45 replies to this topic

[Frostiken]

Roland, on 07 June 2012 - 06:46 AM, said:

Those kind of tradeoffs are what make mechwarrior a great game.

The problem is that the 'tradeoffs' have absolutely zero correlation with anything. Yeah, the Timberwolf is super-powerful, so an Achilles heel like that might 'fit', but the TRO artists never stopped to consider 'hey, why is this mech so damn big for a 40 tonner' because it was irrelevant.

For every mech that deserves to have a weak point because of its strengths, there's a mech that isn't that great and is getting screwed over. The Hollander, for example - destroying the right torso destroys basically its entire armament, and you can hit that thing from ANY angle. And the Hollander seriously doesn't deserve a huge weakness like that, not for how little you get out of it.

Quote

You have called me names now, have called other people names in other threads, and create posts that are hyperbole. I am sick of your negative attitude and how you look down on people who don't agree with you.

I didn't call you names. I said everything you have to say is useless drivel. Your entire "argument" is that this isn't MWLL and therefore there's zero chance at all that this will ever be a problem!If you can't understand why something that ended up being a big problem in MWLL could possibly be a problem in another mech game that's running basically on the same engine and thus will handle hit detection the same way, then there's no help for you.

Instead of bring a colossal useless bore in this thread, how about you go find every single thread where people talk about Mechwarrior 4 and spew your nonsense in those too.

All I'm trying to do is bring focus to a problem that has existed before in the hopes that it will get some understanding / attention. All you're doing is sh*tting in threads just to argue with people. We call people like you trolls.

Edited by Frostiken, 07 June 2012 - 06:58 AM.

[Judge Doug]

Frostiken, on 07 June 2012 - 06:52 AM, said:

Instead of bring a colossal useless bore in this thread, how about you go find every single thread where people talk about Mechwarrior 4 and spew your nonsense in those too.

All I'm trying to do is bring focus to a problem that has existed before in the hopes that it will get some understanding / attention. All you're doing is sh*tting in threads just to argue with people. We call people like you trolls.

Poppin' my forum cherry here. Glad to know this game will be full of hot tempered childish teabaggers. Yay!

[Nik Van Rhijn]

I would hope that enough experienced players are in the closed Beta to determine if there are any glaring geometry problems with any of the mech designs. I'm not sure how many mechs they actually have to play with. The only ones I've seen in the videos are the Jenner, Hunchback, Catapult and Atlas. That doesn't actually give them much time to get the other 8 mechs in the game and tested before the Founders start in mid July.

[EagleFire]

Yea that's Frostiken. He's been warned and banned several times on the MWLL forums for posts just like this. Either you agree with him, or you are a borish troll out to get him. Even if he does have good points, he's just too much of a tactless boar to defend his ideas in a way that might sway someone's opinion rather than escalate it into a flame fest that ends with a ban for him.

[Billy Taylor]

EagleFire, on 07 June 2012 - 08:04 AM, said:

Yea that's Frostiken. He's been warned and banned several times on the MWLL forums for posts just like this. Either you agree with him, or you are a borish troll out to get him. Even if he does have good points, he's just too much of a tactless boar to defend his ideas in a way that might sway someone's opinion rather than escalate it into a flame fest that ends with a ban for him.

Hey now, don't be ******** on him. Frostiken whilst generally a ***** spouting gibbert, was one of the few people to actually buck the sycophantic trend of analingus on the MWLL forums. I'd say he's raised a fair concern here and something the development team of this "ftp cashcow omg turbo mechfigher go EX Edition" would benifit from listening to.

But until I've actually played I cannot comment fully, but it WAS (and still is to a degree) an issue on MWLL, so comparitively speaking I could see it potentially being a problem here.

One love and ting, yadda yadaddadadada

[Roland]

Hey now folks, I know folks are getting a little tense from staring at that pending button for weeks, but let's not start freaking out at each other. We're all cool here, right? No reason to start screaming at each other and getting the thread locked.

Frostiken, on 07 June 2012 - 06:52 AM, said:

The problem is that the 'tradeoffs' have absolutely zero correlation with anything. Yeah, the Timberwolf is super-powerful, so an Achilles heel like that might 'fit', but the TRO artists never stopped to consider 'hey, why is this mech so damn big for a 40 tonner' because it was irrelevant.

For every mech that deserves to have a weak point because of its strengths, there's a mech that isn't that great and is getting screwed over. The Hollander, for example - destroying the right torso destroys basically its entire armament, and you can hit that thing from ANY angle. And the Hollander seriously doesn't deserve a huge weakness like that, not for how little you get out of it.

Well, in MW4 the hollander wasn't that crappy a mech... was basically a less robust hunchback in a lot of ways. And its profile was good deal thinner than the hunchback.

What you "got" for having the big gun on your shoulder was the ability to have a big freaking gun on a tiny 35 ton mech. I mean, honestly, having a mech that was only 35 tons but could field basically any ballistic weapon in the game wasn't a trivial aspect. It was part of what gave the hollander its identity. The trade off to that capability came in the form of having all your eggs in one basket, to some extent.

I haven't seen any renderings of the Hollander in MWO yet, have they announced such a mech? If not I'm not sure we can really make comments regarding its geometry at all, much less its hit box locations.

[Nik Van Rhijn]

No anouncements yet - although a number of people are looking at the Hunchback with a Gauss. That extra 15 tons makes it much more surviveable and capable of carrying more ammo to extend its usefulness. You can up the speed without an XL engine to help it out for flanking with EndoSteel. It very much comes down to how things play out. I'm hoping that mediums will have advantages on things like angle and speed of torso twist, acceleration etc to assist in their survivability.

[Solis Obscuri]

Geez, what possible advantage will there be to piloting an XL-engined superheavy Assault gunbag with armor and weapons amounting to 3x the total mass of a scout 'mech if it doesn't have a smaller target profile than the scout too?

[Leanansidhe]

From Mechs to Forum Epenis in 2 pages.

[Judge Doug]

I would hope the 60 experienced developers of Piranha games and the thousands of Beta testers providing literally millions of lines of logging data indicating which weapon, which angle, what distance, what area hit, etc, will reveal deficiencies in 'mech designs and will allow appropriate adjustments.

In the above I trust; in some fussy random dude on teh internets I do not.

[LordDeathStrike]

Frostiken, on 06 June 2012 - 10:49 AM, said:

An oft-overlooked aspect of mech design, mostly because it's irrelevant in tabletop, is the physical size of a mech.

MWLL learned this lesson the hard way, with several units simply being so large (and in the case of the Shadowcat, so small) that you were at a massive disadvantage / advantage by piloting physically larger / smaller mechs or vehicles.

This is hardly a matter of 'intentional design', as mechs have to look like their original drawings (otherwise what's the point), and they just drew whatever they wanted back then. However, we ended up with mechs like the Uziel, which had massively oversized side torsos and were impossible to miss, making it a deathtrap. The Owens design made it laughably easy to leg, as from the side it was leg almost the entire way up. The Mad Dog's missile racks, like the Uziel, are such a huge target you literally cannot miss them.

MWLL redesigned a couple but in general refused to 'fudge' armor just armor values to balance them out, so the Shadowcat is still ridiculous hard to hit.

Is there any consideration for this in MWO?

first, the shadow cat isnt hard to hit, i hit bas as they jump around, get some skill at shooting things.

second i have yet to see a mech badly out of proportion to what its supposed to look like. the uziel pops when hit because its armor value is crap. if your vulture is getting hit youre playing it wrong, its either 4 lrm 20s and bombing at 1k or srm boat sneaking up behind the enemy position and unloading into their rears and then dieing in a blaze of ****** glory as you take out 4-5 of them.

the only things off in mwll, are the cockpits because the engine doesnt let them render nice glass, and the weapons all being super pinpoint accurate and mw4 ranged. honestly mwo has gone out of their way to give weapons more drift and shot lag so you cant focus 10 weapons into 1 spot consistently all day long.

[JazzySteel]

BDU Havoc, on 06 June 2012 - 11:28 AM, said:

I think the easiest thing to do for the "pods" of certain 'Mechs is have their armor included in LT/RT armor. The Catapult doesn't really follow this model, since it has no arms the missile pods are just considered arms. TWolf, Vulture and other designs that have missile pods on their shoulders or shields on their arms (MW4's Black Knight) should just have those considered extensions of the torso/arm they're attached to. IMO.

Sounds good in theory. But with this setup, a Timberwolf with an XL engine is screwed. Unless, the devs gave it a seperate hitbox like MWLL did, but instead of making you put armor there, just give it the same Armor level as the LT and RT.

[Frostiken]

LordDeathStrike, on 07 June 2012 - 08:35 PM, said:

first, the shadow cat isnt hard to hit, i hit bas as they jump around, get some skill at shooting things.

I believe I said it was harder to hit. Which it is. A physically smaller unit with comparatively smaller hitboxes is harder to hit. This is a fact of, well, reality. Your personal opinion based on your own skills are irrelevant to this matter.

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the uziel pops when hit because its armor value is crap

No, it popped because the armor was crap and it was oversized.

You do realize the MWLL devs put new mech development on hold so that they could remodel and reskin a handful of the oversized mechs, right? And they fudged a bit of the armor distribution on others to help cover certain over-vulnerable areas? Are you saying you think the devs themselves didn't know what they were doing when they downsized the Uziel?

Pay special attention to the size of the Shadowcat's torso compared to, say, the Osiris or the Kit Fox.



Yeah, I can't see any reason at all as to why anyone could ever think that a mech MASCing around at 120kph could possibly have an advantage because of its physically smaller hitbox. Also, notice the Uziel with a torso the size of an Atlas.

Never in the history of videogaming has a physically smaller hitbox been considered an advantage. Everyone should've just LERN 2 PLAY.

Edited by Frostiken, 08 June 2012 - 11:32 AM.

[UncleKulikov]

The nice thing about 3d models is that they can be scaled to fit whatever balance issues are discovered.

Or for a more subtle gesture, the mech chassis in question could receive bonus unalterable armor for the extra vulnerable locations depending on how bad the disadvantage is. I'm thinking the Stalker's side view personally.

[Ghost]

Cool your jets, Frostiken. Can't you just agree to disagree? Maybe a little time out is in order.

[jlbdeath]

at a 100 tons it should be easy to hit and at a 57 kph it should be very easy to hit. now at 25 ton a 1/4 of the size its got to be smaller and harder to hit. it would be unfair to have a jenner the same size as a Atlas. from every thing I have seen from the vids it looks very balanced.

[Tyra]

Thread title is misleading. I thought it was talking about relative sizes of mechs to each other matching better.

The real issue is with hitboxes and oversized individual elements on the mech.

[Kyle Hawkins]

Ghost, on 08 June 2012 - 01:19 PM, said:

Cool your jets, Frostiken. Can't you just agree to disagree? Maybe a little time out is in order.

Agree to disagree with what though? I've just read through all this and everything he's said makes plenty of sense. Spare the irate tone that came out when Orion Pirate came in solely to denounce the discussion/concerns as pointless, he's said nothing wrong. I don't know Frostiken's history here or elsewhere, but it would help if we all start focusing on what's said a little more, and less on who said it. It's suddenly became something of a band wagon. '-'

Going back to the post that started the fuss...

Orion Pirate, on 06 June 2012 - 01:24 PM, said:

Mech size concerns...

Are unfounded. No matter what you do, something will be easier to hit then something else, unless all the mechs look exactly the same.

Is that what you want?

Say that again a few months down the line when the full game is out and underway. This kind of thread WILL turn up again, talking about something more specific next time with people clamoring for a fix.

It's not unfounded, its a valid concern and a repeatedly proven and significant issue in Mech Warrior games. It's one I trust the Piranha devs to be aware of and doing their best with, but it's also one that the MWLL devs were aware of too and still made mistakes and had to put special thought into fixing latter on. One might say that all of these "concern threads" about some gameplay or balance issue are largely wasted idle keystrokes whilst waiting for the game since they're unlikely to change anything, but some issues have already been shown to have been noticed by the devs and confirmed fixed or under their attention. And what else are we meant to talk about? (The AC20 velocity in the first teaser vid for example)

Things don't have to be wildly unbalanced to keep the mechs unique. No one's asking for all mechs to be equal and identical (certainly not). There are plenty of subtle fixes that can be made to hitbox areas and minor model sizing tweeks that can be made without harming the mech's character. Since honestly, look at all the official artwork for mechs. Most of them are about as consistent and precisely drawn as a set factory mis-shapes. There's room for adjustment.

[Ghogiel]

Frostiken, on 08 June 2012 - 11:20 AM, said:

Pay special attention to the size of the Shadowcat's torso compared to, say, the Osiris or the Kit Fox.

What Frostiken fails to mention is that since this image was made, many moons ago,the Uziel has had a size decrease and the Shadwowcat had a size increase.

[Hanged Man]

It seems like the OP's concern has more to do with the shape than size of most 'Mechs, barring modeling foulups that place a given chassis badly out-of-scale with other 'Mechs its size. Since that's impossible to predict, we're left with the fact that some designs have locations that are out of proportion to the rest in a way that's exploitable when targeting them. I don't have a good answer for this, it's a problem as old as 3D Mechwarrior games. I certainly don't think giving problem 'Mechs an armor advantage is the answer, and hope that the targeting system in place already is sufficient to obviate the issue. I'm sure they've given this some thought because of headshots, and look forward to seeing how it shakes out in-game.