1263 replies to this topic

[Kneipenboxer]

The idea of punishing boats is absolute nonsense. It takes away a lot of freedom and creativity out of the game respectively the mech lab. Why give a mech 6+ energy hardpoints at all? Really ****** decision. For me a reason to quit playing the game. One more setback after the horriblecelo tweak.

[Jabilo]

re. Additional heat penalties for firing weapons simultaneously.

This is so incredibly stupid, you must have been on the moon when you dreamed this up.

It is so convoluted and inaccessible. Good job explaining the game mechanics to new players when each weapon system has different, illogical mechanics for heat generation.

THIS weapon can be fired THIS many times at once, but THIS weapon can only be fired THIS many times, but THIS weapon is unrestricted.

Bear in mind that new players could not even get their heads around two reticles...

It is so arbitrary and beyond all physical reasoning.

Out of all the ways you could have looked at this issue this is easily the worst solution you could have come up with.

With regards to heat damage at the 150% threshold limit, it is not clearly explained how it ties in with how damage is already generated at over 100% heat (if you over ride).

You accuse the forums of making assumptions but fail to explain your proposals clearly.

Talk about taking a problem and finding the most complex and unnecessary solutions.

All you needed were heat penalties for overheating your mech even if you shut down.

The normal penalty for if you override, a lesser penalty if you take the shut down.

Tweak the travel time of PPCs a bit and your good to go. At least START with something simple and intuitive and see how it goes.

Well, I am mad. I do not think that any change in this game ever got to me before (I even took third person in my stride) but this takes the biscuit.

Two word review of proposed changes:

"Try again."

edit.

I have tried to articulate why this is such a terrible idea, but perhaps I have not done a great job.

In this opening post Victor dissects the idea with a laser scalpel and shows you why it is so ridiculous - hurting the wrong builds and not doing anything at all against the builds that really cause the problem.

http://mwomercs.com/...-idea-is-awful/

Check it out, vote in the poll. Lets get some momentum going.

Peace

Edited by Jabilo, 11 June 2013 - 01:11 PM.

[Genewen]

Mokou, on 11 June 2013 - 12:47 PM, said:

So if i use override, shoot and overheat to 149% my mech will not have any damage?

That is how I read it. Which is horribly stupid, because it makes the 100% treshold a joke and overriding mandatory since you suffer no consequences until 150%. All in all, the whole heat approach PGI has chosen here is one metric ton of facepalm.

Weapons which are not the problem get punished and people will just chose alternative high alpha builds. Also, bad alpha builds like the 6PPC Stalker get punished less than good alpha builds like the 4PPC Stalker. Also, it does not solve future problems of 3 or even more Gauss builds (unless PGI decides to never bring any mech that could use that config).

All in all, that "solution" was not thought through well.

[WolvesX]

Seriously the LPLs are hotter than a PPC if you nerf them like this.

LPLs are a near-bad weapon now, why nerf them even further?

Edited by WolvesX, 11 June 2013 - 12:58 PM.

[Tennex]

Laser boat exemption should be a quirk for the HBK - 4P
LRM boat exemption should be a quirk for the Catapults

[Deathlike]

WolvesX, on 11 June 2013 - 12:56 PM, said:

Seriously the LPLs are hotter than a PPC.

Well, the current LPLs are a niche weapon, and actually generate only 7.3 heat... and I don't remember the last time anyone called it OP.. either just right or "useless" or underpowered.

Quote

LPLs are a near-bad weapon now, why nerf them even further?

Working as intended.

[KitK]

My Wall-O-Text re: the topic

SSRMs - sounds good.

Flamer and MG - it's kind of surprising to see a tweak so soon after the last on this. I doubt doing 0.8 or 1 damage over 10 seconds is going to satisfy Flamer/MG users until engines and gyro's can take crits.

Pulse Lasers - I get that this is a temporary phase to align the weapon type for tuning. I knew the LPL was running too cool (a buff to make it a good option), so the heat increase is no surprise. But nothing about the MPL, which along with the ML seem to run too hot.

Heat damage - yeah 150 seems too generous (though I'm sure I'll pay for this on the battlefield). Right now 100% = +30 on the TT heat scale, which is automatic shutdown among other bad things. Wecan already operate beyond this. 150% would give an additional 20 heat wiggle room (before DHS or additional HS) to avoid damage. I suppose one factor unknown to us is how fast the damage will accrue. If it is fast, 150 might be OK.



Heat penalty - This seems quite complex just to discourage players from alpha striking boats even once. It doesn't seem to address Alpha-Builds, which I think is fair, except that the issues are clearly intertwined. My gut reaction is “Please, no!” It feels very un-Battletech. Yet, my sense is that it will go forward because it’s the best idea at this point. It makes sense to me that you would at least have the boated weapons (E, B & M) tuned to their likely final values prior to doing this, and that this would get some very intense testing before getting pushed to live servers.


pro
-Another mech "characteristic" for PGI to tweak
-Remains skill based
-Attempts to be fair to boaters and their targets too, while addressing the alpha boat issue

con
-increased complexity in designing one's heat management system (sinks, type of sinks, groupings)
-increased complexity for understanding heat production to go along with the heatsinking complexity (Think of the new player! Though I suppose we figured out the heatsinks, so we'll get the penalty figured out too.)
-increased pressure on the already much maligned single heatsink (though I suppose to be honest, those aren't in too many true boats)
-it doesn't "feel" like the type of heat penalties incurred in battletech or previous digital versions
-thresholds may have an arbitrary feel to users even if they are based on data and rational decision making
-despite skill basis it can still be macroed

Notes:
-sides with the "it's the mech camp" rather than the "it's the gun camp"
-applies the net effect is greater than the sum of the parts principle
-is the game play system broken or is the player behavior broken? Assuming that the game play system is not broken, is it reasonable to change that system in an attempt to mould player behavior?

[Mokou]

Genewen, on 11 June 2013 - 12:55 PM, said:

All in all, that "solution" was not thought through well.

They just need add PPC and HeavyBallistic (AC20/Gauss) sub-hardpoints. But nooooooo~ we want some magic heat penalty!

150% heat is too much, safety layer must be 15-25%, not 50%.

Edited by Mokou, 11 June 2013 - 01:02 PM.

[MonkeyCheese]

Wow...

So you are going to fix the boating ppc problem but are ignoring all the people (and the 44 page thread) who are affected by your screenshaking nauseating band aid fix for poptarts, and poptarts were a problem because of the ppc/heat problem in the first place..

You got some balls of steel for ignoring this issue.

I guess I give up

R.I.P my little spider mech you shall be missed.

Edited by MonkeyCheese, 11 June 2013 - 01:02 PM.

[Rippthrough]

Suprentus, on 11 June 2013 - 12:40 PM, said:

Man, everyone and his mother is a naysayer and is certain they know how to program balance mechanics better than PGI. Forum warriors, go figure.

Excuse me? Have you been playing a different game to the rest of us for the past 6 months?
Only I've only seen a round-robin style selection of anything from complete cockups to wtf-were-they-thinking balance tweaks. And it just goes around and around and around because they seem determined never to revisit anything they've touched and instead **** about about with nerfing a dozen other playstyles/configs to try to balance what they broke in the first place.

I've literally just started playing again for a couple of days after a 2 month sabbatical because of this ****, and 2 days in the EXACT SAME stupid balance knee-jerk crap is STILL ******* HAPPENING.
Seriously, if it wasn't like herding sheep, I'd have every clan I know that feels the same way do a mass walkout for a week. As it is, I'll probably just stop playing full stop.

Edited by Rippthrough, 11 June 2013 - 01:02 PM.

[Steel Will]

For any chance of this having a positive effect the heat penalty needs to scale down over a second (or more) and not just go away after .5s. And it needs only effect PPC's because lasers certainly aren't any sort of problem.

And have internal damage start scaling exponentially immediately after 100%.

tl;dr
Scale.

[Suprentus]

I find it funny (with a touch of irony) that everyone is calling the idea dumb, then explaining how they would make it better. That's exactly why this change is being implemented. This exact boating punishing mechanic is what so many other forum warriors, like yourselves, have championed as the true way to "fix" boating.

[Skyfaller]

Quote

Flamers and Machine Guns are getting a damage boost. Flamers will be increased from 0.4 damage to 0.7 damage. Machine Guns will be going from 0.08 damage per bullet to 0.1 damage per bullet. (June 18th Patch)

Looks, I'm sorry to put it this way but you fellas have been going at these two weapons the easy/lazy way. You're just upping the damage and hoping for the best.

Flamers: Their primary effect is heating the enemy mech up. Not damage. The flamers would be perfect if:

1- They inflicted 1 heat to enemy and 0.5 heat to mech firing the flamer, per flamer.
2- Cap of enemy mech at 90% currently in place is good.
3- Flamer should be low damage 0.5dmg but with VERY high crit chance (like mg's).
4- Range increase to 100m

Voila. Flamers are fixed.

MG's: Currently the damage they do is more than fine. Heck I scored 800+ damage last night with them in a 6-mg jager. The problem is they have no convergence!!!

MG is easy to fix:

1- Add convergence to the MG. Hard-code the convergence to work ONLY at 150m max.
2- Increase range to 1km. With no convergence past 150m the MG becomes a lead shotgun.

There is a known glitch with the MG refire rate that is lowering the dps it should be doing so in hindsight the damage increase could compensate for it.

Quote

Pulse Lasers are being normalized to have their variances standardized between the different sizes. This is in preparation of them being tuned as we move toward launch. What this directly means is that for now, Small Pulse Lasers will have their damage increased to 3.4 and their heat reduced to 2.4. Large Pulse Lasers will have their damage increased to 10.6 but their heat is also increased to 8.5. This puts all 3 pulse lasers in alignment of having an approximate 1.25 variance for DPS and a 1.3 variance for HPS. Once this is implemented into the live servers, we will be looking at how they play out and making further adjustments as needed. (June 18th Patch)

The small laser could have its range increased to 120m while the small pulser remains at 90m. Just a suggestion.

Quote

Heat Damage at High Heat Levels
We now have a system in test that will apply damage to your Mech’s internal center torso if your Mech exceeds 150% of its tolerable heat level. While your Mech is above 150% heat, it will take damage over time. Once your Mech has cooled below 150%, it will no longer take heat damage. Be careful with that override button or high heat alphas when you’re near your max heat threshold.

I don't see what difference this makes. The moment you fire something with override that puts you over 110% heat your engine commits instant suicide.

Quote

Heat Penalty

Last update, I let it be known that we would be investigating a heat penalty for high alpha builds. It is understood that this raised the eyebrows of the many but at the same time a lot of assumptions were made which should hopefully be cleared up here.

We considered the notion of doing a max heat threshold reduction but this would have ended up nerfing every weapon system and every Mech in the game. This is why the heat scale penalty path was chosen since it lets us address every weapon individually and also allows us to take into consideration all Mech builds.

How it works:

• We set a threshold of the number of weapons fired simultaneously. By simultaneously fired, we mean weapons of the exact same type being fired in under a 0.5 second time range. This 0.5 second time comes from the amount of time between weapon switches when Chain Fire is engaged. Chain Fire is a mechanism meant to help MechWarriors manage their heat and we do not want to punish those who use this mechanic.
  
• If a player fires a number of weapons beyond the threshold, the heat scale will increase significantly for every weapon fired beyond the threshold.

I think this is a very bad idea. I agree there should be a heat management solution to the alpha boating but this is just ridiculously complicated and you are ignoring the native problem with chain fire: It doesn't make use of the gun's true refire rate but rather a static timer. Try chain firing a 6 AC2 jager and you will see what we mean. There is a reason why people have to resort to using a macro.

A much simpler, workable solution is to change the heatsink system. The ONLY REASON why boating is in the game is because DHS enables it. More specifically, the engine DHS bonus.

So, how about you guys simple change the heatsinks?

Single heatsinks should have higher heat capacity (2.0 of current) but dissipate heat slower (at 1.0 which would be their current dissipation).

Double heatsinks should have lower heat capacity (1.0 or current of SHS) but higher dissipation (2.0 of current SHS).

What this does:

If the max heat currently of a single heatsink mech is 100 (to use an easy number) then:

SHS: 200 heat capacity, 1.0 heat dissipation
DHS: 100 heat capacity, 2.0 heat dissipation

Result: SHS might be better for support/long range fire builds. DHS might be better for brawlers/sustained fire builds.

And alpha boating is punitive in either heatsink type. SHS has the capacity to boat-fire one burst or maybe two at least..then LOOONG cooldown time. DHS can fire maybe one alpha but then would have to wait until heat is near 0 to fire another.

[Genewen]

Mokou, on 11 June 2013 - 01:00 PM, said:

They just need add PPC and HeavyBallistic (AC20/Gauss) sub-hardpoints. But nooooooo~ we want some magic heat penalty!

Exactly. That would also be more accessible for new players than reading through the heat penalties of every single weapon. It'd be very understandable that the biggest guns can not be mounted on places built for MGs and small ACs.

Suprentus, on 11 June 2013 - 01:04 PM, said:

I find it funny (with a touch of irony) that everyone is calling the idea dumb, then explaining how they would make it better. That's exactly why this change is being implemented. This exact boating punishing mechanic is what so many other forum warriors, like yourselves, have championed as the true way to "fix" boating.

Actually, the idea I saw most often is the above. Also, while we're being ironic, I want to point at how "funny" it is that somebody is being condescendend towards others calling them forum warriors while posting and arguing on the forums himself.

Edited by Genewen, 11 June 2013 - 01:09 PM.

[Shakespeare]

StalaggtIKE, on 11 June 2013 - 11:08 AM, said:

Not my preferred method, however I feel this has potential to work.

Agreed. I do think that a hard-cap on heat, and a boost to heat sink cooling speed, would be a better heat system, but I didn't really think they were going to completely revamp heat thresholds. Taking steps toward addressing boating directly via heat 'penalties' is at least a direction worth exploring, and won't cost as much time and redirection as a total overhaul.

[DEMAX51]

Kunae, on 11 June 2013 - 12:44 PM, said:

10+10+15=35, NOT 25.

And being pin-point, it is high.

Excuse me - typo - but I still don't consider 35 a high alpha, pinpoint or not. I would only consider 40+ points to be "high alpha" (and then only if it was all pinpoint like you said).

And it's not exactly "pinpoint", either, because the gauss round travels slower than the PPCs and, if fired at the same time - particularly at a mech more than a few hundred meters out - the gauss has a good chance of hitting a different part of a mech or even missing completely.

Edited by DEMAX51, 11 June 2013 - 01:08 PM.

[Suprentus]

Rippthrough, on 11 June 2013 - 01:01 PM, said:

Excuse me? Have you been playing a different game to the rest of us for the past 6 months?
Only I've only seen a round-robin style selection of anything from complete cockups to wtf-were-they-thinking balance tweaks. And it just goes around and around and around because they seem determined never to revisit anything they've touched and instead **** about about with nerfing a dozen other playstyles/configs to try to balance what they broke in the first place.

I've literally just started playing again for a couple of days after a 2 month sabbatical because of this ****, and 2 days in the EXACT SAME stupid balance knee-jerk crap is STILL ******* HAPPENING.
Seriously, if it wasn't like herding sheep, I'd have every clan I know that feels the same way do a mass walkout for a week. As it is, I'll probably just stop playing full stop.

Oh, go take a nap. You know the game is supposed to have imbalances, right? This isn't chess. Every build has weaknesses, and if you're a true gamer, you'd be able to exploit those weaknesses instead of crying about them on the forums.

[Deathlike]

Suprentus, on 11 June 2013 - 01:04 PM, said:

I find it funny (with a touch of irony) that everyone is calling the idea dumb, then explaining how they would make it better. That's exactly why this change is being implemented. This exact boating punishing mechanic is what so many other forum warriors, like yourselves, have championed as the true way to "fix" boating.

The mechanic itself doesn't actually deal with legit builds that accomplish the same instant damage effect. Plus, the 6 PPC Stalker boats simply don't have to alpha.. just half alpha at 2 second intervals (30 damage per interval)... but if you were to build a 3 ERPPC/1 Gauss Rifle build that the Atlas-RS and Highlander-733 can build, you still do the obscene 45 pt damage alpha that avoids said limitation. You don't really change the meta of the builds that much... you only influence usage.

[Uoke]

Generally I like the new heat system idea, but there are certain mechs that should definitely get a quirk to allow them to continue boating without penalties. The Hunchback 4P and Blackjack 1X can't do anything but boat small energy weapons, so why punish them for it? (Yes, I know they could technically boat 3-4 larger energy weapons, but any mech can do that.)

And forgive me for throwing a little jab at you PGI, but...who has ever claimed that the 4P was overpowered and needed to be nerfed?

And now that I've jabbed, I'm going to say something you don't hear enough: I love the game, and thanks for all your hard work!

[Kunae]

DEMAX51, on 11 June 2013 - 01:07 PM, said:

Excuse me - typo - but I still don't consider 35 a high alpha, pinpoint or not. I would only consider 40+ points to be "high alpha" (and then only if it was all pinpoint like you said).

And it's not exactly "pinpoint", either, because the gauss round travels slower than the PPCs and, if fired at the same time - particularly at a mech more than a few hundred meters out - the gauss has a good chance of hitting a different part of a mech or even missing completely.

In the current environment of nerfed SRMs, a 35 point, pin-point, alpha is high. The speeds aren't that different, and the majority of the time they will all hit the same armor location. This is especially true if you're firing at a heavy or assault.

Also, this is a 35pt, pin-point, at ~660m, with ERPPCs + Gauss.