MustrumRidcully, on 11 February 2014 - 02:15 AM, said:
Yet they don't usually glue together 4 guns and have them all hit the same spot. Especially not in a contest of shooting skills. There is a reason Biatlethes have to hit 5 targets with one gun, and not 1 target with 5 guns glued together so they all hit the same spot. They have to prove consistently good aim under pressure (time and the general excited physical state).
If you want aiming to emphasize "skill", the combination of group fire and convergence has to go. You can have your perfect crosshair that adjusts for range*, but if you want that, you don't get to five 4 guns hitting the same spot
So I am not just making shit up as Armchair Designer when I see inventing new mechanics to fixing balance issues shoudl always be a last resort and a good designer would actually try to tweak the mechanics he has first to fix his problems? PGI certainly loves to invent new mechanics. I suppose it's more fun then tweaking some lame numbers.
*I genuinely think that would be better for the game, since it's easier to understand and doesn't require any additional UI or logic to identify the actual "divergence" your weapon would have. Making more weapons be beams or burst fire weapons or outright forcing weapons to be chain-fired would be a lot easier.
The following human made war machines would like to have a word with you.
P-51 mustang
6-8 .50 cal machine guns mounted in the wings. These guns would be set to converge on a single point. Some pilots had two different convergence points. The outer guns would converge at a farther distance than the inner guns.
P-47 Thunderbolt
A heavy fighter, used for tactical bombing. Usually tanks, trains, ships, and transport vehicles. Six .50 cal machine guns.
P-40E Kittyhawk Air superiority fighter, and bomber. Six .50 cal machine guns.
Just three examples, but I can go on.
The idea for using multiple weapons to converge on a point is not unique to MWO. It is most likely how laser weapons could and will be made in the future. It would be more economical to build four smaller laser weapons, and have them converge there beams, than to have one really large laser. This is called an array.
Your rant on "skill" is miss guided. Skill come with how a person uses a weapon, mech, or other item in game. Whether or not a person uses one, two, or six of the same weapon does not detract from a persons skill. That is just finding an efficient way to accomplish a goal. The goal being to destroy another mech before he destroys you. Hokey mechanics that make a player jump through hoops to use is not skill, its hokey mechanics.
If you truly wanted a realistic skill based game. Then mechs would be specialized to do a job. Then rely on only one or two weapons to do that job, with a secondary back up weapon. After all real modern tanks only use one main gun, with a secondary weapon, such as an anti tank missile, and one machine gun for infantry.
Following that logic, the catapult A1, and the Hollander are perfect mechs.