Geminus, on 17 July 2013 - 10:09 AM, said:
agree 100% I think a good fix would be to not make the point of impact be the center of the cross hairs. Instead of having the direct fire weapons hit the 1 pixel center of the cross hair, their should be a 30 or 40 pixel wide "ghost ring" that the weapons will hit in. This also adds validation to the Clans targeting computer, which would otherwise be useless in this game play.
Well, I don't agree with convergence being the problem. That's just saying people with true aim should not have an advantage over those whose aim is not so good in a game where weapons are fired by hand and non-aiming weapons like Streaks and LRMs are held in disdain by the same players claiming convergence is a problem. A bit similar to the problem I stated above about people complaining about others abilities and asking the devs to fix it for them. A person with a very good aim -should- be able to pick off pieces of a mech and hit weakpoints with weapons that require aim to use.
The problem is that MWO is set up for combat at such close ranges that this kind of targetting is the norm. Similar to the problem with ECM, the maps in MWO are so small (or designed to encourage combat at such close ranges) and the weapons so short-ranged that the target is large enough to place shots on specific sections of a moving target without significant chances of a miss. Also, as I stated above, the armor values are so large that mechs don't fear being killed to line up their shots carefully.
If people remember MW3, the combat tended to happen at ranges where specific targetting was very hard to do unless you charged the enemy, which often left you crippled or dead by the time you did so because you didn't have the armor to take general hits as in MWO. Most of the time, just getting a hit on a target at range was a challenge, and anything like specific targetting required the firer stay immobile to do so.
All that aside, none of this is as important as making shutdown a near-fatal occurance. Right now, the biggest problem is that no one fears a shutdown. If you shutdown, you'll take about a single volley of fire which, if you are fairly fresh, your double armor will take and the lack of internal criticals virtually assures you will survive until your mech is back up and running. Thus, it is well worth people pushing heat regularly into the shutdown range or beyond, and even the slight damage from the current system changes nothing in that regard because the damage doesn't do anything significant. In order for shutdown to be a serious problem, it must have serious consequences. And it doesn't.
Thus, convergence and alpha strike penalties are non-issues that won't solve anything. Instead, the penalties for overheating and, -especially-, shutting down must be radically increased to solve this problem. I'd also say overhaul weapons and maps to make extreme long range combat the norm, but I think that would require too much change to what has already been engineered to make it workable as a solution at this point.
My two cents.
Edited by Jakob Knight, 17 July 2013 - 11:03 AM.