each other to win the match. It seems very strange to me that a fantasy future game about giant walking robot tanks would have better actual real-world tactics than a game about actual real-world tanks, but that has definitely been my experience.

One of the main goals of contests in online games is to increase activity in general, not just game playing. That's why they have a variety of ways that you enter and receive prizes. If everyone were automatically entered and automatically rewarded, they might as well just randomly give stuff away. People would win who had no idea they were even participating (as could happen in this event). Having an entry process requires people to actually take the step to enter, which in turn creates buzz and gets more people interested.

Yeah the Malyutka makes me think that the twin AC turret is the only one that will get used. So... yay! MOAR DAKKA AT TIER 5!!! :-|

I don't play PvP in Armored Warfare, so I can only go with what I've heard. And what I've heard is that the T-15 is just good in PvP, and due to the ability to YOLOphelia rush, OPAF in GLOPS. I have no idea who A1arM is, but something else to consider is that they might just be really good players who are using their abilities combined with teamwork to exploit what's otherwise a fairly small skill window. In all honesty, that is what you're buying into when you play PvP so you really can't use it as a counter-example. Regarding the "difficulties" that you list in PvP... most of those sound like mode problems, not vehicle problems. Even the MTLB/Pindad spam issue is really a mode problem - at it's core it's a problem of bad players getting themselves isolated where the MTLB or Pindad can abuse them. Those vehicles aren't good against bots in PvE because finding a lone, unsupported bot is rare. If people stuck together and worked as a team in PvP then those vehicles wouldn't be all that great in PvP, either. Also just FYI, I suspect that network issues are worse in PvE, because the bots don't have network issues. The team you're fighting against has zero ping and zero lag... they just happen to be bots that are fairly predictable so not that hard to beat on an individual basis. I realize that it feels worse in PvP because you're fighting another person and that other person just beat you because of lag or whatever, but the actual advantage/disadvantage encountered has to actually be worse in PvE.

If you think balance is bad in PvP... then yeah, you don't play enough PvE. I.e. Arty was so poorly balanced that they removed it from PvP and GLOPS (also because cancer), but when they put it back in PvE they stripped out half the changes and didn't put back the stuff that made it useful in PvE. Just neutered it completely. It isn't as bad as it used to be, but it used to be that they'd try to force people to play PvP in order to obtain prizes/gifts. You could pretty much always get them by playing purely PvP, but you could not get them by playing PvE. Vehicle tuning is always attempted to be balanced for PvP no matter what it does in PvE. T-15 is/was an OPAF god-tier vehicle in PvE... infantry is introduced, so ya know what let's give the T-15 some so that it's even more OP than before. CATTB is wreaking havoc in PvP, so let's nuke the one thing that makes it great in PvE - its resistance to HEAT. (Don't get me wrong, it's still a darn good vehicle in PvE, but the nerf was horribly disproportionate against PvE play.) Bots aim at pixels still, though it's not as bad as it's been in the past. If a bot decides that you need to die, you die. Bot can be moving full speed while turning and twisting the turret while you're doing the same, but it's laser precision will nail your driver's port every single time. Bots routinely cheat with ATGMs, firing them around corners and over hard cover. They're tricks that in theory players can also do, but in practice no actual person can pull off. Players have high win rates in PvE not because it's too easy, but because the bot AI is programmed to "cheat" and do things players cannot, not programmed to be smart. Once you learn the bot cheats you can work around them, but it doesn't make it more difficult or more fun, just more frustrating. I could go on and on...

I assume so as well. Experiences in PvE are weird because while what SilentStalker said is very true, the fact that Tier 7 gets thrown in with Tier 10 makes all of the Tier 7 vehicles seem super-weak. They're actually not - they're a huge improvement over Tier 6 - but because of the matchmaker buckets you never actually get to experience that improvement in PvE. I'd love to see them sync up the matchmaker buckets, too. Meaning, make the PvE buckets the same as the Spec Ops buckets. Tier 8 is a more natural break point for PvE matches, which shows in Spec Ops. It works really well there. So why not use the same breakpoint for PvE?

I think you're ignoring the most important consequence, which is that PvE players get shat on all the time and for some - and in this case specifically some paying customers - this could be the last straw. I think SilentStalker is headed in the correct direction, which is to find a way to mitigate Ophelia in PvP modes without harming her in PvE modes. Unfortunately it sounds like the game engine isn't capable of distinguishing game mode during play, so the ideal solution of having different stats in different modes is apparently impossible. (Note that this would also improve vehicle balancing if it were possible, but alas it seems it is not.)

That's covered in my graph. The solid red portion of Tier 10 goes farther to the right than the solid red portion of Tier 9. The best Tier 10s would still be better than the best Tier 9s, and so on all the way down the Tiers. All I've done is make it so that the best Tier 10s wouldn't be dramatically better than the best Tier 9s, because one of the desires of the rebalance is to make it so that people play more tiers in each game mode. If Tier 10s are dramatically better than Tier 9s even after the rebalance, then nothing will change. People will continue to only play Tier 10s unless they have some external reason (like grinding to advance) to play a lower tier. Oh I don't think it needs to be nerfed. Playing one in PvE shows that it isn't the vehicle that's a problem, it's the bot programming. Bot LT vehicles seem to get specific bonuses (or perhaps just more finely tuned AI) for targeting and potentially pen, which the PL-01, Anders, K21 XC8, et al use with annoying reliability. And while I don't believe that they actually get a bonus to VR, in practice they have a VR advantage because there are more bots coming at you from multiple directions than there are players. So in the hands of a bot, the PL-01 is pretty damn potent. But it's only in the hands of a bot, so if a correction is needed (and as much as I hate the damn thing, I don't think one is needed) the way to do it would be to change the AI coding.

That's just it - she isn't meta in PvE. I use her in only a handful of vehicles that I use regularly, and that's because those particular vehicles are the types of vehicles that tend to only get spotted when in a bad position. I.e. they're high damage output but rely on stealth to use it, so if/when they get spotted it's pretty instantly bad news. She feels rather nicely balanced for PvE. Also, saying that you can "maximze" Ophelia for both damage and spotting is something of a misnomer for PvE. VR is tied heavily to camo, and to "optimize" Ophelia for VR you lose 8% camo. You'd pretty much always prefer Juan Carlos over Ophelia for spotting purposes. So while that's fine if you only want to use her in MBTs, that's really the only use for her once you've done that. It's not a great build overall in PvE, in no small part because if you're spotting in an MBT you're up front where you don't need bonus VR from your commander, so it's wasted commander skills. Optimizing her for reload speed similarly has side effects, specifically to health. Again - not all that bad if you only want to use her in MBTs, but it's risky for other applications. I've done that because I'm only using her key ability as a safety valve if I'm suddenly spotted and insta-gibbed, but it wouldn't be a good thing to do if you wanted to use her more generally. I'm not even sure it's a good build for MBTs because they need their health... losing 15% health for reload speed is a suspect trade-off for an MBT. Anyway the point is that people bought Ophelia because of her abilities. I doubt anyone bought Alyssa specifically to use for PvP or GLOPS, so making her worse in PvP or GLOPS wouldn't matter to them. I'm sure that people did buy Ophelia for PvE, though, so you can't nuke her for PvE without pissing people off. Unlike vehicle balance, I wouldn't be opposed to a general buff to commanders. Even the best ones feel no better or maybe slightly better than a single retrofit, and the bad ones basically just feel useless. Buffing all of the commanders up to retrofit level doesn't seem like a bad thing, provided they're different enough to still feel unique compared to each other.

I hate that tank in PvE. God I hate that tank. You can't see it until it's too late, and it auto-pens basically anything it shoots at. Every 2 seconds. And it has troll armor. PL-01 is a higher priority target in PvE than a T-15. T-15 sucks because if it surprises you you're dead, but if it doesn't surprise you it's pretty easy to mitigate. PL-01 is kind of the opposite - it kills you slowly enough that you have time to pop smoke and try to hide, but then it's still out there and you can't mitigate it. It's going to pen you as soon as it can see you, so you just have to hide until a teammate takes it out. Anders and K21 can be similarly annoying, but they don't have troll armor or insane camo so aren't as bad.

I don't think they can do that, either. She can be tuned, but you can just up and nuke half of her abilities. If you make her a one-trick pony, you've destroyed her for PvE and since PvE is the dominant game mode I have to assume it's also the dominant revenue stream. Honestly her other abilities are at least as important for PvE as her key skill, if not more important. I'm sure it depends on play style, but her key skill only comes into play for me in maybe 20-25% of games. (And after typing that it really feels too high... maybe 10% for me?) But her other skills are constantly useful. It needs to be a measured approach to tuning - perhaps more than once - to get her to a state where she's no longer toxic in PvP/GLOPS, but is still useful in those modes, and ensures that she hasn't been destroyed for PvE.

I re-did my version so that it better shows what's happening. You could also leave Tier 10 as a 3-wide like the other tiers so that it only has to be "nerfed" 3 times instead of 4, but I honestly feel like that would leave Tier 10 vehicles too powerful compared to the overall meta. If one of your goals is to allow more than just Tier 10 vehicles to be competitive at top-end play, then the gap between the best Tier 10s and the best Tier 9s needs to be smaller than the gaps at lower tiers. Again, apologies for the rudimentary MS Paint skillz.

Yeah, that would be a risk. It does seem weird to me that PvP players are so attached to actual stats vs relative stats, but it's true. (I've played a lot of PvP in other games, particularly MW4 and MWO.) PvP players would rather have everything else get buffed up to the OP levels of their favorite vehicles, even though that's many times more work and much riskier in terms of the re-balancing being successful. I suspect that TTK is one of the impetuses behind the re-balancing. It's a borderline too low right now. A very slight across-the-board nerf to TTK would go a long way toward fixing balance across classes.

I have to agree with SilentStalker on this. As a game publisher, you have to be really careful about nerfing things that people paid real money to obtain. EULA notwithstanding, making massive changes to Ophelia would feel an awful lot like bait-and-switch. You can tune her abilities, but it'd be extremely difficult to remove (or even neuter) her key skill because that was likely a main factor in many purchasing decisions. As a tuning suggestion, her key skill could go inactive within 50 meters of an enemy vehicle. That would at least help with the YOLOphelia rushing in GLOPS and PvP, and wouldn't have much of an effect (if any) on her in PvE where she's already fine.

What they should be doing (pardon the rudimentary MS Paint skillz) Their plan leaves 7-10 PvE in shambles because the size of Tier 8 is still too large and the gap between Tier 6 and Tier 8 is also still too large. It kind of looks like they're not considering SpecOps in their plans, and SpecOps breaks at Tier 8, not at Tier 6. Right now it's pretty rare to see a Tier 6 in a Tier 8 match, but it does happen and those poor Tier 6s are useless when it does. My idea is that Tiers 7-9 should be the same "size", but smaller than Tiers 1-6, and that the gap between odd numbered Tiers (or even numbered) should be the same progression as it currently is in Tiers 1-6. That will mean that the top end advantage of Tier 10 over Tier 9 is smaller than they have planned (which IMHO is good for all game modes), and perhaps more importantly the gaps between top-end Tier 6s and top-end Tier 8s will be smaller (good for SpecOps), as will the gap between top-end Tier 7 and top-end Tier 10 (good for PvE and presumably GLOPS and PvP). To do this, top-end Tier 7s get nerfed. Bottom-end Tier 8s get buffed. Top-end Tier 9's get nerfed. Tier 10 gets nerfed hard - its entire new range is below the old range.

Umbrella just now. I'm in my MGM. Haven't fired a shot. 45 seconds into the match, a T-15 does 3700 damage to me while I frantically smoke, backpedal, and use my FRBK, shooting past the GAU-8 a good 100 meters in front of me that just annihilated the Bradley sitting next to the T-15 and ignoring the AS21 just to my left in front of me that's peppering it with AC fire. I'm left with 184 health for the rest of the match. W. T. F.

This is actually a nerf to bots. Gun-fired ATGMs are generally worse for bots than whatever standard ammunition the gun can fire, so the fact that the Merkavas now fire an ATGM once in a while means they're less effective than if they'd just fired the gun. Bot ATGMs are only a problem on vehicles that can spam them rapidly. A bot firing a single ATGM every 6-8 seconds isn't a problem in PvE.

Most notably vision range. It's very nearly impossible to out-spot a bot Lieutenant no matter what you're in. AS21 and Hunter can do it if properly set up... maybe Sphinx too? There aren't many vehicles that can do it, and they all have good camo AND very good vision range.

Gah. Yesterday in a game I was gang-banged through my teammates by several bots right at the start of the game. I was in my 915, but so were 2 of my teammates and they were in front of me in LOS of the enemies. I was evidently slow to connect because everyone else started moving before me and had engaged by the time I caught up, yet the instant that I fired (while well to the rear of our formation) about 3-4 bots all turned and shot me taking me into the red less than a minute into the game. I popped smoke and a FRBK and played extremely conservatively after that, yet continued to get targeted with insane precision any time I was within max view range of bots (the white circle on the mini-map). I was only able to really contribute when I was outside the white circle from the bots and relying on teammates to spot for me, which of course they didn't understand and were lambasting me for camping and sniping. I still managed top damage on the team, but basically no spots or spotting damage so came in 2nd overall. I took just over 4400 total damage in a 915 without dying. (Vincent with +14.5% health - just over 2500 at full health for the 915 - saved my bacon.)

Same. I really only play PvE, and she's no longer my primary commander in PvE. There's a certain type of vehicle that calls for her, but she's probably in maybe 20% of the vehicles that I use regularly. She's a good commander in PvE, but she's far from uber or OP.

The York is a favorite to pile one as OP - and it is absolutely OPAF - but honestly for a new player the DCA is just as bad in the hands of a veteran. The main difference is that the York has useful armor, which makes it better for mediocre and average players. (That and it was easy to get and is a premium, so people play it more often for the extra credits.) Anyway... the experiment that you guys are running is how I played the game when I started. Totally FTP, no purchase whatsoever, just grind along and see how things go. I don't believe that I bought any gold until I was past Tier 6 and into Tier 7, at which point I started hurting for credits so bought a VFM Mk5. That sustained me pretty well until I reached Tier 8 at which point I needed a better credit earner so bought an AMX10-RCR and played the crap out of it. Still my most-played vehicle to this day even though I haven't really used it much at all for probably 18 months.

My own experience seemingly contradicts every "general rule" that anyone has ever posted. The bots target me in situations that make absolutely no sense whatsoever, unless somehow your Dossier factors into the equation. That doesn't really make much sense, so I'm left baffled by situations too numerous to count. An example: I'm in an AS21 following a teammate PL-01 and Ramka-99. We're rounding a corner to ambush a bot PL-01. I'm in 3rd person view because this happens ALL THE FUCKING TIME so I know what to expect and do my best to watch for it. Teammate PL-01 rounds corner, fires at bot; bot ignores it. (Might have been reloading? Sure.) Teammate PL-01 only gets off one round and then must have had to reload because he just sits there. A second or two later the teammate Ramka-99 rounds the corner, stops in front of the bot, and opens up with the AC; bot ignores it. Note that all this time the bot has been tracking me through hard cover, even though I'm not spotted by any enemy bots. I wait a few seconds just in case the bot is reloading, or I'm actually spotted and just haven't been alerted to it yet by Situational Awareness. Nope, the bots just sits there, staring at me, while the Ramka-99 slowly eats its health. As the bot's health grows smaller and smaller, I round the corner to try to get the kill and the bot instantly shoots me, before I've even fully rounded the corner, and it has to shoot between my teammates to do it. And no, we were not within 50 meters. I was not spotted until I rounded the corner. Something like this happens to me in just about every game I play. It's why I play so cautiously, because most of the time when the bots do this they're also playing in god mode so that they auto-pen no matter how ridiculous the shot is. Bots fire missiles at me around corners all the time while one or both of us is moving. Granted, by the time the missile hits there's line of sight between us, but when they're firing they're blocked by hard cover and fire around the corner (or another favorite is over a hill before they - or I - have crested it). Sometimes I can rationalize the action. Last game just now I'm in my GAU-8 waiting for the barrel to cool off while aimed at a bot K21. A teammate Wilk drives in front of me, parks blocking my line of sight, and starts firing. Asshole. So as he's firing about his 3rd shot in a row, I pull forward and push him. Bot K21 immediately shoots me even though I'm mostly blocked by the Wilk. Okay I can rationalize that it's possible that the Wilk's much better camo made it so that it was still hidden from the bot... but really? The Wilk fired like 3 times and has weaker armor and less health. And the bot had to deliberately aim around the massive body of the Wilk to hit me. FML. The only thing I can think of is that aggro is cumulative in some way throughout the match. This kind of crap seems to happen most often in matches when I'm a very high damage dealer, so if all that damage builds me up as a priority over the course of the match that might explain it. I'd always thought that aggro was per enemy, though, which would mean that damage done early in a match would no longer be applicable to bots that weren't even spawned on the map when that damage was done.