84 replies to this topic

[Homeless Bill]

Some of you may remember that a year ago, I pitched that crazy convergence idea and got an overwhelming amount of support. Now that the anniversary has arrived, I figured there's no better time to take a look at where we stand, what our big problems are, and what can be done.

Fear not, citizen – I’m not going to beat you over the head with accuracy penalties; this time, I’m going to lay out a way to address many of our current imbalances (jumpsnipers, high-alpha, pinpoint damage in general, time-to-kill, and underperforming chassis) simply by making an adjustment to the way heat penalties work. Effectively, I just want to take the "Ghost" out of "Ghost Heat." The Short Version is the TL;DR for the entire article. That said, I highly encourage you to read the whole article here.

The Short Version

The Problem: Ghost Heat falls short in adequately addressing high-alpha damage, particularly in the case of pinpoint weapon combinations (and especially paired with jumpjets). Even after nerfs to jumpjets, nerfs to the PPC, a Gauss charge mechanic, a Gauss limit, and ballistic speed and falloff nerfs, the poptart continues to reign supreme because of its high-pinpoint-damage, low-exposure capability. The arrival of the Clans has only amplified that problem (jumping Timber Wolf and 60-point-alpha Dire Wolf). The root of the problem with Ghost Heat’s current implementation is the arbitrary way weapons are linked together, which lets the vast majority of weapon combinations avoid any penalty altogether. In addition, it’s very difficult to explain and communicate to players.

The Solution: Change the way heat penalties work. Each ‘mech’s reactor would have an Energy Threshold of 100 units that dissipates at a rate of 100 units/second; each weapon and piece of equipment would have an associated Energy Draw that adds to the Energy Threshold. When the reactor is overloaded (Energy Threshold > 100), a heat penalty would be applied; 110, for instance, would result in a modest heat penalty, while hitting 200 would mean serious trouble. With all weapons linked together, there would be no dodging alpha limits with odd weapon combinations. Additionally, if jumpjets had an Energy Draw, it would effectively put a lower limit on in-air alphas (thereby balancing poptarts with ground-based snipers). There would be an Energy Threshold meter on the HUD next to the heat meter. It would look a lot like the dH/dT meter from MechWarrior 2.

The Good: It balances extreme alphas of all kinds (particularly pinpoint) – regardless of weapon combination, it’s an elegant option to address poptarts, it’s easily explainable and displayable to users, it retains and increases the value of aiming skill, it could help revitalize underperforming chassis (higher Energy Threshold for an unpenalized 3xPPC Awesome), and it improves combat pacing by increasing time-to-kill.

The Bad: A couple weeks of time from an engineer and an artist would be required to make it happen. For the player, there’s questionably added complexity, but I would dispute that. There is one more thing on the HUD and one more value to look at in the Mechlab, but I think that’s ultimately much more sensible than, “Surprise! You killed yourself.” The penalty is there now; it just doesn’t make any sense.

Why It’s Worth It: We’re now in month 15 of the Reign of the Poptarts – 15 months of preposterous bunny-hopping absolutely dominating the game. Even with SRMs back, it’s not enough. How can you beat speed, range, minimal exposure, and extreme, concentrated damage? The answer is not to continually nerf jumpjets, jumpjet chassis, Gauss, ballistics, or PPCs at the expense of non-offenders – it’s to make the heat penalty flexible enough to deal with all alpha strikes. They can add a Gauss/PPC restriction and continue to nerf jumpjets or other weapons, but how many of these one-off mechanics do we need when a global solution would alleviate the problem entirely?

[Sephlock]

Wouldn't this make the slow, ponderous, Awesome-torsoed Dire Wolf... Rather poopy?

I guess it could have a few weapons for each situation... At the cost of vulnerability and mobility.

[FupDup]

I still prefer your original TCL over heat penalties, but this is certainly far better than anything the Nerfinator™ Paul can think of.




Also, one footnote I might add is that the "energy" expended by JJs should be inversely proportional to the number of jets being fired. Basically, you'd use up less energy if you payed up the tonnage and critslots for more jets, and you'd be less efficient if you just went with a single jet.

If we really needed some kind of quasi-realism explanation for this (for those that are into that sort of thing), we can just say that each individual jet doesn't need to do as much work because the load is split between multiple, whereas a single jet would have to work really really hard to lift up a 90 ton monstrosity...

[Sephlock]

Also, it makes sense that if ghost heat were re-done in a sensible manner (it won't be), that the gimps/changes to the weapons should be undone or at least given another look.

Nope.

[Mercules]

Easier solution... Remove Pinpoint Instant Convergence. Boating becomes less of an issue when not all the shots hit the same tiny point of a mech.

[AlmightyAeng]

Spoiler

Homeless Bill, on 24 June 2014 - 10:00 AM, said:

Some of you may remember that a year ago, I pitched that crazy convergence idea and got an overwhelming amount of support. Now that the anniversary has arrived, I figured there's no better time to take a look at where we stand, what our big problems are, and what can be done.

Fear not, citizen – I’m not going to beat you over the head with accuracy penalties; this time, I’m going to lay out a way to address many of our current imbalances (jumpsnipers, high-alpha, pinpoint damage in general, time-to-kill, and underperforming chassis) simply by making an adjustment to the way heat penalties work. Effectively, I just want to take the "Ghost" out of "Ghost Heat." The Short Version is the TL;DR for the entire article. That said, I highly encourage you to read the whole article here.

The Short Version

The Problem: Ghost Heat falls short in adequately addressing high-alpha damage, particularly in the case of pinpoint weapon combinations (and especially paired with jumpjets). Even after nerfs to jumpjets, nerfs to the PPC, a Gauss charge mechanic, a Gauss limit, and ballistic speed and falloff nerfs, the poptart continues to reign supreme because of its high-pinpoint-damage, low-exposure capability. The arrival of the Clans has only amplified that problem (jumping Timber Wolf and 60-point-alpha Dire Wolf). The root of the problem with Ghost Heat’s current implementation is the arbitrary way weapons are linked together, which lets the vast majority of weapon combinations avoid any penalty altogether. In addition, it’s very difficult to explain and communicate to players.

The Solution: Change the way heat penalties work. Each ‘mech’s reactor would have an Energy Threshold of 100 units that dissipates at a rate of 100 units/second; each weapon and piece of equipment would have an associated Energy Draw that adds to the Energy Threshold. When the reactor is overloaded (Energy Threshold > 100), a heat penalty would be applied; 110, for instance, would result in a modest heat penalty, while hitting 200 would mean serious trouble. With all weapons linked together, there would be no dodging alpha limits with odd weapon combinations. Additionally, if jumpjets had an Energy Draw, it would effectively put a lower limit on in-air alphas (thereby balancing poptarts with ground-based snipers). There would be an Energy Threshold meter on the HUD next to the heat meter. It would look a lot like the dH/dT meter from MechWarrior 2.

The Good: It balances extreme alphas of all kinds (particularly pinpoint) – regardless of weapon combination, it’s an elegant option to address poptarts, it’s easily explainable and displayable to users, it retains and increases the value of aiming skill, it could help revitalize underperforming chassis (higher Energy Threshold for an unpenalized 3xPPC Awesome), and it improves combat pacing by increasing time-to-kill.

The Bad: A couple weeks of time from an engineer and an artist would be required to make it happen. For the player, there’s questionably added complexity, but I would dispute that. There is one more thing on the HUD and one more value to look at in the Mechlab, but I think that’s ultimately much more sensible than, “Surprise! You killed yourself.” The penalty is there now; it just doesn’t make any sense.

Why It’s Worth It: We’re now in month 15 of the Reign of the Poptarts – 15 months of preposterous bunny-hopping absolutely dominating the game. Even with SRMs back, it’s not enough. How can you beat speed, range, minimal exposure, and extreme, concentrated damage? The answer is not to continually nerf jumpjets, jumpjet chassis, Gauss, ballistics, or PPCs at the expense of non-offenders – it’s to make the heat penalty flexible enough to deal with all alpha strikes. They can add a Gauss/PPC restriction and continue to nerf jumpjets or other weapons, but how many of these one-off mechanics do we need when a global solution would alleviate the problem entirely?

I can't believe you're still alive...that's fantastic! I thought you'd quit after PGI ignored all the work you did that would have fixed a bunch of their problems.

Edited by Ghost Badger, 24 June 2014 - 10:12 AM.

[Argent Usher]

Hmm yours or this...not sure.

[Malleus011]

Sounds reasonable to me. One could assume the reactor is build to power the stock load out of the 'mech (unaltered stock designs should never suffer Ghost Heat/Power penalties); alterations begin to create power management issues. It would be nice to have a Tech actually informing you of these sorts of things in the Mechlab. (Sir! I can mount that third ERPPC there, but you're gonna have power issues!) Naturally the fusion reactor *can* be kicked into high gear to produce more power, but it'll start churning out more heat.

Of course, this mechanism would also allow engine criticals to have an in-game effect. Each engine crit could reduce the amount of available power, effectively simulating the effect of lore engine Crits. Which would be nice.

[Iqfish]

[Mechteric]

Sounds very much like my proposed energy capacity limiter thread, so of course I'm all for anything that can do a better job than ghost heat:

http://mwomercs.com/...23#entry3316223

Quote

For anything like Ghost Heat to be fair, which still IMO needs to be removed, but if the devs are looking for sane alternatives it would need to apply across all weapons, not just tied to individual weapons and static amounts of those weapons. It also needs to allow certain chassis to do more based on their quirks. It should also be feasible as an in-universe system.


My proposal would be that each weapon has an "energy value", and you have an "energy limiter" of an amount appropriate to that chassis. Its only when you go over that limit that you incur a linear % penalty of heat. This represents the amount of "overdrive" your fusion engine requires to fire additional weapons over a period of time and as a result extra heat is generated when going into overdrive. That limit has a linear energy dissipation over time also. This energy limiter could be represented as a bar graph of a slightly different color (purple?) directly next to the red heat bar.


Examples:

1. An Awesome has an "energy limiter" capacity of 30. This value linearly decreases (from 30) to 0 in 5(?) seconds.
- PPCs require 10 energy (this value may not necessarily be 1:1 with heat, for instance Gauss rifle maybe should be possibly 20 energy)
- Therefore, an Awesome can alpha strike 3xPPCs every 5 seconds without incurring heat penalty.
- But, if the Awesome fires its 3xPPCs at 4 seconds again after firing its first alpha (its "energy limiter" would have only decreased down to 6) which would hit the limiter of 30 with 6 extra leftover. That extra 6 energy would incur a penalty of 6 heat for that alpha.
- The "energy limiter" itself never actually goes above the chassis limiter value of 30, its just that when it hits 30 any extra energy over that gets applied as extra heat in that overage amount.
- If the Awesome starts at 0 energy and alpha strikes 3xMedium Lasers (for example, requires 3 energy) at the same time as 3xPPC, this would result in an extra 9 heat since it was 3x3 over the 30 limiter.

2. A Hunchback has an "energy limiter" capacity of 25. This value also linearly decreases (from 25) to 0 in 5 seconds.
- A Gauss rifle requires 20 energy.
- The Hunchback can alpha a Gauss and one Medium Laser with no penalty (20 + 3)
- If the Hunchback alpha strikes a Gauss and 3xMedium Lasers (20 + 9), then its limiter hits its max value of 25 and incurs 4 penalty heat.
- After 5 seconds its energy limiter is back to 0.

Edited by CapperDeluxe, 24 June 2014 - 10:34 AM.

[Agent of Change]

I'm not going to say this is the bestest solution ever proposed but I would give it a hug if it were sad.

It's a novel approach and I think it's highly implementable. Personally i know the real demon to be perfect instant convergence regardless of range and this doesn't address that bug-a-boo but it does do a lot to increase TTK and might just stop people from cowering behind rocks in their giant warmachines all match.

Good show my good man, good show.

Edited by Agent of Change, 24 June 2014 - 10:43 AM.

[CygnusX7]

PGI should be "omniscient and all knowing".. There should be no need for this sort of thing.

[Homeless Bill]

I'm really digging that this thread is just going to be a dumping ground for Paul memes. It's times like these I miss the forums.

Mercules, on 24 June 2014 - 10:11 AM, said:

Easier solution... Remove Pinpoint Instant Convergence. Boating becomes less of an issue when not all the shots hit the same tiny point of a mech.

You should check out my original proposal. I do favor an accuracy penalty over a heat penalty, but at this point, I just want something sensible.

Ghost Badger, on 24 June 2014 - 10:11 AM, said:

I can't believe you're still alive...that's fantastic! I thought you'd quit after PGI ignored all the work you did that would have fixed a bunch of their problems.

Meh. I just like game design and writing. I never expected them to do anything with it, nor do I expect anything to come from this. I'd like it to, but I'm really just here to argue about how right I am =P

[stjobe]

I'm for anything that gets rid of the opaque solutions the Nerfinator comes up with.

Any proposal that reduces the unholy trinity of Perfect Accuracy, Instant Convergence, and Front Loaded Damage is worth a discussion, at least.

That said, I think it is a real shame that we still don't have any heat penalties for anything less than 100% heat; adding them would be a cinch - all the needed code is already in the game!

[Mercules]

Homeless Bill, on 24 June 2014 - 11:02 AM, said:

You should check out my original proposal. I do favor an accuracy penalty over a heat penalty, but at this point, I just want something sensible.

Seen it and read it. It makes sense if you have to cater to the crowds that think it would take more skill to land 10 shots that pinpoint automatically than it would to do the same if the guns didn't converge or only did so after so long on target.

My personal opinion is that torso mounted weapons converge only a tiny bit and same with arms lacking lower actuators. Since most mechs with lower actuators have low slung weapons letting those converge wouldn't be over powered. Boating becomes less useful since you can't get 3 PPCs to all hit one point all at once but would have to chain fire them with slight aim adjustments or accept that you will hit the enemy mech but likely all over the place.


Since Ghost Heat is there to affect boating it goes away. 2 AC20 Jaggers are still scary using them for Alpha Strikes but not as scary as they are with pinpoint accuracy from arms that shouldn't track horizontally very well.


We all know Ghost Heat is a crappy solution, but they don't want to touch convergence. Your new proposal seems an acceptable compromise but is still more complex than not having pinpoint accuracy.

stjobe, on 24 June 2014 - 11:07 AM, said:

I'm for anything that gets rid of the opaque solutions the Nerfinator comes up with.

Any proposal that reduces the unholy trinity of Perfect Accuracy, Instant Convergence, and Front Loaded Damage is worth a discussion, at least.

That said, I think it is a real shame that we still don't have any heat penalties for anything less than 100% heat; adding them would be a cinch - all the needed code is already in the game!

That would help a lot as well.

[Destructicus]

It pains me that the people who play this game actually put more thought into it than the people who are actually designing it.

Edited by Destructicus, 24 June 2014 - 11:28 AM.

[TLBFestus]

In essence HB is saying "remove the weapon specific heat penalties" and come up with a heat system that bases heat production with weapon size/damage. At least that's what I read.

It's simple, addresses many issues around the loopholes in ghost heat, and could even be visualized easily by players.

For all those reasons, the Devs will ignore it.

[Rebas Kradd]

If this is just going to be a dev-bashing thread, I feel bad for Bill not actually getting any feedback on his idea.

[1453 R]

It’s simple.

It’s transparent.

It’s comprehensive.

It’s flexible

It’s scalable.

It’s…it’s beautiful.

I honestly like this more than the accuracy penalty systems everyone keeps coming up with. This is much more intuitive and easily communicated to the player, it’s simpler, it doesn’t invalidate marksmanship as a viable/useful skill in the game, and it’s something that can be applied to absolutely everything. Its potential for helping to balance out forgotten chassis like the Awesome is something one cannot ignore. It’s quirkable, it’s module-able, it’s absolutely hateful that I’m never going to see it in-game.

Damnit Paul, this is as close to The Answer as you’re ever likely to get, within the scope of PGI’s resources and time budgets. Make it happen, Inouye.

[Ambuscade]

I like the idea of heat penalties, and if presented in an obvious and understandable way could do wonders to gameplay. Things like loss of mobility (decreased max speed, turn speed, etc), maybe accuracy (I'd just slash weapon convergence speed temporarily for that, which hopefully deprives you of pinpoint convergence), more added heat, and very minor ammo explosions detonating only a fraction of the entire bin (ammo explosions are too rare in my opinion).

Furthermore, heat penalties make the flamer more worthwhile. With it you can force an opponent to suffer heat penalties for as long as you can keep the pressure on. This would make it more tactical weapon, and not necessarily the stun locking monster everyone makes it out to be.