124 replies to this topic

[von Pilsner]

Viktor Drake, on 12 July 2013 - 11:17 AM, said:

Additionaly the graphics and distructable environments would bring the game to its knees in any MMO setting. Still I would have loved to see that version of the game come out, in fact maybe it will sometime in the future.

I don't think 8v8 or even 12v12 in a non-persistent world is an MMO, I suppose I would go with vehicle shooter or MOBA before calling this an MMO.

[Mystere]

Unbound Inferno, on 12 July 2013 - 09:44 AM, said:

Good argument.

I have been against the removal of Group Fire on the idea it gave MW:O something unique, but I suppose if you did awya with that completely it could solve a good deal.


While playing Star Wars: The Old Republic they use a global cooldown system. You only do one action at a time, with a few select that ignores is if certain requirements are met. I would wonder if we restricted it to that how ell would it do?

LRMs and Streaks would need overhauls to work however as the current tracking and AMS systems would decimate any practical use of it.

People are already complaining that MWO is not much of a simulator. Adding global cooldowns will drive the game even farther from that.

[Gallowglas]

Hotthedd, on 12 July 2013 - 11:57 AM, said:

You have arrow keys for that.

The only way I'd ever get behind that concept would be if I could control the order of fire. Having to carefully (and arbitrarily) determine when I should skip over the next weapon in the firing sequence is conducive to a lot of accidental misfires, slower, more deliberate firing decisions, etc. Even then, I'm not sure that I like it. It just seems awkward.

[East Indy]

I support the concept. There's no good argument for firing heavy guns simultaneously save for "Because I want to."

[Traigus]

Well, you could turn the group functionality into chain functionality.

Switch between
chain1 - 2 PPCS
chain 2 - 4 MLs
and chain 3 -UAC 5


could use the same UI we have now... just firing on row 2 chainfires weapons that are turned on for row 2, instead of Alphaing row 2.

Indeed the only thing needed to implement this: would be to remove the "group fire key" and make every group chainfire only.

(there would also be issues with AC2s, and probably with MGs.).

Edit:for clarity

Edited by Traigus, 12 July 2013 - 12:32 PM.

[Lykaon]

Gallowglas, on 12 July 2013 - 10:53 AM, said:

How would you ever bind enough keys to effectively play something like a Stalker, which has a large number of weapons? Having 10 keys that each fire a separate weapon seems like it would be really frustrating gameplay.

Group fire and weapon groupings are not the same.

Having 4 medium lasers in a single group that chain fire but can not all fire at once is essentially and example of this proposal.

I would also like to comment on the counter argument of hardpoint limits not solving the "born to boat" issue like for example awesome 8Qs that by design must be allowed to boat at least 3 PPCs.

The hardpoint restrictions do not have the capacity to limit native boats like Awesome 8Qs or Catapult A1s.Not when taken as a stand alone concept.

Hardpoint restrictions do however limit boats to specific chassis or chassis variants.Isolating the boats to specific chassis allows for other mechanics to be used to balance the now isolated examples of "born to boat "mechs.
For example chassis quirks or engine size limits can be used to create balance by giving highly desireable hardpoint loadouts undesireable handling characteristics.You will not get it all for nothing.

[Joseph Mallan]

Not to mention there are many passages of Pilots changing the weapons on the triggers to run a cooler set, more powerful, or just a Goldfish!

[East Indy]

Lykaon, on 12 July 2013 - 12:32 PM, said:

Hardpoint restrictions do however limit boats to specific chassis or chassis variants.Isolating the boats to specific chassis allows for other mechanics to be used to balance the now isolated examples of "born to boat "mechs.
For example chassis quirks or engine size limits can be used to create balance by giving highly desireable hardpoint loadouts undesireable handling characteristics.You will not get it all for nothing.

Well said. I'm surprised PGI hasn't mitigated this direct threat to their pipeline, as players get the functional essence of a 'Mech like the Awesome without the physical drawbacks, thus utterly devaluing the model.

As I posted elsewhere, I don't understand how PGI understood the value of model exclusivity for ECM and jump jets, but not weapon configurations.

[AndyHill]

Unbound Inferno, on 12 July 2013 - 11:18 AM, said:

There has been an idea that doesn't eliminate weapon groupings, just the firing of it.

Forced chain-fire basically.

Yes, there would be no need to have a huge number of keys for firing. You could still group weapons, but instead of firing the group all at once the firing button in question would only ever fire one of them at a time. the functionality would be pretty much the same as if you had a few groups on chain fire except I would make the chain fire delay a bit longer and you couldn't fire from two separate groups at once to circumvent the forced chain fire.

[AndyHill]

Hotthedd, on 12 July 2013 - 10:42 AM, said:

OP,

I am very sorry but I can only give your post one "like".

I think I may go create 1000 alt accounts for the express purpose of coming back here solely to "like" your post.

You should only do that if there are some good news from the devs, I don't want them thinking that the suggested heat penalty thing just brought them a large group of new players.

[AndyHill]

Lykaon, on 12 July 2013 - 12:32 PM, said:

Hardpoint restrictions do however limit boats to specific chassis or chassis variants.Isolating the boats to specific chassis allows for other mechanics to be used to balance the now isolated examples of "born to boat "mechs.
For example chassis quirks or engine size limits can be used to create balance by giving highly desireable hardpoint loadouts undesireable handling characteristics.You will not get it all for nothing.

I have a feeling that you would have to nerf the said 'mechs intensely to negate their natural boating bonus. Also, depending on the implementation of course, pretty much all clan omnimechs are very capable of boating, so it's hardly a matter of a few specific designs.

[Khobai]

group fire isnt the problem. convergence is. remove convergence not group fire.

[GingerBang]

I think everyone needs to just stop this silly theory crafting and go play Mechwarrior Living Legends for like, a day. Seriously. That game puts MWO to shame.

[AndyHill]

Adding this to the why group fire is bad - balancing -section, since I forgot it initially:

When balancing against huge pinpoint alphas it's not only weapon balancing that suffers. It is likely that a simulator will require some form of armor buffs purely due to the players' aiming accuracy. However, in an environment where you can smash 60 points of damage to one location, it's going to be a much greater buff if it is to have any effect. Balance-wise this means that bringing single weapons into the match becomes less enticing. Calculating and arranging a firing solution for an AC/5 for example is too much trouble in most situations for the small reward that is a single 5 point hit. Two is already a bit better - and that's actually comparable to the original BTech values, since MWO has doubled armor. The end result is that a system that is balanced for alpha boating encourages further alpha boating, since not only is it the most effective playing style, it can also become the only style, when hitting with single weapons becomes basically meaningless.

[Ken Fury]

There was a time in closed beta when Mechs were dying too fast. The Armor levels were still at TT levels during that time. The "fix" was doubling hitpoints, internal and armor. HSR increased the lethality again, so why not increase hitpoints again?. It would be the same solution and would require more firing of weapons.

Removing group fire can be circumvented by using normal mouse software. So it's only punishing lesser equipped players (cheap mice don't have those functions).

And heat is the reason Alpha boating is only "the best" for a time. Since at some point more heat efficient weapons will be better. Like Gauss, AC/5 and AC/10.

Edited by Tank Boy Ken, 12 July 2013 - 09:45 PM.

[AndyHill]

Tank Boy Ken, on 12 July 2013 - 09:43 PM, said:

There was a time in closed beta when Mechs were dying too fast. The Armor levels were still at TT levels during that time. The "fix" was doubling hitpoints, internal and armor. HSR increased the lethality again, so why not increase hitpoints again?. It would be the same solution and would require more firing of weapons.

Removing group fire can be circumvented by using normal mouse software. So it's only punishing lesser equipped players (cheap mice don't have those functions).

And heat is the reason Alpha boating is only "the best" for a time. Since at some point more heat efficient weapons will be better. Like Gauss, AC/5 and AC/10.

If group fire was removed there would naturally be global cooldown mechanisms preventing the firing of any two weapons closer than x seconds apart. Thus you could macro weapons as much as you like, but it wouldn't help at all. Groups would simply allow you to choose easily which weapon will be fired next.

Adding armor will help slow down the pace of combat as 'mechs die slower, but at the same time non-pinpoint weapons such as LBX and missiles get enormous nerfs. Adding armor also has the effect of encouraging boating, since you will have to do multiple weapons' worth of damage to a single location to justify the risk of exposing yourself.

I disagree strongly on the alpha boating part, it is always the most effective approach. Heat only causes the weapon of choice to be different from time to time. One of the classics is the Gauss cat that was a dominant force in a world without double heatsinks. Swaybacks boated SLAS because they couldn't handle mediums and so on. The weapons may change, but something will be alphaboated, since it is so darned effective. And any hope of PPC boats disappearing with heat changes are probably unfounded, since when they get too hot people stop using them, PGI sees that in their statistics and they do the exact same things that lead to our current situation again.

[WildeKarde]

What about a global cooldown of say 0.25 (doesn't matter amount just that it's stop continual grp firing) applied to any single group firing but the maximum damage you can output in a single group is your engine / 10. So an atlas could group fire 30pnts in a single shot, then needs 0.25 to fire anything again, stock HBK 4G would be 20.

That means the max grp they can use is 40pnts to any single shot.

[Hotthedd]

Since the Devs have stated in Ask the Devs #42- Answered that they will not be fixing convergence, Removing Alpha Strike is the only way to address the problem.

[MustrumRidcully]

Well, they definitely said that changing convergence is difficult, because of the server-related aspects here. So it seems a technical hurdle that's only difficult to take.

I'd say that global cooldowns are a bit easier to consider.

Regarding the Mechwarrior V video and "Earth Shake Simulator Online":
One thing to consider is weapon cadence. Currently we basically can fire our entire arsenal once in 5 seconds. Cockpit shake and the like si easily taken to extreme effects under such a circumstance.

If, on the other hand, firing speed overall was slower, you would have more and longer pauses between incoming shots.

People often worry that this would make the game too slow, and I can't prove otherwise, but there are things to consider:

1) With forced chain-fire, you don't get too shoot all your weapons once every 4 seconds. You must fire your weapons individually, and if you have 6 weapons with ROF of 1 shot per 10 seconds, that would still mean 1 shot every 1.66 seconds.
2) Cockpit shakes effect and the like might still make you "feel busy" if you're under fire and waiting for the best time to get a stable, well aimed shot back.

The real problem we have is that this game is long past Closed Beta and speeding up to release and it's basically too late to have a solution only now. Changing to a different approach is non-trivial and requires a lot of testing and trying. But that doesn't mean not trying it would be the better choice. It just means we don't have good choices.

No silver bullets.

[AndyHill]

Well, I was one of the people who tried to tell PGI not to go open beta last fall, because I didn't believe that the game design was ready for balancing with statistics and numbers. So far I have unfortunately been correct. The sniper pinpoint alpha meta can only be corrected with gameplay changes, not numbers. And raising heat enough to curb heavy energy weapons just means we're back to Gauss days of the single heat sink era. You're absolutely correct in there not being easy answers anymore, but things are just getting tougher and tougher every day.