195 replies to this topic

[BlackWidow]

Dimento Graven, on 13 August 2013 - 01:08 PM, said:

WOOT WOOT FOR KILLIN' CATS!!!

Sadly, Kilrathi, nor any cat race currently, will be in game. That thar be the booty of Electronic Arts.

[FatBabyThompkins]

I'll post this again, as it has gotten attention in the past. A crude mock up to simulate Modifier's to fire

Spoiler

Stage 1: The reticle jumps occasionally at random times in random directions for only a fraction of a second. Just enough to break the concentration of someone staring at the reticle (sorry for the MS Paint graphics, but my graphics workstation STB'd). Also note that the reticle jump does not affect where the weapon fires, rather is just a graphical "bug".



A more prominent Stage 1:




Stage 2: A fading of the reticle is followed by a short jump. Aiming is still possible, but at a slight disadvantage.




Stage 3: Reticle disappears for periods of time in addition to the above.

[Dimento Graven]

BlackWidow, on 13 August 2013 - 01:22 PM, said:

Sadly, Kilrathi, nor any cat race currently, will be in game. That thar be the booty of Electronic Arts.

Ah yes, EA, or Evil Autocrats...

Oh yeah, and let's not forget:

'You can't spell greed, without EA. Yeah it might be spelled wrong, but it's the same damn thing...'

Edited by Dimento Graven, 13 August 2013 - 01:25 PM.

[Chemie]

Time for another complex chalk board implementation by Paul. More hole-plugging of the d ike instead of fixing the underlying issue.

I figure this will play out in two ways:
1. You just fire your PPC first and 0.01 seconds later the gauss to defeat it. While your JJ recharge, so does the gauss/PPC system. (This assumes the method they implement is that firing a gauss causes your "power" to be unavailable for period of time). Heck, maybe we get a power bar to go along with the recharge bars.
2. Or they make it very long time (4-6 seconds between PPC and gauss being fired) in which case gauss is useless. People switch to 3 PPC instead. For every patch, there is a work around that does not fix the underlying problem. Gauss is already the lowest health weapon and explodes as soon as armor is gone....so why are we making it useless?

How you really fix:
Option 1: Make high damage go from pin point to splash. e.g. PPC does 5 damage where you aim and 5 damage as splash to other mech points.
Option 2: Fix DHS. Bottom line none of these problems existed in CB with SHS. Let's look at 10DHS vs 20 SHS
- save 10 tons (=more weapons)
- save 10 crit slot (= more weapons)
There is a reason every mech has it; it is the single strongest element in the game.

How to fix? Make them double the heat dissipation but not double the capacity. This means you cannot not take boats of high heat weapons.

Without a complete re-work of heat mechanic, we will need a 10-page manual on all the Paul "fixes" to keep things straight.

Edited by Chemie, 13 August 2013 - 01:26 PM.

[Yankee77]

Lyoto Machida, on 13 August 2013 - 12:42 PM, said:

I seriously can't run a 4 LL build without extra heat buildup because of PPC/Gauss people???

Obviously not. LLs have a max alpha because 4-6LL boats were also deemed as being a problem. Now you need to split out those salvos to avoid the heat penalty, which is precisely what it was intended to accomplish.

I would hope that by this time people would have been clued in that the heat penalty system was NOT meant to just stop PPC boats, but rather to penalize ALL high alpha attacks. That's why almost all weapon systems were included.

In short, the devs would rather see you have 2 PPCs and 2 LPLs instead of 4 PPCs or 4 LPLs (to give an equal-tonnage example), since the damage is not all loaded at the same instant or at the same spot. Likewise, a PPC or LL boat now needs to split up its attacks to avoid the penalty, again reducing the change all that damage goes to the same spot (assuming your opponent isn't just standing there).

And it's working precisely as designed. Sure, there are ways around that, with PPC/Gauss being a prime example, but they ARE working on that issue, and in the meantime it certainly cut down on the boats and (mostly) forces them to manage their heat better/split up their salvos.

Granted, the heat penalty is pretty complex, but hopefully some good visual indicators will be provided by UI 2.0.

As for using the TT heat scale, the devs have already stated (I think in an ATD in fact) why they didn't go that route: in TT the heat output and dissipation occurs instantly at the end of the round. So somebody with 15 DHS could fire 4 PPCs at once and only end with 10 heat, whereas doing the same in MWO would instantly shut you down. Granted, there's plenty of ways they could have gotten around that (such as spreading weapon damage and heat over 10 seconds, such as having PPCs fire in 2 salvos of 5/5 each with a 5 second cooldown), but really by now it should be clear that's not the road they want to take, there's no need to keeping beating that dead horse.

Thank you.

Edited by Itkovian, 13 August 2013 - 01:33 PM.

[Joseph Mallan]

Quote

CGR-SB - This radical modification looks to turn the Charger into a traditional assault 'Mech by reducing the 'Mechs speed to 54 km/h, which allows the use of a smaller engine (incidentally, the commonplace Pitban 240 reactor). The 'Mech is armored with fifteen and a half tons of armor and is armed with four Large Lasers and a Medium Laser, kept cool by twenty-eight heat sinks.

Just sayin...

Edited by Joseph Mallan, 13 August 2013 - 01:36 PM.

[Lyoto Machida]

Itkovian, on 13 August 2013 - 01:31 PM, said:

Obviously not. LLs have a max alpha because 4-6LL boats were also deemed as being a problem. Now you need to split out those salvos to avoid the heat penalty, which is precisely what it was intended to accomplish.

I would hope that by this time people would have been clued in that the heat penalty system was NOT meant to just stop PPC boats, but rather to penalize ALL high alpha attacks. That's why almost all weapon systems were included.

In short, the devs would rather see you have 2 PPCs and 2 LPLs instead of 4 PPCs or 4 LPLs (to give an equal-tonnage example), since the damage is not all loaded at the same instant or at the same spot. Likewise, a PPC or LL boat now needs to split up its attacks to avoid the penalty, again reducing the change all that damage goes to the same spot (assuming your opponent isn't just standing there).

And it's working precisely as designed. Sure, there are ways around that, with PPC/Gauss being a prime example, but they ARE working on that issue, and in the meantime it certainly cut down on the boats and (mostly) forces them to manage their heat better/split up their salvos.

Granted, the heat penalty is pretty complex, but hopefully some good visual indicators will be provided by UI 2.0.

As for using the TT heat scale, the devs have already stated (I think in an ATD in fact) why they didn't go that route: in TT the heat output and dissipation occurs instantly at the end of the round. So somebody with 15 DHS could fire 4 PPCs at once and only end with 10 heat, whereas doing the same in MWO would instantly shut you down. Granted, there's plenty of ways they could have gotten around that (such as spreading weapon damage and heat over 10 seconds, such as having PPCs fire in 2 salvos of 5/5 each with a 5 second cooldown), but really by now it should be clear that's not the road they want to take, there's no need to keeping beating that dead horse.

Thank you.

What about 3 LL "boats"??? I used to run 6 LL Stalkers...show me an instance where people were complaining about them. Not saying it doesn't exist...just that I've never seen it.

Also...heat penalty? What heat penalty? The one they made up as a band aid fix instead of implementing an actual heat system?

I'll just leave this here:

[Gallowglas]

Z0MBIE Y0SHI, on 13 August 2013 - 01:01 PM, said:

In other news, the Star Citizen alpha starts this month.

Let the rest of us know when all you folks have built THAT game up to be comes crashing down, too.

[Ralgas]

How about we calm down till we get details for all we know yet it may be as simple as 1or the other getting a 5sec recharge and paul wording it badly........

That said, they could have run with that fool idea someone had of using mechassault ppc's..........

[Khobai]

Quote

PGI has already said that they're limited, currently, in their ability to change how convergence works.

Theyre time-limited because they only have a month left till release. So they are looking for the simplest solutions possible to fix the game in a month... even if theyre stupid solutions.

Which is fine to be honest. But PGI needs come up with a better solution for convergence by the time Clans come out. All of this crap theyve added with heat penalties and desyncing needs to be purely stopgap, and needs to be removed from the game completely, once a better solution is implemented.

[FatBabyThompkins]

Khobai, on 13 August 2013 - 01:43 PM, said:

Theyre time-limited because they only have a month left till release. So they are looking for the simplest solutions possible to fix the game in a month... even if theyre stupid solutions.

Which is fine to be honest. But PGI needs come up with a better solution for convergence by the time Clans come out. All of this crap theyve added with heat penalties and desyncing needs to be purely stopgap, and needs to be removed from the game completely, once a better solution is implemented.

MechWarrior Online 2.0.1.45.9.3392.ID.10T.911.WHY!

I kid, but I agree with you though. Sometimes, you've just got to release with what you have, regardless if you've met your goals. I may not agree with the system, but business is business. Investors want that ROI. It comes down to if you can retain some customers during your transition to the game you wanted rather than the game you have.

[Tombstoner]

TOGSolid, on 13 August 2013 - 10:52 AM, said:

If they can't change the aiming mechanics then just change how the weapons work. Make the Autocannons shoot a burst of gunfire. The Gauss will be a bit tricky but it probably won't be a big deal if it fired twice as fast but did half damage, thus giving a weapon that did pinpoint damage but still gets the DoT conversion treatment.

Tadaa. No more instant, pinpoint, alpha striking nonsense and the entire issue just goes away. Even better, both the purists and the guys who don't give a damn will be happy. The guys who love the video game aspect get to keep playing with pinpoint weapons that promote proper target tracking and all that in a predictable manner and the purists get a translated form of TTs inherent innaccuracy.

Edited for my favorite parts

DOT conversion treatment was suggested.... it would fit perfectly for this game. This sort of post makes me want to cry...
I cant, cause it also make me angry at PGI for being so intractable to game changes suggested by the Forum community.

[Khobai]

DOT treatment isnt necessary. We KNOW what the problem is. Its perfect convergence of weapons. PGI is just being obstinate about fixing it.

But I dont think anyone expects convergence to get fixed right away. We just want PGI to tell us that theyre working on it... even if that fix is 6 months away. Its the fact PGI doesnt tell us anything, keeps us completely in the dark, and then comes up with these stupid ideas out of nowhere that ****** people off.


Simply put, this is what PGI needs to do:

Short Term (1-2 months)
Do whatever is necessary to balance weapons for launch of the game. Implement whatever stupid fixes you want, whatever... because anything is better than PPCwarrior online. Have a couple meetings, come up with a more permanent solution to fix convergence, discuss it with the players, and get something in the pipeline for release 4-6 month from now.

Long Term (4-6 months)
Once a convergence fix is implemented, get rid of all the nonsense boating penalties, get rid of the desyncing crap, and whatever other awfulness was added to the game. Do a complete balance pass on ALL weapons and rebalance them for convergence.

So yes it may take a while to fix the game properly... but at least this gets us there... instead of still having a game thats in shambles 6 months from now.

Edited by Khobai, 13 August 2013 - 02:14 PM.

[Splitpin]

When will this nonsense end. 35 point 2PPC+Gauss is too much, ok nerf that and it'll become 30point 2Gauss builds, then what? This is getting just plain silly. Assault/Heavy mechs are big bad things, they carry big bad weapons, otherwise there's no point. There's a current poll in this Gameplay Balance forum asking what you think a max pinpoint alpha should be, currently only about 33% think less than 35 points. Meaning 66% think a reasonable level is 35 or more.

[Khobai]

Quote

When will this nonsense end. 35 point 2PPC+Gauss is too much, ok nerf that and it'll become 30point 2Gauss builds, then what? This is getting just plain silly. Assault/Heavy mechs are big bad things, they carry big bad weapons, otherwise there's no point. There's a current poll in this Gameplay Balance forum asking what you think a max pinpoint alpha should be, currently only about 33% think less than 35 points. Meaning 66% think a reasonable level is 35 or more.

Because those idiots cant see the forest through the trees. You really think its going to be just 35 point alphas once clan weapons come out? Clan tech will change EVERYTHING.

We are talking 50+ point alphas... while completely bypassing the current boating penalties. 2 CERPPCs and 2 CERLLs is a 50 damage alpha with zero boating penalty which any Madcat Prime can run. While 2 CERPPCs, 1 CGauss, 2 CERLLs is a 65 damage alpha with zero boating penalty is a build a Daishi Prime is perfectly capable of doing.

Convergence ABSOLUTELY needs to be fixed before clan tech comes out.

Edited by Khobai, 13 August 2013 - 02:30 PM.

[DegeneratePervert]

I'd like to see "interference" with certain weapon combos, and I'm prepared to be lynched for voicing this:

I feel that PPCs, being a massive burst of EMP laden energy (see: ECM removal), should interfere with sensitive ballistics, such as the Gauss Rifle, and other PPCs. Meaning, the Gauss Rifle could have a "failsafe" on it, preventing the firing of it for .5 seconds after a PPC shot. In the same process, firing a Gauss round will "de-magnetize" your PPC, preventing it from being fired for .5 seconds after a gauss round. Granted, I feel that this should only be applicable with ERPPC, since it is a more powerful burst. Thus, the combo is preserved in that it can still be pulled off by experienced players who are willing to wait a half-second, which is fine to me. This gives the experienced player time to realize "I've just been shot by PPC/Gauss, time to twist."

I also feel that all ballistic weapons should cause a certain amount of screen shake for the person firing. For example, two AC/20's should shake the cockpit of the person firing like some fine imported booty. The effect could be lessened for things that are not "power weapons." Another idea of mine is to have energy weapons cause HUD interference for the user. PPCs, when fired one at a time, produce slight static. When fired in an "alpha" configuration, the static increases. Same for Gauss; when firing one gauss rifle, your crosshair blinks. When firing two, your HUD fizzles out and resets from all the magnetic energy you just used.

Just my thoughts, even if they are very likely flawed.

[Sprouticus]

BlackWidow, on 13 August 2013 - 10:28 AM, said:

Are you 12 years old, bro? Only people that say that are losers and posers on forums.

But, I'm always hungry for some troll bait. So, I'll bite.

No, not angry. Not even coming off as angry. I'm simply bewildered and frustrated by the countless dev cycles being wasted on trying to bandaid a solution they have created.

So, I put forth a suggestion with reasoned points to support it.

What did you do? You opened your mouth and took a crap.

But, I expect nothing less from you.

You presented the same arguments 50 other people have presented and took 3 posts to do it. Nothing new for the devs to read, nothing except whine.

Quote

"PGI, in their infinite wisdom of all things balanced </sarcasm off> is now saying that 2xPPC+Gauss will be "de-synced" to prevent simultaneous firing."

How do you expect PGI to even look at your idea when you start it with this.

I was intentionally sarcastic because I am sick and tired of people posting emo rants with no value.

Try posting an original idea. Try being polite. Then maybe others will respond in kind.

[Joseph Mallan]

Khobai, on 13 August 2013 - 02:18 PM, said:

Because those idiots cant see the forest through the trees. You really think its going to be just 35 point alphas once clan weapons come out? Clan tech will change EVERYTHING.

We are talking 50+ point alphas... while completely bypassing the current boating penalties. 2 CERPPCs and 2 CERLLs is a 50 damage alpha with zero boating penalty which any Madcat Prime can run. And 2 CERPPCs, 1 CGauss, 2 CERLLs is a 65 damage alpha that any Daishi Prime can run. Again no boating penalties.

Convergence ABSOLUTELY needs to be fixed before clan tech comes out.

Worse Khobai I had Clan Mechs with cool running 75 point Alphas! 3 points of excess heat per Alpha... Running.

Edited by Joseph Mallan, 13 August 2013 - 02:26 PM.

[Splitpin]

Khobai, on 13 August 2013 - 02:18 PM, said:

Because those idiots cant see the forest through the trees. You really think its going to be just 35 point alphas once clan weapons come out? Clan tech will change EVERYTHING. We are talking 50+ point alphas... while completely bypassing the current boating penalties. 2 CERPPCs and 2 CERLLs is a 50 damage alpha with zero boating penalty which any Madcat Prime can run. While 2 CERPPCs, 1 CGauss, 2 CERLLs is a 65 damage alpha with zero boating penalty is a build a Daishi Prime is perfectly capable of doing.

I really hope you're right and we do get to face that problem. Of course the 40 point IS version is also currently still valid. Why has the Gauss+PPC combo become the top evil ?

[Lyoto Machida]

Gallowglas, on 13 August 2013 - 01:43 PM, said:

Let the rest of us know when all you folks have built THAT game up to be comes crashing down, too.

Well, considering he made one of the greatest PC games of all time, I'm sure his track record is better than PGI's.

What's their most successful game again?

DegeneratePervert, on 13 August 2013 - 02:19 PM, said:

I'd like to see "interference" with certain weapon combos, and I'm prepared to be lynched for voicing this:

I feel that PPCs, being a massive burst of EMP laden energy (see: ECM removal), should interfere with sensitive ballistics, such as the Gauss Rifle, and other PPCs. Meaning, the Gauss Rifle could have a "failsafe" on it, preventing the firing of it for .5 seconds after a PPC shot. In the same process, firing a Gauss round will "de-magnetize" your PPC, preventing it from being fired for .5 seconds after a gauss round. Granted, I feel that this should only be applicable with ERPPC, since it is a more powerful burst. Thus, the combo is preserved in that it can still be pulled off by experienced players who are willing to wait a half-second, which is fine to me. This gives the experienced player time to realize "I've just been shot by PPC/Gauss, time to twist."

I also feel that all ballistic weapons should cause a certain amount of screen shake for the person firing. For example, two AC/20's should shake the cockpit of the person firing like some fine imported booty. The effect could be lessened for things that are not "power weapons." Another idea of mine is to have energy weapons cause HUD interference for the user. PPCs, when fired one at a time, produce slight static. When fired in an "alpha" configuration, the static increases. Same for Gauss; when firing one gauss rifle, your crosshair blinks. When firing two, your HUD fizzles out and resets from all the magnetic energy you just used.

Just my thoughts, even if they are very likely flawed.

A shame that we can't have aforementioned booty domestically grown without importing it.