367 replies to this topic

[Noth]

Timothy MacBrian, on 08 August 2014 - 04:24 PM, said:

I know this probably won't be popular, but I think a really good fix to the PPC-Gauss combo is to not let them fire together. You could say the electrical energy from the PPC interferes with the electromagnets powering the Gauss Rifle. This would mean that you did not need to mess with the speed of the PPC. Just a thought.

Funnily enough, that was the original plan by PGI to deal with the sync problems of the ppc and guass.

[Punkass]

Sandpit, on 08 August 2014 - 04:19 PM, said:

yes because having a good, lengthy, constructive discussion works so well
http://mwomercs.com/...ctive-feedback/
right?

I know. All that gets ignored, and the only way for the devs to respond to this is for people to rage on the forums and threaten to quit playing. Absolutely pathetic that it comes to this.

[The Dancing Joker]

Bulletsponge0, on 08 August 2014 - 04:15 PM, said:

and fix the damn hit reg for ALL PPCs...ER and regular, Clan and IS

to nerf a weapon that only registers hits 1/2 the time is ludicrous....

This. cERLL has nothing to do with pinpoint damage.

As with what a few others have said. Instead of nerfing the weapon(they seem rather fine even at the introduction of the Clans). Try to nerf the 'mech with quirks. If you do not want to see boating of PPCs, Gauss, or any weapon... then penalize platforms that allow such boating.

Also, hit up the test server with patches, gather your data. Rather than releasing such sweeping changes into general gameplay.

[Sable Phoenix]

Good start. Now reduce the beam time back to 1.5 (which was already arguably too long).

[xJohnWolf]

Thank you. I still don't agree with the way they were nerfed. I think they should've been hotter, not reduced in dps and increased in duration. But... I do agree that they needed to be nerfed. Thank god you guys didn't stick with the original plan. That was way too far. Now... to get into game and see how they work with the changes.

[MischiefSC]

Sandpit, on 08 August 2014 - 03:55 PM, said:

Personal attacks = bad

"Blaming" Paul for these nerfs and hotfixes = accountability.

HE posted the threads
HE asked for feedback
HE ignored it
HE concocted this hotfix
HE did this so HE does need to be held accountable for it.

That doesn't mean discuss him on a personal level but HE is the lead designer and heading this up, so yes HE in particularly, needs to be held accountable. That doesnt' mean attack him though, but that also doesn't mean he's not to blame

Here's the thing though. YOU don't know that he did any of that. He may not even be at work today.

Paul is a regular person. He has a family, stuff he does, a vehicle he drives, bills he pays. He works at PGI. His job is lead designer on this game. It is not the sum total of who or what he is. Directing feedback about this one thing, which is the product of a group of people, at him personally is not only incorrect but self-defeating.

For one thing it serves to separate the decisions made at PGI from PGI itself - you make it Pauls decision. It's all PGIs decision. He is PGI, same as Russ is PGI when he said it was getting rolled back. You don't identify decisions made by a company by the people who announce them. They're all company decisions. Anything more personal than that takes place at the company.

For another it changes the tone of the feedback. If you are upset at a decision PGI has made regarding game balance or direction you direct your feedback/rage at the decision, or even PGI itself. When you call someone out by name you're not complaining about the decision but that person. That's an HR issue - and one which you have no basis to make. You have no idea what involvement he may or made not have had; you're just making assumptions. You're trying to blame a specific person for a decision you don't actually know about other than its result.

Don't do it.

You don't get to try and enforce accountability on PGI employees for their decisions at PGI employees, even if you did know what they were. That's PGIs job. If we try to get involved in that all we do is make it more difficult for them to split feedback on the content changes (useful) from personal attacks about people we don't know regarding a decision making process we also don't know anything about (not useful).

Don't do it Sandpit. Just don't. If you're having trouble separating 'Paul did X' from 'PGI did X and Paul announced it' then you need to step back a bit. All you're really doing is making your feedback (which at its core is probably very valid and useful) more difficult to sort out and apply.

Let's touch on this too -

If there is an outcry of personal attacks on a PGI employee the response to those attacks at a business and management level will inevitably be colored by that. If the decision is made to roll that back there's going to be a sense of 'not protecting your own', because the challenges to the game mechanic change got tied to challenges to a company employee. You might see hesitance to roll back a bad decision because doing so is, because of your word choice, easy to construe as supporting the insults on a coworker.

Conversely you've got how it colors internal business decisions. Maybe there is someone at PGI who's made some bad decisions and there's consideration of how to review that with the employee. How do you split your leadership feedback and coaching to that person from the hail of personal attacks getting levied by the community? What if Paul was off last week, just came back and the patch was designed by a subordinate. If he then gives negative feedback to the person who made the decisions is he doing so just because the decision was bad or because Sandpit called him names on the forums? That's an over-simplification but don't think it's not there.

This sort of stuff just screws up PGIs ability to deal with our feedback on those decisions.

We are not involved in PGIs decision making process nor accountability for PGI employees nor any of that. When we try to forcibly insert ourselves there it just hurts the validity of our arguments and complicates PGIs ability to deal with that feedback and any personnel involved.

Don't do it. You know I like you, I agree with most of what you say but we need to stop trying to call people out by name over stuff. For all we know Paul is still under a pile of hookers and blow in Bangkok and this was done by his POC while he was away. The point is we don't know and will never know. Argue the point, not the person.

[Mystere]

Nikolai Lubkiewicz, on 08 August 2014 - 03:20 PM, said:

Please let us know what you think of the latest news regarding today's weapon balance changes!

Well, we were already showing what we thought ... by rushing and slaughtering the enemy on Terra Therma. But then your server kicked us out of the match before we could finish the job, just because of this freaking hot fix.

Now I have to go for another murderous and utterly merciless rampage in-game to satisfy my blood lust.

[StevieRayVaughan]

Sandpit, on 08 August 2014 - 03:35 PM, said:

i'm freaking psychic

called it 12:30 last night lol

PGI's not nearly as slick as he thinks he is and there's already people cheering him for "listening to the community feedback" They knew dam well taht the CERLL nerf was way too drastic. That's specifically why he left it out of Paul's feedback thread and launched it today as a "surprise" because he also knew that he'd get praised by the sheep because it looked like they actually listened to them

Now everyone (or at least a good chunk who were only concerned about the CERLL because the PPC doesn't affect them personally) will go back to "normal" noise levels and the PPC nerf stays. It's not hard to figure out what he did, how he did it, and why.

I also saw this coming.

The sheep still don't get this Sandpit, wasting your breath explaining good cop bad cop to those with Stockholm Syndrome after dumping cash into this cow.

Edited by Beast Incarnate XIII, 08 August 2014 - 04:32 PM.

[Nauht]

This hardly instils confidence in me cos it just highlights one or more (or all) of the following -

1) That Paul and the dev team are really out of touch with their own game and the playerbase in even making a change that's not in the spirit of the game.

2) That there's a disconnect between Paul and Russ. This was a design decision. Paul's nerf hardly had the time of day to fully test.

3) You would have thought that Paul would have told Russ and then Russ had this epiphany. So either they really have NFI or that Russ was willing to let Paul take the fall while he's perceived as the "good cop". - Look at his post, he makes it sound like it's all him and not the decision of the entire design team.

Either way it's hardly a unified front.

And Paul was totally oblivious to the nature of the change in the first place.

[jlawsl]

I don't really see what all of the complaining is about. I decided to do a little experiment with the CERLL and a MK7 Targeting computer on my Warhawk. My only armament-4 CERLL, heatsinks and the MK7 and of course, the advanced zoom module. I wanted to see how long the range/damage ratio played out if I moved as little as possible from the starting spawn. Now, this was no comprehensive study or any crap like that, just an experiment. In 6 games I didn't move more then 200 meters from the starting spawn and did a minimum of 430 damage per round, maxing at around 850. I never overheated,and the results were pretty consistent around 480-550 damage with little to no effort required. LRM boats and other long range mechs had to move around 500 meters, under constant fire before they even got in range, by then, they were just walking torsos, if not dead. If you ask me, the CERLL needed this because of the extreme range it can fire at. Coupled with anything from a 1 ton MK1 targeting computer(why wouldn't you take it) to the MK7, these weapons have greater range and potential damage then most other weapons in the game.
I know that people get used to their build and like consistency with their damage and kill output, but some things need to be changed in order to make the game more playable for people that didn't buy a clan mech or don't plan to. I know a majority of players bemoan the divergence from the TT but unless an accelerated timeline is implemented for tech, anyone that plays IS mechs are just going to be try-hard stat pads for clan players. I do agree with the roleback on the heat penalty after one laser though, its just when you get into 4+CERLL mechs that the difference in balance is really apparent. Heat has always, and should always be an issue with builds that boat energy weapons with unlimited firepower over time. Now we just need a fix for (mostly)IS ammo based mechs so they don't have a ton of ammo in the head(where the heck would that fit in a locust) or other stupid locations like the legs. It really isn't a huge issue, its just kinda stupid in my opinion.

[CHH Badkarma]

Now that they showed everyone something shiney by fixing the CERLL....
Speed up the damn CERPPCs for cryin out loud.

[5th Fedcom Rat]

Why are people thanking these inept developers for rolling back their own idiotic change?

I thought after the Clan release, PGI was finally starting to get their act together but this whole debacle has tanked my opinion of them to a new low.

[DrSlamastika]

THANK YOU.

Now lets roll speed and range of PPC back - or on some reasonable numbers (not this kind of joke)

And also that funny mechanic PPC+GAUSS, and we are fine

[SVK Puskin]

DrSlamastika, on 08 August 2014 - 04:34 PM, said:

THANK YOU.

Now lets roll speed and range of PPC back - or on some reasonable numbers (not this kind of joke)

And also that funny mechanic PPC+GAUSS, and we are fine

A čo by si ešte nechcel? heheh

[ParaOrdnance]

overall I'm wondering a few things

1st: This is not how you should do any mid-product change for any product ever. Basically you are saying this and correct me if I'm wrong. I bought something, and then you are going to take that thing and effectively steal it, mess it up, then give it back and say that you did it in my best interest?

2nd: listening to your player base is paramount here. both options were not supported of a ppc nerf because most of us did not want a ppc nerf and yet you did it anyway?

3rd: You randomly nerf another weapon system with just a brief heads up and didn't at least get our feel for it?

4th: Who is the "people" that you are trying to cater to here? A simple voting structure would have sufficed for most of this, if you were to actually follow the players on this.

5th: do you answer to microsoft at some level (they used to have the rights to this)? Because if so I feel that it is only a matter of time before these blunders cause them to find new management for these property rights.

My general reaction to this is not to purchase any new chassis (for mc) until they have been out for more than 6 months because at least at that point I will know what the product is. It's just sound purchasing at this point and I don't feel that you could blame anyone for this type of decision. Also the timeline that I suggest for others is to wait at least one year for any new weapons system purchase if it is for mc, as it will surely change inside of that year at least once (especially if it is good)

[Sylvara-Arc]

This change is a step back in the right direction but only a small one.

After having used them the burn time of 2 seconds is still far too long and has considerable impact, particularly on clan lights whom have to practically stand there exposed for those full two seconds just staring at the enemy if they want to have hope of actually doing significant damage.

[1453 R]

Now that sanity has reasserted itself, some not-angry, facepalm-free feedback on the rest of the changes:

2s burn time on the C-ERLL seems harsh, but I’m willing to give it a shot and see how it plays out. Oddly enough I’ve experienced the burn time as being less of an issue at extreme ranges, where the target doesn’t move around as much relative to your point of aim, than it is in a close fight, but that may just be an odd quirk of my brain. Who knows. Either way, it at least makes sense as a thing to try, though I wish we could find an option that didn’t hurt lighter machines as much as this extra face time is going to. My Adders’ lives are hard enough, mang…

The base heat and Ghost Heat modifier changes (now that it’s possible to avoid Ghost Heat outside of hard-locked chainfire) are reasonable. Having run afoul of the old modifier a couple-odd times in my quad-ERLL Timber Wolf, I had noticed that the Ghost Heat penalty seemed unusually mild for the weapons. I could drill someone with all four lasers at once and while I was certainly steamy at the end of it, it wasn’t risking instant thermonuclear detonation if I wasn’t already riding on the top half of the heat bar. Went from idle/standing heat to 53% once triggering all four lasers simultaneously on Frozen City, without much more than the stock 15DHS on the Timber Wolf. That’s something I’ll totally agree needs adjusting.

Let’s leave it here for a little bit, I’ll run some of my C-ERLL favorites when I get off my shift, and get back to you guys on whether the weapon still seems workable or not. Sound like a plan? Sweet.

[Colonel Tequila]

Perhaps you will also reconsider adjusting the other ER LL values.............. 2 second beam time .... no thanks, not when almost all other weapons are instant hit damage.

Edited by Colonel Tequila, 08 August 2014 - 04:43 PM.

[ZnSeventeen]

It all sounds good to me hypothetically, especially now that the ghost heat level is back to 3, but I will have to try it and see.

[MischiefSC]

CERLL damage to 10, range to 780 or so, heat the same, burn time back to 1.5. It's a hard blow to the lights and mediums but only a mild difference to brawling and sniping heavies/assaults. This would make it more about balancing the weapon than a 'playstyle'.