97 replies to this topic

[stjobe]

Elwood Blues, on 26 September 2013 - 08:35 AM, said:

Good question. I only have my own experience to go off of, just like you. I practice my targeting on lights as often as I can. I go out of my way to chase them down in most mechs. If you can lead a fast mech, leading slower mechs is cake. I don't have that many problems with Commandos, Ravens, Jenners, or fast Cicadas. Spiders seem to be the biggest offenders when it comes to dropped damage. I use a lot of ballistics (Gauss, AC20, AC5s). So, have a pretty good idea when you hit. You can see the impact animation and the crosshairs turn red. My ping is generally under 100 (around 80) so it shouldn't be lag since hit detection is server side and we have host state rewind that seems to work fine against other mechs.

There are many better pilots out there than me, but I've enough experience with the game to know when I hit and when I miss. Some times I shoot at spiders and my targeting is just way off and I'm playing like {Scrap}. I don't blame the game for my crappy targeting. But when I took my time, waited for my shot, actually saw the hit, and it don't see the effect on the paperdoll, or much less damage than I should have done, something is wrong. And screw lasers, firing a laser against a Spider is just an exercise in frustration.

Or is confirmation bias perhaps a part of it? You expect (in no small part from reading the forums) a Spider to not register hits, so when it doesn't you go "yup, there we go again... darned Spiders and their borked hit reg" and forget about all the times when it does take damage, but when a Commando doesn't register a hit you go "er, wut? Well, never mind", and forget about it.

My stats clearly show that I don't survive more matches in my Spiders than in my Commandos - less, in fact, in my 5K. How is that even possible if hit reg was so bad on Spiders?

And just to make it clear: I've played Commandos for over a year now, mastered all five variants, and during this week I've alternated between my COM-3A (0.42 D/M) and my SDR-5K (0.59 D/M), working on those last scraps of XP to master the 5K (which I did yesterday - go me!)

Why am I dying more in my Spider than in my Commando, if hit reg is especially bad on Spiders?

Please note that I'm not denying there is hit reg issues - there is, I get it too from time to time shooting at any kind of 'mech. I'm just saying that perhaps this "Spider is especially borked" isn't true - and my stats seem to corroborate that. People kill me all the time.

Edited by stjobe, 26 September 2013 - 08:51 AM.

[DemonRaziel]

stjobe, on 26 September 2013 - 08:50 AM, said:

Why am I dying more in my Spider than in my Commando, if hit reg is especially bad on Spiders?

If I was playing the devil's advocate, I could say that you play the Spiders wrong, so you have a borked D/M on them. Or that you are so good/experienced with Commies, that your D/M is exceptionally high. Or that you have played significantly less games in one or the other 'Mech and the datasets are thus different...

Rebuffing any kind of evidence on the internet with words is not that hard, but it does get harder with more and more hard data.

[DyDrimer]

I run a Jenner and a moded out CID and I can tell in about 2 seconds who is a good shot and who I will mess with. I get hit a lot so I think it's more poor aim, I see the laser come close but not hit. Also I will give a trick I learned from mw2 and beyond this has always been a complaint. Yes the small size and speed make it hard to hit As some one stated and a good light pilot has tricks as in changing speeds just slightly to make you miss I will go from full out to just a drop or two slower so you think you are hitting and all you are doing is splash damage but at such a high speed it is hard to see the change.

[Elwood Blues]

stjobe, on 26 September 2013 - 08:50 AM, said:

Or is confirmation bias perhaps a part of it? You expect (in no small part from reading the forums) a Spider to not register hits, so when it doesn't you go "yup, there we go again... darned Spiders and their borked hit reg" and forget about all the times when it does take damage, but when a Commando doesn't register a hit you go "er, wut? Well, never mind", and forget about it.

My stats clearly show that I don't survive more matches in my Spiders than in my Commandos - less, in fact, in my 5K. How is that even possible if hit reg was so bad on Spiders?

And just to make it clear: I've played Commandos for over a year now, mastered all five variants, and during this week I've alternated between my COM-3A (0.42 D/M) and my SDR-5K (0.59 D/M), working on those last scraps of XP to master the 5K (which I did yesterday - go me!)

Why am I dying more in my Spider than in my Commando, if hit reg is especially bad on Spiders?

Please note that I'm not denying there is hit reg issues - there is, I get it too from time to time shooting at any kind of 'mech. I'm just saying that perhaps this "Spider is especially borked" isn't true - and my stats seem to corroborate that. People kill me all the time.

I'm not actually a big forum reader here. The problem drove me to the forums more than the other way around. I didn't have any preconceived notion until I experienced this problem repeatedly. So, I formed my own hypothesis about it. Other seem to have formed the same.

[PropagandaWar]

PEEFsmash, on 25 September 2013 - 07:38 PM, said:

Lights are underpowered, but bads think they are overpowered....because they can't aim and can only hit barn-door atlases not moving.

Thats not true Peef my boy. I'm not a terrible shot and I don't know how many times a light just shrugged off my shots. Being a medium pilot that does get frustrating because I get stuck chasing you guys around half the time. All that aside there are plenty of great light pilots out there that have beat me fair and square, but its bs and frustrating when you know you had them hands down but they just shrug off 3/4ths the damage. I remember pre cryengine upgrade and knockdown some terifying Jenner pilots.

[Komagn]

Big Ballistics and Pulse Lasers work really good against them. They delvier most damage in shortest amount of time. Problem with regular lasers is that if you can't keep the beam on a super fast moving small target, you'll barely scratch them. SRMs are inconsistant on hitting them too unless you are hitting them dead on in the face at 50m.

[meteorol]

I don't think hitdetection is necessarily worse on light mechs than it is on other mechs.
You just recognize it more often and it somewhat "hurts" more to see a perfectly lined up shot not doing any damage on a light.

That 1 perfectly aimed shot, going straight into into the already exposed rear torso of a light mech not doing any damage?
GZ little mech, you just died, respawned and played on without even noticing it. Lining up killshots on lights often takes time and isn't too easy (Well, it's no sorcery either). Seeing them causing no damage hurts, because more often than not the light will be over a hill and gone and you won't have a second shot.

Same happening on an assault mech? Wait 3 seconds and shoot again, noone misses huge slow mechs. They can torsotwist, but thats it. Just hold back your killshot till he twists back and finish him. Hitreg CAN decide faith of a battle between assault mechs when the win boils down to the last few points of damage, but it happens less often.

Every well aimed ac20 shell which does no damage is basically a free respawn for a light mech.

I think this is what causes the rage of some people. Atleast this is how i feel about it.
When my AC20 does no damage on the atlas CT, i'm like "damn, that puts me into disadvantage during this fight".
If the same thing happens with a light mechs already damaged rear torso, i'm thinking: F**k you, you should be dead and you don't even know it.

Edited by meteorol, 26 September 2013 - 09:38 AM.

[Lostdragon]

Spiders are hard to kill. Do they absorb damage? Maybe, but I believe it is not just for the reason people think. The spider's hitboxes are setup in a way that makes it easy to spread damage around. Combine that with the fact that the mech is very small and you get a lot of frustrated players. I learned how to play lights in the Jenner. The Spider feels about two or three times as tough as the Jenner because the Jenner is a walking CT and is significantly larger.

An experienced light pilot knows how to make people miss or otherwise minimize the damage done to his mech. The Spider is better for this than any other light mech. I believe that even with an arm blown off the Spider model still has a significant portion of the arm hit box intact. So in addition to being better able to spread damage to the arms and STs, I think the Spider benefits from damage transfer rules quite a bit with a missing arm, further increasing its overall toughness.

My other observation is that without these benefits the Spider would probably be extremely rare on the field. They don't have the hardpoints or the tonnage to carry big weapon loads. They have very little armor and even in their current state it is pretty hard to do big damage with them. When I see a Spider doing 500+ damage that tells me there is a pretty damn good pilot behind that mech.

[stjobe]

DemonRaziel, on 26 September 2013 - 09:02 AM, said:

If I was playing the devil's advocate, I could say that you play the Spiders wrong, so you have a borked D/M on them. Or that you are so good/experienced with Commies, that your D/M is exceptionally high. Or that you have played significantly less games in one or the other 'Mech and the datasets are thus different...

Rebuffing any kind of evidence on the internet with words is not that hard, but it does get harder with more and more hard data.

All interesting objections so let's look at them (in reverse order):

Datasets differing
In my stats, I have
95 matches in my 5D (0.42 D/M)
96 matches in my 5K (0.59 D/M)
143 matches in my COM-3A (0.42 D/M)
74 matches in my COM-1D (0.53 D/M), and
137 matches in my TDK (0.44 D/M).
So yes, there is something to that, although the spread is larger between my best and worst Spider than my best and worst Commando.

Exceptionally [low] D/M in Commandos
Let's look at some of my mediums (at least the ones with over 50 matches in my stats):
CN9-A: 0.42 D/M over 106 matches
BJ-1: 0.54 D/M over 99 matches
BJ-1DC: 0.59 D/M over 92 matches
BJ-1X: 0.59 D/M over 93 matches

It seems my spread is 0.42-0.59 in my mediums as well, so that probably suggests that I'm playing my Spiders (spread 0.42-0.59) as well as I can, but that I'm a slightly more accomplished Commando pilot (spread 0.42-0.53).

I play the Spiders "wrong"
Well, this one's a bit hard to argue against, and frankly it seems a bit silly as a counter-argument. It hinges on the notion that I haven't been able to adapt what I've learnt about general light-piloting from well over 1,000 matches in Commandos (and over a year of playing them - stats are only from early summer) and apply it to one Spider (the 5K), but I can to the other (the 5D) - and that I haven't learnt how to pilot a Spider successfully after over 200 drops in them.

But sure, I could be playing them "wrong". I won't rule that out, but wouldn't the 5D be borked as well then, and not only the 5K?

In the end, that's 545 light matches and 390 medium matches I've accounted for that doesn't show a tendency for the Spider to survive better than any other 'mech I play - and in the case of the 5K, it actually show it slightly worse at surviving.

Edited by stjobe, 26 September 2013 - 10:26 AM.

[Lostdragon]

stjobe, on 26 September 2013 - 10:23 AM, said:

All interesting objections so let's look at them (in reverse order):

Datasets differing
In my stats, I have
95 matches in my 5D (0.42 D/M)
96 matches in my 5K (0.59 D/M)
143 matches in my COM-3A (0.42 D/M)
74 matches in my COM-1D (0.53 D/M), and
137 matches in my TDK (0.44 D/M).
So yes, there is something to that, although the spread is larger between my best and worst Spider than my best and worst Commando.

Exceptionally [low] D/M in Commandos
Let's look at some of my mediums (at least the ones with over 50 matches in my stats):
CN9-A: 0.42 D/M over 106 matches
BJ-1: 0.54 D/M over 99 matches
BJ-1DC: 0.59 D/M over 92 matches
BJ-1X: 0.59 D/M over 93 matches

It seems my spread is 0.42-0.59 in my mediums as well, so that probably suggests that I'm playing my Spiders (spread 0.42-0.59) as well as I can, but that I'm a slightly more accomplished Commando pilot (spread 0.42-0.53).

I play the Spiders "wrong"
Well, this one's a bit hard to argue against, and frankly it seems a bit silly as a counter-argument. It hinges on the notion that I haven't been able to adapt what I've learnt about general light-piloting from well over 1,000 matches in Commandos (and over a year of playing them - stats are only from early summer) and apply it to one Spider (the 5K), but I can to the other (the 5D) - and that I haven't learnt how to pilot a Spider successfully after over 200 drops in them.

But sure, I could be playing them "wrong". I won't rule that out, but wouldn't the 5D be borked as well then, and not only the 5K?

In the end, that's 545 light matches and 390 medium matches I've accounted for that doesn't show a tendency for the Spider to survive better than any other 'mech I play - and in the case of the 5K, it actually show it slightly worse at surviving.

I have significantly more matches played with double basics in the JR7-F than the SDR-5D and the Jenner has a better KDR. The Spider has a significantly better win/loss record though. I attribute this to it being easier to kill in the Jenner due to it's larger weapon loadout, but easier to influence the overall match in a Spider because you can harass and distract the enemy and play a little looser than with the walking CT Jenner.

The Jenner stats also reflect the learning period when I was still horrible at lights though, so I wish I could see the Jenner stats since I bought the Spider. I think they would be more even.

[Mehlan]

Quote

In the end, that's 545 light matches and 390 medium matches I've accounted for that doesn't show a tendency for the Spider to survive better than any other 'mech I play - and in the case of the 5K, it actually show it slightly worse at surviving.

What's the loadout on the 5d & K... :0) My guess/assumption would be the...weapon loadout, the 5d has 3 energy pts, vs the K's 4 ballistic and 1 energy. Realisitcly there aren't a lot of options/combinations for either... presuming a laser/mg config on the K, I think there's kinda the answer. The K almost requires closer action in order to get more damage on the target, which potentially means taking more hits, from the target..it's teammates and your own.

[stjobe]

Mehlan, on 26 September 2013 - 10:49 AM, said:

What's the loadout on the 5d & K... :0) My guess/assumption would be the...weapon loadout, the 5d has 3 energy pts, vs the K's 4 ballistic and 1 energy. Realisitcly there aren't a lot of options/combinations for either... presuming a laser/mg config on the K, I think there's kinda the answer. The K almost requires closer action in order to get more damage on the target, which potentially means taking more hits, from the target..it's teammates and your own.

The 5D has a single ERPPC and the 5K an ERLL and 4 MGs, so yes, the difference between those two may well be that I get in closer to use the MGs when in my 5K.

But that doesn't really add any water to the "Spider has especially bad hit-reg" argument, does it?

[thebman]

Bottom line is that lights right now are over powered and should lose have of the armor that they now carry.

[DemonRaziel]

stjobe, on 26 September 2013 - 10:23 AM, said:

But sure, I could be playing them "wrong". I won't rule that out, but wouldn't the 5D be borked as well then, and not only the 5K?

In the end, that's 545 light matches and 390 medium matches I've accounted for that doesn't show a tendency for the Spider to survive better than any other 'mech I play - and in the case of the 5K, it actually show it slightly worse at surviving.

My last counter argument (as being the devil's advocate is not that much fun) would be, that due to the usual 5K' s loadout being limited to an effective range of 100 meters and requiring constant fire (and thus constant front exposition to the enemy), the 5K has a much harder time avoiding enemy fire. Therefore one could argue, that while his ability to ignore damage is on par with the 5D, he's being hit much more and therefore dying more.

The 5D relies on a completely different weapons-loadout compared to the 5K, and so do the Commandos, as neither of those has balistic hardpoints.

Annd to add some stats of my own, my D/M for a Spider 5D is similar to yours (0.44) and significantly better than for all my other Lights (0.55 for a Jenner 7-K, 0.64 for a Raven 3L and 0.61 for a Commando 2D), but seeing as I have played that Spider almost twice as much as all the other Lights combined (1140 matches vs 717) I had much more practice with that 'Mech as well as a lot more games played after mastering it.

[Lostdragon]

thebman, on 26 September 2013 - 11:04 AM, said:

Bottom line is that lights right now are over powered and should lose have of the armor that they now carry.

How many matches have you played in lights?

[Shadey99]

I posted these a bit in the other thread, but I have some stats for reference as well:
* 5V: 81 matches, 49 deaths, 60.49%
* 5D: 108 matches, 65 deaths, 60.18%
* 5K: 91 matches, 63 deaths, 69.23%

I don't own any other lights, but I do own Cicadas...
* 3M: 105 matches, 64 deaths, 60.95%
* 2A: 81 matches, 51 deaths, 62.96%
* X-5: 114 matches, 75 deaths, 65.78%

I should point out I've never done a premade game, so all my results are PUGs, and I tend to have a fairly aggressive playstyle (I'm usually ok with dying if I took someone with me). Oh and my highlanders, Jagers, and Catapults give similar results.

(Sidenote my worst deaths per matches are the JM6-A, which also has my highest kills/matches and CPLT-C4)

[dario03]

stjobe, on 26 September 2013 - 10:57 AM, said:

The 5D has a single ERPPC and the 5K an ERLL and 4 MGs, so yes, the difference between those two may well be that I get in closer to use the MGs when in my 5K.

But that doesn't really add any water to the "Spider has especially bad hit-reg" argument, does it?

It could simply be that your not one of the people that gets the wonky hit detection on your spider. Like I said earlier I think a lot of problems affects certain people in certain conditions. I had a spider and it never seemed to be invincible and I've been in matches where I watched one spider die almost instantly from laser fire and then watched another spider in the same match shrug off twice as much firepower no problem. Would be like how when mechs were teleporting a lot, it happened to high ping players most but didn't always happen and sometimes would happen to lower ping players too.

[Orkhepaj]

Just remove lights from the game.
No more lights no more problem-->fixed game

[Mehlan]

Orkhepaj, on 26 September 2013 - 12:23 PM, said:

Just remove lights from the game.
No more lights no more problem-->fixed game

Replace 'lights' with 'whiners' and you get the same result.

[Zerberus]

Adridos, on 25 September 2013 - 09:13 PM, said:

Or, you know, play from Europe with 200+ ping and regularly see connected AC/20 shots not even change the color of the armor to orange or red and have to basically play a lottery of how far ahead to shoot in the blank to kill the poor guy with a shot that from their perspective hit only some rocks.

I DO play from Europe with a 200+ ping and still have to honor of saying "Kersplatter" at least 10 times an evening as a result of my AC/20 going in one side of a raven or Jenner and out the other....