62 replies to this topic

[MustrumRidcully]

vnlk65n, on 15 December 2013 - 04:27 AM, said:

It is definitely NOT a stun, since a mech that can move can actually get back behind cover or retreat to allies. The mechs with flamethrowers aren't nailing you to the ground out in the open to get rectally ravaged by the rest of the team at leisure.

If you want to create some false equivalency with mechanics from other games then it's really more like a mana burn- an ability that damages and temporarily limits an opponents options, without removing control of character.

In any case, as you phrase the dilemma, in what situation should you ever expect to go into a 2v1 (or "team of mechs") at close range and walk away alive, assuming players have equivalent skill levels???? Oh no, they're "stunlocking" you! Perhaps you'd prefer them to just shoot you to death instead? Maybe you'll feel less impotent, but you still wasted your mech by getting caught alone.

Fundamentallly, you can lose in fun ways and you can lose in unfun ways. UNable to shoot back and dying under enemy fire is less fun then shooting back and dying under enemy fire. THe less fun a method of dying is, the more complaints you'll hear about it. And I thin rightfully so.

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Making flamethrowers more than just a damage dealing weapon (and making things like NARC viable in general) is important to the health of the game. You look at the pvp communities of other arena-style games like WoW, LoL, DOTA2 etc.- all games that have a level of success that I hope PGI aspires to- all of these pvp communities flourish because the games have complexity and depth beyond just min-maxing for pure damage. "Stun locking" isn't some kind of problem in these games either -not at any serious competitive level- all of these games have ways of mitigating them and teams use stuns and stun removals as appropriate. In these games, if you walk into a 2v1 and get stunned to zero, that isn't stuns being op, that is you getting outmaneuvered and soundly defeated. As that related to MWO and flamers, maybe you should just stay with allies so you have someone to watch your back, and that way you won't have to worry about dying alone and pathetic.

I don't agree. Those games are different. For example, they have counters, heals and all that. Unless we also get fire extinguishers as weaponry, I see Flamers as powerful crowd control only as a problem for this game.

This game is a lot closer to a shooter than WoW or LOL. And in shooters, you don't generally have stuns or "anti-weapon fields" or however we want to describe this powers. And if you balk at the term "shooter"; we could also say "simulation" and compare them to other simulation type games, like tank or flight simulators - not many of those feature crowd control/debuff powers like that.

[Khobai]

The problem with the flamer is that they made it a constant stream instead of a cooldown weapon. While thats fine for realism it's a nightmare to balance.

The way the flamer should work: it should shoot a fireball-like projectile which increases the heat of any mech it hits. By giving flamers the same conventional cooldown as other weapons they can balance the heat gain more far more easily. Also you can significantly increase the range of the weapon if it shoots fireballs, and flamers should have a 180m range (since all the other energy weapons have double range).

Edited by Khobai, 15 December 2013 - 10:57 AM.

[Aggravated Assault Mech]

MustrumRidcully, on 15 December 2013 - 08:11 AM, said:

I don't agree. Those games are different. For example, they have counters, heals and all that. Unless we also get fire extinguishers as weaponry, I see Flamers as powerful crowd control only as a problem for this game.

This game is a lot closer to a shooter than WoW or LOL. And in shooters, you don't generally have stuns or "anti-weapon fields" or however we want to describe this powers. And if you balk at the term "shooter"; we could also say "simulation" and compare them to other simulation type games, like tank or flight simulators - not many of those feature crowd control/debuff powers like that.

Flamethrowers don't have counters? Have you considered that you can simply kill a mech with flamethrowers from long range? Use coolant? Use weapons that don't generate a huge amount of heat? Travel in packs and focus them down? That's an entire spectrum of counters right there.

and FPS games have had flashbangs and stun grenades for the past.. 15 years?

Contemporary FPS/shooter games are completely rife with mechanics that kill you in ways that you can't fight back against like killstreaks or vehicles. The most analogous game to MWO- World of Tanks, just straight up allows you to kill people without your tank even being rendered, nevermind being able disable specific parts of their tank, which in some cases is effectively a stun (in the case of tracking tank destroyers).

You might think it isn't fun to die to gimmick mechanics, and many people might agree with you, but the fact is that what players actually want from a game is not the inverse of what they don't like. Most players don't like most of World of Tanks idiosyncratic mechanic retardation such as dying to invisible enemies, but that doesn't stop it from having an online population higher than EVE Online.

TDM w+mouse 1 gameplay just isn't that popular anymore because players have been conditioned for games that have depth to meta. If a game has no depth it has no serious lasting appeal and that is an important consideration for a multiplayer game with a F2P model. Players may not like dying to things that leave them feeling helpless, but nontheless the benefit of having these things is that they make a player more invested in making their decisions. When these decisions pay off (ie: a player baits a flameboat into an ambush), the player feels good and is inclined to keep playing.

Examples of what I'm talking about in shooters- In BF4 if you don't want to get owned by aircraft or tanks you have to carry a certain loadout, play in certain areas, or coordinate with your team. In World of Tanks if you don't want to get circled to death by a light tank or perma-tracked you have to drive a tank fast enough to avoid getting hit, train a crew for repairs and use consumables, or coordinate with your team. In this regard, reduce flamers to just a pure DPS weapon, and that kind of decision has become either self-evident or immaterial. Either everyone uses them because they have the best DPS, nobody uses them because they don't, or nobody cares because there isn't a big enough difference from other weapons in the same parameters to make the decision important. That is not fixing anything.

Why should MWO be any different from these other shooters? Because you want to die(lose) fighting rather than simply think your way around a gimmick mechanic? Making flamethrowers just another DPS weapon would just be a slap in the face to what got billed as "the thinking mans fps."