43 replies to this topic

[Teralitha]

You cannot center this games balance on anything else. There needs to be only 1 heat scale, not 2, and with penalties, because only 1 will be the balanced one, and the other secondary scale cannot be.

If all other metrics are balanced around the first heat scale, then a second heat scale with different values upsets the balance between all the other metrics that were balanced based on the first heat scale.


What are these?

Single heat sinks
Double heat sinks

In order to balance the game, one of them has to go. Cant have both and have a balanced game. Its impossible.

There should only be... "heat sinks", with set, unchanging values that all other metrics are balanced on. The game cannot be balanced until a singular heat scale value is set in stone, and henceforth never changes from here on out.

This post is mainly directed at the developers but anyone is free to discuss and debate as you wish.

Edited by Teralitha, 17 July 2013 - 06:26 PM.

[Onmyoudo]

Don't forget the basic efficiency, and how it gets doubled after you've elited the chassis.

At this point, it's been essentially proven that SHS are worthless for anything that's not running dual Gauss. If they made a standard "Heat Sink" with Double values it might make balancing easier for them, but realistically I think everthing is just balanced for Doubles anyway and Singles are left to suffer. Until you get 1.5mil CBills and upgrade immediately, that is.

[Echo6]

Teralitha, on 29 April 2013 - 04:11 AM, said:

You cannot center this games balance on anything else. There needs to be only 1 heat scale, not 2. because only 1 will be the balanced one, and the other secondary scale cannot be.

If all other metrics are balanced around the first heat scale, then a second heat scale with different values upsets the balance between all the other metrics that were balanced based on the first heat scale.


What are these?

Single heat sinks
Double heat sinks

In order to balance the game, one of them has to go. Cant have both and have a balanced game. Its impossible.

There should only be... "heat sinks", with set, unchanging values that all other metrics are balanced on. The game cannot be balanced until a singular heat scale value is set in stone, and henceforth never changes from here on out.

This post is mainly directed at the developers and not meant for redundant debate/discussion with the rest of the player base, but your free to post anything you want anyway.

I've never understood why weapons fire can't be slowed down to once per 10 seconds. Does anybody have a reason for this, other than "well, Reasons, duh!"?

[Relic1701]

Echo6, on 29 April 2013 - 05:43 AM, said:

I've never understood why weapons fire can't be slowed down to once per 10 seconds. Does anybody have a reason for this, other than "well, Reasons, duh!"?

Slow and boring gameplay with nobody ever overheating....

[Anton Shiningstar]

Echo6, on 29 April 2013 - 05:43 AM, said:

I've never understood why weapons fire can't be slowed down to once per 10 seconds. Does anybody have a reason for this, other than "well, Reasons, duh!"?

Because that would be to slow a rate of fire. The rate of fire was made rapid enough to feel like it is live action but the heat was left at the silly TT fluff rate of 10 seconds. Rates of fore were increased by 2.5-3.0 times. Increase Heat dispersion to 5.0 seconds and things will be much better for Sock Mechs.

Edited by Anton Shiningstar, 29 April 2013 - 05:49 AM.

[Teralitha]

Onmyoudo, on 29 April 2013 - 05:30 AM, said:

Don't forget the basic efficiency, and how it gets doubled after you've elited the chassis.

At this point, it's been essentially proven that SHS are worthless for anything that's not running dual Gauss. If they made a standard "Heat Sink" with Double values it might make balancing easier for them, but realistically I think everthing is just balanced for Doubles anyway and Singles are left to suffer. Until you get 1.5mil CBills and upgrade immediately, that is.

That is where you are incorrect. The DHS value is currently the broken one. SHS values are what the game was designed around originally and are actually fairly balanced as is, and no, the SHS is not worthless for anything but guass, that is an absolutely ignorant assumption.

People that prefer the arcade version of mechwarrior will hate having to deal with heat managment and oppose this suggestion fiercely, while the thinking man shooter type will appreciate the game alot more with the heat managment skill back in the game.(and knockdowns)

Edited by Teralitha, 29 April 2013 - 07:41 AM.

[Echo6]

Relic1701, on 29 April 2013 - 05:48 AM, said:

Slow and boring gameplay with nobody ever overheating....

Anton Shiningstar, on 29 April 2013 - 05:48 AM, said:

Because that would be to slow a rate of fire. The rate of fire was made rapid enough to feel like it is live action but the heat was left at the silly TT fluff rate of 10 seconds. Rates of fore were increased by 2.5-3.0 times. Increase Heat dispersion to 5.0 seconds and things will be much better for Sock Mechs.

So, because REASONS, got it.

[Roadbeer]

Echo6, on 29 April 2013 - 12:58 PM, said:

So, because REASONS, got it.

Looks to me like they answered your question. Slow, boring game play.... what more were you looking for?

[Echo6]

Roadbeer, on 29 April 2013 - 01:02 PM, said:

Looks to me like they answered your question. Slow, boring game play.... what more were you looking for?

I don't understand why it would be boring; this reason is being stated without being justified. I think it'd be pretty interesting.

I mean the question is: too slow for what? For a battlemech? Seems just right to me.

Edited by Echo6, 29 April 2013 - 02:57 PM.

[Roadbeer]

Firing once every 10 seconds seems right?
Count that down or use a stopwatch...

I'll wait. Let me know how that'd work out in an 'action' game.

Now, keep in mind, if you're going to change RoF to the 10 second rule, you have to do the same with movement and everything else.

Ok, start your watch...
Now

[Homeless Bill]

Echo6, on 29 April 2013 - 02:57 PM, said:

I don't understand why it would be boring; this reason is being stated without being justified. I think it'd be pretty interesting.

I mean the question is: too slow for what? For a battlemech? Seems just right to me.

Have you ever dropped on Alpine? We don't need to triple out fight times as well. Reasons why having such a low rate of fire would be bad:
1. Capwarrior - You'd see an explosive increase in capturing. Because battles would be so prolonged, you'd see a lot of 'mechs bailing out to go capture. It wouldn't get a ton worse, but you wouldn't see the 2ML zombie warriors stick around like they do today.
2. New Player Pwnage - I know how to torso twist, and I'm really good at it; new players aren't. I know when someone's about to fire, I have a good guess about what they want to hit, and I know which way to turn to make that not happen. If I only had to worry about that a half or a third as much as I do now, I'd have an even larger advantage over poor newbies that actually face their target at all times.
3. Alpha Strike Madness - Think massive alpha builds / poptarts are a problem now? Wait until your reduce rate of fire essentially mandates high-alpha, pinpoint damage for competitive play (much more than even now).
4. Boring - Speaking from a strictly subjective point of view, I would no longer enjoy the pacing. Right now (poptarts / alpha maniacs aside, and even with them), the game strikes a good balance between being able to take some punishment but never feeling safe. You may find it enjoyable, but I'd be somewhere between angry it takes so long to kill people and sleepy because the tension evaporated.

#3 and #4 are probably mutually exclusive scenarios. If alpha strikes are left untouched, #3 would happen and that would be it. If alpha strikes were countered to accommodate the new pacing, #4 is the more likely alternative.

[Echo6]

Homeless Bill, on 29 April 2013 - 05:21 PM, said:

Have you ever dropped on Alpine? We don't need to triple out fight times as well. Reasons why having such a low rate of fire would be bad:
1. Capwarrior - You'd see an explosive increase in capturing. Because battles would be so prolonged, you'd see a lot of 'mechs bailing out to go capture. It wouldn't get a ton worse, but you wouldn't see the 2ML zombie warriors stick around like they do today.
2. New Player Pwnage - I know how to torso twist, and I'm really good at it; new players aren't. I know when someone's about to fire, I have a good guess about what they want to hit, and I know which way to turn to make that not happen. If I only had to worry about that a half or a third as much as I do now, I'd have an even larger advantage over poor newbies that actually face their target at all times.
3. Alpha Strike Madness - Think massive alpha builds / poptarts are a problem now? Wait until your reduce rate of fire essentially mandates high-alpha, pinpoint damage for competitive play (much more than even now).
4. Boring - Speaking from a strictly subjective point of view, I would no longer enjoy the pacing. Right now (poptarts / alpha maniacs aside, and even with them), the game strikes a good balance between being able to take some punishment but never feeling safe. You may find it enjoyable, but I'd be somewhere between angry it takes so long to kill people and sleepy because the tension evaporated.

#3 and #4 are probably mutually exclusive scenarios. If alpha strikes are left untouched, #3 would happen and that would be it. If alpha strikes were countered to accommodate the new pacing, #4 is the more likely alternative.

The problem with alpha strikes isn't that they occur... it's that they occur three times within 10 seconds.

[Teralitha]

Echo6, on 29 April 2013 - 02:57 PM, said:

I don't understand why it would be boring; this reason is being stated without being justified. I think it'd be pretty interesting.

I mean the question is: too slow for what? For a battlemech? Seems just right to me.

For an FPS game, 10 seconds is far too long for weapon recycling. people have short attention spans. I would say 6-7 seconds tops on the slowest rate of fire weapon.

[Duncan Fisher]

While I'm guessing there is about a 0.01% chance that double heat sinks will be removed, given that they are a significant part of BT canon, I think it would be great if they at least got rid of the double engine heat sinks. Getting +.4 free heat sink at the expense of 2 crit slots seems like a balanced trade off, but right now DHS essentially gives you 10 tons back at the cost of 0 crit slots (since just about any viable build can benefit significantly from having 20 heat sinks instead of 10), which is absurd. Without these 10 free heat sinks, heat management would play a much bigger factor in combat, and I think it would bring the PPC into line, in addition to adding overall depth to the combat mechanics.

While it might not be canon, I think that if they removed the 2.0 engine heat sinks for DHS (leave them as singles), it might even make sense to bring the additional DHS's up from 1.4 to 2.0, since you still have to sacrifice triple the crit space.



I'd also add that the mere existence of 2 different "heat scales" in no way upsets the balance of the game in and of itself. There is essentially only 1 "heat scale" anyway, that of double heat sinks. Since every mech can equip DHS, it is balanced in that regard. Sure, if you don't have 1.5 million extra cbills you are at a severe disadvantage, but everything else you would upgrade costs cills as well, so you should just view that as an extra cost when buying a new mech (if you want to play "competitively"). Removing single heat sinks would be like removing flamers or small pulse lasers; it would change nothing in overall balance, since you only find them being used by new/poor/troll players or in trial mechs (which basically suck beyond salvation anyway compared to a custom build), so it is silly to come to the conclusion that if we remove one of the "heat scales" (single heat sinks) it would help in balancing the game.

Since I heard that I've become a hated enemy of House Jurai ( ), I figured I should point out that your argument is horribly flawed: A singular heat scale is for all intents and purposes already set in stone, and clearly the existence of two separate heat scales itself is in no way upsetting the balance of the game.

I think that what you are really driving at though is that the current implementation of double heat sinks are negatively impacting game balance, which I believe is a valid point of view, however your claim in this specific thread is just flat out wrong.

Edited by Duncan Fisher, 30 April 2013 - 01:16 AM.

[stjobe]

A RoF of once per 10 seconds could actually work, people seem to equate a RoF of 10s with "I can only fire once per 10 seconds" when it would actually mean "I can only fire each of my weapons once per 10s".

Let's take the stock CN9-A as example; it has an AC/10, two MLs, and an LRM-10. It could fire one of these weapons every 2.5 seconds.

A 6-ML Jenner could chain-fire its MLs once every 1.7 seconds.

Not that I actually advocate going to a once-per-10-seconds RoF, but I felt it needed to be clarified.

As for the topic, yes, heat is broken. However, it's not the fault of the DHS, and blaming it is nonsensical.

What is broken is a number of things:
* The heat cap is way too high, and adding heat sinks raises the heat cap
* Heat generation works on a different time-scale than heat dissipation.
* Rate of Fire was tripled, heat dissipation was not.
* There's no heat penalties besides shutdown at 100% heat.

Adjusting these to fix the heat cap in place, not allowing heat sinks to raise it (but allowing them to increase dissipation), increasing the per-heat sink dissipation to match the increased RoF, and introducing heat penalties would go a long way towards fixing the balance of the game.

Removing DHS though, would do nothing to address the underlying issue, whether or not it'd have an effect on the symptoms.

[Yokaiko]

Echo6, on 29 April 2013 - 05:43 AM, said:

I've never understood why weapons fire can't be slowed down to once per 10 seconds. Does anybody have a reason for this, other than "well, Reasons, duh!"?

Because it becomes a raw hardpoint game at that point, and it would be pretty boring.

[MustrumRidcully]

It is indeed impossible to balance double heat sinks with single heat sinks.

But you could try to balance all members of the pure single heat sink enviroment against each other, and then balance all the members of the double heat sink enviroment against each other, and just treat double heat sink vs single heat sink like you'd treat 1st level characters vs 10th level characters in table top games or RPGs.

PGI unfortunately is wishy-washy about what they want. The nerfed DHS, but that nerf hardly does anything to make DHS inferior to SHS. It just makes them a bit less superior. The only use that might have is that the game might appear to fast-paced with true DHS. (But giving that engine sinks are true DHS, they really only affected the top end).

Relic1701, on 29 April 2013 - 05:48 AM, said:

Slow and boring gameplay with nobody ever overheating....

Slow and boring perhaps. But 6 (ER) PPCs mechs would probably still be able to overheat.

The trick with the heat mechanics is - you are unlikely to ever create a system where mechs do not overheat if tricked out. mSure, you can buil a mech that is completely heat neutral or could cool off twice its weapon load. But that is an incredibly wasteful design that will killed by overheating monster simply because that overheating monster will deliver twice or more the damage in the same time as the cool mech does and kill it way before the cool mech can kill it.

And it might not even be slow and boring. How often can you fire a sniper rifle in an ego shooter? Say every 3 seconds. Now realize - in MW:O, our mechs are equipped with 4+ guns!
You just need to encourage chain-fire instead of alpha striking all the time. You can do that by:
Extreme Option: Not even allowing weapons to fire together and enforce a global cooldown between each shot.
Soft Option: A very low heat capacity so you must chain-fire to dissipate the heat of a weapon off before you can fire another one.

Edited by MustrumRidcully, 30 April 2013 - 03:55 AM.

[Teralitha]

Duncan Fisher, on 30 April 2013 - 12:57 AM, said:

While I'm guessing there is about a 0.01% chance that double heat sinks will be removed, given that they are a significant part of BT canon, I think it would be great if they at least got rid of the double engine heat sinks. Getting +.4 free heat sink at the expense of 2 crit slots seems like a balanced trade off, but right now DHS essentially gives you 10 tons back at the cost of 0 crit slots (since just about any viable build can benefit significantly from having 20 heat sinks instead of 10), which is absurd. Without these 10 free heat sinks, heat management would play a much bigger factor in combat, and I think it would bring the PPC into line, in addition to adding overall depth to the combat mechanics.

While it might not be canon, I think that if they removed the 2.0 engine heat sinks for DHS (leave them as singles), it might even make sense to bring the additional DHS's up from 1.4 to 2.0, since you still have to sacrifice triple the crit space.



I'd also add that the mere existence of 2 different "heat scales" in no way upsets the balance of the game in and of itself. There is essentially only 1 "heat scale" anyway, that of double heat sinks. Since every mech can equip DHS, it is balanced in that regard. Sure, if you don't have 1.5 million extra cbills you are at a severe disadvantage, but everything else you would upgrade costs cills as well, so you should just view that as an extra cost when buying a new mech (if you want to play "competitively"). Removing single heat sinks would be like removing flamers or small pulse lasers; it would change nothing in overall balance, since you only find them being used by new/poor/troll players or in trial mechs (which basically suck beyond salvation anyway compared to a custom build), so it is silly to come to the conclusion that if we remove one of the "heat scales" (single heat sinks) it would help in balancing the game.

Since I heard that I've become a hated enemy of House Jurai ( ), I figured I should point out that your argument is horribly flawed: A singular heat scale is for all intents and purposes already set in stone, and clearly the existence of two separate heat scales itself is in no way upsetting the balance of the game.

I think that what you are really driving at though is that the current implementation of double heat sinks are negatively impacting game balance, which I believe is a valid point of view, however your claim in this specific thread is just flat out wrong.

With the way they have the upgrade of DHS implemented, and the differences between SHS values and DHS values, if they were to make engine HS set to only the SHS values, then they would have to program it so that both types of heat sinks will work together on the same mech with 2 different values at the same time. I am referring to the capacity and dissipation rates.

Due to this complexity of coding such a change and PGI's track record of taking the lazy way out in implementing things, I went with suggesting to just remove DHS. And then buffing SHS a bit, and just call then .. "heat sinks" rather than single or double. Keep in mind we dont have to stick to canon, this game is an open slate.

I have no idea how you got the idea that HJ hates you. Thats news to me anyway... I think you are just trying to flatter yourself....

Edited by Teralitha, 01 May 2013 - 06:16 AM.

[Teralitha]

stjobe, on 30 April 2013 - 01:24 AM, said:

Removing DHS though, would do nothing to address the underlying issue, whether or not it'd have an effect on the symptoms.

Actually, DHS.... ARE the underlying problem.

Edited by Teralitha, 17 July 2013 - 06:29 PM.

[Yokaiko]

Teralitha, on 01 May 2013 - 06:06 AM, said:

Actually, removing DHS would solve many balance problems. And its not like SHS couldnt be buffed a teeny tiny bit.

At ten seconds you don''t NEED double heatsinks, a stock Awesome -8Q would be able to fire all three PPCs at rate for like 10 minutes for it even got hot.