1126 replies to this topic

[Burktross]

cSand, on 15 April 2015 - 03:59 PM, said:

What if the torso weapons didn't converge (just at optimal range) but the arms did?

you'd screw over countless mechs

[Dino Might]

tortuousGoddess, on 15 April 2015 - 03:57 PM, said:

Only a small segment of the small portion of the community that visits the forums even mention wanting something like this, so it's safe to assume the majority of players are good with how it is.

And stop referring to "other shooters" as if that's some sort of reference for how this game should be. Among the many reasons why it's idiotic to compare them, most importantly is the fact that you're talking about CoF on guns that are firing 10+ rounds a second, and trying to apply the logic to guns that fire once every four seconds. Additionally, the time to kill in those games is less than a second, compared to this game where a kill requires repeated well aimed shots on specific components. You wouldn't be able to use hardly anything effectively outside of 200m. You can't just do that, you are literally turning the game into dice roll warrior and a large portion of the community would quit within days.

Once again, you are not really understanding how CoF works, and you are assuming a very large standard deviation that nobody here has been a proponent of. Quit taking an exaggerated example and arguing against it. We'd all be in agreement with you. It's like protesting arson. Who is there to argue with?

Dice rolls only approach a normal distribution when looking at sums. Otherwise, a single die is a uniform distribution. Totally not acceptable for the systems we would want. You need to learn more about probability and statistics before you ignorantly bash an idea that you don't understand.

[Ratpoison]

Dino Might, on 15 April 2015 - 04:19 PM, said:

Once again, you are not really understanding how CoF works, and you are assuming a very large standard deviation that nobody here has been a proponent of. Quit taking an exaggerated example and arguing against it. We'd all be in agreement with you. It's like protesting arson. Who is there to argue with?

Dice rolls only approach a normal distribution when looking at sums. Otherwise, a single die is a uniform distribution. Totally not acceptable for the systems we would want. You need to learn more about probability and statistics before you ignorantly bash an idea that you don't understand.

It's really not, but exaggerated or not, it would still ruin the game in the same manner. You're still applying arbitrary dice rolls where aiming skill otherwise makes the difference. This game is about applying repeated damage to specific components and you're still ruining that entirely by applying CoF.

[Burktross]

tortuousGoddess, on 15 April 2015 - 05:20 PM, said:

It's really not, but exaggerated or not, it would still ruin the game in the same manner. You're still applying arbitrary dice rolls where aiming skill otherwise makes the difference. This game is about applying repeated damage to specific components and you're still ruining that entirely by applying CoF.

CS:GO is practically about getting headshots, yet you not only have CoF but wild spray patterns. And I mean wild! Like, some guns will spray "7"s or "Z"s
But its not bad there.

[ROSS-128]

The only thing "good" I could see coming of this is that suddenly LB-X ACs would be considered awesome, because their spread pattern is smaller than some of the cones people in this thread are suggesting.

[Burktross]

E Rommel, on 15 April 2015 - 05:46 PM, said:

The only thing "good" I could see coming of this is that suddenly LB-X ACs would be considered awesome, because their spread pattern is smaller than some of the cones people in this thread are suggesting.

10 pt. pinpoint on a LT while aiming for a CT is still better than 4 ct and the rest spread, imo

[Ratpoison]

Burktross, on 15 April 2015 - 05:26 PM, said:

CS:GO is practically about getting headshots, yet you not only have CoF but wild spray patterns. And I mean wild! Like, some guns will spray "7"s or "Z"s
But its not bad there.

Yes, because you only have to get ONE headshot with a weapon that fires 30 rounds in a couple seconds, instead of converging several weapon systems that cycle once every few seconds onto a single component several times, maintaining your aim for the duration of each attack. If I could spray my guns at a mech and have it die in under a second, you'd have a point. As is, you simply cannot pass that off as reason to think CoF will work out here.

Also, I'm glad you specified CS:GO since even there the CoF effect only causes negligible deviation when not moving. The spray patterns are what really direct the deviation of your fire. It's the system that makes the game so competitive and successful. As you can see here:

Every gun has a unique spray pattern to represent its recoil. Thanks to this, skill and practice allow you to compensate for the recoil in order to place your shots effectively for the duration of the spray you need. CoF has almost no impact comparatively when not moving. CS:GO remains successful by limiting the impact CoF has on the game greatly, and that's what you should be taking away from that example when thinking about MWO.

[Burktross]

tortuousGoddess, on 15 April 2015 - 06:08 PM, said:

Yes, because you only have to get ONE headshot with a weapon that fires 30 rounds in a couple seconds, instead of converging several weapon systems that cycle once every few seconds onto a single component several times, maintaining your aim for the duration of each attack. If I could spray my guns at a mech and have it die in under a second, you'd have a point. As is, you simply cannot pass that off as reason to think CoF will work out here.

Also, I'm glad you specified CS:GO since even there the CoF effect only causes negligible deviation when not moving. The spray patterns are what really direct the deviation of your fire. It's the system that makes the game so competitive and successful. As you can see here:

Every gun has a unique spray pattern to represent its recoil. Thanks to this, skill and practice allow you to compensate for the recoil in order to place your shots effectively for the duration of the spray you need. CoF has almost no impact comparatively when not moving. CS:GO remains successful by limiting the impact CoF has on the game greatly, and that's what you should be taking away from that example when thinking about MWO.

I suppose you're right.

[Frostiken]

Fooooo, on 15 April 2015 - 12:22 AM, said:

What happens when you fire a sniper rifle in any of those shooters ?

Is there a CoF ???

No ??

Yes, there is, especially if you aren't using the scope. If you ARE using the scope, not only is there usually significant scope sway, not only is it also affected by your own movement and stance, but the targets you're shooting at are also typically very small, mobile, and have tons of cover to hide behind.

Seriously, did you write that because you thought you had some sort of point? Because all you just told me is that you've NEVER PLAYED AN FPS GAME BEFORE IN YOUR LIFE.

Quote

When you fire a machine gun at a rifle range in single shot mode, is there a CoF ? Does it not goto where your sight is pointing. (not accounting for wind, which MWO doesnt account for, and heat in the air, which MWO also doesnt account for.)

No, it doesn't. Every weapon has some inherent accuracy or inaccuracy. Again, you sound like you're just making **** up with no actual real-world experience. A Mosin-Nagant has a very long barrel and a bolt action. Very accurate, right? Wrong, the typical non-sniper Mosin Nagant is basically 'minute of bad guy' at 100 yards, 200 if you found the 1%.

Now go ahead and stick your Mosin Nagant at the end of a spindly arm that's attached to an inherently unstable mobile platform and controlled by really ******, slow computers, and see what kind of accuracy you're going to get.

[Frostiken]

Telmasa, on 15 April 2015 - 02:49 PM, said:

It's that it sucks when a game has *all* of the guns forced to have some sort of spread.
Thankfully most games don't actually have *all* guns forced to have some sort of spread. And that's the point.

World of Tanks is the absolute worst offender that I know about, that's why I bring it up as the prime example of What Not To Do when it comes to resorting to CoF.

Yeah because World of Tanks was such a failure and obviously tens of thousands of people are lining up to play Mechwarrior games, where one of the shittiest long-lived communities in gaming history sits around screaming about "MY SKILLZLZZ".

Edited by Frostiken, 15 April 2015 - 07:11 PM.

[Frostiken]

tortuousGoddess, on 15 April 2015 - 05:20 PM, said:

It's really not, but exaggerated or not, it would still ruin the game in the same manner. You're still applying arbitrary dice rolls where aiming skill otherwise makes the difference. This game is about applying repeated damage to specific components and you're still ruining that entirely by applying CoF.

Yeah, except what you aren't considering is that the same people shouting for pixel-perfect weapon convergence are also the first people to cry a river of tears if their precious gauss rifle actually starts generating heat, like it should in reality, or that the weapons deviate from the tabletop-defined ranges and damage values, or that mech armor levels and damage models deviate from tabletop rules.

If tabletop Battletech were designed so that every single shot could go exactly where you told it to go, do you seriously ******* think that the rules used would mimic anything even close to what we have?

Not to mention we're already broken the balance of the game, because tabletop had no provision to account for the size and shape of mechs. Do you really think the tabletop rules were made to account for the fact that the Atlas side torsos are easier to hit than the center torso? Every single Mechwarrior game has avoided addressing this and at this point people just delude themselves into thinking it's "balance". People are even saying that blowing up a Timberwolf engine by shooting its ears is 'fair'. No, it's complete nonsense.

Battletech was never about coring through a single weak point, it was about slugging matches between mechs back and forth. Unless you hit the cockpit, there was almost zero instances of this ******** you get in-game where a Raven crests and hill and is killed faster than it can even throw the throttle in reverse.

If you want to have pixel-perfect weapon convergence so you can jerk it about your skill, then the Mechwarrior rules need to dramatically change to accommodate it. There's a reason why mechwarrior games have never attracted any seriously large crowd of gamers, and the asinine nonsense balance and metagame gimmicks are a big reason why.

If you want to have Unreal Tournament: Mech Edition, then make a game that's actually balanced around your fantasy of playing a first-person version of MechAssault (you ******* pleb), stop trying to shoehorn completely ridiculous tabletop rules into a 3D shooter, where half the weapons have absolutely no business performing as they have.

I've played every single Mechwarrior game. There has yet to be a single actually *balanced* one. Every single one has been a mess, depending on how deeply you want to look into it.

Edited by Frostiken, 15 April 2015 - 07:23 PM.

[Frostiken]

If we want to have pixel-perfect aiming, the first thing I would do to fix it would be to remove the 'area armor values'. If I shoot a spot on the left torso of a mech, then that specific point I shot should have less armor. If I aim two feet lower and shoot again, I'm hitting fresh, unmarred armor. THAT should be the balance tradeoff for your pixel-perfect 'LOL YOLO SWAG 420 XxX360NOSCOPEXxX' skill you all profess to want so much. Battletech never let you aim at specific points. Since we now can, it makes no sense to keep using this armor system that was not designed, in any way whatsoever, for use in a game like this.

Edited by Frostiken, 15 April 2015 - 07:28 PM.

[NocturnalBeast]

tortuousGoddess, on 15 April 2015 - 06:08 PM, said:

Yes, because you only have to get ONE headshot with a weapon that fires 30 rounds in a couple seconds, instead of converging several weapon systems that cycle once every few seconds onto a single component several times, maintaining your aim for the duration of each attack. If I could spray my guns at a mech and have it die in under a second, you'd have a point. As is, you simply cannot pass that off as reason to think CoF will work out here.

Also, I'm glad you specified CS:GO since even there the CoF effect only causes negligible deviation when not moving. The spray patterns are what really direct the deviation of your fire. It's the system that makes the game so competitive and successful. As you can see here:

Every gun has a unique spray pattern to represent its recoil. Thanks to this, skill and practice allow you to compensate for the recoil in order to place your shots effectively for the duration of the spray you need. CoF has almost no impact comparatively when not moving. CS:GO remains successful by limiting the impact CoF has on the game greatly, and that's what you should be taking away from that example when thinking about MWO.

Look up "recoilless rifle". Also MWO is set in 3052 which is 1037 years in the future! Look at how much technology has changed from 978 AD to 2015 AD and some of the tech which was recovered during that time had been "lostech" from Roman times. Also Gauss Rifles would have next to no recoil and Lasers would not have any recoil.

Edited by Ed Steele, 15 April 2015 - 07:34 PM.

[ROSS-128]

Ed Steele, on 15 April 2015 - 07:29 PM, said:

Look up "recoilless rifle". Also MWO is set in 3052 which is 1037 years in the future! Look at how much technology has changed from 978 AD to 2015 AD and some of the tech which was recovered during that time had been "lostech" from Roman times.

Recoiless rifles, aren't.

Also BT cannons are definitely not recoiless rifles, because they have closed breeches.

Recoil is also pretty irrelevant to BT/MW though. Our rates of fire are low enough that we have more than enough time to re-acquire our point of aim, and the weapons with the most recoil have the lowest rate of fire.

Frostiken, on 15 April 2015 - 07:27 PM, said:

If we want to have pixel-perfect aiming, the first thing I would do to fix it would be to remove the 'area armor values'. If I shoot a spot on the left torso of a mech, then that specific point I shot should have less armor. If I aim two feet lower and shoot again, I'm hitting fresh, unmarred armor. THAT should be the balance tradeoff for your pixel-perfect 'LOL YOLO SWAG 420 XxX360NOSCOPEXxX' skill you all profess to want so much. Battletech never let you aim at specific points. Since we now can, it makes no sense to keep using this armor system that was not designed, in any way whatsoever, for use in a game like this.

I don't think you thought that through very well. Assuming we have the same amount of total armor, breaking down the hitboxes to that level would let pinpoint damage kill you even faster.

Because, let's say for example a side torso segment is 5m tall by 2m wide, so 10m square surface area and has 60 HP. If I hit it with a dual AC20, it takes 40 damage. You have 20 armor left. Painful, but not dead or taking crit damage.

If you distribute that 60hp across its surface area in 1m squares, each square would have 6 HP. The dual AC20 hit would do 6 armor damage and 34 structure damage, with a pretty good chance of critting whatever is in your side torso. As long as I can keep my fire focused in, say, a 2x2m grid, I'd only have to burn though 24 armor before I can rip your internals out with impunity.

If I'm using a high-alpha build it probably wouldn't matter though, because the overflow from each individual hit would gut your internals long before I strip your armor. I'm pretty sure this is not the slugging match you're looking for.

It *would* shift the balance very strongly in favor of ballistics and PPCs though, since lasers would have to stay focused on a single tile through their whole duration to benefit the same way a ballistic or PPC hit does.

It would also make IS pulse lasers much more dangerous, especially on mechs with good duration quirks, because they will have much less trouble drilling through a 2x2 or 3x3 tile segment of your side torso than the full ST armor they currently have to deal with.

[Frostiken]

E Rommel, on 15 April 2015 - 07:45 PM, said:

I don't think you thought that through very well. Assuming we have the same amount of total armor, breaking down the hitboxes to that level would let pinpoint damage kill you even faster.

I don't think you thought that through very well. An M1 Abrams doesn't have 1.5 meters of armor SPREAD OUT across its front, it has 1.5 meters of armor across the entire thing. Pick a spot on the front of the turret, it will have the same thickness armor as the spot three inches to the left and right.

If my mech has 40 points of armor in the left torso, it should be broken down into small segments, each with 40 armor. If you hit one area with your AC20, it now has 20 armor. You fire again, and you hit just to the left. Now I have two weak points on my torso with 20 armor, and the rest of it has 40 still. Because you didn't hit them.

I honestly cannot figure out why you thought for even a second that 'spreading the armor' was at all what I was talking about, or how that would be a good idea whatsoever.

Sure, you would probably have to dial down how much protection armor itself gives you, but there's no rational explanation for why we're combining a ****** system designed for dice-rolling tabletop gameplay with a ****** system designed for tryhards and dropouts who were too terrible to play Counter Strike or Unreal Tournament, so they went to a game where the targets are the size of apartment buildings.

Edited by Frostiken, 15 April 2015 - 08:01 PM.

[Cementi]

Perfect convergance up to the optimal range is fine. Once you go past that weapons should spread more and more as you get out to a weapons maximum.

[Alex Morgaine]

E Rommel, on 08 April 2015 - 02:27 PM, said:

...
Regarding heat scale, that's a tough one to tackle because most mechs in this game run really hot, and slamming their heat cap all the way down to 30 would make playing them a painful experience. Plus as mentioned I don't consider TTK to be too short, so I really don't see the appeal of throwing the book at any mech carrying more than a single PPC (poor Awesome).

I suppose substantially faster cooling might be a good tradeoff for reduced cap, but it'd have to be fast enough that you can be heat neutral or close to it with most builds (for example, my HBK-4P build would be heat neutral in TT thanks to DHS, in MWO it's around 30% heat efficient).

So I'd rather not nerf my heat capacity into oblivion. If it happens anyway, I would at least want a 10 second "grace period" to cool down after hitting heat cap, so that I can get away with redlining my heat as long as my heat sinks can pull me back down in time.

Because shutting down or Stackpoling the instant you hit 30 heat would suck for a lot of mechs. Adder and Warhawk come to mind.
...

Thus. This is what people against a 30pt limit forget and keep forgetting... a ten second window to let heat sinks do their thing is exactly how the heat scale would need to work out or yeah, it wouldn't work. Hell, the "penalties at 101%" style we have now would still work fine. just... faster.

Iunno, at this point the heat system at least let's you dakka with energy without stackpoling on the first mlaser. Personally, hoverjets feels like more of a pressing issue to me. Maybe velocity quirks to certain varients? Anyway heat, cof... id like to see torso/head limits on convergence, arms depending on lower actuators or not.

Edited by Frosty Brand, 15 April 2015 - 09:01 PM.

[Y E O N N E]

Ed Steele, on 15 April 2015 - 07:29 PM, said:

Look up "recoilless rifle". Also MWO is set in 3052 which is 1037 years in the future! Look at how much technology has changed from 978 AD to 2015 AD and some of the tech which was recovered during that time had been "lostech" from Roman times. Also Gauss Rifles would have next to no recoil and Lasers would not have any recoil.

Gauss rifles definitely have recoil. You are trying to accelerate a mass and, by Newton's Laws, there is a reaction equal in magnitude but opposite in direction to the force moving the projectile. The only reason the projectile moves is because you are more massive.

It's just like a conventional gun, but using electromagnetic forces instead of gas expansion to shoot the round.

[Ratpoison]

Frostiken, on 15 April 2015 - 07:17 PM, said:

Yeah, except what you aren't considering is that the same people shouting for pixel-perfect weapon convergence are also the first people to cry a river of tears if their precious gauss rifle actually starts generating heat, like it should in reality, or that the weapons deviate from the tabletop-defined ranges and damage values, or that mech armor levels and damage models deviate from tabletop rules.

If tabletop Battletech were designed so that every single shot could go exactly where you told it to go, do you seriously ******* think that the rules used would mimic anything even close to what we have?

Not to mention we're already broken the balance of the game, because tabletop had no provision to account for the size and shape of mechs. Do you really think the tabletop rules were made to account for the fact that the Atlas side torsos are easier to hit than the center torso? Every single Mechwarrior game has avoided addressing this and at this point people just delude themselves into thinking it's "balance". People are even saying that blowing up a Timberwolf engine by shooting its ears is 'fair'. No, it's complete nonsense.

Battletech was never about coring through a single weak point, it was about slugging matches between mechs back and forth. Unless you hit the cockpit, there was almost zero instances of this ******** you get in-game where a Raven crests and hill and is killed faster than it can even throw the throttle in reverse.

If you want to have pixel-perfect weapon convergence so you can jerk it about your skill, then the Mechwarrior rules need to dramatically change to accommodate it. There's a reason why mechwarrior games have never attracted any seriously large crowd of gamers, and the asinine nonsense balance and metagame gimmicks are a big reason why.

If you want to have Unreal Tournament: Mech Edition, then make a game that's actually balanced around your fantasy of playing a first-person version of MechAssault (you ******* pleb), stop trying to shoehorn completely ridiculous tabletop rules into a 3D shooter, where half the weapons have absolutely no business performing as they have.

I've played every single Mechwarrior game. There has yet to be a single actually *balanced* one. Every single one has been a mess, depending on how deeply you want to look into it.

You're really grasping at straws by trying to bring up all those unrelated things and grouping them with opposing opinions. Not a single word in there matters to the discussion. Disappointing.

[Frostiken]

tortuousGoddess, on 15 April 2015 - 09:58 PM, said:

You're really grasping at straws by trying to bring up all those unrelated things and grouping them with opposing opinions. Not a single word in there matters to the discussion. Disappointing.

You seem to have confused me with someone who gives a shred of a **** about your self-righteous reviews of their posts.

Edited by Frostiken, 15 April 2015 - 11:01 PM.