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Alkaline_Stingray

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Everything posted by Alkaline_Stingray

  1. Damn, I must not have noticed, or that change must have happened when I took a pretty long hiatus from the game. I started playing back when Obsidian was still in charge, but I think I stopped before the handover to My.com, and came back quite some time afterwards. Ah, my bad. I thought you meant to that the C2 MEXAS should be part of progression from the Leopard 1. It'd make more sense if it stemmed from the 1A5. Though I can see how this can get pretty confusing and appear arbitrary; with the case of the T-72, technically you could argue that the T-90 would itself be a variant of the T-72. I'd say that it'd be a good idea if - assuming that there's no change in tier with each upgrade - each tank only increases in power level by 1 or 1.5 tiers. Of course, they could still put in tanks like the T-55AGM which could be a tier 1 to tier 6 jump for those who are super determined to play the T-55. Although it would be far easier to keep each vehicle in its own tier, I think it'd be more rewarding for players if they could see their vehicle progress. I think being able to see some form of progression on the vehicle you're using would make the grind seem a lot less, well, grindy. Also, I feel that at some point, they're going to run out of vehicles for the low tiers since most vehicles nowadays stem from the same few tanks.
  2. The reason why I figured that they needed to be up-tiered was because I thought that having something like a, say, Leopard C2 MEXAS at tier 3 where it could potentially face tiers 1 to 2 would be rather unfair to those playing bottom-tier vehicles. Then again, that would likely only apply for PvE, so I guess this would go into the whole discussion as to whether or not there should be a difference between PvE and PvP balancing. I think one compromise would be to just view each tank individually; a Leopard 1A3 or 1A4 would unlikely offer enough of an upgrade over the Leopard 1 to be up-tiered, but a C2 MEXAS might need a little more testing to see how it would actually work in a game. Your second point was kind of what I'd like to see in this game, where instead of having variants of the same vehicle being separate and distinct vehicles, you'd instead have the base vehicles in the trees and their variants as upgrade packages. It would, as you say, reduce the number of unique vehicles by quite a bit, and I would even say that you'd have to cut down the number of tiers as well. It could even morph into a Generation 1/2/3/4 sort of system which more-or-less reflects real life classifications. I'd reckon it would also make it easier to introduce tanks as they appear in real-time, since almost all future tanks are lumped into Generation 4 at this point in time. However, as a starting point, I think this system would be best for tiers 1 to 5. I really only thought hard about this when I realised that having a lack of a players in low-tiers would not bode well for the development of new tech trees.
  3. Not too sure if this is where it should go, and not too sure if this is even a good idea since I doubt the devs will see it, but I figured it'd be better if I just threw this out there instead of just keeping it inside my head. I recently got a friend to come back to AW, and one thing I noticed was that PvE matchmaking at the very low tiers took quite a long time. We were stuck in the queue for roughly three minutes for a hardcore tier 1 match, and it wasn't that much better in standard. I understand that firstly, this might be due to timing or the fact that few people play tier 1 matches nowadays, but I couldn't help but think how this might be quite off-putting to a new player. Either they wait for a long time to get into (if ever) a match, or they might end up being a tier 1 in the midst of a group of tier 3s. The first solution I could think of was to just introduce AI team mates at tiers 1 and 2 for PvE, and that might work as a stopgap measure, but then I thought of something else. One of the things that drew me to this game back in 2015 was the idea that you could take a tank and slap upgrades on it until it was something decent for it's tier. For example, I was hoping that you could do something like taking a T-55, putting ERA and other upgrades on it and turn it into a T-55MV or even T-55AGM. What I'd like to suggest is the introduction of a similar mechanism. Maybe not as extensive as to feature individual upgrades (eg. FCS, Stabilisers, etc, etc) as that might mess up the tiering system, but something along the lines of allowing a player to 'up-tier' their low-tier vehicles into unique vehicles. Using the T-55 as an example, it could be that within the T-55 upgrade tree, there would be a progression-plus upgrade not unlike those found in the tier 10s where you'd be able to unlock a T-55MV kit to move it up into tier 3 or 4, and maybe even have a subsequent upgrade into the T-55AGM to turn it into a tier 6. Similar upgrades can be used for other vehicles: Leopard 1 (3) - > Leopard C2 MEXAS (5?) Type 62 (1) -> Type 62G (2? 3?) PT-85 (1) -> PT-90 (2?) -> Type 63 (2? 3?) -> Type 63A (4?) M41 (1) -> M41 105 (3?) And so on and so forth. I think this would not only bring players back into the low-tier pool and give it the boost in population is needs (which would lead to better teams and maybe a better new player experience), but would also make it easier to introduce vehicles that would otherwise be hard to slot into any of the existing tech trees, or are just unique vehicles that would be hard to build a tree around.
  4. If I may give my two cents on the issue of balance... I think one reason why MBTs might be so OP right now is because most of your other targets are armoured vehicles, which is what MBTs were designed to take on and destroy. I can't think of a way to make MBTs less OP without making them feel unrealistic. I think the MBTs of 0.33 are about as close as we can get to IRL values with regards to armour, reload speed, and damage without MBTs actually making every other class obsolete. Using damage falloff is a pretty novel way of balancing a class, but I think maps would have to be bigger before you actually feel the hurt from sniping at range with an MBT. Personally, I've never felt that the damage falloff was affecting me in any significant manner (Unless I'm just that aggressive of a player and never noticed it) A direct way of balancing things would probably return us to how things were in 0.32, and I wasn't much a fan of that, either. I guess one way of balancing would be to just nerf their view range even further, making them dependent on other vehicle classes to find enemies. That would come with its own set of problems, of course, but apart from pushing reload times up into an average of 10 seconds again, I can't really think of much. An indirect way of nerfing would be just to make the other classes feel a little more useful. Introducing airborne targets would make AFVs or anything armed with an AC seem a lot more attractive, I reckon (though of course, MBTs would have to be given their own, limited form of AA in case players get put into an all-MBT team). Maybe there could be maps with rivers that are impassable to MBTs but can be crossed by amphibious vehicles? That would also allow for the introduction of true amphibious capabilities instead of such vehicles simply drowning at a slower rate. MBTs would still be able to use a slightly longer and maybe more indirect route, but amphibious vehicles would be able to, say, take a more direct approach to completing secondaries, or even just to rush to stop a cap.
  5. I gave an elaboration of my answers in the form, but I thought I'd share some here as well. Coincidentally, on the day the PVE query came out, I actually had a chat with a friend who used to play AW, and whom I was trying to get to play again just so I had someone to platoon and chat with during games. I wasn't successful, and some of his grievances were things I felt that nothing much could be done about (the grind, mainly). Other parts however, I thought I'd share as part of my response. Firstly, the variety of missions. As mentioned by other players, sometimes it can feel like you're playing the same mission again and again throughout the week. This can be easily solved by creating a wider variety of missions, and so I'm all for recycling PVP maps for PVE use. In all honesty, until Haskell pointed it out, I didn't actually know that Albatross used the same map as Umbrella and Snake Bite (And I've been playing since beta, so goes to show my skills of observation....). I think it would also help to just have more objectives such as taking part in missions, joining a larger push across open ground, or having to dig in and defend against waves of enemies. This brings me to a point which I didn't put in the query form, but I thought of afterwards. Maybe there could be the introduction of AI allies in standard missions, such as how it was done for spec ops? Personally, I quite liked the idea that we were just playing as one mercenary out of many, and having some AI tanks pushing forward with us would certainly help to build that feeling of being one part out of something larger and grander. It would also help to make the aforementioned objective types possible; an ambush where the AI vehicles are hit, a push with maybe two other platoons of AI tanks, or digging in with other AI vehicles. This would also prevent those types of objectives where the players are likely going to be shot at quite a lot a little less frustrating; the AI allies can draw attention away from the team. I liked the special mechanics in spec ops, but only when you could do something about it. For instance, being able to shoot down the drones/gunships targeting you. I wasn't so much a fan of dodging attacks that you couldn't really do much about; it reminded me a little too much of bullet-hell type games. Dodging artillery, on the other hand, was something that I figured couldn't be helped if enemy artillery was to make a return in PVE. On the topic of shooting down drones and helicopters, I think one way of implementing that into standard missions would be to allow vehicles the use of their roof-mounted machine guns or remote weapons stations. That way, they have a way of fighting off airborne enemies should the team lack an AC-equipped vehicle. On the note of vehicle-mounted machine guns, I'd love to see more missions where enemy infantry plays a bigger role, or even technicals. It would make the currently-introduced coaxial machine gun a lot more useful, I think. Having enemy infantry would also mix things up a little by having something different to shoot at every now and then. As far as the story goes, I was okay with it until the latest expansion. I liked it when it was just mercenaries and corporations, and no world-threatening thing for us to stop. I understand that a storyline is very useful to a game, but maybe it could just be toned down? Like instead of following a team in its quest to save the world, it could instead follow maybe a character or a group as they rise from simple mercenaries to being a PMC in their own right. I recall from an old post on AW about the setting that there are parts of the world where even corporations would not set foot in. That would be a pretty nice place to have such a story. Lastly, I think AW's biggest draw is that it has an actual PVE mode. WoT sure doesn't have one, at least not permanently, and WT's PVE is to me, quite a joke. I stuck with WoWS for as long as I did only because it had a PVE option, but it lacked variety, and the missions it had were tier-locked. With these games I mentioned, PVP is their main focus with PVE being more of sideshow. I think if AW does the opposite, putting more focus on PVE with PVP having a smaller focus, it would be able to carve out quite a niche for itself amongst the vehicle-arcade-semi-simulator group of games.
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