I was writing something about ammunition expenses in Mechwarrior Online (each individual Artemis Long Range Missile costs 334 C-Bills; each Gauss round is 2000!), but then Piranha Games had to go and ruin everything with this news.
As of the eighteenth of December (which it already is here ion Australia as I write this, but isn't quite yet in Vancouver, where Piranha are), repair and re-arm costs are going away, completely.
So install XL engines and expensive-ammo-ed weapons to your heart's content! You'll still have to pay for ammo when you first install the weapon, I think, but no longer will you be installing extra ammo bins so that the free 75% reload after a game will give you enough to get along, without paying a fortune for that last 25%.
Newbies will get a lot more money - a "Cadet bonus" - for playing their first 25 games, so they can afford a reasonable 'Mech quickly. And trial 'Mechs will now earn as large a C-Bill and experience point reward as owned 'Mechs. So when you buy your first 'Mech you may already be able to afford an efficiency upgrade or two. You still can't upgrade or modify trial 'Mechs, but now they'll just be normal 'Mechs with I presume the traditional lousy setup, rather than complete second class citizens.
Oh, and non-newbies will be getting about eight million C-Bills, the total Cadet bonus, just as a present.
Rewards for starting a game and just standing around doing nothing are now very small. Rewards for killing enemies are much higher. The money and XP reward for assisting in a kill was until now the same as the reward for kill; now you will actually get quite a lot more of a reward for assisting than for being the person who fires the killing shot!
Also, rewards for capturing the enemy base in Assault games are now zero. So nobody will be shouting at the rest of their team to leave the last AFK baddie standing there and capture instead. Capturing is now just a way to end a game when you can't find, or don't have time to get to, the last enemy.
(You will of course get rewards for capturing things in the upcoming Conquest mode, since that's the whole point of that game mode.)
18 December 2012 at 11:17 am
Love this game, but don't really have a suitable computer. What would you suggest as a min-max PC build targeted at giving a decent gameplay experience (I don't care if I'm missing out on specular highlights on mechs; I do care if my framerate or visual acuity affect my ability to Kill Mechs, Kill Mechs, Kill More Mechs)?
(Cost is less of an option if I can build it around a Mac Mini or iMac in some way, because I have something resembling a good reason to buy one of those, though I think the current video cards in those things are pretty far from the recommended options).
28 December 2012 at 7:54 pm
I'm running MWO on Windows 7 under BootCamp on a current Mac Mini (with a quite decent spec) and it seems to play quite nicely. It's not pumping out a stupendous frame rate, but it's enjoyably playable - I'll take a look at what FPS it averages and report back if anyone is interested. I am dying quite often, but that's due to my lack of skills not any hardware limitations.
I've run into the 4FPS bug, which is annoying, but that happens to people running proper gaming rigs, which I'm quite aware a Late 2012 Mini is not. I could, I'm sure, build a good PC for gaming for what I paid for the Mini, however the gaming thing is secondary for me, so the fact that it works for a few games is enough.
Given the 2011 Mini had a discrete graphics card (AMD Radeon HD 6630M), it may have even been slightly better for gaming than the 2012 Mini with no discrete graphics (Intel HD Graphics 4000).
For reference, it's a 2.6GHz quad core Core i7 with Intel HD Graphics 4000, 16GB RAM (cheap 3rd party so why not), SSD + HDD 'Fusion drive'. Obviously, the graphics subsystem is the limiting factor.
18 December 2012 at 7:47 pm
I'm not really sure about these changes.
When I'm being negative:
- The removal of R&R costs might unbalance of things like XL engines, FF armour and Artemis, removing one of their major downsides
- Making assists more valuable than kills might lead to people just painting every mech on the enemy team once (I know I will).
- Removing the cap bonus is sad :-(
On the other hand, if I'm being positive:
- Some mechs were very expensive to run, especially FF armour was something I just didn't get except for lights.
- This way it's less annoying when someone else kills that mech you've been 1-on-1-ing for 5 minutes. Ok, no kill, but more cash!
- Like you said, it just turns assault into team deathmatch, with an escape option for annoying opponents.
We'll see tonight!
19 December 2012 at 2:21 am
I'm pretty positive about it. Yes, it'll make at least one or two 'Mech upgrades very important if you want to be competitive, but those upgrades are not that expensive to buy in the first place, and now the up-front costs are all you have to worry about for anything.
A 'Mech with all possible upgrades has some serious advantages... but a 'Mech with all possible upgrades is also likely to have room for one Medium Laser and a small loudhailer through which you can curse at the enemy. If you get Ferro-Fibrous, Endo-Steel AND double heat sinks, you're not going to be able to fit in an XL engine unless you install pretty much no weapons. That part of the game is quite well balanced already, I think, so the new changes should just let people claw back a few slots they were previously using to boost their 75%-reload numbers.
XL engines, in particular, are a nicely-judged trade-off even without repair costs. Having engine crit locations in your entire torso is, I think, an adequate punishment for the XL weight benefits; huge repair bills on top of that are, I think, unfair.
(I say this as a player with a couple of XL 'Mechs and several non-XL ones. :-)
19 December 2012 at 5:03 am
I have a couple 'mechs I don't practice enough with because they cost more to repair than the payout for a loss (Atlas D-DC, Endo, DHS, Artemis SRMs... 100-120k repair). I'm happy that now I can run them outside of the 8-man "we don't care if you lose money, we need another Atlas" arena and still make money. Also, it makes it more attractive to try new things, without as much punishment in the "learning the mech" phase.
Also, I think that the bonus you get from the kill, plus the bump up in the rankings at the end of the match, will make it more profitable to get the kill than the assist. So you'll still lose out when someone steals your kill, but not as badly. ;)
It did always feel a little cheap to win the brawl and lose the match because a couple lights got to the cap. Not that I was ever on the giving end of that, nope, never. But it was "Assault" mode, and the goal was capture. People just slugged it out in the middle because it was fun :)
19 December 2012 at 3:21 am
Step 1: Register New Account
Step 2: Redeem Penny Arcade 1 day Premium time
Step 3: ...
Step 4: Profit!
19 December 2012 at 3:47 am
Seriously though, that 8M Cbill bonus is just enough to get me into a shiny new Stalker, though at 48 kph, I'm not sure if this would be a great idea for a primarily light/medium pilot. I'll probably just blow it all away on XL engines and FF armour for the mechs I already own, now that repair costs are gone.
19 December 2012 at 5:12 am
This is great. Anything that brings in new meat is a plus.
19 December 2012 at 7:59 pm
Having played a few games yesterday, I can say that if you're not a bad player, there's no real change to the average profits per match
I'm making less each game (especially in conquest, it seems*), but without the R&R costs, I come out about the same as before the patch.
* It seems that in Conquest, kill and assist bonusses are halved. But that was just what we observed yesterday, I might be wrong.
20 December 2012 at 7:26 am
Significantly better fps for me from this update. To the point where I *might* be able to play in 16:9 rather than 4:3!
Downside being far more crashes.
Really enjoying playing with and playing against the new stalker mech.