The easiest and least disruptive on other game mechanics way of rectifying this situation is to make ACs and PPCs not instant-damage; and the preferred method is burst-fire, since that has a very solid grounding in BattleTech lore.
It addresses an issue highlighted in closed beta in a way that has no RNG. it converts an easy to use weapon into one that needs skill to obtain 100% damage, much like lasers and disrupts some combo meta's. it should be a relatively easy and acceptable change.
It addresses an issue highlighted in closed beta in a way that has no RNG. it converts an easy to use weapon into one that needs skill to obtain 100% damage, much like lasers and disrupts some combo meta's. it should be a relatively easy and acceptable change.
You have just listed all of the reasons why PGI will never implement this concept.
OneEyed Jack, on 23 February 2014 - 02:38 PM, said:
I think "able to handle" might be a bit of a stretch. SRMs, anyone?
The truth behind the real SRM hit detection isn't actually hit detection at all. Aim ahead not for hitting the target but at the air in front of a target going 90 kph and you will always hit. Enemies are "ahead" of where you see them for SRMs. That's the only secret.
Even if your missiles fly through the air and hit the ground to your eyes, the enemy picks up massive damage. "Hit effects" are client-side. Thus you see hits when there are not, because the client shows hits. But the server is God. If God says no, it's not going to happen. Counter for the lag illusion; aim for the air ahead of the enemy.
That's the majority of the issues.
Of course, if you just chain fire your SRMs you'll notice that HSR works just fine. The server works at 100 frames per second. This lightens the HSR load and allows it to actually work. Ghost heat was for more than just a punishment. I hate to admit it, but apparently it was.
That said, the "actual" hit registration problem that has to do with hit registration is much more minor.
So if your missiles hit at 0.01, 0.02, 0.09, 0.1, 0.5, 0.8, or even 1 second you're fine.
But if some of your missiles hit at 2 seconds, one at 2.01 second, three at 2.017 seconds, and the rest at 2.02 seconds... then the three missiles that hit between 2.01 and 2.02 seconds...don't exist. The more missiles you fire at once, the more likely that will happen. Try chain firing.
A simple 3 round burst effect. Picture if this was say an AC/5 with a little bit more space between bursts. Or an AC/20 with a bit more space between bursts (and slower spacing between shots in a burst). Brawling Dragon.
Hunchback burst fire. Macro-slow, then hold-button hyper speed. Recorded back when the AC/2 ninja ghost heat penalty was still a secret and not publically revealed, then later announced as "intended but not working properly." Before it got much worse.
Got no problem with hit detection there. And that's a lot faster than most burst fire would be.
This still works.
In 30 seconds this does around 300+ damage in the current slower firing MWO. Imagine what it did back then.
This I made a while ago. It's got some issues (chemjet is 4 shot, but ignore that, certain lore elements not correct) requiring a remake soon. But enjoy. 3 shot burst designs and a 10 shot burst design for an AC/20.
Thank you for the technical answer for server behavior. that explained a few things. it also showed how burst fire would be harmed if a round was cliped. however over time the over all damage of each round of the burst can be increased 10% to compensate for any long term damage loss to clipping. the would also apply to lasers. this also add to the explanation that large alphas are the way to go... low chance the be clipped by the server and loose damage. also why large swarms of lrrm's don less damage the chain fire.
Edited by Tombstoner, 28 February 2014 - 09:36 AM.
Thank you for the technical answer for server behavior. that explained a few things. it also showed how burst fire would be harmed if a round was cliped. however over time the over all damage of each round of the burst can be increased 10% to compensate for any long term damage loss to clipping. the would also apply to lasers. this also add to the explanation that large alphas are the way to go... low chance the be clipped by the server and loose damage. also why large swarms of lrrm's don less damage the chain fire.
Ballistic HSR for fast moving rounds works pretty perfectly. It's slower moving rounds like AC/20 and AC/10 that do not hit-detect well. Switching to burst would allow them to travel faster without encouraging their use with PPCs (since burst fire and PPC pinpoint do not coincide too well; thusly alienating the weapon combination).
Far as missiles, you actually increase your damage with chain fire.
This build before ghost heat would take 3 strikes to kill an Atlas at close range. That's 1.5 tons of ammo or 270 LRMs to kill a fresh Atlas, firing 90 LRMs at once. Back then LRMs did more damage per missile as well.
At the time around this video, it took less 180 missiles to do the same. Missiles also had lower damage per missile. The difference? Chain fire. The stream of missiles does 2 things. One, the missiles are NOT required by the code to spread out because they are not fired en masse. Two, because the missiles are stream-fired they are less likely to hit between time indexes of 0.01 and 0.02, HSR is better able to compensate, and most importantly, with less spread the missiles are more center-focused.
Alpha strikes hurt your damage output when it comes to mass numbers of projectiles trying to hit at the same time. It does NOT help it because HSR cannot compensate.
A burst fire AC, however, would be firing projectiles one at a time. HSR would have no problem with that. There's also a reason why Clan streaks will be fired 2 at a time; it's easier for HSR to allow the streaks to do what they do. If you could fire 6 Streak SRM-6s at once you would have the same problem that alpha striking 6 SRM-6s would; as in maybe only 12 missiles register out of 36.
Edit: Found this.
Before "HSR" which is lag compensation for those overseas... this number of LRMs at once wasn't any problem; evidently they had at least 4 ROFLpults in closed/early open beta. That's 360 LRMs fired at once if they fire at the same time. + everything that everyone else is doing, and back then these things danced!
So hit detection hasn't got to do with the game itself, more the HSR which can't compensate for mass amounts of fire on the same target at the same time.
However, my builds frequently do stuff like this and work just fine.
But their shots don't generally hit outside of the 100 FPS of servers. Something that happens when you fire mass amounts of missiles at once.
I posted in one of the command chair feedback threads about server clock times a couple months ago. I have not seen any devs respond to it at all. Now we have someone with more info on the subject posting, and Koniving linking to it.
I REALLY hope this issue sees light of day soon and the programmers at PGI see it, and investigate it.
I played CoH, and it took Cryptic over 2 years to discover the server clock discrepancy, and it forced them to rewrite several powers in each powerset( not a small thing) and caused more then one balance pass revision for DPS.
I have been saying for almost the entire time HSR is in now, "when weapons do full dmg, PGI will have to start over on balance". And if this server clock discrepancy comes about, they will find out the hard way that some of the weapons in this game do a crap ton more dmg and kills then what they thought. basically, anything with multi-hit or hitscan falls prey to this, as the timing of when you fire vs packet cutoff vs server clock with HSR can make 0-100% of the dmg hit, and ping fluctuations make it worse because that F's with HSR.
This, (well, and the pinpoint alpha, but in many cases this) is a major reason why AC20 and gauss and PPC are used over things like ERLL, missiles. All the dmg hitting most of the time is far far better then some of the dmg hitting all the time due to the nature of combat in this game.
SOMEONE IMPORTANT THAT CAN DO SOMETHING ABOUT THIS OR TALK TO DEVS DIRECTLY READ THIS AND ACT!
what will happen is the devs will need to change all the cooldown timers to synch with the server clock, and possibly even have tiny delays in fireing the weapons put in so that the applied dmg and whatnot also can synch. yes, tiny delays and whatnot can be annoying, but it is far better then the spontaneous WHIFF mechanics now.
By changing cooldowns to synch with the clock, it will(maybe not but i would think so) also create changes to current DPS output, again, creating the need for a balance pass.
THE TIME TO INVESTIGATE THIS IS NOW BEFORE CLAN WEAPONS ARE INTRODUCED. Why implement a whole slug of new weapons based on bogus server clock synch issues?
Have the dev's said whether or not this is technically possible? I would think that the introduction of a massive increase in the number of projectiles would be taxing on their already less than optimized systems.
Lasers do damage over time like every .1 seconds or something, and they seem to work fine. Really though, if you shoot 10 bullets that do 1 damage each (AC10) and 9 hit and one gets lost, I think most players would be fine with that. It's better than missing a shot entirely.
LocationOn your six, chipping away at your rear armour.
Posted 28 February 2014 - 12:19 PM
The MG is already implemented as a zero-cooldown laser (and with a cone of fire to boot), so they've already shown that they can do it.
If they wanted to, they could probably implement ACs like a laser with a short "beam" duration. I don't know if lasers are fixed tick count (10 ticks in 0.6 seconds = 0.06 seconds apart) or fixed tick spacing (0.6 second beam = 6 ticks 0.1 second apart), but if the latter it would be mere moments work to implement burst-fire ACs. If the former, they'd have to get creative if they didn't want all ACs to have 10-round bursts.
The MG is already implemented as a zero-cooldown laser (and with a cone of fire to boot), so they've already shown that they can do it.
If they wanted to, they could probably implement ACs like a laser with a short "beam" duration. I don't know if lasers are fixed tick count (10 ticks in 0.6 seconds = 0.06 seconds apart) or fixed tick spacing (0.6 second beam = 6 ticks 0.1 second apart), but if the latter it would be mere moments work to implement burst-fire ACs. If the former, they'd have to get creative if they didn't want all ACs to have 10-round bursts.
Sometimes i just have to facepam when people call out the COF for the MG an no one cares.... where are the NO RNG in my game people. The high rate of fire and large cone of the MG combined with the crit bonus makes the MG deadly in groups of 4. your guaranteed of hitting an exposed area. it also make short work of the legs of light mechs since your guaranteed of scorning some hits all due to the COF and high rate of fire.
No reason you couldn't have 200 rounds for the ac-2 personally they should be going the excact same number of shots as the MG for 2 points of damage. the MG is the short range version of the AC-2, just change round size
Edited by Tombstoner, 28 February 2014 - 12:48 PM.
That's all fine and good, Tombstoner, but you have to remember Clan tech weapons like the UAC2. The AC2 has, and I'm willing to bet that the UAC2 will maintain it, a cooldown of 0.52 seconds. If you were to make all ACs true burst fire, you'd have to keep the burst short enough so that the UAC could put in that second burst. At most, with the timing, you'd turn the AC2 into a two shot Boffers gun. But, with the advent of the UAC2 coming, there is absolutely no way that you could have the AC2 turn into a heavy MG.
On top of that, as Stjobe said, the Machine Gun is, for all practical purposes, a laser. It doesn't have a velocity, despite what the websites say. When you pull the trigger, you do 0.1 points of damage instantaneously. What the Devs did, though, to similulate velocity was to put in a cone of fire. So, even if you sit 90m away from your target that isn't moving and hold down the trigger, despite aiming dead center mass, you'll still hit the side torsos.
Edited by Trauglodyte, 28 February 2014 - 12:59 PM.
Trauglodyte, on 28 February 2014 - 12:58 PM, said:
That's all fine and good, Tombstoner, but you have to remember Clan tech weapons like the UAC2. The AC2 has, and I'm willing to bet that the UAC2 will maintain it, a cooldown of 0.52 seconds. If you were to make all ACs true burst fire, you'd have to keep the burst short enough so that the UAC could put in that second burst. At most, with the timing, you'd turn the AC2 into a two shot Boffers gun. But, with the advent of the UAC2 coming, there is absolutely no way that you could have the AC2 turn into a heavy MG.
I believe that the current AC2 has a cyclic rate which is too high anyway. I would slow it down a bit. Do that and you can make a little room for the UAC2.
Edited by FactorlanP, 28 February 2014 - 01:14 PM.
ACs and UACs, then: The MWO implementation of the UAC is that it can fire again after half the cooldown, although it suffers a chance to jam if it does.
For the AC/5 and upwards, this is a straight conversion to burst-fire, but the AC/2 is a bit different. Its cooldown is just 0.02 seconds above the magical Ghost Heat number, so a UAC/2 would automatically get Ghost Heat penalties if we followed the same pattern as the other ACs.
But then again, the AC/2 is crazy overpowered as compared to what it should be; it has a higher DPS than the AC/5, and it's very, very far from the "light-weight", low-damage, long-range plinker it is supposed to be according to BT lore. It should be a heavy, extremely long-ranged MG, not the crazy thing it is right now.
Let's say we cut the AC/2s DPS in half by making it fire a 3-shot burst for a total of 2 damage in 0.3 seconds, then cool down for 0.7 seconds; the UAC/2 could then be made to fire after 0.3 seconds, or every 0.6 seconds - slightly slower than the current AC/2.
ACs and UACs, then: The MWO implementation of the UAC is that it can fire again after half the cooldown, although it suffers a chance to jam if it does.
For the AC/5 and upwards, this is a straight conversion to burst-fire, but the AC/2 is a bit different. Its cooldown is just 0.02 seconds above the magical Ghost Heat number, so a UAC/2 would automatically get Ghost Heat penalties if we followed the same pattern as the other ACs.
But then again, the AC/2 is crazy overpowered as compared to what it should be; it has a higher DPS than the AC/5, and it's very, very far from the "light-weight", low-damage, long-range plinker it is supposed to be according to BT lore. It should be a heavy, extremely long-ranged MG, not the crazy thing it is right now.
Let's say we cut the AC/2s DPS in half by making it fire a 3-shot burst for a total of 2 damage in 0.3 seconds, then cool down for 0.7 seconds; the UAC/2 could then be made to fire after 0.3 seconds, or every 0.6 seconds - slightly slower than the current AC/2.
Well, you've got the AC2 doing 4 DPS, the AC5 doing 3.3 DPS, the AC10 doing alright at 4 DPS, and the AC20 doing 5 DPS. The Gauss used to be doing ok but the charge time delayed it's DPS. Personally, all ACs need to be dropped to 3.3 or 3.5 DPS. But, then people would be complaining that the 20 fired too slowly and how it is the worst weapon in the game. You could accept it at a 5 second recycle because of how slow it is. But, the AC2 at 3.5 DPS would still be firing every .57s and that isn't far off from what it is doing now. I hate the damned thing.
How about both? Put out different models of ac. Have some of them be a single shot and some of them be burst. YOu could play with cooldown, heat, durability, crit rate and many different cycle and fire times as well as jam chance to balance them nicely.
*bump* Cause it makes both parties happy. *breaks into some, something along the lines of "Why cant we be friends" *
*bump* Cause it makes both parties happy. *breaks into some, something along the lines of "Why cant we be friends" *
Compromise on the MWO forums.... shakes head...
Now if we can get The Ukraine, Russia, USA and Euro union to get along... then we can fix the IS succession wars and then the middle east.
This is a win win for everyone. depending on how burst fire is implemented.
At this point it would be great if a PGI rep commented.... something the community is craving for.something along the lines of - for or against.... what about this... or you forgot this aspect.... no point to do anything till clan tech is added.
5
stjobe, on 23 February 2014 - 03:23 PM, said:
