721 replies to this topic

[DarkJaguar]

A lot of great feedback guys, thank you again everyone for this discussion. I would ask though, that anyone who says TT numbers won't work prove it to me. I made pictures and charts and typed up a huge explanation as to why they WOULD work, but all I get in return is "TT numbers don't work, LOL neckbeard."

As I've stated in a previous post, I intend to take the lessons learned from this thread and forumlate individual threads for each topic to deliver a clear and concise argument as to why they work, if you disagree with me, please prove me wrong so that I don't waste my time.

[Victor Morson]

I think the only TT game relevant to balancing a realtime environment is the Solaris dueling rules game. It's not perfect, but it the far greater detail in what is happening makes it a far better template for a sim than core TT.

I'm a huge TT fan, and a huge MW fan, and all of my experience at seeing MW try to copy TT has not been very positive, largely because weapons are based about what they do over a period of time, not per shot, something that is a huge deal to translate. In particular when you consider that TT has it's own set of huge imbalances, like the horrendous AC/2, that does more DPS in Solaris for similar reasons to why it does more DPS here.

Now, the spirit of the rules.. that I'm a big fan of. I think you can take almost any concept from BattleTech and make it into something that works well in a sim, including the heat effects. It's not really necessary to 1:1 convert it to get the desired result.

My other problem with being too faithful to TT is that FASA was notorious for trying to avoid retconning things, ever, leaving a huge slew of balance problems in the game that survived all the way from BattleDroids.

But again, my primary concern is translating them in a way that gets the spirit of the concept intact.

Edited by Victor Morson, 03 July 2013 - 02:10 PM.

[stjobe]

DarkJaguar, on 03 July 2013 - 02:02 PM, said:

A lot of great feedback guys, thank you again everyone for this discussion. I would ask though, that anyone who says TT numbers won't work prove it to me. I made pictures and charts and typed up a huge explanation as to why they WOULD work, but all I get in return is "TT numbers don't work, LOL neckbeard."

I think the funnier (or sadder, depending on how you choose to look at it) part is that those "lol neckbeard, TT numbers don't work" seem to totally disregard that most of the numbers in MWO are actual TT numbers - and if they differ, they started out as TT numbers.

What went wrong was that PGI choose to implement just *some* of the TT numbers - the worst possible way of doing things. It would have been okay if they made up all their own numbers, and it would likely have been okay if they used all TT numbers. Sadly they didn't do either of those things, and now we're stuck with a half-baked system that's too labour-intensive to redesign in the fashion that's needed - either go to all TT numbers like your OP suggests, or ditch the rest of the TT numbers as others have suggested.

Neither is very likely to happen, and both are likely to tick of one part or the other of the player base, so we can only hope they somehow manage to band-aid their way to some semblance of balance through sheer luck or dogged determination.

Victor Morson, on 03 July 2013 - 02:09 PM, said:

I think the only TT game relevant to balancing a realtime environment is the Solaris dueling rules game. It's not perfect, but it the far greater detail in what is happening makes it a far better template for a sim than core TT.

Whoa there... It's precisely because they based the game on the Solaris VII turn system that we have this mess we're in right now. Solaris VII is infamous for its bad handling of heat - and MWO has the exact same problems since it's more-or-less a carbon copy of the Solaris VII heat system.

Edited by stjobe, 03 July 2013 - 02:12 PM.

[Victor Morson]

stjobe, on 03 July 2013 - 02:10 PM, said:

Whoa there... It's precisely because they based the game on the Solaris VII turn system that we have this mess we're in right now. Solaris VII is infamous for its bad handling of heat - and MWO has the exact same problems since it's more-or-less a carbon copy of the Solaris VII heat system.

Thus why I said it's not perfect, but it's a better jumping on point than core CBT rules for a realtime environment.

[stjobe]

Victor Morson, on 03 July 2013 - 02:14 PM, said:

Thus why I said it's not perfect, but it's a better jumping on point than core CBT rules for a realtime environment.

I'd say the proof is in the pudding, and that the current game experience proves you wrong. Heat is broken, has always been broken, and likely will stay broken as long as they don't ditch the "weapons fire three times faster than in TT, but heat per shot stays the same as in TT, and heat dissipation is on a 10s cycle, same as TT" - just like in the horrible Solaris VII heat system.

Add to that PGI's own idea of heat sinks adding to both heat cap and dissipation instead of just dissipation and you have what we have now - high-heat energy boating. In no minor part because energy weapons lose their most important balancing factor - heat.

[MasterErrant]

you knmow all this has been said and the devs know lots of us think this way. but they abviously beleive the FPS junkies are their bread and butter. not the Battletech junkies. one of them obviously has a hadron for the ac@ for example. it's actually the most powerful weapon in the game. and the only thing wrong with the PPCs is the failed heat system. I'm not packing a single PPC and I do fine. I also play lassically balanced builds and do fine.

The armor doubleing was a good choice...it's a faster game. it needs to be there.
I agree on the het and damage balance. and I'd love the see the AC special effect being autofire bursts. but they need to hit a a solid shot to one location....it's their niche.
and many of those damage numbers are wrong BTW. missiles do not do thier listed damace (Except the ssrm most of the time) nor do lasers.

[Victor Morson]

stjobe, on 03 July 2013 - 02:18 PM, said:

I'd say the proof is in the pudding, and that the current game experience proves you wrong. Heat is broken, has always been broken, and likely will stay broken as long as they don't ditch the "weapons fire three times faster than in TT, but heat per shot stays the same as in TT, and heat dissipation is on a 10s cycle, same as TT" - just like in the horrible Solaris VII heat system.

Add to that PGI's own idea of heat sinks adding to both heat cap and dissipation instead of just dissipation and you have what we have now - high-heat energy boating. In no minor part because energy weapons lose their most important balancing factor - heat.

Jumping off point =/= direct conversion. I said it's a better jumping off point than TT, and it is. However the problem lies when they've started to do their own thing without community input, pretty much for the majority of 2013.

MasterErrant, on 03 July 2013 - 02:26 PM, said:

you knmow all this has been said and the devs know lots of us think this way. but they abviously beleive the FPS junkies are their bread and butter. not the Battletech junkies.

But they aren't catering to them either. They're catering to nobody.

Most of the FPS minded 'mech fans are playing Hawken, which is actually really good if you're looking for a shooter 'mech game. It is what advertises it is, and tries to do well at it.

MW:O should stop trying to be Hawken and stop trying to turn the maps into a corridor shooter through stupid movement changes. It will never be as good a twitch shooter as the game designed to be a twitch shooter.

Edited by Victor Morson, 03 July 2013 - 02:30 PM.

[stjobe]

Victor Morson, on 03 July 2013 - 02:29 PM, said:

Jumping off point =/= direct conversion. I said it's a better jumping off point than TT, and it is.

You have yet to say how it's better though. Just because its time scale is finer-grained? There was all kinds of issues with the Solaris VII system, the biggest being the handling of heat, as noted above. Another was that it absolutely destroyed weapon balance (sounds familiar?), making some weapons way more powerful and some way less powerful than they were in TT.

In fact, I think the TT rules would give a designer more leeway in interpreting what actually happens during a 10-second turn than the 3-second Solaris VII system does. It allows for more variation in things like beam durations, cooldowns, burst-fire durations (oh how I wish we had burst-fire for ACs!) and so on. It also doesn't tie you to the stake when it comes to heat - in fact it demands that you make a heat system that won't allow for much more than 3 PPCs to fire at once, no matter how many heat sinks the 'mech has.

Perhaps it's just my memory that's playing tricks on me, but I can't remember anyone I played with or talked to that found Solaris VII to be a better system than TT - in fact most of them agreed it was a terribly flawed system. So why start from a flawed system?

[Helsbane]

Yet another thread about balance for PGI to totally ignore claiming "everyone is happy with the current game" and that the OP is "part of the vocal minority". Sad state really. Here we are, supposedly testing the game in order to provide feedback, and all they do is arbitrarily flip things between totally overpowered and completely useless.

I had a lot of hope for this game before if devolved into the "boat whatever weapon is OP into whatever chassis has the most broken hit boxes / lag shield" meta we have now. The game has more flaws than even ECM can hide, but PGI insists everything is fine, 'working as intended'...

[Lucian Nostra]

MustrumRidcully, on 01 July 2013 - 11:58 PM, said:

The table top rules do not actually require that an alpha occurs within a single millisecond. It occurs in a 10 second turn. So maybe a mech like the Warhawk or the Awesome 8Q or 9Q actually chain-fires all weapons in this 10 second turn, with just enough time between shots to allow the dissipation to catch up and allow the next PPC hit?

A fixed threshold at 30 would then also work for MW:O.

Wow do you have any idea how much this last paragraph just blew my mind?

Seriously??

I've never realized it till now but when you play TT all weapons fire was simultaneous so it always kinda was assumed it was some sorta alpha strike, than I read your post and remembered that you have to roll separately for each weapon fired..

If it was a group fired shot of 4 PPCs you'd just roll once wouldn't you? I mean you fired all 4 at the same exact second..

Wow.. TT never had group fire.. they've always chain fired..

[Victor Morson]

Helsbane, on 03 July 2013 - 02:42 PM, said:

Yet another thread about balance for PGI to totally ignore claiming "everyone is happy with the current game" and that the OP is "part of the vocal minority". Sad state really. Here we are, supposedly testing the game in order to provide feedback, and all they do is arbitrarily flip things between totally overpowered and completely useless.

I had a lot of hope for this game before if devolved into the "boat whatever weapon is OP into whatever chassis has the most broken hit boxes / lag shield" meta we have now. The game has more flaws than even ECM can hide, but PGI insists everything is fine, 'working as intended'...

Obligatory response reminding you that if you have problems, you're on an island, bud.

[Victor Morson]

Actually, I think this sums up my reaction of what PGI is doing to MechWarrior right now:

Edited by Victor Morson, 03 July 2013 - 03:01 PM.

[Aerik Lornes]

Factored tabletop wouldn't be perfect, but it would be a whole lot better place to (re)start. The OP, I, and many others have shown the math since way back in closed beta, but apparently we are all on islands. At least we can do math on those islands.

OR, as has been often said as well, they could have tossed all that away and started with new ideas. Either would have been great, instead we got the abomination that is some tabletop numbers used completely out of context.

Also, regarding Autocannons and speeding up their fire rate while reducing per shot damage as a specific example:
https://en.wikipedia...wiki/Autocannon
"An autocannon or automatic cannon is a rapid-fire projectile weapon that fires armor piercing or explosive shells, as opposed to the bullet fired by a machine gun. Autocannons often have a larger caliber than a machine gun (i.e., 20 mm or greater). Usually, autocannons are smaller than a field gun or other artillery, and are mechanically loaded for a faster rate of fire. They can use a variety of ammunition: common shells include high-explosive dual-purpose types (HEDP), any variety of armour-piercing (AP) types, such as composite rigid (APCR) or discarding sabot types (APDS)."

http://www.sarna.net/wiki/Autocannon
"An Autocannon is a type of rapid-firing, auto-loading direct-fire ballistic weapon, firing HEAP (High-Explosive Armor-Piercing) or kinetic rounds at targets in bursts. It is, basically, a giant "machine gun" that fires predominantly cased explosive shells though models firing saboted high velocity kinetic energy penetrators or caseless ordnance do exist. Among the earliest tank/BattleMech scale weaponry produced, autocannons produce far less heat than energy weapons, but are considerably bulkier and are dependent upon limited stores of ammunition."

http://www.sarna.net...i/Autocannon/20
"The Autocannon is a direct-fire ballistic weapon, firing HEAP (High-Explosive Armor-Piercing) rounds at targets either singly or in bursts.
Different manufacturers and models of autocannons have different calibers (25mm-203mm) and rates of fire. Due to this, autocannons are grouped into generic "classes" of autocannons with common damage ratings, with Autocannon/20s doing massive damage while having very short range.
An example of the rating system: the Crusher Super Heavy Cannon is a 150mm weapon firing ten shells per "round" while the Chemjet Gun is a 185mm weapon firing much slower, and causing higher damage per shell. Despite their differences, both are classified as Autocannon/20s due to their damage output."

Lastly, I'm playing a space viking, I'm proud of my neckbeard.

[Sereglach]

After reading this writ-up I concur wholeheartedly with the balancing suggestions. Not only would rebalancing the game in this fashion allow for single heat sinks to become viable and making doubles actually doubles, but it would also permit armor values to go back to standard tabletop values. On the other hand, leaving tabletop values at their doubled settings would create some long and brutal battles, which could be pretty awesome to see.

Although I was thinking of suggesting a small cone of fire for all weapons as a means of convergence balancing, I like this method a good bit more, and think it would work wonderfully for balancing. One of the biggest issues in MWO is that in TT weapon strikes are determined by the roll of the die, while in MWO if you put your appropriate reticle on CT then everything is going to hit CT. Although the need to keep beam weapons on target helps mitigate this SLIGHTLY, direct fire weapons become broken in this system. Some MechWarrior games balanced this by having the heavy direct fire weapons inflict some of their damage as splash damage. Here . . . well . . . there is a reason that direct fire rules the battlefield.

While you've mentioned every weapon for balancing in comparison to tabletop, there is one aspect of a weapon that you missed, and since it's my baby, I figured I'd include it here and fill in the hole (albeit tiny, but important to me, personally).

HPS Generation for Flamers

Tabletop Heat Generated 3
Tabletop HPS .3
MWO Heat Generated 1 (increasing over time)
MWO HPS 1 (increasing over time)

Already covered and good to note . . . on the other hand, how about heat DAMAGE:

Tabletop Heat Damage 6
Tabletop HDPS .6
MWO Heat Damage 0 (increasing over time)
MWO HDPS 0 (increasing over time)

As we already see Flamers in TT do DOUBLE the heat damage that they generate. MWO uses a heat scaling mechanic that works slowly, and requires a steady stream for good yield. This mechanic also does more heat for me than my enemy (at least at first), so I need to maintain a stream for at least a couple of seconds to start to really yield results outside of enemy heatsink mitigations. Although I've had some acceptable results with them in MWO . . . I've had to develop it like an art form, and it's a very niche work.

Flamers are used for support, and always will be used for support. However, in TT I could also force mechs to shut down and pop, and I can't do that here in MWO. PGI gives us this feedback of not wanting people to be able to stun lock enemies and kill them with flamers . . . my response to that is if their allies are watching their back and working as a team it'll be EXTREMELY difficult for me to accomplish that feat, especially considering that once shut down, enemy mechs are cooling off at must faster rates than if they're running. I also can't create smoke screens that impair vision, sensors, and laser fire. I also cannot create ambient heat from lighting terrain on fire to create hazards for my opponents.

The effectiveness of flamers also coincides with heat sink balancing. Although TT flamers seem to do pitiful HDPS (Heat Damage Per Second), it is still DOUBLE the heat that they generate on themselves, and if heat sinks and weapons were all balanced accordingly the capabilities of flamers would fall right in line.

Anyway, enough of my tirade on Flamers. It is an amazing write-up DarkJaguar, and if you don't mind I'll be referencing the data here when I finally finish and post the flamer balancing write-up I've been working on.

Thank you again for writing this. I hope PGI looks over it and everything within this thread and takes it seriously. There is a great deal of good information here that they should be taking note of. These implementations would almost immediately balance 90% of the game.

[DarkJaguar]

Thanks Sereglach, I look forward to seeing your post! Keep it up guys, I've seen a ton of positive feedback, and a great discussion thus far. I'll start writing up my thoughts into an organized presentation based upon everyone's input.

[Aym]

Pht, on 03 July 2013 - 12:53 PM, said:

... and yet you nor nobody else on these forums has ever been able to offer a single simple logical demonstration of why the TT system can't convert to realtime.

All anyone does is say the equivalent of "but ... DICE! TURN BASED!" and nobody even bothers to think they need to show how their argument is valid.

Replay TT BT with perfect pilot skills. Go on, play a game, you'll QUICKLY see that even with TT values the game plays much like it does here, high pinpoint alpha's at long range, ducking into cover, mechs being destroyed by focused fire...
The forums don't need to prove you wrong if you can't prove yourself right.

[DarkJaguar]

Aym, on 03 July 2013 - 06:07 PM, said:

Replay TT BT with perfect pilot skills. Go on, play a game, you'll QUICKLY see that even with TT values the game plays much like it does here, high pinpoint alpha's at long range, ducking into cover, mechs being destroyed by focused fire...
The forums don't need to prove you wrong if you can't prove yourself right.

So because perfect piloting/gunnery skills allow more hits to happen in TT, we should keep the weapons at between .94 and 10 times the table top damage and let every weapons hit the exact same spot if fired at the same time, because that works better? I'm sorry if I don't see your argument as even coming close to telling me why my OP would never work.

[The Cheese]

DarkJaguar, on 03 July 2013 - 06:20 PM, said:

So because perfect piloting/gunnery skills allow more hits to happen in TT, we should keep the weapons at between .94 and 10 times the table top damage and let every weapons hit the exact same spot if fired at the same time, because that works better? I'm sorry if I don't see your argument as even coming close to telling me why my OP would never work.

The problem I have here is that I don't think it should be referred to as a factor of the TT number at all. There is no need for it.

Ultimately, I think it comes down to what you're hoping to achieve. Some people feel that having the game act just like TT is the most important thing. Others disagree. Unless you can state categorically what you want the result to be, no one is going to be able to give you a solid answer on "why it won't work". It might work perfectly well to achieve your desired result, but be completely incompatible with someone else's preference.

Edited by The Cheese, 03 July 2013 - 09:10 PM.

[Fate 6]

I honestly wish we knew what went on over at PGI's offices. ECM was really the first sign of the downfall. Recent things like [potential] nerfs to the 4P and [already implemented] movement on hill "size tiers" (mediums are now the same as heavies, except for the QKD which gets the shaft? Stalker is smaller and more nimble than a Victor?) somehow still surprise me although I know they shouldn't given PGIs record. I just thought that they actually learned from their mistakes.

[Helmer]

DarkJaguar, on 03 July 2013 - 02:02 PM, said:

A lot of great feedback guys, thank you again everyone for this discussion. I would ask though, that anyone who says TT numbers won't work prove it to me. I made pictures and charts and typed up a huge explanation as to why they WOULD work, but all I get in return is "TT numbers don't work, LOL neckbeard."

As I've stated in a previous post, I intend to take the lessons learned from this thread and forumlate individual threads for each topic to deliver a clear and concise argument as to why they work, if you disagree with me, please prove me wrong so that I don't waste my time.

In friends and family all the numbers were exact to TT values. It honestly, was not fun. It did have a certain hardcore appeal, but it ended up being a "Take a huge engine, put in a bunch of med or small lasers" fight. It was easy to use terrain to get in close and maul people.

However, this was with Forest Colony, a very brawler friendly map. It would be a different story in say Alpine.

With the advent of the Public Test Server perhaps PGI could be convinced one day to move all values back to strict TT . It would be fun, and interesting to see......



Cheers.