Thoughts on moneyball ring safety

It seems to me that one of the problems with maps is that there is a number of "safe" locations where players can attack the moneyball once it is down with very little the defending team can do to prevent it while also trying to regain lane control.

This is mostly an issue with assassins and assaults. Not because of their bounce based weapons, but because of their mobility.

Each of these locations are far enough away from the moneyball, or difficult enough to reach that by the time you get to them, or begin approaching them, the attacker has already moved on. However even getting 1shot to hit the moneyball from these spots keeps it down, and thus weakens your bots, leaves your team vunerable to back dooring or juice rushes, and can quickly cost you the entire game.

However, if you are attempting to police these locations (especially important against assassin's who might attempt to get there while cloaked.) you are doing much less to be able to actively push out your bot lanes, you are too far from your base to effectively counter a surprise juice rush or enemy team push.

The fact of the matter is that each of these locations is far too safe, far too easy to use and difficult to counter, and thanks to the way that the moneyball shield mechanic works, far too effective.

Design of how the games tactics should interact is something that needs to be a triangular system. You have 3 corners, Safety, Efficiency, and Ease of use. A setup should only allow for 2 of these 3 things at any one time. If something is Safe, and Efficient, it shouldn't be easy. If it is Safe and Easy to do, it shouldn't be terribly efficient. If something is easy to do, and efficient , it shouldn't be safe (risk vs reward kind of thing.)

You seem to have forgotten the front of GrenADE III. At issue, I agree that 1 skilled Assassin can always keep a moneyball down once it's there, regardless of any base defenses, as long as she is not eliminated. I don't really think there's a good solution to this. It has little to do with location and more with her own capabilities (I can't say anything about Assault). You'd have to make the Smoke Bomb recover at level 3 like it does in 1, and even then it doesn't entirely remove the issue. I just chalk it up to the same thing as spawncamping. The emphasis is on preventing it from happening, and the game becomes excessively difficult to reverse from there.

The thing is that unlike spawn camping, these things can't be fought or actively prevented.

Spawn camping for the most part, is a strategy that still only utilizes 2 of the 3 edges of the strategy triangle. It is easy, and efficient, it is NOT however, safe. Unless you are doing it as a sniper from far away, in which case you lose efficiency due to the multiple spawn exits.

These sort of locations require your team to only have made the mistake of having your moneyball shield go down once. The front of grenade 3 isn't quite as "safe" as these locations, because it requires you to be a lot closer to the spawn gates than any of these do.

And this list doesn't even include all the locations that can be reached using assassin's or assaults abilities, it also doesn't include locations that can only be utilized by assault's grenade launcher or assassin's shurikan launcher rebounds.

Every single location on this list is usable by every class (except the one on steel peel, Support can't make any use of that spot even if he could get up there.)

The reason that assault and assassin are an issue with these is their ability to escape unharmed when you attempt to counter their attack, and the ease in which they can return to doing it.

I had an assault use one of these locations in steel peel against us. It took me a few moments jsut to figure out where the attack was coming from and by then we'd lost way too much health.
I was thinking: just make the ball immune from attacks that come from outside the ring?

Maybe not specifically outside the ring (that is kind of a small area), but from a certain range sure. There are plenty of areas outside the ring that aren't really "safe" or abuseable

I feel having the ball immune to damage from a certain range though (to be determined by testing and devs) would make things like shuriken sniping, and assault bomb richocheting MUCH less annoying. This is most annoying because the shurikens and assault grenade launcher both do not have damage drop off and are fairly good at doing moneyball damage.

The other classes are slightly less annoying doing it since at least the damage they are doing is fairly low even if keeping the moneyball down by doing it is a big big advantage to keep. None of the other classes have long range weapons that are any good at attacking the moneyball. Railgun does crap damage to moneyball (especially compared to the amazing jetgun damage.) mortar does meh damage, and the minigun has damage fall off, the sniper rifle does meh damage and smg has damage falloff.

Even if you kill the assassin they can respawn and get back in place within 30 seconds easily.

I am not sure what uber can do. Besides changing the maps of course.

I don't know why no one has mentioned this but I figured and even more long range method to keeping the money ball up, and in some cases not even leave my base. Long range Gunner bombing.

I decided to try this out during a run on the ammo mule map. Needless to say the Mortars do work and I actually made 5 kills and several hits on the money ball this way. I would call this method safe, but I honestly say that saturation bombing as a gunner is a unless you are far out and it is by no means efficent. There are a few issues with long range bombing that almost makes it better to go ahead and make some sacrafical deaths.

1.In order to even aim for anything long range you have to be around 90-75 degree angle. If you are aiming your mortar anywhere between those angles, then you might as well be killing the fans because it will most likely hit the wall or just go out of the arena.
2. It takes a lot of trial and error get the sweet spots. With some hits like the money ball, I knew when I was making blows because my juice meter went up. Yet it took me over a minute to figure out where to aim in the air to just bombard the money ball. Safe and ease of use, but not efficent by any means.
3. You are shooting blind. Some of you may be reading and saying " There is no point to doing that because need to look at the air and not the ground." Which is the third reason why this move is risky. Deployed gunners can give you some heads up when you are being attack, give you extra protecion and avoid grapples etc. But if you are spotted you have only a few seconds to switch out, or maybe none at all.

The entire tactic has limited use, but there is a sense of satisfaction in killing people in their own base and damaging the money ball while still in the comfort of my base that puts a smile to my face. :mrgreen:

Just an off-the-wall idea: what if the moneyball only stays down so long as bots are attacking it? Pros do the most damage, but if the bots don't get there, the shields go back up. So you can plink away at it all you want from safety, but if the enemy team starts pushing your bots back, you're going to have to step in and get your hands dirty.

^This is what i was thinking. For now, it appears that once the moneyball goes down, bot-pushing goes out the window.

Bots are too weak, the ball would never stay down.

Meh. They don't have turrets, bot lanes all the way back, and their own bots are spawning with low health. The other team needs to push weak bots while a bunch of pros are in their base, it isn't exactly easy.

The only one of the spots list in this post I actually have issue with is the one on Steel Peel.

The Lazor Razor one is close enough to the base and open enough that a defender hardly has to move out of position to push them back so all you really need is the awareness to check for it. You can also hit the money ball on Lazor Razor from the tunnel enterance on the other side of the base but again pretty easy to push back.

Finally that Ammo Mule spot has these rather odd windows that it just seems to intentional a design to have been a mistake. I am pretty sure these were included to allow an offensive team a relatively safe position to apply preasure from on what is an otherwise very open base which makes turrets and defenders incredibly effective.

I am curious how players in the XBox community have dealt with these positions because the number of changes made in the port over to PC alone makes me think there may be a relatively effective way to deal with it. The only one that comes to mind though is a good sniper as pros in these locations are fairly imobile and thus easy targets, if you see them.

The ammo mule one requires looking at a specific angle. I'm pretty sure that the wall was placed there originally to allow some cover on that side, and then the windows were placed to make it difficult to simply camp that corner on either side of the wall (firebases placed next to the wall are too short to shoot over it so a support can't simply hide there in safety.)

The reason I don't mention the tunnel entrance is that it is much easier to counter as you can go around and come in from behind much easier and conspicuously. Also it is not as safe as the one up the ledge as the ledge one is farther from a turret, on higher ground (easier to defend), and many classes have to use the jump pad to easy get up there which is much easier to control and/or see coming. The Lazerazor one is much less of an issue than the steel peel or ammo mule ones though, those two need to be fixed for sure, lazerazor is more annoying than imbalanced.

Just to give you guys an idea of this being changed or not, players have been voicing their "opinions" about these location since MNC's launch week and none have been changed.

In fact the spot on Steel Peel used to have a little crack where the glass walls meet the circle. They changed that but left the other spot untouched. If you look close enough you'll see their little patch job.

I think the bots should be stronger when the ball is down, or my favorite suggestion...

The moneyball should only stay down if bots keep it down, not from pro damage.

The problem I see with getting rid of this is that OT happens way to often as is. If you ball goes down you deserve for it to stay down simply because all your doing by bringing it back up is stalling OT longer. I would rather the Sin/Sault be able to cheaply keep the ball down simply so I don't have the random *** chance of OT screwing everything up for my team.

I don't think this should be the case but a majority of the time, it is.

The OT thing is because bots are too fragile and thus it is too easy for bot lanes to simply stagnate and never be an issue.

When you look at other MOBA type games, one of the reasons that minions/creeps are so important is that you need them to damage soak against turrets since most champions/heroes/ect can't attack a turret without having the turret attack them back due to the range differences. However in this game, every class has at least one way to attack a turret from outside its targeting range. This lowers the importance of bots. Combined with their fragile nature due to every class being able to damage an entire wave at once, and some being able to flat out kill an entire wave. As well as how often the ejectors and annihilator are available, and affordable. The game ends up too often in overtime due to this.

However with the moneyball mechanics as they are, it also makes comebacks much more difficult. Even if you do manage to push the bot waves back and start making progress towards the enemy, you are still being punished for that previous bad play and are forced to play more defensively as you need to keep searching for people attacking your moneyball.

Overall both bot weakness, and moneyball shield mechanics promote a defensive natured game because if you attempt to extend and your moneyball goes down you are screwed, it is simply safer to wait till OT and do what you can to prevent your ball from dropping until then.

Don't suck. Playing defensive is the absolutely worst idea you can ever come up with in MNC as it is now.

Get out of your base and kill stuff. If you push bots into their base you don't even need turrets. You don't even need turrets if you are at midfield the whole game either.

But the thing is, one (of two) teams must win. If you fail at the game, expect to lose. Do not expect to be mollycoddled because you think playing defensively is a smart bet (it isn't).

People on the forums love their 15 minutes of nothing followed by a 30 second overtime that completely invalidates the whole rest of the game with a juice run. I see absolutely nothing wrong with a 2, 3, 5, 10 minute game ending well before overtime. It means that one team actually did something that the other team completely failed to protect against. This must happen in an adversarial context, one team wins one team loses. This isn't little league baseball where everyone wins and goes to Chuck E. Cheese's for pizza and soda after the games you know...

Actually I never said I do that. I said that the game promotes a defensive style of gameplay due to the inherent nature of how harshly it punishes mistakes during offense compared to mistakes during defense. I personally push bot lanes a lot, and often end up 2nd or first in bot kills pro assists (usually not #1 in pro kills though but I've usually got 2x as many assists as anyone in the game even though I main assault.)

But having been on both the receiving and the giving end of the moneyball shield is down so now the game is over I can tell you that it is a problem.

Its like this: you push out, if you break through their defenses then you win. However during the time that you are pushing out if the enemy breaks through your defenses, you lose. The thing is that while pushing you can't as easily react to an enemy push on the opposite side (this is a huge issue on grenade 3 for instance) However if you play in a more defensive nature, pushing out only a little bit but never really going to their base, then you are close enough to react to a strong push attempt and punish it if they make a mistake. Thus allowing you to quickly counter attack and down their moneyball.

In practice this sounds fine right? However the issue is that both teams end up in this mutually assured destruction type of cold war where both teams know that if they push and screw up, then they just cost their team the game, but if the enemy pushes they just won the game. Thus neither team is willing to chance losing and they end up just poking each other for weaknesses, maybe lone wolf juicing one or two turrets before retreating.

If the effect of getting out and escorting your bots wasn't so easily countered, then there would be more incentive to attempt it since the risk of it backfiring and doing nothing but leaving you wide open is much less.

This combined with slight increases in respawn times, and a change to the moneyball shield mechanics would end up probably leading to more organized play in my opinion

If you play defensively your bots will never make it to their moneyball. If they make a mistake you need to still escort your bots all the way across the map. If you wait for OT then the other side (being more aggressive) are already at your base and you still need to cross the map to their ball.

If you're pushing a lane and an enemy rushes past behind you, as long as you're still killing bots they're not going to down your moneyball.. If the other lane fails and they get bots through there then you have a problem, but that lane should be defending (dropping back with the leading bots or respawning at the MB).

You only get bad situations when players are too busy trying to get kills and not doing their job properly. If your pros are getting distracted then you don't have enough people to hold the lanes. Defending is not going to win you the game in that situation. It's jsut going to make you lose slower.