198 replies to this topic

[MrZakalwe]

There have been many posts dropped around this forum blaming convergence for all the world's ills and I can't help but disagree.

Cone of fire would not really work in a game where a medium mech can legitimately fire 8 guns at once and some people have even suggested random chances to hit in direct immitation of tabletop.

If I want that I'll play Mechwarrior: Tactics.

EDIT: I both like and play Mechwarrior: Tactics if you want random hit locations I suggest you also play it- it's fun.

Lots of fun, in fact.

Edited by MrZakalwe, 16 August 2013 - 05:34 AM.

[Modo44]

Bad troll is bad.

[MrZakalwe]

Not a troll at all- I think convergence is the only thing that allows this game to function like a shooter when mechs often have more guns than they can sensibly chainfire.

imagine an 8 laser hunchie alpha striking with cone of fire - really picture it in your head - what does it look like?

P.S. I really hate that attitude- this guy doesn't agree with my opinion? Obviously trolling.

Edited by MrZakalwe, 14 August 2013 - 12:38 AM.

[One Medic Army]

Explain why every modern FPS and 3PS game in existence has cones of fire then...

[MrZakalwe]

One Medic Army, on 14 August 2013 - 12:39 AM, said:

Explain why every modern FPS and 3PS game in existence has cones of fire then...

Which modern FPS expects me to fire 6 guns at once? Also which one makes me take several seconds to slow down after walking? Which one can I only turn my torso slowly? Accurate fire is accessible within half a second in pretty much every FPS there is.

Edited by MrZakalwe, 14 August 2013 - 12:42 AM.

[One Medic Army]

MrZakalwe, on 14 August 2013 - 12:41 AM, said:

Which modern FPS expects me to fire 6 guns at once? Also which one makes me take several seconds to slow down after walking? Which one can I only turn my torso slowly? Accurate fire is accessible within half a second in pretty much every FPS there is.

Accurate fire with an assault rifle in a modern FPS: attainable when stationary, aiming down the sights, not taking damage, and only within a certain range.
Accurate fire with a SMG in a modern FPS: LAWL
Accurate fire with a sniper rifle in a modern FPS: if you cancel out the reticule sway and only fire about every 10 seconds.

Accurate fire in MWO: everything, all the time, forever.
It has nothing to do with 1 weapon vs 10 weapons, if anything firing 10 weapons at once should make you less accurate.

[Nebelfeuer]

So cone of fire is ok for one gun but not for 6 guns fired at the same time....???
I asked my mechs but they said they´d never expect me to fire six guns at once.

[MrZakalwe]

One Medic Army, on 14 August 2013 - 12:49 AM, said:

Accurate fire with an assault rifle in a modern FPS: attainable when stationary, aiming down the sights, not taking damage, and only within a certain range.

You stopnearly instantly, and the sights tend to take a small fraction of a second to come up. near perfectly accurate fire attainable within half a second from a moving start.

One Medic Army, on 14 August 2013 - 12:49 AM, said:

Accurate fire with a SMG in a modern FPS: LAWL

Good point but isn't this where our SRMs come in? Because of both spread and travel time they are far from pinpoint accurate.

One Medic Army, on 14 August 2013 - 12:49 AM, said:

Accurate fire with a sniper rifle in a modern FPS: if you cancel out the reticule sway and only fire about every 10 seconds.

Sway doesn't have time to make a difference if you scope and fire instantly, time to accurate fire at long range less than 0.5 seconds usually with 1 shot kill capability. P.S. an accurate shot every 10 seconds? CoD and CS:GO I can have 5 instakill shots downrange instantly during that time and I'm a bad sniper!

One Medic Army, on 14 August 2013 - 12:49 AM, said:

Accurate fire in MWO: everything, all the time, forever.

Projectile travel times are this games accuracy reduction mechanism- you are perfectly accurate against a stationary target but it starts to get a bit messy outside of point blank range after that- I believe that certain projectile speeds *coughPPCcough* could do with being reduced, though, to make this more pronounced.

One Medic Army, on 14 August 2013 - 12:49 AM, said:

It has nothing to do with 1 weapon vs 10 weapons, if anything firing 10 weapons at once should make you less accurate.

Certain chassis don't have many other options than to fire a bunch of weapons at a time.

[627]

if you like to compare FPS shooters, then take only the first shot: this first shot almost always hits the target, that was the fatal MG-sniper shot in BF2 and BF3 and in every other shooter you'll hit with it. all your following full-auto dakka shots will hit the dirt, but the first one will hit.

You can't transfer this to mwo - we don't have dakka weapons. TAnd the only one we have has actually a CoF.

nerfing convergence only leads to randomness, just like JJ-firing (there you have your CoF). This would be more true to Battletech lore, though, but I have doubts that it would be fun to constantly miss. And don't come up with modules or Skills, this only makes it worse for new players.

i think some kind of align mechanic could work, targeting a mech and waiting for the reticle to go golden like in the books but this will make hitting fast lights even more difficult.

[MrZakalwe]

Or just slow down projectile speeds a tiny bit so that if you hit or not is not based on a random number generator but based on both your skill at judging travel times and the targets skill at avoiding.

Edited by MrZakalwe, 14 August 2013 - 01:35 AM.

[MustrumRidcully]

Just because you don't like some of the possible "counters" to removing convergence doesn't mean convergence isn't the problem. It just means you haven't seen a good way to deal with it that you would actually appreciate.

I don't know if I can offer you one.

But first, why is it it a balance problem?

Firing 2 PPCs together is better than firing 2 PPCs seperately. If you had to choose between chain-firing a PPC and group-firing them, with convergence, the choice goes to group-firing unless something else is stopping you. Group-Firing means you deal all damage to one spot, chain-firing vastly increases the chances of one of the two shots hitting a different spot than the other, and it also forces you to spend more time on aiming and facing the enemy, meaning less time you can spend in cover or twisting your torso away from your enemy.

However, 2 LLs firing together might be better than chain-firing them (especially if you must wait the full beam duration), but it's not as good as 2 PPCs, because you need to hold both LLs on target for a full second, and this isn't so easy. Your precision compared to a PPC would suffer.
Firing 2 SRM6s together is even "worse", since you spread all over the enemy anyway.
But even if you get no precision advantage at all, the advantage of only aiming once, and spending less time directly looking at your enemy, is still there.


Now there are many solutions people.

No Convergence At All
No convergence at all would not introduce randomness. The weapons fire a straight line, the only thing is that each weapon needs a seperate crosshair (or you need to learn how far off your weapon is from the cross-hair) and an alpha strike will not have all weapons hit the same spot.
You would be forced to chain-fire if you want at least a chance of hitting all the same spot.

Cone of Fire
Cone of Fire when group-firing forces a choice between alpha striking for lessened precision (each individual weapon fired would be treated like a traditional shooter might treat each individual bulle tfired in an automatic weapon), or chain-firing (each weapon is fired alone and converges perfectly).

Removing/Changing Group-Fire
Removing group-fire gives you no choice - you must chain-fire. Large damage weapons obviously have an advantage over small damage weapons, but consider this: The AC/20 weighs 14 tons + ammo and sinks to deal 20 damage, 4 MLs deal the same damage for 4 tons plus heat sinks (I know that the amount of sinks needed will be different) - such an advantage might actually be fair, because weapon stats were actually designed for a game system where high single-shot damage was very valuable and damage per shot and weight did deliberately not scale linearly.
Convergence is now not a problem, because the only thing converging is one weapon and your cross hair, not multiple weapons and one crosshair.

"Forced chain-fire" will probably not be practical if every weapon must follow a 0.5 second delay - You could not possibly utilize more than 4 medium lasers in such a system, which would be dumb. It could be done with weapon specific chain-fire delays - an AC/20 or Guass might have a 0.5 second delay, but an AC/2 or Medium Laser might only have a 0.05 second delay. It forces you to spend more time facing the enemy, and gives you more "chance for error" on targeting.

If you're really married to the interpretation that a table top alpha strike (all weapons fire in one 10 second turn) must mean in real time that all weapons fir einstantly, you could leave the full alpha strike in the game, but remove convergence for such shots, and make it a limited ability (useable once in 10 seconds).

I prefer the remove/change group-fire solution.
It can also allow slowing down recycle rates, because once you are forced to fire each weapon seperately, waiting 5-8 seconds for a specific weapon to recycle isn't a big deal - you are busy firing probably at least 3 other weapons in that time frame, which will give you similar "wait times" as we have now.

[Alex Warden]

convergence has NOTHING to do with random hit mechanics or cone of fires... it even was IN THE GAME during closed beta, but it was bugged,because weapons too often converged towards terrain tiles rather than actual mechs and thus is was TOO HARD for some guys to aim...

that´s by the way the reason why many design choises have been made... the more people got into closed beta and even more people with open beta, the more they QQ´ed about a game that basically was totally okay and much more fun than the arcade-blasting we have now...

aside from many bugs and bad netcode/ lagshields, the weapons mechanics were not bad at all...

and on topic again:

convergence ain´t anything to do with tabletop,it would be one of the most realistic mechanics in this game and help with many issues, many games use such mechanics,from tank games via flightsims to even online shooters (resizing/colorchanging reticle while moving and turning anyone? ever seen? yea)...but yea, it would actually take more skill

Edited by Alex Warden, 14 August 2013 - 01:56 AM.

[Khobai]

MWO uses TT armor values, but TT armor values are balanced around not having convergence. Therefore, MWO should either not use TT armor values, or it should not have convergence. Simple logic really.

PGI either needs to remove convergence or use armor values that are balanced with convergence in mind.

[Karl Streiger]

Khobai, on 14 August 2013 - 01:56 AM, said:

MWO uses TT armor values, but TT armor values are balanced around not having convergence. Therefore, MWO should either not use TT armor values, or it should not have convergence. Simple logic really.

PGI either needs to remove convergence or use armor values that are balanced with convergence in mind.

Its so simple obvious - and still 80% of MWO games didn't even know this.

[MrZakalwe]

MustrumRidcully, on 14 August 2013 - 01:40 AM, said:

Just because you don't like some of the possible "counters" to removing convergence doesn't mean convergence isn't the problem. It just means you haven't seen a good way to deal with it that you would actually appreciate.

I don't know if I can offer you one.

But first, why is it it a balance problem?

Firing 2 PPCs together is better than firing 2 PPCs seperately. If you had to choose between chain-firing a PPC and group-firing them, with convergence, the choice goes to group-firing unless something else is stopping you. Group-Firing means you deal all damage to one spot, chain-firing vastly increases the chances of one of the two shots hitting a different spot than the other, and it also forces you to spend more time on aiming and facing the enemy, meaning less time you can spend in cover or twisting your torso away from your enemy.

MustrumRidcully, on 14 August 2013 - 01:40 AM, said:

However, 2 LLs firing together might be better than chain-firing them (especially if you must wait the full beam duration), but it's not as good as 2 PPCs, because you need to hold both LLs on target for a full second, and this isn't so easy. Your precision compared to a PPC would suffer.
Firing 2 SRM6s together is even "worse", since you spread all over the enemy anyway.
But even if you get no precision advantage at all, the advantage of only aiming once, and spending less time directly looking at your enemy, is still there.


Now there are many solutions people.

This is one of my arguments against most of the solutions- any system that requires you to stare at people constantly to fire anything but a very small weapons loadout with any effect would kill the defensive manouvering side of things.

Convergence would also be less of an issue if projectile speeds were lower so that a hit was less certain at longer ranges (I don't know about you but against Spiders/Jenners I tend to chain fire my PPCs right now to give myself the best chance I can to land at least one or two shots on target)

MustrumRidcully, on 14 August 2013 - 01:40 AM, said:

No Convergence At All
No convergence at all would not introduce randomness. The weapons fire a straight line, the only thing is that each weapon needs a seperate crosshair (or you need to learn how far off your weapon is from the cross-hair) and an alpha strike will not have all weapons hit the same spot.
You would be forced to chain-fire if you want at least a chance of hitting all the same spot.

Would be cool and an excellent solution if the maps were flatter but would have the secondary effect that mech profile would become super important (even more so than now) so would require resizing of many of the mechs.

MustrumRidcully, on 14 August 2013 - 01:40 AM, said:

Cone of Fire
Cone of Fire when group-firing forces a choice between alpha striking for lessened precision (each individual weapon fired would be treated like a traditional shooter might treat each individual bulle tfired in an automatic weapon), or chain-firing (each weapon is fired alone and converges perfectly).

Forces the staring contest again and those are bad.

MustrumRidcully, on 14 August 2013 - 01:40 AM, said:

Removing/Changing Group-Fire
Removing group-fire gives you no choice - you must chain-fire. Large damage weapons obviously have an advantage over small damage weapons, but consider this: The AC/20 weighs 14 tons + ammo and sinks to deal 20 damage, 4 MLs deal the same damage for 4 tons plus heat sinks (I know that the amount of sinks needed will be different) - such an advantage might actually be fair, because weapon stats were actually designed for a game system where high single-shot damage was very valuable and damage per shot and weight did deliberately not scale linearly.
Convergence is now not a problem, because the only thing converging is one weapon and your cross hair, not multiple weapons and one crosshair.

This would be interesting to see it tested but as you said below it would require a big change to weapon recycle times (they would need to be longer) and that would dramatically change the dynamics of movement in combat (unless you reduced target resilence to compensate but then you might hit the 'lights mechs get 1 shotted by AC20s' issue again).

MustrumRidcully, on 14 August 2013 - 01:40 AM, said:

"Forced chain-fire" will probably not be practical if every weapon must follow a 0.5 second delay - You could not possibly utilize more than 4 medium lasers in such a system, which would be dumb. It could be done with weapon specific chain-fire delays - an AC/20 or Guass might have a 0.5 second delay, but an AC/2 or Medium Laser might only have a 0.05 second delay. It forces you to spend more time facing the enemy, and gives you more "chance for error" on targeting.

Agree.

MustrumRidcully, on 14 August 2013 - 01:40 AM, said:

If you're really married to the interpretation that a table top alpha strike (all weapons fire in one 10 second turn) must mean in real time that all weapons fir einstantly, you could leave the full alpha strike in the game, but remove convergence for such shots, and make it a limited ability (useable once in 10 seconds).

MustrumRidcully, on 14 August 2013 - 01:40 AM, said:

I prefer the remove/change group-fire solution.
It can also allow slowing down recycle rates, because once you are forced to fire each weapon seperately, waiting 5-8 seconds for a specific weapon to recycle isn't a big deal - you are busy firing probably at least 3 other weapons in that time frame, which will give you similar "wait times" as we have now.

My issue with most of these (and other suggestions) is that they require you to stare at the other guy constantly to apply damage and that means if the other guy wants to fire back you will core him even more easily that current implementations as he can't really twist defensively or really use any of the current defensive measures.

I'd say shots still need to be accessible but harder to land on target (mechanically harder rather than random chance- I hate RNGs).

[Ralgas]

As anyone who's followed me in these topics knows, my view is given the mech and weapon variety we have it's far from an easy or a complete fix in itself.

Ofc you cant tell anyone largely different sized targets with multiple weapon systems and firepoints on demand is different to what they are comparing mwo with

[ghos t in the shel l]

One Medic Army, on 14 August 2013 - 12:49 AM, said:

Accurate fire with an assault rifle in a modern FPS: attainable when stationary, aiming down the sights, not taking damage, and only within a certain range.
Accurate fire with a SMG in a modern FPS: LAWL
Accurate fire with a sniper rifle in a modern FPS: if you cancel out the reticule sway and only fire about every 10 seconds.

Accurate fire in MWO: everything, all the time, forever.
It has nothing to do with 1 weapon vs 10 weapons, if anything firing 10 weapons at once should make you less accurate.

So why do you need an excuse as to why you die? Do you have some faint hope that through the implementation of some sort of accuracy nerfing change that you and others like you might stand a better chance on the battlefield? Here's a suggestion, learn to aim.

[StaIker]

One Medic Army, on 14 August 2013 - 12:39 AM, said:

Explain why every modern FPS and 3PS game in existence has cones of fire then...

Mechwarrior is not in any sense an FPS when judged by game mechanics. Don't confuse First Person and Shooter as being the same thing as FPS inplies. VIrtually nothing is transferable between the game types without screwing up some existing aspect.

[MustrumRidcully]

MrZakalwe, on 14 August 2013 - 02:12 AM, said:

My issue with most of these (and other suggestions) is that they require you to stare at the other guy constantly to apply damage and that means if the other guy wants to fire back you will core him even more easily that current implementations as he can't really twist defensively or really use any of the current defensive measures.

I'd say shots still need to be accessible but harder to land on target (mechanically harder rather than random chance- I hate RNGs).

It requires both sides to have their cycle times linked - if you saw him 2 seconds earlier then he did you, you will only maintain that 2 second time advantage if you keep firing rapidly and don't wait for him to face you and shoot his guns in your face, too.

Maybe it turns out the most optimal approach is to play the starting contest, but it could also mean that the most optimal approach is not always go "for the face" and deliberately targeting stuff you can't get out of the way with torso twisting so easy - legs or arms, for example. So you slowly disarm or cripple the enemy. Eventuelly you can go to the staring contest, but if you managed to carry your advantage for some time, you might have neutered his build so far that the staring contest will go well for you.

It's a bit speculative. Maybe it will require tuning. (I tend to think alone for the fact that our game doesn't have random hit locations, armor values need to be distributed differently. It's not even relevant if we have convergence or not, the moment I choose with the mouse instead of rolling on a specific hit location table where to shoot, the original armor values stop making sense.)

Too bad you can't just mod Mechwarrior Online on a private server.

[MrZakalwe]

MustrumRidcully, on 14 August 2013 - 02:25 AM, said:

It requires both sides to have their cycle times linked - if you saw him 2 seconds earlier then he did you, you will only maintain that 2 second time advantage if you keep firing rapidly and don't wait for him to face you and shoot his guns in your face, too.

Maybe it turns out the most optimal approach is to play the starting contest, but it could also mean that the most optimal approach is not always go "for the face" and deliberately targeting stuff you can't get out of the way with torso twisting so easy - legs or arms, for example. So you slowly disarm or cripple the enemy. Eventuelly you can go to the staring contest, but if you managed to carry your advantage for some time, you might have neutered his build so far that the staring contest will go well for you.

It's a bit speculative. Maybe it will require tuning. (I tend to think alone for the fact that our game doesn't have random hit locations, armor values need to be distributed differently. It's not even relevant if we have convergence or not, the moment I choose with the mouse instead of rolling on a specific hit location table where to shoot, the original armor values stop making sense.)

Too bad you can't just mod Mechwarrior Online on a private server.

Agree strongly on all points. Balancing location armour so that hitting anywhere other than the CT is a valid decision would make convergence a non-entity.