281 replies to this topic

[wanderer]

Quote

It's absolutely bizarre that many of you would excuse poor game design decisions with "It's in BattleTech!" and yet are able to completely ignore far greater deviations from the setting.

It isn't poor game design, it's statting the unit appropriately.

SHS are junk. They are supposed to be junk. They are literally substandard parts, destined to be replaced virtually universally in 'Mechs in a few years of game time. Battletech is balanced around the -double- heat sink, while the SHS is a cheap, relatively useless replacement for them when for some reason, you're still chipping flint to make LRM warheads.

Making SHS viable in the long run is like strapping cloth-and-canvas wings on an F-16 and expecting improvement in performance. The purpose they serve is simple- they allow 3025-era units to be built and placed in the game...where any sensible player will then modernize them, just like the IS does in the real game.

[El Bandito]

Praetor Shepard, on 26 February 2014 - 01:34 PM, said:

I'd say remove or reduce the gifted + 30 Heat Capacity we get. Reducing that down to 20 is a start so that we have a Heat Cap starting at 30 with the default requirement of 10 heat sinks, (Single or Double). Then have any and all heatsinks only raise heat capacity by 1 point each, so the only difference between SHS and DHS is the crits slots needed and heat dissipation provided. Combined with a tweak to dissipation rates and we have more trade-offs between the two. Otherwise, making Heat sinks only modify Heat Dissipation by the number you mount, and fix Heat Capacity to a Specific value (such as a hard cap of 30) is another change I'd like to investigate.

This guy spoke with more wisdom than anything PGI had done about heatsinks for the entire duration of this game.

Edited by El Bandito, 27 February 2014 - 03:02 AM.

[Joseph Mallan]

Varent, on 26 February 2014 - 01:29 PM, said:

Double Heat sinks are a direct upgrade.

They dont need to be balanced with single heat sinks.


This is akin to literally taking two handguns, and giving one an extended clip. They are not balanced and not supposed to be.

If you want the upgrade pay for it.

They are balanced with Doubles already. It takes 2 to be as effective as a Double sink. If something is double another it is balanced by 2 of the lesser.

[Matthew Ace]

An idea here:
Each heat sink (single or double regardless) lowers heat production of each weapon which are mounted in the same location as said heat sinks by 0.1.

Another:
Make DHS even more fragile? 5 HP instead of 10 or something.

I also agree that Base heat capacity should be lowered (but it will be good to use it in conjunction to lowered heat on energy weapons).

Edited by Matthew Ace, 27 February 2014 - 04:50 AM.

[Joseph Mallan]

For 30 yeas one heat sink equaled one point of heat reduction. Now I get and understand the time to vent in MW:O and I even like it. BUT Sinks vented their full load BEFORE the Mechs fired a second time. Sinks should be venting in around 3 seconds if average cyclic rate is 2.5. Slightly longer than it takes to fire a second time. Our weapons can fire 4 times before our sinks can dissipate the first volley's heat. That is not how it worked in Universe. Thugs Are heat Neutral out of the box, several Mechs were, but heat was used as a balance factor, that if you wanted to you could give up a small amount of fire power to have a sustained level of fire that made up for the reduction of Spike damage. Sustainable higher DpS.

[Bobzilla]

Just make DHS not require a price to upgrade, but drastically increase the cost of an individual DHS. Make DHS/SHS a toggel so you can't use both at the same time. So if DHS cost 150,000 cbills each, 10 in the engine still cost 1.5 mil, but can be placed on all your mechs. Costly, but an interchangable one time cost, like weapons.

[Joseph Mallan]

The "Upgrade price" is the cost of removing your single sinks from your engine and throughout your mech and replacing them. Reversing the procedure is just as much work. The price is justified since we don't have down time between drops.

[Purlana]

Kaeb Odellas, on 27 February 2014 - 01:10 AM, said:

Who the hell cares that DHS are supposed to be a direct upgrade to SHS in the lore? This isn't the goddamn tabletop game. This is an online shooter based on a certain tabletop game's setting. It doesn't have to adhere strictly to the tabletop rules, and shouldn't. Otherwise, it would be an unplayable mess.

A direct upgrade with functionally no downsides in a competitive online game is simply bad game design. All of the other "upgrades" in this game have drawbacks attached. Only DHS does not.

Any FPS with skill trees already has direct upgrades....

Putting a single point into a pilot skill directly upgrades your ability with a mech, no drawbacks involved. You just need XP to do it....

Edited by Purlana, 27 February 2014 - 05:58 AM.

[Kaeb Odellas]

wanderer, on 27 February 2014 - 02:22 AM, said:

It isn't poor game design, it's statting the unit appropriately.

SHS are junk. They are supposed to be junk. They are literally substandard parts, destined to be replaced virtually universally in 'Mechs in a few years of game time. Battletech is balanced around the -double- heat sink, while the SHS is a cheap, relatively useless replacement for them when for some reason, you're still chipping flint to make LRM warheads.

Making SHS viable in the long run is like strapping cloth-and-canvas wings on an F-16 and expecting improvement in performance. The purpose they serve is simple- they allow 3025-era units to be built and placed in the game...where any sensible player will then modernize them, just like the IS does in the real game.

Requiring the player to spend 1.5 million C-Bills every time they purchase a new mech is a pretty dumb idea, I think. I mean consider the new user experience. Nowhere is it documented that every mech should 100% always be upgraded with DHS. The new guy will play a few rounds in the trial mechs (all equipped with DHS) until he finally gets enough C-Bills to purchase a mech of his own. Since he doesn't know about double heatsinks, he's not necessarily going to know to save 2 million C-bills over the purchase price of the mech. He might find himself spending several rounds in his completely useless SHS mech, not knowing why this mech that he purchased and now owns is performing so poorly. He may get frustrated and quit the game altogether.

Granted, heatsinks aren't the only place this is an issue. Endo Steel is also pretty much mandatory for any mech below Assault class, and XLs are mandatory for Lights and other mechs. These issues, however, are far less problematic than the heatsink issue. You might be able to scrape by in an unoptimized STD engine build with DHS, but even the most weight/space optimized mech is going nowhere with singles.


Why are you so attached to the idea of SHS being worthless garbage, anyway? Would the existence of viable SHS somehow make the game worse for you?

Joseph Mallan, on 27 February 2014 - 05:29 AM, said:

The "Upgrade price" is the cost of removing your single sinks from your engine and throughout your mech and replacing them. Reversing the procedure is just as much work. The price is justified since we don't have down time between drops.

The problem with upgrade prices is that they discourage experimentation. If I want to try out Artemis on my build, I have to spend a hefty sum to add the upgrade and purchase new launchers. And if I don't think the tonnage and space requirements for Artemis are worth it, I still have to pay another fee to take it off. Same with running compact builds using both Endo and FF.

Edited by Kaeb Odellas, 27 February 2014 - 06:16 AM.

[Joseph Mallan]

Kaeb Odellas, on 27 February 2014 - 06:08 AM, said:

The problem with upgrade prices is that they discourage experimentation. If I want to try out Artemis on my build, I have to spend a hefty sum to add the upgrade and purchase new launchers. And if I don't think the tonnage and space requirements for Artemis are worth it, I still have to pay another fee to take it off. Same with running compact builds with Endo and FF.

Yes it does. But after you have tried it ONCE, you should know if you want to use it in the future or not. Forst time you use Endo you will know FFA is a last resort Mod. You are paying for the work to get done and UNdone. The cost is justified. If you do it over and over again, the cost is still justified. You and I will have to just disagree for reasons of game perspective.

[Bobzilla]

Joseph Mallan, on 27 February 2014 - 05:29 AM, said:

The "Upgrade price" is the cost of removing your single sinks from your engine and throughout your mech and replacing them. Reversing the procedure is just as much work. The price is justified since we don't have down time between drops.

That would bake sense if there weren't so many other things similar, or even more diffucult, that cost nothing. I would think switching from a STD150 to a XL350 would involve stripping everything off the mech, including taking the 10 HS out and putting it all back in.

[wanderer]

Quote

Requiring the player to spend 1.5 million C-Bills every time they purchase a new mech is a pretty dumb idea, I think.

Good thing that some 'Mechs don't, and the ones that do are cheaper to begin with.

The further you go past 3050, the more 'Mech models come with DHS, stock and as part of the price.

And yes, I do find SHS being "balanced" with DHS to be a load of horse droppings, the same way I find Clantech being made into IS-tech-shuffle a stinking mess. The reason SHS exist is so we can have more chassis options by allowing for 3025-era designs (which are cheap dates compared to 3050-era ones), which can then easily be refitted to DHS without penalty.

Not so we can have SHS as a viable alternative to DHS in most cases. MAYBE so 3025-era types can have private matches with low-tech only for funsies.

[Kaeb Odellas]

Purlana, on 27 February 2014 - 05:55 AM, said:

Any FPS with skill trees already has direct upgrades....

Putting a single point into a pilot skill directly upgrades your ability with a mech, no drawbacks involved. You just need XP to do it....

MWO doesn't have skill trees. The mech "efficiencies" are linear upgrade paths, and no, I don't like them either. Now, if they replaced it with an actual tree, with branching options and a limited number of points that you can use to spend on upgrades, then yes, that would be a real skill tree, and that would be much better than what we have.

I mean for crying out loud, we have the "Arm Reflex" efficiency for mechs that don't have actual arms!

Joseph Mallan, on 27 February 2014 - 06:17 AM, said:

Yes it does. But after you have tried it ONCE, you should know if you want to use it in the future or not. Forst time you use Endo you will know FFA is a last resort Mod. You are paying for the work to get done and UNdone. The cost is justified. If you do it over and over again, the cost is still justified. You and I will have to just disagree for reasons of game perspective.

If you think the costs for adding and removing upgrades is totally fine, then why doesn't every customization have a cost attached to them (besides cost of parts). Completely stripping a mech down to the bones doesn't cost anything. Why should replacing the armor with a different type have to cost something?

Requiring upgrades to have a big initial cost to purchase the necessary parts is fine. Charging the player to swap them out when you already have the original parts in a box somewhere when no other customization costs money doesn't make sense. The current system is just weirdly inconsistent.

[Joseph Mallan]

Kaeb Odellas, on 27 February 2014 - 06:27 AM, said:

If you think the costs for adding and removing upgrades is totally fine, then why doesn't every customization have a cost attached to them (besides cost of parts). Completely stripping a mech down to the bones doesn't cost anything. Why should replacing the armor with a different type have to cost something?

Requiring upgrades to have a big initial cost to purchase the necessary parts is fine. Charging the player to swap them out when you already have the original parts in a box somewhere when no other customization costs money doesn't make sense. The current system is just weirdly inconsistent.

I suggested this in CB. I don't have a problem paying a fee for Mods. As rarely as I change my builds once they are to my liking, I am not punished by the costs. Problem is some folks want everything for free. We don't have a downtime for mods so C-Bills would be a fair balancer to me.

[Purlana]

Wait are we complaining about cost, and complaining that it has no drawbacks?

You can't complain about both at the same time, you need to pick one or the other.

Edited by Purlana, 27 February 2014 - 06:46 AM.

[Joseph Mallan]

Purlana, on 27 February 2014 - 06:45 AM, said:

Wait are we complaining about cost, and complaining about no drawbacks?

You can't complain about both at the same time....

Amateur.

Edited by Joseph Mallan, 27 February 2014 - 06:46 AM.

[Purlana]

Joseph Mallan, on 27 February 2014 - 06:46 AM, said:

Amateur.

No double heat sink for you! Come back... 1 year!

Edited by Purlana, 27 February 2014 - 06:49 AM.

[Joseph Mallan]

Aw dad!

[Cyborne Elemental]

Get rid of the huge bonus that DHS applies to engines, level it out so DHS and SHS IN THE ENGINE cool at the same value.

An Option it should be, not a requirement for every single build you have down the road.

SHS should be viable at the cost of extra weight, but need for odd # Slots during a build.
DHS should be for crazy heat builds like PPC's, when you need the extra 1.4 per HS ton.

I'm sure that its setup this way to keep insane Ballistic only builds in check, could be better ways to balance things out though.

That, or reduce costs of SHS to 0.75 tons to at least make SHS builds possible.

[wanderer]

Let's try this again.

SHS are supposed to be garbage.

They were substandard, low-tech cooling systems used in TANKS that only were put in a 'Mech because they couldn't make anything better. By 3030, they'd recovered enough to start slapping them into new 'Mechs. By 3050, virtually all new designs use DHS. By 3055, it's closer to 90% of modern designs- and SHS are viewed as a liability in the machines they were installed in.

They are not meant to be viable in a DHS world, DHS were their REPLACEMENTS, not their alternatives.