67 replies to this topic

[Damion Stranik]

Lurking in the forums these days has been an interesting experience. Mostly I see people voicing their excitement, their fears, their cautious optimism. A lot of this speculation has focused on the mechlab. The sandbox where our factory stock machine becomes a brutal engine of destruction limited only by our imagination, c-bills, and of course the balancing system - Tonnage, Hardpoints, and Critical Slots.

The largest fears I see are from people who dread the return of MW4 gameplay, or a stale endgame where there is but one single optimal build for every chassis. The previously mentioned systems have to date never managed to solve the problem of boats, and I don't believe they can.This boating and powergaming is considered undesirable by many, but par for the course for anyone with a strong desire to win. I fully support the competitive scene, and do not begrudge boating and powergaming if its the optimal strategy, but a simple and unimaginative metagame breeds a weak and unstable competitive community. No one wants to watch the same matches played every time, nor is it all that fun to simply execute the same one mechanic over and over again.

On the other side of the coin, cannon mechs and weapons are clearly built with large and unavoidable flaws. The medium laser is always going to be the most efficient weapon while machine guns, AC 2s. and AC 5s are always going to be enormous liabilities that cripple you in multiple ways. Every single one of these weapons also happens to be worse than their Clan counterparts. This means that if we want to get rid of optimal weapon loadouts on chassis we're going to need a rebalance of many weapon systems to make them more viable. I expect the most diehard grognards will object and shout that we should all be forced into playing stock Cicadas and stock Jagermechs, because gosh darnit, thats what I did back in my day. The unfortunate fact of the matter is that Tabletop is balanced by BV, while MWO MUST be balanced by number of players. Otherwise, the minute you make an obsolete mech/weapon, you will never see it played and boating + stale single mech matchups will become the norm.

This is the reality of the situation, and unfortunately the purists are going to lose out either way. Will MWO attempt to stick as much as possible to the spirit of battletech? No doubt they will, but if people want to see this game evolve into a competitive and dynamic online game, all weapons and chassis must be viable.

Thoughts? Criticisms? Stories about that one time you TAC'ed an Atlas's center torso with an AC 2 so therefore there is nothing wrong with it?

Edited by Damion Stranik, 04 June 2012 - 01:02 AM.

[yaay]

HERE WE GO AGAIN ERRYBODY

[BulletChief]

care to explain what boating is?

[Kanatta Jing]

Woo! In for the ride!

Well every other MMO re balances the classes every now and then so that different things are over powered at different times. I expect that the Era of the Medium Laser will be followed by the Era of the AC/10 followed by the Dawn of the SRM.

[SyberSmoke]

This game will be nothing like MW4. Try going further back when critical spaces mattered...say MW2. MW4 was an abomination in comparison since they are using the core rules from the books and not some made up over simplification. Not to mention all of the other flaws, made up drek, and more that M$ pulled out of their collective *****. Yup...no comparison except that the mechs resemble one another and may have the same tonnage.

[Max Liao]

BV is a crutch. I use it only for tournaments. In home games (TT or MegaMech) we usually play by tonnage or weight classes. (e.g. 2 Lances, one light the other 2 med/2 hvy.)

The balance factor with the ACs comes with money. Lasers and PPCs cost a lot more than ballistic weapons. So, if the game does a good job of keeping us broke then you'll see more ACs/SRMs. If not, it'll be all PPCs and lasers.

I guess another advantage of missiles would be if indirect fire were to be implemented. That would be fun. It still doesn't help the poor AC though.

[Damion Stranik]

SyberSmoke, on 04 June 2012 - 01:10 AM, said:

This game will be nothing like MW4. Try going further back when critical spaces mattered...say MW2. MW4 was an abomination in comparison since they are using the core rules from the books and not some made up over simplification. Not to mention all of the other flaws, made up drek, and more that M$ pulled out of their collective *****. Yup...no comparison except that the mechs resemble one another and may have the same tonnage.

Well, we do have all three of those systems, if you watch the Mech Lab videos you will see the hardpoints, critical slots, and obviously tonnage coming into consideration. Now I know that none of the previous games combined them exactly like MWO is doing - but the game clearly owes itself to its predecessors.

BulletChief, on 04 June 2012 - 01:06 AM, said:

care to explain what boating is?

Boating is simply the practice of loading a mech entirely with a singular weapon system or closely related group of weapon systems. LRM boating is an obvious setup which even has a few canon mechs dedicated to the concept. There are some other boats in canon, but they tend to be few and far between. Back when Critical slots were the only thing that mattered, you could set up just about any mech of the same tonnage with extremely similar weapons - basically destroying all variation between chassis' of similar tonnage.

Hardpoints were introduced to allow only certain weapons to be placed in certain areas of a mech. This didn't fix boating because the weapons themselves all had obvious advantages and disadvantages which made creating optimal setups easy, along with the few canon boat mechs allowing for the originally undesirable gameplay to continue.

Edited by Damion Stranik, 04 June 2012 - 01:20 AM.

[BulletChief]

Max Liao, on 04 June 2012 - 01:12 AM, said:

BV is a crutch. I use it only for tournaments. In home games (TT or MegaMech) we usually play by tonnage or weight classes. (e.g. 2 Lances, one light the other 2 med/2 hvy.)

The balance factor with the ACs comes with money. Lasers and PPCs cost a lot more than ballistic weapons. So, if the game does a good job of keeping us broke then you'll see more ACs/SRMs. If not, it'll be all PPCs and lasers.

I guess another advantage of missiles would be if indirect fire were to be implemented. That would be fun. It still doesn't help the poor AC though.

i guess that's just a question of playtime... at first many ACs and stuff will be used... in a couple of month tons of lasers.

it's also a question of map design: "desert maps" could keep ammo-type weapons viable...

[Max Liao]

BulletChief, on 04 June 2012 - 01:17 AM, said:

i guess that's just a question of playtime... at first many ACs and stuff will be used... in a couple of month tons of lasers.

it's also a question of map design: "desert maps" could keep ammo-type weapons viable...

True, and it'll be fun to watch the money drain on the 'power gamers' as they try to OmniMech every engagement. I plan on building one generalized design that's effective and functional in all/most situations and sticking with it. I'm geared more to team play than to 1v1.

[Talynn DeRaa]

Max Liao, on 04 June 2012 - 01:12 AM, said:

BV is a crutch. I use it only for tournaments. In home games (TT or MegaMech) we usually play by tonnage or weight classes. (e.g. 2 Lances, one light the other 2 med/2 hvy.)

The balance factor with the ACs comes with money. Lasers and PPCs cost a lot more than ballistic weapons. So, if the game does a good job of keeping us broke then you'll see more ACs/SRMs. If not, it'll be all PPCs and lasers.

I guess another advantage of missiles would be if indirect fire were to be implemented. That would be fun. It still doesn't help the poor AC though.

If what you say is correct, then that already opens up the floodgates to MWO becoming Pay 2 Win. Because once you take away that "Balance in Price and Cost," thanks to hard cash, then we have the P2W problem.

In my mind's eye, MechWarrior Online -will- encourage the use of Boating. Will it be effective? Maybe. Will there be means to counter it? Quite possibly. Will there be means to give players benefit of using multiple weapon-types on their mech? Jack-you-bet-cha. With the consideration of the Hard Point system in mind, where every mech can only have so many of any type of weapon at any time, will truly give this game its real balence. Sure, the Swayback can mount -six frickin medium lasers,- but thats 6 delicious medium lasers all mounted in a Sweet, sweet RT. Blow that RT out, and you cut its firepower efficiency down by 75%. There's also the fact that, since its a laser boat on its own, you can take some flamers to it, and make sure she's never back up and running anytime soon. "But what about Ballistic and Missile Boats?" What about them? Player maneuverability has shown us in both vids, and screenshots, that players can easily sway and dodge incoming missile fire by traveling toward the origin of the attack in any way, so long as its above ~50kph. As for Ballistics, given that there's some actual "Weapon convergence" going on, in which the fact the Atlas' AC/20 fires a little low and to the right of its Torso reticle (As displayed in the Assault Developer Breakdown) as well as the Hunchback firing a little above and to the right of the reticle (As displayed in the Medium Developer Breakdown). With this factor, compounded on the fact that torso aiming is slower than Arm aiming, may allow players to dodge those specific mounted weapons. HOwever, for efficiency vs mechs like Cataphract and Centurion, with their own powerfully arm-mounted weapons, we'll have to see how those battles pan out.

[Riptor]

You have to keep in mind that in other games heat was done very very poorly.

Your standard mech with 10 heat sinks could only fire 3 medium lasers before reaching his heat treshold, if he continued to use any other weapons he would go over it and suffer negative consequences.

In no mechwarrior game to date had heat such a drastic impact on the gameplay... sure it was there but how often realistically did anyone blow themselves up due to heat?

There also where no ammo explosions... your mech never got slower as heat build up.. your sensors and thus your hitting chance was never effected in any way or form.

Heat is the way to go to balance the ammo based weapons against the energy weapons and make both viable.

If you want an energy weapon heavy loadout you gonna need lots of heat sinks wich means less tonnage for other stuff... if you take ammo based weapons not so much but need to atleast take one ton of ammo... wich you save by yanking out any extra heatsinks you might have and dont need.

Also the no limits customsisation system is a horrible horrible idea because it renders different chassis and variants of the same mech/tonnage absolutely void because what you do is essentially making all the mechs of a given tonnage THE SAME, just looks different.

We are allready given a huge amount of freedom in customisation and if i have learned one thing then that there is no "be all end all" loadout for any given mech since it highly depends on the pilot how he handles the tools given to him

Edited by Riptor, 04 June 2012 - 01:28 AM.

[Kanatta Jing]

But so far we've only seen MC (Hard Currency) being good for buying Mechs and presumably premium time.

Equipment looks like it costs C-bills.

[Black Dragon EnDrakus]

Talynn DeRaa, on 04 June 2012 - 01:24 AM, said:

If what you say is correct, then that already opens up the floodgates to MWO becoming Pay 2 Win. Because once you take away that "Balance in Price and Cost," thanks to hard cash, then we have the P2W problem.

In my mind's eye, MechWarrior Online -will- encourage the use of Boating. Will it be effective? Maybe. Will there be means to counter it? Quite possibly. Will there be means to give players benefit of using multiple weapon-types on their mech? Jack-you-bet-cha. With the consideration of the Hard Point system in mind, where every mech can only have so many of any type of weapon at any time, will truly give this game its real balence. Sure, the Swayback can mount -six frickin medium lasers,- but thats 6 delicious medium lasers all mounted in a Sweet, sweet RT. Blow that RT out, and you cut its firepower efficiency down by 75%. There's also the fact that, since its a laser boat on its own, you can take some flamers to it, and make sure she's never back up and running anytime soon. "But what about Ballistic and Missile Boats?" What about them? Player maneuverability has shown us in both vids, and screenshots, that players can easily sway and dodge incoming missile fire by traveling toward the origin of the attack in any way, so long as its above ~50kph. As for Ballistics, given that there's some actual "Weapon convergence" going on, in which the fact the Atlas' AC/20 fires a little low and to the right of its Torso reticle (As displayed in the Assault Developer Breakdown) as well as the Hunchback firing a little above and to the right of the reticle (As displayed in the Medium Developer Breakdown). With this factor, compounded on the fact that torso aiming is slower than Arm aiming, may allow players to dodge those specific mounted weapons. HOwever, for efficiency vs mechs like Cataphract and Centurion, with their own powerfully arm-mounted weapons, we'll have to see how those battles pan out.

I like this explaination, another thing to keep in mind, heavy weapons loads in mech arms are actually very vulnerable becuase the arms are easy to damage or destroy with broadside attacks, and they have much less armor than the torso, so I could disarm a Dragon's arm mounted AC 10 easier than I could a Hunchie's torso mounted AC 5

[Talynn DeRaa]

Kanatta Jing, on 04 June 2012 - 01:29 AM, said:

But so far we've only seen MC (Hard Currency) being good for buying Mechs and presumably premium time.

Equipment looks like it costs C-bills.

Only running a hypothesis on that one. My real statement lies in the rest of my post.

Then again, all of this is highly hypothetical and only theoretical. Until we actually see what this game has to offer, for present and future, we can only speculate, and spin our own fantasies.

My own fantasy is that MechWarrior Online will have its balance within heat management, the Pilot and Mech skill tree system, and Role Warfare. They keep pressing that this is no longer an Arms Race, and in order for that fact to strike home, the newest elements to MechWarrior must be the ones that dominate the balance, and/or mentality we've all so harbored in games of old.

[Gu4rdi4n]

Why limit options, just curtail them correctly, like in the imaginary wallet.

Would the balance be correctly represented in this matter if customerisation would be expensive.

If you would actually kill said # boat, it being a laser or LRM boat, said person or clan would loose a hell of a lot more credits than a stock mech.

Yes boating would be an option, but a correctly setup counter would see said boating clan loose way more than say 3 full battles of stock mechs.

Don't say it should be removed, via hardpoints or whatever, just make it viable but limited by resources. If MWO would be used by a league(s) and they use factories and resources, clan wars would limit boating hugely.

I.e. say said X factories on planet Y could make 12 med mechs of a partically design and loadout per month, but the newly conquering clan would only want boats of that design (say a vulture) the factories would need more time and resources to build said mechs. The X factories would only be able to make 4 mechs as boat loadout per month. This means not only said mechs were 3x more expensive, but it would take 3x as long to build 12 mechs.

Boating is fine, if the financials would limit it so excess wouldnt be seen in battles or leagues.
I.e. In randoms it would cost just 3x much to customise your whole mech to become a boat.

My 2 cents.

[Faenwulf]

I don't think (Laser) Boating will be a big problem. Going by the videos released so far, just look at the heat bar while they are firing the lasers. Thats a ******* big amount of heat produced! ( which is good, imho)
This would mean that you either need to pick some other weapons that generate less heat to have a somewhat good fire rate or you need to pasue for a long tiem before firing again ( which will make you vulnerable against faster mechs).
Again, you could just load tons more heat sinks, but that would limit your lasers too because of the weight you need to add.

That said, as already pointed out in this topic, Missiles and Cannon shots seem to be things one can evade more or less easily, so Cannon and Missile Boating shouldn't be a problem because its not as viable, especially again versus fast mechs.
( Not to mention the lots and lots of ammo you would need to load and that could explode beneath your butt)

Edited by Faenwulf, 04 June 2012 - 01:57 AM.

[Zso Sahal]

You (OP) use the term MUST entirely too much. Its ok to be opinionated, but presenting your ideas and opinions as facts is just crass.

I'll debate your post point by point once I've made some coffee.

[Talynn DeRaa]

Faenwulf, on 04 June 2012 - 01:53 AM, said:

I don't think (Laser) Boating will be a big problem. Going by the videos released so far, just look at the heat bar while they are firing the lasers. Thats a ******* big amount of heat produced! ( which is good, imho)
This would mean that you either need to pick some other weapons that generate less heat to have a somewhat good fire rate or you need to pasue for a long tiem before firing again ( which will make you vulnerable against faster mechs).
Again, you could just load tons more heat sinks, but that would limit your lasers too because of the weight you need to add.

That said, as already pointed out in this topic, Missiles and Cannon shots seem to be things one can evade more or less easily, so Cannon and Missile Boating shouldn't be a problem because its not as viable, especially again versus fast mechs.
( Not to mention the lots and lots of ammo you would need to load and that could explode beneath your butt)

This is very true. Not to mention you'd need CASE for every area you store that Ammo in...Right? I can't remember the specific mechanics of CASE. I always thought it worked like Artemis IV, one Artemis for every different missile launcher type on that mech.

That said, there's also an additional factor about lasers: They aren't instantaneous like they are in all the previous MechWarrior titles. Think MW3's Pulse Laser, but shortened to 2 or so seconds, with its damaged (and heat) transferred over time. This can mean, especially against fast mechs, an inability to actually hold a consistent beam. People may opt to PPC boat over lasers for Effect, which means more heat generated, and the possibility of being far more vulnerable to having those weapons denied through destroying where they are fixed.

[Phaid Knott]

Perhaps increasing the repair costs for every weapon system that changed from the stock version might be an answer?

Would allow players the freedom to choose what they want, but also make it ecomonically viable if you "nerf" yourself by playing a stock mech.

[Kargush]