16 replies to this topic

[Shiroi Tsuki]

I've only played 1 other MechWarrior title before, and it's MechWarrior 3. Since I've started MWO a few years ago, there are some things that I barely have any ideas on, and these are:

-Why is it called LRM "Boating" when you slap on crap loads of LRMs in your mech?
-Where did the 400 ton Steiner Scout Lance come from?
-What is the difference between a critical slot and a regular slot?
-How come max armor is never a full/half ton? (Max armor for the Jagers is 13.2 tons, Max armor for the Spideees is 6.6 tons)
-I saw some old MWO gameplays, and some mechs can trip over. Why was it removed?

Sorry for the noob questions

[Egomane]

I'll move this thread once I answered your questions

Boating:
It's boating as soon as you mount a high number of the same system on your mech. You can also be laser boating or AC boating or even MG boating.

Steiner Scout Lance:
This one comes from the lore. Steiner is depicted as the richest of the 5 successor states and prefers heavy and assault mechs over everything else. It's a joke that takes this preference to the extreme.

Critical slot:
No difference! All slots, except those for modules (an MWO only invention) are critical slots.

Max armor:
Max armor is defined my the mechs weight and comes from the tabletop game construction rules. A mech could mount a specific amount of armor points. Different types of armor provide different numbers of armor points.

Mech tripping:
The mechanic was faulty and led to warping mechs and server inconsistencies. It has been removed until there is time to work on a version without those problems. It was also abusable!

Edited by Egomane, 27 August 2014 - 04:35 AM.

[Shiroi Tsuki]

Why is it called Boating?

[Egomane]

From the urban dictionary:

Quote

Boating
GAMING TERM

1. The act of bring more force than what is needed to defeat the enemy, making a fair fight not so fair anymore.

2. A group of gamers in the act of killing any enemy whether he be alone, have friends or be level 10 or level 50.

This does not mean, 1v1, 3v3, 6v6, or any form of even/fair fight.

Boating would be a 1v1 only to have your enemy call for help from 2 others making it 1v3.

or minding your own business and 6 guys come out and destroy you.

It is believed to be derived from the word "Boatload".

As in, "I WILL BRING A BOATLOAD!"

The term Boating seems to originate on the Ariel server of Aion Online.

Similar to Zerging but unlike Zerging the force does not have to be a lot of low level / weak characters but any level, strong or weak.

Though boating is not against any rules(At least not in Aion) it is frowned up by many. It's fine to get a little mad when it happens to you but just remember, you would do it too.

[Redshift2k5]

The mech collission and falling was buggy as ****. Weights were not counted correctly, no real physics simulation was present, if you got clipped by an elbow it knocked you completely over as if it was a head-on impact, when mechs would stop to stand up they would warp around several meters in a random direction, and a mech on the ground was often unhittable (you had to wait until it was standing again to get a clear shot free of warping or failed hitreg)

Even as the game currently stands, bumpnig into another mech can cause all kinds of warping and desyncing. The game engine & netcode does not handle it well at all.

[Modo44]

To do it properly, the server would have to authorize the entire fall animation for correct hit detection while falling. Separately from dev resources to re-implement the feature, it is a matter of reducing server cost (iron and bandwidth). The problem is not just money, it also relates to how much can be handled while preserving relatively low latency.

[IraqiWalker]

Who here remembers when an Atlas falling had a solid chance of crashing the game? Part of the reason why the system was removed. Also, griefers could just keep bashing you and cause you to fall without a chance for retaliation, until you slowly die from falling damage.

[Konril]

Shiroi Tsuki, on 27 August 2014 - 03:31 AM, said:

I've only played 1 other MechWarrior title before, and it's MechWarrior 3. Since I've started MWO a few years ago, there are some things that I barely have any ideas on, and these are:

-Why is it called LRM "Boating" when you slap on crap loads of LRMs in your mech?

http://www.sarna.net/wiki/Missile_boat

The "missile boat" is one of the battlemech roles name in the early generations of the tabletop games. So the term has been around at least since the '80s. Otherwise, why they're called "boats" I couldn't tell you.

Incidentally, the terms "laser boat" and "gun boat" seem to be unique to the MWO community. In the old role system, something that mounted a lot of lasers to damage close in would be a "striker," with big AC/10s, AC/20s, or lots of SRMs would be a "brawler," and something featuring AC/2s, AC/5s, and PPCs to fight directly over long range would be a "sniper."

Quote

-Where did the 400 ton Steiner Scout Lance come from?

Egomane explained that pretty well.

Quote

-What is the difference between a critical slot and a regular slot?

This is another leftover term from the tabletop game. You are probably already familiar with the way stuff in your mech takes up slots. On a paper record sheet, these slots are numbered. So when a battlemech takes critical damage dice are rolled to determine which slot gets taken out. And therefore the "critical slots" make up a critical-hit table. Stuff that takes more slots not only takes up more space in the mech, but is more likely to take critical damage. The MWO server handles this automatically, so you won't see the dice rolled. But the "critical slot" term remains.

Quote

-How come max armor is never a full/half ton? (Max armor for the Jagers is 13.2 tons, Max armor for the Spideees is 6.6 tons)

The maximum amount of armor a location can hold is exactly double the amount of structure the component has. At the same time, the amount of structure there depends on the specific maximum weight of the mech. The rule might have been originally written to prevent games from dragging on endlessly. After all a 10 second tabletop "turn" takes a lot longer than 10 seconds with all the declared actions, dice rolling to determine results, and tactical thinking required. 5 minutes per 10 second turn isn't unreasonable. I simply suspect the original designers were just not thinking about clean rounding numbers at the time.

[Dawnstealer]

Boating also has military connotations. For example:

A Missileboat:


A gunboat:



The reason for the term is that, as the sea-going vessels above indicate, you forego any other type of weapon to overload in a specific type. So a missile boat, in MWO, is going to have tons of LRMs and not much in the way of other weapons (vs another mech of the same model that has a blend of weapons).

[Koniving]

For an example of the issue with Mech Tripping...


Rather than fix it they disabled it and said they'd fix it after community warfare.

[Dawnstealer]

Koniving, on 27 August 2014 - 10:26 AM, said:

For an example of the issue with Mech Tripping...


Rather than fix it they disabled it and said they'd fix it after community warfare.

Man, the game was so pretty back then. I wish they'd bring it back. Maybe make it a little more weight-dependent for an actual take-down (like 20 ton difference to knock someone down, otherwise, you just bounce off and stop)? But even as a guy who regularly flings himself around the map in Commandos and Locusts, I'd kind of like there to be some consequence for sprinting up to an Atlas at 170kph and slamming into its legs.

[Just wanna play]

Now the REAL reason is because a group of dragons kept knocking over one of the devs...

Edited by Just wanna play, 27 August 2014 - 11:20 AM.

[Egomane]

Just wanna play, on 27 August 2014 - 11:20 AM, said:

Now the REAL reason is because a group of dragons kept knocking over one of the devs...

No... that's the reason they like to promote. Please do not try to turn the new player help into another bash the devs thread. You can use the GD forums or, better yet, K-town for that, if you have so much fun with that kind of topic.

[Modo44]

Egomane, on 27 August 2014 - 11:31 AM, said:

Please do not try to turn the new player help into another bash the devs thread.

Please do not be so uptight. Goons heart paul (easy to find on YouTube) is still a funny joke. We know it is not the reason for missing collision mechanics.

Edited by Modo44, 27 August 2014 - 11:39 AM.

[Egomane]

Modo44, on 27 August 2014 - 11:39 AM, said:

Please do not be so uptight. Goons heart paul (easy to find on YouTube) is still a funny joke. We know it is not the reason for missing collision mechanics.

We know! But there is no reason to try to indoctrinate new players with such nonsense. There are already way to many players who actually believe this.

[terrycloth]

The game got a lot prettier (and faster framerate) when I turned on DX 11 and high detail. Both were off by default.

[LauLiao]

Dawnstealer, on 27 August 2014 - 05:21 AM, said:

The reason for the term is that, as the sea-going vessels above indicate, you forego any other type of weapon to overload in a specific type. So a missile boat, in MWO, is going to have tons of LRMs and not much in the way of other weapons (vs another mech of the same model that has a blend of weapons).

This is exactly where it comes from. Great explanation.