Literally, on 29 September 2013 - 04:41 PM, said:
Like I said, I mostly agree with you, but I've gotta correct you on this one. Ghost Heat absolutely did NOT "well and truly smash the meta that existed at the time". The meta problem at the time was #2PPC1Gauss jumpsnipers. The counters to #2PPC1Gauss jumpsnipers were LLboat Stalkers, PPC Stalkers, and fast SRM brawlers. Ghost Heat made 3PPC1Gauss Highlanders switch to 2ERPPC1Gauss (which most good players had already done), did nothing to any other jumpsniper builds . . . and shut down LLboat Stalkers, PPC Stalkers, and fast 3SRM+ brawlers.
So Ghost Heat failed to weaken the #2PPC1Gauss jumpsniper meta, and then strengthened it by nerfing the counters to #2PPC1Gauss jumpsnipers.
The changes which mattered were JJ reticule shake (which reduced the jumpsniping some but didn't change #2PPC1Gauss) . . . and then PGI finally listened and changed the XML to nerf PPCs.
You don't have to approve of all the systems in a game. We gave up on that one a long time ago in MWO. But do keep the facts straight: Ghost Heat was months of wasted effort for something that hurt the game instead of improving it, when what we needed was an actual fix and progress before launch.
I shouldn't have used the term "Meta" - I'm well aware of the problem you mention, but be aware it wasn't the central goal of Ghost Heat to address 2PPC/Gauss snipers. They wanted to reduce heavy frontloaded damage overall. Now, I'm not defending Ghost Heat here - as I said, I think it's terrible and doesn't work. But it DID really change how loadouts worked. For better or worse, well, that's very subjective. But it DID change them. Yes, other things stopped 2PPC/Gauss and would have without Ghost Heat, for that matter, but as I said, understand that Ghost Heat wasn't about stopping 2PPC/Gauss builds. Was it wasted time? In my opinion, yes, but whatever.
So, no, I don't need correcting. I fully understand - and understood then, as well - I was front and center in saying exactly the same things about Ghost Heat that you posted above. Anyways... It doesn't matter, for the purposes of this post. It's totally irrelevant.
Ghost heat is a ****** mechanic. If it never happened, though? We would NOT have CW now. Ghost Heat cost a designer some time coming up with the initial numbers, a coder a bit of time implementing it (Functionally, it's a fairly simply system, despite it's unintuitiveness and general badness) QA some time testing, and that's it. Yeah, probably around a month or so overall, but that's almost entirely eaten in testing, which would have happened alongside other testing.
If Ghost Heat didn't happen, we would NOT have had CW significantly earlier. CW is vastly more complex, and more importantly is gated almost entirely by UI2.0. Without UI2.0 functioning, many aspects of CW can only be prototyped at best, as Community Warfare is primarily a UI based feature. Maybe we'd have had UI2.0 a patch earlier, maybe CW a patch earlier as well - two weeks earlier, tops.
Basically, GH is a minor design change to how heat is generated, CW is essentially another game entirely that encapsulates the game we're already playing.