7 replies to this topic

[Chou Senwan]

Do you know what a 16th note is? Like, a normal song has four beats per measure. Each beat is a quarter note. If you fit four notes into the space of a single quarter note, those are sixteenth notes.


(Go to 0:12.)

And that is as fast as I think burst damage weapons should be allowed to fire.

See, the problem people are really complaining about with poptarters and PPC Stalkers and AC 40 Jaegers is not that they can fire all those weapons without overheating. It's that the hits almost always land on a single location.

Your lasers, flamers, machine guns, and missiles -- these weapons naturally scatter damage across the target unless he's holding still or you're at just the right range. But a sextet of PPCs from 800 meters away can all drill into the enemy's CT and core a light in one hit.

Rather than adding new heat penalties or outright banning certain weapon combinations, just enforce that whenever you try to fire multiple weapons with pinpoint burst damage -- autocannons, gausses, and PPCs -- each weapon is delayed a quarter second from the previous one. And if the mech overheats between shots, you lose the rest in the series.

I'm thinking a rate that is slightly faster than normal chainfire now, but slightly slower than this:
http://www.youtube.c...dEVmc6w&t=7m45s
(Go to 7:45.)

Now a skilled pilot will still be able to hit his target with each shot, even if the target is moving. But the slight delay gives the target mech's pilot an opportunity to torso twist or otherwise perform some sort of defensive maneuver to spread the damage across his mech.

(And if that still doesn't fix the problem, we go to eighth notes.)

What do you think?

Edited by Chou Senwan, 01 June 2013 - 09:05 AM.

[El Bandito]

A BT novel "Blood Legacy" had addressed such problem:

Quote

Phelan nodded to himself and studied the auxiliary monitor. "Gauss rifle in my left arm?"

"Great weapon. It uses magnetic currents to launch a ball of ferrous metal about the diameter of a melon. Generates next to no heat and packs one hell of a wallop. The only problem is that its power requirements are fairly heavy. If you try to shoot it and the lasers at the same time, the computer will have to cycle and allocate power, so it will take a bit longer to get your salvo off."

Basically, each weapon should have it's own power requirements. More/larger weapons you want to alpha, more power it will draw and stagger the shots.

[Taemien]

El Bandito, on 01 June 2013 - 09:25 AM, said:

A BT novel "Blood Legacy" had addressed such problem:



Basically, each weapon should have it's own power requirements. More/larger weapons you want to alpha, more power it will draw and stagger the shots.

Great idea in theory. Bad to try to use in the CryEngine. The more chatty the network is, the more hit detection goes down the tubes. This could work if the power levels only applied to large weapons. If applied to every weapon we'd have to drop the match size to 6v6 or less rather than try to up it to 12v12.

Sorry to say but heat is already taxing the network, adding a similar mechanic would only push it over the edge.

[A banana in the tailpipe]

Considering the Ultra/AC5 jams every thrid shot and the uselessness of LBX/SRMs... are you complaining about burst weapons or Alphas here?

[PapajIGC]

I smell the use of big *** capacitors and boost converters in the future...

[MustrumRidcully]

We don't need to implement complicated energy systems for this idea.

We only need the concept of a "global cooldown" or "shared cooldown". Most MMOs feature something like this.
Give either all weapons a global cooldown. After you fired one weapon, all weapons go on a 0.25 second cooldown. This is seperate from the normal weapon cycles (so if the weapon is already on cooldown, the global won't change anything, but if it was ready to fire, it now isn't for 0.2 seconds).

A "shared" cooldown could be a softer implementation, and be used to only work for specific weapon or weapon groups.
For example, all ballistics could have one shared cooldown, and all PPCs have one shared cooldown. So you can alpha-strike a Gauss and a PPC, but not 2 Gauss or 2 PPCs, or 1 ER PPC and a PPC, or an AC/10 and an AC/5.

Note that a shared cooldown of 0.25 seconds would make more than 2 AC/2 useless, but they could either make the AC/2 not share cooldowns (no one would be scared even by a 10 AC/2 alpha strike), or alter its recycle time and give it other advantages instead of its high DPS.

Edited by MustrumRidcully, 01 June 2013 - 10:25 AM.

[Chou Senwan]

A friend of mine plays League of Legends and says that they implemented something similar to this after some champions proved too powerful by being able to use multiple abilities at once. Anyone here play LoL and have experiences they could compare to MWO?

[YueFei]

To me this is the best solution, though I would only put the shared cooldown on large pin-point weapons. Lasers and missiles, and smaller caliber autocannons could still all fire together, they are DoT weapons anyway.

It also doesn't introduce RNG to the point-of-aim, and doesn't require removal of convergence which would probably give new players a nightmare (or vets trying to acclimate to a new chassis or new variant).