I am sure DEVs are aware that Norhoop players tend to be the mass of average MMO gamers with average MMO player concerns.  Your cheerful working adult/family person who wants a good MMO to play in his/her spare time.  What drives us is fun.  Are we enjoying this MMO?  If not, why not?  We want to love this MMO and play it long-term, so make it a worthy MMO.

Whereas Infestation's main concern 24-7 seems to be how do we dominate the server and grief and troll others, never mind overall balance.  Drown out dissenting views with trolling and distraction tactics, cries of L2P, relating any thread to unrelated incidents to control the forums.
Post count of Infestation posters >5 a day on average of junk post after junk post and disrespect towards the hardworking moderators.

Griefer-trolls or average MMO player.  Guess which demographic is much larger than the other.  Guess which demographic is the growing main body of game population?
Guess which perspective DEVs should listen to if they want to grow the game?

Bring back mechs to be central to this mech game.  Make sure they are worth the EP.
Make sure they are very flexible and usable in roaming PVP, intrusions, PVE, everything.
The center of any mech game is MECHS.
You lose identity as a mech game if you don't remember this.

Campana is right but Container has a point also. With more objectives mechs could become viable - but open pvp is and will be king. There should be no domitaing role in that - and if there should be one - of course not the cheapest bots. Thats common sense.

Mechs/heavy mechs are already great at defense, to say they have no role is just false.  Pop out some mechs when someone is near your outpost or miners and a roaming ewar group is not going to do much at all if it doesn't have it's own.  I thought we established this over a month ago.

Make mechs better at offensive roaming by buffing their speed by all means, you won't hear me complaining but it's not going to change the pvp balance since we'll just run mechs then(even though we already do off and on).

Problem about trolling, eh?  You treat others with disrespect. Then suddenly you expect others to suddenly respect what you think.  The people you slander to magically listen to you with an open mind.  Sorry.  Choose to troll and thereafter no one listens to you seriously ever again.  Cause and effect.  Enjoy the irrelevance you brought upon yourself.

Anyway, yes, Tiggus, I think mechs should be viable for use in offensive roaming via a speed boost.  The fear that they will obsolete other classes is unfounded.  EWAR lights has good stealth and the tackle role as they will still be faster than mechs.  Lights and assaults should be cheap PVP bots not up to par of the others as befits their price.  Nothing wrong with that.  They still do damage and can kill tacklers.

Perhaps heavy mechs should have the ability to transform to a movement mode they can use no mods or weapons but can travel 20% faster but are more vulnerable.  And take 1 minute to transform back to standard combat mode.  Well, at least it would bring back some cool factor to a class that very sorely needs it.

I think learn-2-play is actually a major component of the problem.

Taking your mech out to farm NPC's is not the same as using them in a PVP situation.

It has been agreed that Mech's are designed for specific uses in PVP, which are fairly rare.

Mechs bots are not too expensive, but fully PVP equiped mechs are too expensive for most corporate stooges to just practice with. An officer or ranked member may not get 'talked' to for destroying 10 or so mechs on the learning curve, but joe member isn't going to be allowed to do so. While insurance covered the cost of the bot (while it was active) it didn't do anything for the millions of NIC's worth of equipment; even standard equipment.

Yes, corps will give members mechs during intrusions, but they are too few and far between for players to acutally learn how to use them.

We need more incentive to 'train' players on mechs to make them more useful.

internet robots are... as you say srs bsnss...

Heavy mechs aren't bad, neither are mechs.

But they are tool to the end, not the end itself.

Bots are tools, ends are you to decide.

Also, go whine on eve online forums how 3 interceptors will kill your battleship, see how people care about your troubles there...

This is your usual "bigger is better" syndrome whiners. Eve had them, now they found they way in here. EVE devs did not cave to them, and i sure hope our devs will not either.

We should not expect mechs and heavy mechs to be able to roam effectively?
Go watch the trailer again. http://www.perpetuum-online.com/Media:Videos
What do you see roaming?  That is right.  Mechs. Heavy Mechs.
So you think my asking for these to be able to roam is unreasonable?
Why? It was what was advertised in the first place.

Having metal spiders be the most-used mechs in the game instead of MECHs is like selling people a car race game and then making it so that cars are not as good as motorbikes in the game.  So everyone ends up racing motorbikes in the game.  You see the disconnect between expectations and actuality?  This leads to disappointment.

Just watch the trailer again with all the Open PVP between mechs.
And tell me you don't want to play THAT game instead of whatever skewed version we currently have.

Next time you want to champion how light bots and assaults and EWAR lights are so great, realize that they are sidetracks away that weaken tremendously the main appeal of the genre, the mech.

The last 5 or so posts brought nothing new. We kinda agree that each mech has its role - thats fine.

We also agree that objectives for mechs are rather rare compared to EWs - but that this will likely change.

But how about not assigning roles as in: roamings or static defenses to bot types, but try to give each type a meaning in any scenario?

How about a simple change - a MK2 variant of each type having a focus on the opposite abilities they have now: an armored light/EW variant - and faster but lighter mechs as in less armor etc. or some kind of implants with can have those effects on your mech.

Those inverse mk2 variant would have higher reqs - again nothing would be taken away, but just  possibilities added. To create those MK2 variants is also rather easy.

don fall back to the trailer of the game...

its showing mechs fighting each others - the mechs your complaining about - and i bet none of those had a lwf fitted for that movie.
Nothing about the equipment/power has changed since the trailer vid was recorded.

and if your insisting on your definition of "what peaple expect of mechas" - then where is my sword, and where is my big-breasted avatar? the term "mecha" comes from japanese mecha-animes/mangas and was adapted into anything that has to do with human controlled mechanical units.

and if speed is your only concern - Kains are damn fast!

No one is stopping you from roaming with mechs... you'll win every fight with those ewar squads that are on your island....

The problem that you have is, ewars are faster and will always be faster than mechs (unless a poor design decision is made)... So the only solution is to make Mechs the same speed as ewar, or else roams that have the sole purpose of picking off targets of opportunity, will always be able to dictate when/where they fight the statistical favorite for winning being the mechs..

Can we agree on this Container?

If so, then we can assume that the problem isn't the balance but how your mechs are being used... I am going to give you a hint here... You guys can win any engagement or defend any area against light ewar if you hold ground in your mechs... it's when you want to try and chase down the lighter, more agile, less powerful, and faster (rightfully so) bots that you begin playing their game and not your own.

Is this all coming up because we're killing your indy characters and you guys can't stomp us down in your mechs... ? Be honest please... this will allow the readers of this back and forth to view this with the appropriate subtext

Actually, all it would take to fix the usefulness of mechs/heavy mechs would be:
a) Increase mech speed by 10kph.
b) Give heavy mechs the ability to switch to vehicle mode (1 min to convert) to move faster but be defenceless during vehicle mode.
c) Reduce weapon size by 10-20 percent for all medium weapons.
Done.

No, light bots are not going to be irrelevant, the gap in usefulness between lights and mechs/heavy mechs will just be not so large.
There is too much fear of rendering small bots useless.
They won't be useless and they should not be in the main spotlight anyway.
Mechs should the central class in the mech genre.