I came here to get a feeling for the movement modifier and pilot skill debates, as it is pretty intense where I play. To me, the current PV Beta, combined with several of the rules listed already in this discussion, seem relatively balanced. To reiterate for clarification, those are:
-Declared Stationary (not holding position, but declaring a completely stationary unit) to gain -2 to hit while losing movement modifier.
-Declared Jumping imposes +1 to hit for attacking and +1 defense for movement modifier.
-Use of specialty munitions (precision, heat seeker vs. Heat Scale)
-Use of AOE attacks.
-12 is an automatic hit, regardless of perceived difficulty (mentioned here:
http://bg.battletech.com/forums/index.php/topic,37970.0.html, I didn't notice it in this thread, but I may have overlooked it.)
Now, I do see where one could consider the PV calculations too lenient on Movement Modifiers (MM). On the other hand, if one were to make that argument for MM, then they must also make the argument for pilot skill, as well. For reference:
http://anydice.com/ (be sure to put in 2d6 for probability calculations).
Baseline Combat Reference:
-Seemingly average combat scenario: +2(Medium Range) + 2(MM) + 4(Skill) = 8 or more to hit
-Seemingly average scenario will result in a hit 41.66% of the time (add up roll chances from 8-12).
When looking at pilot skill:
-As soon as you drop the pilot skill to 3, the shot target drops to 7, which will theoretically happen 58.33% of the time (add the chance of rolling 7).
-This result is nearly a 40% boost in performance over the 41.66% (16.66% increase in hit probability) at only a 10% cost in increased PV.
-The performance boost for skill 2, going from 7 to 6 shot difficulty, is only about 24% (a 13.88% chance to hit increase up to 72.22% from 58.33%).
-The performance return drops to 15% at skill 1 (shot difficulty of 5), and barely 10% at skill 0 (shot difficulty of 4).
To me, this honestly seems to balance each other out. You pay 10% for this relatively significant boost in skill, just as you pay for the movement modifiers of light units.
Same Scenario as above, only looking at movement modifiers countering skill:
-With a skill of 3, on the other hand, a movement modifier of 3 pushes the shot difficulty back to 8, which costs that same 10% boost in unit PV.
-The cycle can continue to 2Skill/4MM, 1Skill/5MM, 0Skill/6MM
-OR the cycle can be altered with other attack boosters, such as the rules mentioned in the beginning of this post.
As it stands, I'm not averse to seeing something like that PV boost mentioned by Dark Jaguar tested (very interested in hearing an official word on that), but at the same token I think something would also need to be done to address skill costs on a similar scale. This would be done with a significant cost to go to 3, with decreasing PV costs down the line. For example, a 1.3 PV multiplier for going from skill 4 to 3, an additional .2 to go down to 2, and an additional .1 to go down to 1 and 0. This addresses the huge early on gain while compensating for the diminishing returns of later skills.
Dark Jaguar is correct in that the movement modifiers work in a bell curve, but so does pilot skill. Pilot skill starts at the middle and has great gains early on, with ever diminishing returns. Movement modifiers start slow with low early gains, and have their great gains later down the scale.
On the other hand, if absolutely nothing changes, and they keep the special circumstance rules listed in the beginning of this post, I'm perfectly ok with that, as I think PV values counter each other. Regardless of any changes, as long as the system is reasonably balanced and enjoyable at the end of the day I'm fine with any tweaks they make.