IraqiWalker, on 05 June 2014 - 07:37 PM, said:
Ignoring his attitude, his statement is correct, a good way to suppress jump snipers is LRM boats. If you know what you're doing, you can dumb fire your missiles to make sure they never pop out without getting wrecked. As for adding a TAG in there, plus Artemis, Plus Target decay, that just guarantees that if they pop out, they get hit very hard.
Well,
no they don't; any competent jump sniper knows how to avoid LRMs using tall cover or lateral movement to avoid dumfired and unlocked missiles - and if he's good at using cover (repositioning and paying attention to his backdrop) it's often impossible to hit him with dumbfired missiles. You can only suppress him with dumbfired missiles if he's got a slope behind him, and just sits behind cover without moving while he waits for his next hop.
KrataLightblade, on 06 June 2014 - 01:10 AM, said:
That said, it is a tactic that seems to be disproportionately successful and judging from the tabletop as the source material it is not the intended use of jump jets and not the intended way to dominate a battlefield. The fact that it does so is a quirk of mechanics in this game that deviates significantly from the source material. It also renders a large amount of the available materials for play something close to meaningless in highly competetive high level play. When a roster of almost thirty mechs sees over half of them declared "useless", that strikes me as an issue that needs to be corrected; not just a meta, but a by definition FLAWED meta that should be brought back into line to make more builds passably useful.
A very well-thought position, but I feel I might offer a minor correction on a point that doesn't affect the validity of your conclusions?
The tabletop game is an excellent resource for adhering to the feel of BattleTech in MWO, but it cannot be a reference for how
this game is intended to function. This is true because two vastly different game formats are involved, and the points in game design where changes can be effected do not correlate directly. Jump jets are an excellent example; jumping in BattleTech allowed you to ignore terrain costs and obstacles while jumping with a penalty to being hit, but you also had a penalty to hit other people - and under Level Three rules, you could fire from the air to defeat terrain just like you can here. The thing is, if we were playing BattleTech and had the current meta as a problem, we could adjust the to-hit modifiers for hitting jumpers, or for firing while jumping - but MWO doesn't have those statistical arbiters of player performance.
In MWO, being a first-person game, the levers for managing the metagame are in different places - and blindly adhering to tabletop rules is often either impossible or counterproductive. Take the Locust (please!) One of the problems with the Locust is that its legs are disproportionately fragile even for its small size and tonnage - if it adhered to normal 'Mech proportions, its legs would be 25% tougher. And this is in addition to the cooling and space problems caused -ironically- by needing only a small engine rating to achieve its max speed! So why did PGI make the decision to nerf the Locusts's legs? I don't know that they did - I strongly suspect that they simply translated the tabletop stats into MWO as a matter of standard practice.
Trouble is, BattleTech had these break-points at which adding more speed made you harder to hit - and that was on a 2D6 bell curve, so that each additional modifier was worth more than the one before it. Once 'Mechs hit 20 tons or lighter, they could hit this break-point with enough ease to carry a moderate amount of firepower for a light - thus, the more fragile legs to compensate. But here there are no universal break-points for speed; laser weapons are actually nigh-impossible to completely miss with, and other weapons have different ballistic characteristics. So the BattleTech rules being translated into MWO did not work - on the contrary, they created yet another weakness in an already problematic chassis.
The tabletop rules are a great resource for preserving the overall feel of the BattleTech universe, but they cannot be used as an authoritative reference for how specific mechanics in MWO should be arranged.
Deitz, on 06 June 2014 - 05:26 AM, said:
Like most players I’ve always wondered how or why PGI has made the changes they’ve made. I started looking at the forums and found a lot of complaints, and started to recognize where the changes are coming from. Changes are affected by the complaints received. PGI just doesn’t make changes because it’s the right thing to do, or it’s something they’re watching closely. Someone had to tell them it’s happing before they take any action, and if enough players start to complain about one subject too often, PGI will do something about it. Like any gaming company PGI wants as many players as possible, and will do anything necessary to acquire that player count. If it was my company, I’d do the same thing. The problem here isn’t PGI. I see the problem as players that don’t understand the game enough, or don’t put the effort into learning or developing a skill set to counter certain builds.
I have to admit to auditing the posts in this thread - because every time I check back in, I have 30+ more responses to sort through. But I carry on in my haphazard way because I'm interested in other people's thoughts. You've obviously put some thought into this issue, and this post at least is neither passive-aggressive or rude - however, I do think you're wrong, and that you may not have considered that your argument requires a fairly large amount of ignorance and plain stupidity on the part of PGI.
Certainly any business has to satisfy their customers, but it's a paradoxical fact that you cannot generate customer satisfation by placating complaints. You don't expect that when you enter training for a serious customer service job - at least I didn't. But the reason is that what customers say they want, what they
ask for, is not really what they need. I've done a lot of jobs which involve resolving customer complaints, from simple fast food, to retail, to phone service at a telecommunications company - but the common factor is this: you always have to ask if there is a real problem. If there is a real problem, you fix it; sometimes you fix it (mostly in fast food) even if you can't verify, but there has to at least plausibly be a real problem. Otherwise, even if they
say they're happy, the customers you merely placate tend to leave - industry research has shown this to be true; corporations are
very interested to know why and how their customers are leaving. Time and again companies and independent researchers have found that if you simply placate complaints, you bleed money
AND customers: because customers will begin to undervalue your product if they can get it for free by complaining - and what they
want is often not what they need.
What every MMO dev team whose game I have ever played has done is to use player complaints in the same way a parent uses a tantrum - find out where there is a problem, and then use your grown-up powers of experience and expertise to determine where it's coming from and how to fix it. More technically phrased, they'll use customer complaints to highlight areas of concern and then do internal testing and analysis of demographic data (which only they have) in order to determine if changes are made and to decide what those changes will be. They'll tell you this; they've always told us this, yet the urban legend continues, like chupacabra and the flat earth.
In order for the statement, "PGI makes changes when enough players complain about it," isn't only that PGI has to be totally ignorant of business practices and too stupid to follow standard industry practices - it's that they have to be
selectively so. Because there have been widely-denounced issues before where PGI has looked at the data and said - very politely and with pictures - "nope, it's all in your head; it's working pretty well, and while there are a few minor issues, we're gonna go work on more important stuff like Community Warfare first." I am referring, of course, to all the matchmaker complaints - which continue to this day - claiming that the matchmaker is regularly matching teams of vastly unequal Elo against each other. These are the "Every Match Is A Stomp" threads; PGI looked at their data, arranged it into pictures, and basically told us that the "uneven Elo" that people were seeing is actually just the cumulative effect of focus fire in action. They knew about some issues, but they were going to work on UI2.0 instead of overhauling a system the were going to rewrite for CW anyway. That doesn't fit the "enough people complained" model, because
tons of people complained - and PGI very politely told them to go soak their heads.
So as I said, I'm not sure if you've realized how stupid PGI would have to be to just cave in to player demands - I've seen that happen to some extent with WoW during Wrath of the Lich King, and this doesn't look like that. Further, it's unlikely that the industry was unaware of what happened with WoW, especially since the Blizzard devs recognized the problem and
undertook steps to correct it. You should have seen the
vitriol on the forums after that blog, but I digress. In the end, while the devs do listen to complaints - after all, they shouldn't ignore us - they make changes based on their own analysis, testing, and design goals.
Everyone does that, and has from EverQuest on up - it's the standard way of running an MMO.
Voivode, on 06 June 2014 - 09:40 AM, said:
They made JJ require larger numbers to achieve full effect.
What I'm talking about is a straight increase in JJ refresh time, though that is technically tied to the number of jets.
Reduce the extreme reward of pop tart sniping by creating longer breaks between possible shots.
They also tweaked the maximum effectiveness of the jets. For example, have you noticed the dearth of Highlanders recently, particularly in competitive teams? That's in large part because the Highlander, even with max jets, now feels like it's being hoisted up with a crane rather than rising into the sky on wings of fire.
That being said, I gather from things PGI is saying that increasing the effective cooldown on jump jets is one of the things they're looking at - probably by increasing their heat generated to tie the risk/reward of using that system more tightly to the system itself.
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