468 replies to this topic

[Ken Fury]

MWO needs to get even more distance to the TT rules to become the game it's destined to be. It's a very good game even in it's current iteration.

[Syllogy]

Straight from Jordan Weisman when talking to Bryan Ekman about TT Rules: "Clan Tech and Heat Balance is a perfect example of something that we did in TT that was not done right"

Edited by Syllogy, 10 April 2013 - 03:50 PM.

[Elyam]

No doubt. Nothing wrong with correcting some numbers, methods and procedures as long as those things that are core to the universe are upheld. Adjustments to the heat system to reduce or eliminate errors brought about with the intro of DHS isn't controvertial. Many house rules were made over the years by players after the intro of the 3050 changes, mostly to compensate for how much DHS removed too much heat challenge from BT. There are arguments for or against, but I agree with Weisman on this one.

But this is an example of something that shouldn't have bearing on the thread topic - which should move beyond the title's mention of canon 'stats' and have concern for those parts of canon that outline what Battletech is. Not numbers - but descriptions, reasons, facts about each object's role and purpose, bonuses and flaws and changes that MWO makes that alter those in a way that causes us to lose important qualities of Battletech. Again the main example: simultaneous weapons fire perfect to the aiming reticule is a mayhem-inducing decision.

(Clarification: I believe PGI is doing a decent job on the mechnics and play of MWO. It is giving us the feel of BT/MW and will get better and eventually do a decent job simulating more of the Inner Sphere. Success can be increased if they are bold enough to make a few revisions)

Edited by Elyam, 10 April 2013 - 06:42 PM.

[Karl Streiger]

Syllogy, on 10 April 2013 - 03:49 PM, said:

Straight from Jordan Weisman when talking to Bryan Ekman about TT Rules: "Clan Tech and Heat Balance is a perfect example of something that we did in TT that was not done right"

Oh thats exactly the point. Clan Tech screwed everything up - but keeping the stats will screw MWO up too.

As Tank Boy said... Range is another of these "not" usefull figures from the board game. We don't play on boards. The range makes sense on tactical games...like MWTactics or similar...where you don't want to scroll 5sec to get to your units. The quadruppled range would have been minimum i would have been started with.
Actually a Jenner can cross the distance between the effective range of a large laser and a medium laser in less than 4 sec. With quadruppled range its about 18sec.

Elyam, on 10 April 2013 - 06:14 PM, said:

But this is an example of something that shouldn't have bearing on the thread topic - which should move beyond the title's mention of canon 'stats' and have concern for those parts of canon that outline what Battletech is. Not numbers - but descriptions, reasons, facts about each object's role and purpose, bonuses and flaws and changes that MWO makes that alter those in a way that causes us to lose important qualities of Battletech. Again the main example: simultaneous weapons fire perfect to the aiming reticule is a mayhem-inducing decision.

Descriptions, reason, facts... exactly did you knew that i was disapointed to death after i have to recognize that the Sunglow Type 2 Laser of the Thunderbolt was just an ordinary Large Laser?
The look of these thing, the description in novels i thought that thing is able to outmatch a PPC in terms of raw fire power.

I read the novels - played MW2, even MW3...and after that i started to play the Board Game.
Same with Autocannons...i ignored the fact that the AC5 should deal 5dmg for a long time - i used them for 8dmg.

Some said Balancing is about mathematics and figures...so what about the Gauss...it doesn't make sense that this gun have 1 heat - per shot.
You have waste heat while the discharging of capacitors and you have heat while reloading the capacitors.
But they sticked at the TT stats- for no reason. Would have the Gauss Rifle been broken when discharging would have been 4 heat and reloading 1.5 heat per second?
I don't think so.
Would have the PPC been broken when the damage would have been increased towards 15. But reloading time of 5-6sec - with 8 heat on discharge and 2 heat per second while reloading?

Edited by Karl Streiger, 10 April 2013 - 11:42 PM.

[AndyHill]

The thing is, the numbers and dice don't have much to do with each other. When PGI messes with the numbers (double armor, triple heat, triple damage etc.) they are mostly messing with weapon balance. 'Mech endurance and average engagement duration should be mostly adjusted by changes in firing rate and 'mech speed, not heat, armor etc.

The translation from dice to real-time simulation needs to be done regardless of what the numbers are and this is something MW games have failed at since MW2 (I don't remember if MW1 did it as well) by allowing massive pinpoint alpha strikes. Of course it can only be considered fail if you don't want the fraction of a second engagement times of AC boats in MW2, but PGI for example have specifically stated that they don't want that.

I don't think this discussion is so much about TT being perfect, the numbers being perfectly suitable for real-time or unwillingness to change anything in the TT game, but more about the preceived idea that PGI have messed with the wrong numbers in the wrong way, producing less than ideal balance and gameplay in the process.

[SixstringSamurai]

I love this game right now. I get an incoming missile warning and I just keep shooting. Seriously I tend to avoid equipping them in the first place but what were they thinking? Was it because it would of been too much work to remove splash damage? Is the game secretly that broken? They took an entire style of play and a section of the player base then flipped you guys the finger with a maybe we will fix this.

[Syllogy]

SixStringSamurai, on 11 April 2013 - 06:12 AM, said:

I love this game right now. I get an incoming missile warning and I just keep shooting. Seriously I tend to avoid equipping them in the first place but what were they thinking? Was it because it would of been too much work to remove splash damage? Is the game secretly that broken? They took an entire style of play and a section of the player base then flipped you guys the finger with a maybe we will fix this.

Missiles will be brought back up around pre March Madness levels in May. Confirmed by Bryan.

[Karl Streiger]

Oh actually the Splash Damage is a perfect example for abstraction. I know that TT purist want me burn for that.
The Devs stated that they have some problems with clustering the missiles.

To much spread and hardly any missile hit, to few spread they are all moving into center torso. During CB with 2 per hit and the introduction of TAG...my Atlas was killing menace with its dual LRM LRM 20 linked to a TAG resulting in 80dmg at a single location. Hardly anything that could coun't as spread.

So the splash "simulates" that spread. Because LRMs was designed as well as Cluster LB 10X to sanding off a Mechs armor...everywhere.
So if you ask me...reduce the to hit damage to 0.3 and improve the splash damage. So when a LRM volley of 20 missiles hit CT of a Atlas ...there should have been 2 to 4 locations that got damage from 2 to 5.

[Pht]

http://mwomercs.com/...ost__p__2208940

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--^^have no experience or knowledge of this rule so i will leave you alone here.

Tactical Operations, pg 80. I believe it was in Maximum Tech too.

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--^^so lasers would be just like ballistics except they would require no lead, BRILLIANT!!

You have a bad habit of assuming conclusions that people's posts don't support.

... No, they wouldn't. The fiction has them, at most, going across maybe two armor panels, and usually just across a single one, and as far as the TT combat system, they have the same overall relative aim-ability as nearly every other direct fire weapon; a zero to-hit weapon modifier.

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--^^so how much of the player is the mech supposed to replace? ...

How much? The 'Mech calculates the place to try and physically align the weapons to in order to hit what the pilot is tracking with the reticule and the mech actually has to physically align those weapons.

So you use every skill you would use in a FPS game except you don't calculate lead, and in the place of that single skill are placed multiple skills, which amount to knowing how your 'Mech can handle whatever conditions and make the shot you're trying to make. It still requires 100% of the skill in manipulating a reticule that an FPS requires.

That's the difference between a MW video game and the average fps.

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--^^except i never mentioned AMS anywhere did i?

... and as I posted, right above your reply, "even WITHOUT ams it happens."

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--^^so it is a worthwhile move for a light mech to continually circle around an assault mech at very close range? both the close range mech and the long range mech get movement penalties to hit for their speed right? the long range mech gets the distance penalties right? during your turn can't you rotate mechs around as much as you want in your movement phase? it is a turn based game so at some point the player has to leave the light mech on the board right? so it seems to me that the close range light mech only gets the penalty for his speed, while the long range light mech gets THE EXACT SAME SPEED PENALTY AND THE RANGE PENALTY.

You're missing the point.

With the penalties being calculated in real-time, the fact that the light mech is zipping across your firing arcs very quickly becomes a factor that doesn't exist in turn-based calculation of the same rules; so the human factor comes into play as a blancing effect.

So while the range penalities would be calculated as short range, and thus not very prohibitive, the player would have a hard time keeping their reticule on their target - if you can't even get your reticule on the target, all the factors in the world that make it easier to hit won't count for anything.

The conversion to real-time calculation of the rules actually accounts for this.

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--^^so when do these advanced rule sets work the dice into the aiming system?

----

--^^except when you don't like it, example: reactor explosions
http://mwomercs.com/...ost__p__2207995
last time i checked books and games added to the lore unless they were considered apocryphal. even the TT has rules for mech explosions.

... the advanced rules work with the non-advanced rules that they don't outright replace. The to-hit modifiers that the weapons themselves incur, that the conditions incur upon the 'mech, and the ultimate ceiling on weapons convergence the mech intrinsically has are all still intact; so the probabilities of hit based upon target range, weapons type fired, and mech capabilites are all present.

----

The "exploding fusion reactors going nuclear" thing is offically an urban legend in the BT lore:

http://mwomercs.com/...y-an-education/

Do a search on the page for "7.4 Fusion engine explosions" minus the quotes. It'll explain it... and the info on that page is from the official source on the topic.

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--^^...and that is the primary point you demanded i defend

I haven't asked you to explain why you think we should "remain true to every TT rule."

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--^^so which rule sets are we using then. let me know when you have made up your mind which hodge podge of rules works and then we will throw out the parts that don't work.

There is no "hodge podge" about it.

The standard is to use the most advanced rules, because they make the game work more intutively and sensibly in real time computer based calculation.

People don't use them in the TT game very often because they take a long time to do manually.

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--^^looky more stuff that doesn't work that has been thrown out. hint: rhymes with "faking urns"

... "More?" ... are you really that blind?

I've been saying from the start that for the MW video game format, you calculate the rules in realtime; in this thread ... pretty much everywhere this topic comes up for discussion.

[Pht]

Syllogy, on 10 April 2013 - 07:04 AM, said:

Sorry, but I don't like Call of Duty. Nice try though.

So it's ok for you to erect a strawman and try to portray it as the position of those who disagree with you ...

But it's not ok for people to do the exact same thing to you?

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I've been playing Mechwarrior as a PC game since 1989. I can say with all honesty that no Mechwarrior Title has ever tried to use the Tabletop dice-rolls as a legitimate game mechanic.

And because they haven't even tried, none of them have lived up to the potential for the series or the genre.

Syllogy, on 10 April 2013 - 07:42 AM, said:

If you want Dice Rolls and Hardcore TT Rules, then you need to be playing Tactics, plain and simple.

Yes, because you say it, and for no other reason.

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It's not a bad thing, I play Tactics, and I also play MWO. They each perform their genre-roles admirably, but trying to make a child out of both would yield a face that only a kool-aid drinker could love.

And how do you know that using the TT rules in realtime, minus the parts that simulate the pilot's human skill, would result in a bad game?

Or are you simply presuming it would, without having a decent knowledge of the topic?

Or will you react to this question in the same way that virtually everyone else has - ignore it, strawman it, flame the person who asks you it, and otherwise do anything but engage the question with some honesty?

[Pht]

Elyam, on 10 April 2013 - 06:14 PM, said:

But this is an example of something that shouldn't have bearing on the thread topic - which should move beyond the title's mention of canon 'stats' and have concern for those parts of canon that outline what Battletech is.

... and this is another big problem.

This false idea that you can ignore or otherwise treat the stats and rules as somehow secondary to making the game play fit the way the lore has it.

With any and every game, it's the game's rules and stats that make said game fun beyond anything more than a very short time playing.

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Not numbers - but descriptions,...

The numbers ARE the descriptions, and in the case of any gaming format, the necessary descriptions.

[Syllogy]

Pht, on 12 April 2013 - 04:12 PM, said:

... and this is another big problem.
This false idea that you can ignore or otherwise treat the stats and rules as somehow secondary to making the game play fit the way the lore has it.
With any and every game, it's the game's rules and stats that make said game fun beyond anything more than a very short time playing.
The numbers ARE the descriptions, and in the case of any gaming format, the necessary descriptions.

NO MECHWARRIOR PC GAME HAS EVER FOLLOWED TABLETOP RULES.

IF HUNDREDS OF VERY SMART GAME DESIGNERS DID NOT FOLLOW THE RULES, THERE WAS PROBABLY A GOOD REASON.

[Pht]

Syllogy, on 12 April 2013 - 04:53 PM, said:

NO MECHWARRIOR PC GAME HAS EVER FOLLOWED TABLETOP RULES.

IF HUNDREDS OF VERY SMART GAME DESIGNERS DID NOT FOLLOW THE RULES, THERE WAS PROBABLY A GOOD REASON.

So truth is now determined by counting how many people agree with a position?

If all of your friends said up was down, and that all of their friends thought so too, would you agree with them?

[Syllogy]

Pht, on 12 April 2013 - 05:41 PM, said:

So truth is now determined by counting how many people agree with a position?

If all of your friends said up was down, and that all of their friends thought so too, would you agree with them?

And we're to the basis of the world's monetary system, and the Court of Justice.

What makes $1 worth $1? The fact that the majority agrees.

What makes a man guilty of a crime? The fact that the majority agrees.

And philosophically, yes. Truth is determined by consensus. Fact is quantified with inarguable data. They are not mutually exclusive.

Neither Fact nor Truth has your back on this one.

Edited by Syllogy, 12 April 2013 - 06:26 PM.

[Elyam]

Pht, on 12 April 2013 - 04:12 PM, said:

... and this is another big problem.

This false idea that you can ignore or otherwise treat the stats and rules as somehow secondary to making the game play fit the way the lore has it.

With any and every game, it's the game's rules and stats that make said game fun beyond anything more than a very short time playing.



The numbers ARE the descriptions, and in the case of any gaming format, the necessary descriptions.

I agree with you. I'm not suggesting the original numbers, methods and procedures be tossed in an effort to tune the game to fit the written lore or to fit some other agenda. I'm a designer with a long background in rules and dice theory for games and have profound respect for the places these hold. I'm suggesting that minor changes to these shouldn't be the main focus of debate. For example, if one of the designers like Weisman tells PGI that FASA should have handled a few things differently with heat post-3050, I'm not against PGI experimenting with DHS tuning similar to the way it's done now (2x in-engine, 1.4x out). I think experiments like that are pretty normal. So many arguments occur over similar minor experimental changes. It all takes the spotlight off the real elephants in the room like the one I keep repeating: simultaneous weapons fire perfect to the aiming reticule is a universe-level change that carries us too far from a core part of Battletech.

So, it isn't that I want any changes from TT - quite the opposite. I just want attention on the most significant of those changes and these heavy battles won up front...then we can go after all of the other stuff. Go back to my 1st post in this thread. If I were producing this title, it would be the most pure port possible. But at the moment we're faced with convincing others. It can be done by holding firm on the entirety of it, or piece by piece. I'm testing the argument somewhere in the middle of that.

Edited by Elyam, 12 April 2013 - 07:40 PM.

[blinkin]

Elyam, on 12 April 2013 - 07:39 PM, said:

So, it isn't that I want any changes from TT - quite the opposite. I just want attention on the most significant of those changes and these heavy battles won up front...then we can go after all of the other stuff. Go back to my 1st post in this thread. If I were producing this title, it would be the most pure port possible. But at the moment we're faced with convincing others. It can be done by holding firm on the entirety of it, or piece by piece. I'm testing the argument somewhere in the middle of that.

i can respect that.

i am not going to believe that a direct TT port will work just because it is the almighty battle tech, but if you can convince me of the validity of each individual peice i will accept those peices, but i will judge each rule or system on it's own merits. none of it gets to slip by just because it works with dice and measuring sticks in a turn based game.

it is a very drastic change when you take the turns and dice out of a tabletop game, so everything must be thoroughly tested and justified. top down turn based squad strategy games are going to be different from a first person realtime combat game, simply trusting outright that everything would be portable is plain ignorance. BUT any game source can be drawn from for ideas, several of my suggestions have been inspired or influenced by world of tanks and many other random sources.

[Randalf Yorgen]

wow long thread, tried to read as much as I could.

(see I used the enter key for those punctuation police out there)

Just a few quick points I want to respond to, there are many but I will just talk about a few of them. 1st. Doubling the armour, the argument was "Can you imagine how fast the game would be over with out it, I was here before they doubled it and let me tell you..." or words to that effect. I too have been here since before they doubled the armour and if they had left it as it was people would have had to learn how to play using cover, sniping, scouting. Scouts would have to find safe spots to target enemy mechs from. Mediums would have to hunt down enemy scouts that got behind their lines. Heavies would have to pair up with assaults for mutual protection both from AMS and added firepower against an enemy target. Assaults would have to wait until the battle lines had closed so that once they stepped out of cover they would be so close to the enemy that neither side could launch missles because they would hit their own team just as much as they would hit the enemy. You know, Roll Warfare. What we have now is a mostly mindless rush to the middle and melt the other team game. There are no tacticts, there is very little skill and ping rate plays a bigger roll than a pilots (players) natural abilities to think on their feet and maintain situational awareness. They tried to correct this by trippling the range of some weapons and making almost every weapon hit just so long at the crosshairs are on the target. That was a step in the wrong direction as it lead to the 140kph Assault Ravens and Spiders with ECM and JJ's. all they had to do was reduce the armour values to something closer to the original values and let the players figure out how to play with those limits.

Long responce so far huh, sorry there's more.

2nd, with the present converge and targeting capabilities in game what will the Clan Advanced targeting computer do? will it actually show the hit boxes on the enemy mech? Will it allow you to select and lock onto the area on your target that you want to focus all your fire on, will it let you see what colour undies the enemy pilot is wearing in his/her cockpit? IS Tech is only now (yes I know I'm going into timeline lore here) just recovering from almost 400 years of continual warfare which saw factories, technical schools and experts, and almost all advanced blueprints vaporised and all that advanced Star League tech was lost to time. Yes it was what 3020 3032 something like that when the Grey Death Memory Core was returned to the IS and yes schools and institutes are accessing and learning everything they can from the modual but the factories aren't yet able to mass produce the tech yet for the entire IS. Also Comstar is still trying to protect their secret (50+ regiments of star league era mechs plus the factories and techs needed to build more and maintain their army) so they will be slowing things down, "losing data packets" and seeing blackouts as unfortunate times.

My point, with the way converge is in game now for the IS mechs the Clan mechs will be able to stand infront of you, fire all their weapons and because of how advanced their computer is supposed to be, Core your CT REAR armour. Think about it...

used the enter again, happy guys?

LAst point I want to mention, look at how baddly light mechs maul assaults and heavies right now, down right shameful that the devs would allow this imbalance in game. What about when the Clan lights arrive? XL engines that only have two crits in the left and right torso so blowing one of those off won't stop it, just make it run hot. With the game in its present format a single Adder of Kit fox would be able to down an entire lance or the complete 8 man team solo because of how advanced it is supposed to be. And without scouts scouting and finding targets, with out units using cover and being smart with the battles, without mediums pack hunting down enemy lights or heavies sticking with assaults to bring down the enemy mechs as fast as possible (because no one had to learn how to play that way because they doubled the armour back in the begining) the Clans will have stealth mechs that fire A/C 60's that have a range of 2000m and will never over heat or miss (yes that's an exageration but it's driving my point home)

With what they have done to the game so far when the clans arrive there will be no reason to play IS anymore because there is such an imbalance that there will be no way for 8 or even 12 IS mechs to stop two Clan lights.

PGI broke it good and have gone so far down the path that there is no coming back. Is it any wonder that they stopped the "Parallel timeline" and made it so that the Clans haven't arrived yet?

[Pinselborste]

PGI should have gone the same way as the MW:LL devs did, they created their own weapon stats in order to make a working real time game where both Clans and IS are balanced and all weapons where usefull.

The TT stats where made to work with the mechanics of a turnbased game where you have random hit locations and people dont move at the same time they shoot, they work well for that but they where never made to work in a realtime game where you aim yourself.

[MustrumRidcully]

Pinselborste, on 13 April 2013 - 06:28 AM, said:

PGI should have gone the same way as the MW:LL devs did, they created their own weapon stats in order to make a working real time game where both Clans and IS are balanced and all weapons where usefull.

The TT stats where made to work with the mechanics of a turnbased game where you have random hit locations and people dont move at the same time they shoot, they work well for that but they where never made to work in a realtime game where you aim yourself.

I think there would have been two ways

1) Make the stats entirely your own, forgetting the canon stats and stock mechs and just try to restore the spirit of all mechs.
2) Take the canon stats as base, including the heat scale, and then adjust where you need to account for non-random hit location (how about adjusting armour values and ratios between hit locations?), mouse aiming (range penalties from TT don't fit to the behaviour of a mouse, aiming a medium laser at 200m is just as easy or hard as aiming a large laser at 200m) and convergence (single shot damage is worth a lot less in a game with convergence), and tweak further. (How much alpha damage do we want to be possible to make a reasonably paced game? How often do weapons need to shoot to feel "fun"?), always with one goal - make stock mechs still work reasonbly (not optimzied, but reasonbly) well.

PGI seemed to go with Option 3):
Let's steal all the stats from the table top, but apply random different fire rates, let's ditch the heat scale and the heat penalty management aspects of TT, oh, convergence, mouse aiming, why not, let's do it, and let's use stock mechs as the intro mechs, but we don't need to worry if they overheat in 6 seconds... Oh, and let's mix Level 1 and Level 2 Tech and remain completely undecided whether we want Level 2 Tech to be an upgrade or not...

[Daneel Hazen]

ECM should be able to engage terminal homers..... so if it isn't 'canon' oh well... there's many types of guidance though.