1263 replies to this topic

[ZiddaDragon]

Do you think we will ever see the MRM's?

[Xandalis]

[Rant]
You, a PGI, continue to astound me: have any of you ever actually played the original MW games? Tabletop? What's driving the nerf fests? Players whining about it being imbalanced (hello, MW/BT has always been about tactics and strategy, and dealing with imbalanced force matchups...)? The more you restrict how we can build (and utilize) the mech loadouts, the less fun it becomes. Alpha-striking already carried an inherent "penalty:" you just put all your weapons on cooldown, built up massive heat compared to staggered and timed group-fire, and possibly just shut your mech down (or cause internal damage if shutdown was overridden, possibly leading to those pesky ammo explosions that possibly spark off more ammo explosions internally, etc, etc, etc...). Those with the combat awareness to use alpha-strikes effectively, SHOULD out-perform those who don't have it. IE, skill vs build. Skill won't always win, but neither will build.

I don't expect a constructive response. Also don't expect me to be putting any more money into this game, at the rate you're going.
[/Rant]

[Sp3ctre18]

PGI, I can empathize with seeking some solutions, but stop trying to discourage boating because people whine about the nature of the game. HARDPOINTS, prevent enough boating. Some mechs can still manage some boating, and that's fine, that's part of the Battletech universe. Warhawk / Masakari has 4 PPCs, the Nova/Blackhwk has 12 ERML, the Supernova has 6 ERLL, Awesome has 3 PPCs, Rifleman has 4 LPL.

Boating still leaves a mech with weaknesses. ML boats need to get in range, the 6 PPC stalker gets ripped by light mechs that get in range.

New or less-skilled players will complain but that's the nature of the game. They have to deal with some tough fights and learn the strengths and weaknesses of mechs and their builds.

THIS IS A THINKING MAN'S SHOOTER. Those who do NOT think will not be able to deal with boats.

I rarely boat myself but I've NEVER had a problem with them (or even with pop-tarts for that matter), whether it was MW2, MW3, MW4, or MWO.

IF YOU WILL IMLPEMENT SOME SORT OF PENALTY, though, at least I do like a previous sugest to make it on a per mech basis. The Swayback has a 6 ML pod that are meant to fire together, so NO penalty. Any stock variant that has boating cannot be penalized. But 6 MLs on a mech that does not have it that way stock or any fashion that makes it PART of the DESIGN, could take a little penalty.

At least you can make up the excuse that the mechs with stock loadouts they're designed have slightly better efficiency.

Edited by Sp3ctre18, 13 June 2013 - 01:31 PM.

[Petroshka]

in terms of normalizing pulse lasers. I'd rather see less damage and less heat. longer battles = good.

[aseth]

Make heat generation temporarily reduce your heat dissipation instead of doing this strange "six of these are okay, but only three of those" thing - it's not intuitive at all.

When you generate more heat in a single salvo than the number of heat sinks you have (counting double heat sinks as 2), your heat dissipation should suffer for a short period of time as the heat sinks are overloaded. The more you overload them by, the longer it takes to recover. Modify based on temperature, etc.

Yeah, the hunchback will have problems firing all six ML's in one alpha strike. It can chain fire them, or group them into smaller units. The 6 PPC Stalker can get around it by chain firing them too. That's okay. Chain fire is less effective than alpha striking.

[Victor Morson]

I'd love to agree about Hardpoints, again; I think MW4 style hardpoints overlayed onto the TT system would have been better than "class" hard points, sure. It would have been a way for further define mech personality and give a method for the easy tweaking of inferior variants. I lobbied for it too, folks.

What hardpoints don't do is stop boating: The popular sniper builds today (1 Gauss, 2 PPC) aren't even boats. Actual boating (Medium Laser) banks are a literal non-issue in MW:O right now. If you seriously think MW4's system was the saving grace to things like 4 PPC 'mechs, well, it had several 4 PPC 'mechs.

Really, I can't stress enough boats are not the problem. Even pinpoint alphas aren't the problem. In my opinion a 90 ton Highlander should absolutely wreck a combat Hunchback. It's just the way BattleTech works. It's also why weight / BV restrictions are absolutely necessary.

Think of Assaults like a Queen in chess - extremely powerful, sure, but the real power comes from the other pieces on the board. Playing MechWarrior without weight limits is like playing a game of chess where every single person is allowed to replace everything but the pawns with Queens straight up.

EDIT: I am not opposed to unrestricted drop lobbies and stuff. They should totally exist. But there should be readily available options for other weight ranges; sacrificing the ability to chose this stuff for the sole purpose of making matchmaking one click is not doing anyone any favors. If UI 2.0 brings weight lobbies, it'd probably be better if it was replaced with a quick match button to put you into a pre-existing lobby instead.

Edited by Victor Morson, 13 June 2013 - 01:52 PM.

[TheRulesLawyer]

I swear this game gets worse with every update.

Edited by TheRulesLawyer, 13 June 2013 - 01:49 PM.

[Arlen]

I honestly think all this will hurt is the new players who haven't got the idea for a good build.... Also, yeah, I agree with the others here. 150% is far to generous even with the heat penalty. If anything mitigate the damage taken above 100%. for example: 100% - 110% = 1dmg/ sec; 111%-125% = 2 dmg/sec; 126% - 150% = 3 dmg/sec (or some other scale). Furthermore, it would defiantly get a pilots attention hearing betty saying, "mech taking heat damage". Just my two-cents.

[Vermaxx]

So you're finally implementing the phantom 'alpha heat penalty' everyone has been rumoring since closed beta. It was a shart idea when it didn't exist, it's just utterly unbelievable now.

Seriously, three PPC? So every X-Wing Catapult is now out in the cold, sucking an extra ten heat from a gun they aren't carrying. Boating is a result of your game design choices - weapons hit where you aim, ALL of them, and the maps do not require you to build a varied mech. Specialization is the name of the game in MWO, and alphas are the result. So you're just going to hammer people for doing exactly what is the best way to play. Smart.

The machine gun. Seriously guys, I do not know how you can keep missing the mark. Give it a cooldown. Give it two damage. Give it a half second fire duration. Done. The weapon is USEFUL, the weapon is balanced against a small laser, and the Raven/Spider with ballistic hardpoints suddenly become viable mechs. Do the same thing for flamer.

Stop with the always-on fire for these weapons, it is literally what is killing their value.

[Shumabot]

OneEyed Jack, on 13 June 2013 - 01:15 PM, said:

Bull-****.

You claiming that "most" people support that lame-arse idea doesn't make it so. It applies primarily to people that think MW4 was the epitome of mech gaming. Most certainly not a majority opinion.

I think you might have made the mistake of thinking "when most people imagine a successful hardpoint limited system" and "when most people imagine hardpoint limitations" as the same. I'm ignoring when people have bad ideas because those peoples ideas are bad and I'm not going to list them or give them any credence. More often than not when people think of a materially superior system, and there are more than one because the current implementation is terrible, they're thinking of something like what I outlined. Whether you think it's superior or not is entirely irrelevant to me, I don't particularly respect the ability of this games userbase to know what is and isn't good for them. I don't respect it in a lot of other ways too, but lets limit to this for now.

Quote

And such a system would be a long way from offering any actual diversity. Sure it would make individual variants more different from each other, at the cost of any real options within a variant. Those slots would pigeonhole the variants into carrying only certain certain weapons, since only certain weapons make any sense in them. The only real option would be not filling slots, which wouldn't be a very good option because you don't have a larger slot somewhere else to make up for it.

A: I don't think you know what diversity is.

B: You are being ludicrously hyperbolic, cutting the available weapons in an individual hardpoint in half doesn't reduce 100% of the options. In an algebraic way that is dumb of you to say because it's mathematically wrong. If you want to get in to the meat of it it actually greatly increases the number of VIABLE options while decreasing the total number of available options, but I'm going to assume you have absolutely no experience with general game design concepts or the psychology of choice. I don't think it'd be worth explaining it to you given how strongly you're initially opposed to the idea and how blatantly wrong you are... Meh, I'll still try.

Would the slots pigeonhole mechs into certain builds? Yeah, kinda. The thing is, that's already the case. That will always be the case because boating is materially superior to mixed builds. The more freedom you give to people the more freedom they have to choose what is best, you are both giving them the choice and ability to take what is most mechanically superior. What is most mechanically superior is boating, ergo it's what everyone will eventually do, ergo giving people too much freedom of choice destroys variety.

But then, you're not here to debate ideas, you're here to shout and act mad. You don't know what you're talking about but you sure want to be heard.

Quote

Might as well remove Mechlab altogether and just run a stock-only game, since there wouldn't be any significant variance.

Thank you captain six year olds logic. I appreciate your logical fallacies. Go share them with the world, I'm sure you'll get great responses.

Edited by Shumabot, 13 June 2013 - 02:17 PM.

[Vermaxx]

I just want you guys to know I loved Ikari's post so much I copied it before anyone could censor it. I might just have to leave it laying around in threads in the future.

[Lord Psycho]

I want to say this in Paul's defense....if anything I'm not sure Paul came up with the idea per se. Secondly, if he has any kind of addiction, it might be the community's fault. All I have to think abut is the goons lining up to knock him down..that vid should still be on youtube.....

a perfectly functional idea abused and then removed...

How many times has this community done these things?

Don't just blame PGI.

[Big Giant Head]

Okay, PGI, I understand that you are trying to make your own rules and your game - thats awesome
But you cant just post small piece of your system (like Paul´s post) and expect players to understand it.
So, either take some time to figure things out then come up with something that really makes solid metagame.

Just answer this question: What will make one mech different from another? (Crits slots, number of crit slots, certain restrictions, maybe something different,....)
And post it on ATD

Edited by Big Giant Head, 13 June 2013 - 02:48 PM.

[Deathlike]

TheRulesLawyer, on 13 June 2013 - 01:49 PM, said:

I swear this game gets worse with every update.

[Anders]

Lord Psycho, on 13 June 2013 - 02:27 PM, said:

I want to say this in Paul's defense....if anything I'm not sure Paul came up with the idea per se. Secondly, if he has any kind of addiction, it might be the community's fault. All I have to think abut is the goons lining up to knock him down..that vid should still be on youtube.....

a perfectly functional idea abused and then removed...

How many times has this community done these things?

Don't just blame PGI.

Mr. Lord Psycho:

Please direct your Mk. I eyeballs to this post:
http://mwomercs.com/...38#entry2443838

We here at The Word of Lowtax thank you for your post. We here at the Word of Lowtax realize that you have limited entertainment destinations and appreciate that you're spending your entertainment electrons on us. Please continue to choose the Word of Lowtax in your future holiday destination spending! We are grateful for your out of the box, blue-sky thinking, and appreciate you touching base with us here at the Word of Lowtax. We hope to synergize our efforts to achieve quantifiable paradigm redefinitions in a future collaboration soon.

Robotically Yours,
Anders

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[DroLongShot]

I like all the ideas EXCEPT heat penalties. I don't even boat but boating is and always has been part of the Battletech universe. You give us mechs with multiple like hardpoints and penalize us for using them... It's not a good idea. Any good pilot isn't going to alpha all their heat weapons anyway. Every build has a weakness and every pilot has a responsibility to learn what they are. Ppc boats can be surpressed with lrms or fast mechs. Srm cats can be taken out with a little focused ballistics fire. Lrm boats can be defeated by staying out of los. Laser boats can be defeated by drawing fire and causing the mech to overheat. Boating is a non issue and there is no need to "fix" it.

[OneEyed Jack]

Shumabot, on 13 June 2013 - 02:15 PM, said:

I think you might have made the mistake of thinking "when most people imagine a successful hardpoint limited system" and "when most people imagine hardpoint limitations" as the same.

I'll just skip the pathetic attempt to suggest that I obviously must be mentally inferior for not agreeing with you.

Such a system would, in fact, be successful... at limiting. But that's about it. It wouldn't remotely create a diverse game where people can pick mechs because they like the mechs and play them in a style they want to play. They would be forced to pick a mech already pre-selected to be the style they want, if one even existed. To a certain extent that can be said of the current system, but in a much more variable way. Let's take the K2 as an example. By the current system I could run:

• Standard-type load; 2 big energy, 2 small energy, 2 MG(?)
  
• Big energy load; 4 big energy
  
• Mixed load; 2 big energy, 2 medium ballistic, and maybe squeeze in 2 small energy
  
• Ballistic load; 2 big ballistic w/ maybe some number of small energy back-up
  
• Ballistic load 2; 1 big ballistic, 4 small energy back-up
  
• Mixed load 2; 1 big ballistic, 2 big energy

Those are just off the top of my head, and each one has options within it. By the system you encourage you could run

• PPCs
  
• Large Lasers

Shumabot, on 13 June 2013 - 02:15 PM, said:

A: I don't think you know what diversity is.

Yeah, I think I already covored which one of us knows what diversity is.

Shumabot, on 13 June 2013 - 02:15 PM, said:

B: You are being ludicrously hyperbolic, cutting the available weapons in an individual hardpoint in half doesn't reduce 100% of the options. In an algebraic way that is dumb of you to say because it's mathematically wrong. If you want to get in to the meat of it it actually greatly increases the number of VIABLE options while decreasing the total number of available options

You don't cut the available options in half, you cut them to almost nothing. The choice between Medium and Small Laser isn't a real choice. MGs would be MGs, with no options at all. Maybe we'd get to choose between Gauss and AC20 on the few mechs that could carry them, and had the crits for a AC20. Or if we're lucky, we could downgrade to a smaller AC, but that's just a direct downgrade of the mech, since we couldn't upgrade somewhere else to balance it back out. The same goes for sticking a small energy in a large energy slot. Downgrading in one place without the ability to upgrade in another leaves no viable options. So it really does stick everything into something very close to no significant options at all. If the options aren't significant, then they're not real options, just window dressing.

Shumabot, on 13 June 2013 - 02:15 PM, said:

Would the slots pigeonhole mechs into certain builds? Yeah, kinda. The thing is, that's already the case. That will always be the case because boating is materially superior to mixed builds. The more freedom you give to people the more freedom they have to choose what is best, you are both giving them the choice and ability to take what is most mechanically superior. What is most mechanically superior is boating, ergo it's what everyone will eventually do, ergo giving people too much freedom of choice destroys variety.

Not even remotely true. I already covered the differences in limitations, so I won't repeat it. The fact of the matter is plenty of people don't use the same cookie-cutter builds. Your ill-conceived notion would take away all their fun, sometimes goofy, personalized builds in a vain effort to force more variety on power-games. Which proves that either you haven't a clue about the psychology of power-gaming, or are being deliberately obtuse in your refusal to acknowledge it.

So you take away all these options, and the power-gamers will diversify into using a broad spectrum of mechs (notice I don't say 'builds', because that no longer has significant meaning)? Wrong. Despite your attempts, there would still be a given mech that would stand out as the best at what it does, for whatever reason. Now there would probably be a few such mechs, to fill different roles, but these would be the only mechs such players used. Don't delude yourself into thinking they would use other mechs, because they only want to accomplish one thing. And with no significant choices to make in load-out, there would be no question as to which mech for a role was the best. All you will have accomplished is to consolidate the power-gamers into fewer mechs and ruin any chance for enjoyment among those that enjoy customization for it's own sake.

Don't pretend you have a clue about balancing games, because you don't even have one about what that means. Balancing isn't accomplished by pigeonholing. Since any options at all invariably create at least the illusion of imbalance, there can never be a perfectly balanced game that has any options, whatsoever. The key is simply in bringing it close enough that, though the power-gamers may still be power-gamers (you can't change human nature), the non-power-gamers still have a reasonable chance. And the current balance isn't as far off that mark as it's made out to be by the doom-criers.

Yes, there's a few crappy weapons we all know about, and Small Lasers that will never be more than filler. On the other end there's really just PPCs. As a weapon they're probably very slightly too good, but it's really only in multiple (4+) that it's enough to stand out, and then only because of convergence. How scary would a 6xPPC Stalker be of it was lucky to land 2 in the same location? Most mechs could take a couple shots without major worry, and those that couldn't shouldn't be giving him a good shot and/or are small enough that some might miss altogether. it could still unload serious damage, but it's a weapon-intensive Assault mech, so that stands to reason. The same goes for the the other large weapons, such as dual AC20. Without instant pin-point convergence it's painful, and should be, but not immediately deadly.

It doesn't even have to be cone-of-fire. A slight delay in convergence would allow accuracy at the cost of time. 6xPPC or 2xAC20 could still unload hell on a single location, but they'd have to remain exposed to do it, making them more vulnerable to return fire, in exchange. This would make them more balanced with more varied load-outs, which are already less pinpoint. It would be harder to one-shot anything, especially a light (on which convergence would be difficult), but that same light would have less convergence, as well... unless he wanted to leave himself open to retribution. It puts everything on a much more even balance, but without removing the ability for people to play the way they want to play.

That's the definition of diversity (as applied to this case).

Or it could just be that you want everyone pigeonholed because you like the idea of stock-only, and want to force everyone to play very close to that with you.

[ebea51]

I think its a good idea, however, I think the 0.5sec needs to be increased to 0.75-1 sec. Typically 0.5sec is a long time and I would agree, but mechs move slowly. 0.5sec is not a long time - for all intensive purposes, its just as good as an alpha.

I love your reasoning on the Swayback pack not being penalized as this is obvious that the pack can/should/is intended to be fired as an alpha (for the record: I don’t like hunchbacks, while I have them, I don’t like them – so no, im not being a HBK {Noble MechWarrior} when I say what I just did).

However, I do think that the PPC penalty should be reduced to 2, with the first penalty occurring at 3 PPCs.
MOST mechs can comfortably fit 2 PPCs and can come stock with 2 PPCs… but after you fit the 3^rd, you should be considered boating.
THERE SHOULD BE EXCEPTIONS… of course.
One being the Awesome AWS-8Q which come stock with 3 PPCs. This would make this mech unique to this rule.
Im sure there are other mechs which would join as ‘exceptions’ to the rule, and with different weapons (not just PPCs)

While your heat scaling is a good solution to the current epidemic of boating plaguing the metagame – I think it needs to be expanded.

Not only should there be a penalty for boating by giving additional heat as you propose – but there should also be an ALPHA HEAT PENALTY dependent on your ALPHA DAMAGE.
High Damage = High Heat Weapons, therefore, High Alpha = Mega Heat.
This would mean that mechs with smaller alphas will alpha cooler than mechs which have boated with the singular mentality of producing a high alpha mech.

This would not mean the end of sniping mech builds – they have their place. However, their rate of fire will be substantially curtailed encouraging players to aim instead of spamming alphas when they have the heat to spare.

For instance (using Paul’s example, without lowering the PPC boating penalty to 3):
- 3 PPC fired = 0 heat penalty for boating + 10 Heat for High DMG Alpha
- 3 PPC + Gauss fired = 0 heat penalty for boating + 20 Heat for High DMG Alpha
- 4 PPC fired = 10 heat penalty + 20 Heat for High DMG Alpha (as this dmg is comparable to 3PPC+Gauss)
- 4 PPC + Gauss fired = 10 heat penalty + 30 Heat for High DMG Alpha (a cuttoff would occur between alpha-dmg brackets)
- 5 PPC fired = 20 heat penalty + 20 Heat for High DMG Alpha (less dmg then 4PPC+Gauss, therefore, falls back into previous alpha dmg bracket)
- 6 PPC fired = 40 heat penalty + 30 Heat for High DMG Alpha (High DMG Alpha would continue into next dmg bracket)... YES, a 6 PPC alpha will most likely shut you down if you don't stack you DBL-HS, over-ride shutdown and use your coolshots, but you are point-alpha'ing 60dmg on the same spot. Expect a drawback from doing so.

This way you can still boat hard and snipe, however, you have a LONG cool down time after putting out all that dmg and you must really pick your shots.

Of course, a similar model would be applied to large laser boating.

Edited by ebea51, 13 June 2013 - 04:20 PM.

[Dryer Lint]

Everything suggested except buffing flamers and machine guns is so incredibly stupid that I will literally leave Mechwarrior after playing for almost an entire year if they are all implemented. These are the most convoluted and nonsensical "balance" changes ever fathomed and my advice to you is stop doing so much coke. Mechwarrior tabletop variants are utter gargage from all points of view and you should feel ashamed to have thought pushing MWO builds towards them would be anything but a disaster.

[Dryer Lint]

Oh and another thing Chainfire sucks and any pilot worth weight in silver uses AHK with custom delays.

Edited by Dryer Lint, 13 June 2013 - 04:23 PM.