1063 replies to this topic

[J0anna]

While the op has some good points, and I don't see the real harm in trying this out, it misses on some points. It fails to take into account the skill of the target mech to spread damage around by moving/twisting. Properly done, this tactic significantly increases the life of your mech. The cone of fire has the effect randomizing hit locations, which effectively does this for you, thus reducing the need to torso twist and reduce damage.

However, as I said I don't see any harm in trying this. Doubling armor has reduced the BV of ballistics in relation to energy weapons. Missiles have had this adjusted by increasing their damage. While having an AC/20 do more than 20 damage is just wrong to me, the impact of 7 rounds of AC/20 in MWO is less than 7 rounds in TT. I would really like to see ammo values doubled to account for the doubled armor and need to him more often.

[TheJs]

I was initially skeptical about the OP's idea. But after thinking about it, it does have some merit. I think the main effect from this change would be to shift focus away from 'Get as much Damage Per Second' to 'Get as much Damage Per Single Shot'. Indeed this would discourage boating mass small weapons as although they might do more damage, they just take so long to fire accurately(to maintain pinpoint accuracy).

The only worry is a too much Cone of Fire spread. At the end of the day you don't want too much uncertainty of hitting or else people will just wonder what is the point of aiming. The ideas for making the Cone of Fire spread more while moving and hot also sounds feasible, adding positioning and heat management depth. The hand-accuracy absolute convergence is also great idea because it does not totally allow boating

[RagingOyster]

Frostiken, on 21 January 2013 - 09:59 PM, said:

So you talk about how great you are and how competition is the best thing in the ******* world, and then say you sucked at what is basically the gold standard of FPS game competition. After you accuse everyone who wants better gameplay of being 'lobster clawed stroke victims' who just want the game 'dumbed down'.


Do you want to know why people don't make "competitive FPS games" with "high skill ceilings"?

Because they aren't ******* fun. Brink was designed to appeal to competitive gameplay. It had a great movement system and solid shooter handling. It failed, because your average player is used to getting a little more out of an FPS game than stroking your **** to a 'YOU ARE THE WINNER' screen. Enemy Territory Quake Wars had excellent skill ceilings and really refined the massively popular Wolfenstein ET game. The result, it failed spectacularly. The average player didn't find it fun, and the competitive egotists like you were too cheap to change games from W:ET which you were already playing. Then you whine that nobody makes games like that anymore.

Competitive games like you describe are dead, because nobody finds them fun. I don't find them fun. The last fiercely competitive game I played was probably Natural Selection, and Natural Selection 2, attempting to appeal to 'skill' and 'competition', sucks and died and lost 80% of its playerbase in the first month.

People got spoiled, me along with them. We actually want depth in our games, and there is usually almost no depth to shooters that advertise to be "competitive". The entire reason games like CS and Quake were like they were was because shooters were crude things at the time. The concept of a pixel-perfect hitscan weapon was the defacto standard of getting shooting done, cones of fire barely existed as a concept back then. This was when you still ran over glowing things on the ground to get DOUBLE DAMAGE. They were arcade games.

I'd give you more examples but a can't because, like I said, nobody makes them anymore, because nobody cares.

People like you also make up the playerbases of those games, and who the **** would want to hang out in a community like that? You don't find any game with a cone of fire fun, for some ridiculous reason (I'm sure it's because you're such a pro at FPS games. That's why we've all heard of your accolades in Quake). Did you ever maybe think that you're just an ******* who hates fun?

Look man, you are getting way too worked up about this...
No need to flip a **** and start insulting people. I like having my shots go where I aim them. I never enjoyed CS as much as many other shooters because I thought it was completely ******** that there was no ADS and your shots fly all over the place. It is not fun, it is not competitive and it is not realistic. Frankly, my top 5 FPS games of all time are something like Halo 3, Tribes: Ascend, Tribes 2, Battlefield 3 and Gears of War 3. All fantastic games, all have weapons whose bullets fly where they are aimed. None of those are MW though, nor is CS or CoD or anything else. In BF3 you can drop a target with a handful of shots, so spread is important because it keeps people alive. Not so in MW where every target is a 20-ton (min) war machine.

Cone of fire in MW would turn the game into a "cross your fingers" game of chance. The only weapons that should not go right where they are pointed are ballistics, missiles and arm-mounted lasers (which should have convergance at certain ranged, and spread at close range)

/thread

[Josef Nader]

Vapor Trail, on 21 January 2013 - 10:43 PM, said:

Because the easy head-cap isn't BattleTech? In TT you couldn't intentionally head-cap under most circumstances. Making it difficult, but not impossible seems to me to be the best way to keep the spirit of TT.

And "free easy backshot" is generally punishment enough, or would be if the critical system was fully implemented, I think.

Because BT is based off of random dice rolls, and it sucks bum to have your mech explode before doing anything because the dice came up against you. It's in there, but the chances are very slim. In a real time adaptation of the mechanics, you have a lot more control over your mech. You can finely tune exactly how much heat you put out, how you manuver, how you twist to absorb incoming fire, and how you respond to enemy threats. All of this is happening in real time, on a second by second basis. Headcaps are very difficult to accomplish in MWO, but for different reasons. The huge, swirling mass of robots and the tiny size of the head hitboxes for most mechs mean that they tend to be pretty lucky shots in a brawl, and hard to replicate with any consistency. Ergo, if you go into heat shutdown due to poor playing, you and only you are to blame for your bad luck. The dice came up against you. Your stompy robot got headcapped. If you play well, your chances of getting headcapped are astronomically slim.

twibs, on 22 January 2013 - 12:53 AM, said:

MWO, last I checked. How about you go and do a single AC/20 Hunhcie build for example and tell me how competitive you feel.

A single AC20 4G and a single AC20 Wang are currently my best builds on top of being the builds I have the most fun in. The AC20 is -brutally- effective. Sure, it can't completely kill a mech in a single shot like it could in TT, but if it could then this game just wouldn't be any fun. It -can- punch through the front CT armor of an Atlas in 5 shots or less, and that's something that very few other single guns in this game can replicate. It can also, I might add, blow through rear armor and hit internals on ANY mech (Barring armor redistribution) in a single hit.

I just think that you have no idea what you're talking about, nor do you play this game very often.

Critical Fumble, on 22 January 2013 - 01:01 AM, said:

I fail to understand your argument that CoF mechanics reduce the influence of skill in the game. Tracking a giant robot with your mouse counts as skill, but trigger discipline doesn't? Point and shoot is deep gameplay, but managing your weapons spray is shallow?

No, removing my ability to place shots (a vitally important skill in this game, might I add), especially against small or fast moving targets is pointlessly lowering the skill cap and making it so that bad players can survive longer in the game. The strategy in MWO comes from strategically taking your enemy apart, identifying their soft spots and focusing fire on them all while everyone is running about in a swirling mass. Add in an RNG CoF and the skill becomes about who is best at wrestling with their mouse. I'll take my thoughtful dissection of enemy robots over "where the hell is my cursor going? Is my mouse sensor failing?" gameplay anyday.

Edited by Josef Nader, 22 January 2013 - 08:11 AM.

[HRR Insanity]

Josef Nader, on 22 January 2013 - 08:08 AM, said:

No, removing my ability to place shots (a vitally important skill in this game, might I add), especially against small or fast moving targets is pointlessly lowering the skill cap and making it so that bad players can survive longer in the game. The strategy in MWO comes from strategically taking your enemy apart, identifying their soft spots and focusing fire on them all while everyone is running about in a swirling mass. Add in an RNG CoF and the skill becomes about who is best at wrestling with their mouse. I'll take my thoughtful dissection of enemy robots over "where the hell is my cursor going? Is my mouse sensor failing?" gameplay anyday.

Keep in mind that my original proposal keeps perfect accuracy for weapons fired individually.

No CoF unless you choose to fire groups of weapons.

[HRR Insanity]

Moenrg, on 22 January 2013 - 04:14 AM, said:

While the op has some good points, and I don't see the real harm in trying this out, it misses on some points. It fails to take into account the skill of the target mech to spread damage around by moving/twisting. Properly done, this tactic significantly increases the life of your mech. The cone of fire has the effect randomizing hit locations, which effectively does this for you, thus reducing the need to torso twist and reduce damage.

If you don't twist/turn, a good gunner is going to put individual shots over and over into the same panel... and with the real BT weapon values, it won't take long to hit something critical.

Quote

However, as I said I don't see any harm in trying this. Doubling armor has reduced the BV of ballistics in relation to energy weapons. Missiles have had this adjusted by increasing their damage. While having an AC/20 do more than 20 damage is just wrong to me, the impact of 7 rounds of AC/20 in MWO is less than 7 rounds in TT. I would really like to see ammo values doubled to account for the doubled armor and need to him more often.

Agree, if nothing else changes, ammo should be increased further.

[TheForce]

Josef Nader, on 22 January 2013 - 08:08 AM, said:

I'll take my thoughtful dissection of enemy robots

Enemy robots? Nice. Thats exactly what this game is until group fire, concentrated damage, and pinpoint accuracy is addressed. RobotWarriors Online, NOT MechWarrior.

[Aldon]

OP,

There should not be a balance. Build your mech and fight. Some weapons will be better than others. If you remove the simulator quasi-realism from this game we will lose a staggering amount of players and then it will die.

I don't care about TT or BT rules if this is your line of thinking.

[HRR Insanity]

Aldon, on 22 January 2013 - 08:51 AM, said:

There should not be a balance. Build your mech and fight. Some weapons will be better than others. If you remove the simulator quasi-realism from this game we will lose a staggering amount of players and then it will die.

I have no desire to remove the quasi-realism. I want to make it MORE like the universe the game is trying to simulate.

Quote

I don't care about TT or BT rules if this is your line of thinking.

/sighs/ Read the post. You can't balance weapons using BT or MW as a base if you leave weapon convergence in the game.

If you want to start over with new weapon tonnages/criticals/damage/armor models... that's fine. But the Devs didn't and don't want to. Yes, there will be better weapons. But as the DEVS have stated they're going to try to balance weapons, you have to try to actually balance them.

At present, the ability to combine weapons into super-weapons makes the game impossible to balance.

See original post.

[MustrumRidcully]

Aldon, on 22 January 2013 - 08:51 AM, said:

OP,

There should not be a balance. Build your mech and fight. Some weapons will be better than others. If you remove the simulator quasi-realism from this game we will lose a staggering amount of players and then it will die.

I don't care about TT or BT rules if this is your line of thinking.

If you don't balance teh weapons and mechs, then mechs and weapons will fall by the wayside and die, and people will wonder "why all these noobie trap?".

[Paul McKenzie]

TheForce, on 22 January 2013 - 08:41 AM, said:

Enemy robots? Nice. Thats exactly what this game is until group fire, concentrated damage, and pinpoint accuracy is addressed. RobotWarriors Online, NOT MechWarrior.

There have been numerous video games before this, all of them pretty damn good and were going to pick now in mechwarrior 5 or mwo to start saying shots SHOULDNT go where I want them to?

[TheForce]

Paul McKenzie, on 22 January 2013 - 08:53 AM, said:

my shots have gone where I pointed them since mechwarrior 1 and the video games are honestly the only thing that matters for building another video game.


If you can look at what we have and HONESTLY say the combat isn't good for any mech other than an lrm boat I'd call you crazy. This thread is 18 pages of whining about a game that already has good combat and is working well minus the ECM not having its counters implemented yet.

I'm not saying it isn't good - this is the best MW title yet, but it can still be a more true representation of what MechWarrior is. MechWarrior is MORE than a video game and MW2, 3, and 4 didn't get it right either.

I won't stop whining until it is addressed. OK I might stop whining if we get private games/stock battles

[Corvus Antaka]

Group weapons have ALWAYS dominated the online mechwarrior games. Why? Because you can hit 1 location only at the same time over and over.

Double armour has helped the fights to be more drawn out. It is still not the end all be all fix, however after 6 months playing I do like it. Even mech3 had 1.5 times armour.

IMHO core issues with the game now are centered more around how heat, recycle times and ammo amounts are interacting with double armour, and the entire disfunction of tracking/locking missiles.

1. Ammo - I spent a long time calling for double ammo due to double armour. Now that we have the ammo amounts we do, I do contemplate whether a 25% ammo reduction across the board might be a good thing - but overall I think ammo is in a fairly decent place. Perhaps having large amounts of ammo should with it carry a drawback like more risk of internal ammo explosions when overheating past the heatcap.

2. Recycle times - I prefer balancing via heat vs recycle times. Therefore to see the MWO recycle times I think this works fairly well, but could be improved upon by moving to a heatscale that has a lower top end but dissapates heat faster. As it is now heat efficient mechs rarely have any if any heat problems, but alpha strike top heavy mechs can pump 2-3 volleys before needing a full cooldown cycle, which takes forever, especially with single heatsinks.

when you consider PGI brought recycle timers down from TT to up the pace of fire for gameplay reasons, I think with heat we are in the same place, we want to up the rate of fire, but bring down the amount of fire being pushed out in alpha strikes.

half the heatcap, double the dissipation, and we get double heatsinks working properly and SHS that actually dissipate heat instead of forcing you to run off for 30 seconds to cooldown. Someone at PGI probably wants to strangle me by now for broken recording this, for all I know in playtesting this gives problems

Having internal ammo explosions occur due to overheats in any mech location would also be interesting.

3. Missiles. All the locking missiles are very simplistic and defective right now. LRMS are still fire and forget missiles that cannot be evaded beyond using cover or stacking AMS or of course blanket ECM immunity.

Moving LRMS to work as per mech3 would make them have a travel distance of 1000m, and the pilot could aim the trajectory of the missiles for the first 400 meters, after that the missiles home in on the target. If the target is fast, manueverable or smart in vectoring, it can evade missiles, but if the LRM pilot is good at aiming and arcing his LRMS, he can factor for evasion and try to aim the LRMS to hit the target. multiple LRM boats can setup triangles of fire to cover each other & enemy vector.

This spread mechs more across the map that into an 8 man humpfest as well.

SSRMS - same problems. track too well. Fly through the shooting mech to hit the enemy. Are undodgeable. Cant be evaded with jumpjets. Having SSRMS need a fresh lock everytime they fire is something once suggested that may well be the easiest solution.

both LRMS & SSRM need to be dodgeable much more than currently. missiles do not turn 180 degrees at 1 meter to wip around and hit a target that dodges them, they instead crash into the ground. LRMS and SSRMS in MWO will fly 1 meter past you, do a 180, and still smack you down.

If LRMS missed, if they didnt turn so well, itd be fine to have their damage where it is now or even at 2.0. Same for SSRMS. but as it is now both types need damage nurfs.

Then of course ECM, the great LRM remover, which has enough pages to cover its many issues

[Aldon]

HRR Insanity, on 22 January 2013 - 09:02 AM, said:

I have no desire to remove the quasi-realism. I want to make it MORE like the universe the game is trying to simulate.



/sighs/ Read the post. You can't balance weapons using BT or MW as a base if you leave weapon convergence in the game.

If you want to start over with new weapon tonnages/criticals/damage/armor models... that's fine. But the Devs didn't and don't want to. Yes, there will be better weapons. But as the DEVS have stated they're going to try to balance weapons, you have to try to actually balance them.

At present, the ability to combine weapons into super-weapons makes the game impossible to balance.

See original post.

I read your post. I simply don't agree with you at all that this type of balance is a good idea. A beam weapon or projectile must go where it is aimed. Period.

[PurpleNinja]

Aldon, on 22 January 2013 - 09:06 AM, said:

I read your post. I simply don't agree with you at all that this type of balance is a good idea. A beam weapon or projectile must go where it is aimed. Period.

I disagree, a torso mounted laser will only line up with the reticule at a certain distance.
The beans of two parallel torso mounted lasers will never touch each other.
Since we're only throwing ideas that will never see the light in MWO, I'll go even further and say that players should be able to align their weapons in mech lab prior to combat. This way I can align all my 4 ML to cross at 125 meters, so this is the distance where all 4 lasers hit the center spot on the reticule. I could even mount then in parallel, so I have the spray effect to fight light mechs and none of then ever touch the center of reticule.

Chance of any of these to be implemented: 2.37%

[Mister Blastman]

I too posted a mega-thread about weapon convergence in the closed beta, back in June. Have we seen a solution yet? NO.

[HRR Insanity]

Aldon, on 22 January 2013 - 09:06 AM, said:

I read your post. I simply don't agree with you at all that this type of balance is a good idea. A beam weapon or projectile must go where it is aimed. Period.

You didn't read the post then. Individual weapons DO go where they're aimed.

Period.

Only groups of weapons (which break the armor/damage model) will be subject to cone of fire. This balances the game and allows small weapons to co-exist with large weapons as they were intended to.

[KinLuu]

Mister Blastman, on 22 January 2013 - 09:33 AM, said:

I too posted a mega-thread about weapon convergence in the closed beta, back in June. Have we seen a solution yet? NO.

Because it would be hated and a stupid thing to do for PGI.

Deal with it.

[HRR Insanity]

KinLuu, on 22 January 2013 - 09:41 AM, said:

Because it would be hated and a stupid thing to do for PGI.

Deal with it.

The Devs indicated in the past threads that there would be some form of weapon convergence/divergence implemented. It just hasn't happened yet.

This thread is just a reminder/encouragement that without it, their game will never have any sort of weapon balance.

Best get ready.

[KinLuu]

HRR Insanity, on 22 January 2013 - 09:44 AM, said:

The Devs indicated in the past threads that there would be some form of weapon convergence/divergence implemented. It just hasn't happened yet.

This thread is just a reminder/encouragement that without it, their game will never have any sort of weapon balance.

Best get ready.

I predict we rather get 3rd person and CW than that.