82 replies to this topic

[Villz]

627, on 15 January 2014 - 03:43 AM, said:

yay, another high ego elo gameplay vid from villz! With more poptart cheese! And even worse music!


Sorry man but why don't you leave those gauss/PPC builds at home for just a day. Only one.

Build a mech around an LBX and/or some pulse lasers, rock with those guns and show your true skillz.

I did this ALONGGGG time ago as i learnt the science of mechlab now i have my PHD in min max.

I also do try every new weapon as balance changes and stay ontop of whats best.

Maybe if you just ran what was good they would change something if everybody did it.

Or you can be ******** and get all defensive and childish about it whatever float your boat cpt.

LORD VILLZ

ggclose™

[627]

so if you know how to minmax, if you know what weapons are op and which not, if you clearly know that PPCs are one of the best weapons, why do you even try to mask your "show off" vid as a base for a gameplay discussion?

You obviously have no interest in discussing balance with your vids. Just post them in barracks and everything is fine.

[Mister Blastman]

I've said it before and I'll say it again...

In TT, the only way to have anything like convergence was to have a targeting computer on your mech. Targeting computers took up extra tonnage and crits.

[Xyroc]

reply to title NO ... and Im not even fond of using PPCs

[Joseph Mallan]

Mister Blastman, on 15 January 2014 - 08:19 AM, said:

I've said it before and I'll say it again...

In TT, the only way to have anything like convergence was to have a targeting computer on your mech. Targeting computers took up extra tonnage and crits.

[Kosh]Yes.[/Kosh]

[Lightfoot]

Mister Blastman, on 15 January 2014 - 08:19 AM, said:

I've said it before and I'll say it again...

In TT, the only way to have anything like convergence was to have a targeting computer on your mech. Targeting computers took up extra tonnage and crits.

In Table Top board games the mechs don't move so the dice apply random hits based on modifiers. In interactive simulations of mechs they move, some very fast, and that becomes the random modifier for hit location. Works better for a Spider than an Atlas, but the Atlas gets more armor and is in the advantaged position even though it gets hit more often than the Spider. How well you do depends on your ability to pilot either mech. This is good, because you don't want dice rolls controling a simulation, which MWO tries to be, mostly.

MWO does not have convergence. It uses two reticles, which suffer a movement penalty when locked together. The various weapon types do not have convergence with each other and this de-convergence factor can be multiplied by moving laterally. Skill is needed to not expose your mech to focus fire of several mechs, but is otherwise very effective at spreading damage.

Like weapons in the same location do have convergence, but that is all, and you can still induce low accuracy with lateral movement. That is skill dependent. Your personal Mech-piloting skill is being put to a defensive test and you win or lose based mostly on this skill.

The above has always worked fine for me in MWO, as well as MW2-MW4 where you couldn't ask for the game to be adjusted to your needs and beyond known and discovered exploits, nothing was ever changed.

The PPC is over-hot in MWO actually and has a 90 meter minimum range now with no way to turn off the field inhibitor which creates this minimum range, something you could do in Battletech. That's more than enough nerfing.

Here is Battletech's PPC description which matches MWO's PPC pretty well except the heat values are wrong for DHS 1.4. being balanced for full DHS 2.0's.

PPC

"The Particle Projector Cannon (or PPC) is a unique energy weapon. PPCs fire a concentrated stream of protons or ions at a target, causing damage through both thermal and kinetic energy. Despite being an energy weapon, it produces recoil. The lethality of the weapon rivals that of higher-caliber autocannons; just three shots from a PPC will vaporize two tons of standard military-grade armor. Targets hit by multiple, simultaneous PPCs can also suffer electrical side-effects, such as overloaded computer systems or targeting sensors. The ion beam also extends to much farther ranges than autocannon fire, though PPCs generate large amounts of waste heat.

PPCs are equipped with a Field Inhibitor to prevent feedback which could damage the firing unit's electronic systems. This inhibitor degrades the performance of the weapon at close ranges of less than 90 meters. Particularly daring warriors have been known to disengage the inhibitor and risk damage to their own machine when a target is at close range."



You see MechWarriors, piloting that mech is a skill. The mech is an encumbrance that makes you easy to hit and how well you pilot it is more important than how well you aim. If you are just popping over a ridge, you will likely get full convergence of every weapon your opponent carries. That's a lesson teaching you not to do that. If you don't like it, don't make yourself a "Fat Target". Please don't come to the forums and ask for changes to gameplay that most players are happy with.

For anyone having problems with piloting their mechs and being fat targets all too often, I suggest switching to a Joystick. It's what I use and I have no problem spreading the damage from multiple mechs. The only mech I get cored in is the Awesome, but it's just too fat a target. Any other mech is damaged all over before going down. Seriously though, piloting the mech is the test of your personal skill, not a game flaw, not a convergence problem.

[Mister Blastman]

Lightfoot, on 15 January 2014 - 09:12 AM, said:

In Table Top board games the mechs don't move so the dice apply random hits based on modifiers. In interactive simulations of mechs they move, some very fast, and that becomes the random modifier for hit location. Works better for a Spider than an Atlas, but the Atlas gets more armor and is in the advantaged position even though it gets hit more often than the Spider. How well you do depends on your ability to pilot either mech. This is good, because you don't want dice rolls controling a simulation, which MWO tries to be, mostly.

MWO does not have convergence. It uses two reticles, which suffer a movement penalty when locked together.

MWO does have convergence, just like Mechwarrior 3 and 4 had it, too. Convergence is where all the weapons concentrate on one pinpointed spot underneath your reticle.

Look, I've been playing Mechwarrior since Mechwarrior 2, online over the internet. I'm not new here.

Convergence has been breaking the game online since the 3rd game in the series. Oddly enough, even Mechwarrior 2 had convergence but the weapons weren't nearly instant hit so that plus lag shooting nullified it online.

Quote

Seriously though, piloting the mech is the test of your personal skill, not a game flaw, not a convergence problem.

I dunno, I think I know something about piloting a battlemech. How do you get out of 3rd person view again?

Quote

skill is needed to not expose your mech

Yes, there is skill to pop-tarting. The problem is it has far too many advantages (100% impenetrable armor aka the ground) and not nearly enough disadvantages.

[Pjwned]

Drunk Canuck, on 14 January 2014 - 09:38 AM, said:

The hit registry on smaller Mech's is horrendous and the whole under 90 meters of the standard PPC thing not doing damage doesn't work properly, I have seen and been killed by 2 PPC Cicada's from 40 bloody meters.

Are you sure those PPCs weren't ER PPCs? Regular PPC has a minimum range of 90m but ER PPC has none.

Personally I think that's a pretty crappy design but that's also another argument.

[Lightfoot]

Mister Blastman, on 15 January 2014 - 09:23 AM, said:

MWO does have convergence, just like Mechwarrior 3 and 4 had it, too. Convergence is where all the weapons concentrate on one pinpointed spot underneath your reticle.

Look, I've been playing Mechwarrior since Mechwarrior 2, online over the internet. I'm not new here.

Convergence has been breaking the game online since the 3rd game in the series. Oddly enough, even Mechwarrior 2 had convergence but the weapons weren't nearly instant hit so that plus lag shooting nullified it online.



I dunno, I think I know something about piloting a battlemech. How do you get out of 3rd person view again?



Yes, there is skill to pop-tarting. The problem is it has far too many advantages (100% impenetrable armor aka the ground) and not nearly enough disadvantages.

Yes, I always played for the "force first person=ON" leagues in MW3-MW4. MW4 was ruined by 3PV poptarting. I don't think 3PV is an issue in MWO though, it ruins the reticle allignment from what I have seen.

If you don't want pop-tarting, also known as firing weapons while jump-jetting, you petition MWO/PGI to not allow Mechs to fire while airborne. Good luck on that, but say what you want rather than trying to corrale what you want with blanket nerfs.

I almost never get "cored" in my mechs. Damage is always spread across the mech, but I always move laterally to my opponents to try to make them sit and pivot. Good pilots won't sit and pivot because they know they will be "cored" quickly if they don't move laterally as well.

Some say there is too much convergence and pin-point damage. I say no because the weapons all have different travel time speeds and patterns and the mech's have two reticles that never really allign unless you use a key command or check to default 'lock reticles'. PGI added the 'lock reticles' command to increase convergence I guess?

Now PGI has said they can't add a targeting point for each weapon on the mechs. CPU load? So asking for de-convergence means having the mechs fire into a slightly smaller than mech-sized damage footprint, essentially turning the mech into a massed LB-X by hitting any group-fire, so you would do less pin-point damage, but also never miss, even against Light mechs. That last part would be very bad since Lights fold pretty fast to moderate damage. Conversely a light mech can use speed and skill to avoid being hit by pin-point damage types.

It boils down to do you want piloting skill to win games or do you want PGI to dummy-down MWO so piloting and aiming is no longer a factor? You folks seem to think there is some happy middle ground between these two outcomes, but there is not. De-convergence turns the mechs into massed shotguns that don't miss and pin-point means your mech might get cored, grazed, or missed all together, with your piloting and speed figuring heavily into what happens. You all think about that before wishing away a great mech simulation like MWO (which could certainly be more like Battletech than it is!).

[Mister Blastman]

Lightfoot, on 15 January 2014 - 01:34 PM, said:

Yes, I always played for the "force first person=ON" leagues in MW3-MW4. MW4 was ruined by 3PV poptarting. I don't think 3PV is an issue in MWO though, it ruins the reticle allignment from what I have seen.

If you don't want pop-tarting, also known as firing weapons while jump-jetting, you petition MWO/PGI to not allow Mechs to fire while airborne. Good luck on that, but say what you want rather than trying to corrale what you want with blanket nerfs.

I almost never get "cored" in my mechs. Damage is always spread across the mech, but I always move laterally to my opponents to try to make them sit and pivot. Good pilots won't sit and pivot because they know they will be "cored" quickly if they don't move laterally as well.

Some say there is too much convergence and pin-point damage. I say no because the weapons all have different travel time speeds and patterns and the mech's have two reticles that never really allign unless you use a key command or check to default 'lock reticles'. PGI added the 'lock reticles' command to increase convergence I guess?

Now PGI has said they can't add a targeting point for each weapon on the mechs. CPU load? So asking for de-convergence means having the mechs fire into a slightly smaller than mech-sized damage footprint, essentially turning the mech into a massed LB-X by hitting any group-fire, so you would do less pin-point damage, but also never miss, even against Light mechs. That last part would be very bad since Lights fold pretty fast to moderate damage. Conversely a light mech can use speed and skill to avoid being hit by pin-point damage types.

It boils down to do you want piloting skill to win games or do you want PGI to dummy-down MWO so piloting and aiming is no longer a factor? You folks seem to think there is some happy middle ground between these two outcomes, but there is not. De-convergence turns the mechs into massed shotguns that don't miss and pin-point means your mech might get cored, grazed, or missed all together, with your piloting and speed figuring heavily into what happens. You all think about that before wishing away a great mech simulation like MWO (which could certainly be more like Battletech than it is!).

I wouldn't call MWO great.

Minute for Minute I had far more fun playing Mechwarrior 2: Mercenaries online than I've ever had in this. In Mechwarrior 2: Mercs you could literally turn yourself into a God if you were good enough at the game.

Here you don't have that option. You have Russian Roulette with the matchmaker and prayer.

Look, I can spread damage with the best of players. You can't spread 30 pts to a single panel though in a 45-ton mech. You get hit once and that panel is gone. You get hit again in that spot and you're dead. Game over. Two shots if you're lucky. Many times it is only one shot.

That's a problem.

It wouldn't remove skill from the game at all. In Mechwarrior 2: Mercs, for instance, your shots would take a while to core someone out and kill them (unless you exploited the back armor bug while flying which even happened unintentionally). What it would do is allow greater weapon balance and ... gameplay diversity.

See, diversity is the whole problem here. At the top, you either snipe and win or ... get sniped and lose. Brawling is suicide with Russian Roulette because most teammates are scared to death, all the time.

Break up convergence and you open the doors to brawling again. It doesn't make the game duller or easier, it just adds variety. In many of the proposals I have made, they allow tremendous amount of skill potential to be brought to the table.

I'm the last person on these forums that would want a skill-less game experience. I fly Falcon 4.0 BMS for crying out loud. That has more skill in turning on, taxiing and taking of the jet than this has in an entire game. This game is child's play right now. It could use quite a bit more variety for skill.

[Lightfoot]

Mister Blastman, on 15 January 2014 - 01:43 PM, said:

I wouldn't call MWO great.

Minute for Minute I had far more fun playing Mechwarrior 2: Mercenaries online than I've ever had in this. In Mechwarrior 2: Mercs you could literally turn yourself into a God if you were good enough at the game.

Here you don't have that option. You have Russian Roulette with the matchmaker and prayer.

Look, I can spread damage with the best of players. You can't spread 30 pts to a single panel though in a 45-ton mech. You get hit once and that panel is gone. You get hit again in that spot and you're dead. Game over. Two shots if you're lucky. Many times it is only one shot.

That's a problem.

It wouldn't remove skill from the game at all. In Mechwarrior 2: Mercs, for instance, your shots would take a while to core someone out and kill them (unless you exploited the back armor bug while flying which even happened unintentionally). What it would do is allow greater weapon balance and ... gameplay diversity.

See, diversity is the whole problem here. At the top, you either snipe and win or ... get sniped and lose. Brawling is suicide with Russian Roulette because most teammates are scared to death, all the time.

Break up convergence and you open the doors to brawling again. It doesn't make the game duller or easier, it just adds variety. In many of the proposals I have made, they allow tremendous amount of skill potential to be brought to the table.

I'm the last person on these forums that would want a skill-less game experience. I fly Falcon 4.0 BMS for crying out loud. That has more skill in turning on, taxiing and taking of the jet than this has in an entire game. This game is child's play right now. It could use quite a bit more variety for skill.

Then what you want is for like weapons to not occupy the same physical space, but I think PGI has tried to do that with Heat Scale and the Gauss desync, which are not ideal at all. So I think if they could give each weapon it's own target point they would. Maybe they could make arrays of weapons fire in a grid window so not quite pinpoint, but not a shotgun blast either.

There are other solutions like having the hitboxes overlap so only a precise hit would score all damage to a single section. I think this is CPU lower cost than individual targeting for weapon groups. Then it would be more like a targeting feat to hit dead center, like a headshot is now. I have suggested this one numerous times though.

MWO gameplay is starting to break down from too many nerfs piled one on top of another now and there has to be a better way. You can't just go nerf this, nerf that, and end up with anything but a sausage factory of nerfs.

Edited by Lightfoot, 15 January 2014 - 02:11 PM.

[Lykaon]

Villz, on 14 January 2014 - 04:07 AM, said:

^
As you can see despite the nerfs ppc's seem to be just as popular.

What does ever1 think about adding the gauss charge mechanic onto the ppc also?

The problem isn't with PPCs directly the problem is with an interaction between several mechanics and the armor mechanics.

MWO uses armor mechanics pulled directly from the Battletech table top game.The only adjustments made very early on was armor values were doubled (considering that rate of fire was nearly tripled this seemed wise).

So apart from doubling values the concepts of MWO's armor mechanics and table top Battletech's armor mechanics are identical.Each body part has a fixed value of armor determined by an internal structure value.Destruction of a mech's vital components results in mech destruction.

The problem arises in MWo when the armor mechanics are exposed to several mechanics present in MWO.

The table top game used several supporting mechanics to create a functional enviorment for the armor mechanics.MWo has failed to provide sufficent mechanics for the armor mechanics to function well.

The core problem is the armor mechanics and values were never designed to function well in an enviorment with group fire and ease of aiming at critical body locations.

[Trauglodyte]

Lykaon, on 15 January 2014 - 02:54 PM, said:

The problem isn't with PPCs directly the problem is with an interaction between several mechanics and the armor mechanics.

MWO uses armor mechanics pulled directly from the Battletech table top game.The only adjustments made very early on was armor values were doubled (considering that rate of fire was nearly tripled this seemed wise).

So apart from doubling values the concepts of MWO's armor mechanics and table top Battletech's armor mechanics are identical.Each body part has a fixed value of armor determined by an internal structure value.Destruction of a mech's vital components results in mech destruction.

The problem arises in MWo when the armor mechanics are exposed to several mechanics present in MWO.

The table top game used several supporting mechanics to create a functional enviorment for the armor mechanics.MWo has failed to provide sufficent mechanics for the armor mechanics to function well.

The core problem is the armor mechanics and values were never designed to function well in an enviorment with group fire and ease of aiming at critical body locations.

Just to further this, and Lykaon and I have been in agreement with this for a long time, is that, while they doubled the armor all mechs carried, they also increased the firing rate at which weapons performed. That, essentially equalizes damage to armor back to TT levels. BUT, what is missing here is the environmental impact and your ability to aim, the fact that convergence doesn't exist in this game and you can get around JJ impact by way of a button push (gotta love the Lock Arms To Torso toggle), and that most of the internal components in your mech can't be destroyed. If I tear of the armor on your arm, I should be able to kill an arm actuator. If I hit your hand, nothing happens but if I destroy one of the other actuators, your armo should be rendered useless and your weapons, for all intents, destroyed. But, I don't and most of the damage goes straight to the Internal Structure. If I strip your leg, I should be able to slow you down by 10% for each leg actuator destroyed until you lose all of them and then move as if you leg had been destroyed. But, it doesn't. And, if I strip one of your torsos, I should be able to hit your engine to destroy Heat Sinks and cause a reduction in power. I should be able to hit your gyro and cause you to take a movement hit like you'd just been hit by an AC20 x2 or more.

We need to get convergence back into the game so that pin point shots aren't the norm (they can be if you stop and aim). We need to suffer from heat as it builds up (like stripping out efficiencies and more) so that we're not running like a Ferrari 100% of the time. And we need to add some substance to our mechs. Right now, we're running around in giant metal pinatas that shatter when you look at them wrong all because we're allowed to build our mechs like a Gundam Battleship (nothing wrong with that).

All in all, I'd like to see the PPC paired down a little bit by way of some splash. But, most of the weapon balance in the game is fine. We just need to get ourselves beefed up more and then look at addressing movement (JJs) and the weapons that have been left out in the cold (LRMs, SRMs, Narc, Pulses, etc).

Edited by Trauglodyte, 16 January 2014 - 10:37 AM.

[NRP]

The "charge up and fire" mechanic is stupid. No weapon designer would stay employed for longer than two minutes after presenting such an asinine idea. Yeah sure, an electrical energy based weapon system (such as a PPC or gauss rifle) does need a "charge up" time. That time is the "recycle" time (i.e. the time between shots). No sane individual would design a weapon system where the pilot must simultaneously manually initiate the charging process and the firing process in one continuous action, while in combat. It's just frickin ludicrous.

To suggest something like this is not only plausible but also worthwhile is to be willfully ignorant.

[Jaeger Gonzo]

Homelessbill idea is a damn solution to all this nonsense that PGI is serving here.

[Troutmonkey]

Nerf Villz and his poptarting, air strike spamming Highlander racket.

[Mister Blastman]

Troutmonkey, on 16 January 2014 - 09:27 PM, said:

Nerf Villz and his poptarting, air strike spamming Highlander racket.

k thx bai

[Troutmonkey]

Mister Blastman, on 16 January 2014 - 09:34 PM, said:

k thx bai

Enjoy your overtonned premade vs pug victory.

[Mister Blastman]

Troutmonkey, on 16 January 2014 - 09:37 PM, said:

Enjoy your overtonned premade vs pug victory.

I bathe myself in delicious tears.

[Scandinavian Jawbreaker]

"Everyone running highlanders with ac20 and ppcs should be banned", said one guy and rage quit when I killed him under 90m with a gauss rifle in 732.

Hatred is strong. So strong your being spat at when piloting highlanders. Even if they did nerf PPC more someone will still ruin someone's day with a PPC and it's op once again... The ppc is not the imbalance.