647 replies to this topic

[Shumabot]

BlueSanta, on 15 March 2013 - 10:18 AM, said:

Than fix it. Reboot BattleTech.

I'd love to, but I'm not the license holder and the die hard fans don't want their game brought into the 21st century.

[Star Colonel Mustard Kerensky]

Shumabot, on 15 March 2013 - 10:21 AM, said:

I'd love to, but I'm not the license holder and the die hard fans don't want their game brought into the 21st century.

Quite a serious case of bittervet syndrome you've got there.

[stjobe]

PapajIGC, on 15 March 2013 - 10:04 AM, said:

Really? You're going to wait 2.5 gorram weeks to remove something as gamebreaking as this? Apparently nobody has the cajones to step up and say "Sorry, we done goofed big time, we're getting on this ASAP" and would much rather play the " But it's still Beta" scapegoat card and stick another nail in their own game's coffin and further isolate/anger their already small playerbase.

Why should I even log in and play the Jagers if all that will happen are I drop into games with literal flocks of Raven 3Ls and be decimated by streaks while I remain unable to hit them thanks to a terrible engine and still bugged hitboxes/UI notifications. Oh wait, it's because I wasted money on premium time and I hate wasting money. You dirty, dirty people.

Pro tip of the day: Keep your playerbase happy and you keep your game alive. Treat your playerbase like trash and watch your game get thrown in the trash.

Pro tip (and by "pro" I mean professional software developer) of the day: Removing features from a production environment can be just as hard or even harder than implementing them in the first place.

[Shumabot]

Astroniomix, on 15 March 2013 - 10:23 AM, said:

Quite a serious case of bittervet syndrome you've got there.

I grew up and something I loved as a kid didn't.

[PapajIGC]

In regards to the video of the Hellfire missile, regardless of whether or not BT technology is behind the times, explosions don't kill people and deal the devastation. What kills people and deals devastation is the shrapnel inside the warhead, or the pressure differential created by the rapid expanding and contracting of the air surrounding the explosion. So I ask, what the %#$! is a blast of rapidly compressed and uncompressed air going to do to a gigantic hulk of metal. Unless that hulk of metal has exposed holes to the outside environment and has living tissue that can rupture from such newtonian forces, the answer is nothing. Even if the warhead were a fragmentation warhead, you're looking at minimal structural damage...not amplified damage because there was a big boom and a lot of fire.

[FactorlanP]

Really the lesson here should be that the Devs should make as many testing tools available to the community as possible.

I would wager that if the Testing Grounds feature had been available sooner, or if we had a way to put together matches against friends easily, this glaring fault would have been pinned much much sooner.

This is a Beta still, they say. If the community had testing tools, we could actually test stuff and spot stuff like this much sooner.

[p4r4g0n]

Shumabot, on 15 March 2013 - 10:16 AM, said:

It scales up to fifteen times listed damage values. It actually is pretty game breaking, but this is a broken game in so many other ways, so this hardly is the leak thats sinking the ship.
-snip-

Did you actually look at your stats for missiles? From my own stats and what I've read posted by others, effective dmg / hit (Total Damage / Total Hits) for missiles is actually quite close to the listed dmg / missile or at least not a multiple of 1.8 / 2.5 per missile.

Which probably explains why it hasn't really been something people could pin point till the Testing Grounds came along.

[Star Colonel Mustard Kerensky]

Shumabot, on 15 March 2013 - 10:27 AM, said:

I grew up and something I loved as a kid didn't.

Growing up is overrated. I've been 10 years old for...... a few decades.

[PapajIGC]

stjobe, on 15 March 2013 - 10:25 AM, said:

Pro tip (and by "pro" I mean professional software developer) of the day: Removing features from a production environment can be just as hard or even harder than implementing them in the first place.

Sounds like PGI needs people who are better at their job. I'll admit I would not be one of them, but if I get paid to flip burgers and deep fry potatoes, and then all of a sudden I found my burgers and fries to be not coming out as specified and I couldn't figure out a way to make them in-spec, I'd be fired rather quickly.

Ransack, on 15 March 2013 - 10:20 AM, said:

what's the big deal about a two week wait? Apparently it went undetected for months

The big deal is that it ruins enjoyment of a game that doesn't even have a solidified playerbase yet and will only hurt the game down the road when it does launch (if ever, lol@ForeverBeta). Why when asked "Hey man, should I play MWO?" would I lie to people and tell them anything but "Nah man, those devs have no competency when it comes to game balance, programming, hotfixing clearly gamebreaking issues like weapons doing 5x their normal damage, or being unable to optimize their engine for accurate hit detection/tracking."

Also, it went undetected for months because you could never hit light mechs to begin with thanks to the god awful netcode. Now that the netcode is somewhat fixed, all these unknown issues suddenly enter the spotlight and we realize just how bad of a state this game is in.

Edited by PapajIGC, 15 March 2013 - 09:57 PM.

[stjobe]

p4r4g0n, on 15 March 2013 - 10:29 AM, said:

Did you actually look at your stats for missiles? From my own stats and what I've read posted by others, effective dmg / hit (Total Damage / Total Hits) for missiles is actually quite close to the listed dmg / missile or at least not a multiple of 1.8 / 2.5 per missile.

Which probably explains why it hasn't really been something people could pin point till the Testing Grounds came along.

Are you 100% sure the stats even count splash damage? Or that there's no other bug with it?

People have been complaining about overpowered LRMs, SRMs, SSRMs, StreakCats, 3Ls, and the uselessness of the Commando since forever. There's just been so many changing variables it was unpossible (sic) to nail it down until we could do controlled experiments.

[LT Kinslayer]

So this means my gauss rifle has splash, that would explain my damage per hit.
495 hits for 7602 damage --> 7602/495 = 15.36 and a lot of those hits are beyond max damage range.

If gauss really has no splash, then the slug must sometimes hit two sections at the same time and deal full damage to both (or at least more than 7.5 dmg each, but enough to cover for all those 900-1100m shots)

edit:
I always thought the high value was due to ammo/component explosions somehow being added to the damage count and even though that would be slightly odd, it would not be a must fix bug..

Edited by LT Kinslayer, 15 March 2013 - 10:45 AM.

[Shumabot]

p4r4g0n, on 15 March 2013 - 10:29 AM, said:

Did you actually look at your stats for missiles? From my own stats and what I've read posted by others, effective dmg / hit (Total Damage / Total Hits) for missiles is actually quite close to the listed dmg / missile or at least not a multiple of 1.8 / 2.5 per missile.

Which probably explains why it hasn't really been something people could pin point till the Testing Grounds came along.

Go back two pages to where paul says that the missiles are doing 12.5 damage per missile to a commando.

[Teralitha]

stjobe, on 15 March 2013 - 10:25 AM, said:

Pro tip (and by "pro" I mean professional software developer) of the day: Removing features from a production environment can be just as hard or even harder than implementing them in the first place.

Hard as it may be, it must be done to save the game from losing even more players. Like a bandaid... just rip it off. Itll feel better after its over...

[stjobe]

PapajIGC, on 15 March 2013 - 10:40 AM, said:

Sounds like PGI needs people who are better at their job. I'll admit I would not be one of them, but if I get paid to flip burgers and deep fry potatoes, and then all of a sudden I found my burgers and fries to be not coming out as specified and I couldn't figure out a way to make them in-spec, I'd be fired rather quickly.

And rightly so, making burgers isn't rocket surgery - programming on the other hand, isn't either, but it's a damn sight more complicated than flipping a patty.

Any programmer will tell you that code behaves in unexpected ways, especially in large projects like an online game. It's not really something you can avoid, you can just try to minimize it, and be quick on your toes when you find something that goes awry.

But back to splash damage: If it was as easy as setting a flag somewhere in the code and then splash damage was off, they'd do it. My suspicion (completely unfounded, except for 30+ years of programming experience) is that it's a bit more complicated than that. They'll have to go through all the code that's got anything to do with splash damage - hit detection, damage calculations, etc - and adjust it. Then they have to build that code and push it onto their test server and test that the game still runs and nothing else has broken. Since something likely has broken, they'll have to go back to the dev environment and fix that part of the code and then build again, test again. This can go on for some time before the build passes all tests.

Only then is it ready to patch to the live server.

I can easily see this process taking a week or more - and you probably don't want to stop all your other projects dead while this is implemented, so it'll take that bit longer just because of that.

April 3rd gives them one week to back splash damage out, and one week to test it (along with testing everything *else* that'll go into the April 3rd patch).

[Shumabot]

stjobe, on 15 March 2013 - 10:50 AM, said:

And rightly so, making burgers isn't rocket surgery - programming on the other hand, isn't either, but it's a damn sight more complicated than flipping a patty.

Any programmer will tell you that code behaves in unexpected ways, especially in large projects like an online game. It's not really something you can avoid, you can just try to minimize it, and be quick on your toes when you find something that goes awry.

But back to splash damage: If it was as easy as setting a flag somewhere in the code and then splash damage was off, they'd do it. My suspicion (completely unfounded, except for 30+ years of programming experience) is that it's a bit more complicated than that. They'll have to go through all the code that's got anything to do with splash damage - hit detection, damage calculations, etc - and adjust it. Then they have to build that code and push it onto their test server and test that the game still runs and nothing else has broken. Since something likely has broken, they'll have to go back to the dev environment and fix that part of the code and then build again, test again. This can go on for some time before the build passes all tests.

Only then is it ready to patch to the live server.

I can easily see this process taking a week or more - and you probably don't want to stop all your other projects dead while this is implemented, so it'll take that bit longer just because of that.

April 3rd gives them one week to back splash damage out, and one week to test it (along with testing everything *else* that'll go into the April 3rd patch).

Given the obvious lack of forsight and the sheer fact that this has been occuring for many months and no one at PGI noticed until the userbase told them it was happening (despite anecdotal evidence that SRMs were wildly overpowered) I think that burger flipping analogy might still stand.

This plainly shows that they do no metric tracking what so ever for balance. That fact is horrifying. It means that they fundamentally don't care about this games balance enough even track if their own mechanics are functioning.

[Vapor Trail]

p4r4g0n, on 15 March 2013 - 10:08 AM, said:

If you use missiles, look at your weapon stats and calculate your dmg / hit. Unless you're getting a number wayyyy above 2.5 / 1.8 I hardly think the term "game breaking" is warranted.

What people should be thinking about is what will be the dmg / hit when splash is removed

This assumes that the stat's not bugged somehow. Which, given the fact that splash is being pulled, meaning there's more damage than intended being done, meaning that the damage stat IS bugged somehow, otherwise it would be showing that extra damage.

[Khobai]

Splash damage makes perfect sense to me. Its just the way it works now is unbalanced towards smaller mechs. I would like to see splash damage added back into the game in the future, but maybe give the commando some kind of splash damage protection to balance it.

Edited by Khobai, 15 March 2013 - 10:59 AM.

[ViKingOmega]

im glad they are doing something about this but April 2nd?!! really? why so long, i mean this bug makes playing a light horrible! why the heck is it gonna take 15 plus days just to remove a feature? WTF seem like it should be something that could be done in a few days at most. Lame lame lame... now im not gonna be able to play until April and that sucks cause i was just getting back into this game. Sink full of poop! i mean this is the kind of game ruining bug that should make them stop work on other less important things to fix. Like push some content planned for next week's patch back until april 2nd and fix this damn problem. Jesus!

[Bubba Wilkins]

Thontor, on 15 March 2013 - 10:45 AM, said:

Damage stats are likely only counting the initial hit of the missile, but not including the additional splash damage

There's also the fact that some parts of some mechs take LESS damage from missiles than the listed 2.5 or 1.8



Only missiles have splash

It is possible you hit the seam between two hitboxes

But I think its more likely the damage stats are including stuff like crit hit damage, or possibly including ammo explosions they cause.

Bottom line, I think the damage star tracker is bugged.

Splash damage is not recorded in your score or stats, only direct damage.

[Scop]

arghmace, on 15 March 2013 - 09:19 AM, said:

Do we have info on the splash radius of different weapons? As far as I know, missiles aren't the only splashers. When I put an AC-20 round into enemy chest, I'm pretty sure he flashes in many locations. So maybe AC-20 does like 100 damage to Commando

You may be seeing flash due to damage transfer from destroyed sections or internal ammo explosions. I've tested ER PPCs for splash in Training Grounds by firing near the subject's feet and observed no change to the paperdoll. I tried an AC/20 test on our favorite test dummy the COM-1B today.

Spoiler

A dead-center shot takes off 9% of the subject's overall health. The paperdoll shows that damage was limited to removing the CT's 16 points of armor and reducing internals to what looks like about 70% to me (and 4 points remaining from the shell would reduce internal's health to 12/16, or .75).

[On a related note, I'm having trouble calculating internal health for torso sections. Limbs have half their maximum armor, well and good, and it's known that heads have 15 internal health. But averaging maximum armor values for front and back isn't resulting in the values seen in Paul's screenshot, but those values do happen to equal maximum armor for rear torso. Any insight? Anyone? Bueller?]



For this shell I aimed carefully for the dummy's shoulder joint, my reticule is unmoved from triggering the shot. The hit registers on the paperdoll as right torso. Another 9% overall is gone, 0% of the 12 points RT armor, and 30-20% RT internals (4/12 happens to equal .3333). The arm is untouched.

Now I shoot near the subject's left foot...




... and the subject is unchanged. Had those been SRMs or LRMs dumb-fired at a point outside their minimum range, the COM would've caught some splash. So my conclusion is that the AC/20 does not have a splash damage property.