Widowmaker1981 said:
what i mean (if you read the rest of the post other than the quoted bit itd be pretty obvious, but still...)
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If im doing all i can to steady my aim - in this game meaning im not moving, and my heat is at a manageable level, i fire a direct fire weapon, and it doesn't go exactly where i aim, that is complete RNG. i dont care if the options its randomly choosing between are limited, its still RNG.
I read the rest of your post, but I decided I'd rather ask and
be sure about it.
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"If you are doing all you can to steady your aim..." You left out the target's behavior, and the time factor of how long you give your 'mech to actually get it's weapons lined up. I'll presume a best case scenario for your argument - your target is not only standing still, but actually immobile (not capable of movement, even standing in place movement) and you waited (ballpark) five seconds (or more, if you could).
I'll also guess that you're not referring to cluster-damage type weapons like LBX cluster rounds ... or missile type weapons which either dumb-fire or have individual homing per-missile - "splatter fire" type weapons.
Just to be obscenely thorough, I'll also point out that your 'mech hasn't taken any damage that would misalign it's weapons (bent barrels, focusing lens thrown out of order, 'mech sensor hits, hits to arm actuators).
In reply, if you agree to those presumptions (aka, best case scenario for what you seem to be saying) ... I would reply that I have already said elsewhere in this thread that certain situations warrant making new maths (spread, tables, whatever you want to call it) that "fit" with the already existing hard numbers. Yes, under the situation presumed, even a normal "plane jane" battlemech would be able to get tighter weapons fire concentration under the crosshairs.
How tight of a concentration would be proper?
Perfect concentration, right? No. WHY? There's a serious no-fun gameplay catch-22 with perfect convergence for everything fired, even under the "nearly perfect" situation above - the weapons damage numbers are far higher than the armor/internal structure/internal components were built to absorb. Perfect concentration with stock numbers on both ends results in the target *nearly instantly vaporizing* which would be far less of a "reward for skill" than it would be the equivalent of "I hit the WIN! button first."
How bad is it? to use my example from the OP in this thread, you can have 92 damage hitting a MAXIMUM of 62 armor (that's if you have
ZERO rear ct armor) backed by 31 points of internal structure. This is from a daishi build that's not obscenely min-maxed - but that's not as bad as it can really get. Using the same Daishi, you can have 106 damage, if you still want to have a long ranged weapon for 27,750,000 c-bills; if you want more damage and you don't mind a heat-nap you can do 119 for 27,630,000 c-bills... and this is with 3050 era
standard clan tech. The IS tech is just as dangerous considering it's cost - an easy *heat neutral* build of a pillager plg-3z can output 66 damage for 22,090,000 - or you can do a heat neutral std engine zombie build devastator DVS-1D that does 62 for
9,544,000 c-bills.
So why not just bump up the armor and internal numbers and keep the perfect concentration of weapons fire? MWO has already tried this. The result was gross weapons imbalances between those weapons that can still manage to penetrate the higher numbers and those weapons that can't. It favors the ppcs/gauss/ac20/Large lasers while it cripples the smaller weapons and makes the smallest damaging weapons almost pointless.
MWO happened to double the external armor numbers. That didn't stop the 'mechs from vaporizing. So they doubled the internal structure numbers. 'Mechs started to stop vaporizing. BTW, MW4 as mektek modded it also tried the same thing with the assault 'mechs, except it was just more armor, not more internals (and the damage/armor/structure numbers were already more than double stock in that game
before MT modded it) - with the same results to balance. So in MWO there was a rate of fire bump for smaller weapons to attempt to pull them off of the shelf.
Not only were the smaller damaging weapons hurt, the light class of 'mechs were hurt as well, for the simple reason that light 'mechs have a very hard time carrying the larger less-effected weapons. Light mechs rely on multiple small damaging weapons. Thus a sort of "double imperative" to make the lighter weapons more attractive again.
But it was (and still is) more involved than that - as every new weapon was introduced, pgi has had to re-balance not only the new weapon just to get it into the game, they've had to *reconsider the entire weapons spectrum* with an eye towards possibly having to rebalance them in light of the new weapon. This is also where the combat mechanic we call "ghost heat" (which magically damages your 'mech instead of just your cooling system) came from; this is where gauss timers came from; this is where the limit on the number of gauss that can be fired at once came from - it's where "the build of the patch" routine came from... it has resulted in the pre-eminent battlefield role being far and away "who does the most damage to the fewest armor sections in the least time." The choice to bump up armor/structure numbers vs damage numbers as a "fix" will continue to bear sour fruit for the foreseeable future. This happened in mw4, it's happened in mwo, and it will continue on.
PGI could have gone the route of putting the entire 'mech's armor/internal structure numbers into a single pool and just subtract damage from that, but who wants to hit an arm with obscene damage and not have it fall off? If they set damage percentages for x component/structure destruction, that's just going back to the same old routine as we have already, with the same problems.
They could also try and make it harder to get the perfect concentration hits, but all that would do is reward the patient and otherwise higher skilled players. It would not only reward those players, but it would make it FAR harder for people to progress *up* into that skilled player set, meaning as soon as you broke into that ELO bracket, you would be getting crushed repeatedly. Speaking of which, things like ELO, which by design break up the community, are more necessary with the way MWO is because the damage concentration as it stands rewards those who know how to get it reliably in combat.
That's why spread-damage has come up and continues to do so, even from people who know nothing about the TT BT game. Properly done, spread damge is a better way of resolving damage to battlemechs. You don't have to have constant weapons and 'mech tweaking, resulting in the "build of the patch" routine that can and does ruin the results of all your hard grind; you don't have to have crazy barely-justifiable mechanics like "ghost heat" where the devs
have to attempt to hide the maths from the playerbase for it to work as intended, you don't have to limit the pre-eminent battlefield role to "most damage to a single section in the least time possible" ... you don't have to limit the role of gauss and other big hard hitting weapons below what they were intended for and than try to come up with a justification for doing so. Light and medium 'mechs could actually fulfill their combat roles outside of trying to get into the "damage warfare" pillar just as a matter of mere survival. Heavies could actually *be* fast moving raiders, instead of second-class to assault 'mechs in the damage game.
All that (necessary stuff) said, just what should be the concentration of damage in the "near perfect conditions" situation mentioned above? I don't know off of the top of my head, but I would consider the difference between the "called shot" and "aimed shot" spread percentages as a baseline to start with when figuring out how much to "tighten up" the damage concentration. Also, something to consider from the OP that's not said expressly in it but IS implicated there - because the damage process is in two parts, you can reward human skill not with just tighter weapons concentration, but with a higher "what hits" rate, based on player choices and skill. As a quick example, if someone is dumb enough to stand still (0 throttle/no movement) for 2-3 seconds or more while under your crosshairs, more of your weapons that are fired "will hit."
Will you have some spread that you may not like? Yes; thankfully a lot less than would be necessary in the non-computer format, because you can handle a lot more math and variables. Which *should* bug people a lot less than all of the sour fruit that *must* come of the bitter tree known as "up the armor and internal structure numbers." Choices have consequences; choosing perfect weapons fire concentration (even limited to a few select conditions) "for fun, to reward player skill, so e-sports like it" results in a game that's less fun, has far less options to reward player skill, and thus less serious thinking e-sports support than it could have otherwise. Let's not even discuss what the constant man-hours in balancing costs a developer's bottom line. The bitter tree only looks pretty in theory.
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I think there should be an expanding cone of fire based on factors under the players control (movement, heat), because it would add a level of tactical management. But if it is permanently there it quite simply dumbs the game down, and allows people with bad aim to compete better. newsflash!! if you're bad at something, you practice to get better, you accept that you wont compete or you stop doing it. You don't get to change the rules to suit your deficiencys. (note that i know im not the absolute best shot, i often slow down/stop to maintain accurate fire. doesn't mean i want the rules changed so you can only fire when stopped, even though that would 'help' me)
The OP already has spread in relation to player control. At this point, it seems you disagree with having spread in a few specific conditions; which was discussed above.
"Dumbs the game down" ... "allows people with bad aim to compete better" - NO. This is a
crazy caricature of the OP. As I showed in the last example in it, it takes especially good aim (possibly better aim than most players currently have with mwo and the way it's crosshairs behave) to get the reward of being able to have very tightly concentrated shots (again, relative to armor values) versus even
mobile targets. Even when you're *not* trying to pull off an aimed shot, the OP *still* has skill (and risk)/reward properly related to each other.
If you don't bother to learn what it takes to get your weapons fire to concentrate more (called & aimed shots & whatever winds up being added) ... your shots that do hit will spread more. Not only that, the things that make your shots spread more also coincide with things that make it harder for your 'mech to hit your target *at all.*
You can't even *get* a hit on called and aimed shots if you don't know how to make it easier for your 'mech to hit a target... also you can't get them if you don't know what to aim at - or don't have the skill to aim at what's necessary. So unskilled, or worse, lazy players get *
fewer hits* that are *
less concentrated.* Anyone with a modicum of dedication will progress up the skill(risks)/reward ladder. The "position, point, time the shot, and click" skills and choices should NOT be the only way to reward players. There are more options.
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