494 replies to this topic

[Carrioncrows]

Bishop Steiner, on 03 February 2014 - 07:48 PM, said:

dumb question......

I can see the 4 flamers.... where are we getting the info on the 4 ballistics?

Russ tweet -
[color=#292F33]
Russ Bullock ‏[color=#8899A6][color=#B1BBC3]@[/color]russ_bullock[/color] 10h[/color]
[color=#292F33]
People are going to love the Firestarter mech. The hero version has 4 Ballistic and 4 energy hard points and JJ.[/color]

[Bishop Steiner]

CycKath, on 03 February 2014 - 07:52 PM, said:

Twitter, also mentioned over in the official threat in Upcoming Features - http://mwomercs.com/...ight-hero-mech/

found the twitter, never saw it in the official post, thanks!

Carrioncrows, on 03 February 2014 - 07:55 PM, said:

Russ tweet -

Russ Bullock ‏[color=#8899A6][color=#B1BBC3]@[/color]russ_bullock[/color] 10h

People are going to love the Firestarter mech. The hero version has 4 Ballistic and 4 energy hard points and JJ.

And Jenner speed cap. Barring horribad hitboxes, this is gonna be an absolute pint sized beast, like a Chihuahua of Fear and Flame!

[Carrioncrows]

Bishop Steiner, on 03 February 2014 - 07:57 PM, said:

found the twitter, never saw it in the official post, thanks!


And Jenner speed cap. Barring horribad hitboxes, this is gonna be an absolute pint sized beast, like a Chihuahua of Fear and Flame!

In btech the Firestarter was a 6/9/6 while the jenner was a 7/11/5

I don't think they needed to make a 300 engine cap. 280 should of been fine.

I guess the point I am making is that they just obsoleted one of the most popular mechs in the game in one fell swoop.

Technically the Spiders as well.

[Bishop Steiner]

Carrioncrows, on 03 February 2014 - 08:12 PM, said:

In btech the Firestarter was a 6/9/6 while the jenner was a 7/11/5

I don't think they needed to make a 300 engine cap. 280 should of been fine.

I guess the point I am making is that they just obsoleted one of the most popular mechs in the game in one fell swoop.

Technically the Spiders as well.

would not cal DOA till we see the Hboxes and agility specs. Spider is still a much smaller chassis, with borked to hell hit registry. Firestarter is a stocky little beast, more akin the commando. And the Jenner could still well dance circles around the FS9-

things have seldom been as DOA as the forums would have you believe.

The Jenner was claimed dead when the Raven 3L hit, and again for the ECM Spider. It is not only not, but arguably more popular than ever (well at least since closed beta, when realistically it was the ONLY choice of light since Commandos rather sucked)

Edited by Bishop Steiner, 03 February 2014 - 08:26 PM.

[Devil Fox]

Bishop Steiner, on 03 February 2014 - 08:25 PM, said:

would not cal DOA till we see the Hboxes and agility specs. Spider is still a much smaller chassis, with borked to hell hit registry. Firestarter is a stocky little beast, more akin the commando. And the Jenner could still well dance circles around the FS9-

things have seldom been as DOA as the forums would have you believe.

The Jenner was claimed dead when the Raven 3L hit, and again for the ECM Spider. It is not only not, but arguably more popular than ever (well at least since closed beta, when realistically it was the ONLY choice of light since Commandos rather sucked)

Jenner was dead with the Raven 3L, because at the same time the Commando ECM became available. With the way ECM worked if the light didn't have ECM, it was impossible to kill another ECM light without getting streaked to death. It's only been with time and more counters to ECM and hitbox/registration changes that see the increased number of light mechs across the board in general.

Spider was never going to compete head to head when it was released, what it did provide was a completely different play style to previous light's, with the ECM Spider becoming one of the finest snipers for the time.

Now having taken the Spider out into testing ground to compare screenshots to eyeball of the Firestarter, their about the same height but has the wide chuncky commando profile front and back but the slim side armour. It will be an interesting machine, and I'm more curious on the CB variants to come!

[Bishop Steiner]

Apostal, on 03 February 2014 - 10:03 PM, said:

Jenner was dead with the Raven 3L, because at the same time the Commando ECM became available. With the way ECM worked if the light didn't have ECM, it was impossible to kill another ECM light without getting streaked to death. It's only been with time and more counters to ECM and hitbox/registration changes that see the increased number of light mechs across the board in general.

Spider was never going to compete head to head when it was released, what it did provide was a completely different play style to previous light's, with the ECM Spider becoming one of the finest snipers for the time.

Now having taken the Spider out into testing ground to compare screenshots to eyeball of the Firestarter, their about the same height but has the wide chuncky commando profile front and back but the slim side armour. It will be an interesting machine, and I'm more curious on the CB variants to come!

agreed though I love the 4mg aspect on this guy.....

[Levi Porphyrogenitus]

Apostal, on 03 February 2014 - 10:03 PM, said:

Jenner was dead with the Raven 3L, because at the same time the Commando ECM became available. With the way ECM worked if the light didn't have ECM, it was impossible to kill another ECM light without getting streaked to death. It's only been with time and more counters to ECM and hitbox/registration changes that see the increased number of light mechs across the board in general.

Really, the JR7-F was never quite dead, since it was (and for the moment still is) the premier energy light (though future Firestarters could challenge it). Since energy doesn't care about ECM, and focused, accurate fire beats random, lock-based fire in the hands of a skilled pilot, the JR7-F could still compete quite well against ECM lights.

The JR7-D with SRMs did okay as well (it was hugely powerful pre-ECM/SSRM), but wasn't as effective during the darkest days of ECM (when Ravens had buggy hitboxes like modern Spiders). Now it's pretty well dead due to SRM hit registration issues, but BAP has given a new lease on life to the JR7-D streak builds.

In short, the Jenner has always been potent, including during the height of ECM light dominance, even if there were times when certain variants or certain builds were less effective or outright underpowered compared to others.

[IceCase88]

MC... check! Mechbay... check! Waiting for patch time... check! It will be fun... check! Don't like it? 311 says it best...

[Lindonius]

Carrioncrows, on 03 February 2014 - 07:47 PM, said:

You must of missed it the hundred million times it's been said before, but here it is one more time.

The people who produce and create the mechs are not the same people who are working on CW.

Didn't miss it at all. I'm fully aware that they are different and am in fact complaining about their misallocation of resources. As Brian said in his command chair post......

- There is around 20 total staff working on content from maps, to `Mechs including hero, champion as well as skins and cockpit items. Remember all these staff do not contribute to features like CW and UI 2.0 they also do not drain away from those efforts
- 7 staff under production, developer support (internal QA), marketing and community management.
- This leaves 18 staff, all engineers to work on both live ops and feature development. And right there lies the key, if these 18 engineers could focus solely on feature development things would move much faster but these people have to also manage the live ops so there is always a constant stream of work involved to keep the game running smoothly, rollout patches, update the Patcher/Launcher, database management and other MWO tools. So the end result is you are only getting a fluctuating amount of full time effort from some portion of those 18 engineers to make the forward progress.

20 staff for designing mechs, 18 for EVERYTHING ELSE. And every time they release a new mechpack/hero mech, they demonstrate again where their priorities lie.

But I agree I shouldn't really criticise how people want to spend their money. If they want to pay 500 dollars to drop a gold mech into a game which is comparable to most other game's Alpha stages then who am I to argue?

[GrandLocomon]

Just noticed, it looks like it has MGs on the torso... 4 energy and MGs, this should be good. Unless the mech is ridiculously big or something.

[zagibu]

Lindonius, on 03 February 2014 - 11:14 PM, said:

20 staff for designing mechs, 18 for EVERYTHING ELSE. And every time they release a new mechpack/hero mech, they demonstrate again where their priorities lie.

Come on, don't tell me you believe this. If there were really 20 full time devs working on mechs and maps, we'd get a new mech each week and a new map every two weeks.

And 18 full time devs working on the rest? Yeah, right. 10 trainees working half-time could keep up with the current pace.

GrandLocomon, on 03 February 2014 - 11:19 PM, said:

Just noticed, it looks like it has MGs on the torso... 4 energy and MGs, this should be good. Unless the mech is ridiculously big or something.

The version in the screenshot you are probably referring to actually has at least 6 energy and 2 MGs, look at CT, there are two mini-flamers. Unless you are talking about the hero, which has 4E 4B.

Edited by zagibu, 04 February 2014 - 12:49 AM.

[Carrioncrows]

Lindonius, on 03 February 2014 - 11:14 PM, said:

Didn't miss it at all. I'm fully aware that they are different and am in fact complaining about their misallocation of resources. As Brian said in his command chair post......

- There is around 20 total staff working on content from maps, to `Mechs including hero, champion as well as skins and cockpit items. Remember all these staff do not contribute to features like CW and UI 2.0 they also do not drain away from those efforts
- 7 staff under production, developer support (internal QA), marketing and community management.
- This leaves 18 staff, all engineers to work on both live ops and feature development. And right there lies the key, if these 18 engineers could focus solely on feature development things would move much faster but these people have to also manage the live ops so there is always a constant stream of work involved to keep the game running smoothly, rollout patches, update the Patcher/Launcher, database management and other MWO tools. So the end result is you are only getting a fluctuating amount of full time effort from some portion of those 18 engineers to make the forward progress.

20 staff for designing mechs, 18 for EVERYTHING ELSE. And every time they release a new mechpack/hero mech, they demonstrate again where their priorities lie.

But I agree I shouldn't really criticise how people want to spend their money. If they want to pay 500 dollars to drop a gold mech into a game which is comparable to most other game's Alpha stages then who am I to argue?

Yeah right now they are hurting for programmers, that's true.

They built and executed a game, and then realized they needed more from their project. So instead of the programmers having 2 years to rebuild a static UI, they rebuilt a much better dynamic modular in one.

So what happens when all the programming work is done? Just fire the extra help and push them out the door?

What about crunch time for the clans, get a few homeless people in and have them paint mechs for pizza's then push them out the door?

UI 2.0 is a big deal. Yeah it was pushed back, it was delayed it for just what we see. But what we see is a Iceberg, it's a fraction of the things going on in the backfield and is the bottleneck keeping.CW in check.

You know what would of happened if they tried to launch CW before Ui 2.0? It would of been a nightmare. You know how hard it is to run something as dynamic as a CW with it's ever changing battlefields and planets? They would have to have a programmer update it hourly and then bring it down to patch to update the status of what is going on.

So what, push it out to daily? weekly?

Come back in six months, with UI 2.0 out of the way if there isn't some damn snazzy changes then you officially have my permission to complain.

But today, give them a little credit for doing a damn good job getting it done in 1/2 the time it took the previous UI

[Myke Pantera]

Reminds me a little of a Predator from the 20th Cent. Fox movies =) Looks really nice!

Looking 4ward to todays patch, hopefully it will be online before 23:00 Central Euro Time =)

So in the end the controversial thing about the firestarter is that Ross originally said it won't be the firestarter?

[Kyynele]

Myke Pantera, on 04 February 2014 - 03:38 AM, said:

Reminds me a little of a Predator from the 20th Cent. Fox movies =) Looks really nice!

Looking 4ward to todays patch, hopefully it will be online before 23:00 Central Euro Time =)

So in the end the controversial thing about the firestarter is that Ross originally said it won't be the firestarter?

It was told that it won't be the Panther. Firestarter was a pretty obvious possibility all the time.

I'd bet the variant with ECM, JJs, and more hardpoints than a Jenner is the controversial one. Should be pretty obvious why.

[CDLord HHGD]

DrxAbstract, on 03 February 2014 - 03:29 PM, said:

Why do you feel the need to point this out?

I was not making a request nor does my statement suggest i want an ECM Hero - Pointing out the obvious differences between a real Jenner IIC and the Oxide is not an indication of want. I really could care less, though i'm curious why you felt the overwhelming need to make such a pointless comment, especially to me.

You know how far I had to go back to check the reference?? So yeah, it wasn't meant as "You, DrxAbstract" but more like "You, the MWO community including myself". And every time anyone mentions Hero and ECM in the same sentence I will bring it up. Until they release the Jenner IIC, the Oxcide is as close as we got right now so the reference is applicable.

[Myke Pantera]

Kyynele, on 04 February 2014 - 05:20 AM, said:

It was told that it won't be the Panther. Firestarter was a pretty obvious possibility all the time.

You're right, my mistake. He said it won't be the Panther.

The rumour about the mech being faction related, made me check off the firestarter from my personal list of possible mechs...

Just glad it's not the UrbanMech

[Bishop Steiner]

I found Alex's original concept art for the Firestarter (with some help from MeiSooHaityu)

Edited by Bishop Steiner, 04 February 2014 - 08:42 AM.

[Dawnstealer]

Such a cool little mech - I just wish flamers were more useful.

[The Silent Protagonist]

Better jump in my Commandos, see if after my 3 month hiatus I can still pilot lights for shit... This can only end badly.

Goodbye KDR. Goodbye positive TDK stats.

[IceCase88]

Lt XKalibur, on 04 February 2014 - 08:06 AM, said:

Better jump in my Commandos, see if after my 3 month hiatus I can still pilot lights for shit... This can only end badly.

Goodbye KDR. Goodbye positive TDK stats.

Stats are overrated! Just do it! Inspirational scene coming...