1263 replies to this topic

[Sandpit]

Yokaiko, on 01 August 2014 - 01:33 PM, said:

Why the hell not an 8 ton 5"/54cal Naval gun fires NINE MILES in real life, the design is 45 years old, so you are telling me that an AC5 going 1800m is "current" frigging black powder rolling cannons pulled by HORSES fired further than that.

your'e also referring to a NAVAL cannon, mounted on a ship weighing upwards of 1000 tons, on the water

as opposed to

the equivalent of a tank cannon, mounted on a two legged tank, on dry land, weighing at MOST 100 tons

Not to mention, other than having some sort of representation of physics, this is a video game not ruled by real world physics and technology. It's a video game, not real world. In the real world there's no way a unit like a mech could withstand the punishment it does.
You would also have things to worry about such as
recoil
inertia
pilot fatigue
repairs
maintenance

I understand wanting to have as much "real world" realism as possible but the argument of "well in the real world, we have (insert whatever here)" simply isn't valid. You can't nitpick and cherry pick which "real world" examples you'd like to have while ignoring the rest. It's a game, real world tech, knowledge, examples, etc. do not apply.

[Yokaiko]

Sandpit, on 01 August 2014 - 02:43 PM, said:

your'e also referring to a NAVAL cannon, mounted on a ship weighing upwards of 1000 tons, on the water

as opposed to

the equivalent of a tank cannon, mounted on a two legged tank, on dry land, weighing at MOST 100 tons

Not to mention, other than having some sort of representation of physics, this is a video game not ruled by real world physics and technology. It's a video game, not real world. In the real world there's no way a unit like a mech could withstand the punishment it does.
You would also have things to worry about such as
recoil
inertia
pilot fatigue
repairs
maintenance

I understand wanting to have as much "real world" realism as possible but the argument of "well in the real world, we have (insert whatever here)" simply isn't valid. You can't nitpick and cherry pick which "real world" examples you'd like to have while ignoring the rest. It's a game, real world tech, knowledge, examples, etc. do not apply.

Ok M1 Abrams, 4.75" gun that fires 2.5 (4000m) miles with guided munitions. Weighs 63 tons and goes 60mph.

Like I said real world need not apply

[Sandpit]

Yokaiko, on 01 August 2014 - 02:50 PM, said:

Ok M1 Abrams, 4.75" gun that fires 2.5 (4000m) miles with guided munitions. Weighs 63 tons and goes 60mph.

Like I said real world need not apply

not syre what your point is here?

[Wintersdark]

Yokaiko, on 01 August 2014 - 02:08 PM, said:

Real life physics have NO place in anything Mechwarrior.

Ever.

Absolutely. Ranges in battletech simply are what they are.

Basically, the moment one starts trying to bring real life physics and weaponry to the table, the whole house of cards collapses. Sure, the ranges are absurdly low, but then, Battlemechs are a ridiculous concept from the start, so far inferior to tanks for so very many reasons as to be a total waste of time.

[Yokaiko]

Leave. Real. Life. Out.

The game breaks down the SECOND you add reason and logic a game that has (had) its mechanics and weapon ranges based on a 30m HEX THAT HAD TO FIT ON A TABLE TOP. If you went even slghtly realistic in this case you would have needed a Basketball court to fit a map.

[Astrifer]

Please do not nerf ppc or gauss because of poptarts. We don't all poptart.

As someone else mentioned, consider decreasing aim accuracy when jumpjetting/falling

[Wintersdark]

Astrifer, on 01 August 2014 - 03:00 PM, said:

Please do not nerf ppc or gauss because of poptarts. We don't all poptart.

As someone else mentioned, consider decreasing aim accuracy when jumpjetting/falling

it has nothing to do with poptarts. Good lord, why does everyone think every change is about poptarts?

[Livewyr]

Just to throw this out there again:

Increase PPC Cooldown to 7. (ALL of the meta builds people are complaining about, that PGI has noticed, revolve around the PPC!)

Need a lore reason? Just as the 12-15 ton Gauss Rifle takes half a second to charge after cycling a round in place...and can only charge two at a time due to power, and Lasers need to recharge their energy for next shot.. the 6-7 ton ER/PPC which takes an IMMENSE amount of power, would take 7 seconds to recharge.

Need an in-game reason? Easy: Long Range-Unlimited "Ammo"-Small-Relatively Light-Fast Travel-Front Loaded Damage.
It is a light weight, unlimited ammo, ballistic. (The higher heat does not matter that much with Double Heat Sinks, especially for IS PPCs, and especially for the Awesome now.)
Twice the range, 1/3rd the size, half the weight, half the damage of an AC20 and no ammo concerns. (Depletion or explosion) WITH THE SAME RATE OF FIRE.

(And the AC20 is the best bang for the ballistic buck).

Edited by Livewyr, 01 August 2014 - 03:14 PM.

[Wintersdark]

Sandpit, on 01 August 2014 - 02:36 PM, said:

I've got a similar idea that (as far as I know) Joe and I came up with quite a while back.

The convergence gets slowed down based on weapon size. Bigger the weapon, slower it converges. Now we're not talking 5 seconds here, just slow down each weapon's convergence speed based on size for ACs and PPCs. That still allows pilots to use their skill to hit where they aim but requires a little more finesse. If you absolutely need to take the shot quickly, hey go for it, but your damage will wind up spread out a bit. You'll still hit exactly where you're aiming, you just have to give it a small amount of time for those reticles to come into "focus"

Start it with something like this
AC2 = 0
AC5 = +.2 seconds
AC10 = +.5 seconds
AC20 = +.75 seconds
PPC = +.3 (I figure that's a happy medium between AC10 and AC5)

Adjust as needed.

Most importantly?
NOT
COMPLICATED

no need to code all new mechanics, no need to code funky trigger mechanisms, no need to make it even more confusing and adding in another barrier for new players to have to compete with. I just don't get how ideas like this are ignored while Paul comes up with stuff like that....

This still requires all new mechanics, though. Not that it's a bad idea at all, mind you.

But they ditched the old convergence because it ate too many CPU cycles and was incompatible with HSR without substantial performance cost over what it already had. Karl talked about this some time ago.

Too much work tracking where weapons where converged given the vagaries of different pings etc.

So, not that it's a bad idea, but would still effectively need to be recreated from scratch so you lose the "its already there" advantage.

Edited by Wintersdark, 01 August 2014 - 03:16 PM.

[Postumus]

Put the brakes on the PPC speed change. The desire to do something about the Gauss/PPC combo is admirable, and necessary, but the way to go about it isn't with nerfs to the PPC. While lowering the speed of the PPC projectile will make it much harder to use a PPC and gauss together, it also just makes it much harder to use a PPC by itself. All of the builds that use just a single PPC, or two together, are going to be that much less viable, and these are NOT the builds that are an issue.

Look at what the nerf to the AC/2 resulted in. The changes to the AC/2 (reducing the rate of fire, leaving the heat), made in order to nerf then-popular dakka builds, made the AC/2 useless UNLESS you fit around 3 of them - a single AC/2 does poor DPS and has a high heat-per-second. While the changes made 4/5 AC/2 builds less viable, it made single/dual AC/2 builds even worse.

The problem with the weapon balance is pinpoint damage and boating. A couple years worth of iterative balance changes (and often rollbacks of those same changes over time) could have been avoided by implementing something like variable weapon spread based on the number of weapons fired, or hardpoint restrictions that would bar the exact type of problem builds that are being discussed now.

Try and think long term solution, instead of short term fix, and when you do make balance changes like this, don't focus entirely on the effect the change will have on problem builds. Think about the kind of balanced, diverse builds that make the game interesting, and what the changes do to them.

[Sandpit]

Wintersdark, on 01 August 2014 - 03:15 PM, said:

This still requires all new mechanics, though. Not that it's a bad idea at all, mind you.

But they ditched the old convergence because it ate too many CPU cycles and was incompatible with HSR without substantial performance cost over what it already had. Karl talked about this some time ago.

Too much work tracking where weapons where converged given the vagaries of different pings etc.

So, not that it's a bad idea, but would still effectively need to be recreated from scratch so you lose the "its already there" advantage.

it shouldn't. The mechanics are already there. That's how your reticle moves. It should jsut be a matter of slowing down the reticle

[stjobe]

Jakob Knight, on 01 August 2014 - 01:19 PM, said:

Except for the one glaring fact that so many players in this thread seem to either forget or simply never understood.

This isn't Counterstrike.

This is Mechwarrior.

A fact you also seem to ignore. MechWarrior is BattleTech, which has certain peculiarities; one of which is there is no pin-point accuracy, and certainly not pin-point accuracy by multiple weapons simultaneously.

As an aside (and a personal pet peeve) another sadly ignored fact is that heat should be just as much a problem as the enemy; not just "will I overheat or not with this next alpha" but "by how much will my 'mech capabilities be degraded by this next shot". 'Mech combat was just as much fighting your own heat as it was fighting the enemy.

Jakob Knight, on 01 August 2014 - 01:19 PM, said:

This game isn't about infantryman combat. It's about armored vehicle combat. An infantryman trying to shoot on the move is hampered by his/her movement because the weapon and the movement system are an integrated whole not meant to operate in the way they are trying to act. By comparison, even modern armored vehicles feature computer-aided targeting systems and gyro stabilization systems that make firing on the move pretty much as accurate as standing still, and ensure that where the shot is aimed is where the round hits.

Now strap two turrets on that tank and put two more guns at the front, put it on two legs, make it run at 90+ kph through rough terrain and jump by using rocket thrusters, and then try to get all four guns on target at the same time.

As for perfect accuracy, even the real-life M256 gun on the M1A2 has a cone of fire; the official CEP is 35 meters at 8,000 meters.

Every gun in the real world has a cone of fire; there's not a gun yet made that has perfect accuracy.

There simply is no comparison to real life here. Mechanics should make sense in the BattleTech universe, not in ours, and in that universe there's no perfect accuracy for 'mechs.

Jakob Knight, on 01 August 2014 - 01:19 PM, said:

For these reasons, especially the idea that the outcome of a battle be taken out of the hands of the players and put to random chance, I oppose any addition of randomness such as a cone-of-fire aim effect to normal combat systems in what is supposed to be a simulation game.

Nobody is arguing for "taking the outcome of the battle out of the hands of the players", that's just a straw man. What a limited CoF or other semi-predictable inaccuracy adds is a higher skill ceiling, not a lower one, by introducing more skills involved in hitting a target than just positioning your mouse and clicking the button. Skills like CoF management and tactical use of one's own speed.

Jakob Knight, on 01 August 2014 - 01:19 PM, said:

As a final note, I will say that the reason Battletech featured a random hit location was because it was a game about tactics and strategy, not piloting a battlemech. The decisions and actions of the players were all about position, weapons employment, and achieving objectives. Mechwarrior, by contrast, is about actually piloting the battlemechs through a combat situation to achieve objectives.

MechWarrior is about MechWarriors and BattleMechs, yes. The MechWarrior tells the 'mech what target to engage and when, and the 'mech itself handles the aiming. That is canon lore (p. 42 of the Tech Manual if you want to look it up).

Let me repeat that, because it's rather important: The MechWarrior is not the one aiming the weapons; most of them weigh several tons and cannot conceivably be directly moved by MechWarrior himself. The 'Mech's actuators and myomer musculature aims the weapons.

[Dark Horse X]

Sandpit, on 01 August 2014 - 02:43 PM, said:

I understand wanting to have as much "real world" realism as possible but the argument of "well in the real world, we have (insert whatever here)" simply isn't valid. You can't nitpick and cherry pick which "real world" examples you'd like to have while ignoring the rest. It's a game, real world tech, knowledge, examples, etc. do not apply.

Not trying to cherry pick anything, just saying that a PPC charge acting like a slow moving ball of static is really pushing the boundaries of our imaginations. Not!

[Wintersdark]

Jakob Knight, on 01 August 2014 - 01:19 PM, said:

Except for the one glaring fact that so many players in this thread seem to either forget or simply never understood.

This isn't Counterstrike.

This is Mechwarrior.

This game isn't about infantryman combat. It's about armored vehicle combat. An infantryman trying to shoot on the move is hampered by his/her movement because the weapon and the movement system are an integrated whole not meant to operate in the way they are trying to act. By comparison, even modern armored vehicles feature computer-aided targeting systems and gyro stabilization systems that make firing on the move pretty much as accurate as standing still, and ensure that where the shot is aimed is where the round hits.

To say that an armored vehicle with advanced computer-controlled, gyro-stabilized fire control systems would not be able to hit a target under the crosshairs because of some randomized 'jump' without any cause other than normal operational conditions is rather far-fetched. It smacks of going even further from a simulator into a console game.

So, wait, you feel that we should be extending modern technology to Battletech, and as such... why am I moving crosshairs to aim? I should be able to select a target location and let the TC do the job for me, no?

Quote

No, cone-of-fire is just an excuse for those who see this only as a video game where the computer has to generate challenge, rather than a simulation where it is the actions of the pilots which determine challenge and outcome. Adding cone-of-fire would simply be rendering the arguments that artillery shouldn't be capable of destroying mechs by random hit location invalid (and, in fact, advocating the inclusion into MWO of random-chance for an instant kill on any target, which was also part of the same TT rules set people looking for random damage location seem to forget), as well as the impression that pilots with good aim should see no more benefit than those with bad.

For these reasons, especially the idea that the outcome of a battle be taken out of the hands of the players and put to random chance, I oppose any addition of randomness such as a cone-of-fire aim effect to normal combat systems in what is supposed to be a simulation game.

As a final note, I will say that the reason Battletech featured a random hit location was because it was a game about tactics and strategy, not piloting a battlemech. The decisions and actions of the players were all about position, weapons employment, and achieving objectives. Mechwarrior, by contrast, is about actually piloting the battlemechs through a combat situation to achieve objectives. It is the difference between a General in the command post deciding how and when to move the assets under his command to achieve victory, and the Pilot in the cockpit actually trying to do the work of fighting. Randomness in the job of the General was put in to simulate the fact that the actual pilots under their command weren't robots and would choose how to strike an enemy different from the commander back in the HQ building because -they- were the ones trying to defeat the enemy in the middle of a firefight.

Thus it is that calling for random damage in MWO simply doesn't hold water except as a call that pilots should not be responsible for the outcomes of their actions, in effect making MWO an arcade game.

Ok, first, please read this carefully: Reticule bloom and increasing CoF IS NOT A CALL FOR RANDOM DAMAGE. It's 100% up to the player whether he suffers any CoF at all, from moment to moment. You only suffer CoF if you're pushing your machine to it's very limits.

If not, you have 100% pinpoint accuracy.

Now, as to your later point regarding Battletech and randomized damage.

You'd have a great argument there, if not for the fact that all the damage and armor values of this game have been taken from Tabletop, which was designed around randomized damage. Now, we're not asking for randomized damage all the time, but only in more extreme circumstances, because high amounts of pinpoint damage break this game. You may not feel that that's the case, but these discussions keep happening because the majority of the players and the developers think it does.

The whole game system we have is designed around NOT having mechs flying through the air dropping massive pinpoint strikes with ease. And yes, it's with ease: It takes very little "skill" to be accurate at clicking on a mech, despite what people want to believe - turn down your mouse sensitivity and it's trivial.

This isn't about realism, nor is it about being a console game or a sim, it's about game design. The alternative to pulling back on pinpoint a bit is an endless succession of moronic broken mechanics to keep breaking problem builds, and nobody wants that. Long term, that's way worse for the game.

The expanding CoF concept (or other, similar concepts like Li Song's great recoil system or sandpit's convergence modifications or countless other ideas) is a way to preserve TTK, all while giving players the option to have 100% accuracy if they want, or be able to sacrifice accuracy in return for other things.

This added player choice improves the skill cap in the game, makes it more interesting to play. You're adding difficult decisions, and hard decisions while playing make for great gameplay.

[Skull Leader2]

The problem is that we will get stuck in this stupid cycle all over again. It used to be that very few people used the PPC because it was high heat and slow. Well they increased the speed to a reasonable amount and slightly reduced heat I think. Now people use PPC and they are talking about slowing it down. The PPC and the Gauss are supposed to be big, heavy hitting weapons. They are fire and forget with no forgiveness like a laser and way more heat/damage ratio in the case of the PPC. The Gauss makes up for this by being heavy, extra big and a glass cannon. Oh...and you have to charge the darn thing meaning it requires skill. Any mech that is mounting the 2 PPC and 2 Gauss combos people are apparently complaining about is giving up a lot of something (speed, heatsinks, space, slots) to use them. How about looking at buffing other weapons instead of constantly reducing effectiveness of others towards a common low denominator. Maybe a lower heat pulse-laser or ERLLAs. A module to make lasers have a shorter beam duration hile delivering same damage. Special munitions for SRMS and autocannons. It might be a little ahead of the timeline but really we are already getting away from canon enough that we could fiddle with the deployment of such things.

[Sandpit]

Vlad Dragu, on 01 August 2014 - 03:50 PM, said:

Not trying to cherry pick anything, just saying that a PPC charge acting like a slow moving ball of static is really pushing the boundaries of our imaginations. Not!

we don't know WHAT a ppc would look like as a weaponized cannon to be fair. We have an idea on what one MIGHT resemble here in our real world but that's it. Point being, you can't just say "oh, well in real life we have missiles that travel with pinpoint accuracy with a range of 1000 miles". It's completely irrelevant.

and none of that really has ANYthing to do with feedback on the proposed ideas from Paul. Paul, just to say this, I've been a part of a LOT of gaming communities over the years but I have NEVER been in one that universally disagreed about so many of the "balance guy's" decisions. I understand "big picture" and "long term" but seriously, you've got the entire community in an uproar
again
for about the 4th or 5th time
You are not listening, you DON'T know better, and you're simply getting too complicated. Just stop, take a breath, step away for a few, then take an impartial look at it. There's not a single post (that I've seen anyhow) that says "great ideas Paul!". This isn't some "fringe element", this is every single piece of feedback on your proposed ideas. If you move forward with either of those ideas the only thing you're going to do is piss off customers, solidify the idea that you don't listen to your customers, and make the game even MORE complicated to new players. Just stop. Please.

[Sandpit]

Wintersdark, on 01 August 2014 - 03:54 PM, said:

a way to preserve TTK, all while giving players the option to have 100% accuracy if they want, or be able to sacrifice accuracy in return for other things.

I think that pretty well sums it up. You still have pinpoint accuracy but if you're going to alpha strike everything you have, yea, it can overload your system a bit. You might have to hold your reticle on target a bit longer, you might have to fire 2 groups (gasp! not all at once???), or you might have to chain fire every now and then or suffer the horrid wrath of your shot dropping off target by 8 inches
at 800 meters
while flying through the air
firing 2 high powered canons
or
running at 65/kph
firing off 3-4 big weapons at once (or 2 in the case of AC20s)
at a moving target

standing perfectly still?
Hey, no convergence penalty

there's nothing in there talking about taking away pinpoint OR fld.

[GunnyKintaro 01]

It happen's again and again ... No matter what you nerf it just make's a new meta... leave it alone learn to play the game .. All fixxed case close

[Chaosity]

Nice con on the energy usage. Did anybody at PGI pass high school physics? And how do you expect to explain how you can now control the speed of energy? Did somebody at PGI disprove Einstein's work?

In short, don't change anything. We do not need another module cluster puck situation. This "If it ain't broke we'll fix it until it is." mentality is getting old. I know, that sounds harsh, but be on THIS END of your changes. Stop listening to the minority of whiners and listen to the majority of players.

[GunnyKintaro 01]

Hell we would be playing CW by now if they didn't have to tweak weapons all the time and hold everyone's hand every time someone cried that the game is to hard for them...