105 replies to this topic

[Mawai]

Hi All,

This is not intended to be inflammatory. It is an honest question.

In the Russ Bullock NGNG podcast part 2 there is a section where Russ discusses heat sinks around 27 to 38 minutes in.

http://mwomercs.com/...terview-part-2/

He states that the 1.4 heat sinks are overpowered. (especially in comparison to SHS). He states that they are too easy to install with only a cbill requirement. He would have liked a game play requirement in terms of mech mastery to unlock the technology upgrades ... however, with the cbill grind where it is now, earning the cbills to install double heat sinks can take a while so heat sinks are still a time investment sink (if a relatively modest one).

However, on the topic of these so-called "1.4x" heat sinks, it has been my understanding that the IN-Engine inherent heat sinks have been 2.0x since the month after they were introduced. The only 1.4 heat sinks are the external additional ones added on afterward. This means that the majority of heat sinks on most mech builds are actually true 2.0 double heat sinks inherent to the engine. The incremental difference due to external 1.4x heat sinks is a relatively small effect. Have the developers of this game forgotten this? Or am I wrong about the engine heat sinks?

The game is essentially already balanced around core true double heat sinks.

e.g. Most mechs carry 10 to 20 double heat sinks:

10 MWO double heat sinks (250+ engine) = 10 x2 = 20 heat dissipation. These are true double heat sinks.

15 MWO double heat sinks (250+ engine) = 10 x 2 + 5 x 1.4 = 27 heat dissipation compared to 30 for true double heat sinks. About a 10% difference.

20 MWO DHS = 10x2 + 10x1.4 = 34 dissipation compared to 40 for true double. About 15% difference.

They could probably make double heat sinks true doubles without upsetting the apple cart too much. On the other hand, if they made all heat sinks 1,4x (eliminate engine doubles) it would be a very different game. It would play slower and all the weapon systems would again be unbalanced since they are essentially balanced around double heat sinks.

Anyway, Russ's off the cuff remarks about heat sinks seemed to be a concern to me since any significant change to heat sinks will substantially change the balance of the entire game. High heat cost energy weapons are usable at the moment without being OP due to the current value of heat sinks. Before they make any such changes I would suggest that they do extensive and comprehensive testing of a wide range of mechs and builds.

Due to the nature of the MWO techology upgrades in terms of double heat sinks and to a lesser extent endo steel and ferro-fibrous - the game balance needs to at least assume a mech using double heat sinks. The concern expressed was that beginning mech builds start off with single heat sinks and thus make new players less competitive. However, at the present time a double heat sink upgrade requires only a modest amount of grinding. If you try to slow the progression so that more single heat sink mechs are in play or nerf double heat sinks so much that there is little or no difference between SHS and DHS ... you will continue to alienate a core fraction of your audience and still not solve the design issue you are trying to address.

Options:
1) Have only one level of technology so you can balance the game overall with all players. This breaks BT canon in more ways than I can count and would make the introduction of the clans mostly meaningless. Nerfing double heat sinks to be only marginally more effective than single heat sinks would be a step along this route.

2) Introduce improved matchmaking that takes some estimate of "battle value" into account. Balance a match based on battle value and ELO ... dropping tonnage as a constraint. Obviously heavier mechs will have a higher base battle value. Battle value will be affected by chassis, weapons and tech equipped. To be honest, I think you will need something like this when you introduce the clans or you will break the balance on the game. Russ suggested just having a tonnage modification for clan mechs dropping in a match but that will again assume that the clan mechs are using a common level of technology or fitting optimal weapons loadouts. (I know that this has been suggested before but after listening to the podcast, the concerns expressed by Russ and his comment on BV being "maybe some day" ... I think that the time for battle values over tonnage should be on the horizon and if they aren't already re-designing the matchmaker for it they should be).

P.S. Tried to change the topic name after posting since it seemed a little too flamable in retrospect ... but can't seem to do it ...

Edited by Mawai, 23 September 2013 - 07:48 AM.

[MustrumRidcully]

The answer to your question is:
Probably not.

Though Russ isn't the entirety of PGI. Maybe someone else in the team could have corrected him or rather would have expressed it more correctly.

But even then, one prevalent belief at PGI seems to be: "Heat Neutral Mechs are the Devil", which is why we have this heat system with its giant heat threshold, its low dissipation, and no heat penalties.

[Joseph Mallan]

And +24 Ghost heat on one of the few truly heat efficient builds!

[ICEFANG13]

Really weapon balance is pretty good right now, not bad anyway. Which is great! It only took them like a year or so to get here. Other balance is still pretty bad. PGI has never shown any degree of knowing what it up, at least not for a few months at best.

[stjobe]

Expected another mindless rant, got a thoughtful (and respectful) analysis instead.

Well done OP.

For the record, us players have been telling PGI much the same thing you're saying since the introduction of DHS; the mythical 3-second Jenner is as much a bad excuse as the mythical 6 MG Spider was; smokescreens to hide that they're going to do it their way even in the face of logic.

Edited by stjobe, 23 September 2013 - 08:03 AM.

[FupDup]

stjobe, on 23 September 2013 - 08:01 AM, said:

Expected another mindless rant, got a thoughtful (and respectful) analysis instead.

Well done OP.

For the record, us players have been telling PGI much the same thing you're saying since the introduction of DHS; the mythical 4-second Jenner is as much a bad excuse as the mythical 6 MG Spider was; smokescreens to hide that they're going to do it their way even in the face of logic.

3-second Jenner.

[stjobe]

FupDup, on 23 September 2013 - 08:02 AM, said:

3-second Jenner.

Dammit, not again!

Edited by stjobe, 23 September 2013 - 08:03 AM.

[SteelPaladin]

Tying mastery to getting DHS because getting them w/C-Bills is "overpowered" is a joke. If they're overpowered (and the entirety of PGI's heat system is massively debatable) then they're overpowered, period. Trading one timesink for another might make PGI more money on premium time (but they totally wouldn't make the change just for that reason >_>), but it does nothing for balance.

You can't balance on time to acquire an item in a game where there is no way to move backwards. MMOs have fought against this for ages and (most) have finally figured it out. If it's simply a matter of time invested, an ever increasing amount of people will get it and it will still be unbalanced. Balance the bloody item; don't play "milk the customer" and dangle necessary items behind a long grind.

[Shadey99]

The problem with the heat system in general is the original canon source the SHS were always bad, but you could deal with them by limiting your weapons load to range bands. So you were heat neutral or heat negative at long range, heat neutral at medium range, and ran hot at close range. Some mech designs inverted this and were hot at long ranges and fairly cool up close (PPCs and AC20s for instance), though this was rare.

DHS rewrote the game by allowing you to have much heavier weapons loads usable across ranges for lower weight costs. Mechs that once had to limit their fire every other turn can now keep going with all weapons with a lower weight cost in heat sinks. However past the 10 internal HS they took up alot of internal space. Super hot builds were often limited to standard engines, standard internal structure, and standard armor. All of which limited the weapons load that could be carried.

Even at full double heat sinks in MWO the fact that rate of fire is at least 2x what it was in the canon source is going to make heat neutral builds exceedingly harder. I did a good write up of what it takes to be heat neutral in MWO in the mechs and loadout forum for each weapon system. So as much as PGI may hate them heat neutral builds exist even so (though some are better than others). I even run a heat neutral 4xML Cicada which can fire every 4 seconds for an entire match. It just isn't terribly good in the current meta.

Edited by Shadey99, 23 September 2013 - 08:49 AM.

[Funkadelic Mayhem]

Not knowing your own game is underpowered. He needs a buff.

Edited by Funkadelic Mayhem, 23 September 2013 - 08:50 AM.

[Team Leader]

They really don't. All employees have unlimited MC and cbills. They don't have to grind for everything, they already have it all unlocked. They don't know what it's like starting out as a new player for the first time, stuck in a terrible trial mech with SHS, a DOA victim of huge spikes to HPS, in builds that were already sub par or average in the TT. They don't know what new players want or experience, the 1.5 mil money sink is ok for them, and the people with 300million cbills sitting around collecting dust, but that's a huge tax on new players. SHS-DHS conversion should be much cheaper, for the sake if sanity and not forcing people into a longer grind to just get competitive than there already is.

DHS won't be balanced until they're as free and cheap as SHS

Edited by Team Leader, 23 September 2013 - 09:00 AM.

[Joseph Mallan]

With anything coming from TRO 3055 you will get your Dubs that free.

Edited by Joseph Mallan, 23 September 2013 - 09:42 AM.

[General Taskeen]

Remember when the "heat system" was better in previous Mech games? I do :-D

[Toong]

Mawai, on 23 September 2013 - 07:47 AM, said:

...However, on the topic of these so-called "1.4x" heat sinks, it has been my understanding that the IN-Engine inherent heat sinks have been 2.0x since the month after they were introduced. The only 1.4 heat sinks are the external additional ones added on afterward. This means that the majority of heat sinks on most mech builds are actually true 2.0 double heat sinks inherent to the engine. The incremental difference due to external 1.4x heat sinks is a relatively small effect. Have the developers of this game forgotten this? Or am I wrong about the engine heat sinks?

They could probably make double heat sinks true doubles without upsetting the apple cart too much. On the other hand, if they made all heat sinks 1,4x (eliminate engine doubles) it would be a very different game. It would play slower and all the weapon systems would again be unbalanced since they are essentially balanced around double heat sinks.

Anyway, Russ's off the cuff remarks about heat sinks seemed to be a concern to me since any significant change to heat sinks will substantially change the balance of the entire game. High heat cost energy weapons are usable at the moment without being OP due to the current value of heat sinks. Before they make any such changes I would suggest that they do extensive and comprehensive testing of a wide range of mechs and builds.

Due to the nature of the MWO techology upgrades in terms of double heat sinks and to a lesser extent endo steel and ferro-fibrous - the game balance needs to at least assume a mech using double heat sinks. The concern expressed was that beginning mech builds start off with single heat sinks and thus make new players less competitive. However, at the present time a double heat sink upgrade requires only a modest amount of grinding. If you try to slow the progression so that more single heat sink mechs are in play or nerf double heat sinks so much that there is little or no difference between SHS and DHS ... you will continue to alienate a core fraction of your audience and still not solve the design issue you are trying to address.

I truncated your quote a bit for sake of space. In NGNG podcast 88.5, I believe Paul Inouye said that in-engine heatsinks work at 1.4 efficiency as well. I'd go on further to explain why double heat sinks are a bad idea, but the second half of that interview already mentions the nightmare world of 2.0 efficiency doubles. If you don't agree with what Russ explained, there's nothing I can say that'd probably convince you any better.

Nice post, by the way. Good, reasonable approach.

ICEFANG13, on 23 September 2013 - 08:00 AM, said:

Really weapon balance is pretty good right now, not bad anyway. Which is great! It only took them like a year or so to get here. Other balance is still pretty bad. PGI has never shown any degree of knowing what it up, at least not for a few months at best.

Wow, way to give one hell of a backhanded compliment. I'd refer you to pretty much every other game ever in reference to your insult that PGI "knowing what [is] up". In my experience, PGI's cycle of weapons balancing has been average to a little above average in my experience, when it comes to online games. Champions Online had a certain notorious Electrics build that was ridiculously strong for a year before they fixed it; EVE has (until the past couple years) always had one or two builds that were head and shoulders above the rest; Fallen Earth has always favored rifles; APB has never successfully balanced the N-TEC in 3 years of trying. These are cherry picked examples, of course, but my point is weapon balance is notoriously difficult and time consuming. Scoffing at PGI for "only" taking a year to nearly balance every weapon system in the game is like scoffing at a busy restaurant for "only" taking 15 minutes to prepare your food.

PGI have also said a few times that they don't even try to draw conclusions on whether a weapon tweak was successful or not for a month or so, to give players time to properly break it. The data doesn't lie, but it does take time to collect.

SteelPaladin, on 23 September 2013 - 08:30 AM, said:

Tying mastery to getting DHS because getting them w/C-Bills is "overpowered" is a joke. If they're overpowered (and the entirety of PGI's heat system is massively debatable) then they're overpowered, period. Trading one timesink for another might make PGI more money on premium time (but they totally wouldn't make the change just for that reason >_>), but it does nothing for balance.

You can't balance on time to acquire an item in a game where there is no way to move backwards. MMOs have fought against this for ages and (most) have finally figured it out. If it's simply a matter of time invested, an ever increasing amount of people will get it and it will still be unbalanced. Balance the bloody item; don't play "milk the customer" and dangle necessary items behind a long grind.

That's not quite what Russ meant in that interview. He meant that he personally would've preferred them to be something that were more difficult to achieve, and therefore more rewarding when you finally do get it. Of course, he's also waxing nostalgic a little bit about what might have been. Right after this, NGNG and Russ go on to discuss how repair and rearm would have balanced Double heat sinks nicely, if the system wasn't so fundamentally flawed that they had to remove it. In the Bryan Eckman interview part 2, they discuss briefly that PGI has plans to re-implement some kind of 'mech maintenance (though not repair and rearm specifically) at a future date, once they figure out how to not make it disproportionately harm certain players, especially new ones.

I'd also like to remind, that Double heat sinks are/were completely awesome and better than singles in virtually every way in canon and lore, which in my opinion takes some of the steam out of the argument for making single heat sinks viable.

Team Leader, on 23 September 2013 - 09:00 AM, said:

They really don't. All employees have unlimited MC and cbills. They don't have to grind for everything, they already have it all unlocked. They don't know what it's like starting out as a new player for the first time, stuck in a terrible trial mech with SHS, a DOA victim of huge spikes to HPS, in builds that were already sub par or average in the TT. They don't know what new players want or experience, the 1.5 mil money sink is ok for them, and the people with 300million cbills sitting around collecting dust, but that's a huge tax on new players. SHS-DHS conversion should be much cheaper, for the sake if sanity and not forcing people into a longer grind to just get competitive than there already is.

DHS won't be balanced until they're as free and cheap as SHS

Haha wow, you have no idea what you are talking about. Like at all.

[ICEFANG13]

Toong, on 23 September 2013 - 09:22 AM, said:

I truncated your quote a bit for sake of space. In NGNG podcast 88.5, I believe Paul Inouye said that in-engine heatsinks work at 1.4 efficiency as well. I'd go on further to explain why double heat sinks are a bad idea, but the second half of that interview already mentions the nightmare world of 2.0 efficiency doubles. If you don't agree with what Russ explained, there's nothing I can say that'd probably convince you any better.

Nice post, by the way. Good, reasonable approach.



Wow, way to give one hell of a backhanded compliment. I'd refer you to pretty much every other game ever in reference to your insult that PGI "knowing what [is] up". In my experience, PGI's cycle of weapons balancing has been average to a little above average in my experience, when it comes to online games. Champions Online had a certain notorious Electrics build that was ridiculously strong for a year before they fixed it; EVE has (until the past couple years) always had one or two builds that were head and shoulders above the rest; Fallen Earth has always favored rifles; APB has never successfully balanced the N-TEC in 3 years of trying. These are cherry picked examples, of course, but my point is weapon balance is notoriously difficult and time consuming. Scoffing at PGI for "only" taking a year to nearly balance every weapon system in the game is like scoffing at a busy restaurant for "only" taking 15 minutes to prepare your food.

PGI have also said a few times that they don't even try to draw conclusions on whether a weapon tweak was successful or not for a month or so, to give players time to properly break it. The data doesn't lie, but it does take time to collect.



That's not quite what Russ meant in that interview. He meant that he personally would've preferred them to be something that were more difficult to achieve, and therefore more rewarding when you finally do get it. Of course, he's also waxing nostalgic a little bit about what might have been. Right after this, NGNG and Russ go on to discuss how repair and rearm would have balanced Double heat sinks nicely, if the system wasn't so fundamentally flawed that they had to remove it. In the Bryan Eckman interview part 2, they discuss briefly that PGI has plans to re-implement some kind of 'mech maintenance (though not repair and rearm specifically) at a future date, once they figure out how to not make it disproportionately harm certain players, especially new ones.

I'd also like to remind, that Double heat sinks are/were completely awesome and better than singles in virtually every way in canon and lore, which in my opinion takes some of the steam out of the argument for making single heat sinks viable.



Haha wow, you have no idea what you are talking about. Like at all.

Taking a year to reach a slight amount of balance is considered good? Knight who is White alert!

Edited by ICEFANG13, 23 September 2013 - 09:27 AM.

[MustrumRidcully]

stjobe, on 23 September 2013 - 08:03 AM, said:

Dammit, not again!

It's an easy mistake to make. 4 seconds might actually allow for a few realistic scenarios back given the existing cycle times.

Edited by MustrumRidcully, 23 September 2013 - 09:35 AM.

[Dracol]

It seems every time the discussion of making the 1.4dhs into true 2.0dhs one key component is always forgotten:

1.4DHS are only 1.4 when no mech efficiencies are unlocked

After coolrun is unlocked they become 1.505
After double basic is unlocked, they become 1.61

Meanwhile, the 2.0 engine heatsinks become 2.15 / 2.3 respectively

With double basiced unlocked, having 16 total DHS on a mech will give it an average of 2.0....
Less then that and you're running better then true double heat sinks
More then that and you're running worse then true double heat sinks

[Joseph Mallan]

Dracol, on 23 September 2013 - 09:35 AM, said:

It seems every time the discussion of making the 1.4dhs into true 2.0dhs one key component is always forgotten:

1.4DHS are only 1.4 when no mech efficiencies are unlocked

After coolrun is unlocked they become 1.505
After double basic is unlocked, they become 1.61

Meanwhile, the 2.0 engine heatsinks become 2.15 / 2.3 respectively

With double basiced unlocked, having 16 total DHS on a mech will give it an average of 2.0....
Less then that and you're running better then true double heat sinks
More then that and you're running worse then true double heat sinks

Then just make 'em doubles and scrap the efficiencies!

[Dracol]

Joseph Mallan, on 23 September 2013 - 09:37 AM, said:

Then just make 'em doubles and scrap the efficiencies!

That would be a buff to heavies and assualts

IMHO, anything that gives mediums and lights a little extra edge is a good thing... and how DHS are set up now, they're leaning towards buffing lights/mediums more so then heavies/assaults that can install large numbers of heat sinks.

[Prezimonto]

The fact is that all the upgrades were balanced in TT by money, scarcity, and battle value.

This game has very little of that.

ALL the upgrades:
DHS/Endo/FF/XLengines should be rewritten to have more actual in-game penalties much like artemis.

Artemis is both more expensive and take more weight and takes more slots.

If DHS had variable efficiency (really good on very hot maps or up at the top of heat thresh hold but much poorer or even worse that SHS at constant cool down) they'd be a trade off. If they were super frail and caused you to take some damage when destroyed (the acidic matrix leaks and deals 10 damage to internals or something) they'd be more balanced.

ie... trade off: more offensive capability at the expense of toughness OR make them a pure trade off in play style

Endo: gives you back weight at the cost of 20% of your internals health... offensive for staying power trade

FF: given the entire lack of defensive upgrades I love to see this give actual bonus to the amount of armor you can pack on your mech (at an additional weight cost) so you can install them (costing slots) and add extra armor (costing weight). This is a real trade off.

XL-engines... Not sure.. .they've got SOME trade off already, but not enough. I think I would argue for engine HP and crits to be added with XL engines having only 2/3 the normal engine HP... and then spread over the extra slots. Engine crits can damage engine heat sinks... and if DHS are more frail than SHS.... XL+DHS = your heat dissipation can be shredded with damage.

Any or all of this... or a Market based Battle Value system would work significantly better than what we have. Because what we have was meant to be balanced by Repair and Rearm, which was DOA due to failed economy lessons for F2P games.