1263 replies to this topic

[Zaptruder]

Nacon, on 11 June 2013 - 05:40 PM, said:

How about this? Stop trying to address all the ******** whining. No matter what you do, low-skilled players will find a new way to whine everytime pro-players find a new way to kill them.

This heat penalty is ******** and unrealistic. Frankly I don't give a damn if someone is boating, let them boat however they want! I don't care! I'll destroy them and they shall whine some more... that's how you win a game.

Stop babysitting and get back to work!

PS: if you give such penalty to ballistic like 6xAC2 on Jagermech, I'm gonna flip a table out the window.

Good players will continue to find a way to win irrespective of the current situation.

Like Koreanese before he left, because even though he was a champ at boating, the game didn't mesh with the way he *wanted* to play... which was to brawl like a champ.

But yeah, this is a dumb change - not because it nerfs boats, but because it doesn't fix the core problems in the game, only gets at some of the symptoms of it.

[AntharPrime]

Nacon, on 11 June 2013 - 05:40 PM, said:

How about this? Stop trying to address all the ******** whining. No matter what you do, low-skilled players will find a new way to whine everytime pro-players find a new way to kill them.

This heat penalty is ******** and unrealistic. Frankly I don't give a damn if someone is boating, let them boat however they want! I don't care! I'll destroy them and they shall whine some more... that's how you win a game.

Stop babysitting and get back to work!

PS: if you give such penalty to ballistic like 6xAC2 on Jagermech, I'm gonna flip a table out the window.

I agree, boating has been a part of BT for ages it's built into the game. You adapt and compete, not whine. I was running all weight classes against boats and managed to still do well enough to enjoy the game. Horrible idea PGI.

[WolvesX]

And for the love of mechajebus...

STOP TROLLING PAUL WITH LPLs!

[Deathlike]

WolvesX, on 11 June 2013 - 06:01 PM, said:

STOP TROLLING PAUL WITH LPLs!

I wub wub Paul.

[Wildmynx]

Paul was wondering if it is not to much trouble if you could provide a couple of videos of the next patch (18th), so we can have an idea what they will be like. Also keep up the good work. Thank you.

[Tennex]

they can barely balance the variables weapons use now. damage, cooldown, heat, range.. etc etc..

now we add 2 more variables, boating penalty, and boating threshold.


dear lord.

[Zaptruder]

Victor Morson, on 11 June 2013 - 05:52 PM, said:

I'd say 1 because, really, no system like this at all is needed. We don't need to rework it, it simply needs to not exist. I'm all for adding heat effects but every single thing from the proposed plan needs to go tin the trash, along with the core idea of it. It's not good for anyone.

As for 2.. it is my hope that one day Pulse Lasers will actually have a fairly decent ROF; also Autocannon/2s are an excellent example of what I mean. You often see 'mechs running 4 and way too rapidly to standardize the heat like you were pitching.

I'm just opposed to ANY system that impacts Alphas. I do not mind, however, making people manage their heat better and like I keep saying and more than for some new heat effects. I am OK with punishing very hot builds, or making them a high risk/reward.

I am opposed, however, to limiting designs on artificial limits for no practical purpose.

Alphas are essentially the bane of this game.

In TT, an alpha strike is essentially a mech firing all its weapon systems... over a 10 second time frame. Each shot has a to hit roll and each hit has a roll on the chart.

It's designed this way because the weapon systems and armor and multipart nature of the mechs were all designed around each other.

If you allowed players to do what they do here; link all weapons into a single to hit roll and one location hit roll, then you'd get much the same result in the TT as you do in this game - where the most obvious and efficient way to win is to boat the biggest pin point alpha damage weapons possible.

If alpha strikes necessitated a delay in firing between weapon groups, it would be much more like the desperation maneuver in both the TT and the books that it was originally envisioned to be; as opposed to the current most effective way of destroying mechs in MWO that it is.


I mean, you only need to look at the weight, damage and range values of weapons to understand how heavily the game skews away from high pin point damage in its core mechanics.

Medium laser = 1 ton, 1 crit, 5 damage.
AC20 (only 20 point damage weapon in the game) = 14 tons, 10 crits, 20 damage.

A 14 fold difference in the weight of the weapon because it concentrates large amounts of damage into a single spot.

If we were to keep the same geometric progression in weight balancing, we'd need a 50 ton weapon to do 40 damage. But in MWO, it becomes a 28 ton weapon that many mechs can boat along with the requisite number of heat sinks to actually power them.

Edited by Zaptruder, 11 June 2013 - 06:13 PM.

[Scarcer]

Consider this:

Energy Weapon Solution:
Small & Medium Energy Weapons are not effected by any penalty. No energy platform is really overpowered. The Swayback as example is no more formidable than any other Hunchback variant.

Large & Assault Energy Weapons [ERLL, PPC, etc] generate a lot of heat. Carrying/firing one (or two) has no penalty; the chassi is expected to handle the heat output reasonably well. Firing more than one puts extra stress on the chassi, the heat has to be dissipated faster, so each weapon then requires one heatsink each in the same torso/limb to avoid a penalty. This can be a DHS or a SHS. This solution also forces the dreaded ER PPC boating stalkers to utilize SHS's in order to have enough room to avoid the penalty, or to utlize PPC's instead to viably avoid heatsink requirments.

Penalty will be experienced when firing multiples before approximatly 50% of the previous weapons recharge cycle, and build up expodentially the more weapons are fired; when the Heat Sink Requirments are not met.
(Some stock builds carry 2 or more of these weapons; the penalty may be light enough for it not to be an a crippling issue, or those specific variants may have a slight & unique heat perk to handle it.)

Possible chassi to give heat-management perks is to the Awesome, since it is a large energy platform.

It is probable that DHS & SHS will require some balancing to make this work optimally. Additional heatsinks on the mech will work as normal, but will not negate the heat penalty; as the heat from the weapons will take longer to be expelled.

LIGHTBULB: While your developing UI 2.0, you can also implement a 2D graphic for the pilot to consult in the mechlab that shows the direction and intensity of heat spread and dissipation using orange & red waves during a hypothetical alpha strike. It will give the pilot a tangible idea of how effective their modifications to the chassi are.

Ballistic Weapon Solution:
Light & Medium class Ballistic Weapons [AC2/5/10, MG, LBX-10 etc] are not effected.They require more skill to fire and succesfully kill with.

Heavy & Assault Class Weaponry [AC20, Guass, LBX-20 etc] causes much more recoil. Firing one causes the chassi to shake/rattle slightly. Your crosshairs and aiming will be effected for approximatly 50ms similar to using Jump Jets but to a lesser extent (depending on the chassi/variant).

Firing 2 at a time will cause either

A ) Full Accuracy & Cause the entire chassi to shake/rattle considerably high for 160ms,

B ) Loss of Accuracy & Throw off the trajectory of both weapons, with 60ms shake.

Possible chassi to give perks for 'less penalty' would be the Jagermech. The Jagermech has significant recoil compensation, and it would make up for it's lack of armor.

Missiles & Rockets:
LRM's, SRMS & SSRMS should be unaffected; they are fairly ballanced, and while can deal much damage, are not formidable enough to destroy entire enemy teams due to the essentialy removed splash damage.

Thankyou, please take my proposal into consideration. It should be far more viable than what has been presented to us as a solution.

Sincerely,
Scarcer

Edited by Scarcer, 11 June 2013 - 06:42 PM.

[GingerBang]

Arbitrary weapon counts before triggering the heat penalty seems REALLY silly, and past experience working on games like this tells me it is NOT going to work well. BUT, i am glad to see PGI taking steps in the right direction.

What i would suggest PGI, is creating "Hot bones." Have parts of the skeleton carry heat values that will quickly add up over time. Basically, you have something like a catapult arm fire and accumulate 10 points of heat. The the "bone" between the arm and the torso holds on to a 1 heat penalty. Obviously, numbers and such need to be made relevant to your current heat system, but i think you get my point.

[LockeJaw]

Here's a thought. Instead of coming up with some crazy *** behind the scenes heat scaling system, that'll confuse the hell out of new players, how about you just

PUT IN A SCALING HARDPOINT SYSTEM ALREADY?!?!!?!?!?

I'm seriously confused why you keep fighting the "issues" instead of just ripping out the root of the problem. If you let people put ppc's where small lasers were before, THEY"RE GOING TO.

[Tennex]

3rdworld, on 11 June 2013 - 12:24 PM, said:

or 3ppc gauss Misery.

or instead of using 2PPC 2 ERPPC 3F, swap to just 4PPC and you only create 4 more heat.

maybe the solution to the 3PPC 1gauss builds is to add more heat to the gauss.

Guass is a freebie as things currently stand.

[Kaldor]

I leave work, reading this thread at like 4-5 pages, and we are at what, like 19 pages? Gotta be a new record....

[GingerBang]

LockeJaw, on 11 June 2013 - 06:15 PM, said:

Here's a thought. Instead of coming up with some crazy *** behind the scenes heat scaling system, that'll confuse the hell out of new players, how about you just

PUT IN A SCALING HARDPOINT SYSTEM ALREADY?!?!!?!?!?

I'm seriously confused why you keep fighting the "issues" instead of just ripping out the root of the problem. If you let people put ppc's where small lasers were before, THEY"RE GOING TO.

Oh yeah and there is this idea, which honestly is the most sound and fool proof.

All i ever hear is "OHHH BUT MW4 HAD IT AND THAT GAME WAS MIN/MAX FEST." The only reason it was a min max fest was because there was literally no reason to not take a daishi, or nova cat, or any old boat like that. Reward players for taking smaller mechs, and institute a hardpoint system. Problem solved.

[Chronojam]

I do not think the heat changes are good. It would be more interesting to add deviation to the weapon themselves, or even change the refire/cooldown for the weapon rather than cause a heat spike. Really you are trying to fix a problem that does not exist in a way that will screw up "fair" builds instead of just making more good builds viable.

Edited by Chronojam, 11 June 2013 - 06:55 PM.

[GingerBang]

The more i think about it the less sense this makes. I can fire 6 mediums all just inches apart, all at the same time. But the moment i fire that one laser from all the way on the other side of the mech, i get a heat penalty? The **** are you drinking PGI? Are you going to give blue prints for every mech to pin up in the cockpit explaining which weapons you arbitrarily decided to group, and which weapons will draw a heat penalty? This could not have been thought through all the way.

[TheSteelRhino]

Sounds Great. I especially like the way you are handling the Hunchback -4p...almost like a "quirk" of that chassis since it's designed that way.

I am hoping you will keep this published this somewhere however. Sounds like a good way to encourage diversity.

Honestly, I would've gone for 2 PPC's..w/ no penalty and start penalizing when you exceed 2 unless the design is obviously designed for that. Likein the case of the awesome, which comes with 3....

PPC's were supposed to be FEARED weapons...so lowering damage or spreading it would probably make it and overtonned large laser. But it's supposed to be HOT.

For those that don't like this...
Boating is a part of Battletech so we do have to live with it somewhat. (Yes I know, it's just BASED of TT). But remember, for those that say the weapons themselves are the issue...since we have double armour, they are only half as effective anyways.

Edited by Rhinehardt Ritter, 11 June 2013 - 06:36 PM.

[Vaan]

DocBach, on 11 June 2013 - 11:35 AM, said:

I think triple PPCs being penalized would hurt the Awesome

Totally agree.. my Awesome 9M is running on 3x PPC, 3x ML & 1x SRM6 with XL370 engine.. It's a monster but definitely not a alpha build!

[Buckminster]

I agree that the heat penalty (for multiple weapons) is a bad fix. It's very arbitrary, and all it will really do is set more artificial boundaries for people to try and work around.

I do like that CT damage is being introduced as a factor of high heat, but I'd also love to see some of the other TT heat penalties start to work their way in. I think that if you start to introduce to-hit penalties (add in a 'cone of fire' as heat rises) and speed penalties, people will have to think carefully as they design their high-alpha, high-heat builds. I actually think this will do more to reduce high heat builds than an arbitrary heat penalty.

[Mahnmut]

Regarding heat scaling.

Keep it simple, stupid

Not only will it cause headaches for the developers trying to maintain balance as they add in new mechs it also becomes very non intuitive for players.

Before doing anything unnecessarily complicated, revert PPC heat values to pre host state rewind values and see how that goes.

The damage for overheating is a good idea but as many have said, 150% is too lenient.

[jakucha]

keith, on 11 June 2013 - 11:53 AM, said:

like norm PGi goes to an extreme to nerf something instead of going to root of the problem. if there was a weight balance system for game types, u would not seem many heavy energy boats. now 6 ppc mech= insta shut down= extreme over kill. could have gotten away with making something like +10-15 heat so mech was unusable in combat, much worse fate then shutting where it cools faster.

It's not an extreme, more like a baby step. If they went with an extreme nerf it would be much worse.