181 replies to this topic

[Pjwned]

Lefty Lucy, on 13 November 2014 - 11:35 AM, said:

In order to effectively reduce the enemy team's ability to fight, you need to kill their mechs. Most importantly, you need to kill their mechs as fast as possible in order to minimize damage to your own team as well. For all but the most powerful mechs, 1 v 1 TTK is slow in this game. Slow enough that if one mech is losing a solo fight it can quite easily return to its team before dying. This is why focus fire is of utmost importance.

What this says to me is that critical damage doesn't matter enough in this game since even if you blast the armor off of multiple components and the internals are orange/cherry red the mech is still likely to be a big threat, which makes flanking/ambush maneuvers not very valuable most of the time unless you can guarantee a kill. It doesn't help that most weapons are rarely destroyed (without just blowing off the whole component anyways) because of terrible balance when it comes to item health in crit slots, so that even when you take a bunch of hits to an exposed component the only thing it's likely to affect is your internal structure even if there's 1 or more weapons in there as well.

Another problem with slow time to kill in 1v1 engagements is weapons like machine guns, (S)SRMs, flamers, and small lasers generally doing a pretty piss poor job at killing mechs unless boated to the extreme.

Edited by Pjwned, 13 November 2014 - 02:16 PM.

[Thorqemada]

OP is completely off the rails...

The MWO i know has a TTK that is not longer than a few seconds which forces Cat and Doc to make use of Cover excessively.

Edited by Thorqemada, 13 November 2014 - 03:41 PM.

[Lyoto Machida]

Here's a solution...have a "hardcore" mode like with the Golden Gun in Goldeneye for the low TTK fans. Any shot that touches a body part destroys the entire section immediately...CTs take 3 hits to kill.

And then another "hardcore" mode for fans of Battletech. Leave the weapons as they are if they can't fix convergence but increase armor/internal structure to 300% of tabletop stats...this way, components will be destroyed more frequently before the limb is gone.

[Coolant]

Most quirks for IS mechs included additional armor or structure or both, so I'm not detecting much difference in TTK...

[TygerLily]

The Boz, on 13 November 2014 - 11:54 AM, said:

Disagree.
Also, the blob is not a result of a slow TTK, but a lack of objective-oriented gameplay.

Agreed here.

Also,

Lefty Lucy, on 13 November 2014 - 11:35 AM, said:

Don't get me wrong, I think this game is fun with relatively slow TTK, but suggesting even *slower* TTK as a way to improve gameplay is incredibly misguided.

EvilCow, on 13 November 2014 - 11:44 AM, said:

I agree, increasing the TTK too much would just make the game too forgiving and ultimately dumb.

I think the point to these early comments is to say that say moderation is key. Slower would be fine, IMO, but I don't want the "triple armor," etc. solutions that others have posted.

I think there are many ways to lower TTK without making it ridiculous, from the longer recycle time (not too much!), a bit higher armor (but not too much!), etc.

In the end, no matter what the armor values are, focus fire will always prevail. If armor is tripled, then a good team will still focus the 300 points off the Atlas' CT with their 40 pt alphas together while being shield by their own massive loads of armor. Nothing changes...

Tweaks and better objectives, IMO.

PS, regarding better objectives, can I pimp this?

Spoiler

USING THE NEW DROPSHIP MECHANIC

Premise:
Grid Squares are capturable and require adjacency to capture enemy Squares. Create a contiguous path to your enemy’s Home Grid Square and capture it.

Win Conditions:
Kill All Enemy Mechs
Capture Enemy Home Grid Square

On Time Out:
Least Number of Squares to Enemy Home Grid Wins
If Tied, Most Number Grid Squares Captured Wins
If Tied, Most Number Of Kills Wins

Gameplay:
The game begins with Grid Squares evenly divided between the teams and each team has a Home Grid Sqaure.

You can only capture an enemy grid if it is adjacent to one you own.

An enemy Home Grid Square can only be captured if there is a contiguous connection to your Home Grid Square (below: Enemy present in a Grid you are capturing does NOT stop the capture but DOES slow the rate of capture).

Any Grid Square that touches a Home Grid Square can be captured without adjacency to one you own. This allows teams to go behind enemy lines and begin backward paths toward the front lines in effort to create a contiguous connection.

Mechanics:
If a Lance or more (4+) occupy a Grid Square it begins to capture at the rate of current Conquest capture.

If 1 to 3 Mechs are in a Grid Square it will capture but at half the rate (IE twice as slow).

There is no neutral period of capture; a Grid Square is either Team A’s or Team B’s. As soon as one team lowers the enemy capture bar they immediately begin filling their own capture bar.
If enemy enter your Grid Square while you still occupy it, it does NOT stop capturing but it does cut the capture rate in half (IE capturing continues but will take longer).

If all friendlies exit the Grid Square then the capture stops. If Team A is present when all of Team B have abandoned a Grid Square or enter one of Team A’s owned Squares then they must undo Team B's progress and then proceed to capture the Grid Square (just like a half-capped Resource Node in Conquest).

On the Battlegrid, captured Grid Squares are tinted with your team’s color. Home Grid Squares are tinted bright, bright green and indicated on the HUD compass
.
A Grid Square being captured will flash on the Battlegrid.

Grid Squares that are 10% or more INSIDE the map boundaries are capturable. IE, fully square Grid’s are not necessary...just mostly present Grid Squares, to ensure enough space to contest those Grids without needing perfectly square maps.

How It Promotes Role Warfare
The ability to "back capture" from the enemy's Home Grid Square allows fast Mechs to begin working backwards to capture.

Slower Mechs are intended to push the front line and the mechanic of allowing a Square to keep capturing even in enemy presence gives durability and pilot skill in standing their ground a meaningful part of the game.

Making 4+ the ideal capture size means Lances benefit from sticking together for capture but teams benefit by splitting Lances for quicker territorial gain. This makes the leadership role valuable. This also plays in to the new Rewards System which emphasizes Lance cohesion.

http://mwomercs.com/...-mode-territory

Edited by TygerLily, 13 November 2014 - 03:24 PM.

[Herr Vorragend]

Ursh, on 13 November 2014 - 12:38 PM, said:

Low TTK will only drive away more of the $300+ club who MWO desperately needs to keep.

Simply no!
I'm also one of this club and me and my mates are just beginning to have fun in this game again. Maybe buff the armor on all mechs by a few %. But the feeling of weapon dmg output and result is pretty good at the moment imho.

A slower recycle time would make the game too forgivingly and (sorry) dumb. If you manage to get a good position with your mech, maybe sneak up from behind, then you should be rewarded for that by a good shot (and maybe a fast kill).
Someone suggested to lenghten the recycletime of the gauss by 2 seconds. Sorry, who in hell would equip a gauss then? The boats (and only the boats can be a problem) will use them, okay. They got the advantage of having them stacked. But what about single-gauss-mechs? They'd be even more fu**ed up after having to use the dumb charge-mechanic.

Should I start cooking coffee until I can shoot again? Or take a bath while waiting?

Edited by Herr Vorragend, 13 November 2014 - 03:36 PM.

[Lefty Lucy]

Thorqemada, on 13 November 2014 - 02:37 PM, said:

OP is completely off the rails...

The MWO i know hs a TTK that is not longer than a few seconds which forces Cat and Doc to make use of Cover excessively.

You only die that fast if you: are a significantly lighter mech going face-to-face with a direwolf, or if you have terrible situational awareness and get focus fired.

[Thorqemada]

With the current Firepower it takes 1 Volley to take out the STs from all Mechs but Assaults and some Mechs can even do that.

You probably count misses and time in cover to the TTK...

[Sadist Cain]

The Boz, on 13 November 2014 - 11:54 AM, said:

Disagree.
Also, the blob is not a result of a slow TTK, but a lack of objective-oriented gameplay.

This, lots of this.

Any wonder that Blobbers hate Conquest...

Joseph Mallan, on 13 November 2014 - 12:07 PM, said:

Its also a lack of communication and knowledge of actual formations to use.

Wait a second, you mean to tell me the duckling march isn't the best most multifaceted flexible formation there is?!

By jove, if word of this got out...

[Alistair Winter]

The Boz, on 13 November 2014 - 11:54 AM, said:

Disagree.
Also, the blob is not a result of a slow TTK, but a lack of objective-oriented gameplay.

The Boz just ended this thread in the third post. Why are people still talking?



By the way, another reason blob tactics is viable is because every lance is much closer to friendly mechs than to enemy mechs. It's almost impossible to intercept enemy lances before they can regroup. In Conquest, there's a lack of lance vs lance combat because neither lances nor bases are spread out far enough. So it makes sense to form a blob.

TTK does affect the efficiency of maneuvers like flanking and ambushes to set up crossfire. But I think Mechwarrior games have always been about the joy of smaller engagements. That's why the single player campaigns were usually a series of smaller skirmishes and tactical maneuvers, and only rarely about huge 12 vs 12 mech battles.

[SweetJackal]

Lefty Lucy, on 13 November 2014 - 11:35 AM, said:

This game having a relatively slow TTK is the reason why "the blob" dominates tactics, and why things like flanking maneuvers are basically pointless against competent opponents.

In order to effectively reduce the enemy team's ability to fight, you need to kill their mechs. Most importantly, you need to kill their mechs as fast as possible in order to minimize damage to your own team as well. For all but the most powerful mechs, 1 v 1 TTK is slow in this game. Slow enough that if one mech is losing a solo fight it can quite easily return to its team before dying. This is why focus fire is of utmost importance.

Similarly, if you attack a mech from an angle it is not currently observing, it almost always gets a chance to return fire. Combine this with relatively long cooldowns compared to other shooters, and the only way to effectively damage an enemy mech without simply trading damage with them is to hug cover obsessively. It also means that trying to "flank" a prepared defensive position is pointless because getting the first shot in combat is only a minor advantage, rather than a decisive one.

Don't get me wrong, I think this game is fun with relatively slow TTK, but suggesting even *slower* TTK as a way to improve gameplay is incredibly misguided.

It's not merely just slow TTK but also the many issues that others have brought up including a lack of adequate communication tools within the client. One issue not being brought up is that "high speed and high mobility" in MWO outside of extreme cases with light mechs is still relatively slow and immobile, meaning it is harder to deal damage without trading damage.

It's one of the reasons why Poptarting was so pervasive, it was a means of dealing damage while reducing their ability to trade. Vertically going up and down was a faster means of movement than moving laterally. Jump Jets have been blamed for this for a long time and changed in accordance with that design but if Jump Jets gave omnidirectional control and thrust instead it would be a step to providing greater lateral mobility and enabling players more option to deal damage without committing to a damage trade.

Changing the way acceleration, deceleration and turning worked in relation to engine size and speed would be a step in the right direction. I am reminded of Steel Battalion in this respect, where the game allowed you to try to turn on a dime yet doing so too fast would have you tip over and fall. Applying this concept to MWO with Speed and Turning being measured against Weight could add more depth to the game and add more power to Lights and Mediums by increasing their mobility while having Heavies and Assaults require more skill to use when moving quickly.

Our mechs have been running pretty much on autopilot and cruise control, something I would like to see changed.

[SilentWolff]

The Boz, on 13 November 2014 - 11:54 AM, said:

Disagree.
Also, the blob is not a result of a slow TTK, but a lack of objective-oriented gameplay.

Certainly there is some truth to this, but the blob mentality is also a direct results of horrible weapon balancing. PGI has nerfed range weapons into the ground, so there is now no effective way to stop the blob pulse, SRM rush. Look at SJR's tactics as an example. All they do is death blob with fast brawl mechs an insta leg anything within range. Anything that may get away gets ***** then by 6 med Jenners or Firestarters. There are no longer any real tactics to this game.

[Livewyr]

Very low TTK = Hiding. Lots of it.

Rambos are more emboldened..but everyone else are pretty timid. (The entrance camping on T-Therma was ridiculous before... now-. yeesh.)

[Telmasa]

Respectfully, I completely disagree that TTK is too long. I think it's reasonably balanced, with each kind of weaponry breaking about even, as long as the proper tactics (and mechs with quirks, I guess), are used to employ them.

The overall problem, from my perspective, is that most players are not aggressive enough.

I like each enemy mech being a challenge to take down, rather than "oh, alpha burst loadout, haha you're gone".

I like having to worry about which component to target, rather than "spam everything at CT". Lower TTK would just favor dual-ERPPC/Gauss builds over low-alpha, high-damage-over-time builds (and I really do not want to see *more* dual AC20/gauss catapult K2 cheesers running around).

Killing an enemy mech under the current "TTK" doesn't actually take all that long - IF you focus fire on specific components, IF you make a build that has a good balance between "burst" damage & DPS, and IF you aren't afraid to move in and keep shooting, relying on your teammates to do the same.

That's something I've noticed over time - when I sit back, mosie around, try to minimize damage and try to peek and poke and whatnot, the average match goes more slowly, I tend to not achieve a high score, and there's an increase in the chance of it being a loss.

It doesn't particularly matter, to me, what your weapon loadout *is* - whether favoring DPS and cooling or favoring alpha burst damage, the key thing is to find a target and keep on hitting it til it goes down.

Most "pug" match losses are determined by which team does the least 'hanging back' trying to not get shot, and instead moves up and hits a target and just does not stop shooting.

Even competitively, from what I have seen, all-out (but still tactful) aggression is the name of the game.

Part of the problem, I think, is many MWO players have transitioned over from World of Tanks, where the gameplay is often the exact opposite - the team that finds a place and camps it best wins best, and "agressive" players get whacked by tank destroyers and/or autoloaders, not to mention alpha-centric SPGs. Even the most aggressive competitive play is determined more by methodical, steady movement (barring the occaisional mass-cap-rush, which rarely works).



TL/DR: Players should be given more incentives to be agressive in a match. I don't know how to achieve this, though - maybe via PVE modes, tutorials, perhaps even community warfare will provide the impetus.

[Telmasa]

Also, I'll add, I think the "blob" is a result of map design more than anything else. Only Alpine and Caustic are really "open" maps, and both have a gigantic mountain in the middle that everyone with shorter-range builds can just circlejerk around.


Now, there should be a balance in a map between long-range and short-range capabilities, I'll grant that. But, the majority of maps (as few as they are...) seem to favor the "brawling deathball" sort of tactic.

If the maps had a *bit* less clutter and junk and oddly shapped rocks scattered around (but don't remove too much of that cover), I think games would have a better-rounded feel when it comes to what range they occur at.

[Kiiyor]

TTK doesn't need to be increased THAT much - just to the point where you can actually exchange fire with someone in anything but an assault without ending up as a smear on the landscape.

Fighting for information used to be awesome. You could step out of cover, exchange a salvo or two, and get an appreciation of the loadout and skill of your opponent, and not be worried about instagibbing.

Now, if you step out of cover (not peeking, which is different), you are usually either 100% committed to killing your opponent, or you are looking to get a shot off while you scurry to find something else to cower behind. Or you are doomed. One hit from a meta DireWolf or MadCat - just one - can remove a medium or light from the battle. In the case of the meta DireWolf, it can remove a heavy.

I miss the feeling of driving the pinnacle of war machines in the BattleTech universe. In mediums, I feel like i'm in an unarmored transport.

[Captain Stiffy]

Uh let's see what has now or has had high TTK that the community has cried about in rivers?

Dual guass
Dual ac/20
LRM'sssssssssssforever
Pulse laser boats
PPC boats
Any boat

All the community does is cry about good weapons. Everything gets nerfed.

[Kiiyor]

Captain Stiffy, on 13 November 2014 - 05:12 PM, said:

Uh let's see what has now or has had high TTK that the community has cried about in rivers?

Dual guass
Dual ac/20
LRM'sssssssssssforever
Pulse laser boats
PPC boats
Any boat

All the community does is cry about good weapons. Everything gets nerfed.

I think it's less about good weapons, and more about weapons that far out-perform others.

Now, with perks and the latest WUB-update, lots more weapon systems are finding a viable niche.

I don't think anything needs to be nerfed, as IMHO, weapon balance is in a nice place. It's just that things are maybe a little too lethal at the moment.

[Quicksilver Aberration]

Kiiyor, on 13 November 2014 - 05:18 PM, said:

I think it's less about good weapons, and more about weapons that far out-perform others.

Now, with perks and the latest WUB-update, lots more weapon systems are finding a viable niche.

I don't think anything needs to be nerfed, as IMHO, weapon balance is in a nice place. It's just that things are maybe a little too lethal at the moment.

Well TTK has a direct effect on the importance of PPFLD. The more people cower thanks to lower TTK, the more important PPFLD is to get good snapshots or commit and kill the enemy before he can kill you. Ergo, changing the overall lethality of weapons will indirectly affect weapon balance.

Back in the day of Closed Beta which probably had the best average TTK for any mech game, a couple of Atlases could push over a ridge and not get insta-neutered.

Between the power creep that has been constant since the introduction of DHS, Endo, and Ferro (though ghost heat did curb this a little bit), the continued production of small maps, and introduction of 12 v 12 to all maps, TTK has been steadily been going downhill since and the game has been worse for it.

Edited by WM Quicksilver, 13 November 2014 - 05:43 PM.

[Xanquil]

I'm sorry, TTK in MWO is to long??
Time to kill is only a few seconds which is way too short to begin with. This short TTK is the main reason flanking is pointless do to the fact that any unit caught out side of the "blob" is instant gibed. With the current quirk system TTK has gone down even more removing even more tactics from the game, and making it less fun overall.

Side note: TTK= amount of time it takes to "kill" the target when all shots hit the target, excluding "lucky" hits(head shots). TTH does not include any defensive maneuvers done by the target.