40 replies to this topic

[Felbombling]

I want to preface this by saying that I am an old school TT BattleTech fan that has also spent countless hours at the keyboard playing Mechwarrior games. I love both versions of the game but know and understand that a TT game will have issues being adapted to a computer simulation environment value for value, straight across. I think PGI have done a pretty good job of merging the two, made some tough choices along the way to better mesh the two styles, and yet there are some sticking points. The game looks great and shows great appeal/potential, but some of the inner mechanics seem off.

TL/DR: The game would be better if we implemented the stuff in the title.

So, for all their efforts, the game still has some subtle issues that make it feel more like a first person shooter and less like a ‘thinking man’s shooter’. When I play, I don’t get the feeling of being this massive juggernaut on the field of battle, wading forward into the jaws of the enemy. I don’t get the feeling of ruggedness and durability that I think, if I recall, the Devs advertised. The overwhelming feeling I get is of a fairly fragile combat unit that has to hug terrain to last longer than ten seconds in a fire-fight. I’m not sure this is the overall direction the ‘thinking man’s shooter’ should be headed in. We’re talking about a game without respawn that can, if circumstances dictate, result in four and a half minutes of movement punctuated by a ten second firefight. I have dished out such outcomes and have been on the receiving end of them, as well. Neither is very much fun, in my experience.

It is obvious at this stage that there will be no movement on the heat scale mechanic or the sped up weapon recycle/reload times. This is fine… it will appease the twitch shooter crowd who enjoy the ‘excitement’ factor of seeing a bunch of weapons firing all the time. Let’s face facts… waiting ten seconds for a Medium Laser would be tedious and annoying, given that the heat sink cycle works on the same ten second refresh. We also have serious flexibility in the Mech Lab when it comes to engine rating on every chassis. I am really against this flexibility, as it takes tough choices out of the equation when designing Mechs in the Mech Lab. In the TT game, set chunks of tonnage needed to be allocated to increase engine performance. In MW: O, only .5 ton increments are needed, which makes Mech design MUCH less painful a process.

When I step back and try to look at the current game, with some of the trends that we have seen manifest themselves or Mech design theory implemented, I come to some of the conclusions I alluded to in the topic title. There will always be boating in a game like this, with the level of flexibility we enjoy in the Mech Lab. There is no way around it. People will look at a list of weapons; calculate which one is most effective in their mind, and pack as many as possible onto their Mech of choice. This is simple human nature. What the Dev team could do, however, is take some of the tools away that make boating feasible. Right now the Devs are not forcing tonnage into the hard points.

As the title suggests, I’d love to see the game keep current pace, but make it a fun and rewarding slugging match. I think if you restrict engine choices tighter, quadruple the armour while merging the cockpit location with the center torso, you’d have much more rugged Mechs lumbering around. Assault Mechs would be feared. It would take concentrated fire, over a greater length of time, to down them. Medium and Heavy Mechs would have their roles, too, where their contribution to the match would be on par with their attributes and Light Mechs would fall back into their scouting/strafing roles as annoying, yet potent, combat machines.

To top it all off and make it work with the other current game mechanics, you MUST up the ammunition levels on practically every ammunition bin. I see a major component of boating being the low ammunition values for weapons as it is, in the face of the doubled armour values. It simply requires too much tonnage to make certain weapon systems viable. This tonnage would otherwise be spent on weapon hard points, but that doesn’t seem to be the case right now.

Players are allocating tonnage to the hard points and then shoehorning an engine into the chassis. It should be the other way around.

[Bagheera]

I'm sorry guy, but the more you limit the mech-lab, the fewer variety of mechs you will see in game. This is simply because once you limit the number of combination in a setting where the majority are fixated on using the best, or their favorite, combination you simply create a situation with a smaller number of "best" and "favorite" builds.

[Ranzear]

Somehow you've managed to come up with a bunch of changes to turn MWO more into CoD than even PGI has considered. Bravo!

[FupDup]

Ranzear, on 24 March 2013 - 07:52 AM, said:

Somehow you've managed to come up with a bunch of changes to turn MWO more into CoD than even PGI has considered. Bravo!

While I disagree with pretty much the entire OP, how does making mechs take forever to kill make the game more like CoD? Last time I checked, people die pretty fast in that game...

Edited by FupDup, 24 March 2013 - 07:58 AM.

[Thirdstar]

I tend to upgrade engines in the majority of my builds, not downgrade.

Quadruple armor sounds interesting but would probably be overkill.

Any attempts at limiting the mechlab would be ill advised. It's practically half the game.

[Wintersdark]

I love how any change someone doesn't like is immediately labeled "making the game more like CoD" even if the result has nothing whatsoever to do with the game.

It's like MWO has its own implementation of Godwins Law, except you replace ****'s with Cod.

That said, I strongly disagree with the op. Having read some Battletech books... Mechs are much more fragile there than here.

I understand why the devs doubled armor the first time around - but even that caused problems. It creates imbalances in the heat system, and as weapon damage isn't changing (obviously) it's a change that greatly benefits heavier mechs more than lighter ones. It then pushes people into heavies and Assaults, and sidelines lights and particularly mediums.

Simply doubling armor again would exponentially worsen these problems.

Merging the head with the center torso? No. Simply no. If you're getting headshot too frequently, you need to stop staring at your opponents - in short, learn to play.

[PapaKilo]

The developers of MechWarrior 2 made a huge mistake when they did the customization on the OmniMechs. They allowed the changing of engine, internal structure, and armor -- all three of which are supposed to be permanently set on Omnis.

Now we expect that kind of customization on our Inner Sphere 'Mechs, instead of what might be realistically available for Inner Sphere pilots in-universe. I.S. pilots don't go around regularly ripping their 'Mechs completely apart and rebuilding them from the ground up. If there wasn't an Endo Steel chassis available from the factory, it would take months or years to design one from scratch, and then weeks or months to actually build and test the thing to make sure you got it right. Ripping out one engine and putting in a different one would take weeks of designing and fitting and building and rebuilding just to get it functional again. We have crybabies now QQing about how they should own the upgrades and not have to pay conversion costs both ways -- imagine if the game did customization the in-universe way. Whee!

Anyway...

I don't foresee any of this happening, despite the fact that some of it would have very positive effects on the game. Too bad.

[Woska]

Sorry, I think you're wrong on this one. I thought opening up the option for more engines was a great idea. In the table top the strict engine restrictions only made sense because you needed it to work out to whole numbers for hex movement.

Instead of simply increasing the armour more, I'd rather see the internal structure increased. That way you have to really work at destroying the Mech, but once the armour is gone you start doing critical damage that reduces the effectiveness of the enemy mech.

[Joseph Mallan]

The problem is that changing the engine, armor et all is part of the construction rules for TT. Adding the base chassis rules for Omnis... well, as overkill as Omnis are, they needed a downside.

[Monsoon]

Just terrible ideas all around. The one that could be viable would be limiting engine downgrading, since they've already put a limit on upgrades.

Edited by Monsoon, 24 March 2013 - 08:15 AM.

[FupDup]

PapaKilo, on 24 March 2013 - 08:10 AM, said:

The developers of MechWarrior 2 made a huge mistake when they did the customization on the OmniMechs. They allowed the changing of engine, internal structure, and armor -- all three of which are supposed to be permanently set on Omnis.

Not to get too far off-topic, but Omnis could in fact change their internals BUT they would have to deal with the consequence of losing Omni capabilities and therefore becoming a standard Battlemech. In TT that might have been a significant drawback, but here in MWO, Battlemechs are teh pwnsauce. Nobody in their right mind would want an Omni here (particularly those with paper-thin stock armor).

[BGrey]

FupDup, on 24 March 2013 - 07:57 AM, said:

While I disagree with pretty much the entire OP, how does making mechs take forever to kill make the game more like CoD? Last time I checked, people die pretty fast in that game...

How quickly people die isn't really the definitive characteristic of CoD, nor is it one that should be used to classify games by comparing time to kill with CoD. For example I prefer FPS style games where people die FASTER than they do in CoD as is the case in the red orchestra games.

That being said, mechwarrior isn't a traditional FPS, and I feel that the time to kill is about right where it is. Increasing armor would promote a kind of teamwork that just isn't fun. I would like to see scouting and map control with teams working together and communicating, increased armor values would further promote stomping around with a blob of mechs blasting things down.

[Zyllos]

StaggerCheck, on 24 March 2013 - 07:42 AM, said:

I want to preface this by saying that I am an old school TT BattleTech fan that has also spent countless hours at the keyboard playing Mechwarrior games. I love both versions of the game but know and understand that a TT game will have issues being adapted to a computer simulation environment value for value, straight across. I think PGI have done a pretty good job of merging the two, made some tough choices along the way to better mesh the two styles, and yet there are some sticking points. The game looks great and shows great appeal/potential, but some of the inner mechanics seem off.

TL/DR: The game would be better if we implemented the stuff in the title.

So, for all their efforts, the game still has some subtle issues that make it feel more like a first person shooter and less like a ‘thinking man’s shooter’. When I play, I don’t get the feeling of being this massive juggernaut on the field of battle, wading forward into the jaws of the enemy. I don’t get the feeling of ruggedness and durability that I think, if I recall, the Devs advertised. The overwhelming feeling I get is of a fairly fragile combat unit that has to hug terrain to last longer than ten seconds in a fire-fight. I’m not sure this is the overall direction the ‘thinking man’s shooter’ should be headed in. We’re talking about a game without respawn that can, if circumstances dictate, result in four and a half minutes of movement punctuated by a ten second firefight. I have dished out such outcomes and have been on the receiving end of them, as well. Neither is very much fun, in my experience.

It is obvious at this stage that there will be no movement on the heat scale mechanic or the sped up weapon recycle/reload times. This is fine… it will appease the twitch shooter crowd who enjoy the ‘excitement’ factor of seeing a bunch of weapons firing all the time. Let’s face facts… waiting ten seconds for a Medium Laser would be tedious and annoying, given that the heat sink cycle works on the same ten second refresh. We also have serious flexibility in the Mech Lab when it comes to engine rating on every chassis. I am really against this flexibility, as it takes tough choices out of the equation when designing Mechs in the Mech Lab. In the TT game, set chunks of tonnage needed to be allocated to increase engine performance. In MW: O, only .5 ton increments are needed, which makes Mech design MUCH less painful a process.

When I step back and try to look at the current game, with some of the trends that we have seen manifest themselves or Mech design theory implemented, I come to some of the conclusions I alluded to in the topic title. There will always be boating in a game like this, with the level of flexibility we enjoy in the Mech Lab. There is no way around it. People will look at a list of weapons; calculate which one is most effective in their mind, and pack as many as possible onto their Mech of choice. This is simple human nature. What the Dev team could do, however, is take some of the tools away that make boating feasible. Right now the Devs are not forcing tonnage into the hard points.

As the title suggests, I’d love to see the game keep current pace, but make it a fun and rewarding slugging match. I think if you restrict engine choices tighter, quadruple the armour while merging the cockpit location with the center torso, you’d have much more rugged Mechs lumbering around. Assault Mechs would be feared. It would take concentrated fire, over a greater length of time, to down them. Medium and Heavy Mechs would have their roles, too, where their contribution to the match would be on par with their attributes and Light Mechs would fall back into their scouting/strafing roles as annoying, yet potent, combat machines.

To top it all off and make it work with the other current game mechanics, you MUST up the ammunition levels on practically every ammunition bin. I see a major component of boating being the low ammunition values for weapons as it is, in the face of the doubled armour values. It simply requires too much tonnage to make certain weapon systems viable. This tonnage would otherwise be spent on weapon hard points, but that doesn’t seem to be the case right now.

Players are allocating tonnage to the hard points and then shoehorning an engine into the chassis. It should be the other way around.

A lot about engines *could* be the problem. TT assuming that your engine rating has to be divisible by the the tonnage. That would change a lot in this game if it was enforced. You would have to then build around the engine, like you said. You couldn't get every ounce of speed out of tonnage that way.

Another *major* flaw, that I have been pushing and telling people since Closed Beta is weapon convergence. This is why it is death to lower your engine rating (beyond the issues with it causing your DHS to be nerfed compared to higher rating engines for some reason, more explanation below). And this is why the top tier players tend to stay away from mechs like the Dragon (read this thread for more reasons: Why is the Dragon Terrible?) because you can not converge weaponry easily with mechs that spread and mix their weaponry.

That issue above, I personally think, is a community issue and balancing nightmare #1. With all weapons converging into a single point, this game is always going to be unbalanced to mechs with different weaponry across many sections than those who's hardpoint types are in the same location.

About the DHS balance to smaller engines, it makes no sense to make smaller engines, which are already at a disadvantage when compared to larger engines due to weapon convergence and speed, to have their DHS also less effective. PGI needs to balance DHS dissipation rates across all equipped locations.

I also agree with your assessment about making RoF @ 10.0s. But there is also an issue with having a very low RoF. It eliminates the usefulness of equipping many weapons to increase the RoF of that type of weapon. The HBK-4P is a good example of this. With 8 Medium Lasers, if your trying to keep heat down, you could chain fire several lasers at a time. But with high rate of fire, there is no reason to have so many Medium Lasers equipped because you could constantly fire 2 or 3 Medium Lasers at maximum speed instead of chain firing 6 or 8 Medium Lasers in groups of 2 or 3. I personally think reducing RoF by 50 to 100% (4.5s to 6.0s for a Medium Laser) would make equipping many weapons more important than equipping a few large, hard hitting weapons, especially when up close.

So, I do agree. MWO has several fundamental flaws that are within the game. But many of these flaws are very fixed. Especially weapon convergence, which would really help balance out the game considerably.

[Dr Killinger]

PapaKilo, on 24 March 2013 - 08:10 AM, said:

The developers of MechWarrior 2 made a huge mistake when they did the customization on the OmniMechs. They allowed the changing of engine, internal structure, and armor -- all three of which are supposed to be permanently set on Omnis.

Now we expect that kind of customization on our Inner Sphere 'Mechs, instead of what might be realistically available for Inner Sphere pilots in-universe. I.S. pilots don't go around regularly ripping their 'Mechs completely apart and rebuilding them from the ground up. If there wasn't an Endo Steel chassis available from the factory, it would take months or years to design one from scratch, and then weeks or months to actually build and test the thing to make sure you got it right. Ripping out one engine and putting in a different one would take weeks of designing and fitting and building and rebuilding just to get it functional again.

My biggest problem with how Battletech in general has handled customization. Omni means nothing unless you house-rule it.

[Wintersdark]

Woska, on 24 March 2013 - 08:11 AM, said:

Sorry, I think you're wrong on this one. I thought opening up the option for more engines was a great idea. In the table top the strict engine restrictions only made sense because you needed it to work out to whole numbers for hex movement.

Instead of simply increasing the armour more, I'd rather see the internal structure increased. That way you have to really work at destroying the Mech, but once the armour is gone you start doing critical damage that reduces the effectiveness of the enemy mech.

Actually, this is a fairly interesting take. Increased structure would actually make "crit seeking" weapons (which are otherwise worthless) actually useful.

[Wintersdark]

Zyllos, on 24 March 2013 - 08:18 AM, said:

So, I do agree. MWO has several fundamental flaws that are within the game. But many of these flaws are very fixed. Especially weapon convergence, which would really help balance out the game considerably.

Weapon convergence is a source of many (most?) of the issues, but it's NOT one that's easily fixed.

Well, there certainly are "easy" (from a development perspective) ways to fix it, but they're not ones that would be accepted now. It's just too late - such changes should have happened in Closed Beta, the userbase is much too large now. It's very much "core gameplay", so it's just not going to happen. I'd love it if it did, but it won't.

Monsoon, on 24 March 2013 - 08:15 AM, said:

Just terrible ideas all around. The one that could be viable would be limiting engine downgrading, since they've already put a limit on upgrades.

Why even limit downgrades? Do you really find many builds that benefit from a tiny engine? Being slow in this game is death.

[Terror Teddy]

I'll put this as delicatly as I can.

ARE YOU ******* INSANE???

[Terror Teddy]

Wintersdark, on 24 March 2013 - 08:27 AM, said:

Why even limit downgrades? Do you really find many builds that benefit from a tiny engine? Being slow in this game is death.

Urbanmech.

[Wintersdark]

Terror Teddy, on 24 March 2013 - 08:41 AM, said:

Urbanmech.

Sorry, I'm not seeing how this is a problem?

Again, why limit downgrades?

[Terror Teddy]

Wintersdark, on 24 March 2013 - 08:46 AM, said:

Again, why limit downgrades?

Quote

Do you really find many builds that benefit from a tiny engine?

THIS is what I answered on. The Urbanmech DOES benefit from a tiny engine.

I have no issues with NOT limiting downgrades.