348 replies to this topic

[Nastyogre]

Torso Weapons should have fixed (or a very limited traverse) Arm weapons converge. Three recticles (or 4 if your arms move too far to the right or left)

That's the solution. Cone of fire, while nice, its just using a random element which isn't really appropriate for this environment.

Multiple recticles with a slow convergence with torso weapons keeps the skill in the game and eliminates the perfection of so many perfect builds. It values the flexibility of arm mounted weapons. Boomjagers are still terribly dangerous if you stand in front of them, but 6 PPC or 4 PPC and 2 Gauss or whatever, monstrosities are difficult to use, as they should be.

[Xanquil]

Theodore42, on 04 October 2014 - 03:33 AM, said:

Ok, I've noticed a lot of people (myself included) misunderstanding the recoil suggestion:
Firstly, a cone of randomness where your shots go is, as I said, right out. Not geometrically feasible.

HOWEVER!

There is an FPS called Insurgency. Every shot lands where the crosshair is pointing but the recoil is simulated with mouse input. You have to control your recoil with your mouse. If you're good enough (or try hard enough), you can put a solid stream of bullets on a target.

I would be all for MWO having this kind of recoil. You can simulate the shuttering of the mech as you fire each round, adding to the player / mech immersion. And each round still goes where the crosshair is pointing. This would decrease pinpoint accuracy without giving a hit to skill. (or having to do some kind of armor buff on all mechs)

The downside is that it would affect dps on recoil weapons and might be a game balance issue. But this is the only method of recoil that I would be down for. Not sure of any other way to simulate it without randomness, which is unacceptable in a FPS. Spray patterns would maybe be ok, but that isn't going to help the people with the problem in the first place. Which is that some people's aim is too good.

This sort of system is far to easy to get around with programmable interfaces, anything that modifies accuracy needs to be handled server side. Otherwise Aimbots become common place.
It also does nothing to remedy the problem of weapons fired in a group all hitting, and hitting the exact same location.

[Belorion]

stjobe, on 04 October 2014 - 03:10 AM, said:

It absolutely does not when you cut out the anti-CoF brigade's hyperbole. It could very well increase the skill needed to put your damage on target as opposed to lowering it. It's all in the implementation details.

Pilot skill maybe, but not gunnery skill.

Again the only acceptable solution to pin point damage is to turn everything into rate of fire weapons and simply not have weapons capable of pin point damage.

Rate of fire does take increased skill. landing 4 or 5 or 10 shots where you used to land one takes skill... as long as the shot is going where you want it to.

Cone of Fire is simply a nerf to skill. The weapons we have that have a cone of fire make sense. Missiles, LBX-10...

[Eddrick]

Belorion, on 04 October 2014 - 07:22 AM, said:

Pilot skill maybe, but not gunnery skill.

Again the only acceptable solution to pin point damage is to turn everything into rate of fire weapons and simply not have weapons capable of pin point damage.

Rate of fire does take increased skill. landing 4 or 5 or 10 shots where you used to land one takes skill... as long as the shot is going where you want it to.

Cone of Fire is simply a nerf to skill. The weapons we have that have a cone of fire make sense. Missiles, LBX-10...

Could try the approach Mechwarrior Living Legends uses. There is almost no such thing as pinpoint damage in that game. Lasers act like ours, all ACs are burst fire, PPC does splash damage, and Missiles work simlar to ours as well.

To do it like them. We just have to give IS weapons the same treatment as Clan weapons and expand on it.

Edited by Eddrick, 04 October 2014 - 07:30 AM.

[Xanquil]

All weapons hitting and hitting the exact same location just because you fired them at the same time is not skill. If you can hit with and hit the exact same location with all of your weapons every time you chain fire or single fire weapons that is skill.

Prefect instant pinpoint convergent alpha strikes remove skill from the game, plain and simple. Adding a COF to alpha strikes would just make sure that those people with skill sine brighter.
Alphas should be a tactical choice, not the standard form of attack. The only reason it is the standard form of attack is because it is the easiest way to guarantee that all of your weapons will hit, and hit the exact same location.

[Joseph Mallan]

Belorion, on 04 October 2014 - 07:22 AM, said:

Pilot skill maybe, but not gunnery skill.

Again the only acceptable solution to pin point damage is to turn everything into rate of fire weapons and simply not have weapons capable of pin point damage.

Rate of fire does take increased skill. landing 4 or 5 or 10 shots where you used to land one takes skill... as long as the shot is going where you want it to.

Cone of Fire is simply a nerf to skill. The weapons we have that have a cone of fire make sense. Missiles, LBX-10...

That is not the only Acceptable solution. Its just the easiest.

Edited by Joseph Mallan, 04 October 2014 - 07:45 AM.

[1453 R]

I'm going to just summarize the CoF proponents' arguments here, to make it easy for people to figure out what the rationale is.

Ahem:

"Aiming OP. Prana, plz nerf aiming."

Whatever else you all decide to say, however else you explain it, your intent is to reduce or eliminate the player's ability to hit what his crosshair is pointed at. Everything you say, all the "REAL MEN AIM COF STYLE" arguments, are meaningless. You all claim it takes REAL MAN SKILL to land shots on target with a randomized dice-roll hit system?

A'ight,a ssume for the moment it does. Guess what? You've also killed a skill that's already in the game, removed it completely, rendered it utterly pointless. That skill would be defensive movement, maneuvering, and torso twisting. Knowing when, where, and how to take hits from your enemy in such a way as to maximize your effective engagement time. All of that would be completely out the window. There wouldn't be any point to it anymore, after all - the BattleMechs' own dilapidated, drunken targeting systems would spread damage wildly as it stands. There wouldn't be any need for defensive twisting, or indeed defensive maneuvering at all. You could sit there and stare dead-on at the bad guy like a rank bleeding moron and it wouldn't matter, because not even RHoD league-level ultracomps could hit where they were actually aiming enough to punish people who didn't twist and spread damage on their own!

Does that seem like a fair trade, skill-wise? Trade away defensive maneuvering/piloting skill in exchange for REAL MAN SKILL in partially-but-never-fully compensating for faulty targeting equipment in order to be able to, say...hit the enemy 'Mech with seventy percent of well-aimed* fire from 200m, rather than only hitting him with forty percent of well-aimed fire from 200m.

And before y'all start yelling at me for hyperbole and exaggeration again - am I wrong? Am. I. Wrong? The numbers may be off (and since none of YOU can agree on numbers either, that strikes me as fair), but the ideas, the intent, the "Aim OP, Prana plz nerf" are all right exactly perfectly there. Your intent is to force my weapons to shoot somewhere other than where I aim them. Your intent is to transform what should have been hits into what ends up being misses. Your intent is to disable group fire on the sly because everybody thinks that chain fire is somehow REAL MAN MECH COMBAT, and never mind that pilots used fire groups all the blasted time in basically every canon source ever.

Your intent is to turn this game into a crap shoot, with some minor methods here and there of making your shot mildly less crappy. You can justify it all you want, you can couch it in whatever pretty language you like, but that doesn't make the intent behind the words any different.

[Joseph Mallan]

1453 R, on 04 October 2014 - 09:49 AM, said:

I'm going to just summarize the CoF proponents' arguments here, to make it easy for people to figure out what the rationale is.

Ahem:

"Aiming OP. Prana, plz nerf aiming."

Whatever else you all decide to say, however else you explain it, your intent is to reduce or eliminate the player's ability to hit what his crosshair is pointed at. Everything you say, all the "REAL MEN AIM COF STYLE" arguments, are meaningless. You all claim it takes REAL MAN SKILL to land shots on target with a randomized dice-roll hit system?

A'ight,a ssume for the moment it does. Guess what? You've also killed a skill that's already in the game, removed it completely, rendered it utterly pointless. That skill would be defensive movement, maneuvering, and torso twisting. Knowing when, where, and how to take hits from your enemy in such a way as to maximize your effective engagement time. All of that would be completely out the window. There wouldn't be any point to it anymore, after all - the BattleMechs' own dilapidated, drunken targeting systems would spread damage wildly as it stands. There wouldn't be any need for defensive twisting, or indeed defensive maneuvering at all. You could sit there and stare dead-on at the bad guy like a rank bleeding moron and it wouldn't matter, because not even RHoD league-level ultracomps could hit where they were actually aiming enough to punish people who didn't twist and spread damage on their own!

Does that seem like a fair trade, skill-wise? Trade away defensive maneuvering/piloting skill in exchange for REAL MAN SKILL in partially-but-never-fully compensating for faulty targeting equipment in order to be able to, say...hit the enemy 'Mech with seventy percent of well-aimed* fire from 200m, rather than only hitting him with forty percent of well-aimed fire from 200m.

And before y'all start yelling at me for hyperbole and exaggeration again - am I wrong? Am. I. Wrong? The numbers may be off (and since none of YOU can agree on numbers either, that strikes me as fair), but the ideas, the intent, the "Aim OP, Prana plz nerf" are all right exactly perfectly there. Your intent is to force my weapons to shoot somewhere other than where I aim them. Your intent is to transform what should have been hits into what ends up being misses. Your intent is to disable group fire on the sly because everybody thinks that chain fire is somehow REAL MAN MECH COMBAT, and never mind that pilots used fire groups all the blasted time in basically every canon source ever.

Your intent is to turn this game into a crap shoot, with some minor methods here and there of making your shot mildly less crappy. You can justify it all you want, you can couch it in whatever pretty language you like, but that doesn't make the intent behind the words any different.

Cause with all the rounds I've seen fly down range, What most players call skill is the game doing the impossible/improbable.

Players want Sniper level accuracy while running over hill and dale! It is beyond silly. Its insulting.

Edited by Joseph Mallan, 04 October 2014 - 09:57 AM.

[Mcgral18]

1453 R, on 04 October 2014 - 09:49 AM, said:

I'm going to just summarize the CoF proponents' arguments here, to make it easy for people to figure out what the rationale is.

Ahem:

"Aiming OP. Prana, plz nerf aiming."

Whatever else you all decide to say, however else you explain it, your intent is to reduce or eliminate the player's ability to hit what his crosshair is pointed at. Everything you say, all the "REAL MEN AIM COF STYLE" arguments, are meaningless. You all claim it takes REAL MAN SKILL to land shots on target with a randomized dice-roll hit system?

A'ight,a ssume for the moment it does. Guess what? You've also killed a skill that's already in the game, removed it completely, rendered it utterly pointless. That skill would be defensive movement, maneuvering, and torso twisting. Knowing when, where, and how to take hits from your enemy in such a way as to maximize your effective engagement time. All of that would be completely out the window. There wouldn't be any point to it anymore, after all - the BattleMechs' own dilapidated, drunken targeting systems would spread damage wildly as it stands. There wouldn't be any need for defensive twisting, or indeed defensive maneuvering at all. You could sit there and stare dead-on at the bad guy like a rank bleeding moron and it wouldn't matter, because not even RHoD league-level ultracomps could hit where they were actually aiming enough to punish people who didn't twist and spread damage on their own!

Does that seem like a fair trade, skill-wise? Trade away defensive maneuvering/piloting skill in exchange for REAL MAN SKILL in partially-but-never-fully compensating for faulty targeting equipment in order to be able to, say...hit the enemy 'Mech with seventy percent of well-aimed* fire from 200m, rather than only hitting him with forty percent of well-aimed fire from 200m.

And before y'all start yelling at me for hyperbole and exaggeration again - am I wrong? Am. I. Wrong? The numbers may be off (and since none of YOU can agree on numbers either, that strikes me as fair), but the ideas, the intent, the "Aim OP, Prana plz nerf" are all right exactly perfectly there. Your intent is to force my weapons to shoot somewhere other than where I aim them. Your intent is to transform what should have been hits into what ends up being misses. Your intent is to disable group fire on the sly because everybody thinks that chain fire is somehow REAL MAN MECH COMBAT, and never mind that pilots used fire groups all the blasted time in basically every canon source ever.

Your intent is to turn this game into a crap shoot, with some minor methods here and there of making your shot mildly less crappy. You can justify it all you want, you can couch it in whatever pretty language you like, but that doesn't make the intent behind the words any different.

You know, you should really start reading, otherwise you look like this:



MWO's shooting requires no skill. Absolutely none. Everything converges, you have nothing to control or monitor aside from your heat, no decision to make whether you want to alpha strike and not have all 8 weapons magically hit the same pixel, or fire in two salvos, which will all magically hit the same pixel.


You want to keep the game dumbed down.

Edited by Mcgral18, 04 October 2014 - 10:03 AM.

[Adiuvo]

Mcgral18, on 04 October 2014 - 10:01 AM, said:

You know, you should really start reading, otherwise you look like this:

MWO's shooting requires no skill. Absolutely none. Everything converges, you have nothing to control or monitor aside from your heat, no decision to make whether you want to alpha strike and not have all 8 weapons magically hit the same pixel, or fire in two salvos, which will all magically hit the same pixel.


You want to keep the game dumbed down.

If MWO's shooting requires no skill then why isn't everyone good at it?

Edited by Adiuvo, 04 October 2014 - 10:04 AM.

[Mcgral18]

Adiuvo, on 04 October 2014 - 10:03 AM, said:

If MWO's shooting requires no skill then why isn't everyone good at it?

Because there are lots of Bads?

[Hoax415]

To the people who refuse to explain how instantaneous pinpoint accurate alpha strikes in every circumstance are good for the game because they make the game more fun I ask this series of questions.

How come you don't want to remove ghost heat? Why is it ok to punish someone for firing 4 PPC's? 3 PPC's? 3 LLAS? How can too much pinpoint alpha be bad for the game if pinpoint alpha is good for the game?

How do you square the idea that ghost heat is fine and it makes the game more fun with your pathetic nonsense babbling about how any reduction in pinpoint alpha would ruin MWO.

Because that's exactly what ghost heat as a system sets out to do, prevent too much pinpoint alpha damage.

How come you don't want to remove the Gauss Rifle charge time?

The only reason it exists is because Ghost Heat had a huge blind spot when it came to Gauss (because it generates such low heat) and people realized that 2xPPC + Gauss was doable on a bunch of mechs and those mechs became FOTM because they had ghost heat free high damage pinpoint alphas.

So they added charge time. To prevent pinpoint alpha that combines Gauss with other weapon systems.

Now the general logic is that single Gauss is meh but dual Gauss is strong. Because a single gauss is not enough pinpoint alpha damage to be worth dealing with charge time but once you are up at 30 damage pinpoint alpha. Well guess what that's a good mech!

But if pinpoint alpha makes the game more fun, then clearly the Gauss Rifle charge time change makes the game less fun right? The game would be more fun if we could use Gauss + 2 PPC in tandem again right?

What about the PPC projectile speed nerfs? Put in to make PPC less useful as a long range pinpoint alpha delivery system and to make it so that like Gauss PPC's tend to not play as well with other weapon types when alpha'd together because they tend to be slower making it so they are less likely to land pixel perfect.

But pixel perfect alpha is good! So why did we nerf projectile speed!? Surely that made the game less fun because pinpoint alpha is fun.

Why was pop tarting a problem? Afterall the ideal pop tart builds were all pinpoint alpha builds, you snap off a perfect alpha strike that all lands in one exact place. That must have been good for the game right? It was a skillful display firing those pinpoint alphas like that. Yet the community barely complained when they took jump jets out back and shot them in order to take pop tarting out of the game.

Why? Snap-firing pinpoint alpha strikes are the epitome of skill, fun and good gameplay right? Where was the protesting when they came for the pop tart mechs and builds?

Every one of those systems is trying to band aid the obvious problem this game has where you can get all of your weapons to fire perfectly at 1 pixel at the same time. You only have to aim once to get all the damage exactly where you want it.


TL;DR
If pinpoint alpha is good for the game and makes the game more fun why has PGI spent most of the past year+ introducing systems and nerfs to prevent whatever the highest pinpoint alpha of the day was either by nerfing the mechs who could use it or the weapons involved?

Or better yet, why did the community not rise up in anger over these changes that clearly ruin fun because fun is high damage pinpoint alpha?

Edited by Hoax415, 04 October 2014 - 10:09 AM.

[Joseph Mallan]

Adiuvo, on 04 October 2014 - 10:03 AM, said:

If MWO's shooting requires no skill then why isn't everyone good at it?

Cause some of us have slower reflexes from being older than dirt!

Some of us have used our hands to fairly effective sledgehammers!

(Do those hammers look like dexterous digits?)

Some of us only play the game a few hours a week.

Do you need any more reasons?



Yes. That is a Poke'mon Plushy on my shoulder. Is there a problem with that?

Edited by Joseph Mallan, 04 October 2014 - 10:39 AM.

[Adiuvo]

Mcgral18, on 04 October 2014 - 10:04 AM, said:

Because there are lots of Bads?

...If it's possible for there to even be 'bads' then obviously shooting requires skill. That there's variance at all requires that.

Hoax415, on 04 October 2014 - 10:05 AM, said:

How come you don't want to remove ghost heat? Why is it ok to punish someone for firing 4 PPC's? 3 PPC's? 3 LLAS? How can too much pinpoint alpha be bad for the game if pinpoint alpha is good for the game?

The world doesn't require an all or nothing approach.

[Aresye]

"Players that can't aim, being mad about players that can aim." - Pinpoint damage argument in a nutshell.

[Quicksilver Aberration]

Adiuvo, on 04 October 2014 - 10:03 AM, said:

If MWO's shooting requires no skill then why isn't everyone good at it?

Piloting skill and reflex speed.

You hear the complaint about a bad walking over a hill getting murdered more than a bad getting murdered because he couldnt hit the broadside of a barn do you not?

Edited by WM Quicksilver, 04 October 2014 - 10:20 AM.

[Adiuvo]

WM Quicksilver, on 04 October 2014 - 10:13 AM, said:

Piloting skill and reflex speed.

You here the complaint about a bad walking over a hill getting murdered more than a bad getting murdered because he couldnt hit the broadside of a barn do you not?

People are more likely to blame something that they don't control over something they control.

Bad players don't consider themselves getting shot at as something they have an influence over. It's basically impossible to somehow blame something else for your shots though.

I've spectated enough people that even when taking into account spectator lag, it's just obvious that they're bad at shooting.

[Kjudoon]

Could always replace the target reticule with several ones in a cluster. Then with pinpoint skill tree advancment, shrink the cluster by half. No more insta-Alpha-Gauss-death because 80 point alphas land all on the same bodypart, but you're going to get stuff blown clean off. Want that single target reticule, only have one in a weapon group and use that.

Oh, and shake them all while moving in different ways.

Edited by Kjudoon, 04 October 2014 - 10:18 AM.

[Mcgral18]

Aresye, on 04 October 2014 - 10:12 AM, said:

"Players that can't aim, being mad about players that can aim." - Pinpoint damage argument in a nutshell.

I'm gonna call bullshit on that one.

I'm saying 12 goddamn weapons shouldn't hit the same pixel if you fire them all at once.


Of course, I guess some people want CoD 3050, rather than a BattleTech game. Neither do they want any challenge in a game.


Fire everything, hit the same pixel, twist, wait for heat levels to alpha again, FIRE EVERYTHING, hit the same pixel, twist again.
So goddamned easy.

[Joseph Mallan]

Adiuvo, on 04 October 2014 - 10:09 AM, said:

...If it's possible for there to even be 'bads' then obviously shooting requires skill. That there's variance at all requires that.


The world doesn't require an all or nothing approach.

Shooting requires a slow even pull. MW:O needs *CLICK* *CLICK* *CLICK* Not even close to the same thing Aduivo.