85 replies to this topic

[Zyllos]

Seox, on 24 March 2013 - 11:03 AM, said:

You still haven't even addressed how something like this is not going to be morbidly unfair to equally viable direct ranged builds. Good balance does not take out entire columns of existing balance with it when it is implemented; this does not make such considerations. The game will become even more brawling oriented, which will further hurt build diversity and etc. Furthermore, there will be disproportionate viability in weapons like SRMs which do not rely on convergence.

That you have yet to even address potential concerns like this heavily underline the lack of forethought that you're putting into this; Furthermore, that you don't seem to be able to adapt to torso twisting and juking fire really leave me feeling that the game is fine as is and that those in favor can't seem to learn how best to apply the mechanics. What the game needs is a tutorial, not breaking aim, torching PPCs and Gauss, buffing the hell out of SRMs and capping skill artificially while raising the skill floor at the same time, all with one extremely poorly thought out idea that was thrown around the forums 5+ times. That literally makes the game less friendly to every single group of players out there; beginners, poor players, skilled players...you name it, all because five or six people haven't yet found their niche in game.

People who are not skilled at the game will have more trouble by default, as their attempts to hit will be spread around further. Ever spectated players after you die? Noticed how badly they spread their fire? At least it's all focused on one point; this suggestion would remove even that.

You assert multiple times that it's a skill that people could pick up, thus it "introduces more skill." People have enough problems with parallax aiming in third person shooters using a single weapons along a single axis where hits to any part of an enemy are rewarded; no human being has the level of spatial intelligence necessary to calculate parallax on two or three sets of weapons, especially when this game requires FOCUSED fire and not just hits to any part of the enemy.

I get that you think convergence leads to low TTK, I really do. I'm just not convinced that breaking all these other things is worth "fixing" something that only a handful of people have a problem with. If you'd demonstrated some consideration of the implications of implementing a system like this, sure, but to me it just looks like you're upset that 6 PPC stalkers killed you.

Good constructive post!

Regarding SRMs, you still have to aim them to have them land on a section. So I am not sure why this would be disproportionally balanced toward SRMs being better than other weapons. Take the Stalker, those SRMs mounted in the LT and RT would be landing on the left side and right side of the mech when firing. No matter how far or close away, their center of spray would be to the left and right of the Torso crosshair. So if you want them both to hit the CT, you would have to first aim to the right and fire the LT SRMs and then aim right and fire the RT SRMs.

The suggested change would also effect brawlers more than long range direct fire builds more as they have less time to compensate for the various sections to fire. So they will either need to take their time on some important weapons (like the AC/20 on the Atlas) or just fire at the mech to deal damage.

The long range direct fire mech has much more time to aim their individual weapons onto locations. But being that you do have to aim for different locations on the Torso crosshair (and minorly on the Arm crosshair if the arms have large deviations in their placements) while compensating for travel time (except in the laser's case but that is the benefit of having to keep facing on the target to deal full damage), they will also need to be a good shot to land them all onto the same location. All I see here is balance, both situations have to compensate for various things based on their situations.

On your statement that I can not torso twist or fire juke, I am not sure how you can gather that statement from my suggestion. If you are insinuating that I am a terrible player because I want more weapon spread, I think your mistaken. While I am no top tier player, I am better than your average player. I have gotten destroyed from players in the RHOD tournaments but I have also beaten players.

I do agree on your assessment that this change will be a big one. It will take time for players to get use to having to aim their weapons based on their location on mechs. But to the average or low tier player, the only difference they will feel is that their weapons will be hitting different locations when firing at the same time. But it will still be hitting. Players at that level do not care about getting weapons to land on a specific point, they just want to fire weapons and see them hit other players. And after so much fire, they want that player to die. Top players just want to smallest duration of time for a target to drop. So what this does is places more balancing factors on the top players on that they have to spend more time to drop a target while lower tier players will see their time to drop the target increase, but not proportionally to the top tier players.

And I have rarely been killed by the 6 PPC Stalker, what I have been killed by are the 2 Gauss Rifle and 1 ER PPC Jump Cataphracts that many run on the top tier builds. All they do is click a single button to have 40 points of damage to hit a single location. That is what I am trying to balance against. The changes would force all mechs to have to take time to reevaluate their fire patterns before firing a section of weapons. Or they could focus on a few single select weapons.

[Seox]

Pht, on 24 March 2013 - 01:50 PM, said:

A "simulation" does not mean what that thread defines it as - a game that requires you to master an obscene number of details just in order to play it.

Spoiler

Speaking of misused - "Simulation" does not denote that a game must have a massive overload of details which the player is required to track, manipulate, and master in order to play a "sim" type game. All that a game requires to be a simulation is that it properly portrays whatever is being imitated - so, thank your stars and garters that at the most basic level, BattleMech piloting is conceptually easy (think othello or pente or chinese checkers). The flip-side is that while the "ground level" is easy and inviting, the more a player pays attention and learns, the more reward they get out of the experience - it may be simple in concept and at the ground level, but there's a lot of reward to be had in return for experience and a bit of thinking and "legwork." A MW simulation is not a thing that should or would scare new players away or bore long time players.

http://mwomercs.com/...060#entry107060

"simulation" = "imitation," not "obscene complexity - and I've been pointing this out for some time now.



You can either have direct player aiming of the weapons with no mech involved (non-mech combat) - what you've been advocating...

or

You can have direct player control of a 'mech - (mech combat).

It is impossible to have both.

Your argument is heavily based in semantics; I really don't think it matters what it's called, mate.

[Khobai]

Quote

A: We’ve removed randomness from weapon firing in favor of skill.

Agreed. Weapon randomness has no place in the game.

The issue however is that were using armor values based on random hit locations in a game that allows aiming at specific locations.

The result is that damage ranges anywhere from 2-5 times higher than it should be.

[Cyke]

Well, at least the discussion has evolved into all participants gaining a proper understanding of the topic.

We've established these:
- The current implementation actually has an intelligent, automatic player-assistance system that helps to aim the weapons for him
- The suggestion does not involve any randomness
- The suggestion involves removing the automatic player-assisting features
- The suggestion necessitates that convergence will need to be manual (group weapons based on which side of the torso they're on, manually adjust aimpoint, fire one side at a time)


So now we can move onto the real questions:
- Will removing the the automatic aim assistance make the game too difficult?
- What is its effect on good players?
- What is its effect on new players?

Edited by Cyke, 24 March 2013 - 05:36 PM.

[Zyllos]

Cyke, on 24 March 2013 - 05:35 PM, said:

Well, at least the discussion has evolved into all participants gaining a proper understanding of the topic.

We've established these:
- The current implementation actually has an intelligent, automatic player-assistance system that helps to aim the weapons for him
- The suggestion does not involve any randomness
- The suggestion involves removing the automatic player-assisting features
- The suggestion necessitates that convergence will need to be manual (group weapons based on which side of the torso they're on, manually adjust aimpoint, fire one side at a time)


So now we can move onto the real questions:
- Will removing the the automatic aim assistance make the game too difficult?
- What is its effect on good players?
- What is its effect on new players?

Hmm, now that is a tough question.

While I personally do not think the difficulty goes up, I think the degree in which you can consider a top tier player and an average player would be much larger. The main thing I was hoping the suggestion would do is that it would not change how the average player plays the game. All they have to do is still just aim the Torso crosshair at the target and the majority of their weapons should hit.

Now, there are mech builds that this could most definitely be the case. I think an Atlas aiming at a Commando dead center *might* miss with both the SRMs and AC/20 due to having such a large torso comparatively to the Commando. Of course, it might put more emphasis on the mis-matched fighting that happens between a 25t and 100t mech. But beyond those extremes, I think the differences in hitting mechs would be only a minor nuisance when your just wanting to hit the target.

So I would hope it would effect average players in only a negligent way. But for good and top tier players, these are where, I hope, the changes would matter the most. The top tier player would immediately try to find a mech which will still allow some way to converge weaponry to circumvent the change. Honestly, the mech with the most weaponry close together on the torsos or all the weapons in arms would come to mind.

So the Cataphract like the Ilya Muromets would be a good candidate. With 1 Ballistic in each arm, it could in theory converge two weapons onto a single point. Of course, the shots would be landing slightly below the Arm crosshair but I think that would just be a minor inconvenience.

The newly released Jagermech would also be a mech that easily lets players converge weaponry due to the arms.

The CPLT-K2 would also have energy arms which would allow convergence.

A Stalker, with the many hardpoints in the arms, would allow a lot of convergence. Missile and energy hardpoints which would converge onto points due to them being mirrors. Of course, the missile hardpoints would land lower than the energy hardpoints in the arms so that would effect them a bit.

The HBK-4P, with 6 Medium Lasers in the hunch would almost converge all their weapons onto a point. But that point is tall so might miss depending on the target.

But, what I am seeing here is a pattern. And this pattern is what I want the suggestion to weapon convergence change to do. Place emphasis on arms and their usefulness. This makes players want to shoot at arms because of their ability to converge some weaponry easily onto points of the player's choosing. But we all know that arms are some of the most vulnerable spots on the mech. They are also usually one of the first places being hit when trying to torso twist against incoming fire.

But this also means you don't want to constantly keep facing your target because that is exposing a torso section to your enemy.

I am also hoping that individual weapons that hit hard would show their usefulness compared to large array of smaller weaponry due to the amount of convergence. But this also makes smaller mechs with an array of smaller weaponry still be a threat to larger targets because their hit sections are larger, thus less minute changes is needed to hit a single location.

This is why I wanted to have individual weapons not to be convergence. It's in hope that lower end and average players will not be heavily effected while the good and top end players would have to adjust their play styles. And this suggestion would also remove the majority of the pin-point alpha strikes that many players play. At least, the build won't guarantee you hitting a single location when alpha striking.

Edited by Zyllos, 24 March 2013 - 06:42 PM.

[Khobai]

Uh I think its reasonable to believe that in 1000 years, they have the technology to make weapons shoot where the aiming reticle is pointed. Considering they had that technology you know 70 years ago...The whole idea of not having perfect weapon convergence is completely goofy.

All we actually need is increased armor values that can handle the converging weapons. Not only does increasing armor make more sense but its way easier for PGI to implement. All PGI's gotta do is armor up the side and center torsos better to fix the whole problem.

Edited by Khobai, 24 March 2013 - 07:52 PM.

[Zyllos]

Khobai, on 24 March 2013 - 07:44 PM, said:

Uh I think its reasonable to believe that in 1000 years, they have the technology to make weapons shoot where the aiming reticle is pointed. Considering they had that technology you know 70 years ago...The whole idea of not having perfect weapon convergence is completely goofy.

All we actually need is increased armor values that can handle the converging weapons. Not only does increasing armor make more sense but its way easier for PGI to implement. All PGI's gotta do is armor up the side and center torsos better to fix the whole problem.

Your first point is invalid for the Battletech lore. The whole point of Battletech is having these futuristic advanced war waging machines with targeting technology of WWI. Read Lostech

On your second point, with armor increased again, what would be the point of Small Lasers and Small Pulse Lasers? Heck, what would be the point of Medium Lasers? These weapons need to be dangerous in their own right and just increasing armor yet again destroys the value of such weapons.

[Psydotek]

Arm weapons should converge (provided the proper actuators are in place). Torso weapons should not converge and each individual weapon should have it's own reticle.

[David Sumner]

Seox, on 24 March 2013 - 11:03 AM, said:

You still haven't even addressed how something like this is not going to be morbidly unfair to equally viable direct ranged builds. Good balance does not take out entire columns of existing balance with it when it is implemented; this does not make such considerations. The game will become even more brawling oriented, which will further hurt build diversity and etc. Furthermore, there will be disproportionate viability in weapons like SRMs which do not rely on convergence.
....
You assert multiple times that it's a skill that people could pick up, thus it "introduces more skill." People have enough problems with parallax aiming in third person shooters using a single weapons along a single axis where hits to any part of an enemy are rewarded; no human being has the level of spatial intelligence necessary to calculate parallax on two or three sets of weapons, especially when this game requires FOCUSED fire and not just hits to any part of the enemy.

Specify a weapon convergence range for each weapon. At that range it will hit the crosshair centre.

[Davers]

I do agree with the OP. At competitive levels of play you have few if any medium mechs, and many mechs that can do 40+ damage alphas with close to pin-point accuracy. The ability to one shot or two shot other mechs is becoming the only criteria worth looking at. Thats why the Dragon sucks- it just simply cannot replicate builds like that, unless you drop the engine. So we are ending up with a game of very slow, but devestating heavy+ mechs, and very fast light mechs.

[Nebelfeuer]

Agree with the OP. Sounds closer to a Mechbattle then the current aproach.

[Khobai]

Quote

Your first point is invalid for the Battletech lore. The whole point of Battletech is having these futuristic advanced war waging machines with targeting technology of WWI

I read "Lostech". Nothing in there is mentioned about targetting being WWI equivalent. That leads me to conclude you completely made it up out of your !@#.

Besides even WWI gunsights were accurate enough to shoot where you aimed if you knew the convergence distance of your guns.

Theres sharpshooters today that can hit a quarter-sized targets from a half-mile away using exact replicas of civil war era rifles. Guns have been shooting accurately since the mid-1800s when rifling was added to gun barrels.

Again this whole lack of targetting technology nonsense is a farce made up by people who have no common sense. Guns should shoot where you aim them. Period. The problem is on the armor side, mechs arnt armored to handle the damage of converging weapons because were still using armor values that come out of a game with random hit locations.

Edited by Khobai, 25 March 2013 - 01:17 PM.

[Syllogy]

L2Aim.

Precision only works when skilled players use skill to aim their weapons at a vulnerable spot on a moving target.

... which requires skill.

Dumbing down the skill component of the game that separates skilled players from unskilled players will fly about as well as brick.

[Zyllos]

Khobai, on 25 March 2013 - 01:11 PM, said:

I read "Lostech". Nothing in there is mentioned about targetting being WWI equivalent. That leads me to conclude you completely made it up out of your !@#.

Besides even WWI gunsights were accurate enough to shoot where you aimed if you knew the convergence distance of your guns.

Theres sharpshooters today that can hit a quarter-sized targets from a half-mile away using exact replicas of civil war era rifles. Guns have been shooting accurately since the mid-1800s when rifling was added to gun barrels.

Again this whole lack of targetting technology nonsense is a farce made up by people who have no common sense. Guns should shoot where you aim them. Period. The problem is on the armor side, mechs arnt armored to handle the damage of converging weapons because were still using armor values that come out of a game with random hit locations.

But you did read in Lostech that technology was lost due to being bombed back into the 21st century? And much of the technology could not be repaired/replaced due to automated facilities that worked but if broken, would be permanently shutdown?

[Zyllos]

Syllogy, on 25 March 2013 - 01:18 PM, said:

L2Aim.

Precision only works when skilled players use skill to aim their weapons at a vulnerable spot on a moving target.

... which requires skill.

Dumbing down the skill component of the game that separates skilled players from unskilled players will fly about as well as brick.

Precisioned isn't changed. Did you not read my original post?

All weapons hit the same location on every fire, just that location is different dependent on their location.

Also, this is a matter of balance. All "realistic or lore" reasons behind why/why not to change (fix) weapon convergence is a non-issue. How is it balanced that 1 mech can place 2 Gauss Rifles and 1 ER PPC onto the same weapon plate while another mech can not do this due to weapon placement and hardpoint types?

Every mech needs to follow the same rules regarding weapon convergence. The current system does not allow mechs to function like they are suppose to. The whole reason why PGI introduced the 2 crosshair system was to eliminate many weapons converging onto a single point.

[Khobai]

Quote

The whole reason why PGI introduced the 2 crosshair system was to eliminate many weapons converging onto a single point.

No its not. The reason they introduced the 2 crosshair system is so arm weapons could have a greater field of fire which they do in battletech.

[Seox]

David Sumner, on 24 March 2013 - 08:45 PM, said:

Specify a weapon convergence range for each weapon. At that range it will hit the crosshair centre.

Which will disproportionately effect direct ranged builds; that's the exact point of everything I've said. This is why people who can't read shouldn't be allowed to comment on balance.

Khobai, on 25 March 2013 - 01:29 PM, said:

No its not. The reason they introduced the 2 crosshair system is so arm weapons could have a greater field of fire which they do in battletech.

What's worse is that OP is routinely making assumptions about dev intentions/etc and then basing further argument on the implicit acceptance of that premise.

Edited by Seox, 25 March 2013 - 04:42 PM.

[Pht]

Seox, on 24 March 2013 - 04:40 PM, said:

Your argument is heavily based in semantics; I really don't think it matters what it's called, mate.

... and your post is completely based on semantics - or what the words you post mean in the context you've used them.

I meant something different than he did by his use of the word "simulation," thus his refutation didn't apply, is the point.

Khobai, on 24 March 2013 - 05:07 PM, said:

Agreed. Weapon randomness has no place in the game.

So the conditions that are occuring when you take the shot should never, under any circumstances, have any affect on your 'mech's ability to calculate where to align the weapons and it's physical ability to align those weapons?

Look, If you want a game where you have direct control over the aiming of the weapons, there are plenty of them out there.

I simply don't understand why people who dont want to play an armored combat game where the armored unit actually has some meaning in said game are playing an MW video game...

...

Or why the MWO developers decided to accomodate that route.

[Seox]

Pht, on 25 March 2013 - 04:49 PM, said:

... and your post is completely based on semantics - or what the words you post mean in the context you've used them.

I meant something different than he did by his use of the word "simulation," thus his refutation didn't apply, is the point.




So the conditions that are occuring when you take the shot should never, under any circumstances, have any affect on your 'mech's ability to calculate where to align the weapons and it's physical ability to align those weapons?

Look, If you want a game where you have direct control over the aiming of the weapons, there are plenty of them out there.

I simply don't understand why people who dont want to play an armored combat game where the armored unit actually has some meaning in said game are playing an MW video game...

...

Or why the MWO developers decided to accomodate that route.

And if you want to play a game that craps on people who are more skilled than you to drag them down to your level while rewarding you for playing like a moron, go play WoT.

Edited by Seox, 25 March 2013 - 05:26 PM.

[Khobai]

Quote

So the conditions that are occuring when you take the shot should never, under any circumstances, have any affect on your 'mech's ability to calculate where to align the weapons and it's physical ability to align those weapons?

Look, If you want a game where you have direct control over the aiming of the weapons, there are plenty of them out there.

I simply don't understand why people who dont want to play an armored combat game where the armored unit actually has some meaning in said game are playing an MW video game...

...

Or why the MWO developers decided to accomodate that route.

Because a skill-based game which challenges players and promotes competition will attract more players than a hold-your-hands kiddie game which rolls dice.

Dice rolling is fine in battletech, since its a casual game that you play for fun, but MWO has potential to be fiercely competitive in a way tabletop never was. And that is a good thing for an mmo game.

Edited by Khobai, 25 March 2013 - 05:49 PM.