17 replies to this topic

[Felbombling]

PGI, in a previous Ask the Devs, you stated that weapon convergence was here to stay, due to technical difficulties. Ok, so let's work with what we do have and get around the detrimental effects that weapon convergence has brought to the game.

A: Do away with the alpha strike button altogether.

B: Every weapon group has a 0.25 second chain fire delay for each weapon.

C: Standard chain fire option stays in game for heat management option.

Voila! The detrimental game effects of pin point accurate weapon convergence are greatly diminished, along with the attraction to jump sniping and other meta styles that have cropped up over the last two years.

Discuss.

[Pyrrho]

Alpha Strikes will most likely persist. Using your example, if I were to put one weapon each on groups 1-6, I could still mash the 1-6 keys on my keyboard and "alpha" 6 weapons at once.

[Mechteric]

No, its a terrible idea. I can almost certainly say the game would be less fun for it.


How about if instead some of those weapons just didn't do all their damage in one shot? PPCs could have a splash component and AC's could become DPS weapons. That would pretty much take care of it.

[Joseph Mallan]

CapperDeluxe, on 17 January 2014 - 10:54 AM, said:

No, its a terrible idea. I can almost certainly say the game would be less fun for it.


How about if instead some of those weapons just didn't do all their damage in one shot? PPCs could have a splash component and AC's could become DPS weapons. That would pretty much take care of it.

I have no interest in my hammer being made into DpS. Leave the weapons as three distinct forms of damage, but buff the weaker weapons to be more formidable.

[Mechteric]

Joseph Mallan, on 17 January 2014 - 11:02 AM, said:

I have no interest in my hammer being made into DpS. Leave the weapons as three distinct forms of damage, but buff the weaker weapons to be more formidable.

How can you not think it would be more awesome, especially to help bring brawling back. It would be like the Atlas from the old Mechwarrior trailer:

http://youtu.be/orhOvbfyyJw?t=1m30s

Edited by CapperDeluxe, 17 January 2014 - 11:07 AM.

[Mister Blastman]

CapperDeluxe, on 17 January 2014 - 10:54 AM, said:

No, its a terrible idea. I can almost certainly say the game would be less fun for it.


How about if instead some of those weapons just didn't do all their damage in one shot? PPCs could have a splash component and AC's could become DPS weapons. That would pretty much take care of it.

I like this solution better. Make the PPCs splash be a function of range. Closer to max effective range, more concentrated the beam is.

I also wouldn't mind seeing something that I believe was modeled in the Tesla pods (or at least the cool MFDs made you think it was)...

A power-load system in the Battelmech. What? Well, it'd simply be the power routing could be modeled and if more power than a particular loop is capable of handling is requested, it is doled out to each weapon one by one until they are all filled. The pilot would have the option of overriding this loop with risk of damaging the power delivery system to that hardpoint area of the mech with detrimental effects...

Things such as...

Random weapon misfires
Incomplete capacitor charging with reduced damage
Beam focus failure causing them to spread out and do splash damage
Reduced range

to extremes like...

Weapon over-charge leading to complete meltdown
Brownouts in other areas of the mech including the cockpit and sensor systems

^^^ You see all that above, THAT would really make this game badass. You'd begin to feel like you are piloting some nasty gigant robot of destruction.

[Khobai]

Alpha Striking isnt the problem. Its all the weapons in the alpha strike hitting the same location thats the problem.

For example, if someone fires four SRM6s at you, no one thinks thats unbalanced.... even though its 48 damage, because that damage is spread out like crazy.

Conversely, if someone fires dual AC/20 into your side torso, thats really unbalanced.

So why remove alpha striking? Thats the wrong mechanic to remove.

Quote

I like this solution better. Make the PPCs splash be a function of range. Closer to max effective range, more concentrated the beam is.

Im not sure theres any easy way for PGI do to that though. Seems like it would just be easier to give PPCs a 70/30 split for damage. Where 70% of the damage goes into the location hit, and the other 30% goes into adjacent locations.

Quote

Random weapon misfires
Incomplete capacitor charging with reduced damage
Beam focus failure causing them to spread out and do splash damage
Reduced range

RNG should be limited in the game as much as possible. I would be against using most these mechanics as a means of discouraging alpha striking.

Although these could be neat effects for weapons that have suffered crit damage but havent been completely destroyed. Weapons could be undamaged, damaged, or destroyed with damaged weapons suffering from a one or more bizarre effects.

Edited by Khobai, 17 January 2014 - 11:19 AM.

[Joseph Mallan]

CapperDeluxe, on 17 January 2014 - 11:06 AM, said:

How can you not think it would be more awesome, especially to help bring brawling back. It would be like the Atlas from the old Mechwarrior trailer:

http://youtu.be/orhOvbfyyJw?t=1m30s

cause I am a power player. Killing my enemies in as little time as I can makes me happy. So when My AC20 kills a light mech in one shot I am happy! Two to three Alpha's from my Heavies and Assaults should leave most everything else a smoking husk. That is my idea of fun. And yes, I can accept instant death as well.

[Khobai]

Quote

cause I am a power player. Killing my enemies in as little time as I can makes me happy. So when My AC20 kills a light mech in one shot I am happy! Two to three Alpha's from my Heavies and Assaults should leave most everything else a smoking husk. That is my idea of fun. And yes, I can accept instant death as well.

unfortunately this attitude only encourages people to play assaults more and lights less lol.

[Felbombling]

Khobai, if they're not going to [cannot] remove weapon convergence and you believe alpha striking isn't the problem, how do you propose spreading damage out if one click of the mouse can send all weapons into the exact same location instantly? If, as you say, alpha striking isn't the problem, how do we get around the massed damage into one location issue? The armour locations were not designed to sustain this punishment.

[Khobai]

Quote

Khobai, if they're not going to [cannot] remove weapon convergence and you believe alpha striking isn't the problem, how do you propose spreading damage out if one click of the mouse can send all weapons into the exact same location instantly? If, as you say, alpha striking isn't the problem, how do we get around the massed damage into one location issue? The armour locations were not designed to sustain this punishment.

Make autocannons work more like the AC/2, by having them fire in short rapid bursts. The AC/2 already spreads damage around like all the other autocannons should.

Make PPCs do damage to adjacent locations. So instead of putting 10 damage into one location it might put 6-7 damage in one location and 3-4 damage into adjacent locations.

[Joseph Mallan]

Khobai, on 17 January 2014 - 11:27 AM, said:

unfortunately this attitude only encourages people to play assaults more and lights less lol.

Must be why I play em also!
Even if I lose to lights more than any other type of Mech.

[Sandpit]

Alpha Strikes are a good thing. They are great for that last-ditch effort to take down an enemy mech.

[lsp]

You must be new to Mechwarrior.

[Joseph Mallan]

Sandpit, on 17 January 2014 - 11:34 AM, said:

Alpha Strikes are a good thing. They are great for that last-ditch effort to take down an enemy mech.

They are also that good 1st, 2nd an 3rd Ditch effort as well!

[Mister Blastman]

Khobai, on 17 January 2014 - 11:09 AM, said:

Alpha Striking isnt the problem. Its all the weapons in the alpha strike hitting the same location thats the problem.

For example, if someone fires four SRM6s at you, no one thinks thats unbalanced.... even though its 48 damage, because that damage is spread out like crazy.

Conversely, if someone fires dual AC/20 into your side torso, thats really unbalanced.

So why remove alpha striking? Thats the wrong mechanic to remove.



Im not sure theres any easy way for PGI do to that though. Seems like it would just be easier to give PPCs a 70/30 split for damage. Where 70% of the damage goes into the location hit, and the other 30% goes into adjacent locations.

It wouldn't be hard.

You have a several packets of data being sent from the client to the server. The packets says:
Player fired PPC from grid x,y at [timestamp] in Z direction

the next packets say

Player fired PPC from grid x,y at [timestamp] in Z direction

Server adds PPC into state machine. Server begins simulating PPC every cycle.

Fast forward to cycle where PPC scores a hit. Server has PPC loaded into state machine as part of a memory table. Server references that entry. Server sees where PPC was fired from and then raytraces mech that was hit to origination point, determines range.

Using range, it looks up hard-coded table of PPC damage and table responds:

oh, at 300 meters it is A
oh, at 600 meters it is B

Server applies damage to mech appropriately.

Server sends packets to client.

Client updates accordingly.

********************

PGI is probably doing most of this already. We know they are checking range because of damage falloff. The only additional thing they'd need to add is splash to the lookup result from the damage table. As I see it, a rather insignificant amount of coding because they already have a splash damage system.

Sandpit, on 17 January 2014 - 11:34 AM, said:

Alpha Strikes are a good thing. They are great for that last-ditch effort to take down an enemy mech.

[CDLord HHGD]

In the lore, the alpha strike was meant as a last-ditch Hail Mary maneuver that more often than not overheated the mech when fired. The result was hopefully a badly damaged if not destroyed enemy.

The problem is alpha strikes are the normal mode of attack and with pinpoint damage, is very devastating. As JM mentions, the goal of many people is to remove the enemy threat as quickly as possible.

Though I do not know of the method to attain this, but I believe an alpha strike should be a lot more costly in terms of heat and recoil to the pilot. Otherwise, it's totally the choice of the pilot to continually use this tactic.

I do NOT agree in any way, shape, or form with the notion to turn ballistics into DPS weapons. That's the role of lasers. I also do not think PPCs should do varying amounts of damage, splash or otherwise, within its operational ranges...

[Prezimonto]

Mister Blastman, on 17 January 2014 - 11:09 AM, said:

I like this solution better. Make the PPCs splash be a function of range. Closer to max effective range, more concentrated the beam is.

I also wouldn't mind seeing something that I believe was modeled in the Tesla pods (or at least the cool MFDs made you think it was)...

A power-load system in the Battelmech. What? Well, it'd simply be the power routing could be modeled and if more power than a particular loop is capable of handling is requested, it is doled out to each weapon one by one until they are all filled. The pilot would have the option of overriding this loop with risk of damaging the power delivery system to that hardpoint area of the mech with detrimental effects...

Things such as...

Random weapon misfires
Incomplete capacitor charging with reduced damage
Beam focus failure causing them to spread out and do splash damage
Reduced range

to extremes like...

Weapon over-charge leading to complete meltdown
Brownouts in other areas of the mech including the cockpit and sensor systems

^^^ You see all that above, THAT would really make this game badass. You'd begin to feel like you are piloting some nasty gigant robot of destruction.

Oh god, yes please!?