26 replies to this topic

[Ilithi Dragon]

So PGI has tried a number of different jam chance rates for the UAC/5 since Closed Beta, and none of them really seemed to hit a good balance. If the chance is too low, UACs become a death hose, but if the chance is too high, they become horribly ineffective and only useful in groups.

The current jam chance is kind of hitting the worst of both worlds. It's low enough that the UAC/5 can still death hose, particularly in large groups, but high enough that it jams too often to be very useful as a single weapon, often jamming on the first shot at critical moments.

My proposal is to change the flat jam chance to a progressive jam chance. The chance to jam would start out at zero or effectively zero, and then progressively increase the more the weapon is fired. This would help limit the death hosing (the flat jam chance gives you the same chance to jam whether you are sustaining or stuttering fire), and encourage players to fire in bursts.

For example, the very first shot of the UAC/5 would have zero chance to jam, and so long as the RoF was maintained similar to the AC/5, the jam chance would not kick in at all.

But, if the trigger is held down for the double-shot, the first double-shot has a small chance to jam, say, 5%. Then each shot after that increases progressively by 5%, or 10%, or 7.2%, whatever chance increase is found to be the best for balance. This would go as follows:

First single shot - 0% chance
First Double-shot - 5% chance AFTER the double shot fires
Second shot (single or double) - 10% chance
Third shot - 15% chance
Fourth shot - 20% chance
Fifth shot - 25% chance

First single shot - 0% chance
First Double-shot - 5% chance AFTER the double shot fires
Second shot (single or double) - 15% chance
Third shot - 25% chance
Fourth shot - 35% chance
Fifth shot - 45% chance

First single shot - 0% chance
First Double-shot - 5% chance AFTER the double shot fires
Second shot (single or double) - 12.2% chance
Third shot - 19.4% chance
Fourth shot - 26.6% chance
Fifth shot - 33.8% chance

And so on. Personally, I think a 10% increase would be best. The first couple shots have a minimal chance to jam, but by the third or fourth shot you get a serious chance to jam coming in, and by the fifth and sixth shots, you're basically flipping a coin. I don't think the jam chance should go higher than 45% or 50%, either - if someone wants to roll the dice and try and go for the sustained burst, a 50% chance to jam on every shot after #5 is punishment enough.

After fire stops, there would be a cooldown period before the jam chance reset, or during which the jam chance reduced, to prevent a stuttering death hose, and there could be a sliding indicator for the jam chance and/or its cooldown. Maybe a small number displaying the jam chance for each weapon, and a slider for the cooldown?

[Adridos]

Or they could just get rid of chance altogether.

I mean, there is always going to be that perfectly fine shot ruined, because the damn dice roll procced even though it was only at measly 1% chance of failure. How fun loosing a duel that way.

I'm fine with random chance in a SP enviroment, but in a MP game, it's generally a bad idea and is completely out of the question for MP games with high stakes (where you're penalized for loosing and don't get enjoyment out of it). The difference between getting hit by a lucky crit rocket from some Soldier in TF2, starting laughing, respawning and going at it again, probably getting even some more enjoyment out of hunting him down AND getting downed because the dice weren't on your side, feeling like breaking the keyboard in half and screaming obscenities at the monitor while you get to "enjoy" sitting like an ***** doing nothing for another 10 minutes, then having that bad luck shown into your face with no XP and C-Bills to speak of and also being prominently featured on the statistics page.

[Charons Little Helper]

No - because more often than not you only have 5-8 seconds to fire at something at a time. If the early jam chance was that low, the UAC would be amazing. It would only be significantly penalized in a brawl, and not much there. (a triple UAC cataphract would have done 50+ damage (not counting backup weapons) before the % would increase beyond the current 20%.

The only thing the UAC really needs is a toggle switch so that it can be fired at normal AC5 speed when holding down the fire button with no chance to jam. You could do that with macros I suppose (since there's no jam % on single shots) - but that's annoying to have to do.

[kapusta11]

If it were up to me I'd add recoil to all ballistic weapons, want to shoot AC5 2x faster, go ahead, you'll have 2x less time to adjust your aiming.

[Roughneck45]

Ilithi Dragon, on 26 October 2013 - 06:32 AM, said:

It's low enough that the UAC/5 can still death hose, particularly in large groups, but high enough that it jams too often to be very useful as a single weapon, often jamming on the first shot at critical moments.

Sounds balanced to me.

[OneEyed Jack]

Charons Little Helper, on 26 October 2013 - 07:09 AM, said:

The only thing the UAC really needs is a toggle switch so that it can be fired at normal AC5 speed when holding down the fire button with no chance to jam. You could do that with macros I suppose (since there's no jam % on single shots) - but that's annoying to have to do.

I'd be happy if i could reliably tap for a single shot without jamming. How the hell they can't manage to get it to not read a tap as a double-shot when there's 0.75 seconds between shots, I have no idea.

[mike29tw]

Roughneck45, on 26 October 2013 - 07:19 AM, said:

Sounds balanced to me.

It's not about whether the jam chance is balanced. Letting dice rolling dictate the outcome of the battle is wrong.

[kapusta11]

mike29tw, on 26 October 2013 - 12:09 PM, said:

It's not about whether the jam chance is balanced. Letting dice rolling dictate the outcome of the battle is wrong.

You heven't heard about guys that want cone of fire to be implemented yet, have you?

[Adridos]

kapusta11, on 26 October 2013 - 10:21 PM, said:

You heven't heard about guys that want cone of fire to be implemented yet, have you?

Nope, only the ones that advocate non-perfect targeting and those who want realistic targeting.

Of course there was a guy or two stupid enough to suggest CoF, but under no circumstances could that be considered a group worth mentioning in an argument as a viable counter-argument.

[mike29tw]

kapusta11, on 26 October 2013 - 10:21 PM, said:

You heven't heard about guys that want cone of fire to be implemented yet, have you?

And PGI has done a spectacular job not implementing it.

Problem?

[D04S02B04]

Have you even done the probability tree analysis for the results of your proposal? Do you know how severe the impact on DPS of the UAC5 will be?

Currently the UAC5 after accounting for the probability of jams etc stands at 3.85DPS or ~0.75 +/- 0.05 shots per second, averaging out at about ~70% of the time in a 10 second observation period, 7shots 1 jam and that jam can occur at the start, middle or end of that 10 sec period.

Issues with your idea
First of all the mechanic that you're proposing is extremely convoluted. From my probability tree analysis, I noticed that going over 25% jam rate is highly detrimental to performance.

My first interpretation of your proposal
Assuming that players are maximising damage (which they should) they can only fire double fire twice (Going up to 3rd shot probability). They can go for thrice double fire, hitting 5th shot which massively drops the DPS due to jam chance over long term and highly unpredictable performance.

It makes zero sense to fire the 4th shot without going double fire as it results in having to wait 1.5seconds + indefinite time to reset jam probability mechanic, reducing your DPS.

My second interpretation of your proposal
The alternative way I read your proposal was that each "shot" is effectively "each attempt" and that means up to 3rd shot, means up to the 3rd attempt of subsequent consecutive continuous double fire.

If that is so it will massively increase the performance of the UAC5, making it a godly 4.5 seconds (3 attempts) damage time span with very low possibility of jam.

Adridos, on 26 October 2013 - 06:46 AM, said:

Or they could just get rid of chance altogether.

I mean, there is always going to be that perfectly fine shot ruined, because the damn dice roll procced even though it was only at measly 1% chance of failure. How fun loosing a duel that way.

I'm fine with random chance in a SP enviroment, but in a MP game, it's generally a bad idea and is completely out of the question for MP games with high stakes (where you're penalized for loosing and don't get enjoyment out of it). The difference between getting hit by a lucky crit rocket from some Soldier in TF2, starting laughing, respawning and going at it again, probably getting even some more enjoyment out of hunting him down AND getting downed because the dice weren't on your side, feeling like breaking the keyboard in half and screaming obscenities at the monitor while you get to "enjoy" sitting like an ***** doing nothing for another 10 minutes, then having that bad luck shown into your face with no XP and C-Bills to speak of and also being prominently featured on the statistics page.

Remove chance. Make it a skill-based weapon by simply increasing the heat generated, reducing cooldown and removing the double fire mechanic.

There is no way to balance out the weapon with skill if a probability of jam exists because of statistical issues at low sample rates/low amount of attempts (Jamming on 1st or 2nd double shot attempt OR having non-stop firing for 10 seconds with current mechanic, which is 14 shots without jamming)

[kapusta11]

Huh? I was supporting guy that said that MWO is not a tabletop and dice roll is bad.

[Kunae]

D04S02B04, on 27 October 2013 - 12:03 AM, said:

Remove chance. Make it a skill-based weapon by simply increasing the heat generated, reducing cooldown and removing the double fire mechanic.

Um... then it would just be a really, really, crappy AC5, or a really crappy AC2.

[Pariah Devalis]

How about a simple, easy to implement, weapon heat system a la MGs in the old Battlefield games? Hold the trigger down on a per gun basis for over X amount of seconds and it the system overheats and requires a little time to cool off. It makes a very clear, player determined point of failure that they can modulate by backing off on the double-taps just before the gun jams, let it cool a bit, then lean into the target again. SOme adjustment to the doubletap rate of fire may need tweaking.

Or, to illustrate:

You have two UAC5. Double tapping lets them fire once every 0.75 seconds. Firing once for full cooldown puts them at 1.5 seconds between shots. If you fire both UAC5 at the same time once, there is zero weapon heat incurred. If you fire one once and double tap the other one, the gun that doubled now has some heat while the one that fired once has not built up any. This is to illustrate what I mean by a per gun basis. Now, if you were to hold the trigger down and doubletap for 3 seconds straight, the weapon's damage prevention system kicks in and the weapon needs to cool down before it can be fired again. However, if you fired it for 2.5 seconds and then returned to the 1.5 second rate of fire of single shotting, the heat levels on the weapon itself will dissipate over a short time back to zero. Meanwhile, the other UAC5 that was not being doubletapped is completely uneffected by what was going on with the other gun.

Edited by Pariah Devalis, 27 October 2013 - 07:47 AM.

[Mudhutwarrior]

mike29tw, on 26 October 2013 - 12:09 PM, said:

It's not about whether the jam chance is balanced. Letting dice rolling dictate the outcome of the battle is wrong.

disagree, the dice roll has saved my life on many real life occasions and also created my worse injurys. Life is dice.

[mike29tw]

Mudhutwarrior, on 27 October 2013 - 07:51 AM, said:

disagree, the dice roll has saved my life on many real life occasions and also created my worse injurys. Life is dice.

Video games are not real life and should never be like real life.

No idea why people keep bringing this up.

[Victor Morson]

They need to just copy what Living Legends did and give the individual UACs a "heat" meter, so if you push it too high it stalls out and needs to hit 0 before you can use it again.

It was about the perfect implementation of UACs (and RACs in that game) because it gave the jam mechanic to the player as a 100% skill based feature, while allowing easy balance tweaks to those weapons.

MW:O has taken much from Living Legends, and I would not object to them taking one thing more.

[Joseph Mallan]

Adridos, on 26 October 2013 - 06:46 AM, said:

Or they could just get rid of chance altogether.

I mean, there is always going to be that perfectly fine shot ruined, because the damn dice roll procced even though it was only at measly 1% chance of failure. How fun loosing a duel that way.

I'm fine with random chance in a SP enviroment, but in a MP game, it's generally a bad idea and is completely out of the question for MP games with high stakes (where you're penalized for loosing and don't get enjoyment out of it). The difference between getting hit by a lucky crit rocket from some Soldier in TF2, starting laughing, respawning and going at it again, probably getting even some more enjoyment out of hunting him down AND getting downed because the dice weren't on your side, feeling like breaking the keyboard in half and screaming obscenities at the monitor while you get to "enjoy" sitting like an ***** doing nothing for another 10 minutes, then having that bad luck shown into your face with no XP and C-Bills to speak of and also being prominently featured on the statistics page.

You do realize that all projectile weapons have a chance of failure in RL? Even the M-16 in single shot. Losing to a weapon failure in game sucks... less than dying to one in RL. Keep it random to keep it real.

[l33tworks]

No because it would just mean more mechs popping out behind cover unloading fire of hell at the best DPS/lowest Jam chance and getting back behind cover when your jam chance increases.

Edited by l33tworks, 28 October 2013 - 04:55 AM.

[Demos]

Joseph Mallan, on 28 October 2013 - 03:44 AM, said:

You do realize that all projectile weapons have a chance of failure in RL? Even the M-16 in single shot. Losing to a weapon failure in game sucks... less than dying to one in RL. Keep it random to keep it real.

Every time Joseph Mallan argues for "reality" in "Battletech/MWO", the universe kills a catgirl...