well i guess i can't drive a light anymore, seeing how even though i'm only like 5 hours from pgi hq, i live in a rural farming community and even with dsl have a steady 125 ping

My idea for solving the boating problem (although probably a bad one is) rather then mucking about with heat sinks, the heat cap or anything like that. Just have any weapon fired in more then groups of two or three cause ever increasing heat.

Example

You fire two large lasers you generate 18 heat

but if you fire three large lasers you generate 27+(20-25% extra heat)

The amount of extra heat is immaterial at this point cause i'm not about to do the math to figure out a balanced number. My though behind this was, in bt lore they always say that when firing weapons its the spike in energy from the reactor that heats the mech up so shooting more and more weapons should spike the reactor harder then intended. While this option does not effect smaller boats as bad such as 4 ppc builds, if you tried to take the 6LL or PPC stalker you'd generate a crap ton of heat if you alpha. This would also only be weapons of the exact same type so if you had 2 ppc, 2 erppc you would not generate extra heat because its two different weapons. The only problem i have with my own idea is it kills boating smaller ballistics such as ac2 because you would break the weapon cap.

Anyway thats my horrible idea hope you all have a great saturday

I love 6 ppc stalkers, i get right up next to them and feed of their tears

As for boating in general, its been apart of every mechwarrior game i've played, its just to handy to have all your weapon systems go the same distance on the same recycle. It frees up the person to concentrate on aiming and piloting rather then which weapon system he can fire next.

As for variety on the battle field, well all i can say is weapon systems need balancing, lrm/srms are half useless anymore, i'm not afraid of them anyway, i used to run 6med laser, 4 streak 4's on my stalker but it just doesn't do the damage for the risk of getting in close.

As for boating being cheap/easy/dumb well all i can say is drive it before you criticize it. The 6 LL stalker has a head efficiency of like 1.4 at best its a hot mech, it takes some skill to manage all that heat and not just be a stationary target. The best way to beat a boat is to play it, learn its weaknesses and exploit them later on

While I don't agree with exploiting or hacking or whatever you want to call it to circumvent maps your currently don't want to play. We already know someday we are going to be able to tell what our next map will be before we select our mechs. So guess what when I see alpine pop up I'm going to take a long range mech. While it is unfair right now that some teams are using this to gain an advantage, it will eventually become the norm, long range map a team will select long range mechs.

Use terrain, draw the enemy team into a less advantageous position. Don't take a mech load out that can't hit pass 400 meters. While a lot of mechs in the TT version were boats of a single weapon system many more were well rounded so that they could attack at any range and be a threat. Take the consequences for your choices. If your going to drive a splatapult and you rotate into alpine deal with it, or change your load out so you can deal damage at long range. I don't get mad when a raven with ecm runs up to my ppc stalker and stands right in front of me, that is a sound tactical decision on his part.

Pretty much all I'm saying is eventually teams will know what map their dropping before hand and will take load-outs appropriate to the map. Bypassing elo, win/loss ratings, and other statistics is ******** and needs to be fixed