518 replies to this topic

[ExAstris]

For those having trouble hitting with NARCs, remember a few things;

1. Your only indication that you hit is the NARC icon on the mech's targeted bracket. If for any reason that bracket doesn't show up (i.e. another enemy's ECM) then you will receive no notification if the hit was successful.

2. If the enemy has more than one AMS, they can indeed shoot your NARC down before it makes it to the target.

3. NARC likely uses the same basic coding procedures SRMs do, which means they are visually client authoritative, but actually server authoritative. In other words, your client shows you what it looks like they would do as soon as it realizes you've pulled the trigger. But the server doesn't realize you've pulled the trigger until a fraction of a second later and calculates the shot from that time-stamp instead. This causes serious desync for slow moving projectile weapons and leaves the player fighting the server by guessing its latency as much as the enemies they are trying to hit.



Hopefully #3 gets cleared up when they make the client visuals parasitic on the server's calculation of the weapons' actual positions.

Hopefully #1 gets cleared up when someone decides to give MWO an actual information warfare pillar instead of one alter to the ECM god.

Hopefully #2 stays, since the benefit of NARC is mostly missile support, bringing a lot of anti-missile systems seems like an appropriate loadout cost to gain the benefit of killing off beacons that will only bring more missiles. (unlike ECM which does AMS's job better than it on top of its most powerful attribute, hiding your entire team from radar detection)

[anonymous161]

Helmer, on 22 January 2014 - 12:04 PM, said:

PGI reads the boards daily. They play the game often (Despite popular belief) . They have plenty of people who forward them on statistical data and threads. Niko Snow does an incredible job with the feedback and known issue threads. The "important issues" are many , varied, and subjective. Even Garth, who is physically located at PGI, had a difficult time pulling people away from work to answer threads.

Its a slow process, and people get upset already with monthly reiterations of the things PGI are working on. A daily or weekly "Hey we're still working on X things , so maybe later we can work on Y things" would just enrage people because of the slow progress. I'm all for more communication, but as we've seen, its never enough. Take Pauls most recent post. If you look at the feedback thread there are numerous "Well you didn't talk about this... or that....or What about all these other issues". Its normal. What people really want is a sit down 1v1 with certain Devs and know the complete day to day goings on, and for PGI to justify working on X over Y. As many are financially and emotionally invested in the game, its understandable and , to an extent, reasonable.
This is not to say they should stop communicating. As I've said, I'm all for more communication, however, I also understand the realities of the industry. Taking a few hours out of your day to carefully craft a post, have to vetted by the other departments that it might pertain to, have it Ok'd by Bryan/Russ... it slows you down and takes away from development. They're understandably cautious about what they post considering past reactions of the forums.

PGI seemingly understands the passion of the playerbase, and wanting more information. Hopefully they keep this up and find that fine line between communication and development time.


TL:DR Having another person poking Devs and shoving information in their face is not going to help, mostly likely it will hurt.


Cheers.

Then they need to hire more people, and you cant tell me they cant afford it, not to mention they have a NOW HIRING advertisement.

[Cimarb]

Darth Bane001, on 24 March 2014 - 03:25 PM, said:

Then they need to hire more people, and you cant tell me they cant afford it, not to mention they have a NOW HIRING advertisement.

A good lot of us would probably love to work there. I live half way across the continent, so unless they have a stellar relocation program for me and my family, I'm out.

[aniviron]

ExAstris, on 24 March 2014 - 03:18 PM, said:

For those having trouble hitting with NARCs, remember a few things;

1. Your only indication that you hit is the NARC icon on the mech's targeted bracket. If for any reason that bracket doesn't show up (i.e. another enemy's ECM) then you will receive no notification if the hit was successful.

2. If the enemy has more than one AMS, they can indeed shoot your NARC down before it makes it to the target.

3. NARC likely uses the same basic coding procedures SRMs do, which means they are visually client authoritative, but actually server authoritative. In other words, your client shows you what it looks like they would do as soon as it realizes you've pulled the trigger. But the server doesn't realize you've pulled the trigger until a fraction of a second later and calculates the shot from that time-stamp instead. This causes serious desync for slow moving projectile weapons and leaves the player fighting the server by guessing its latency as much as the enemies they are trying to hit.



Hopefully #3 gets cleared up when they make the client visuals parasitic on the server's calculation of the weapons' actual positions.

Hopefully #1 gets cleared up when someone decides to give MWO an actual information warfare pillar instead of one alter to the ECM god.

Hopefully #2 stays, since the benefit of NARC is mostly missile support, bringing a lot of anti-missile systems seems like an appropriate loadout cost to gain the benefit of killing off beacons that will only bring more missiles. (unlike ECM which does AMS's job better than it on top of its most powerful attribute, hiding your entire team from radar detection)

Actually, you do get a red crosshair flash if you hit someone with a NARC beacon, I dropped before posting just to make sure I wasn't hallucinating this. So you could get a red hit indicator but not get a bracket indicator, meaning that double ECM was nullifying the beacon. That means that every NARC shot we're seeing that should be a hit but gives no crosshair flash was either shot down by double AMS or was eaten by the netcode. Given that one AMS creates a large amount of both flash, tracers, and noise, and double AMS even more so, I feel like it's fairly safe to say that at least some of the time the beacons are falling prey to the exact same problem SRMs are having.

Given that this is a system that weighs as much as an SRM6 and only gets 12 shots per ton and almost every mech mounting it is light and therefore devoting a significant amount of tonnage to a system that may or may not work depending on how the network and RNG gods are feeling, I regrettably feel that I am going to have to continue to not recommend NARC. When it works, it's great- finally in a state that makes it worth the significant investment of weight and hardpoints, assuming you're confident that you will have an LRM-toting teammate. But that's too big of an IF to justify bringing it.

[Deathlike]

aniviron, on 24 March 2014 - 08:50 PM, said:

Given that this is a system that weighs as much as an SRM6 and only gets 12 shots per ton and almost every mech mounting it is light and therefore devoting a significant amount of tonnage to a system that may or may not work depending on how the network and RNG gods are feeling, I regrettably feel that I am going to have to continue to not recommend NARC. When it works, it's great- finally in a state that makes it worth the significant investment of weight and hardpoints, assuming you're confident that you will have an LRM-toting teammate. But that's too big of an IF to justify bringing it.

I disagree. Considering that not all targets will be easy to NARC, you will have the opportunities with a faster mech to strafe and NARC it for its future death. Sure it will get lost at times, but more often than not, even trolling a D-DC or 3L is trollworthy enough to give them hell if you get the chance to NARC them.

The effectiveness of NARC primarily depends on whether LRMs are useful... so that's kinda why NARC+TAG get little play prior to the patch. 2D, 5D, and 3L are better platforms for TAG...

Edited by Deathlike, 24 March 2014 - 09:13 PM.

[aniviron]

Deathlike, on 24 March 2014 - 09:12 PM, said:

I disagree. Considering that not all targets will be easy to NARC, you will have the opportunities with a faster mech to strafe and NARC it for its future death. Sure it will get lost at times, but more often than not, even trolling a D-DC or 3L is trollworthy enough to give them hell if you get the chance to NARC them.

The effectiveness of NARC primarily depends on whether LRMs are useful... so that's kinda why NARC+TAG get little play prior to the patch. 2D, 5D, and 3L are better platforms for TAG...

I guess it really depends on how you play a spotter. I tend to find that getting closer than about 400m means you get to spot one mech once and maybe make sure it dies, but then you also die, or at least run a very strong risk of that. If I'm circle strafing someone with NARC, the match is already over for me, my mech just hasn't caught on yet. Even then, a one in four shot at NARC isn't exactly comforting, especially if you're in the middle of the enemy deathball and probably have less than ten seconds to hit as many targets as possible. At that point, you're better off in a JR7-F; pop a UAV for better spotting, and you actually get to do damage too!

I mean, of course NARC lives and dies based on how good LRMs are; what I'm saying is that given the choice between TAG and NARC, TAG is still the hands-down winner, and will continue to be as long as NARC only works some of the time. You can take TAG in a light and still be combat effective; and the greater range helps keep you away from the risk. While the guaranteed 30 seconds of lock on the NARC is nice, I'm not sure that it's so good it's worth devoting your entire build to it, particularly if you spend half your ammo shooting duds, and have to spend a lot longer exposed to fire and might have to hit someone 3-4 times just to get one to stick.

NARC is on the cusp of being very playable, and even (gasp) good, assuming you are dropping with at least one buddy who you know will have LRMs- but for me, the inconsistency kills it. It's pretty decent right now, but the bugginess makes it less worthwhile than TAG.

[Deathlike]

aniviron, on 24 March 2014 - 10:03 PM, said:

I guess it really depends on how you play a spotter. I tend to find that getting closer than about 400m means you get to spot one mech once and maybe make sure it dies, but then you also die, or at least run a very strong risk of that. If I'm circle strafing someone with NARC, the match is already over for me, my mech just hasn't caught on yet. Even then, a one in four shot at NARC isn't exactly comforting, especially if you're in the middle of the enemy deathball and probably have less than ten seconds to hit as many targets as possible. At that point, you're better off in a JR7-F; pop a UAV for better spotting, and you actually get to do damage too!

I mean, of course NARC lives and dies based on how good LRMs are; what I'm saying is that given the choice between TAG and NARC, TAG is still the hands-down winner, and will continue to be as long as NARC only works some of the time. You can take TAG in a light and still be combat effective; and the greater range helps keep you away from the risk. While the guaranteed 30 seconds of lock on the NARC is nice, I'm not sure that it's so good it's worth devoting your entire build to it, particularly if you spend half your ammo shooting duds, and have to spend a lot longer exposed to fire and might have to hit someone 3-4 times just to get one to stick.

NARC is on the cusp of being very playable, and even (gasp) good, assuming you are dropping with at least one buddy who you know will have LRMs- but for me, the inconsistency kills it. It's pretty decent right now, but the bugginess makes it less worthwhile than TAG.

Maybe I'm a bad spotter, but TAG tends to get me killed trying to spot things that I shouldn't. The only reason why I put on a PPC on a Jenner in the first place is the reduce facetime with the target. ECM allows you to do that with impunity (but that's besides the point). The Jenner-K's "justifiable" existence is now complete when NARC is in use. You get "enough" for every target as it is (12 shots per ton), so I don't see this as a huge negative outside of terrible shooting and some shots being lost to the "void"... I mean netcode.

I already bring a UAV on every light mech, so it's not a showstopping thing that I "must" use the NARC. It's simply a "supplement" to destroy D-DCs.

Edited by Deathlike, 24 March 2014 - 10:11 PM.

[aniviron]

Deathlike, on 24 March 2014 - 10:10 PM, said:

Maybe I'm a bad spotter, but TAG tends to get me killed trying to spot things that I shouldn't. The only reason why I put on a PPC on a Jenner in the first place is the reduce facetime with the target. ECM allows you to do that with impunity (but that's besides the point). The Jenner-K's "justifiable" existence is now complete when NARC is in use. You get "enough" for every target as it is (12 shots per ton), so I don't see this as a huge negative outside of terrible shooting and some shots being lost to the "void"... I mean netcode.

I already bring a UAV on every light mech, so it's not a showstopping thing that I "must" use the NARC. It's simply a "supplement" to destroy D-DCs.

I guess I'd chalk that up to the difference in the lights we play- I've always been a Raven kinda guy, and while I broke down and bought some Jenners a while back, I still prefer the Ravens, even though they can't go toe-to-toe with just about any other mech in the game and hope to win. The 3L actually makes a pretty terrific spotter from a distance of 600-700m, and if I have even one buddy I know is dropping with LRMs, I can pretty consistently get him at least 3-4 kills and 800+ damage, and tend to do even better if I have two or three friends on. This works a lot better with ECM, but is certainly doable with the 2X and 4X.

So when the new LRM buff came through a week ago, the first thing I did was put TAG and NARC back on the 3L to try it out. With both equipped, I'm sitting at an armament of two medium lasers, which means getting close is suicide. Sitting about 300m out, I figured the best tactic would be to pop up and down and NARC a few likely targets, and then TAG whichever one the boats fixated on. It was a good theory, but in troublesome games I was hitting stationary targets in the back with the beacon while I too was stationary, and it would take up to 4 hits for a single success, and by that time I could have just TAGged them and let the missiles fly in, and from a safer distance too.

I think the difference between your experience of new NARC and mine is subjective based on how much PGI's servers like us. You're "losing some shots to the void;" I'm getting half or more of my shots just straight up not hitting when there is absolutely no way that should happen. With failure ratios like that, I can't justify the tonnage.

[Deathlike]

aniviron, on 24 March 2014 - 10:40 PM, said:

I guess I'd chalk that up to the difference in the lights we play- I've always been a Raven kinda guy, and while I broke down and bought some Jenners a while back, I still prefer the Ravens, even though they can't go toe-to-toe with just about any other mech in the game and hope to win. The 3L actually makes a pretty terrific spotter from a distance of 600-700m, and if I have even one buddy I know is dropping with LRMs, I can pretty consistently get him at least 3-4 kills and 800+ damage, and tend to do even better if I have two or three friends on. This works a lot better with ECM, but is certainly doable with the 2X and 4X.

So when the new LRM buff came through a week ago, the first thing I did was put TAG and NARC back on the 3L to try it out. With both equipped, I'm sitting at an armament of two medium lasers, which means getting close is suicide. Sitting about 300m out, I figured the best tactic would be to pop up and down and NARC a few likely targets, and then TAG whichever one the boats fixated on. It was a good theory, but in troublesome games I was hitting stationary targets in the back with the beacon while I too was stationary, and it would take up to 4 hits for a single success, and by that time I could have just TAGged them and let the missiles fly in, and from a safer distance too.

I think the difference between your experience of new NARC and mine is subjective based on how much PGI's servers like us. You're "losing some shots to the void;" I'm getting half or more of my shots just straight up not hitting when there is absolutely no way that should happen. With failure ratios like that, I can't justify the tonnage.

/shrug

Here's the fail stats that is called NARC:
NARC 16 130 39 30.00% 01:52:05 0

30% acc... that void is "bigger than intended". I figured I did like 50% or so...

Having driven a Raven before (it was my first mech, so it's hard to forget), the thing was that carrying both TAG+NARC is just a bad idea. Yes, you become the magical ewar mech, but it's just another platform to get shredded by a regular light mech loadout.

Although, having experimented a lot with the Jenner-K, I simply cannot explain this...
JENNER JR7-K 32 17 15 1.13 33 17 1.94 9,572 46,322 03:30:02

/shrug

[derFiend]

In some cases there is really no hitreg to Narc. Don´t understand why, because meanwhile i get close to the targets to hit better because the balistic of the NARC is much worse then with an AK20...

Beside of this, my personal best choice to NARC/TAG will be a commando 2D. But since UI 2.0 was upcoming, it´s NOT possible to start a Mech "without" weapons! Please PGI change it, and let NARC/TAG appear as "weapons", so i could use my commando for real electronic warfare!

[Roadkill]

Great info, thanks guys. I don't know why, but it didn't occur to me that a) AMS might be shooting them down, or the hitreg bug might be eating them. I guess I'll pay closer attention to the red flashing crosshairs next time to see whether or not they're hitting.

Frustrating. I feel like Narc should be useful, but as difficult as they are to use PLUS these (apparent) bugs, I have to agree with Aniviron that it's not a system to be recommended just yet.

[DocBach]

Deathlike, on 25 March 2014 - 12:01 AM, said:

Having driven a Raven before (it was my first mech, so it's hard to forget), the thing was that carrying both TAG+NARC is just a bad idea. Yes, you become the magical ewar mech, but it's just another platform to get shredded by a regular light mech loadout.

Its part of the role warfare foodchain, though - you might be great at supporting the efforts of your team, but if you aren't careful or don't have someone to cover you, light 'Mechs kitted to kill other light 'Mechs will eat you alive.

But its playing exactly how the Raven was invented to be played in the lore so cool points for that.

[Cimarb]

DocBach, on 25 March 2014 - 08:59 AM, said:

Its part of the role warfare foodchain, though - you might be great at supporting the efforts of your team, but if you aren't careful or don't have someone to cover you, light 'Mechs kitted to kill other light 'Mechs will eat you alive.

But its playing exactly how the Raven was invented to be played in the lore so cool points for that.

Now if we can just get destructible terrain so I can use my Firestarter the way it was designed...

[Chronojam]

Cimarb, on 25 March 2014 - 11:34 AM, said:

Now if we can just get destructible terrain so I can use my Firestarter the way it was designed...

That's MW3 LosTech

[Deathlike]

Chronojam, on 26 March 2014 - 07:59 AM, said:

That's MW3 LosTech

Well, they didn't enable it for online play (plus the flamer "nuclear reaction" for mechs in an overheat death, but that's ate frames like nothing).

Still, Lostech.

[Cimarb]

Deathlike, on 26 March 2014 - 08:43 AM, said:

Well, they didn't enable it for online play (plus the flamer "nuclear reaction" for mechs in an overheat death, but that's ate frames like nothing).

Still, Lostech.

Small collisions are being worked on according to a recent tweet, so they will hopefully be in game "soon", but I would imagine starting a forest fire could get a bit graphically intense, so I don't plan on that ever actually being implemented

[anfadern]

Tried NARC, but it's just a black lump I'm throwing at the enemy....
I don't even get a clear indication that I actually hit...
Worthless...
Not fun to at all..

[Mavairo]

anfadern, on 11 April 2014 - 03:20 PM, said:

Tried NARC, but it's just a black lump I'm throwing at the enemy....
I don't even get a clear indication that I actually hit...
Worthless...
Not fun to at all..

What settings are you playing on? Cause unlike the old Narc you can actually See it now in flight. At least on High and Very high. Has a bright trail and beacon that lights up as it flies. and when you hit the enemy regardless there's a Wifi Signal now that is displayed over that mech.

[anfadern]

Thnx for the input. I run on low settings.
It is just a black lump, no trail no hit effect.
Really sorry thing.
Exchange the computer to see how the weapon operate? Nah, I think I rather exchange the narc into something useful.