pbiggz, on 12 April 2015 - 10:27 AM, said:
Hot tootin' cod-whalloping goody for Planetside. Funnily enough...that looked like a fast-paced twitch-shooty infantry-scale game where you fire one weapon at a time. But let's go with it, shall we?
Assume for the moment that weapons fire in MWO is crosshair-accurate, as that Peanutside 2 video demonstrated, while one is perfectly stationary, zeroed out on heat, and firing a single weapon at a time. Move, and you lose five degrees of deviation from your accuracy. Generate heat, and you lose another five degrees of deviation, total ten. Fire another weapon(s) simultaneously with the first and you lose five degrees of deviation per additional weapon fired. Ergo, a typical 5ML Jenner, just as a random, relatively well understood example, performing a typical Jenner drive-by would fire at what he aimed at, save for:
-Moving (+5 DoD)
-Heat (+5 DoD)
-Extra Weapons (4x +5 DoD)
So...this Jenner would hit where he aimed at...within thirty degrees of deviation of his aimpoint. For doing what a light 'Mech is supposed to do and shooting while on the scoot.
Now, in Pontoonside 2, you can alter your stance, fire in bursts, or (assuming, as I haven't played Pattywackside 2) select attachments/specialties that allow you to tighten up your groupings. I.e. you can adjust either your playstyle or your character/class build to regain much of the accuracy lost to you. Let's examine this concept as it pertains to MWO.
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Altered Stance: BattleMechs cannot crouch or go prone. The closest to 'altered stance' a 'Mech can do is to throttle down and move below its maximum speed. Convergence proposals in this and other threads generally do not allow for BattleMechs to increase the accuracy of their weapons fire/decrease CoF/bloom/recoil/whatever by slowing down. They may offer reduced penalties if the 'Mech is at a complete standstill, but cutting throttle to, say, 60% to simulate walk rather than run does not, in most convergence screamo's ideal worlds, offer any benefit to one's accuracy.
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Burst Fire: BattleMech weapons do not really have rates of fire, as Pastaside 2 understands it anyways. Each weapon fires, then reloads/recoils, and otherwise finishes all its stuff before being ready to fire again. In effect, every BattleTech weapon discharges its entire clip in one shot, resetting to rest/default state between every individual shot. The closest one can come to burst-firing in MechWarrior would be to fire less than one's full allotment of weaponry at one time, which is already typically the case in combat despite the convergence folks' bellowing that all everyone does is run around the map for ten minutes with their face smashed against the alpha button.
Convergence proposals, in this thread and others,
do usually include a token proviso for simulating burst fire's improved accuracy in other FPS games, in that they're generally willing to allow single-fired weapons to avoid some small portion of the CoF accuracy penalties, but they fail to realize that comparative firepower levels in MWO are so much enormously greater between, say, a Blackjack and a Dire Whale than between, say, and SMG guy and a rifleman in Poloside 2, that the forced-singlefire thing intended to remove alpha strikes from the game and increase TTK half-cripples any 'Mech which cannot, as Fup mentioned, carry massive single-shot weapons. It also does absolutely nothing to address the fact that unlike in Pandaside 2, where a close-combat guy can only carry
one shotgun which has an advantage against one assault rifle but does not instantly obsolete that AR, a 'Mech in MWO could carry five or six shotguns whose heavily increased stacking DoD effects wouldn't matter for snot because it's a spreadifre weapon anyways and is intended to still be competitive when one cannot precisely aim it.
Nor do these proposals tend to acknowledge that there's a difference between firing three medium lasers on a Spider and firing nine PPCs on a Direstar. The same (extremely unforgiving) accuracy penalties are applied to both 'Mechs, as if the Spider's triple-medium 'alpja strike' is every bit as threatening as a Dire Whale sitting on the Erase Button. The relative strengths, weaknesses, roles, and combat abilities of any given 'Mech are
never taken into account by convergence screamos, who insist that a Spider firing its three-laser alpha must suffer 100% of the same penalties as a Dire Whale lighting off ten lasers and a pair of gauss rifles.
Because we all know Spiders are actually the most broken 'Mechs in MWO.
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Build Tools: You can attach a grip on your guns in Call of Doty, and presumably Powwowside 2, in order to curtail recoil. You can select perks or specialties or whatever you have to in order to try and specialize yourself as a marksman rather than a brutal thug of an assault trooper. Convergence proposals I've seen in this thread or others don't even acknowledge this sort of back-and-forth exists in other games - they prefer to simply point out that these other games have CoF effects and aren't scheiss without ever pointing out that said games also offer the player many,
many tools to mitigate CoF and fight accurately. As is evinced by the fact that snipers are still very dangerous in these other games, despite the fact that convergence peoples' ideal CoF solution would effectively eliminate long-distance combat in MWO.
I have yet to see a convergence proposal which even so much as acknowledges that targeting computers exist, let alone that equipping one might actually serve to potentially improve one's targeting. I have yet to see convergence proposals which state that while we're going about rebuilding the game's fundamental combat engine, we should redux our skilltree systems so pilots can potentially make meaningful choices in said trees, some of which could focus on being more accurate (at the cost of, say, heat management or mobility skills, perhaps?)
Frankly, I have yet to see a convergence proposal which offers any
give in the give-and-take accuracy equation. You can miss, miss
hard, or miss so loltastically crezzeh that it makes for a funny YT video, but you sure as shootin' can't
hit.
So. While we're on the tangent of pointing out how games
which do not play a damn thing like MWO does implement CoF effects, how about we analyze why those systems work in those games and why players consider them fair, instead of simply wailing about how Spiders firing three medium lasers at the same time Breaks The Spirit of the Tabletop Game and we should totes legit get some hot-n-sloppy spread on all this stuff.
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