1126 replies to this topic

[Quxudica]

Kuritaclan, on 09 April 2015 - 02:46 AM, said:

Funfact is that even the past of a BT universe that has slow progress has over 1000 years to evolve. Since we had a progress in semi conductors within three dacades it is hard to suggest a future that does not achive it within 1000 years. Also looking back from the 80's there was a noticable progress in computers and technic (not that public known or aware) but in military+educational institution's going on. Speaking of Targeting computers - this is not a "own new tech" it is just advanced tech. http://en.wikipedia....i/Moore%27s_law was announced 165 and final in 1975. Even if the BT Creators didn't know it, it is just a part of the past the BT universe progressed out of.

You keep trying to force the BT universe into being a future of our real world, it isn't. It's the future of a fictional earth the creators imagined in the 80's, it doesn't really matter if tech existed in real life at the time they didn't know about - because they didn't include it. Accuracy is notoriously bad in BT, this is as much a balancing mechanic as anything but the lore explains it as being the result of primitive targeting computers (if mechs had Tac's at all, some didn't.)

The ultimate point is it doesn't matter what the tech is now, or what the tech was then, the only thing that matters is what the BT universe says exists. Some of this is altered for the sake of converting to an FPS from a TT strategy, but much of it remains and changing it is both unneccisary and causes problems.

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No it doesn't. if you have like 4 laser beams you charge with the enemy and they contract on the target in diffrent speed because some are light and others are heavy lasers you don't get a convergence until you do not move your aim anymore and the enemy target standing still, this however will have rng in it if you have two moving objects because of relative speed and diffrent readjustment speeds of diffrent weapon systems form diffrent angels. - We have direct and indirect autofocus in cameras this system is not high tech. And it is wan't back then (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autofocus). So nopp focus systems were around and arn't a brake up to the BT universe. The trackingsystems are accurate back then and now. So they will be in a fictional future. - All what you wanna have is making something that is actually working perfectly fine to not work in the future, because you are in a mindset that everything would be insta popcorn. I do not think so and i'm fine with what we have. And for me it is over all absolutly plaussible for a future even if the past of this futre has began back in the 80's.

Again, real life tech doesn't matter as its just not how things work in BT. More importantly however, this is a change primarily for the sake of improving gameplay and reintroducing depth to the combat. Perfect convergence for every weapon on a mech, combined with a binary heat system that includes no penalties, has resulted in a game where the only method of attack is Alpha Strike 95% of the time. It's also caused the introduction of unpopular bandaids like ghost heat and gauss charge times and numerous other things that try to treat the symptoms and ignore the root cause.

If you break convergence so you need to aim different weapon sets separately, you reduce the increasingly absurd amounts of spike damage MWO has steadily been becoming focused on and increase the effect of pilot skill and introduce more interesting decisions to be made. It returns to being something closer to the "Thinking Mans Shooter" it was initially marketed as.

In short I shouldn't be able to instantly drop a 50 point alpha with pixel precision all at once (ontop of suffering no penalty for doing so). I should have to invest more effort to achieve the kind of results that 50 point alpha achieves. This is why so many mechs are subpar, their hit boxes just cannot handle this kind of instant damage that cannot be mitigated.

There needs to be a trade off when choosing your method of firing your mechs weapons. Alpha Strikes should be high heat and low accuracy in exchange for major burst, smaller more considered fire should be the go to for standard combat and precision attacks. Yes current convergence works, but it also diminishes the game and is (along with the heat system) the root cause of numerous issues the game has struggled with for years.

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this however will have rng in it if you have two moving objects because of relative speed

That's not what RNG means, RNG means Random Number Generator and suggests the idea of hidden "Dice Rolls" the player cannot effect changing the outcome of a shot.

[Bloody]

imho Convergence should be removed and /or the whole player skill tree and individual mech trees be redone.

There should be a pilot tree where the player has to choose for Convergence over Speed over Durability, like the skill tree from say WoW. Then each mech should have its own Skill tree to grind up , also split up for say Damage, Convergence, Speed , Durability or even being able to unlock Modules at the bottom. the TTK is too short for this game imho and needs a shakeup

that said this requires a TON of work and PGI with their limited resources and imagination cannot possibly do this, they cannot even produce more maps FFS.

[Kuritaclan]

Doman Hugin, on 09 April 2015 - 02:57 AM, said:

I think a lot of people forget that although BattleTech is a future fiction writen in the past and could not know how we of the present would veiw it, they did give us a point of reference in telling us how we should look at it.

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CENTURIES OF WAR
In the resulting power vacuum, the rulers of the realms now called the Successor States fought endless, brutal wars, each seeking to re-establish the Star League under his own leadership. In three hundred years of conflict, the Successor Lords accomplished little save to blast humankind virtually back to the Stone Age. By the time the third of the so-called Succession Wars ended, humanity had lost nearly every technological advance that the Star League had made possible; only stringent restrictions on destroying JumpShips, DropShips, BattleMechs and other irreplaceable technologies of war allowed interstellar combat to continue. As the Successor States battered each other senseless, the fighting ground down to endless border skirmishes in which no combatant gained significant advantage.
As the Inner Sphere warred, so did the descendants of the SLDF. Within two decades of planetfall, the men and women who had followed Kerensky in order to preserve the ideals of the Star League had betrayed those ideals and degenerated into vicious, fratricidal conflict. Determined to salvage something from the wreckage of his father’s dream,

Between 3025 and 3050 there have been great leaps of discoveries but the scientists and techs are only just figuring out how all this ancient tech works. Saying they've had plenty of time to catch up is just argumentative as the books, lore and everything BattleTech says they haven't.

You and many others overlook the subordinate clause. You allways refere to: "to blast humankind virtually back to the Stone Age" or "had lost nearly every technological" - but you allways do not take into account : "that the Star League had made possible" This is the mainproblem of the view. The Star League was a progress accelerator, but it was founded in the 2500's, the progess that was made before e.g. 500 years didn't been lost since the the lose of tech is only the lose of "star league advanced tech". - lost tech is something like HPG, not how to build components for battlemechs since they were inventd a full century before star league. - It is refered to that no new battlemechs could be designed and produced or new tech come into the mechs - but all mechs which were designd up untill this point were fully maintainable and in some cases produceable by industry through the full history up until clan invasion.

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Instead of each weapon being gimballed have them fixed in each location, but set up by your tech crew to converge at either the weapons optimal range or a mech bay chosen range.

So if you fire one weapon it goes to the cross hairs the second will fire at its pre-setup path, or fire them chained to give the mech time to adjust the aim for the next weapon.

Of course if you can get the distance just right you can still get your alpha.

You can modify this, torsos and arms are independent so they could converge independently so that at any range you could get 3 weapons to converge, any others would be pre-set.

With this method most weapons fired together would probably hit the target just not at the same point, if you fire an ERLL and a SPL one would probably miss.

I do not support this idea. - I could however support the idea to remove the option to have arm locked after a certain number of games. So players are forced to then play without it. But this however needs an interactive UI, what tells the newplayer you have passed 50 games. You have only 50 games to get better with your aim, after 100 games completed the option of armlock is no longer available. Or something like this. There need also be a learning curve. Not an even bigger gap you get thrown into as a new player, who is allready confused and needs to adapt. However by design there are mechs what feature same weapon stacking in a location with at least 3+ of the same kind - they do not disappear and will become the go to mechs, while the chassis which don't feature such things will become absolutly garbage. Damn well done. Instead of fixing a problem you creat a bunch of usfull mechs and a bunch of ****. This weapon location problem also will become meaningfull with locked kokus points or other thinkable interference mechanisms to disable the possibility to aim correctly with all your weapons on a spot you like to hit.

Bloody, on 09 April 2015 - 03:11 AM, said:

imho Convergence should be removed and /or the whole player skill tree and individual mech trees be redone.

There should be a pilot tree where the player has to choose for Convergence over Speed over Durability, like the skill tree from say WoW. Then each mech should have its own Skill tree to grind up , also split up for say Damage, Convergence, Speed , Durability or even being able to unlock Modules at the bottom. the TTK is too short for this game imho and needs a shakeup

that said this requires a TON of work and PGI with their limited resources and imagination cannot possibly do this, they cannot even produce more maps FFS.

virutaly even if this happens and the TTK rise + the main demand of many players is "GIVE US BIGGER MAPS" - i don't know what this game will become. Or in other words the gametime of a round will see a major increase, while rounds have the tendece to be short with the gamestyle of now, this would lead to 20 up to 30min games in solqueue. TTK is fine on CW i mostly burn through 2-3 mechs with occacional use of the 4th within the 30min gameplay - if such drastic changes would occure + bigger maps we have like 1 hour cw games. Humm idk if this is the best for "quick evening entertainment" - maybee such changes will cause a major drift in the still low playerbase with not that much of new players stepping into this game? Did you guys ever thought of this, while supposing such ideas.

Edited by Kuritaclan, 09 April 2015 - 03:53 AM.

[Quxudica]

Bloody, on 09 April 2015 - 03:11 AM, said:

imho Convergence should be removed and /or the whole player skill tree and individual mech trees be redone.

There should be a pilot tree where the player has to choose for Convergence over Speed over Durability, like the skill tree from say WoW. Then each mech should have its own Skill tree to grind up , also split up for say Damage, Convergence, Speed , Durability or even being able to unlock Modules at the bottom. the TTK is too short for this game imho and needs a shakeup

that said this requires a TON of work and PGI with their limited resources and imagination cannot possibly do this, they cannot even produce more maps FFS.

I'd rather see such a system come in the form of mech based upgrades or gear and not a skill tree For instance give the option to choose an arm component that increases weapon precision or an arm component that lets you increase internal structure strength - and make them mutually exclusive. No grinding tree, just an equipment/mechanical choice you have to make for your mech that lets you specialize it to the build you chose. Reinforce that this is supposed to be a Simulation (or at least a Sim-lite) and that these are vehicles, not RPG characters.

[Doman Hugin]

"that the Star League had made possible" is a writer writing about battletech refering to battletech, and "to blast humankind virtually back to the Stone Age" might just mean the stuff between those two points as well.

That's how i read it. That's the beauty of the written word and the curse of the internet, how two people read something can be different.

[R Razor]

Ed Steele, on 08 April 2015 - 10:16 PM, said:

Not enough gunpowder?

Okay that was funny..............but really, I just don't think the "future tech so better fire control" argument can be used when you take weapons ranges into account. As Quxudica said, there are many ways they could improve this game and I think removing convergence (or any number of other suggestions like setting it to max range for the weapon or the heat scale performance degradations) would certainly help it.........increase TTK and you increase the fun quotient in my opinion. If I wanted to play a strictly FPS game I'd play BF or COD, I want Battletech / Mechwarrior, giant machines slugging it out.

[Kh0rn]

Giant machines slugging it out...check.

[Kuritaclan]

Doman Hugin, on 09 April 2015 - 04:18 AM, said:

"that the Star League had made possible" is a writer writing about battletech refering to battletech, and "to blast humankind virtually back to the Stone Age" might just mean the stuff between those two points as well.

That's how i read it. That's the beauty of the written word and the curse of the internet, how two people read something can be different.

I agree with the intepretation. But non of both are wrong, they only feature another standpoint belonging to the weight of both statements which are inconsistent to another. We don't have the power to overcome this - or better to say the power is in the hands of PGI.

R Razor, on 09 April 2015 - 04:43 AM, said:

Okay that was funny..............but really, I just don't think the "future tech so better fire control" argument can be used when you take weapons ranges into account. As Quxudica said, there are many ways they could improve this game and I think removing convergence (or any number of other suggestions like setting it to max range for the weapon or the heat scale performance degradations) would certainly help it.........increase TTK and you increase the fun quotient in my opinion. If I wanted to play a strictly FPS game I'd play BF or COD, I want Battletech / Mechwarrior, giant machines slugging it out.

What you wanna do, or even the majority of the posters in this post, is not likely the same what all players want the game to be nor what the developers think about it. Or in other words, this thread won't give us an awnser to the question: "Do The Majority Of Players Want To Get Rid Of Convergence?" - since it does not represent the majority nor is there any reasonable survey what will tell us what the players wanna have.

Edited by Kuritaclan, 09 April 2015 - 05:06 AM.

[R Razor]

Kh0rn, on 09 April 2015 - 04:57 AM, said:

Giant machines slugging it out...check.

No, COD with different skins and more customization...........instead of a rifle, pistol and grenades I can fire many "rifles" all at once, but it's still an FPS and not a Mech simulator in the vein of a true Mechwarrior / Battletech experience.

[Midax]

MWO is a game. We should not care about how realistic pin point convergence is or isn't. What matters is the effect on game play and the effect is no good. We have Assault mechs focused fired and get cored in seconds, pop tarts that can land PPC, AC, or Gauss salvos to CT from mid air, and Light mechs that can take 8 SL run full speed and land every shot on the back of another mech. All of which should be rare and the devs have but in Band-Aid fixes to try to reduce it. We have armor inflation to try to over come the pin point targeting and ghost heat to break up weapon groups, but they don't work well.

[Kh0rn]

As awesome as I the idea is I really doubt we will ever get a full blown mech sim of Battletech.

[R Razor]

Kh0rn, on 09 April 2015 - 05:35 AM, said:

As awesome as I the idea is I really doubt we will ever get a full blown mech sim of Battletech.

Sadly I suspect you're right.

[Varvar86]

I want more simultaion. It will be great. For FPS i got BF and CS.
Let it be no convergence for anything mounted in torsos.
For example convergence set on 500m - In game i see it like 1 point dot - on 500 m it that show where exactly weapons at torso are aimed to.

When coming closer to target - 1dot separates on two dots one represents left torso and second - right torso weapons. They may be marked for colors or etc. The closer you get the wider points will be on your screen representing where torso mounted weapons will hit. They also auto configures when you aim at long range target ,and then change to the closer target (like distance showing icon working now)

If you go back from target or its furhter than 500m your aiming dots start to wide again but LT and RT aim sectors change sides, actually crosses.

It will be interesting to change mech convergence range point (that not exeed max weapon range) between the games

I already saw this in some game, but can't remember where

Edited by Varvar86, 09 April 2015 - 05:50 AM.

[NocturnalBeast]

Quxudica, on 08 April 2015 - 10:31 PM, said:

A future based on the 1980's. Computers are very very primitive. But this is all irrelevant, the reason for changing convergence is not lore accuracy - it's to improve game play.

Just say it, you want to Nerf convergence as a handicap for bad players.

Edited by Ed Steele, 09 April 2015 - 07:16 AM.

[Doman Hugin]

Ed Steele, on 09 April 2015 - 07:16 AM, said:

Just say it, you want to Nerf convergence as a handicap for bad players.

No we want to nerf the FPS and get MechWarrior

[Weeny Machine]

Ed Steele, on 09 April 2015 - 07:16 AM, said:

Just say it, you want to Nerf convergence as a handicap for bad players.

Wow...I hadn't see this coming. I mean the "U R BAD!1!!!" card came as a real surprise *eyeroll*However, I can't see how fights which demand more tactic instead of lolalphalol runcover lolalpha is less skillful. I would say it is the other way around

Edited by Bush Hopper, 09 April 2015 - 08:13 AM.

[Hotthedd]

Ed Steele, on 09 April 2015 - 07:16 AM, said:

Just say it, you want to Nerf convergence as a handicap for bad players.

How does making something require MORE skill (i.e. fixed convergence, reticle shake while moving, cone of fire penalty for running too hot) cater to LESS skilled players?

To me it would seem the exact opposite. ANY fool can point-n-click.

[Summon3r]

Doman Hugin, on 09 April 2015 - 07:28 AM, said:

No we want to nerf the FPS and get MechWarrior

i would pay top dollar for this to happen, again ill point to WoT, and the accuracy cone when you stop it gets smalleer when on the move it gets bigger. skills and equipment can improve this

[Lightfoot]

Telmasa, on 08 April 2015 - 05:46 PM, said:

Underlined part is just so not true....


@ Overall discussion:

For the love of God and all that is good in the gaming world,
DO
NOT
ADD
RNG

2, 3 years of complete *cancer* has been going on over on World of Tanks thanks *directly* to everything in that game being affected by force-injected RNG dice rolls.

Do NOT clone that epic level of ridiculous bull s*** here, dear god NO.

We already have enough levels of stupid gimmicks to create a neverending meta-B.S.-contest here in MW:O, do NOT make it any worse.

I didn't say anything about fuzzy dice rolls, you must have read some other post about that. I hate that they ruined SSRMs with what is really just a cheap hot-fix to have them hit with a 12-14% chance of hitting any one section when the original simulated version placed Skill as the accuracy determining factor.

When I say Battle Tech balance is (mostly) correct I mean the damage, tonnage, heat, and range of the weapons is very well balanced. A few problems occur when you add humans in a real time simulation, MechWarrior games, but it all works pretty well. If Clan Tech needs to be balanced as a game element, that's okay, but a different reason.

MWO's problem at the moment is that PGI ruined all the long range weapon's accuracy to force the current Laser Brawl 2015 version of MWO on everyone. This makes life really short if you pilot a Light mech with normal hit boxes and I don't think PGI realized this would happen. But Lasers in MechWarrior have always been the EZ Killers. You just point and click the mouse and so what if there is a little tracking for the laser duration, no real aiming or timing was required and that spells death to a Light mech. As damaging as PPCs and the old 1200-1500 meter per second Gauss were, they still missed alot, especially a zig-zagging Light.

But no, absolutely NO to fuzzy dice rolls determining weapon hits. I would quit MWO and never look back.

[Marmon Rzohr]

Doman Hugin, on 09 April 2015 - 07:28 AM, said:

No we want to nerf the FPS and get MechWarrior

Why do you think removing convergence will help ?

The cornerstones of MechWarrior combat are:

1) Multiple weapon management
2) Location damage
3) Heat

Removing convergence doesn't help any of the core aspects. It doesn't incentivize varied, multi-weapon loadouts. It doesn't incentivize precise fire (in fact it kinda nerfs this concept).

If removing convergence is just here to get rid of high, pinpoint burst damage, then a much more logical solution would be to simply implement heat penalties based on the alpha damage/DPS of the weapons fired. Why not use the DPS restriction mechanic that's already a core part of the game ?

Or you could do a hundred other tweaks to weapon mechanics. For example: If you fire more than, let's say, 25 direct damage, your other weapons go on a 1.5 cooldown (the weapons fired cooldown normally). Yeah it's a crude example, but just to illustrate there are numerous ways to tackle the problem. Especially if one day there will be a place where one can clearly read about all the gameplay mechanics.

I get what people want from the game, but everything you get from removing convergence you can get from a dozen other changes most of which are significantly less complicated or frustrating to play with. It makes no sense to me to change the aiming system in order to nerf weapon damage.

Edited by Marmon Rzohr, 09 April 2015 - 08:26 AM.