15 replies to this topic

[Dino Might]

Dear PGI,

First, let me say that I love this game. It's great. I appreciate it. I want to contribute ideas to help make it better.

Like you, I am very tired of all the different recommendations/rants that only address one part of the problem and rely on complex solutions. So I offer up this idea in hopes you will consider it, maybe run a bit with it on the test server to see if it could be massaged into a superior set of game mechanics that will resolve just about everyone's gripes - this is from a post I made in general discussion forum, not being content to let it die amidst the flame war brewing there:

How to fix the problems with balance, heat, too much boating, alphas-r-us, too low TTK?
1. Get rid of ghost heat entirely. It's confusing, sometimes buggy, and doesn't help balance.
2. Add heat scale penalties similar to tabletop. "But it won't work because TT calculates heat over 10 seconds!"
2a. Make the heat penalty calculations based on a running 10 second average. Example: If, in the last 10 seconds, your heat has averaged more than 14, you have a chance to shutdown.

This allows you to have the high alpha builds still, but they will not be able to continuously fire until they reach the heat cap. They will have to cool off for longer periods, and possibly suffer penalties if their cooling rate isn't high enough for the total heat they generated.

This makes alpha striking truly a last ditch effort for most mechs and not the norm. It doesn't force chain fire, but encourages it. This will spread damage over time more. You can reduce a lot of the clan nerfs that make those mechs arbitrarily hot to limit their firepower. Time to kill gets increased, so piloting big mechs is survivable. The assaults get more scary to the lights now, so the 100 tonners that whined so much about Locusts killing them will now have more time to get picked apart piece by piece, but the light pilot who is superior in 1v1 will still be able to kill him, if he doesn't make a mistake.

I think everyone wins...except the twitch shooter fans.


Other objections:
1. Quirks will need to be redone (many eliminated)
1a. Quirks are in a continual state of review and change, and this will not significantly change the workload over time, because the community will continue to find ways to exploit certain builds. With more and more powerful quirks, the variability in the system is higher and it allows for the tail of the "mech-power" distribution (most powerful mechs) to be too powerful compared to the average. Toning down the quirks will help reduce the difference in power between mechs/builds.

2. This is a new heat mechanic that will not be intuitive to players.
2a. The current heat mechanic is not intuitive and is more confusing than what can be explained in a simple tutorial. The current mechanic relies on players knowing ghost heat limits for every weapon as well as the heat generated by every weapon. My mechanic only requires knowing how much heat each weapon generates and understanding what a moving average means.

3. This will totally change weapon balance and weapon stats will have to be redone
3a. That's what the testing is for - it needs to be done. Weapon stats are still being changed on a regular basis. With this, you could leverage more from tabletop and then tweaking, and adjusting stats to balance will be far easier because you are working with a simpler rule-set.

Edited by Dino Might, 13 March 2015 - 06:30 AM.

[Varent]

Just throwing this out here. But you know they removed the 'Game Balance' section of the forums because it simply became a ***** fest that never ended and a process of beating a dead horse over and over again. How about we just let this die. k?

[Nothing Whatsoever]

I'd imagine that setting a lowered Heat Capacity could work, similar to what you seem to be suggesting.

[Dino Might]

Varent, on 13 March 2015 - 06:59 AM, said:

Just throwing this out here. But you know they removed the 'Game Balance' section of the forums because it simply became a ***** fest that never ended and a process of beating a dead horse over and over again. How about we just let this die. k?

I've been here for quite a while, and my goal is to help stop the never ending General Discussion rants. Now, considering I am biased, I can't simply guarantee that my idea is the best that has been suggested to-date, even though I think that. I need collective thinking on this to see if the idea has merit, and I need PGI to acknowledge in one of a few different ways:

1. We looked into this and it's too hard.
2. We looked into this and it makes things worse for reasons x, y, z.
3. We will look into this.
4. Shut up and stop bothering us with this.

The reason so many of these threads exist are:
1. People have complicated but very limited ideas that nobody will agree on (because everyone wants their own specific attribute addressed).
2. Nobody ever hears a response on whether this stuff is even read. I hope PGI reads this forum, but I'm not even sure.

Seriously, give me some feedback on why this wouldn't work and fix all of our collective woes.

[Varent]

The problem is (and this is the key), people think that PGI just doesn't look into these things. I think this is because a lot of people (as you mentioned above) have differences of opinion. PGI pretty much did regularly address most of the things that were brought up on the balance forums. The problem was often that a vocal minority did not like the state of the game and was pressing a bad image. Making it seem like it was horribly unbalanced which it was not.

Just as an example. 1. I like ghost heat, I know why it's there, I see its point. 2. & 3. While your ideas for heat scaling are fine, they wouldn't eliminate the need for ghost heat. They specifically don't want you boating all one weapon. Most mechs do not do that in the battletech universe and it creates a bad gaming environment.

And that's just addressing your first three points. They have addressed these things multiple times. Most players understand and get it. Hence the balance section was taken out.

[Dino Might]

Maybe I wasn't active enough, but the discussions I saw never mentioned a running average heat scale. Ghost heat would no longer be necessary with a significantly reduced heat cap.

Boating is not the problem. Ppfld is. Hunchback 4p is a stock boat. It does not break the game and is lore friendly. If you are still worried about boating, adjust the hard point inflation.

[Varent]

And this is where things go awry and people disagree. Which is what I am getting at. Regardless. They have made their decision and it is balanced (in my opinion personally) and probably in the game designers opinion, instead of the vocal minority. Which is why they removed the section.

[Dino Might]

Well, thanks for at least voicing an opinion. It's more than most. I think of there was a thread with active discussion, on the actual points made, there would be some progress. I hope that those who want to keep things exactly as they are should explain why that is better than the other proposed solutions.

[Varent]

That is against human nature. If you are happy with how things are, why even bother? That is why they removed the balance thread. It literally represented about 5% of the population arguing.

[Dino Might]

That assumption is as faulty as my own, thinking that the majority is in each of our respective camps. Just because people are lazy does not mean they are content with something.

[Firewuff]

Average hear scale is even more confusing thanghost heat. At least that is visible when you hit the button. I would like to see heat penalties based on your current heat so spiking to 80% your movement and torso twist slow down dramatically. This make high alpha boats slow to retreat.to cover and easy targets. Makes running a firestarter hot all the time stupid bc you will be slow

[Dino Might]

Immediate heat penalties would make it impossible to reasonably scale down the heat cap threshhold and also overwhelmingly favor ballistics and long burn lasers. While it could definitely be managed, I think the running average is a better middle ground. Lorewise, it still works, and it's more than simple to create a visual heat scale that marks the running average. You could include both instantaneous heat and average heat if you wanted to, but I'd hardly say it's challenging to understand. Even the kids playing, while maybe not doing the actual calculations in their heads, will quickly gain an intuitive grasp of the mechanic. We have lots of real life control systems that display running averages because of the actual scientific principles concerned.

For example, any system that has the potential to degrade large metal components due to thermal stress will use running averages, because large metal components will not instantly heat and cool uniformly. The associated stresses are not applied instantaneously because the temperature gradient does not apply instantaneously. So, if you applied a delta of 100 degrees Fareinheit on one side of a 2" steel plate for 2 seconds, the plate would be fine, because it wouldn't have time to heat up enough to cause enough thermal stress to degrade it. But if you have a running average of a 100 degree delta applied to one side over 10 minutes, that's going to cause some significant thermal stresses and may crack or fracture your plate depending on the design.

Just about every engineered design that considers stress on metal uses running average calculations to estimate what is more precisely modeled with finite element models run through series of timesteps.

[Vegalas]

uh, you probably already know this is just a game right? What I mean is this. What's the point of starting explain lag as a space time disruption in the Mechwarrior universe which is caused by an unstable black hole or other spacial phenomenon? What's your point in all this? You should know that repairing something that isn't broken is useless. Modified lore isn't the broken part of a game either. Just merely curious, have you ever played Starcraft 2 by any chance? You remind of somebody.

[Telmasa]

- Ghost heat is fine. It needs more fine-tuning to fully achieve its intentions, but it works. Frankly your second suggestion is really just a tweak of ghost heat.

- While your angle is slightly different, I agree that quirks need to be completely redone (even if it has to be over time, given workload problems). I like the trend of the new "iterative" quirks, it's so much better in terms of balance than the first "quirkening" pass.
I still focus down thunderbolt 9s' and firestarters these days, just out of habit, despite them no longer having overwhelming quirks - that's how overwhelming those mechs used to be, and why any mech with more than 25% total weapon quirks (that isn't a lolcust) breaks the game.

- I think weapon balance is in a good place. The only outliers right now are CERML and CSSRMs, everything else feels about right.

[Vegalas]

Imho quirks should be part of a mech specific tech tree but that's just my opinion. Atleast the quirks could be found somewhere ingame.

[Nightmare1]

Still scratching my head over how much everyone dislikes Alphas. I've already find them to largely be a waste of time and heat. Can't imagine what will happen with such a scale implemented. No thanks; I'd rather have the beast I know than the one I don't.

Although...removing Ghost Heat would be awful nice.