Thomas Hogarth, on 28 May 2013 - 07:37 PM, said:
As it stands right now, I have difficulty hitting the CT of a Jenner moving full tilt at range. The shot may hit the arm closest to me, or the torso closest to me, or occasionally the leg, but I generally will hit. I give it about a 70-80% chance. Since I've gone to the dark side of abusing the customization aspect of the game, I will be hitting with enough firepower to damage that Jenner to a huge degree, probably going into internal in one focused shot.
And I am either somewhat below average in skill, or merely average in skill. Remember this, I'll bring it up later.
While you could argue that my skill goes into hitting that Jenner, the real test of skill is in making shots hit that important CT(or side, in case of XL). I think you'd have a hard time finding someone that did not possess enough skill to reliably hit a 'Mech anywhere on it's hitbox. although there was that one Heavy Metal driver today... but that was an outlier, by far most pilots can hit a target.
The "skill" comes from being able to target a specific section of a 'Mech. And that would indeed be an impressive amount of skill... if most players weren't capable of doing the same thing. As I said before, I'm either below average or average, and hitting the CT of most targets is a laughable breeze.
Introducing inaccuracy - be it through cone of fire or some combination of inventive mechanics - does not remove skill. It changes what defines skill. In other words, it's the questions that are asked to define skill that are changed:
"Can you hit the CT of an enemy at least somewhat reliably?"
to
"Can you hit an enemy at least somewhat reliably?"
In a FPS game, that's not the biggest difference in the world. In a game with an HTAL armor layout, that's a huge difference, and the answer to why it's needed.
I still kinda fail to see how this would prevent people going the huge-alpa sniper builds instead of doing quite the oposite?
Since you know you won't be able to hit most of the time no matter how good your aim is - the hell with it - let's just mount 4/5/6 (ER)PPCs, or 3/4 of them with a Gauss Rifle and make that random hit *somewhere* just counts the most.
We've never seen the way that one works out, haven't we?
Oh.. wait
Cause I've been playing Counter Strike alot - by a lot I mean on a descent tournament level - if you're trying to say that making the weapons act similar like they do in CS would make this game better I'm ready to start a very nasty argue about it.
The weapon in this game doesn't have the same fire rate like the most weapons in CS for example - you can't affort to miss 3 of 5 from the 200 shots you got, considering you're playing against 8 ppl( *soon* 12 ), not small teams like 3/4/5/6.
Not to mention that this difference itself(introducing the 12 ppl teams) would push people even more toward the using of hard hitting energy weapons like the PPCs seens they require no ammo... I don't really want to start imagine how worse the things would get if no matter what you do there would be uncertainty about where the shot will hit...
People never get tired of cheating.
That's one of the reasons the game is in the current poptart/PPC/AC40 boating hell.
The other one is that a lot of people are ready to do just about
EVERYTHING just in the name of winning.
The third one is that cheating leads to higher kill rates and victory rates.
To define cheating - some weakness, flaw in the game mechanics, that's allowing something to be a WAY better than all the other choices you can make in a game, that's claimed balanced.
At least that's how's the things for me.
I don't cheat. I don't use ******** poptart/PPC/AC-boating builds. I don't exploit jumpjetting, none-or-almost-none existing hitboxes, lagshields, etc. etc. - I've never done that (if you cut the 2/3 times I was intrigued what's the big deal about those things).
Because in the first place of my top priority list about this game stays the following simple words:
"Just Have Fun!"
Guess "fun" have different meaning for different individuals

And I'm proud for every single kill/victory that I've managed to achieve the way I play.
But I don't think your idea offers any solution to the current "balance issues" - actually I think this would complicate the upcoming(after, for example, someone really decided to listen to you) "hotfixes" about how people should be finally restricted by a number of hardpoints per TYPE OF weapon, or the number of "big weapons" they can carry, or whatever they come up to fix this.
Well... we can already go in that direction and push the game a bit back in the timeline - before all the people went boating without introducing more randomness that would make the alpha-killing even more addictive and satisfieing
I actually thought about a lot of things - and I jumped to the conclusion, that the less things the DEVs have pending to fix, considering the game ballance, the more time they'll have to adress the really cool and (in my opinion) important stuff like...
I dunno - Community Warfare? Clans? More content/maps/mechs/weapons? More game variety?
Those things, by themselves, could easily shift the meaning of the current "game ballance" (for example - just like that poptarding ******* the Highlander - did on it's release) and make the game seems more "ballanced" or the other way around.
For me the resolve of the current game issues is both introducing some huge jumpjetting inacurracy, and restricting mechs from carring more than 3 *large weapons*.
It's sad that that sort of extremistic ways should be taken just to force people use variety and imagination...
Anyways - that's all my opinion