Moderator S1lence, I have a question. Does the support team at Plarium possess any playback features to look into matches that players encounter problems in?

They don't have that.

Okay, I just wanted clarification :D

Anyone have any recommendations for shields on guardian? I'm in between the "barricade" and "multi-layered" mods.

Thanks for making such a considered post as well as providing a mechanism to pass on feedback.

I agree with more or less everything that you have said. I'm not opposed to mods in principle, nor am I one to cry "cash grab", nor am I opposed to change in games -- if done well, it keeps things fresh.

However, in my view mods go far beyond a refreshing change and have completely disrupted the entire game -- very negatively. Even if I give the benefit of the doubt and say "okay, let's allow time for a new feature to settle in and be tuned", I struggle to see how this can work out well.

My main grievance is that it renders many styles of play and evenh weapon classes essentially redundant. You brought up sniper weapons:

"...and how they end the dominance of sniper weapons..."

I completely disagree with this and this is borne out in the game statistics (I wrote a little API to collect results from matches, I won't get into that here but I can post it elsewhere if people are interested) as it is not sniper mechs which are consistently the top scoring mechs.

Mech Arena, has always been far more heavy on the missiles, homing weapons, and artillery style of things. By definition, there is less emphasis on the player being accurate, as either the homing mechanism does the lion's share of the work, or if you miss you still get splash damage. That's not to say they are a skill less weapon, the skillset is just different.

Sniper weapons on the other hand, have no such luxury, if you miss you miss hard, they are a linear weapon and have a low rate of fire. The trade off was if you were accurate, your accuracy was rewarded with high damage. In a game with maps that are relatively small, and already dominated by afore mentioned artillery style weapons snipers were already disadvantaged. That was fine by me, as I enjoyed, and got a kick of a well placed shot.

With mods the reward of high damage for accuracy has completely vanished, especially with the multi layer shields. There is no incentive to use sniper weapons at all, they just aren't effective. I think this can be said if any slow rate of fire weapon, whether it's a shotgun or a sniper rifle.

Many people have said the player base will adapt, and they are right of course, but I think it's a shame to render entire styles of play and weapon classes useless. Maybe in there will be a "renormalization" in the future with weapon mods or something and we'll essentially end up where we were pre-mod, but with an additional currency (mod parts). But until some refinement, for a player like me, who was less interested in winning tournaments and just enjoyed supporting as a sniper, the game as it is now holds no attraction for me.

Silence, thank you for having concern and taking the time to collect comments. There have been many comments coming from Plarium over the past year or so about creating balance in the game, which is why there are been buffs and nerfs. For all the talk about wanting balance, it seems in one fell swoop, the addition of mods took removed that balance. I know that bots have already been toned down since the initial release, but they still seem overpowered at times. It does depend on certain bots and what hanger level you're playing at. 

It feels like the most skilled players who would typically rely on sniper weapons are the ones being punished the most here. Running maxed scout mechs with maxed legendary pilots and maxed RG12's, I can unload full magazines into bots and still not penetrate the shield. That's a hell of a downgrade from being able to put one shot out of each gun into a bot and getting a kill most of the time. 

But my biggest complaint is the addition of mods has sucked all the fun out of the game. It's made all matches last longer just because bots can't be killed. It's just boring now. In addition, it seems the assist scoring is totally broken. If you hit mechs and don't get through the shields/mods you don't get credit for assists. Even when you do seem to get through the mod shields, it seems you rarely get the assist. 

I would say the entire program should be scrapped but I know that's not happening at this point especially with so many people spending so much money already to max out everything. Even nerfing seems unlikely since people spent real money. It may be too late to recover from the damage that's been done. 

The closest I've experienced is due connection error?

Do you remember anything in particular being up with your network at the time? 

If you're going down the epic route ML is definitely better.

Otherwise I'd say it depends tbh. 

Hello pogster, my Internet was good, never gave me any heads up. The game was clearly running smoothly, the only thing trippin' was that zephyr with that IMPENETRABLE ml shield 

Also yes, I've gotten the legendary multi layered shield, and it's useless rn, but upgrading it will (hopefully) make it better:)

MODS changes all precedent Balance: They add too much XP just for Bots and Paying Users; - A lot of weapon maxed before like Em or many many others r now UNUSFUL; - they add Shields for Shield; - Bots r OP now and difference from Pay Users and who don't spend so much r now EMBARRASSING; who (like me) before this have a OP hangar (>11k) now become a little sheep in a Wolf's Arena; I M REALLY LOSING FUN AND MOTIVATIONS for play again.. isn't a Joke, I understand Platinum have to earn MONEY but this system I thk it's the LAST NEW FUNCTION I will see BEFORE LEAVE : whitout Fun and motivations for Play, players decrease as fast as u think, and JUST BOTS game will been MORE AND MORE THAN TODAY THE NORMALLY.. have a great Money Earn or Cash cow game.. I'm leaving probably soon

Mods that improve mobility would be kinda scary lol, imagine a tank chasing down scouts. We have Vortex and I love it and I will not be discussing my hypocrisy here :P.

Unfortunately, no. There are thousands of matches being played every day, and having the support team keep track of each of them sounds like an impossible task. 

For scouts and mechs that you're going to use for a frontal assault, pick the single layer barricade mode. Multi layer mods are mainly for use on sniper builds, to counter other snipers. Since Guardian is a brawler, pick the single layer shield mod.

I understand your perspective, and respect it. It is completely possible that my opinion on sniper weapon dominance comes from my personal experience at 12k SP as well as high end competitive play. Most of my matches pre-mods were decided almost entirely by EM Eclipses and Railgun Gurges. I have had matches where I use EMs vs another 12k SP player and end up with 15+ kills and no deaths, simply because I can farm their bots much more efficiently and thus deprive them of teammates to win the match. Similarly, competitive matches were decided by which team had more skilled sniper users, and those got to a point where 50% of the match was spent chasing enemy snipers with your own sniper builds.

Was sniper play high skilled? Maybe. But after a point, it was not very fun at all. People ran 3 sniper builds in the same hangar because they were so, so overpowered that they became a necessity. 

Right now, though, sniper play isn't dead. It's just not as opressive as it was before. You can use Orion with EMs to pretty much ignore the shields completely and one shot stuff. You can try railgun surge to pick unshielded opponents off, especially mechs like Nomad and Eclipse, which are hard to chase and kill with sustain weapons like Miniguns or overdrivers. In my own experience, I've had to work with my sustain damage teammates to take down mods so that I can deliver the finishing blow as a sniper, compared to pre-mods when I could run snipers and solo multiple opponents without my teammates help. 

Everything said and done, though, your opinion is entirely valid, and I am not disputing any of it. People who liked playing snipers, and were good at it, have every right to feel upset that their preferred playstyle is not as good as it once was. That is the point of this feedback thread after all - to gather feedback from as many people as possible and pass it to Plarium, so that the game devs get an complete idea of what the community feels about the changes. 

I disagree with you on the boring matches part; but then again, my view could be very well biased since it's based on my personal experience alone. I'm facing bots with a signifiant advantage over me, and it's made me enjoy the game more. 

That said, I absolutely agree that the bots as they are now are overtuned. It's been less than a week since mods released yet each bot I face had a hangar with mods that will take me $200 to match....it seems like a move from Plarium to coerce me into buying mods and I detest that. I've had people complain that they shouldn't have to face maxed out mods when they are not running any mods themselves, and I agree with them. Not everyone is a fan of facing overwhlming odds, especially when those overwhelming odds are in the form of bots and not players. And yes, the assist system is broken, I am personally looking into it and trying to capture video footage of it so that I can get it reported to Support to get it fixed. 

As for your last paragraph, I'm afraid that mods are here to stay. It is a polarizing concept, with most people having a negative view of it than positive, but from what I've seen, it's mostly from aspects like mod part economy and bot challenges, both of which can be easily fixed by Plarium should they choose to do so. Rest assured, I will be mentioning both of those in my final report.

I'm sorry to know that you feel that way, but I respect your choice to leave. If a game is not fun for you, you have every right to leave it; the whole purpose of a game is to have fun.

I would think, maybe it was maxed for some reason, but ML shields really aren't that tough at any level.

If it was a bot it's possible it was just bugged ig

Sure you could have more mobile tanks. anything is possible there. Though I'm not sure tanks would carry those types of mods a lot? They could benefit from it but would likely benefit more from additional shielding. And scouts would undoubtedly benefit most from additional mobility. See I was thinking scouts probably won't need canopy shields so a sprint cooldown reduction could be one of the choices in mod slot b and if you want additional raw speed you could take it over additional hp with mod slot c.

But I will admit you could probably get some crazy scary attacker builds with additional mobility. More than with the fortifications? I don't know but it'll be interesting to see. The update was going to shake up the META anyways. Might as well go all in. And because it was already planned the balance could be fine tuned afterwards.

I just want more variety. You have to admit everything having shields and simply being a whole lot tankier is boring.

Lol yeah I agree with you; just shields is boring overall, and having more options would be better. I was talking with Ruffles about just this on his 24 hour stream a few minutes ago; crazy coincidence.