AllSystemsNominal, on 19 July 2014 - 03:53 PM, said:
You're that very selfish type of player that only cares what you like and not what's good for the game as a whole. You are the guy who wants to pilot a direwolf and feel like you're good at video games when you alpha into a medium or light.
Fortunately the designers look out for what's good for the game and not the people who only have fun abusing something that is too strong.
Sandpit and I may not always agree on what the best solution to a problem may be, but we do frequently agree that PGI's decisions frequently take an existing issue and make it worse.
Consider the innovation that was put forward with the Laser. While this was good (and likely pioneered by Smith&Tinker, back when they were involved with the Mechwarrior reboot) - it was meant to be part of a larger weapon overhaul - a way of rethinking how battletech weapons should work in a game, rather than just having everything be another variety of autocannon.
That's how most other MechWarrior games have worked. Lasers were like insta-hit autocannons that were light but had heat to worry about. PPCs were energy autocannons with more heat. Missiles were autocannons or ultra-autocannons that were guided by took time to reach their target.
The laser in MWO changed that - it allowed lasers to be very powerful weapons for their weight - if you could muster the steady hand and motor skills necessary to track a maneuvering target.
Something with 12 Clan ER Medium Lasers would flat out rip a leg off in an instant in MechWarrior 4. Just an insta-melted leg, a vaporized arm, or, God Forbid, a flash-burned cockpit.
It's not that way - even if the developers allowed you to fire 12 medium lasers normally. Yeah - it would hurt like hell, since something like 6 points of damage would be dealt every 1/10th of a second - but that comes at a high heat cost and calls for a very steady/accurate hand.
Now consider how missiles work. They are just guided autocannons. Wait for the best time to push the button and then watch as the guided LBX autocannon swarm makes its way toward the target. It's the same essential weapon with different artwork. They could at least make it -feel- like it's something other than an agonizingly slow LBX from the player standpoint (and I've discussed how to do this multiple times).
Similarly, PPCs are just energy autocannons. That's all.
Which is why they are especially insane when coupled with gauss rifles. Granted - the gauss rifle is the 'sniper rifle' of the mechwarrior universe - and for balancing weapons like it, we need to look at why those weapons were 'balanced' in tabletop:
Much of the mechwarrior universe was not built around Solaris combat in meaningless box canyons. It was built around the idea that there was a real war somewhere across hundreds of square kilometers of terrain that needed to be scouted and secured. While battles may have occurred in relatively small 'arenas' for the sake of tabletop games - many battles were a part of a campaign taking place across a much larger theater.
Translating to a real-time environment - this brings us into the idea of persistent servers with hundreds of square kilometers of terrain and various field objectives (some scripted, most dynamically established by the players) with potentially hundreds of players on at any given time.
The problem with MWO, currently, is that you drop into a game where you have no real objective aside from killing enemy mechs. A flight of helicopters isn't going to come along to piss on your parade of AC20s or gauss rifles with their very heavy ammunition that has to be expended on pissants. You also know the number of combatants, and know that you drop relatively close to them.
A weapon like a gauss rifle is a massive size and weight commitment (before you factor in ammunition supplies). It is a very fearsome ballistic weapon - but if you have to trek six kilometers with light and medium patrols harassing your lance on the way to a heavily fortified objective ... stocking up with four of the damned things is probably not a realistic idea in the long run.
Sure, it may make you a very fearsome turret - but you're missing out on a lot if all you want to do is stand near the base and wait for enemies to waltz into firing range before you have to wander back to reload.
That is the real balancing problem behind MWO. You drop into a match with a very small and known number of opponents who cannot escape. The light mechs cannot really hit and run on you. Ultimately - they have to face the music of a team that will head them off and corner them in a section of the map.
So you can't implement any kind of repair/rearm mechanic - since it has to balance around the fact that most matches end in the loss of one whole team. That means match rewards must realistically cover repair and rearm costs. This means a buildup of credits for the top-tier players and a gravitation toward the highest-end gear the Clans and InnerSphere have to offer (since there is no such thing as an economical build that can do a fair amount of lifting but be economical in its approach - an entire league of min-max mentality is essentially forbidden from practicing their trade of finding the most economical builds that can yield the most profit as opposed to the most kills or highest damage).
Further, the Solaris style of gameplay completely breaks weapons like the AC20 and Gauss Rifle that have serious logistical impacts/concerns to the players who choose to run with them. An AC40 Jaeger, while quite powerful, has a long way to go to get to an enemy base with the enemy able to interrupt attempts to rearm/resupply by throwing harassing mechs or vehicles at the encroaching attack. The tonnage, space, and ammunition liability make twin AC20s a rather poor choice outside of Solaris.
Simply by introducing a thing called a "battlefield" - you immediately resolve many of the most pressing weapon and mech balance issues because you've created an environment where players can capitalize on the strengths of their mechs and weapons while re-introducing the intended weaknesses of other weapon systems.
And we could go on about how the heat system needs to change (I've actually used knowledge of a concept known as "Engineering" to come up with a very fair real-time heat system that would play in the spirit of tabletop while keeping things in tune with the realities of real time systems) - but that's another issue where PGI was presented with a problem and then decided to arbitrarily decide that 2 ERPPCs was okay (20 up-front insta-damage) but 3 large lasers (27 damage spread across 1 full second at a shorter long and maximum range than the ERPPC) were not.
They also thought they could use the same system to penalize 2xAC20s. Which, if the math is still applicable as it was back when this solution was introduced - an AC20+2ERPPC mech has the same up-front damage that can be fired for less total heat than 2AC20s. With less tonnage, less critical space, and better ammunition efficiency.
Because, bluntly, they have no ******* clue what they are doing - or, more properly, they don't care.
Now, I might be wrong and they might have 'fixed' the fact that you can't 2ERPPC20 an opponent for less total heat than AC40ing them... but it wouldn't surprise me if it's still the case.
Now, because there would be geniune outrage if they tried the whole "heat scale" thing with gauss rifles once it became obvious that players could put 4 CGauss on a direwolf (I mean... seriously... this is the -massive- problem with how they've built the Clans - certain chassis become 'overpowered' while others are not worth piloting because their hardpoint configurations aren't remotely competitive) - PGI decided to arbitrarily restrict you to using 2 Gauss at a time.
Nevermind the fact that I can charge 4 Clan ERPPCs at the same time (which charge with enough energy to -vaporize- 60 points of armor as opposed to accelerate a kinetic penetrator to a velocity to defeat a total of 60 points of armor) - gauss rifles just require that much more energy. Science, you know.
But they really don't even need to give that logic for it. Just be honest. "We're too lazy to solve the real problems of the game and are just going to say that you can't use more than 2 of this weapon system."
Then the 2Cgauss and 2CERPPC direwolves started showing up. Because being able to deliver 50 points of damage to a single target area on a reflex shot (meaning you are just kind of shooting back at something that just shot you) without a heat penalty is not as bad as an AC40 Jaeger or preferable to a 4CGauss direwolf.
So what will their solution to that be?
More heat scale?
An arbitrary "you can't do that"?
Isn't this the type of thing the hardpoint system was supposed to keep down on? But now I can't even effectively design a counter because, God Forbid we bolt a missile launcher to the opposite shoulder or add a couple medium lasers.
I can't tell you how many mechs I've had to design essentially to be the same just because it doesn't make any sense to design them any other way at the time, since the hardpoint layouts are essentially the same (with some variants just being better).
Honestly, it's an unmitigated disaster. A train wreck that is only permitted because there is no other game with the MechWarrior title.
4
