Hey there, i'm watching the mechlab/builds section for some time now. It's a great thing, people tinker around and create some very efficient, very cool setups. I'm playing mostly Jagers and Cataphracts (who would have thought) for some time now and during the last months lots of stuff changed. Missiles were nerfed, then buffed, then ignored, the gauss was reworked, PPCs nerfed, introduction of ghost heat, heat links and so on. Changes like this and changes in the current "meta" if you want are usually met with burst of ingenous ideas. Meaning you'll see shitloads of one thing in almost every game. K2-season, ECM overkill, PPC Sniping, teams of 8 lights, teams of 8 stalkers. Maybe you know what i'm talking about. This obviously changes the effectiveness of a lot of builds rated in times later or before those paradigm shifts, while other certain obvious builds never come out of fashion (get a firebrand, two fat ballistics and 4-6 med lasers, kthxbye). In the suggestions board people were talking about an [OLD] tag and other ideas to keep the rated builds fresh and - if you want to use the word - competitive even as the game and peoples behavour and favourite tactics change. I was a bit worried about what would happen, if we now got shitloads of fancy builds, tried and rated, but tried and rated in ancient times. We could end up in a pile of 5-star builds that just don't 5-star anymore. Time related pruning would then again remove those old tried and tested builds htat work, no matter what the devs or people change (COM-1B/RVN-3L can be tweaked but i don't see many diffeerent builds runnning around. For a reason.) Is there any way, any system like a rating decay or 'code of conduct' goin on in the mechlab to take care of that already? Just curious. I also hope this is the right place.First thread here peace!
Welcome to MechSpecs... Rating Decay isn't something that we wanted implemented because as you said what happens to the tried, tested and true builds that work no matter what the Meta? Think Jenner D or Jenner F. Those things have remained fairly constant in meta since... forever. The way that YOU, the public, can help with this is that if you see a build that is no longer viable (think 5 PPC Stalker) you can always go and either change your rating or you can down rate it to 1 star which will reduce its rating over all. As Enileph mentioned there is also a posting date which we suggested to Smurfy and he implemented. So you may see a 5 Star Builds but if it was made back in November of 2012 chances are it may not be valid any more. The onus being on the player more than the system. MechSpecs truly is fan based site; you guys push the content (most of it) and drive the ratings engine.
Is there a quick way for us to look up the builds we've rated? That may help us users adjust our ratings to reflect changes in the metagame.
People seem to think that when meta shifts everything previously goes to shit or something. It's not 'everything' that was previous. Sometimes things that were powerful once before, and weren't so powerful later on, come back into the forefront and become powerful again. Sometimes something that was a joke becomes powerful - think 6 PPC Stalker. I think ratings shouldn't decay for this reason - ratings are dynamic, that will suffice, decay isn't necessary, just actually bother to go back and try some old builds from time to time if you think something could become strong or relevant again.
FYI; Smurfy also has a logic to make the whole date section red to illustrate a big change, such as the ECM hardpoint which invalidated builds where it was placed CT. He's stated that similar logic, if future changes make something totally invalidated, will be included.
