MagnusEffect, on 10 November 2011 - 06:40 PM, said:
One part in particular...wow... that part on not labeling player adversaries:
One of the biggest annoyances of league play is the ease at which a whole team can easily concentrate fire on an single player by simply calling out their gamertag. What if you couldn't identify players by name of the opposite team (maybe some version of that like needing to be close enough by a certain distance)? What if, rather than say "hey, everyone shoot FryingpanMan", they would have to say something like "fire at the biggest mech you see"! In an actual war, soldiers don't know who they are shooting at.
It's called priming, ME, and I agree with you 100%, except there are a few ways to prime. Calling out the pilot's name, as you said, calling out the largest target, or even having everyone prime on the same 'Mech your Lance Leader begins firing on. It's unfortunate, but concentrated fire has, indeed, become a part of the culture and, were it up to me, I would add that to my dishonorable battlefield conduct.
Dsi1, on 10 November 2011 - 07:08 PM, said:
When you are directly controlling a gun(like in MWO), you miss because you failed to control the gun properly and/or account for all of the physics involved, be it as simple as making sure your gun clears the building you're behind, or as complex as accounting for wind, bullet drop and the shifting of your mech.
The trouble is, DSI1, that in the fluff you're dealing with computers that are between 200 and 500 years old because BattleMechs haven't been able to be effectively built or repaired since the technology to do so and the knowledge, as well, have been lost over that many centuries of open warfare. The first, second, and the first-half of the third, Succession Wars were all slaughterfests, and that meant production factories, tool and die support, and most of the industry surrounding being able to build ANYTHING was reduced to ashes. I believe I read about it in the rulebook for the BattleTech box-set from '84 -though I'm not entirely sure about it- that production capabilities had been reduced to late 21st Century technology, and the only thing that was keeping battlements of all types, and starships, going was spit, bubblegum, bailin' wire, and luck.
Of course, since MechWarrior II started off prior to the Clans invading the Inner Sphere, and subsequent games only dealt with a continuation of that time-line, none of the kids who picked it up from that point got to understand Weisman's and Babcock's vision of World War II fighter pilots -you can find this in Shrapnel, actually- in monstrous walking knight gun platforms, so that never mattered to anyone else.