8 replies to this topic

[Pezzer]

Hello all, didnt know where to put this so I decided to put it in gameplay balance, seeing as how it changed the outcome of my match.

So I was just playing in my Heavy Metal Highlander, I have a PPC and a Gauss in each arm, and a Victor bum rushes me. I take a couple hits and fire a few shots, then he ducks behind cover and tries to rush me at around 20 meters if range or so. My main weapons are in my arms (obviously), so I try to turn quickly and line my arms up on him. As im lining up the shot, I take a hit from some sort of AC, screwing my aim up. Ok, no problem, I keep aiming till the shake effect mostly subsides and finally take my shot (this all happened within about 3 secs). For some reason, Im assuming it was some crazy rare glitch, instead of my arms firing at the circle indicator where I had aimed, they fire in opposite directions totally off-target! My arms basically decided to cross over my chest as I fired, mummy style.

Has anyone ever had this happen to them? I wonder if it's a serious bug that needs to be posted or if it was the result of close-range combat plus cannon-hit-shake affecting my accuracy.

Thanks!
Pez

[Kazma]

when I was running a AC20 jager this happened often with it but I don't really know how to reproduce this

[Pezzer]

Yeah I've had it happen maybe 3 times since closed Beta, so its a rare glitch, but it usually is the difference between life and death when it does happen. I may report it in the hopes that they fix this rare occurrence. If others have had this happen as well then I'll definitely send one in.

[Felicitatem Parco]

The Arm-Crossing Glitch most frequently occurs when you are very close to an environmental object, and your crosshairs were converged at that close thing instead of your target. This happens sometimes when you try to fire around corners or just over the top of a low-laying rock, or when a Mech suddenly gets really close to you... your weapons converge on the nearby thing instead of the distant target.

I'll move this over to the New Player Help section, as this might happen to others and people may be wondering about it. This thread could serve as a starting point for this kind of inquiry.

[Pezzer]

That makes sense, I was near a crystal formation and a large hill when the Victor crossed into my LOS. Thank you for the move, didn't know where to put this!

[Mad Porthos]

I've seen this behavior from the same point of view as well as observing it happening to another. Obviously, watching your ballistics crossing "mummy style" and missing a target like a centurion who is only 40m away is frustrating because it's almost like your mech must have gone from a shallow aim angle mostly pointed out at the horizon to a "boxers" stance with the arms raised and pointed inwards in a fraction of a second, due to the sudden close object being percieved as the convergence target.

Seeing it from the outside confirmed this for me. I was on Caustic, having started out on the non-refinery side of the map and had moved into the left side by the valley and rocks, about where epsilon is on conquest. The rocks and pillars there make for good cover and alot of fights circle these obstructions, using them for cover and attempting to flush each other from said cover to be hit by enemies on the volcano hill or elsewhere.

I was circling a large rock that wasn't tall as the "pillars" but was quite stout and a cataphract teamate was circling the same rock going the opposite direction from me. I was in a jenner and was hunting a jenner that had been giving the cataphract a hard time, having lead the phract into the circling of the pillar, since initially it had been a "circle of death" and the cataphract had chosen to put his back to the rock. My joining of the fray meant I could chase the jenner and force him not simply to throttle back and then throttle forward to keep the phract always out of sight. To my delight, rather than scraming, the other jenner was stuck in the circle mentality and rather than running away, kept circling the exact same rock, but quickly now since I was on his tail like the Red Baron. Every time he passed the phract, he'd fire, since he was close to an internal destruction, so I stopped to type to the phract pilot to reverse the direction he was circling, which I just barely managed to quick type.

The Phract turned around and aimed the opposite way, expecting the jenner to come around the corner. I stopped next to him, doing a little hop as well to do a 180degree and primed my lasers, ready to give the jenner two mechs of fire as he looped again, if he was dumb enough to. Sure enough he looped right into sight and stopped, starting to back up.

The phract was a little behind me, to my left. I was next to the rock, with the rock on my right. The jenner had been circling counter clockwise. Apparently the edge of the rock, despite visually seeming to end, extends a fingers width further out from there. As the cataphract pilot watched the jenner stop on a dime and start to literally back pedal, he lead the target, trying to fire behind it...aiming into the area that seemed clear, but apparently actually is the rock's "hitmesh". That caused convergence to read the rock and converge at a much closer angle, which for his right arm weapons ended up creating a line of fire that crossed my jenner's left torso, since I was just a little ahead of him and to the right. Blew off my left torso killing me, while the left arm shots seemed to just impact open space "over" the jenner's picture.

The oddest part of it, was that we watched the beams initially fire, they lance out and START to hit the jenner, but only a split second later the convergence changed for the majority of the shot. Rather than the shot being DRAGGED from one aim point to another, it insta-morphed from a hit, to an outcome that created a blocked shot and a teamkill. UGH.

Looking at the FRAPS vid that a friend showed me from his commando who witnessed it, the catapracht did roughly what I described earlier... went from a sort of gunslinger aim double barrels at a target, to a seizure like instant snap into a boxing stance that had the arms aiming sort of high and together (since the phract has such low slung arms, even the rock and my jenner were higher it seemed).

While I've heard threads screaming about instant convergence having to go cause it's the real problem behind alpha strikes, I've never agreed entirely with that. What this made me consider though is that perhaps it would be good to introduce some sluggishness to aim convergence though, representing the realistic time it should take for a mech to adjust it's aim point, myomers/muscles firing, adjusting and raising barrels, canting them inward etc.

Such a delay could be mitigated by exactly the skill that is supposed to mitigate it... the arm reflex efficiency, perhaps by pin point as well. It also could be relevant to later developments in battle tech lore, such as improved myomers, triple strength myomers, etc, allowing "quicker" reaction time... convergence as regards arm mountings.

Ah but I digress.

Convergence needs some work as is. Not removal, but definite polishing and a close look at for things like this. It looks sloppy and unrealistic when this type of thing goes down in game.

Edited by Mad Porthos, 20 July 2013 - 03:27 PM.

[Koniving]

Happens a lot. Can happen with LRMs too. Put an X-5 on top of a formation/pillar on Tourmaline. Look down to fire LRMs.
"X" cross LRMs. Happens even with a lockon.

For any geological formation, building, etc., figure it to be about 3 meters longer, wider, taller, etc. than it really is. You'll have fewer issues that way, and hit fewer floating invisible walls.

Personally I use a tag. If my tag gives me a red reticle, I can hit the target. If it does not, even if I'm pointing right at it within range, then some invisible wall will be in the way.

[Pezzer]

A little note going off-topic here, the current problem regarding weapon convergence imo is that targeting computers don't exist in-game atm. In BattleTech, different mechs would come with different targeting computers, which affected that mech's accuracy. Currently in-game, all mechs have the same level of accuracy and the same targeting computers. If they added targeting computers into the game, it would fix a lot of things, namely fast-coring and overall pace.

And looking to the future ofc, I'm sure they would add targeting computer upgrades. Also, Clan Mechs get much more accurate targeting computers, so we would see a huge difference there during the invasion

And while I would like to see comps added to the game, I agree that convergence isnt an issue at all. It kinda adds to the whole Heavies/Assaults-dominating-the-battlefield thing, but not by much. Convergence is a skill factor atm, and people complaining about it are either complaining because they want more gameplay variety, or are complaining because they have trouble coring sections.

EDIT: Any tabletop players able to confirm my assumptions regarding computers? I saw on the SARNA wiki that it affected accuracy, but didnt read much into it.

Edited by Pezzer, 20 July 2013 - 04:00 PM.

[Corvus Antaka]

this is because arm convergence does not work like torso convergence does.