7 replies to this topic

[krolmir]

I'm just starting this thread so peeps can vent their ideas on what would help the game be more balanced. Here are my thoughts on this.

1) Hit detection is the number one problem affecting balance. I remember saying almost a year ago, that to balance the game HD needs to function 100% right, 100% of the time. I also stated that you couldn't balance weapons systems and then balance HD, because the minute you do you will have to re-balance all the weapons. Kinda funny really, especially in light of recent dev comments.

2) LBX-10 is not functioning as intended. Throughout BT lore the LBX was a superior version of the AC, capable of both anti-infantry fire, and single point damage armor piercing rounds. It had a toggle function, to select between the two firing modes. The reason the LBX was developed, according to lore, was to help mechs that didn't have machine guns effectively deal with infantry situations. We do not have infantry in MWO, so why is the LBX saddled in the wrong mode? Ultimately the LBX and U A/Cs completely replace the standard AC, meaning the AC 10 is already OUTDATED as of 3050, and yet some how it is better than the LBX in every sense in MWO. My idea on fixing this is to make Lost Tech gear like LBX an unlock in the mech's tree, increase the cost of the LBX, and finally give it proper dual mode firing. This could also be applied to other Lost Tech currently available in game, ERPPC's, Ultra A/C's, Streak's, etc.

3) Ammo per ton could be buffed a little higher for all weapons, especially considering that 12 V 12 matches are having an adverse effect on my ammo count at the end of the match. What used to be enough ammo in 8 V 8 is not enough now. Same tonnage of ammo as before, however I run out well before all enemy is dead. Forcing me to use backup weapons, and hope I make it. I.E. Stalker 3F- 4 ML's, 2 LRM 5's, 2 LRM 15's, and 8 tons of ammo. I will run out on opponant number 7 or 8 if I'm lucky, and that's chain firing them the entire time. For mechs that carry Gauss and A/C 20's I now need to run at least an extra Ton of ammo for the Gauss and 2 for the A/C 20 if I even want to have a shot at making it to the end of the match with a shot left. This means I am sacrificing heat sinks and or motor size to get what I need to fight with, this makes some mechs and their variants even less desirable for gameplay.

4) Hit Boxes, oh hit boxes, and badly designed mis-sized mechs from day one. Take the Kintaro as their most recent effort, the Awesome and the Jenner as the initial lessons of what not to do. Hit boxes for the CT L&RT, should be designed to force a choice, do I go with the XL and risk dying prematurely, or do I use a standard and live longer? With the Kintaro there is no choice, as of right now, it XL all day every day. The CT is so enormous that it can't be missed. The Jenner is much the same. The Awesome is SOL no matter what engine you go with. Giant side torso's, and a giant CT. Standard motors are to heavy for it to move fast making the CT and easy target. XL motors are to squishy and the mech still isn't fast enough with the max motor to avoid any amount of fire. Some mechs do strike a nice balance, but most don't. Hunchbacks another example of a bad chassis "quirk". I think the size of the hunch should be reduced, and lowered into the torso at least 25%, to give it a better profile. I could go on about this issue for days but.....

Thats most of my peev's with our current state of balance, what are yours?

[FupDup]

Mine (may include some repeats from your list) in no particular order:

1. Borked heat scale that prevents heat neutral mechs (in most cases) with painfully slow dissipation and an obnoxiously high heat capacity.

2. Hitbox issues (you already brought this up) that result in numerous mechs not living up to their potential. Also, bad mech size scaling.

3. Certain weapons like LBX and Flamers are just plain bad and in desperate need of an overhaul. Many other weapons just need a little boost to make them better (i.e. reduce AC/10 reload time to 2 seconds).

4. Lock-on missiles are in a wonky state. Streak SRMs currently spread their damage all over the place due to their random targeting nature and used to be CT-coring. Streaks need to require aiming at a specific panel to hit that specific panel--the game should not decide where your Streaks hit. For LRMs, their main issue is that they require lock up to the point of impact, and a second issue is their CT-seeking nature. Making LRMs fire-and-forget (don't need lock until impact) will make them much more useful at range, although converting them to a manually-aimed weapon may prove difficult or impossible due to the nature of indirect fire.

5. The speed cap needs to be removed so that tiny lights like the Commando and upcoming Locust can outrun larger lights such as the Jenner. On a related note, I'd also personally like for all 10 base heat sinks to be built directly into the engine for sub-250 rated engines as an indirect buff to tiny lights like the Commando and Locust.

6. Some certain large energy and ballistic weapons are too effective in every niche, where they really should be more focused so that they can be countered more reliably without "fighting fire with fire."

7. Most mechs are starting to feel like generic, soulless gunbags. This also goes hand-in-hand with bad scaling/hitboxes, causing those badly scaled mechs to be obsoleted by mechs that can hold the same gear without being too huge. I'd suggest chassic/variant specific quirks such as Ravens being harder to detect, Hunchies getting more internal health on their Hunch, Awesomes dissipating heat faster, and so on to help out with this; and I might even dare to say the dreaded "h" word to differentiate chassis from one another.

8. Anything that I forgot about.

Edited by FupDup, 18 August 2013 - 02:47 PM.

[krolmir]

Yeah, I liked the skill-based Streak system that MW4 had, the SSRM's launched in a stream, and you had to hold them on the area of the target you desired to hit. They would only fire if your reticule was lit up. It made them almost like a laser in function. I forgot all about that one.

[James The Fox Dixon]

The lack of heat scale penalties like aiming degradation, slower movement, chances of ammo explosions, and killing the pilot. This balanced all of the weapons quite effectively and made for longer combat. It would cut back on the amount of alphas as well as the PPC/ERPPC+Gauss meta.

The lack of BT Universe drop limits that has led to the current Go Big or Go Home meta. The BT Universe drop limits utilizes specific formations of mechs from the lore as units were classified as Striker, Battle, or Heavy-Assault.

[krolmir]

In competitive play (12V12) I dislike the everyone on Assault mech , the occasional heavy, and a scout mech or two meta. At the same time is it right to force players into niches because of tonnage? Dunno, and don't even want to try to answer that, way to loaded for me. However, it could be given some sort of structure at least.

Edited by krolmir, 18 August 2013 - 07:18 PM.

[Angel of Annihilation]

Balance was pretty good but now they have screwed up alot of the weapons.

PPCs and ER PPCs are too hot again and Streaks are totally useless.

Hit dectection is still an issue but there is also a few other bugs as well like not getting any indication of recieving damage until your mech explodes.

Jump Jets need alot of work to go along with the new movement mechanics, specifically they need forward thrust.

The movement mechanics still need alot of work, specifically getting hung up on a peeble is still broken as hell.

The Economy is totally screwed. It was borderline grindy before the 12 vs 12 patch but was tolerable if you had premium, now neither premium or hero mechs make the grind tolerable.

Many mechs need to be rescaled badly ie Quickdraw and Stalker to name a few. Also several hitboxes need to be looked at an adjusted.

A few weapons still need love such as the LB-10X which still kind of sucks since a single SRM6 at 3 tons is more useful than the LB-10X at 11 tons. A few others need to be looked at as well.

[MustrumRidcully]

1. Heat Scale
The TT heat model that the entire game was balanced around assumes reasonably fast dissipation but early heat penalties, forcing mech builders to counter most of the heat produced by the weapons quickly, and made alpha strikes risky.
MW:O's low dissipation (or rather: high generation) with no heat penalties and a high heat threshold encourage alpha strikes until shutdown occurs - but there is nothing to be gained by trying to be "clever" and chain-firing here - the heat produced (other than from the absurd heat scale penalty system - is the same.

2. Convergence + Group Fire
This enables pinpoint precise large damage attacks with some weapons - but not all. If you boat, you're at a good start, but you're only really good if you boat high damage projectile weapons - PPCs, Gauss and AC/20 being the prime candidates.
Convergence and Group Fire must be limited in some form.

3. Armor Distribution
The max armor values on our mechs come from a system where a player generally could not aim for a specific location - he rolled 2d6 and then see where the shot landed. The armor distribution is based on that hit location table. The armor distribution doesn't stand up to mouse aiming, which leads to people focusing on CT kills because that is the most efficient way to take out an enemy mech (unless you're good at head shotting). The armor distribution must be changed so that CT kills become harder and it becomes more effective to first disarm a mech.

4. Role Warfare
It is lacking. Mediums have no strong role unless they can reach the speeds of light mechs and have some weird hit box perks (Centurion). It gets worse with pinpoint precision alpha strikes, but that is not the only issue. The roles seem to be condensed down to "scout" or "assault" (not neccessarily meaning assault mech, just bring lots of firepower or go home). The game needs to add features that make other roles viable and useful. Some of this could be done by more interesting modules and efficiencies, some could be done by different game modes.
Forcing people to run particularly mech classes with tonnage limits might also work, but it might also cause people to hate the game because they run mechs that they must run to get into any matches without these mechs actually being useful. So be careful.

5. Missiles and AMS
Missile Targeting is a problem. LRMs are CT seekers, Streaks are no longer. Neither is really good. IMO, direct fire use of LRMs and Streaks should lead to LRMs and Streaks aim for whatever you were aiming on (with some spread). Indirect Fire can be more random and less controlled. NARC or TAG might be used to give the spotter the ability to make an indirect fire missile be as precise as a directfire missile (e.g. a missile will hit where you aimed at).

AMS is too effective against low numbers ofmissiles, forcing people to basically run 20+ tubes worth of LRMs or not even bother, while it's too ineffective against huge numbers of missiles. I think AMS would be better off creating an interception chance for each missile that enters its radius. This makes stacking AMS less powerful, but also stacking LRMs, while still keeping overall value to LRMs fired in any salvo size.

6. ECM
ECM has kinda been nerfed to the ground, and it is kinda still too powerful. Because missile lock is dependent on targetability of a mech, and ECM breaking this targetability, it acts as a hard counter to missiles which has now many soft counters. It needs a redesign. I actually think it would be good if it just hid IFF information (but not targeting), forcing people to show situational awareness when exposed to ECM, and maybe created false sensor targets, and disable NARC, TAG, BAP and ARTEMIS.

7. Mech Size and Hit Boxes
Lighter mechs need to be smaller. It doesn'T even matter if this is "logical" or not from considerations of volume and density or stuff like that - it's just that being small in a game with mouse aiming is an advantage, and it's an advantage that can help low-tonnage mech to be more competitive with heavier armed and armoured heavier mechs. But if only some of them have it...

Hit Boxes also matter a lot, again, we're using the mouse to aim, and if point & click under time pressure is difficult at all, then making the target smaller makes it more difficult.
Maybe the issue with armour distribution and hit box size could also be combined - maybe mechs with a particularly large hit box for a specific location get a higher max armor as a quirk than those that have small hit boxes.

8. Hit Registration
It must be reliable, obviously, otherwise balancing the game becomes even harder. I think before HSR, this was one of the many reasons PPCs weren't so useful - when they hit, they had all the advantages the yhad now, but you didn'T hit as often as now. That meant you effectively produced more heat for the same damage result, and without HSR, those Quad PPC Snipers you could already build back then tended to deal damage too slowly, causing their heat to become a real issue.
The recent hit registration problems could also lead to similar issues.
That is just one possible facet on how poor hit registration can distort balance. I pointed this out because it's less obvious then the effect "Jenner hitbox is still 5m behind him after he shutdown at full speed".

Bonus:
What the game needs, among many other things, is a solid balance model for all weapons with all their properties. How much worth is damage per shot, at this range, with this amount of spread, with this amount of heat produced, what must it cost consequently in terms of tonnage and crits?
And it must work on a per weapon basis, because PGI can't run around and tweak every possible mech chassis and build until all the possible builds are balanced.
Mechanics like Group Fire + Convergence and the heat system stand in the way of this objective, because suddenly the weapon combination matters a lot.

Edited by MustrumRidcully, 19 August 2013 - 12:06 AM.

[El Bandito]

Lasers having beam duration is just about the only thing PGI has done noticeably better in terms of weapon balance, when compared with older MW games.


That is all I gotta say about that.