143 replies to this topic

[wanderer]

cazidin, on 30 April 2016 - 07:05 AM, said:

COF is a terrible idea. I've already been here many times and even made a thread discussing in length the short sightedness of convergence. Fix high damage laser alphas and we're done.

Weapon-specific fixes are useless, as the result simply shifts to the maximal alpha that can be neatly slapped into the pixel of choice. Then again, so is a pure COF solution.

Nerf lasers enough and we go back to AC/PPC/Gauss. The problem is that a 'Mech may have 8 hit locations, but it's incredibly easy to ignore half if not three-quarters of them in favor of simply coring your target in two-three salvos.

Spread the damage in a predictable fashion and the problem stops- at the very least, on targets that don't have a full (paperdoll) sensor lock. Set each hardpoint on a 'Mech to aim for a point centered on, but not the center of crosshair as a default "iron sights" shot. Give it a default convergence far enough away from the target that fire will hit if the target is center-massed, but it stops hitting the same pixel with every single gun.

Then get an actual heatscale in and we might see a difference in play.

[Dracol]

Ex Atlas Overlord, on 30 April 2016 - 12:19 PM, said:

COF when accelerating / decelerating is a great idea.

Would light mechs be exempt from this? cause that would, in my opinion, but light mechs at a very unfair disadvantage.

[Ultimax]

Lostdragon, on 30 April 2016 - 07:31 AM, said:

Call of Duty, Medal of Honor, Half Life, Halo. Those are the most popular and lucrative shooters I can think of and all of them have a cone of fire mechanic. You can have a smart cone of fire system that is intuitive and easy to use while also increasing the skill cap necessary to be good at the game.

None of those games have you firing 3 to 8 different weapons at once - with weapons spread all over your body, possibly with varying yaw ability, while managing heat and potentially different firing mechanics for several of your weapons.

Your avatar is also not huge and easy to hit, there is no such thing as torso twisting to protect components.


There aren't enemy players who can sometimes move three times as fast as you, there aren't players who move like slugs and get stuck on terrain.


On top of all of that, those games have massively shorter TTK, its not even in the same realm.





That's what it can look like, that's ONE player shooting targets and killing them in seconds.



And lastly? The posterchild games you guys are using?

None of the avatars are built moronically, with guns mounted in their bellies or held in hands lower then their crotches. The weapons are aimed/mounted from where your eyes are.

Edited by Ultimax, 30 April 2016 - 07:55 PM.

[Lostdragon]

Ultimax, on 30 April 2016 - 07:48 PM, said:

None of those games have you firing 3 to 8 different weapons at once - with weapons spread all over your body, possibly with varying yaw ability, while managing heat and potentially different firing mechanics for several of your weapons.

Your avatar is also not huge and easy to hit, there is no such thing as torso twisting to protect components.


There aren't enemy players who can sometimes move three times as fast as you, there aren't players who move like slugs and get stuck on terrain.

So what?

[FupDup]

Lostdragon, on 30 April 2016 - 07:50 PM, said:

So what?

It means that cones would have a far greater influence on the outcome of combat in MWO than they do in those standard infantry FPS games.

[Lostdragon]

FupDup, on 30 April 2016 - 07:51 PM, said:

It means that cones would have a far greater influence on the outcome of combat in MWO than they do in those standard infantry FPS games.

Yeah, that's kind of the point. I think most people who want to see a CoF mechanic in MWO want to see it used to punish alpha strikes by making them less accurate, make riding the top of the heat scale more dangerous, and generally make the game focus a bit more on tactics and mech management than just finding the enemy and alpha striking over and over.

[Ultimax]

Lostdragon, on 30 April 2016 - 07:50 PM, said:

So what?

So you want CoF, fine, give us TTK of less than 5s with one mech firing on another.

That's why those games have CoF dude, because they don't have avatars like an Atlas that can shrug off multiple players shooting and hitting it for an extended time frame.


You hit a target, it's dead. That's your reward.

[FupDup]

Lostdragon, on 30 April 2016 - 07:57 PM, said:

Yeah, that's kind of the point. I think most people who want to see a CoF mechanic in MWO want to see it used to punish alpha strikes by making them less accurate, make riding the top of the heat scale more dangerous, and generally make the game focus a bit more on tactics and mech management than just finding the enemy and alpha striking over and over.

If you tie it to heat, people will design their mechs to use low-heat alpha strikes instead. Gauss and dakka builds will be king.

Firing all of your weapons at the same time will ALWAYS be the best way to play Mechwarrior games since it reduces your exposure time and increases your accuracy. The most you can do is change which weapons are used for these alphas, but you can never change alpha itself without crazytown mechanics like Ghost Heat or forced chainfire (which come with plenty of their own problems).

Edited by FupDup, 30 April 2016 - 08:01 PM.

[SplashDown]

IMO reducing laser alphas or creating a cof system will simply be the finale nail in the coffin for this game...i try to be open minded to new ideas..but all i see happening if either of these 2 ideas were used is a massive exodus from this game.

Edited by SplashDown, 30 April 2016 - 08:03 PM.

[Lostdragon]

Ultimax, on 30 April 2016 - 07:58 PM, said:

So you want CoF, fine, give us TTK of less than 5s with one mech firing on another.

That's why those games have CoF dude, because they don't have avatars like an Atlas that can shrug off multiple players shooting and hitting it for an extended time frame.


You hit a target, it's dead. That's your reward.

I think we just have different opinions of how mech combat should play out. I want to see it be more slow and deliberate with mechs slugging it out and taking a lot of fire before going down.

FupDup, on 30 April 2016 - 08:00 PM, said:

If you tie it to heat, people will design their mechs to use low-heat alpha strikes instead. Gauss and dakka builds will be king.

Firing all of your weapons at the same time will ALWAYS be the best way to play Mechwarrior games since it reduces your exposure time and increases your accuracy. The most you can do is change which weapons are used for these alphas, but you can never change alpha itself without crazytown mechanics like Ghost Heat or forced chainfire (which come with plenty of their own problems).

I think there should be a multiple factors that impact it, heat being only one of them. I would also make it dependent on the amount of damage being done with no CoF at 20 damage, a small COF at 30 damage, and a COF that rapidly increases in size after that. I would also tie it to movement speed with going full throttle resulting in a penalty to your COF. The penalties don't have to be the same across the board, either, so that lights are not unduly punished and mechs that are hardpoint starved get a bonus to accuracy.

With such a scheme you can fire all your weapons if you want but you will have an accuracy penalty such that it may not be worth firing all 6 of your CERML or both your Gauss Rifles simultaneously while going top speed. This would encourage firing smaller groups of weapons while not making it pointless to have a lot of the same weapon.

Ideally this could also be part of a skill tree revamp or the introduction of a pilot skill tree with skills to reduce the CoF penalties that involve some actual choices, like "Do I want a smaller CoF at full throttle or do I want the skill that gives me a faster top speed?"

[Death Proof]

Right now, the only thing this game needs is fewer queue buckets and a better overall matchmaker.

Also, a return to 8v8 in Quick Play matches, keeping 12v12 purely for Faction Play.

[Alan Davion]

Ultimax, on 30 April 2016 - 07:58 PM, said:

So you want CoF, fine, give us TTK of less than 5s with one mech firing on another.

That's why those games have CoF dude, because they don't have avatars like an Atlas that can shrug off multiple players shooting and hitting it for an extended time frame.

You hit a target, it's dead. That's your reward.

To get a TTK that short in MWO you would need to increase damage output of weapons by about 2 or 3 times over what we have now, and at that point, the TT values will have been completely pissed over and we might as well not even call it MechWarrior, just "Generic Mech Arena Shooter 3000".

The reason TTK is so low in games like CoD or BF is because most weapons have an average damage somewhere around 25-35 points, yielding 3-5 shot kills from 100% health.

What's the strongest weapon in BT/MW? The AC20 isn't it? If all ACs were rapid fire, as they have been in all other games, and as they should be in this, then I could see your point.

But on the other side of the coin, most mechs in MWO are capable of, at minimum, probably about 35 points of damage with every single pull of the trigger so to speak. So instead of about 3-5 shots, you have 3-5 pulls of the trigger, yielding total damage of about 105 to 175 when all is said and done.

What's the highest armor total a mech is capable of in MWO, specifically the Atlas, King Crab and Dire Wolf... Somewhere just north of 100 points or so isn't it?

It all seems roughly the same to me currently.

[Davers]

Lostdragon, on 30 April 2016 - 07:57 PM, said:

Yeah, that's kind of the point. I think most people who want to see a CoF mechanic in MWO want to see it used to punish alpha strikes by making them less accurate, make riding the top of the heat scale more dangerous, and generally make the game focus a bit more on tactics and mech management than just finding the enemy and alpha striking over and over.

Yes, but they are also the same people who think that light mechs shouldn't be viable in combat, LRMs are good weapons, and that exposing yourself to half the enemy team shouldn't hurt much.

People asking for CoF really haven't thought it through. If you added CoF how would relatively slow ballistics ever be useful outside of close range? You would have to lead the target and then hope that the CoF RNG was in your favor. How can you have a CoF when you have such a huge difference in mech sizes? What would hit multiple locations on an Atlas would completely miss a small light mech. Do we want light mechs immune to any kind of long range fire? Seriously, look at the mech size comparisons as seen here . The Locust is only as large as the Atlas' stomach/pelvic regions. Even a few meter spread would make shooting at the Locust a waste of time.

[Davers]

Lostdragon, on 30 April 2016 - 08:16 PM, said:

I think there should be a multiple factors that impact it, heat being only one of them. I would also make it dependent on the amount of damage being done with no CoF at 20 damage, a small COF at 30 damage, and a COF that rapidly increases in size after that.

So 4-5 AC/UAC5s shooting non stop is fine, but if I add 2 medium lasers to my Hunchback's AC20 then I get penalized?

[Lostdragon]

Davers, on 30 April 2016 - 08:30 PM, said:

Yes, but they are also the same people who think that light mechs shouldn't be viable in combat, LRMs are good weapons, and that exposing yourself to half the enemy team shouldn't hurt much.

People asking for CoF really haven't thought it through. If you added CoF how would relatively slow ballistics ever be useful outside of close range? You would have to lead the target and then hope that the CoF RNG was in your favor. How can you have a CoF when you have such a huge difference in mech sizes? What would hit multiple locations on an Atlas would completely miss a small light mech. Do we want light mechs immune to any kind of long range fire? Seriously, look at the mech size comparisons as seen here . The Locust is only as large as the Atlas' stomach/pelvic regions. Even a few meter spread would make shooting at the Locust a waste of time.

See my post above. If a CoF system is implemented such that the player has control over it then there won't be an issue. If you want to have perfect pinpoint accuracy, slow down, don't be at high heat, and don't fire a huge alpha.

[Alan Davion]

Davers, on 30 April 2016 - 08:34 PM, said:

So 4-5 AC/UAC5s shooting non stop is fine, but if I add 2 medium lasers to my Hunchback's AC20 then I get penalized?

I agree tying CoF to damage output is a bad idea, tying it to range is much better.

[Lostdragon]

Davers, on 30 April 2016 - 08:34 PM, said:

So 4-5 AC/UAC5s shooting non stop is fine, but if I add 2 medium lasers to my Hunchback's AC20 then I get penalized?

Well you probably really shouldn't be firing the AC20 at the same time as the lasers in most situations, but yeah. If you keep spamming the AC5s you will heat up and start to suffer penalties until you cool some.

[Davers]

The only way I can think of to limit Alpha Warrior (until a more reasonable person comes along and pokes holes in it) is to make long range lasers hit really hard, but also be much hotter. That way they are worth taking, but very bad to brawl with (smaller lasers might need to become a little more heat efficient). But even then, at the end of the day, Mr. Gauss shows up with good range and damage with no heat. The Gauss really is FASA flipping the entire heat balance thing the finger.

Players want aiming to be important. PGI wants the ability to target specific components to be important. And most people would agree that in CoF games, dying to an opponent because they just got better RNG than you is annoying, but not game breaking since you will respawn in 10 seconds to try again.

[Derps McGee]

"Never been a mechwarrior game with a cone of fire"

I present to you, exihibit A:

Spoiler

Just cut armor values back down to their default battletech settings, and implement the COF much like it was in the glory days, in a combo of heat, movement, and range and we get a wonderful world of

Spoiler

P.S. Add in melee and knockdown for extra fun.

[dwwolf]

I think people are too scared about CoF mechanics.
A 3 sigma value for a cof of 1 to 2 meters at max normal range will mostly result in hitting an adjecant component.

Obviously specifics would have to be tested.
Suggestions:

I have tried to couple as many missing battletech mechanics into to the CoF system as possible. I have tied in component damage, movement, heat and info warfare.
I suggest that CoF offset is determined per weapon location to limit complete wonkiness.

Mods to sigma.
Bonus
5% for a fully locked target.
10% pulse lasers.
5% targetting computer.
10% target fully locked by a friendly light mech within 300 meters of the target.
5% target fully locked by a friendly medium mech within 300 meters of the target.
Arm mounted weapons 20%

Light mechs to recieve a 40% locking speed bonus.
Medium mechs to recieve a 20% locking speed bonus.
Assaults to recieve a 20% locking speed penalty.

Penalties.
Movement upto 2/3 max speed : 5%
Movement upto full speed : 10%.
Heatscale 5% for 2nd quartile of heatscale
10% fore 3rd quartile
15% for 4th quartile
Actuator damage for arm mounted weapons. 20% divided over the number of actuators in the arm.
Damaged weapon 10%

I gave a bonus to arm mounted weapons because except for certain mechs they are generally worse than torso mounted weapons due to lower placement on the mech. As a drawback arm mounted weapons take a penalty for actuator damage.

Edited by dwwolf, 01 May 2016 - 12:41 AM.