74 replies to this topic

[Cyke]

Royalewithcheese, on 12 March 2013 - 10:55 AM, said:

Eliminating convergence would mostly just accomplish a slight change in the meta.

Meh, Royalewithcheese just condensed my last two paragraphs into a single line.

[Zyllos]

Would it though?

I personally would think every Atlas and Cataphract would play different. Especially the Cataphract. Every single weapon is in a different location, thus would be extremely hard to converge weapon fire.

I also think you would see Medium mechs lasting much longer than usual, especially the Hunchback. While you would still continue to aim for the hunch, some of those shots would be hitting the CT or RA, thus lasting longer.

Once the above starts happening, then Lights would not feel so mighty in their defenses due to spreading so much damage on them.

[Stormeris]

Removing convergence would be the most logical choice, because at the moment, the biggest gripe with the game i have that all weapons go in the same spot, allowing for insane damage to a single component. Doubling armor doesn't do anything, mechs are even more fragile than in TT due to convergence.

[Prezimonto]

Remember that arm hardpoints would still converge on the circle, so they're not an issue... if you line up the circle on the cross hair at your set convergence range you get a good alpha... it wouldn't be that hard for a 'phract to line up as a good number of their hardpoints are on their arms.

[Royalewithcheese]

Zyllos, on 12 March 2013 - 12:30 PM, said:

Would it though?

I personally would think every Atlas and Cataphract would play different. Especially the Cataphract. Every single weapon is in a different location, thus would be extremely hard to converge weapon fire.

By "slight change in the meta" I don't mean "every robot will play exactly the same," I mean "you will be able to do basically the same things, just sometimes with different robots."

Pinpoint damage will still be there - the PPC boat might be the RS instead of the Stalker, but it would be the same basic principle. The 3-L would basically be unchanged. Splatcats and DDCs would still be amazing, and would just have to alternate shots between ears/torsos. The gauss carrier position might go back to the K2 or be folded into the poptart, but there would still be a gauss carrier build. Centurions might stop running Artemis, maybe. Poptarts would be able to correct by switching to slightly different weapon configs. And so on.

Zyllos, on 12 March 2013 - 12:30 PM, said:

Once the above starts happening, then Lights would not feel so mighty in their defenses due to spreading so much damage on them.

If there wasn't any convergence, the 3-L would be even better. With 2xMLas in one arm and streaks, that was never really a problem in the first place for it. And now it's harder to hit.

Edited by Royalewithcheese, 12 March 2013 - 01:11 PM.

[Zyllos]

Prezimonto, on 12 March 2013 - 12:46 PM, said:

Remember that arm hardpoints would still converge on the circle, so they're not an issue... if you line up the circle on the cross hair at your set convergence range you get a good alpha... it wouldn't be that hard for a 'phract to line up as a good number of their hardpoints are on their arms.

Well, that depends.

Look at my suggestion on how to remove weapon convergence: #24

I can show another picture, once I get home, on how to keep individual weapons from converging while allowing arms to converge their direction, along with removing torso convergence.

[Kohr Ah Initializer]

Schrottfrosch, on 12 March 2013 - 03:13 AM, said:

If you want to play pure luck games, why dont you go play poker online or something - or maybe go play your WoT or battlefield or whatever, but DO NOT try to dumb down MWO!

Have you ever played poker?

[Zyllos]

Royalewithcheese, on 12 March 2013 - 01:11 PM, said:

By "slight change in the meta" I don't mean "every robot will play exactly the same," I mean "you will be able to do basically the same things, just sometimes with different robots."

Pinpoint damage will still be there - the PPC boat might be the RS instead of the Stalker, but it would be the same basic principle. The 3-L would basically be unchanged. Splatcats and DDCs would still be amazing, and would just have to alternate shots between ears/torsos. The gauss carrier position might go back to the K2 or be folded into the poptart, but there would still be a gauss carrier build. Centurions might stop running Artemis, maybe. Poptarts would be able to correct by switching to slightly different weapon configs. And so on.



If there wasn't any convergence, the 3-L would be even better. With 2xMLas in one arm and streaks, that was never really a problem in the first place for it. And now it's harder to hit.

See, thats the thing, its not harder to hit. It's just harder to get all your weapons to hit the same location.

Weapon convergence now to the suggested change would not effect the difficulty to hit Ravens. This is because you know exactly where the weapon fire is going to land in relation to the crosshair. The only thing that changes is that if you want them to hit the same location, then you have adjust your aim. But if you just want to hit the mech, do not care about the location, just center the crosshair on the middle of the target and it will hit.

This changes nothing in terms of the Ravens survivability but does for the Centurion or Atlas because more time is taken to modify your aim to hit the same location.

As posted above, I can post a picture of this visually explaining what I am doing.

[Royalewithcheese]

Zyllos, on 12 March 2013 - 01:27 PM, said:

The only thing that changes is that if you want them to hit the same location, then you have adjust your aim. But if you just want to hit the mech, do not care about the location, just center the crosshair on the middle of the target and it will hit.

You realize how small a light mech's profile is, right? Something that will be less likely to hit an Atlas or a Catapult in the CT will also be less likely to hit a Raven, like, at all. If people can adjust to hit the raven, just with more of an annoyance factor, they can also adjust their aim to hit the component they want to hit, just with more of an annoyance factor. Meanwhile the 3-L is completely unaffected by the removal of weapon convergence.

[Cyke]

The PPC boat changing to the AS7-RS instead of the Stalker would be an improvement, if massed PPC boating is what we want to decrease. That means only four PPCs (two on each arm) with converging aim, which is significantly less than 6.
Meanwhile, a six-PPC Stalker would by no means stop being a threat. Hitting someone with that many PPC shots is still going to blast the living daylights out of any 'Mech, just that the torso-mounted ones won't both hit the same place. That certainly doesn't mean an Alpha like that isn't going to hurt. Who knows, you might even have players who will fire all the arm PPCs at once, then fire the the torso PPCs one after another while slightly adjusting aim.
The same pretty much goes for dual Gauss Rifle builds.

As for the 3L (or Lights in general), Zyllos hit the nail on the head. It won't be harder to hit fast Light 'Mechs due to a lack of torso-weapon convergence. Light 'Mechs never had the problem of people focusing fire on their individual body parts, they're just generally hard to hit.
If anything, it's possible that a lack of convergence might actually cause the bracketing barrage of parallel shots to have a greater chance to catch them with some of the firepower.


Without going into too many individual examples, it's good to underline the fact that there aren't many (if any) negative ramifications from implementation of such an idea, which complements the positives we've discussed.

Edited by Cyke, 12 March 2013 - 02:08 PM.

[Targetloc]

Noth, on 12 March 2013 - 01:46 AM, said:

BF and CoD only really have the shots fly not where you want them when firing full auto (hence why they fire in bursts) and you can pretty much place your shots wherever you want. Cone of fire doesn't come into play much at all for a good player. The only weapon that even remotely comes close to this in this game is machine guns and they spray damage everywhere. WoT is a horrid example of cone of fire as it relies almost purely on luck. You can be the best player have the best aim, line up the perfect shot and repeatedly miss or bounce just because of the rng. It actually removes player skill from the game.

Mostly. As long as your target is inside a certain distance. If you're mostly sticking to RDS then pretty much anything you can reliably get that dot inside of your shots will hit on single fire. If you start putting scopes on a battle rifle, even low power ones like 3.4x you will start to notice perfectly aimed shots will occasionally miss at longer distances (even accounting for bullet drop).

That makes it a tactical consideration.
1) Switch to a different weapon more suited to that job. A sniper rifle. (Or an ER Large Laser in our case)
2) Take the shot and risk alerting the enemy if it misses.
3) Try getting closer without being spotted to make the shot a sure thing.

It may induce a small bit of uncertainty, but the more skilled player still wins 99% of the time because he is consistent and uses tactics that don't leave things up to chance.

Not all weapons in BF3 are equally accurate:
http://forum.symthic...-etc/#post22815

Ignoring the yellow and red dots, since MWO is concerned with single shot accuracy, even with a bit of spread in the green hit pattern, if you aim for the center of a body part at the appropriate range for the weapon, you will hit it. If you are dead center accurate every time, you'll still hit that head. If you would have just nicked an ear with pin-point accuracy, now there's a chance you might miss.

Adding some degree of spread to weapons doesn't mean the game rolls dice and on a 2 your PPC randomly flies off at 45 degree angle. To a degree it raises the bar on how accurate you need to be. Now instead of hitting a target the size of a barn door to take the side torso off a Cataphract, you need to aim precisely at the center of the component to make sure all your shots fall within it. For most players this would make it considerably harder to put consecutive shots into the same component because now they need to be much more precise. Shooting a dime instead of a Cadillac.


ER weapons suddenly make sense again because in the board game you were paying 50% more heat for what usually worked out to 50% more accuracy. AC2's wouldn't need massive RoF buffs because they are low damage, but high precision.

Targeting Computer and C3 would actually have a noticeable in-game function (increasing weapon accuracy by a few degrees, with C3 being based on how close the nearest ally is to the target, just like the canon rules).

Also, canon heat penalties could be implemented. Running hot constantly would increase weapon spread. Movement could be taken into account so acceleration and deceleration rates would be larger tactical consideration.


It's question of degrees. I think a lot of people freak out because they imagine a cone the size of a whole Atlas with AC20 shells winging off into the top corner of your screen... I'm thinking at the listed 'long' range for a given weapon the spread would be more the size of a Centurion's head, so if you are actually as amazingly accurate as you think you are, you're still golden... but for 99.9% of the playerbase damage is suddenly getting spread around a lot more.

[Cyke]

Royalewithcheese, on 12 March 2013 - 01:37 PM, said:

You realize how small a light mech's profile is, right? Something that will be less likely to hit an Atlas or a Catapult in the CT will also be less likely to hit a Raven, like, at all. If people can adjust to hit the raven, just with more of an annoyance factor, they can also adjust their aim to hit the component they want to hit, just with more of an annoyance factor. Meanwhile the 3-L is completely unaffected by the removal of weapon convergence.

Hmm.. the difficulty in hitting a target because of its size, and because of its speed, are two separate issues.
A Raven in its entirety is bigger than an Atlas' center torso.

I'm not certain that the difficulty (or ease) of hitting a slow Assault 'Mech's specific parts directly correlates with the difficulty of hitting a fast moving Light 'Mech in general. The first is an issue of accuracy and precision, while the second is more an issue of tracking speed and reaction time.
The parallel offset of the shots won't affect the ability to hit a Light 'Mech, unless they were offset by more than the Light 'Mech's size. I'm fairly certain there aren't any 'Mechs with torso hardpoints so far apart that they'd bracket a Light 'Mech without hitting, assuming the crosshair was aimed on target (and if it wasn't on target, the shots are not likely to hit, with or without convergence).

I'm not sure, you may have a point, though. It bears further discussion certainly, but it's possibly something that would need to actually be tested.

Edited by Cyke, 12 March 2013 - 02:24 PM.

[Zerstorer Stallin]

AndyHill, on 12 March 2013 - 04:27 AM, said:

Pinpoint alphas are the biggest balancing problem when translating a tabletop dice throwing game to real-time, but I think the OP's solution is not the correct one. Pinpoint might be ok if something is done about alphas and that's what I'd rather see. Instead of stuff like coolant flush that makes the problem worse.

Free tip to anyone concerned about game balancing: the clans are coming and with them they bring immense firepower and boating on a magnitude only dreamed of by A1 pilots so far.

yeap I see a sad bleak future where only Boats roam pugs because no one is around to 8 man, and then a short wink in the history of contiuned failing games of Battletech.

[Royalewithcheese]

Cyke, on 12 March 2013 - 02:21 PM, said:

Hmm.. the difficulty in hitting a target because of its size, and because of its speed, are two separate issues.
A Raven in its entirety is bigger than an Atlas' center torso.

The point is not that a Raven is smaller that an Atlas's CT, it's that anything that makes it harder to hit a mech with a large profile in an individual component also makes it harder to hit a mech with a small profile at all. However, I don't seriously expect removing convergence will make it harder to hit things, it will just add a layer of annoyance. Which is AFAIK why they made torso weapons converge in the first place.

[Ralgas]

Royalewithcheese, on 12 March 2013 - 02:27 PM, said:

The point is not that a Raven is smaller that an Atlas's CT, it's that anything that makes it harder to hit a mech with a large profile in an individual component also makes it harder to hit a mech with a small profile at all. However, I don't seriously expect removing convergence will make it harder to hit things, it will just add a layer of annoyance. Which is AFAIK why they made torso weapons converge in the first place.

Small mechs mounting std engines would become the new troll builds.

Having slept on it, i wonder if pgi didn't attempt this via convergence delay but scrap it due to the results( pinpoint mech skill is support). Does anyone from cb remember this, or failing that what pinpoint does? Having weps scale in from max range to the targetpoint over 1-1.5 secs might do it,

[Cyke]

Royalewithcheese, on 12 March 2013 - 02:27 PM, said:

The point is not that a Raven is smaller that an Atlas's CT, it's that anything that makes it harder to hit a mech with a large profile in an individual component also makes it harder to hit a mech with a small profile at all. However, I don't seriously expect removing convergence will make it harder to hit things, it will just add a layer of annoyance. Which is AFAIK why they made torso weapons converge in the first place.

Not necessarily.

Consider this: a Light 'Mech is difficult to hit because of its greater speed and smaller size. Basically, it's hard to hit them because it's hard to get the crosshair on them and fire.

But are they difficult to aim at primarily because of their speed, or because of their size?
This is normally an unimportant consideration (it is the combination of both speed and size), but in this case, if we agree that the difficulty of tracking a Light 'Mech with the crosshair is due to its speed, a lack of convergence makes little difference.
Would I be correct in saying that a Light 'Mech that stands still (or moves slowly) is not a difficult target anymore? Does it not follow, then, that the primary factor is speed, rather than size?

At present, if the crosshair is off target, all the weapons will miss, because they will converge on the off-target crosshair's location at time of firing (and obviously, for many players, the crosshair is frequently off-target when firing at Light 'Mechs; if it was not, then Lights wouldn't be considered hard to hit at all).

Finally, consider this: group-firing multiple torso-mounted weapons that travel in parallel trajectories actually increases the chances of hitting with at least some of the weapons, while unfortunately reducing the chances of hitting with all of the weapons.
However, as Light 'Mechs mount less armor, having some weapons hit most of the time will still hurt them more than having all of the weapons miss most of the time.

But again, as you've mentioned, with only a degree of annoynace, the really good players would probably still hit with most of the weapons, most of the time.

Anyway, this is purely theory. Only testing would reveal the actual effects of non-converging torso guns on fast Light 'Mechs, and anyway, the arm weapons would still converge.

Ralgas, on 12 March 2013 - 10:14 PM, said:

Small mechs mounting std engines would become the new troll builds.

If we agree that Light 'Mechs are now too effective and need to have their effectiveness reduced, then this is a good thing. Reduced C-Bill cost aside, Light 'Mechs with standard engines will mount less firepower and armour for the same engine size.
Alternatively, we can still choose to mount XL engines on our Light 'Mechs to free up tonnage, at the risk of death due to loss of a side torso. This is precisely the sort of meaningful decision making in the MechLab that we want!


I am completely of the belief that MWO's game design should prioritize maximum benefit to MWO's gameplay, and only as a lower priority, remain true to the TT. However, strangely enough, it's worth mentioning that this actually perfectly fits the metagame of the TT.

Here is a page that lists some conventional wisdom behind small 'Mechs built for the recon role:
http://www.users.qwe...hlab/recon.html
Refer to the "Notes" paragraph at the bottom of the page..

Edited by Cyke, 13 March 2013 - 08:10 AM.

[Zyllos]

Cyke, on 13 March 2013 - 08:10 AM, said:

Not necessarily.

Consider this: a Light 'Mech is difficult to hit because of its greater speed and smaller size. Basically, it's hard to hit them because it's hard to get the crosshair on them and fire.

But are they difficult to aim at primarily because of their speed, or because of their size?
This is normally an unimportant consideration (it is the combination of both speed and size), but in this case, if we agree that the difficulty of tracking a Light 'Mech with the crosshair is due to its speed, a lack of convergence makes little difference.
Would I be correct in saying that a Light 'Mech that stands still (or moves slowly) is not a difficult target anymore? Does it not follow, then, that the primary factor is speed, rather than size?

At present, if the crosshair is off target, all the weapons will miss, because they will converge on the off-target crosshair's location at time of firing (and obviously, for many players, the crosshair is frequently off-target when firing at Light 'Mechs; if it was not, then Lights wouldn't be considered hard to hit at all).

Finally, consider this: group-firing multiple torso-mounted weapons that travel in parallel trajectories actually increases the chances of hitting with at least some of the weapons, while unfortunately reducing the chances of hitting with all of the weapons.
However, as Light 'Mechs mount less armor, having some weapons hit most of the time will still hurt them more than having all of the weapons miss most of the time.

But again, as you've mentioned, with only a degree of annoynace, the really good players would probably still hit with most of the weapons, most of the time.

Anyway, this is purely theory. Only testing would reveal the actual effects of non-converging torso guns on fast Light 'Mechs, and anyway, the arm weapons would still converge.

If we agree that Light 'Mechs are now too effective and need to have their effectiveness reduced, then this is a good thing. Reduced C-Bill cost aside, Light 'Mechs with standard engines will mount less firepower and armour for the same engine size.
Alternatively, we can still choose to mount XL engines on our Light 'Mechs to free up tonnage, at the risk of death due to loss of a side torso. This is precisely the sort of meaningful decision making in the MechLab that we want!


I am completely of the belief that MWO's game design should prioritize maximum benefit to MWO's gameplay, and only as a lower priority, remain true to the TT. However, strangely enough, it's worth mentioning that this actually perfectly fits the metagame of the TT.

Here is a page that lists some conventional wisdom behind small 'Mechs built for the recon role:
http://www.users.qwe...hlab/recon.html
Refer to the "Notes" paragraph at the bottom of the page..

An extremely well created argument.

Yes, testing will be needed. But, as Cyke has said, just because it is harder to place all of your weaponry onto a single point does not mean it will be just plainly harder to even hit.

Speed when combined with size is what makes mechs hard to hit. So, having no torso weapon convergence would not make the target easier or harder to hit, but it would make multiple weapons harder to land on a mech when firing at the same time. And more so, having all those weapons hitting the same armor location.

[TheRulesLawyer]

FromHell2k, on 12 March 2013 - 04:37 AM, said:

There's still no real reason why weapons should get a random modifier that affects your aiming.

Actually that is how real weapons work. Firearm accuracy is described in MOA- minutes of angle. That is the cone that you can expect a fixed mounted weapon to hit when fired. That for stable fixed platforms. When you have a moving platform you have to compensate for a whole lot of factors and you targeting computer may not come up with the right solution, of the motors on the weapon gimbal may not be able to keep up. This translates into more error from intended impact point. Some sort of cone of fire would be a more realistic approximate of how a fire platform like a mech would realistically work. Given the real cone of fire would be considerably smaller than you'd have it in game just for balance reason. (Combat also takes place far closer than realistic)

The best thing about a CoF is that it gives them at least 3 additional factors to balance a weapon with. 1) Resting accuracy. 2) Expansion rate (through move, fire, etc) 3) contraction rate (I expect this would be mostly fixed by chassis and weapon type)

So yah in short, even if you're looking down the barrel, that's no guarantee you'll hit where you are pointing. I've given up on it ever being implemented though, just claiming that there is no basis for a cone of fire show ignorance on how real weapons work.

[Zyllos]

TheRulesLawyer, on 13 March 2013 - 01:07 PM, said:

Actually that is how real weapons work. Firearm accuracy is described in MOA- minutes of angle. That is the cone that you can expect a fixed mounted weapon to hit when fired. That for stable fixed platforms. When you have a moving platform you have to compensate for a whole lot of factors and you targeting computer may not come up with the right solution, of the motors on the weapon gimbal may not be able to keep up. This translates into more error from intended impact point. Some sort of cone of fire would be a more realistic approximate of how a fire platform like a mech would realistically work. Given the real cone of fire would be considerably smaller than you'd have it in game just for balance reason. (Combat also takes place far closer than realistic)

The best thing about a CoF is that it gives them at least 3 additional factors to balance a weapon with. 1) Resting accuracy. 2) Expansion rate (through move, fire, etc) 3) contraction rate (I expect this would be mostly fixed by chassis and weapon type)

So yah in short, even if you're looking down the barrel, that's no guarantee you'll hit where you are pointing. I've given up on it ever being implemented though, just claiming that there is no basis for a cone of fire show ignorance on how real weapons work.

I agree with this. But this would only be true with Ballistic weaponry.

It is extremely hard to determine a laser "cone-of-fire" without speculation.

Missiles are fine with thier trajectory, just the issues with being point blank with SRMs, LRMs being too tight, and SSRMs possibly dealing too much damage and being to easy to use.

Ballistic weaponry is 100% fine with a cone-of-fire. This is especially true with UACs and AC/2s since their RoF is quite high. But what about energy weapons?

That is partially why I am against a cone-of-fire due to lasers being quite awkward (would look like a laser shotgun if many of them where fired together). That is why I think having all weapons being fired on a fixed axis, directly straight out of the port fired. Then allow the arms to converge the arm axis onto your Arm crosshair and let those weapons fire straight out.

Laser fire should be extremely accurate, as it is now, but not in a way that makes every single weapon hit a single location that is aimed at. The same goes for Ballistic weaponry, while you have to adjust your aiming for bullet velocity, they should not all hit the same location.

Edited by Zyllos, 13 March 2013 - 02:23 PM.

[Genewen]

I reject the notion. If tank models from more than a decade ago can have fully stabilized cannons then I doubt that 31st century battlemechs that are intended to be the apex of military warfare (which is utterly stupid, but whatever, the game is still fun) have nothing of the sorts.