Hawker, on 12 April 2013 - 11:26 AM, said:
There is no way to implement targeting computer in MWO because in order to do so you would have to build in an aimbot. Not going to happen without even more QQ.
So you ran events, so did I, but I also won events at major competitions. I did run clans exclusively since they came out, and only a few actually have a targeting computer. The only time people called shots was when the target mech was shutdown or legged. Most good players wouldn't bother with long range shots and your ideal situation you posed is just that ideal. He didn't move, you didn't move. In competitive play, if you shutdown or don't move, you are dead. No one in their right mind would do that. You must have had very gambling players but in major tournaments, that doesn't work. You need to play the odds well. I didn't win two Nationals by gambling on called shots and in fact I don't remember ever having done so in all the tournaments I played in and I won quite a few. So, I am calling you out on that.
You still fail to see the difference between Battletech and Mechwarrior, so let me lay it out for you one last time, and then you either get it or not, in that I don't really care.
Battletech (the boardgame) was designed around a random number table for hit location. The mechs in Battletech are designed also with this mechanic in mind. It works because it is designed well. Take AC/20s for example. In the real world a cannon like that would easily shoot farther than an AC/2 (I worked on weapon systems in the military so I have pretty specific knowledge there) because of physics. Don't believe me, look up say the effective range of a .50 cal machine gun and a 105mm howitzer if you must.
In Battletech though the ranges are reversed for game play balance, because otherwise AC/20's would be OP. Agree or not on your part, it is irrelevant.
Mechwarrior does not use a random table for hit location. It uses your aim. Most games that use aim as a game mechanic do not have multiple hit locations. They usually have a single health bar and maybe an armor or shield bar that goes before the health bar is affected. Honestly, other than the Mechwarrior series, I can't think of any simulator or shooter that uses multiple hit locations other than head shots which some games treat differently. Unreal Tournament is an example but there are plenty of others, like say Freelancer just to widen the scope of games that use aiming as a game mechanic. Single health bar is the primary means of determining if a target is removed from play or not, instant gibbing aside.
So why does Mechwarrior use multiple hit locations? Because that is the way it was in Battletech, thats why. Is that a sound design choice? No, it isn't and many other games prove that when you use aim as a game mechanic, a single health bar is the preferred method to good game play, and they might add armor/shield on top of that.
Head shots is a separate topic really and I am not going to get into that.
In my opinion, and of course it is only my opinion, Mechwarrior needs to grow up and own up to the fact that it is a sim shooter and not the board game. To do that, they need to redesign the mechs appropriately. That can simply be done by the following:
One armor stat.
One internal structure stat.
Crits could have a low chance to occur for each hit on armor or internal structure or just internal structure. Or you could have hits on internal structure autocrit. (Personally I would just have a small chance that each hit could cause a crit and that crit would be random across all the equipment including things like actuators and such.)
Those changes would be more inline with shooter design. You can still loadout your mech like before, just the armor stat would be a bar, or if you really wanted to you could assign armor to each now redundant location.
The other option would be to invoke a random hit location for each shot and that would make it more like the board game sort of RTS style play in a sense.
Either way, the mechs were designed for random hit location and that just doesn't port well to a shooter based game. Doubling armor is a stop gap but not a real solution. The solution is to design the mechs properly for the type of game it is, a sim shooter.
A very intelligent post. I disagree, but nicely put regardless.
Seperate hit locations for me is why I play this game. I pretty much never play traditional FPSers, but the 'realistic' portion of individual hitboxes is what has always drew me to the series. It influences so much in mech design as well, and I would never want to give that up.
As this is all 'pie-in-the-sky' talk, as PGI most assuredly is not going to go with a health bar at this point...I'll give my observation on what went wrong...They ignored the overwhelming priority of function over form.
Because hitboxes are so important in this game, modeling should have been done with balance in mind first...not artwork. While the mech designs are certainly excellent in form...they lack in function.
Across the board armor doubling was probablly a mistake, and this one they could theoretically still cheat a fix into. For example, A 'phracts arms are twigs graphically and the armor should reflect that as opposed to the ears of a pult which are engineering wise a lot more structuraly sound. Like wise, if the Jager artwork is designed (art) with giant side shields, the armor value should reflect that fact as opposed to the very small side torsos of the pult. Literally every mech (I'm looking at you walking barn awesome) could be individualy tweaked based on the graphic model.
This would of course enrage the TT folks who want consitency at least to core rules (doubled at least is consistent). The only other solution is
adding some form of DR to the game as a graphic/hitbox/size/role type of balancing system. health bars would simply ruin the game...as it's uniqueness is what seperates itself as MechWarrior IMO.
Mr 144
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