Originally Posted by Kerrec
Wow, how ignorant. Ever hear the quote, "the best laid plans of mice and men often go astray?"
They probably had a very detailed "plan". However, the information, metrics and feedback they are receiving is probably causing major shifts in the priority of that plan. A Metagame is probably a huge development investment, where fixing a spawn room is a "relatively" much smaller investment.
Fixing a spawn room will probably also give huge return on investment. The combination of adding several exits and underground tunnels to the main facility forces the attackers to spread out, giving the defenders a chance to focus on one exit and succeed. Also, if the "protected balconies" allow fire outwards but not inwards, then a focused defensive force at the spawn room can potentially enforce a no man's land around the spawn building, once again giving defenders a chance. If those "protected balconies" allow fire outwards at the sky, then spawn camping Air can be stopped dead in it's tracks.
Not only that, but by giving measly rewards for killing someone that just spawned and exited a spawn room, the major motivation for the XP farmers just went away. It will still be a viable tactic to CAPTURE a base, but given human nature, without the reward, there will be alot fewer people doing it.
With dynamic XP granting more XP for people that have done more killing, ESF's will now have a motivator to go after a Lib or an A2G ESF instead of ignoring enemy air to keep his own nose pointed downward.
Dynamic XP should also motivate players to use Libs as tank column busters instead of a relatively safe infantry farming platform. Tanks will probably always be worth 100xp per kill + the crew kill xp, where farming infantry that are being insta killed by a zerg and keep respawning will give nothing worthwile. So Dynamic XP alone will probably motivate the zergs to simply spread out and look for a fairer (and more rewarding) fight.
There are a ton of "minor" changes in these proposed changes, but their impact can be HUGE. This is a GOOD step in the right direction. Small incremental changes, then evaluate. After these changes go in, they will hopefully not touch anything related to them and focus on something completely different, like a metagame and/or giving significance to resources. Once they have had enough time to really digest how the incremental changes has affected the game, THEN they can decide to do a bit more or back off a little bit.
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This +1. Kerrec just nailed it. People really need to pull their heads out of their ass and start thinking more on what is being asked for and how significant the time involved will be to make some of those changes, especially those that alternate major game mechanics. The devs then need to spend more time to ensure they didn't break something else in implementing those same fixes.
I hope they take the time they need to fix things properly. Providing a solution blindly is sometimes worse then the original problem. Something the devs for Mech Warrior Online hopefully have learned by now as their track record for doing just that is horrendous.
All and all, a good first step for 2013. I for one am optimistic. Keep up the good work SOE.