39 replies to this topic

[Wolfways]

I find it strange that PGI make a game based on a TT game that they supposedly enjoy, yet include a heat system that makes it impossible to play the mechs from the "original" game.

Look at the Jagermech Jm6-s.
It has 2xAC2's and 2xAC5's. In a TT turn (10 seconds) all four weapons could fire once and generate four heat total, which was handled easily by the ten standard heat sinks.
In MWO the heat from firing those weapons cannot be handled by twelve DHS! I haven't tried more because with twelve DHS (10engine+2) i had barely any armour or ammo so it seemed pointless to try.

I understand that players want to customize mechs, but with the way the current heat system is you are forced to customize because stock mechs (the way they are bought in the mech lab) are useless.
It's even pointless to sell mechs with equipment because it has to be changed to become playable, usually by changing to DHS first. Why not sell the chassis empty?
Or even better, make a heat system which lets players play actual Battletech mechs.

I know this is an old topic but i felt like ranting.
I just got three Jagermech chassis to elite trying out AC10's vs PPC's (AC's are much better btw) and realised that i can't play the Jm6-s the way it was originally intended.

[Sean von Steinike]

Fire at the rate of a table top turn and see how much heat you generate.....

[Wolfways]

Sean von Steinike, on 10 August 2013 - 11:59 PM, said:

Fire at the rate of a table top turn and see how much heat you generate.....

My point is that the heat system makes most, if not all, stock mechs useless. Even changing heat sinks to doubles doesn't help.

[Lightfoot]

I have been saying the same thing since DHS 1.4 nerf was added at the same time the Awesome AWS-9M was added. It was obvious that PGI was using Heat as a balancing crutch since the AWS-9M stock mech with 3 ERPPCs could never be made to work even with 22 DHS! It would shutdown on the third salvo and if you fired on restart it shutdown for 10-12 seconds, restarting with heat topped out. In TT the AWS-9M fired 9 times before capping heat and having to wait to cool down. That's what would happen, roughly, with actual DHS.

Now PGI adds Heat Scale to nerf the coring of Mechs, but Heat Scale actually increases the amount of time Mechs spend face to face, which is why they actually get cored in MWO faster than previous MechWarrior games. Needless to say the AWS-9M stock can't work at all now.

The actual flaw MWO can't seem to address is the 2xRecharge which forces mechs to just face-off and core each other as fast as they can, unless terrain can be used to break it up. Earlier MechWarrior games had a 6-8 second recharge on large weapons (depending on range) so pilots counted down the recharge on their opponent's weapons and turned away to take many salvos on their mech's arms, etc.

Heat Scale will not work for Clan mechs because even with current nerfs in place Clan mechs will be able to do 50-60 point group-fires with no Heat Scale penalty, easily too.

And it doesn't stop there because now players are complaining loudly about 2xPPCs and 1 Gauss Rifle, which makes me laugh because, again, this is modest compared to Clan tech and if you can't accept a group-fire of 2 PPCs and a Gauss, MWO is seriously messed up, since modest group-fires like this are why you would play MechWarrior in the first place. MechWarrior is giant robots with arrays of weapons that are group-fired. That's what makes MechWarrior unique. Group-fired weapons. Nerfed in MWO. Not good.

So adding more and more heat nerfs to the system will not work to stop mech CT coring and will take MWO farther and farther from MechWarrior styled gameplay. What needs to happen is the mech's Center Torsos have to be able to withstand the 2xRecharge dynamic MWO has set in motion which causes players to usually just face-off and core each other as fast as possible without ever turning away or attempting to deflect damage. Then make a Battletech balanced heat system.

[Wolfways]

Actually my above post was a little incorrect.

My point is this...

Company: We're making a flight sim based on Star Wars.
Player: Great, i so want to pilot an X-wing.
Company: Okay, it's done. Give it a go.
Player: *Flies his X-wing, fires the four lasers and shuts down*
Company: Yeah...you need to remove a couple of those lasers as we put in a heat system.
Player: But if i remove the weapons it's not the same ship. It's not an X-wing...
Company: *shrugs*

[Escef]

Wolfways, on 11 August 2013 - 01:00 AM, said:

Actually my above post was a little incorrect.

My point is this...

Company: We're making a flight sim based on Star Wars.
Player: Great, i so want to pilot an X-wing.
Company: Okay, it's done. Give it a go.
Player: *Flies his X-wing, fires the four lasers and shuts down*
Company: Yeah...you need to remove a couple of those lasers as we put in a heat system.
Player: But if i remove the weapons it's not the same ship. It's not an X-wing...
Company: *shrugs*

Except that isn't what's happening here. What we have here is a heat system, like in many previous MW dames, is derived from the Solaris 7 dueling rules.

[Wolfways]

Escef, on 11 August 2013 - 01:05 AM, said:

Except that isn't what's happening here. What we have here is a heat system, like in many previous MW dames, is derived from the Solaris 7 dueling rules.

I don't know what those rules are. Do they stop players using stock mechs?

[Lightfoot]

Sean von Steinike, on 10 August 2013 - 11:59 PM, said:

Fire at the rate of a table top turn and see how much heat you generate.....

And what about the weapons that don't generate much heat? They get to fire at 2x the normal rate with no heat penalty that would cause them to stop firing. Just bring enough ammo and you have a 2x fire rate weapon that never stops. meaning that MWO weapon balance is their own invention with no relavence to Battletech. They use the Mechs from Battletech, but half of them are nerfed or don't work.

Sorry man, that's not good enough. I would just start over with Heat, Recharge, and Heatsinking if I were PGI to try to get something where the stock mechs all worked. There is no reason stock mechs shouldn't work right. If they don't your problems with balance will just continue to spiral away.

[Lightfoot]

Escef, on 11 August 2013 - 01:05 AM, said:

Except that isn't what's happening here. What we have here is a heat system, like in many previous MW dames, is derived from the Solaris 7 dueling rules.

No it's not. MWO heat balance has not got anything to do with previous MechWarrior games or Battletech. That's the problem.

Edited by Lightfoot, 11 August 2013 - 02:25 AM.

[AlexEss]

All i read is

"I can not do my massive burst alphas any more so i am going to complain that this is not like the TT. Because those are related."

But to counter your argument. The problem with the stock Jäger is not the "lack" of heat-sinks but the fact that it has silk scarves for armor. Now that being said stock mechs are not useless, they are often a less efficient but useless is a very strong word. Not to mention the fact that most lights run perfectly well as stock.

[Shadey99]

I'd love to see a test of everything at TT rules. Every weapon fires once per 10 seconds, DHS are actually double a SHS, weapon damage and range as per TT rules, armor is back to the TT rules... You could do an alpha, if you are willing to wait 10 seconds to fire again or 'chain fire' (which PGI ever so much wants us to do) and spread out fire over any given 10 second period of time. It may not be a 'fix' to alphas, but it would require some sort of backup weapons or face the fact you may be able to do nothing while you wait.

I however don't expect MWO to ever test that. Though it certainly should have been the base level they started from and worked to where they are from it.

[Wolfways]

AlexEss, on 11 August 2013 - 02:38 AM, said:

All i read is

"I can not do my massive burst alphas any more so i am going to complain that this is not like the TT. Because those are related."

But to counter your argument. The problem with the stock Jäger is not the "lack" of heat-sinks but the fact that it has silk scarves for armor. Now that being said stock mechs are not useless, they are often a less efficient but useless is a very strong word. Not to mention the fact that most lights run perfectly well as stock.

If you read anything about alpha's then you must be reading something else.

And the problem with the Jager is the heat (like every other stock mech in MWO). Even if you strip off all the armour you cannot fire the AC's for more than a couple of seconds without shutting down. The TT Jm6-s was heat neutral. Just swapping the heat sinks for doubles should make it heat neutral, but the heat system is so bad that even that doesn't do anything.

Shadey99, on 11 August 2013 - 04:14 AM, said:

I'd love to see a test of everything at TT rules. Every weapon fires once per 10 seconds, DHS are actually double a SHS, weapon damage and range as per TT rules, armor is back to the TT rules... You could do an alpha, if you are willing to wait 10 seconds to fire again or 'chain fire' (which PGI ever so much wants us to do) and spread out fire over any given 10 second period of time. It may not be a 'fix' to alphas, but it would require some sort of backup weapons or face the fact you may be able to do nothing while you wait.

I however don't expect MWO to ever test that. Though it certainly should have been the base level they started from and worked to where they are from it.

I'd actually like to try that, but there's no chance PGI would do it

[AlexEss]

Well you simply need to lift the finger from the trigger every now and then... Problem solved.

And i still retain that the biggest problem of the Jäger is the thin armor... You can manage your fire but 2 PPC and a Gauss will still turn you in to a modern art sculpture. Now i know it is fun to have all the dakka all the time but if you limit your self to fire every 10 second you will be very heat efficient... You will also be dead as a doornail but that is beside the point.

[Nauht]

What a joke firing every 10 seconds in a real time game.

Thanks but no thanks, that **** needs to stay in TT where it makes sense.

[Lightfoot]

Everybody here is saying there is a problem, but the solution remains to start out by making the stock variants work correctly. It shouldn't be that hard, every previous MechWarrior game has done this and kept full normal group-fire too.

The only thing dynamically different in MWO is the 2xRecharge which forces mechs into face-to-face combat for every engagement. In the past only the channeled type/fast recharge weapons did this and they gave bonus damage if you could work it. AC2's, UAC5's, RAC's, etc. This face-off dynamic is why the mechs get cored in 8 to 12 seconds. It's not the group-fire strike (which some call an Alpha in MWO), it's that the mechs are forced into this face-off dynamic which becomes a race to see who can core who first. Players then come here and in a huge chorus moan, "I'been CORED!!!"

Dev response was Heat Scale penalty added to group-fire. A total Battletech reversal since it makes huge numbers of stock mechs unusable due to overheating. It doesn't fix the actual problem caused by 2xRecharge. And Clan mechs will still have 50-60 group-fires that are unaffected by the Heat Scale since Clan tech achieves this damage level with just 2-4 mixed weapons.

The problem is the Mech's center torsos are too weak for the gameplay dynamic of constant face-offs caused by 2xRecharge. So fix that and dump the heat nerfs.

I also just tested the AWS-9M. In Battletech it is supposed to be able to fire all 3 ERPPCs in a salvo 9 times before pausing to cool down. In MWO it explodes on the 9th salvo and if you overide the shutdown and power back up it explodes on the third salvo.

Now I really like MWO, but it needs to at least be able to operate the stock mechs from Battletech without it breaking the game. If it can't it will never be a MechWarrior game.

[Lightfoot]

Shadey99, on 11 August 2013 - 04:14 AM, said:

I'd love to see a test of everything at TT rules. Every weapon fires once per 10 seconds, DHS are actually double a SHS, weapon damage and range as per TT rules, armor is back to the TT rules... You could do an alpha, if you are willing to wait 10 seconds to fire again or 'chain fire' (which PGI ever so much wants us to do) and spread out fire over any given 10 second period of time. It may not be a 'fix' to alphas, but it would require some sort of backup weapons or face the fact you may be able to do nothing while you wait.

I however don't expect MWO to ever test that. Though it certainly should have been the base level they started from and worked to where they are from it.

I would rather have a TT Battletech server than a 3PV server. Do you think we could have both though?

[Bishop Steiner]

Shadey99, on 11 August 2013 - 04:14 AM, said:

I'd love to see a test of everything at TT rules. Every weapon fires once per 10 seconds, DHS are actually double a SHS, weapon damage and range as per TT rules, armor is back to the TT rules... You could do an alpha, if you are willing to wait 10 seconds to fire again or 'chain fire' (which PGI ever so much wants us to do) and spread out fire over any given 10 second period of time. It may not be a 'fix' to alphas, but it would require some sort of backup weapons or face the fact you may be able to do nothing while you wait.

I however don't expect MWO to ever test that. Though it certainly should have been the base level they started from and worked to where they are from it.

And you were testing in Al[ha to know where the baselines were? I know i wasn't, but my understanding is that many things were essentially TT baseline at start, and as it was revealed that it was not working in a real time FPS environment, things were modified.

Not always modified in the direction I would prefer, but it isn't my game, either. I honestly don't get why they feel the jumbo guns need to fire so fast, as I think a lot of heat would simply be mitigated by that, making PPCs have a what, 7 second cooldown like in MW4? Give Gauss a similar amount of time to recharge the capacitors, etc. Then people would be a hell of a lot more hesitant about dumping it all in an alpha, knowing they got nothing for a good chunk if they miss,

The issue with the ACs though is more complex. The rate of fire is what finally makes the ac2 NOT useless, for the first time in any MW game. Problem is if it did not run hot from nonstop firing it would be insanely OP. Could you imagine all other weapons firing slower, overall, and yet a 6 AC/2 Jager running around firing like they currently do, with NO heat issues?

[Bishop Steiner]

Would say the biggest issue is this:

They never balanced Level 1 tech. The Basics. 3025. That was the ONLY time Btech was actually decently balanced. The early Star League tech was when it wen't downhill. The Easiest examples being the Gauss and the REAL LB-10X, which basically invalidated ALL other heavy ballistics.

On here, we never even got the basics balanced, before the newer tech was slapped on. SO when they already have the new tech in, and yet we don't have a satisfactory baseline for simple LRM/SRM, PPCs, etc? How CAN anything get balanced.

Whether it stayed TT true or not, the basic tech needed to be balanced, set in stone and locked as a baseline FIRST, and then the XL, DHS< Gauss, etc added and worked to balance to THAT baseline. THAT is where PGI went disastrously wrong. We should not STILL be tweaking the bread and butter core mechanics to the game when they are adding the decorations and such on top already.

[Tennex]

the AC2 is a special case.

the AC2 hea tissue is a bug.

[Shadey99]

Bishop Steiner, on 11 August 2013 - 06:05 AM, said:

The issue with the ACs though is more complex. The rate of fire is what finally makes the ac2 NOT useless, for the first time in any MW game. Problem is if it did not run hot from nonstop firing it would be insanely OP. Could you imagine all other weapons firing slower, overall, and yet a 6 AC/2 Jager running around firing like they currently do, with NO heat issues?

AC2's were always light damage at extreme range weapons, if you want to increase damage output from them (what PGI did) you need to decide on a 'baseline' of damage. So say we want to balance around 10 points of damage per 10 seconds (1 DPS), then a AC2 would fire 5 times per 10 seconds (if we keep the 2 damage per shot) or once every 2 seconds. But if we boost that to that degree then a AC5 would fire every 5 seconds. A Large laser would fire once every 8 seconds. A PPC once every 10 seconds. a AC20 once every 20 seconds. etc. This would keep a balance between the weapons. Now you can use a heat system to enforce this ideal, but our heat scale doesn't do it. It also doesn't take into account the difference in how weapons fire...

Tennex, on 11 August 2013 - 06:50 AM, said:

the AC2 is a special case.

the AC2 hea tissue is a bug.

Seems to be working as intended since they have gone what, 3 patches now without a fix?

Bishop Steiner, on 11 August 2013 - 06:05 AM, said:

And you were testing in Al[ha to know where the baselines were? I know i wasn't, but my understanding is that many things were essentially TT baseline at start, and as it was revealed that it was not working in a real time FPS environment, things were modified.

Of course I wasn't in alpha, I have no clue who was or even if they had more than a QA team in alpha. However with PGI's focus on 'chain firing' I cannot imagine they did... Or if they did they managed to go in a 170 degrees the wrong direction from how to get the system to cause it without slapping extra crud on top...