147 replies to this topic

[Thell]

DaZur, on 28 January 2014 - 02:18 PM, said:

Anyone can poptart... Doing it efficiently and effectively is an artform.

As is effectively countering them...

I didn't find it necessary to point out the obvious, although I wouldn't call it an art-form. It is just interesting how many people act like it is such a skillful thing to do, to me it is about the equivalent to an ecm Spider running around poking people for an entire game and being ignored and racks up an insane amount of damage.

[Jaguar Prime]

I could probably sympathize if I only could use one style of play. I ground pound as much as I poptart. I brawl as much as I snipe. So I have the perspective that may be different than most. (Short range weapons need a buff but not by nerfing long range.)

One thing I will point out.

After the introduction of screen shake, poptarting died down. The complaint then went to hill humping. In the eyes of many, it was just as bad as poptarting. After the screen shake nerf, it was considered skill to get a kill while poptarting. As more people learned to play with the screan shake, poptarts started to show again. As more began to get better at it, the complaints began to come back. Now we are here again. players wanting poptarts nerfed again.


Seriously, anyone can poptart after a little effort. But to be good at it takes a little more than some of you want to admit. If you don't believe me, build one then play it to a high level of play.

[Thell]

The thing is there is no screen shake on the descent which is when you take your shot and it is extremely accurate.

[wanderer]

I'm just gonna say this.

Do you -really- want a repeat of MW4?

Cause that's what happens if poptarting stays viable. Pogo-sticking 'Mechs launching shots from cover. Smart ones will be even doing it while in motion, giving you that optimal vertical and side-motion for evading counter-tarting and even letting you pick what side of your armor gets glancing hits on as you dump PPC/AC fire on the scrub proletariat.

Just don't shut off the shake when airborne and bye-bye accurate poptarting. It's not bloody tough now, I was bouncing along the caldera back in Caustic ages ago in my Founder's Catapult, and it felt just like old times. Boom go the torso PPCs, dink goes the counter fire against my big ears, down goes the other guy.

[Jaguar Prime]

Thell, on 28 January 2014 - 04:26 PM, said:

The thing is there is no screen shake on the descent which is when you take your shot and it is extremely accurate.

3 things:

1) You have to jump higher now instead of taking the shot on the way up for short jumps. So more opportunity to receive fire from the enemy. (Sorry if you have an issue hitting mechs hanging in the air.)

2) Too be extremely accurate from 600m out while on the way down also means you are a good pilot regardless if you poptart or not. This is something that takes practice and everyone can't do.

3) If there was screen shake on the way down as well as up, when would I be allowed to actually take a fair shot. Remember the random thing during screen shake?

wanderer, on 28 January 2014 - 04:28 PM, said:

I'm just gonna say this.

Do you -really- want a repeat of MW4?

Cause that's what happens if poptarting stays viable. Pogo-sticking 'Mechs launching shots from cover. Smart ones will be even doing it while in motion, giving you that optimal vertical and side-motion for evading counter-tarting and even letting you pick what side of your armor gets glancing hits on as you dump PPC/AC fire on the scrub proletariat.

Just don't shut off the shake when airborne and bye-bye accurate poptarting. It's not bloody tough now, I was bouncing along the caldera back in Caustic ages ago in my Founder's Catapult, and it felt just like old times. Boom go the torso PPCs, dink goes the counter fire against my big ears, down goes the other guy.

Um, I played MW4 competitively in multiple leagues for more than 6 years. Poptarting was only a problem on 3rd person, respawn servers. I avoided them like the plague. I take it you don't remember why poptarting was so overpowered back then. Remember lining up your shot in third then jumping?

And why would you want to kill a style of play because you don't like it? Poptarting should be a viable style of play. No more dominant than any other style. Currently it is not the dominant style. When everyone uses it and ground pounders are locked away in their mech bays, Then i will see a problem and will be the first crusading against them.

I take it you are one of those guys that copied my C1 build after they removed the launch delay on JJs. I was poptarting in that before the 3D was introduced and long before that change to JJ's.

[Coralld]

Thell, on 28 January 2014 - 04:26 PM, said:

The thing is there is no screen shake on the descent which is when you take your shot and it is extremely accurate.

Thell is correct, all poptarting shots are taken on the decent, which is to say as soon as you let go of the space bare which is very easy to do and get a hang of after about 30sec of practice.

Jman5, on 28 January 2014 - 12:29 PM, said:

I have seen some interesting discussion about balancing jump snipers.

1. Reducing the ability to turn on a dime in an assault mech while tapping the jump jet would help balance them against faster lighter brawlers/strikers. You could even base it on jump jet class and amount of jumpjets so the big mechs have more of a problem while the smaller mechs like lights and mediums aren't nearly as impaired.

2. Heavily reducing the effectiveness of single jumpjet users. A lot of jump snipers can get away with just a single jump jet. The fact that you get such a benefit for so little tonnage is a major problem. It also effectively negates an entire line of balancing when different variants have different max jump jet slots. They all just put one in and then go.

Agreed, this needs to happen, however it would not really curve poptarting all that much. What PGI needs to do at the very least with out reinventing the wheel is to make it so you not only have a targeting penalty on the way up while the JJ are in use but also on the way down, chock it up to mech gyros trying to maintain balance or something while during free fall. This would go along way of preventing constantly accurate shots while poptarting out to mid and long ranges while at short ranges are still viable, especially for Light mechs which use their JJ to help them avoid shots at near point blank range.

[Vickinator]

A simple fix would be having reticle shake on the ascent and descent, still allowing you to get over targets and fire but your shots will never be pinpoint accurate, to dissuade this meta that has been how high ELO players have been playing for almost a year.

[Thell]

Jaguar prime, ugh...sigh...I know how it works.

[Coralld]

Jaguar Prime, on 28 January 2014 - 05:18 PM, said:

3 things:

1) You have to jump higher now instead of taking the shot on the way up for short jumps. So more opportunity to receive fire from the enemy. (Sorry if you have an issue hitting mechs hanging in the air.)

2) Too be extremely accurate from 600m out while on the way down also means you are a good pilot regardless if you poptart or not. This is something that takes practice and everyone can't do.

3) If there was screen shake on the way down as well as up, when would I be allowed to actually take a fair shot. Remember the random thing during screen shake?



Um, I played MW4 competitively in multiple leagues for more than 6 years. Poptarting was only a problem on 3rd person, respawn servers. I avoided them like the plague. I take it you don't remember why poptarting was so overpowered back then. Remember lining up your shot in third then jumping?

And why would you want to kill a style of play because you don't like it? Poptarting should be a viable style of play. No more dominant than any other style. Currently it is not the dominant style. When everyone uses it and ground pounders are locked away in their mech bays, Then i will see a problem and will be the first crusading against them.

I take it you are one of those guys that copied my C1 build after they removed the launch delay on JJs. I was poptarting in that before the 3D was introduced and long before that change to JJ's.

I think Serpieri said it best.

Serpieri, on 27 January 2014 - 07:26 PM, said:

Didn't know that hitting space bar took skill.

Also, the people that can't poptart "effectively" in a game I am pretty sure that's because they are currently in a non jump capable mech at that time, or if they are they are set for brawling.

Edited by Coralld, 28 January 2014 - 06:29 PM.

[TygerLily]

"Learn to counter..."

Right, it's my lack of knowing how to play this game, after 12+ months, that leads me to thinking poptarting is unbalanced.

Clearly, I need to l2p against a 90-ton mech with 17-tons of armor (90+ in the CT) who hides behind his team, presents himself for a couple seconds and hit my mech for 30 damage. Let's say I'm in my Atlas, max armor, completely front-loaded (0 armor in the rear CT)...I can take 4.1 hits before my CT is exposed. Oh, and the poptart brought his weakass "competitive" friends along...

/endsarcasm

I don't want it gone, just balanced.

[xMEPHISTOx]

Thell, on 28 January 2014 - 12:58 PM, said:

It also isn't nearly as difficult to poptart as many people claim, acting like it is some great challenge when it isn't.

Surely...yet to be able to do something and to do something well are two very different things, and to excel at it is a rare thing. Skill requirements to use weapons from easiest to highest - arty/airstrike (ezmode), lrms (lazy mode), and everything else is fairly equal in skill required...imo.

As far as all this balance talk...pfft (who cares), only thing I care/complain about at this point is meaningful content or lack thereof (ie. ui2.0, cw's, lobbies etc), I can honestly care less what else they do, balance is good enough as is, put all aside and give me meaningful content. They can do all the balancing they want, it wont bring back the bored uninterested back...however CW's may.

[Mystere]

We have so many thing still missing in the game and people are still endlessly complaining about poptarts.

I have a suggestion. Why not suspend all of these nerf/buff threads until we have all the missing things?

Edited by Mystere, 28 January 2014 - 06:33 PM.

[Roland]

I love how folks say things like, "It's just hitting the space bar".

Yeah dude. The entire game is just pushing buttons. Totally trivial.

[Coralld]

Roland, on 28 January 2014 - 06:37 PM, said:

I love how folks say things like, "It's just hitting the space bar".

Yeah dude. The entire game is just pushing buttons. Totally trivial.

True, but when people call it skill to justify it is when I laugh. Love your satire though.

[Solis Obscuri]

Jaguar Prime, on 28 January 2014 - 04:14 PM, said:

I could probably sympathize if I only could use one style of play. I ground pound as much as I poptart. I brawl as much as I snipe. So I have the perspective that may be different than most. (Short range weapons need a buff but not by nerfing long range.)

One thing I will point out.

After the introduction of screen shake, poptarting died down. The complaint then went to hill humping. In the eyes of many, it was just as bad as poptarting. After the screen shake nerf, it was considered skill to get a kill while poptarting. As more people learned to play with the screan shake, poptarts started to show again. As more began to get better at it, the complaints began to come back. Now we are here again. players wanting poptarts nerfed again.


Seriously, anyone can poptart after a little effort. But to be good at it takes a little more than some of you want to admit. If you don't believe me, build one then play it to a high level of play.

I would agree with you on most points, except screen shake has been reduced to the degree that it's almost been removed from the game. Trying to jump snipe right after it came in was a challenge (though one easily solved by jumping a little higher so you could shoot on the fall). Now it seems pretty effortless, and I don't really go out of my way to practice jump sniping - I just take the occasional potshot over a ridge if my 'mech has jets and I know enemies are on the other side. More often than not, I connect with a torso, and I rarely receive any significant return fire.

On interesting factor of jump sniping is how the terrain mesh seems to work for the purposes of determining what shots hit cover and which ones pass by. Anecdotally, I've noticed that firing down over cover tends to produce more hits on target while firing up a slope seems to get a lot of shots caught "in the scenery" so to speak. I think part of this is due to the low "knuckledragger" arm mounts so many chassis have, I think part of it may be how the terrain mesh is made, but it certainly gives a jumping 'mech a better chance to hit in most cases - particularly against an enemy who believes his cover is good "if I can't hit you, you can't hit me".

The place I see jump sniping as most pernicious is in the large, open maps - within 600m or so hitting jump snipers isn't too bad, but once you get out of the range where Large Lasers are effective and the faster firing ballistics can hit without too much lead, trying to guess the rise and fall of a target (e.g. when he's going to cut his jets) becomes increasingly a guessing game. Even when you can hit, location targeting is a pipe-dream and there's a lot of damage spread, while by contrast makin center-of-mass torso shots on 'mechs on the ground is pretty simple.

Closing in under cover is the best opposition tactic generally speaking (and sending in light mechs with arty against slow assault-class campers is downright hilarious), but if the map is mostly long open view distances, that is sometimes not feasible. Add ECM cover over the snipers, and trying to pull off that flanking maneuver becomes impracticable without very good voice-com coordination.

As long as farming skirmish/assault wins on the more open maps by bringing lots of jump snipers is low-hanging fruit, it's going to be the predominant game meta. So there are a few options to change that:

• Make some direct nerfs to make jump sniping harder and/or less effective (more shake, CoF while airborne, recoil, etc)
  
• Buff some counter weapons, like SRM brawler damage buffs or giving LRMs and SSRMs faster locks on airborne targets
  
• Create some better info warfare tools/modules to help teams close distance more safely (smoke screens, satellite scans, etc)
  
• Change how jump jets work (make them fire faster and farther but recharge slower, making jumps less stable and predictable)

Of the options, I think some of the soft counter paths may offer more intriguing possibilities.

[xMEPHISTOx]

Coralld, on 28 January 2014 - 07:03 PM, said:

True, but when people call it skill to justify it is when I laugh. Love your satire though.

^ Been touched by a poptart and no likey I take it.

Ya, takes no skill , no skill at all...lawls.
What does, close quarter brawling...not really, get close and mash your buttons. Arty striking, ya that takes soooo much skill, how bout lrms...lay back lock a circle in and fire...no. To be an effective jump sniper takes more skill/effort than many other forms of combat w/exception to maybe being good at lights.
Those who whine and say its easy, lawls is all that is. Do we need more variety, sure...but to label jump sniping as ez is lame and ignorant.

[WarZ]

Jaguar Prime, on 28 January 2014 - 01:23 PM, said:

And countering it is no more challenging.

Bulls***. As Jman noted if it was so easy to counter it wouldn't be the de facto strategy in the 12 man queue. It wouln't be the strongest build in all other games.

Why it's a Problem:

1) As noted by another poster - it is high (very high) reward for minimal risk. That alone is a game breaker. Period. Massive damage output with none to very little damage taken in return is big time bad balance. This is the primary #1 problem.

2) The fact that the weapons they carry can be just as powerful in a brawl and mid range combat, as they are in jump sniping. So they get the benefit of a whole additional tactical ability (a VERY powerful one at that) that non jump capable mechs do not.

3) This relegates almost all mechs without jump capability to having a serious disadvantage. A double one since they cant play high reward vs low risk damage trading, as well as not being able to enter or exit battle as easily (mobility and terrain).

4) The fact that a number of "assault" class mechs can do it so easily. Therefore bringing all that armor and heavier weaponry to the tactic, creating even more reward vs risk. Its actually an almost silly situation that this has been around so long.

Its a really crappy situation. Also as another player noted its not actually "hard" to jump snipe. If you have decent aim to begin with it translates just fine into jump sniping. In fact its a bit easier to jump snipe vs brawling. Lot less movement variables.

The only people claiming it takes skill are folks who've come to rely on it, and believe that their "skill" is what makes it work. But its the massive advantages the tactic delivers that makes it work.

Another thought is the idea about the mechs being less agile in the air, while it would help, it does not stop the core problem of the tactic at all. The assault mech might be slightly easier to kill, but its still a frickin assault mech (armor). Plus they are already taking much less damage from return fire (low risk part). So a fix along that line would be a minimal effect at best.

Its a weak arse tactic, that invalidated many elements of the game. Of course the saddest part is "that the devs have let this continue unabated for so long". The only fix (cockpit shake) to address this was basically removed.

If they continue to allow mechs to fire while in the air / jumping they need to really kill accuracy somehow:
1) That skittish shaky reticle should be in effect the ENTIRE time a mech is in the air (No contact with the ground, no ability for the mechs "musculature" to effectively stabilize it). That alone would have a HUGE effect.
2) The "random" hit element in effect now when mech is firing its jump jets should be in effect the ENTIRE time a mech is in the air (same reason as above - non counterable kickback). Again a HUGE effect.
* Either option or BOTH would be the ideal solutions here. You can still fire your weapons in air, but your chance to hit goes way down, therefore reflecting a LOWER REWARD to go along with the LOW RISK. Thats called balance.

Edit: Typos.

Edited by WarZ, 28 January 2014 - 07:42 PM.

[Coralld]

xMEPHISTOx, on 28 January 2014 - 07:36 PM, said:

^ Been touched by a poptart and no likey I take it.

Ya, takes no skill , no skill at all...lawls.
What does, close quarter brawling...not really, get close and mash your buttons. Arty striking, ya that takes soooo much skill, how bout lrms...lay back lock a circle in and fire...no. To be an effective jump sniper takes more skill/effort than many other forms of combat w/exception to maybe being good at lights.
Those who whine and say its easy, lawls is all that is. Do we need more variety, sure...but to label jump sniping as ez is lame and ignorant.

Problem with poptarting however is low skill for high reward with the high front loud weapon meta we have. Also, compare the time it takes for say a hill humping mech to crest a ridge, fire and then retreat vs one that is poptarting. The poptarting mech crests the ridge faster and can fall back behind cover even more so all the while delivering pin point damage to the same location repeatedly.

Now I agree that a poptarter can be easly countered as long as if there are only 1 or 2, even 3, but when you have the vast majority if not the entire team doing it, and your mech is not set for poptarting effectively, you are screwed. Then the only counter to mass poptarting is to mass poptart in return.

As was mentioned before, if there truly was an effective way to counter mass poptarting then it wouldn't be the go to tactic for 12 mans because you know with the whole coordination and all. It gets really old really fast when I try to run a brawling mech and the vast majority of both teams are poptarting because there really isant anything I can do other then play decoy, which sucks Atlas sized big ones as you get focused down, or just sit in the back and be completely irrelevant.

So you can take your snide remarks and shove it.

Edited by Coralld, 28 January 2014 - 08:11 PM.

[DaZur]

Thell, on 28 January 2014 - 03:17 PM, said:

I didn't find it necessary to point out the obvious, although I wouldn't call it an art-form. It is just interesting how many people act like it is such a skillful thing to do, to me it is about the equivalent to an ecm Spider running around poking people for an entire game and being ignored and racks up an insane amount of damage.

Point is there's a lot of copycat posers who "poptart"... They're at best annoying and easily countered. The players who have honed the craft of poptarting are devastating and can literally single-handedly hold a whole lance at bay.

There is a clear and obvious distinction between the two entities...

[Thell]

I like Coralld, they make me smile.