59 replies to this topic

[Lootee]

They should shut the servers down until Star Citizen comes out and ask them for CryEngine and game balance tips.

[Kraven Kor]

Play with heat, range, rate of fire, ammo per ton, damage, all that, fine.

Please do not tinker with weight or crit spaces so that all "canon" builds work, or are at least possible, in MWO.

[Petroshka]

In my utmost humble opinion, the TT and canon should only be a spiritual guide. Anything else is a huge mistake. You cannot make an FPS from a turn based game and expect it not to be completely borked unless you allow tweaking in the name of balance.

Forget canon mechs. They are out the window as soon as they allowed 99% customization, canon mechs were not min/maxed as we see players do if given the opportunity. If you have to break a canon mech for the sake of game balance, absolutely, go ahead.

[Tombstoner]

I agree with what is said. but the game is missing an absolutely fundamental design element that predates and affects all other issues regarding game balance/fun/ player retention....

In order to use TT stats you must include some form of random hit location. other wise you fundamentally alter the relationship between everything - weapon damage, tonnage, range, crit space,. add to that changes in fire rate and heat dissipation. capacity and you have something very very different and very very hard to balance and lots and lots of cored CT's and pissed of new players who dont understand whats happening to them..... thus this game sucks.... and leave before developing the skill to be good.

Convergence was part of the PRS(product requirement specs) and it was controlled by the player.. ok this fits in with removing any form of RNG between the player and hitting the target. GREAT if it worked, the game would be so much farther along in terms of balance and feel very different. The pop tart/ high heat alpha would not have occurred to its current extent. more importantly armor would not have to be doubled in order to extend match/mech times beyond a few second / minutes. another alteration to weapon balance.

With convergence shots would have been spread around the mech as the TT system was designed around.. then all other game stats can be altered to reflect the difference between the TT and FPS / mech sim... then fix any odd TT design choices like mg range... with out it your CT is gone unless you learn to torso twist. this some people think is suficant for a lack of TT damage distribution. I must admit that to an extent it is skillful play. but its really an adaptation to a missing design element that results in stale one dimensional targeting.

At this point PGI is basically developing by the seats of there pants.... a dead line and a finite supply of money....
I'm sure they realize that missing a convergence (damage spreading) mechanic is a seriously hard blow... but the list of other critical to do items on a developers bucket list take priority. those items are things the players will never see or even know about. its real easy to arm chair develop this game as a player. i am guilty of it myself.... i do it only because i care.

Once the game releases and things are stable "ish"... I'm sure convergence or some form of player controlled Hit Probability Indicator (COF) will be evaluated.. Otherwise with out additional degrees of freedom(accuracy) to teak weapon stats beyond heat/ damage/ tonnage and others
its all FUBAR. once 12 vs 12 arrive....your just going to die so much faster with more lopsided wins. add in clan mech to the game.... i dont expect it to balance well, but that remains to be seen with zero info about the clans.

Edited by Tombstoner, 31 May 2013 - 09:00 AM.

[Trauglodyte]

Joseph Mallan, on 31 May 2013 - 04:24 AM, said:

28+ years of shooting a Jenner with an AC20 in the leg left me with a Jenner with structure damage on the torso. Now to get the same results I have to fire two converging AC20s at the same leg!

Twice the weapon to do the same level of damage.

Technically, you're not blowing the leg off because, for reasons that I cannot understand, it is still there. I destroy an arm, and its gone from the shoulder down. I destroy a leg, and it is still there allowing the leg to keep on moving. Hell, the mech doesn't even fall down. Confused says wut?

[Thanatos676]

PanchoTortilla, on 31 May 2013 - 08:24 AM, said:

They should shut the servers down until Star Citizen comes out and ask them for CryEngine and game balance tips.

Thats assuming Star Citizen doesn't end up being unbalanced and full of flavor of the month meta as well of course...

Edited by Thanatos676, 31 May 2013 - 09:31 AM.

[Joseph Mallan]

Trauglodyte, on 31 May 2013 - 09:28 AM, said:

Technically, you're not blowing the leg off because, for reasons that I cannot understand, it is still there. I destroy an arm, and its gone from the shoulder down. I destroy a leg, and it is still there allowing the leg to keep on moving. Hell, the mech doesn't even fall down. Confused says wut?

Point Sir! Touche'
Yes the Leg is magically still here even though arms and torsos vanish under my double 20 love tap.

[Victor Morson]

We shouldn't need to rebalance any weights. We have a nice, fairly even spread of crit space and weights to chose from already.

I would prefer balancing be done in the following order:

- Non-stat tweaks (Discharge time, flight paths, etc.)
- Stat tweaks (Damage, Range, ROF, etc.)
- NOT: Editing the weapons weight & crit space

This is one of those things that irks me a bit so I am pretty strongly behind making this sort of thing a very, very, very last resort.

That said I would make an exception for ECM, as ECM is basically operating as AECM, under the stats & weight of regular ECM.

..

tl/dr: There's no good reason to adjust the weights. There's plenty of ways to balance weapons.

[Lightfoot]

DHS 1.4 and a soft heat cap has completely skewed the game. It prevents competitive gameplay with a mixed loadout and rewards stupid builds like 6x PPCs. So in current MWO you are either a gun-bag or an energy blimp. I'd say get back to TT for core balancing.

Example of bad non-TT is the DHS 1.4. You might say, oh, that's good, but when the Clans arrive and they all have 28-36 DHS 1.4s, you'll be sayin Oops!, not good. Not good at all.

Edited by Lightfoot, 31 May 2013 - 10:07 AM.

[AntiCitizenJuan]

It would be nice if they could alter base weights. Like when you have a stripped mech and it weighs 5 tons (just for example) without any weapons or armor.

If they could reduce that tonnage on the AWS to fit bigger guns or more heatsinks, I think it could really help.

[DocBach]

victor morson pretty much said what I want to say, but in a much more clear and concise manner.

[Deathlike]

Changing the weapon weights and crits/slots is never going to be tolerated (on so many levels).

I remember people were trying to INCREASE the crits used by ECM to insane levels... and NOT deal with ECM itself.

People need to really think beyond "changing" tonnage+crit values, because you can certainly balance the game IF AND ONLY IF you balance the objects in question correctly.

Edited by Deathlike, 31 May 2013 - 10:36 AM.

[Taemien]

Dalziel Hasek Davion, on 31 May 2013 - 08:16 AM, said:

Let's face it, the tabletop game had some pretty broken ideas about weapons.

Machine guns that can only fire 90m at the most and are only accurate inside 30M.
Autocannons where the range decreased as calibre increased.
"Long-range" missiles that could only go 600m
...
You know what - I'm not going to go on.

This is a little misleading.

Machine Guns go out to much further ranges. But for the sake of game balance, yes they are reduced. But it makes sense since they are firing the equivalent to a 20mm round and they have to be accurate enough to buzz a specific spot on a mech in a turn so it can deal that 2 damage. 30-90m represents that accuracy needed to deal the damage.

Autocannons can easily be explained, the larger the caliber, the shorter the barrel. Need proof of this? Look at the barrels of AC2s and AC5s on a Jagermech vs the big barrel of the AC20 on a Hunchback.

LRMs have an effective range of 10km in Battletech in atmosphere, 360 out of atmosphere. Reason why we aren't getting these ranges in MWO or in TT (actually you can get those in TT, but I'll cover that later) is because we're representing the fast and up close combat that happens inside of 10km^2. Mechs are constantly moving, dodging and zig zagging.

Now there are rules in TT for extreme ranges. This allows LRMs to go out to 840 though it is a bit harder (+6 to hit vs +4). And then you have Line of Sight Range. This allows weapons to be fired at anything within 1800m (BHP has only a range of (1440 for active targets, shut down ones use normal rules). Of course under both rules, less missiles are likely to hit (-2 for extreeme, -3 for LOS on the cluster hit table).

So all that being said, the rules DO account for many of these strange things. But only if the players wish to use them. I think its a bad idea to adjust criticals and tonnage. There's too many other factors that can be adjusted instead such as DPS, Damage, Range, Heat, and Projectile speed. And the reason I would say not to adjust Tonnage and Criticals is because it is an integral part of battle tech construction. Stock mechs would be weirdly effected.

Why bother to keep to the stock construction rules? Well it is a MechWarrior game and it is in the BattleTech universe. Something has to be the bone to throw to the BattleTech gurus out there. I understand that some things have to be tweaked here and there. But these two attributes can easily be balanced around and are the most important when it comes to construction. They have the ability to change the game widely. I mean think about it this way. Reducing the criticals on a AC20 means it can be mounted with a XL engine. That changes how many mechs can be built and can throw balance way off.

I know many people that play this game don't care about Btech. But thats fine. The devs play the game or have played it, and thats really all that matters. You're just going to have to deal with the BattleTech players' ******** if you want to play this game. You could go play Hawken, Heavy Gear, or Steel Battalion instead. Battletech fans are simply going to have their cake and eating it to, so buzz off.

[Bunko]

Weight, Heat, Damage, and Range should not be touched from TT.

Bring balance by using a proven system that has been in place for almost 30 years.

[3rdworld]

Nothing should have been off the table.

Keeping the "spirit" is the most important aspect, not sticking to some archaic and unbalanced mechanics from a 30 year old game. Balance is what will make or break the game (as we can clearly see), and shoehorning yourself out of all variables for sake of nostalgia is pretty stupid.

Even worrying about "stock" builds is silly. The game is based on not using stock builds, so why on earth would I care if they work out exactly like their record sheets?

[frag85]

If you keep changing arbitrary value after arbitrary value in an attempt to fix something, you are doing it wrong. There has been little method to the madness of trying to balance this game and adding something else to be changed will only screw things up more.

[A banana in the tailpipe]

I could not find an option in this poll worth voting on. System parts aren't the issue for me, it's lack of tonnage restrictions during matchmaking. My ideal way to enjoy MWO would be with tonnage restricted/stock mech matches.

[MustrumRidcully]

3rdworld, on 31 May 2013 - 11:01 AM, said:

Nothing should have been off the table.

Keeping the "spirit" is the most important aspect, not sticking to some archaic and unbalanced mechanics from a 30 year old game. Balance is what will make or break the game (as we can clearly see), and shoehorning yourself out of all variables for sake of nostalgia is pretty stupid.

Even worrying about "stock" builds is silly. The game is based on not using stock builds, so why on earth would I care if they work out exactly like their record sheets?

I would like the game to support stock mechs, but due to the way they implemented weapons and the heat system, stock mechs are just terrible, and so it's completely irrelevant that you can technically build a Single Heat Sink Hunchback 4P with a Standard Engine and all. It's still incredibly sucky. Being able to build it by the constructions rules does not suffice to "support" stock mechs. That only turns it into a trap for TT fans that think their favorite TT mech could possibly still work.

And if this is the kind of mech you give to noobs, it's also a trap for noobs.

Edited by MustrumRidcully, 31 May 2013 - 12:56 PM.

[Deathlike]

MustrumRidcully, on 31 May 2013 - 12:56 PM, said:

And if this is the kind of mech you give to noobs, it's also a trap for noobs.

"Noob Trap"! I guarentee! It's the craziest MWO trap that you've ever seen!

[Bilbo]

El Bandito, on 31 May 2013 - 03:28 AM, said:

How is it "unbalanced"? No explanation at all?



I can understand about DHS but how was double armor game breaking? I wasn't in close Beta but wasn't double armor in response to two-shotting mechs with most weapons?

Also, MW2--which was more faithful to TT values was no way balanced for multiplayer.

Double armor was implemented before closed beta. I believe it was to increase overall match length by increasing mech survivability.