Bishop Steiner, on 09 January 2016 - 10:47 AM, said:
Meh, that's the thing though, you really can't test, because hitboxes and pinpoint aim and hardpoints really mean nothing in TT.
You have modifiers based on movement, but that really doesn't tell the story. In TT, the Awesome 8Q is an outright death machine. How well has that translated?
In TT, all mechs have the same "hitboxes" (aka location hit chart) and aside from leg mounted weapons and level 1 terrain, the same "hardpoint elevation". Geometry is utterly meaningless.
Those are overwhelmingly the deciding factors of what DOES define viability in MWO, as an FPS.
For it to really tell us anything, all MWO Mechs would have to have the exact same size, profile and hardpoint locations, THEN you could compare the effects of loadout vs armor vs speed.
As it is, TT really tells us NOTHING about in game viability, other than what it SHOULD be able to do, but can't.
You have outlined exactly what needs to be quantified in order to normalize mech durability. TT mech construction cost functions unified 20 ton vs 100 ton mechs. In MWO tonnage and performance has a completely different function.
We know next to nothing about how mechs get there size and hit boxes... what we know is Russ will look into it if sufficient noise is created. That means to me a qualitative assessment not something quantitative derived from a performance model unifying all mechs collected from thousands of games....
Mechs get butchered during the translation from art work into a playable model. This tells me PGI has not quantified the change from a 2d6 RNG hit location system into a skill based FPS. Recent comments from Russ indicate a new system is in place and the Cat will get a pass. So yes progress seems to be happening. But it's obfuscated.
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