Posted 14 August 2013 - 02:12 PM
Aspects to keep in mind when considering the problem:
1. TT is 3rd Person view, so there's no means of adding gunnery skill other than through a small die roll modifier, or to add a lot more funky mechanics that can take a 5 minute per round game and turn it into 25 minutes per round. The mechanic in TT was done for game play expediency and what can be done in a 3rd person only view. Some of this was accommodated by location modifiers depending on what portion of the 'mech you could see, too. After all it wasn't possible to not hit what you couldn't see, ie: legs, when a 'mech was standing behind a Level 1 obstruction.
2. MWO is a first person shooter built on the Crysis2 engine, which was designed from the first person carrying and firing a single weapon at a time perspective.
3. As mentioned earlier, PGI has taken bits and pieces of the BT mechanic and implemented them in this game, missing the corresponding balance features inherit in TT play.
4. PGI has actually bastardized various values in TT, armor per ton, ammo per ton, heat per shot, and more specifically weapon ranges.
5. As mentioned in 4, when it comes to weapon ranges, PGI has actually increased them. Not only that, they compounded this by adding in an "Extended Range" component, giving weapons ridiculous ranges when compared to TT. Given that in TT a single hex was 30 meters, and that LONGEST range you could fire a gauss and actually hit was 22 hexes (30meters times 22 hexes), the LONGEST effective range of a gauss rifle was: 660 meters, regardless of your skill or any modifiers.
6. Lack of a comprehensive Heat Affects table allows repetitive use of Alpha Strike as fast as the weapons can possibly be fired. Something not typically seen in standard TT. In BT, LONG before you risked actual shut down there were other affects that would be activated based on your level of heat adding risks to using alpha strike, ie: It had a balancing factor. MWO, with no heat affects until your heat is beyond 99%, has nothing to balance alpha strike.
What this adds up to is to make MWO more like we expect our BT experience to be 3 things have to happen:
1. Add a comprehensive Heat Affects table for heat levels below 99% to add risk to over use of alpha strikes.
2. Reduce weapon ranges to TT standard, alleviating probably 30%-50% percent of the sniper opportunity.
3. Change the aiming mechanism to add 'pin point' ambiguity at LONG range, but leaving close in 'pin point' only slightly affected.
I'll see if I can't describe point 3 more completely. Essentially instead of having a pin point aiming reticule, you'd have a circle in the center of your screen of say a .5 cm diameter.
In that circle the 'pin point' that you previously used for aiming would exist, but it would be invisible, and in that circle it would randomly drift moment to moment. So that, at LONG range, when a 'mech is really 'small' in your FP perspective, the entire mech could fit inside that circle, but you wouldn't be able to see exactly where the 'pin point' of aim was. It could be dead center, it could be on the outer edge somewhere, and when you fired, it used that point to fire the weapons. You might hit but you only have a percentage chance of hitting exactly where you want, or you might miss entirely. You could possibly expand the number of invisible pin points to match the number of weapons the 'mech is carrying too, so that each weapon could end up with a different aiming point, eliminating 100% weapon convergence.
Now, taking that same .5 cm diameter circle and close in on the target 'mech, as you got close the target 'mech from your perspective grows in size, the targeting circle covers less and less of the 'mech until the point where the circle covers only a section of arm, or left/right torso that you're point at.
This method would simulate the LONG RANGE ambiguity, eliminate 100% convergence, but still allow for close in targeting.
Also for a heat affects, one of the things you could do to affect firing ability while under high heat is to cause the targeting circle to grow from .5 cm to 1 cm on up to as wide as the screen. A very cool affect that does a great approximation of simulating TT heat affects on gunnery skill.
It even adds the possibility of adding a "Firing Computer" control module that could be purchased just like current modules (the NON-MC ones) to reduce the pin points to ONE pin point, adding accuracy, but still maintaining LONG range ambiguity...
My thoughts anyway...