1263 replies to this topic

[stjobe]

Splitpin, on 12 June 2013 - 02:23 PM, said:

To have a base system of heat per weapon and required heat sinks to deal with that, then have to have another layer of penalty to deal with multiples of same weapon denies the validity of the base system.

Yes, that's exactly what we've been trying to communicate to them since closed beta: The heat system is broken. It does not work. This is evidenced in the high-heat alpha game-play we see today, and further evidenced by the proposed band-aid fix in the OP.

They need to re-work it, and luckily it's not that complicated of a fix (in theory):
1. Drastically lower the heat cap (by as much as half)
2. Drastically raise heat dissipation (by as much as double)
3. Optionally lower the heat cap increase from both single and double heat-sinks.

That should take care of the high-heat mess we're in, and the solution to the pin-point damage problem is also (in theory, if not in practice; it'll take some coding) easy:
1. Rework all ballistics to fire in bursts of about 1 second, just like energy weapons.
2. Rework the PPC as a beam weapon, since that's what it's supposed to be.

These two major fixes will eliminate both high-heat alphas and pin-point damage in one fell stroke, and I'm confident PGI could pull it off in good time before release, leaving them with a game in a much better state, closer to its BattleTech roots, and much, much easier to balance. It'll also increase the skill needed to play the game when you'd need to also hold ballistics on target to do your full damage, like we have to with energy weapons currently.

[DisasterMedic]

Victor Morson said:

So, let me count the horrible, horrible ways that this is the single worst idea for a reactive low-ELO nerf in the entire game. I know a lot of you are already likely jumping to say what a glorious day this is, but if you are, you don't understand why "High alpha builds" were a problem in the first place.

- First and foremost: This punishes small 'mechs. If you bought a BJ-1X get ready to throw it in the trash, because the limit on numbers of guns will absolutely wreck it. This and other 'mechs were designed to boat large arrays of lasers, so forcing them to stagger that fire out will absolutely, positively kick light and medium pilots in the balls again.

- Most high alpha builds don't carry many guns anyway! Everyone rambles about the 6 PPC Stalker, which is clearly far worse than the 4 PPC Stalker. This will punish the bad build and not punish the good one; likewise the most common setup is 2 PPC, 1 Gauss, which this will not even impact. That's because small numbers of big guns are better at heavy damage, high focus hits than large numbers of small guns a lot of the time!

- This won't stop synergy. I've said it before, and I will say it again: If you cap how many of X weapon I can effectively run, I will simply run Y and Z that have similar firing characteristics. Stop me from running 3 PPCs and I'll run 2 PPCs and a Gauss; maybe 2 PPCs and 2 Gauss, 'mech depending. Stop me from running 5 Large Lasers and I'll run 4 and an ER Large. No matter how much you smash this, it will never stop it.

- Goodbye, Secondary Guns. Does your 'mech have backup weapons? Lasers or streaks in case they close the distance? Well if you pop those 3-4 backup guns, you're going to take a huge heat penalty now, despite the fact they likely carry less than a tenth of your firepower. I know I'm not going to want to eat surges of heat for firing a bank of small lasers.

- That's the whole point to some variants! In addition to the light variants that are damaged, but what about 'mechs like the Catapult A1? You've effectively rendered the 'mech worthless. What about a less popular example, the Awesome 8Q? No more PPC builds for that! Good thing nobody is using that laserboat Hunchback, too, because that's going to be a joke now.

- This won't stop the true problem. The reason "high alpha builds" have become such a subject of ire (among the non-frankenmech crowd even) has absolutely nothing to do with the number of guns being boated. It is almost exclusively because of a lack of weight restrictions in the game (Which was one of the longest running pre-beta threads on the MW:O forums, mind you, so I can't say some of us didn't see it coming) resulting in every single person driving a Stalker or Highlander.

- Twin Gauss is Coming. Sure the Jagger and K2 can do so, but they're fragile. The 4X can do it but it's slow. Around the corner is the Victor, that can likely sport 2x Gauss and PPCs. By attacking builds running more than one PPC, all you will do is force everyone here next. Again, alpha strikes are not the underlying problem!

The problem: Guess what, no matter what you do to alpha strikes or weapon arrays this won't make the problem go away. As long as 85-90 ton 'mechs are allowed to be the majority on the field, they will ALL hit so hard you will be unable to pilot anything else!

-

Please PGI, do not go this route. I know you login to the forums and see a million angry threads about alpha strikes and want to give your casual players what they want, but the problem is they honestly do not know what they want, if they're blaming that. They're blaming the very most superficial thing, firing multiples of the same gun, and not thinking through any of the other ramifications.

Do not throw lights and mediums under the bus here, in particular 'mechs designed for that very purpose.

-

So what do we really need?

Weight Restrictions. If everyone isn't driving a heavy or assault and mediums are pushed into the mix, 99% of this will go away overnight. I've heard lobbies might be apart of UI2.0 and my God I hope they are. Sacrificing over half your game content on the altar of a quick match button is not working out. I don't mind if there's a no restriction lobby, though!

More heat effects. I've always been a big fan of organically adding heat effects. If heat slowed your 'mech down more at higher levels, it would make a big difference and people may manage their high-heat builds accordingly. This alpha-nerf system on the other hand will not.

Most of all, a wider look at this and other issues. When the forums light up angry about a specific element, I think it's proven disastrous time and time again to just react directly to it (with a few exceptions, such as the consumable roll out plan) rather than facing the underlying causes. Everyone complains high alpha builds pretty much because some TT-Frakenmech players have screamed it loud enough that newbies who are tired of being cored by Assault 'Mechs that are running a few really big guns have chimed in.

As I've pointed out before, however, most of the good alpha builds aren't even running very many guns. At all. 3-4 tops - the NUMBER of guns has absolutely nothing to do with the problem. It's because, in general a small number of really big guns is better than a larger number of smaller guns if you have the weight to run it.

In Conclusion

Effectively this reactive concept is flawed from it's very conception. It's punishing the wrong 'mechs and doing nothing about the issues that are actually frustrating people.

I'd like to ask you this: What is this going to solve? Will it solve the upcoming Victor running 2x Gauss and 2x PPC? Probably not. Will it solve Highlanders running a Gauss and 2 PPCs? Almost certainly not. What about 1 Gauss and 3 PPCs? That still works...

... is this really to solve one 4+ PPC Stalker that's not very good anyway? Is it specifically designed to be anti-4 PPC, when that's not more effective than the other builds listed above?

Will this solve the fact that if everyone's in an assault, they'll all have massive damage output no matter what we do until they are made the minority?

If the answer is no, what is this going to solve?

This guy makes a very :words: post to point out that this 'fix' is addressing a non-existent problem in the worst possible way one could -if it was even a problem-.

Fix brawly weapons (SRMs, ballistics) and the game becomes balanced and fun without requiring hamfisted Rube-Goldberg machine solutions to balance issues, real or imagined.

Edited by DisasterMedic, 12 June 2013 - 02:44 PM.

[BR0WN_H0RN3T]

Nik Reaper, on 12 June 2013 - 01:15 AM, said:

This, ^ this and this . The heat limit should be about 110~115%.
Also if brawling is to come back some increase to srm seems needed as they are the answer to low weigh good payoff for short range only.

Good suggestions there from kitane but I propose 1 extra think: a chassis quirk for AWS 9m and 8Q. Those boys are the real PPC mechs. Give them the recognition they deserve

[Xenok]

Banditman, on 11 June 2013 - 11:06 AM, said:

I don't think that your reasoning for the ML limit is a strong one. You are basing a balance point for the entire game around one single variant of one single mech. That doesn't seem like a great idea to me. I am not arguing for an increase or decrease to the ML limit, only saying that I hope more analysis went into that number than simply to say "Well, the 4P has six energy HP's in it's hunch".

I do not think you cought the jest of the statement. I read into this, the limits wont be the same across all mechs and some weapon systems are designed for a alpha strike therefor no penalty when those systems are fired on that particular chassis. I personally found this very cool and refreshing.

The idea of, you fired 4 MLs togehter bad you is just plain dumb, but the idea of that mech is made to fire these together and manage the heat, but cant fire these others at the same time becomes a mech balancing capability and also will allow for unique chassis varriations that allow a quad PPC stalker that is made to alpha without heat increase but has some other problem (such as slower turning, nearrow torso twist angles and the like to still have it be well balanced. If they do it mech by mech you will have your Hunchback that can do a 30 point alpha from its 6 ML without a heat problem, but you also have a hunch that has most your firepower and everyone blows it off first thing. It will need some adjusting I am sure, but sounds very cool to me.

The blanket these weapons heat up more if you have more than 3 is the part that bothers me. Why wouldnt and enginer work on resolving that problem? They would and the solution would have some costs. Mech by Mech limitations is the way to go.

As far as the .5 seconds thing, its about right. It will make the one shot kill alphas expensive heat wise, but still leave the mech fully able to duke it out brawl, and if your not careful you will end up with extra heat from firing a bit to quickly.

[Jaranath]

Regarding the heat solution:

Seems complicated and arbitrary. I think it will detract from the basic "feel" of the game, at least when it comes to mechbuilding; the rules will be less intuitive and plausible. I want to feel like I really am building a Giant Space Robot, and it's distracting to see the devs and the math peeking through the armor.

I don't think this would impact my play much, my favored builds don't really seem to cross the penalty line. But...while I DO find a few particular boat builds annoying, I'm not convinced they are so great a problem as to warrant this kind of solution. At the least, I would rather see something that works within the existing game mechanics rather than adding an entirely new layer.

I don't know how this will work out in practice, but I don't like the feel of it even if it does work as intended.

[Stoicblitzer]

just read through it.




the balancing in this game is taking wayyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy too long. then when they do think of something, it turns out to be garbage.

Edited by Stoicblitzer, 12 June 2013 - 04:19 PM.

[Blackadder]

Lyoto Machida, on 12 June 2013 - 02:22 PM, said:

What? Remove heat altogether???

no, instead of putting in an anti heat boat mechanic, leave heat as is, put in a reload delay boat mechanic as an alternative.

[Caboose30]

I'm all for the PPC penalty, but on the fence about the Medium Laser one. The reason is because the example you used, the Laserback, is designed for one hard alpha, then chain fire after that. A mech can recover from a medium laser alpha, or even multiple successive ones fairly well. The PPC alpha is just meant to be a one hit kill, as pretty much no mech can recover at all from firing 4-6 of those. If you do keep the ML penalty, tone it down just a hair for multiples past six, or at least keep the multiple the same - 5, 10, 15, not 5, 10, 20. That's pretty much all I have. I don't think there should be a penalty on small lasers, no matter how many you use - you have to get damn close to fire them. Large lasers of any kind I think should be at three or four, probably four - model them after the PPCs.

[Pater Mors]

Heat Penalties/Scale/Threshold
Decreasing the threshold would only be a nerf to all Mechs/Weapons if you didn't increase dissipation to compensate. Can we not try this for a week or two? Perhaps a total max threshold per chassis size with additional heatsinks slowly increasing the threshold towards the cap, eg; A medium has a max threshold of 40 (random number). It gets 20 from the 10 DHS in the engine and each additional DHS adds 5 until it reaches the cap of 40. After that, the only thing that would be increased is the overall heat dissipation (obviously I just made those numbers up to illustrate the idea).

Lower threshold/higher dissipation means an increase in overall DPS in the game and a decrease in overall pinpoint Alpha damage. That is what this game needs right now.

The other changes look good, however I'd rather see a decrease in beam time on the pulse lasers than a straight damage buff. I think the damage is currently fine but the fact is that with the current beam time there's not much difference between taking a pulse and a regular laser especially not for the tonnage (5t for a LL and 7 for a LPL when they essentially do the same thing damage wise?). I suppose a straight damage buff will do this too, but I don't think it's really the right way to do it (10.6 damage for a LPL??). It should be 10 damage with a shorter beam time so that the damage is much more pinpoint, thus giving it a benefit over the sweeping beam of a regular laser. Also a slight increase to the rate of fire would go a long way in distinguishing the two types.

Edited by Pater Mors, 12 June 2013 - 05:03 PM.

[Pater Mors]

Also, I'd like to point out that I am currently running builds that are way hotter than should be allowable and these changes won't effect me at all because I don't boat more than allowable number of weapons, by your OP.

Eg: Highlander 733P - 2x LL 2x ML, 1x LRM20 2x LRM10.
Highlander 733 - 2x ERPPC's 1x Gauss 3x SSRM
Cata C1 - 2x PPC, 2x ML, 2x SRM6

These are very hot builds, but quite manageable currently. With the penalties it will do nothing to stop me firing all my missiles or all my lasers (since they're all different types). This is a simple nerf to fully stocked boats that won't actually do anything to fix the current problems in this game. Under the system in my above post, these builds would also still be fine but would require much more skill to pilot without overheating every 5 seconds.

Oh and lastly, 150% is far too high for damage to start. Anyone that blows past 100% should start suffering damage otherwise what's the point of even having a shutdown cap?? Again, all this addresses is high heat super-boats but does nothing to address the actual problems in MechWarrior: Online.

Edited by Pater Mors, 12 June 2013 - 05:24 PM.

[gjnii]

First off?
whats to stop a player from just putting 1 erppc in the mix and gaining less heat than the penalty, almost the same boating ability, and utility and range to go with it.
or 5xsrm6 1xsrm4
Plus LRM boats such as my stalker 3H use 2x20lrm 2x5lrm

Second?
could this possibly be any more confusing to new players? Sure I'll be fine...
But is there anything more opaque than adding 26 new weapon specific rules that specifically break the listed UI values you're just setting up in that shiny new interface, by adding.. wait for it... a scaling non-intuitive heat variable to a system that already has several different units of measurement incorporated into it. Added, of course, to a system new players are handicapped in by being stuck with SHS.

The only thing worse would be to make mech specific limits too, just so new players would have NO hope of getting a cool mech going.

If you're going to make me sit through a 3rd person view disaster to attract more fanbase, PLEASE, PLEASE try not to completely lose them in the UI/mech building phase before they ever launch and to see it.

That said I love the max heat overheat damage rule. 1 rule, that helps lock in 1 problem.
not .. what 48 rules to deal with 48 problems.. some of which probably aren't even an issue but will be nerfed anyway.

I'm.. generally supportive of the changes to this game, but the anti-boat idea just seems to be a problematic at best.

Edited by gjnii, 12 June 2013 - 05:24 PM.

[Mister Blastman]

Methinks the developers are playing a different game in their offices than MWO. Otherwise, we'd see better ideas on how to balance things.

[Troggy]

I'm with the general consensus on this one. This is a horrific solution to a relatively simple problem. It's gonna suck to implement, it's gonna be easy to game, it's gonna create needless QQ.

A solution needs to be TWO things ROBUST and SIMPLE. This is NEITHER.

Rather, it is overly complicated and pretty confusing. It will have to be different for every weapon and possibly every mech as well. Then if anything changes (say new weapons or mechs), the whole system needs to be re-balanced again. This will all take 10x too long, and will never work correctly. Look how long it has taken just to get the individual mech 'tweaks' implemented. This will dwarf that.


Worse, there are a number of effective potential solutions to this problem. This might be the only non-viable one. Those solutions have been discussed ad nauseum. Mostly, their implementation is trivial. Honestly, I think you (the devs) should pick one, and try it. I cannot imagine any situation in which your current course of action will result in a optimal game balance.

1) Easiest: Just prevent 6 PPCs from shooting at the same time (call it capacitor load or something). Do something similar for ML's, LL''s etc. If you just want a band-aid, this accomplishes the same thing without too much fuss.

2) Better: Make all heat-sinks have 1.0 heat capacity. Make doubles cool at 1.7 (or even 2.0). This means if you wanna boat energy weapons your gonna have to use singles (and get screwed on cool-down), or if you just wanna shoot a lot, you can use doubles, but your gonna have to wait, because you will have WAY less heat capacity.

3) Alternative: Make the heat penalties really crappy. Like slow down @ 80%, guarenteed damage @ 110%, explosion @ 150%. Might not fully solve boating, but would certainly make a player think twice about it.

4) A multitude of other SIMPLE, UNIVERSAL solutions.

I'm a fan of number two. But honestly? Pick an easier solution

--
Troggy

[Ransack]

I meant to read this yesterday. It looks good to me. Only my Cataphracts take a hit.

[BlackBeltJones]

39 pages and no Dev response, it is possible they will just implement this and we will have to live with it - I sort of respect that though I feel the idea is terrible. We also have not seen any chalkboard drawing - maybe diagrams are forthcoming and all this will be stick-figured out. One thing we do know is that Soy is having the time of his life and apparently loving every minute of this. Carry on.

[BR0WN_H0RN3T]

U must remember...the devs have tested this thoroughly in house with their sophisticated testing team. It's working as intended *sarcasm*

[OneEyed Jack]

Ransack, on 12 June 2013 - 05:59 PM, said:

I meant to read this yesterday. It looks good to me. Only my Cataphracts take a hit.

And this is exactly the kind of stupid thought process that leads to this crap in the first place. "It doesn't affect anything I'm playing right now, so overall and future ramifications mean nothing. Looks good!"

[Ronin Starwalker]

I don't know why everyone has their knickers in a knot.

I've done the RCA (Root Cause Analysis) and the issue is convergence, not heat.

But hey, lets try every other path first, preferably the longer and more complicated ones, before we come back to the root cause.

If all you have is a hammer, everything starts to look like a nail.

[Victor Morson]

Ronin Starwalker, on 12 June 2013 - 07:41 PM, said:

I've done the RCA (Root Cause Analysis) and the issue is convergence, not heat.

While individual 'mech balancing is important later on, the actual root cause is no weight limits. If the majority of PPC/Gauss snipers were running 50 tonners and had 1 of each, nobody at all would care.

[Alik Kerensky]

Though I like the idea of a hard heat cap (100%)... I would think a mech who overheats to a level above this heat cap should suffer significant penalties like a reduction in movement and delays in reaction speed (think a punch drunk boxer that has blurry vision and is slow) for a period of time base on how far over the limit they went.

I think that specific levels (percentages over 100%) need to be set to where there is a higher and higher chance to destroy things like heatsinks (reducing the heat that can be handled even further) and other internal component like ammo.

I’d like to see something where the excessive heat levels will cause the MechWarrior to be forcibly ejected from the mech or killed (c-bill penalty) due to being baked alive. Maybe reduce that chance with an advanced cooling suit module.

These arbitrary heat bonuses put on builds that were designed by their manufactures to boat certain weapons are IMHO bad.

Edited by Alik Kerensky, 12 June 2013 - 07:50 PM.