213 replies to this topic

[Joe Decker]

You want to increase the Time needed to kill Mechs ? Go back to 8vs8 and double the Armor Points per Ton

[Joseph Mallan]

Josef Nader, on 06 February 2014 - 02:24 PM, said:

There is one big flaw in your logic. In order to preserve the feel and tone of this game, mechs need to be tough and hard to kill. Nerfs are designed to increase the time to kill. Buffs are designed to decrease the time to kill. The big complaint (whether or not I agree with it) is that 40 damage pop tarts have a time to kill that is out of whack with other builds. If everything gets buffed, the time to kill drops and the game loses some of its flavor, in my opinion.

Mechs should be resilient and hard to put down. Hence, everything that puts them down too quickly needs to be toned down.

Too quickly is sorta subjective though Josef. A quick kill hitting a light with 40-50 damage if spread should be able to cripple SOME lights that same amount of damage should be felt by an assault but be able to be shrugged off a couple times. Light mechs are not normally known for their durability in a fire fight.

[Kaldor]

Khobai, on 06 February 2014 - 06:01 PM, said:

I agree we need hardpoint sizes. Nerfing jump jets still won't make the awesome worth playing. Hardpoint sizes would not only balance mechs like the highlander but also make mechs like the awesome worth considering.

Some mechs will never be competitive until there is a scaling pass done. The Awesome is one of them. Nearly as big as an Atlas, huge hit boxes, less armor, less of everything, almost entirely energy weapon dependent, etc. I can think of a few other mechs that have that same issue...

Gut, on 06 February 2014 - 06:11 PM, said:

/snip

Besides that, fix registration on all weapons (starting with SRMs) and introduce lobbies as soon as possible and people will be happy.

~The Best HGN player in the game

So sayeth the "~The Best HGN player in the game". You want to play the poptart thing, cool. Thats your deal. I did the poptart thing for a long time, and got bored. But dont act like its hard...

Even if they "fix" SRMs, there are other factors that limit brawlers like a broken heat system that punishes play styles that require DPS over time, but have no effect on meta builds. Poor mech size scaling, mech sizes need to be based on armor. Hardpoint sizes need to be put in place to put some limitations on .....

Ah screw it. Ive been over this crap a 1000 times and Im not typing it in again.

Ellen Ripley, on 07 February 2014 - 03:31 AM, said:

This is a PvP game and therefore mistakes should be punished.

Your heart will be pumping if you go against an equally skilled team (no matter what your skill level is). Searching for an enemy is a vital part of playing this game, it's one of the main roles of a team's light Mechs, aka. scouting/reconnaissance.

If you run into 4 "poptart Highlanders" because you where completely unaware of their position and allow them thereby to have a clean shot at you, then your scouts have failed big time.
The problem here is not their ability to kill you in such a scenario because their weapons allow them to, but you/your team failing in the first place, leading to this situation.

If you want this game to be dumbed down to the level where you can survive such a big mistake without severe consequences for your team (losing a Mech/Mechs), then why play a game that is essentially a war game in the first place?
It's war, weapons kill. Please deal with it by learning to avoid putting yourself into situations that allow the enemy to hurt you instead of trying to nerf every weapon in this game to a point at which we basically throw cotton balls at each other.

I agree with your statement that scouting needs to be done, but lets look at this when youre in a PUG drop. 4 guys jump in some meta build, in voice chat, and wreck shop. Been there, got the t-shirt. They have the upper hand because the builds are that much better than everything else. Scouting in a PUG game is minimal unless your lance is doing it. Most maps have very defined places where sniping builds work very well, and no amount of scouting is going to make a difference. What you say makes sense in a perfect world, but the broken aspects of the game are hindering it.

Im also seeing a "please dont nerf my (insert mech and build here)" statement from you. Do you honestly think that TTK is OK right now? Yeah, if you are using lasers and SRMs, TTK is fine. But meta builds far outshine everything else in effectiveness.

[Josef Nader]

Ellen, I'm going to chime in here. I'm a big fan of slow, methodical shooters. I have spent many hours tensely crawling face-first in the mud for several minutes hunting for the teltale 4-5 pixels that denote another player before getting killed in a single shot by someone who saw me first. I quite like those games, but MechWarrior is not those games nor should it ever be.

Mechs are tough. Mechs are durable. In tabletop, it takes a monumental amount of firepower to bring down the heaviest assaults, and even lights and mediums can withstand a solid amount of punishment before going down. That dynamic changes a bit in MWO, as our damage is not randomly placed and skill can apply damage repeatedly in the same spot. It's the nature of the game, and I would not have it any other way. That said, long time to kill is part of the mistique and flavor of this game. It should take coordinated fire from a lance of mechs to drop a mech in anything less than 10-15 seconds, even if the enemy MechWarrior is holding still. Our fighting robots need to feel tough, and even at the competitive level mechs should take a beating before they go down. It's one of the Unique Selling Points of this game, and it needs to be expanded on.

[Ellen Ripley]

Josef Nader, on 07 February 2014 - 07:58 AM, said:

It should take coordinated fire from a lance of mechs to drop a mech in anything less than 10-15 seconds, even if the enemy MechWarrior is holding still.

That's exactly what I was saying in my previous posts. Exposing yourself to 4 Highlanders should get you killed quickly. The Highlander is one of the biggest Mechs ingame, it has 90 tons. It is meant to be a beast with immense firepower and if someone is careless enough to present his Mech to 4 of them at once, then he should die quickly if the 4 Highlanders use focused fire on him.

Edited by Ellen Ripley, 07 February 2014 - 08:58 AM.

[Mercules]

Josef Nader, on 07 February 2014 - 07:58 AM, said:

Ellen, I'm going to chime in here. I'm a big fan of slow, methodical shooters. I have spent many hours tensely crawling face-first in the mud for several minutes hunting for the teltale 4-5 pixels that denote another player before getting killed in a single shot by someone who saw me first. I quite like those games, but MechWarrior is not those games nor should it ever be.

Same here, I play a lot of DayZ and there are times where you are certain someone is about but not sure of where they are and so you patiently move through the area in cover. The patient person ends up surviving, the impatient ends up on the coast starting over from scratch.

One of the biggest issues in Mechwarrior, from my point of view, is the pinpoint accuracy of convergence. With convergence Alpha Striking just makes sense. Convergence makes it the defacto meta especially combined with screwy heat. So mechs that can mount multiple weapons that work well in an alpha strike and deliver all their damage in one quick punch rule the meta. AKA Highlander.

I honestly think removing convergence would resolve so many issues. Someone pointed out that what would happen then is someone would realize they could put 2 PPCs on one arm and again have them strike the same point. This is true, but it also means people only have to strip one arm off the mech to remove the majority of your firepower. This would be why the Griffin is not terribly popular, it's weapons are all on one side making it easy to disarm.
Think of it this way. Removing Convergence will lessen the value of hopping up, firing, and then dropping. Why? Because to hit the same location with all major weapons you would have to fire at least twice with most mechs unless you decided to put your eggs all in one basket, so to speak, in the arms. You could possibly hit the mech with everything but it wouldn't be everything hitting one section of the mech.


As for scouting... scouting is a joke in the game. ECM means you can hide easier BUT it is almost better to have that back covering the team instead of out on a scouting run. Non-ECM Scouts get noticed and spend most of their time ducking PPCs and LRMs. Lacking voice chat with the whole team they have to STOP and type in information. Often you can't even light up all the mechs because there is a DDC or your counterpart light with ECM wandering around among them.

If you DO Bother to scout you get 0 reward for your efforts. Why? Because you don't typically get Spotter bonuses, those go to the people who are just over the ridge from the enemy but not in LoS but are closer than you and have locked them up via your lock before the other teammate fired missiles and so being the closest mech with a lock they get the Spotter bonus. You don't get any of the XP/CBills for component destruction, kill assists, kills, or anything else because shooting a target while scouting means you just alerted them, and their team as to YOUR location which makes it very difficult to continue to provide information to the team since you have to type it in and now you have plasma/shells/missiles inbound and likely one of their own fast movers headed in your direction.

See, what typically happens when you have 4 meta Alpha-Sniper mechs in a 4 man on the other team is that they focus fire anyone who comes into view. If a "scout" gets LoS on them they will destroy it as soon as they can, all firing at it. You can duck and dodge one decent skilled player at that range for a bit, but 4? Why would they kill a Scout? Because in PUGs people still use LRMs and with a scout with eyes those LRMs can be a problem for someone who is trying to Jump-Snipe. So they kill the one person that is in LoS which ends the threat.

So basically the easiest way to play this game right now is a 4 man with 4 heavy alpha builds, preferable with JJs.

[Joseph Mallan]

Reno Blade, on 07 February 2014 - 03:56 AM, said:

Ellen, if you want a shooter with one-shot style where tactic is > everything else, please play CS, CoD and BF instead.

I can understand that you want to be competitive and you guys are always a nasty opponent, but you also have to remember that this is a Mech game where you have multiple weapons, multiple different mechs and all of them are armored and should not die in seconds.
Do you have fun moving 5-10 minutes into a good position and then shooting everything to bits in 10 seconds (exaggerated)?
I'd call that a waste of time!

If you can't have "action" (aka. FUN) in a game, why play it? Beeing in spectator mode for more time than in your mech (not even speaking about actually fighting) is NOT fun.

Therefore, I say the balance between moving into position and actually fighting (a.k.a. time to die when combat starts) needs to be adjusted to have more time in combat than out of combat.

All this is because we don't have respawn. If you have respawn, you can be a lot faster back into action (like in Unreal Tournament).
But we have 15min matches and only one mech.
Thinking about future modes that could involve repair and multiple maps without full repair&rearm to fight a scenario, then the whole thing increases even more so.

By CBT canon a Turn is 10 seconds, An Mech carries ammo enough for 1-2 minutes of sustained fire in combat. A 10 turn game is 100 seconds or less than two minutes of battle.

[Mercules]

Ellen Ripley, on 07 February 2014 - 08:58 AM, said:

That's exactly what I was saying in my previous posts. Exposing yourself to 4 Highlanders should get you killed quickly. The Highlander is one of the biggest Mechs ingame, it has 90 tons. It is meant to be a beast with immense firepower and if someone is careless enough to present his Mech to 4 of them at once, then he should die quickly if the 4 Highlanders use focused fire on him.

Here is a question for you. Why isn't that true of Awesomes and Atlas? They are both one of the biggest mechs in game with immense firepower. Somehow that statement just doesn't seem to apply to them in the same way. Maybe it is because we are not exposing ourselves but that Highlanders can break cover for just long enough to Alpha their "immense firepower" and then are back in cover. 4 of them can do it in a very coordinated fashion too. Why can't Atlas and Awesomes do that? What is the difference here... Hmmmmmmm...


People don't typically make the mistake of exposing themselves too often. What happens instead is that Highlanders have the means to expose you very easily without exposing themselves for too long to return fire. *Pop*-*Blam*

Joseph Mallan, on 07 February 2014 - 09:03 AM, said:

By CBT canon a Turn is 10 seconds, An Mech carries ammo enough for 1-2 minutes of sustained fire in combat. A 10 turn game is 100 seconds or less than two minutes of battle.

Your games are over in ten turns? We typically spend 10 turns just FINDING the enemy, another 5 maneuvering with potshots then about 5-10 more actually shooting.

[Scryed]

Paul Inouye, on 06 February 2014 - 02:53 PM, said:

[color=cyan]I'll chime in here since the write up was well thought out and presented. (Not that other posts haven't been the same, but I'm being prodded by other internal influences)[/color]

Josef above touched on the critical issue that we are looking at... increasing the time to kill. I'll go as far as saying this... some of the medium and heavy 'Mechs went through a quirk balance pass. This has not happened for any of the assaults. Currently, assaults are a little too agile for what they are... the giant sledge hammers of the battlefield. The two Mechs which are currently above expected behaviour are the Highlander AND the Victor. Now keep in mind, it is not just the chassis that is the problem in this case, the jump jet effects on turning and lift also compound the issue with these two 'Mechs specifically. We will be addressing both issues at the same time.

Remember.. the nerf gun is a mid caliber gun... it can do little to medium changes but it's not going to render the targets useless.

Slow fire rate to 5 secs, implement some type of cone of fire so targeting computers will be worth their tonnage, get rid of solaris VII rules because they aren't working, and for the love of mech yeezus put the heat scale to 30 and remove ghost heat....PROBLEMS SOLVED.

But you never did listen to the community anyways so I'm preaching to deaf ears.

[Zyllos]

Not much I can add that has not already been said:

• Hard point sizes
  
• Pin point convergence
  
• Heat scale
  
• Specific Mechanics/Items (JJs, GECM, ect.)

[Fut]

Gut, on 06 February 2014 - 06:11 PM, said:

Why increase time to kill?

Battletech/Mechwarrior has never been a quick battles game. The best part of the IP is that it's a battle of attrition, you slug it out with your enemies, picking pieces off of them and loosing pieces of your own Mech, until finally one of you goes down for good.

This "pew-pew you're dead" game is fun, but it's not BT.

[Joseph Mallan]

Fut, on 07 February 2014 - 09:25 AM, said:

Battletech/Mechwarrior has never been a quick battles game. The best part of the IP is that it's a battle of attrition, you slug it out with your enemies, picking pieces off of them and loosing pieces of your own Mech, until finally one of you goes down for good.

This "pew-pew you're dead" game is fun, but it's not BT.

Its the way BattleTech happens on quite a few tables I know of. Met a player who when he called 5 Clan large pulse in my CT, immediately asked me, "How many structure did I get?" His jaw dropped when I said None.

Edited by Joseph Mallan, 07 February 2014 - 10:08 AM.

[Damocles]

Map design with heat neutral maps and map modes that makes it senseless to blob everywhere.

*ahem* map design.

[Kaldor]

Ellen Ripley, on 07 February 2014 - 08:58 AM, said:

That's exactly what I was saying in my previous posts. Exposing yourself to 4 Highlanders should get you killed quickly. The Highlander is one of the biggest Mechs ingame, it has 90 tons. It is meant to be a beast with immense firepower and if someone is careless enough to present his Mech to 4 of them at once, then he should die quickly if the 4 Highlanders use focused fire on him.

I agree again. But the issue is that the Highlander is too effective at that role. 1 is a tough mech, 4 of them working in concert is a nightmare. And the meta builds are really effective from about 100m out to 500m+.

Ive said it before, and Ill say it again. Its not hard to put 2 PPCs, and (insert ACs of choice) on to a mech that can jump. Its not hard to get in voice chat with 3 other guys. Its not hard to sit in 3PV and peak the hill to scout. Its not hard to jump and shoot. The problem is that every other weapon/build is inferior. You cant boost every other weapon up, or it destroys the TTK for a mech. So what to do?

[MischiefSC]

I'll chime in a bit just because I took a few weeks off from MW:O lately (Assassins Creed IV: Black Flag, god tier game. Seriously, we need to add the Oberon Confederation to MW:O just so I can play a pirate in a mech) and just came back to check out the new UI 2.0.

I actually like it. There are some things to improve, obviously, but the potential is clearly there and I get where the update is going.

It felt very.... CoD. I hopped in my Orion which has always been a solid performer for me. It was quick and nimble and so were my enemies. Everyone died very quickly. Bluntly? Combat in MW:O has become so quick and twitch that it made Assassins Creed feel thoughtful and methodical. I'm not sure I like that for MW:O. I love me some ARMA 2, one shot one kill sort of environment and it can be fun for that but the flavor and identity of Mechwarrior and Battletech is being in a huge, heavily armed and armored robot. It should be slower, better armored. It should feel like a giant robot, not a power suit.

Not to draw fire here but I'm all for nerfing. I admit, I don't like to play my Victors or a HGN. I do when I get the chance to play in 12mans because you either bring the meta or you sandbag your team and I carry my own weight at it but the advantages those mechs provide (high pinpoint, high mobility, small profile, great agility for the firepower/armor/mobility) makes not taking them a self-imposed nerf. Yes, they can be beaten. Obviously they can, nobody is saying otherwise. It's that with only a bit of practice anyone can do better in one of those two mechs than they can in something else.

Just please remember that the issue isn't those specific mechs or even jumpjets. They are just the point of concurrence for the pinpoint damage meta of ACs and PPCs along with narrow torsos and high mobility. Those three issues (relative component size, engine size and torso turn rate and angle along with acceleration/deceleration and pinpoint damage for PPCs and ACs) are the source of the issue.

My respectful opinion would be to bring mechs of similar weight into some sort of maneuverability concurrence. Wider torsos (Awesome, Battlemaster) need more speed, wider degree of torso twist and more torso twist speed. Narrower torsos (Victor, Highlander) need less. The BM-1G taught me an important lesson - a mech that can't turn its torso 90 degrees is utterly worthless in brawling - you can't protect your side torso. You can't turn it enough to escape weapons fire from someone in front of you. You also can't turn sideways to track an opponent. You do something like that to Victors/Highlanders and you'll make them worthless as anything but snipers.

Give PPCs (possibly bigger ACs) a DOT effect. Even a brief one. 0.3 to 0.5 seconds is enough to spread damage across locations when poptarting or hill-humping. Maybe give PPCs 0.5 seconds of DOT for the first 5 damage points and then a 5 point 'whump' at the end? Literally reverse the projectile. It's a PPC anyway, it should be sending a laser-like effect to the target to create a transmission line and then arcing the lightning-like projectile down it. ACs in the 5,10,20 size can be a small burst of fire.

JJs... well, they're needed for mobility. JJ shake was great but perhaps have it not cause motion-sickness inducing shake to the screen but just the reticle? Can that be varied based on mechs weight? Larger the mech the more the shake and the longer it lasts?

[Rebas Kradd]

Eliminating convergence and hardpoint sizes are off the table. PGI is not going to start over from scratch in regards to game balance, and these ideas would have that effect. It would be starting all over and loads of people from every ELO and efficiency would be upset.

Additionally, while convergence is a ****** in certain situations, removing it would eliminate the ability to target specific components and would only result in an even more "shoot the center torso" game than we already have.

I agree that mistakes should be punished in this game, but there are degrees of punishment and they have to be balanced with mechs being tough to shoot. Right now there's so little nuance to this game. Mistakes are punished with five seconds of CLANG-CLANG-CLANG and then you're dead. Curve too steep. Manuevering, range management, heat management, and picking off components are completely irrelevant right now because blob warfare rules because of the high damage output. Tone it down and a ton of nuances return to the game.

We've got way too many people arguing purely on principle in here ("nerfs always lead to blandness and are always bad"). This nerf makes perfect sense in its context (jump jets being too powerful) and is relatively unobtrusive to the actual weapons mechanics. It's a great idea in my view.

Edited by Rebas Kradd, 07 February 2014 - 10:09 AM.

[Jman5]

Gut, on 06 February 2014 - 06:11 PM, said:

Why increase time to kill? Why not put people who can't survive in an environment where people are good shots in a different environment, based on their skill level?

Increasing the time to kill is actually a positive toward making the game more skill-based. The longer an engagement lasts the more skill and experience determine the outcome. The shorter your average engagement lasts the more RNG and luck can determines the outcome.

Think about a modern shooter game where people die extremely fast. Any noob just has to be in the right place at the right time and he can down some pro who has been playing CoD games for 10 years. In mechwarrior, you have a lot more health so even if some noob gets the lucky first hit you have plenty of time to make it back with a better loadout, torso twisting, using cover, and making better subsequent shots. Increasing this time to kill lessens the luck factor of who hit who first and strengthens the skill factor of how you manage your mech while in a fight.

Anyone who thinks they are good at this game should be rejoicing when they increase the time to kill. All that does is widen the gap between good players and bad players.

[Joseph Mallan]

Jman5, on 07 February 2014 - 10:08 AM, said:

Increasing the time to kill is actually a positive toward making the game more skill-based. The longer an engagement lasts the more skill and experience determine the outcome. The shorter your average engagement lasts the more RNG and luck can determines the outcome.

Think about a modern shooter game where people die extremely fast. Any noob just has to be in the right place at the right time and he can down some pro who has been playing CoD games for 10 years. In mechwarrior, you have a lot more health so even if some noob gets the lucky first hit you have plenty of time to make it back with a better loadout, torso twisting, using cover, and making better subsequent shots. Increasing this time to kill lessens the luck factor of who hit who first and strengthens the skill factor of how you manage your mech while in a fight.

Anyone who thinks they are good at this game should be rejoicing when they increase the time to kill. All that does is widen the gap between good players and bad players.

Cept I have had lots and lots of very skilled people tell me that when you are in a fight, the faster you can put your opponent down the better it is for your personal well being. Was Mike Tyson a bad boxer cause he could knock out his opponents in just a few seconds? How well did he do long drawn out fights? My martial art teachers uniformly tell students to end fights quickly to limit harm to themselves.

So I bring that philosophy to the computer as well, The less TTK for me, the better for me to survive a match.

[East Indy]

Joseph Mallan, on 07 February 2014 - 10:15 AM, said:

when you are in a fight

This is a recreational game.

[FactorlanP]

Joseph Mallan, on 07 February 2014 - 10:15 AM, said:

Cept I have had lots and lots of very skilled people tell me that when you are in a fight, the faster you can put your opponent down the better it is for your personal well being. Was Mike Tyson a bad boxer cause he could knock out his opponents in just a few seconds? How well did he do long drawn out fights? My martial art teachers uniformly tell students to end fights quickly to limit harm to themselves.

So I bring that philosophy to the computer as well, The less TTK for me, the better for me to survive a match.

The win will ALWAYS go to the guy who can put the other guy down the fastest.

The trick here is to stretch Time to Kill out enough that BOTH players can get a little enjoyment out of the battle.

With longer Time to Kill, the best players will still win... In fact, longer time to kill should better reveal WHO the talented players really are and who was using the meta as a crutch.

Maybe that's what a lot of these "High Elo" folks are worried about...

Food for thought...