63 replies to this topic

[Felicitatem Parco]

Hardcore TT mode, huh?

So: instantaneous burn lasers (no burn time), single-slug Autocannons for clan and IS, and Clan ERML dealing 7dmg,5 heat when ISLL deals 8/8...

Sure, I would love to test Clan versus Clan mode as the OP suggests, because there would be no reason to play inner sphere mechs.

[1453 R]

Let's add a dissenting opinion to the yes-train, just to make things interesting.

Ahem: Absolutely not, and I would argue myself blue in the face to try and forestall the devs from wasting time and resources on this boondoggle. It would be a disaster.

i'm sorry Lordred, but a pen and paper game from the eighties just doesn't translate properly to a modern(ish) FPS. Simply the ability for players to aim rather than blast in the general direction of the enemy and let RNGesus sort them out pretty much completely and utterly ruins the TT damage formulas. The whole "10 second DPS" is a fantastic way to homogenize every weapon in the game and ensure that none of them feel right (I don't particularly favor the 4-second DPS approach Piranha seems to've picked either, but it's better than 10s), and as for trying to force stock 'Mechs, as your proposed mode intends to do by slapping an hour and a ridiculous C-bill penalty onto every change made?

Well, first of all that's just a time tax that, once paid, offers no actual balance whatsoever. A MWO-optimized Victor with Endo and an XL and an improved armament and all that would still utterly obliterate any of the garbage stock 'Mechs in the game - and they're pretty much all garbage even in a 'hardcore TT' mode. The only reason they didn't seem like garbage in TT was that any sort of customization was left right on out and thus everybody was using garbage.

Look, man. I understand that 3025ers hate everything, and I get that MWO feels like it's broken from the TT canon ruleset in ways that long-standing TT players don't like. I would like to see actual penalties for actuator crits, gyro crits, what-have-you, though the system would have to take into account how much more easily crits can be achieved in a game where one aims instead of rolls, but forced stock 'Mechs? Awful 10-second weapons? More convergence whining?

No MechWarrior game I remember playing had any of that, either. We played them anyways, and dare I say we enjoyed them. I, for one, have never once played a tabletop BT game; I'm in this whole thing because my parents bought a ten-year-old boy Mechwarrior 2 on a lark because he liked robots, and that was a done deal from there. I'm here because I've played every other MechWarrior game I could find to date, because I spent time and what little money a kid could scrounge up on every BattleTech novel he could find including Stackpole ones. I'm here because I bought little pewter 'Mech figurines and a couple of random TROs I found in a local comics shop without even knowing there was a TT game behind them because they were awesome collectibles for this thing I loved.

I am a MechWarrior fan and a BattleTech junkie, and at this point I actively dislike the TT game. Every time I turn around some 3025er or other is snarling and screeching about how Piranha has dared to try and re-interpret something that some nerd in FASA's back closet came up with in '89 to try and fit it more smoothly into a 2015 FPS arcade sim. They want the Clans gone, they want level 2 tech gone, they want customization gone, they want R&R back in, they want the entire public queue gone so Community Warfare is the only game mode 'because random idiots didn't just start fighting each other in tabletop! They fought for territory for their House!'

Go play tabletop already. The rules are still there, the TROs are still there, the little pewter figurines are still there. MegaMek is still there. If you absolutely positively cannot tolerate that MWO is a first-person arcade sim and not pretty graphics strapped onto MegaMek's table simulator engine, then I don't know why you're here. I'm grateful to the Founders for getting the game off the ground - I would've helped you guys if I'd had money when the Founders deal was a thing - but at this point I've chipped in more than my fair share to help keep the game off the ground. It's my game as much as yours, and I'm sick unto death of dyed-in-the-wool 3025ers who hate anything and everything that happened to the franchise after 1987 clamoring that 'this isn't a BattleTech game!"

Funny. I see BattleMechs. I see PPCs. I see damn dirty Smoked Jags who have no idea what's coming for them in fifteen-ish years. I see an Inner Sphere star map that looks a good bit different than I remember once one gets past the Periphery borders. Looks like a BattleTech game to me. Maybe you just need to be a bit more flexible in your thinking, and then it'd look like a BattleTech game to you, too.

[Mcgral18]

Prosperity Park, on 27 March 2015 - 06:42 AM, said:

Hardcore TT mode, huh?

So: instantaneous burn lasers (no burn time), single-slug Autocannons for clan and IS, and Clan ERML dealing 7dmg,5 heat when ISLL deals 8/8...

Sure, I would love to test Clan versus Clan mode as the OP suggests, because there would be no reason to play inner sphere mechs.

Bam, 3025 mode.


SHSs only. Have fun. (it wouldn't be as bad, since it has TT heat dissipation and TT weapon heat...unlike 4x TT heat)

[Lynx7725]

Mcgral18, on 27 March 2015 - 07:31 AM, said:

Bam, 3025 mode.

SHSs only. Have fun. (it wouldn't be as bad, since it has TT heat dissipation and TT weapon heat...unlike 4x TT heat)

Actually, amusingly the Zeus 6T works quite well with Level 1 tech. 3 SRM6s, a PPC and a pair of lasers, runs hot but still quite decent. Yes, 320 STD.

[Kristov Kerensky]

I would love to see that again...

Yeah, I said again, it's been done before and it was a blast, MPBT on GEnie by Kesmai many years ago, anyone else remember that? I know some of the old timers like myself who played that were here once upon a time.

Seems to me that they did full TT, complete with slow RoF and all that, and it worked really well. At a time when you paid by the hour to be online and had to pay to play by the hour on top of that, it had a huge playerbase, so I'm gonna guess it was rather fun for more than just a few of us old TT purists...

[dubplate]

With standard armor it would make for some very short games. There is a reason one of the first things they did was double armor values. I've never played TT but have heard that games last 15ish rounds? In TT that's 150 seconds, 2.5 minutes. I had a 4 minute match yesterday and that felt really fast. I would be curious how games would play out with more lethal damage but longer weapon times, but I wouldn't want PGI to put resources towards it. My understanding of TT is you tend to have a number of mechs so a few bad ones are expected to fill out the ranks, who gets to play those versions of mechs in a team game?

[Metus regem]

dubplate, on 27 March 2015 - 08:05 AM, said:

With standard armor it would make for some very short games. There is a reason one of the first things they did was double armor values. I've never played TT but have heard that games last 15ish rounds? In TT that's 150 seconds, 2.5 minutes. I had a 4 minute match yesterday and that felt really fast. I would be curious how games would play out with more lethal damage but longer weapon times, but I wouldn't want PGI to put resources towards it. My understanding of TT is you tend to have a number of mechs so a few bad ones are expected to fill out the ranks, who gets to play those versions of mechs in a team game?

They also sped up the RoF of the weapons to like 1/3 to half of the TT speed... that meant that with out double armour values, the games would be rather short.

[Lordred]

1453 R, on 27 March 2015 - 07:11 AM, said:

i'm sorry Lordred, but a pen and paper game from the eighties just doesn't translate properly to a modern(ish) FPS. Simply the ability for players to aim rather than blast in the general direction of the enemy and let RNGesus sort them out pretty much completely and utterly ruins the TT damage formulas. The whole "10 second DPS" is a fantastic way to homogenize every weapon in the game and ensure that none of them feel right (I don't particularly favor the 4-second DPS approach Piranha seems to've picked either, but it's better than 10s), and as for trying to force stock 'Mechs, as your proposed mode intends to do by slapping an hour and a ridiculous C-bill penalty onto every change made?

The RoF/Damage can be tweeked for each weapon to make it feel right, even buffed or nerfed a point of damage, but it would help bring weapons all in line, the problem we face is some weapons are just flat the weapon to take if you have the tonnage for it.

Why would such a short wait time for having a mechanic change parts on your mech be a problem. If you had played a TT campaign, you would know that it can take months to fully re-fit a Battlemech, and it is expensive to do, this would be much quicker, but still offer the ability to fully customize a mech. The numbers could be tweeked, but as I said this is only an idea for discussion. Not something for PGI to do.

1453 R, on 27 March 2015 - 07:11 AM, said:

Well, first of all that's just a time tax that, once paid, offers no actual balance whatsoever. A MWO-optimized Victor with Endo and an XL and an improved armament and all that would still utterly obliterate any of the garbage stock 'Mechs in the game - and they're pretty much all garbage even in a 'hardcore TT' mode. The only reason they didn't seem like garbage in TT was that any sort of customization was left right on out and thus everybody was using garbage.

With a properly working heat system, and weapons generating correct heat values, SHS builds are more then viable. The mechs are 'garbage' in MWO because we are at such a huge heat disadvantage due to how our heat system works, and how some of our weapons are hotter then TT, and all fire considerably faster.

1453 R, on 27 March 2015 - 07:11 AM, said:

Look, man. I understand that 3025ers hate everything, and I get that MWO feels like it's broken from the TT canon ruleset in ways that long-standing TT players don't like. I would like to see actual penalties for actuator crits, gyro crits, what-have-you, though the system would have to take into account how much more easily crits can be achieved in a game where one aims instead of rolls, but forced stock 'Mechs? Awful 10-second weapons? More convergence whining?

If you had read the OP, I actually opened with 5 second weapons with 1/2 damage and 1/2 heat, and twice the ammo. And never said anything about forced stock mechs

1453 R, on 27 March 2015 - 07:11 AM, said:

No MechWarrior game I remember playing had any of that, either. We played them anyways, and dare I say we enjoyed them. I, for one, have never once played a tabletop BT game; I'm in this whole thing because my parents bought a ten-year-old boy Mechwarrior 2 on a lark because he liked robots, and that was a done deal from there. I'm here because I've played every other MechWarrior game I could find to date, because I spent time and what little money a kid could scrounge up on every BattleTech novel he could find including Stackpole ones. I'm here because I bought little pewter 'Mech figurines and a couple of random TROs I found in a local comics shop without even knowing there was a TT game behind them because they were awesome collectibles for this thing I loved.

Thats great to hear, this game is here for all of us BT/MW fans, and we love it.



I snipped the rest of your quote as it was all rambling and nonsense.

Prosperity Park, on 27 March 2015 - 06:42 AM, said:

Hardcore TT mode, huh?

So: instantaneous burn lasers (no burn time), single-slug Autocannons for clan and IS, and Clan ERML dealing 7dmg,5 heat when ISLL deals 8/8...

Sure, I would love to test Clan versus Clan mode as the OP suggests, because there would be no reason to play inner sphere mechs.

If teams are built using BV, it could be intresting to see.

Edited by Lordred, 27 March 2015 - 08:23 AM.

[Chuck Jager]

The second you put it on a video screen, allow one pilot one mech, get rid of the hex board etc etc you have changed the rules. TT and Lore pretty much follow each other, much better than most other games and their back stories. Those are great places for use as background materials and an existing fan base, but a first person shooter will operate very differently than a 3rd person board game. Also because the lore is tied to TT so directly there is a good chance that any changes in the online game mechanics will also affect lore. We need to treat lore and TT the same way we treat mythology and religion, as great stories (from a while back) that have a useful framework that should probably not be taken to literally or forced on others.

So if it did not cost PGI any money or time away from pressing issues, I have no problem with anybody having a choice to play anyway they choose. I think that at this time we need to really focus on the nuts and bolts issues many of which are created by trying very hard to stay true to the past. IE "Embrace the Alternate Universe" it is here to stay.

[cSand]

Eh

no


Rather they spend their time on the game I paid for! If I wanted TT, I would have bought the TT game!


If you want TT, get a table! (and the rest of the stuff you need, foam buildings and little trees and stuff)

Edited by cSand, 27 March 2015 - 09:08 AM.

[Apnu]

YES!

[Hospy]

I'd try it, but I don't think it will translate over well.

[TercieI]

No.

[Water Bear]

The answer is no. I've been a BT fan for a long time, and I understand perfectly well that the game has aspects that do not adapt well to FPS.

Moreover I also get that the clans were intended to be OP bad guys, and using straight TT clan tech against IS, you'd gave to have about 2 is mechs to each clan mech to even get started having a chance in hell.

[oldradagast]

There are certain concepts about the table-top game that would be interesting if implemented correctly, such as: an actual economy - but this would have to be more than the old Repair Rearm mechanic and something more interesting than punishing people for playing the game, having a bad team, dying heroically, etc. You also have the scattered damage mechanic, vs. focused fire, and so on.

Other aspects really wouldn't translate at all, such as all weapons having the same rate of fire and Clans being overpowered without some forced way to reign them in (forced "code of honor," or something.)

So, in the long run, it would be interesting to see how this concept would play out, but I don't see any way to literally port over every aspect of the table-top game and create a viable video game.

Edited by oldradagast, 27 March 2015 - 11:00 AM.

[Burktross]

GIVE. ME. THE TT.
In fact, I prefer 10 second cooldowns.

[topgun505]

Doesn't sound half bad.

[Burktross]

I'm all for repair and rearm, but the time it takes is... ify... increased repair and rearm should be enough-- I don't want PGI to get the idea of monetizing "FINISH UR CONFIG NAO!!!111 2000 MC!" or wasting more time on top of the grind

[1453 R]

Lordred, on 27 March 2015 - 08:16 AM, said:

The RoF/Damage can be tweeked for each weapon to make it feel right, even buffed or nerfed a point of damage, but it would help bring weapons all in line, the problem we face is some weapons are just flat the weapon to take if you have the tonnage for it.

Kinda thought that’s what had been done. Certainly it hasn’t been done perfectly, but one problem is that Piranha is largely forced to stick to, or close to, tabletop damage numbers per shot. An AC/5 isn’t allowed to do 3 damage or 4 damage or 2.2 damage or whatever damage it needs to in order to be a middleweight plinker, it has to do 5 damage, end sentence, full stop, because the number ‘5’ is in its name, and because AC/5s have done 5 damage since the eighties.

If players were more willing to flex on the letter of the rules in order to try and stick to the spirit of them, then I think we’d have a much better system. Unfortunately, the letter seems to be the important thing to most folks.

Lordred, on 27 March 2015 - 08:16 AM, said:

Why would such a short wait time for having a mechanic change parts on your mech be a problem. If you had played a TT campaign, you would know that it can take months to fully re-fit a Battlemech, and it is expensive to do, this would be much quicker, but still offer the ability to fully customize a mech. The numbers could be tweeked, but as I said this is only an idea for discussion. Not something for PGI to do.

I do know it takes months or even years to refit a BattleMech to the level MWO players routinely do, as well as multiple millions of C-bills, rare technical resources, sorcerer-level hangar jockeys and the favor of RNGesus. I’ve never played the TT game, but that doesn’t mean I haven’t heard it described and discussed in exhaustive depth around here. The problem is that if ‘such a short wait time’ isn’t supposed to be a barrier to altering your ‘Mech, why put it there in the first place? The only reason for such a mechanic to exist would be as a barrier to customization, discouraging experimentation and adjustment in favor of fixed ‘Mechs. If it takes a twelve-hour wait to flip all the correct levers to get your ‘Mech optimized (endo, DHS, engine swap, whatever), then people will do that, be p!ssed for twelve hours, and then carry on as before. Except that you can no longer run an entire stable of ‘Mechs on three or four carefully selected XL engines to save money, so hey.

Lordred, on 27 March 2015 - 08:16 AM, said:

With a properly working heat system, and weapons generating correct heat values, SHS builds are more then viable. The mechs are 'garbage' in MWO because we are at such a huge heat disadvantage due to how our heat system works, and how some of our weapons are hotter then TT, and all fire considerably faster.

Then ask for a properly working heat system. I’ve had a system in mind for a long time now that I think strikes the right balance between the TT rules and the fact that MWO occurs in real time. Absolute adherence to TT rules actually destroys energy weapons completely as well as big ballistics and missiles, since the 30-point TT heatscale and its penalty effects are only supposed to happen after a turn, and thus enough time for heat sinks to absorb a certain amount of weapons fire without incident.

A 60-point scale in which the bottom 30 points are your ‘free zone’, wherein heat buildup has no adverse effects, followed by a 30-point ‘hot zone’ which is basically the original TT 30-point scale adjusted as needed for MWO, and you have a system which emulates the spirit of the original well without the whole ridiculous nonsense of ‘firing one medium laser once in MWO on a ‘Mech with thirty double heat sinks puts you at brief risk of adverse heat effects because you were temporarily over your maximum safe heat’. That right there is utter horse dung and you know it, and it’s a fantastic example of how TT rules (i.e. heat calculation and effects rolls only at the end of a nominal 10-second turn) translated directly and without modification into a real-time environment, breaks things that even the original TT developers would say should be perfectly possible.

Lordred, on 27 March 2015 - 08:16 AM, said:

If you had read the OP, I actually opened with 5 second weapons with 1/2 damage and 1/2 heat, and twice the ammo. And never said anything about forced stock mechs

Read the entire thread up to my post, actually. The point I was making is that artificially time-gating modifications and reintroducing R&R-but-only-to-customized-‘Mechs are both clearly and obviously mechanics trying to limit or discourage non-stock ‘Mechs. I know what you intended is to try and make players be more careful and thrifty in their choices, but it has the same effect – why bother being careful and thrifty with a bad chassis when you can just nab a pre-optimized TL 2 chassis that comes with endo and DHS and all the good scheiss already on it and then skip the wait times or the R&R entirely?

And then, of course, the only way for TL1 chassis to compete is to forcibly upgrade themselves into TL2 chassis, which means they eat the time gates and the R&R, and of course both sides end up completely feckin’ flattened by Clan stocks.

Lordred, on 27 March 2015 - 08:16 AM, said:

Thats great to hear, this game is here for all of us BT/MW fans, and we love it.

The patronization is strong with this one?

Lordred, on 27 March 2015 - 08:16 AM, said:

If teams are built using BV, it could be intresting to see.

Battle value is a bad system and 3025ers really, really, really need to stop pointing to it as the be-all-end-all Supreme Arbiter of All Things Balance. Yes, it’s better than weight class matching in a theoretical sense, but I happen to know that TT players generally agree that the piecemeal assumed BV value system for calculating customized ‘Mech BV is, ahh…problematical. And this is in a game system where the GM can step in at any time and either disallow a certain customization, manually edit a BV as necessary, or otherwise alter the fundamental rules as required to make the game work.

Piranha can’t do that; whatever they do has to stand on its own without any GM tweaking, and even with hardpoints – which we should generally keep, else we get the ‘walking gunbags with hitboxes’ issue from earlier MechWarrior games – there’s just no possible way for Piranha to manage to create a system that assigns a precise and correct numerical Badass Rank to whatever a player might build. Even if the specific piecemeal BV for any given weapon, item, upgrade, what-have-you is correct, the system would still come apart because it’s the combination of things that make or break any given ‘Mech.

Two stacked AC/5s are more than twice as effective as a single AC/5, but two stacked AC/5s with only a single ton of ammunition between them are seventeen tons of wasted space. A PPC is good but an ER PPC is better unless the ‘Mech has heat issues, in which case the PPC is better again, unless the pilot drops on a cold map in which point the ER PPC starts winning again. Single missile launchers are pointless until we get MRMs, at which point single MRM launchers of whatever weight will not be pointless, but missile launchers’ value as weapons increase exponentially with additional launchers. One is awful, two is meh, three is excellent, four is broken. AMS’ battle value is in direct proportion to how many missiles the enemy team has. ECM’s battle value by itself would be higher than an entire Mist Lynx and skew things tremendously.

Battle Value doesn’t work in a game like this. And this is assuming that Piranha never adjusts a weapon or piece of equipment again, because once you change something it needs a new BV, and everything combined with it needs a new BV, and everything introduced to counterplay against it needs a new BV, and…

No. Just no. Can we please stop talking as if BV is an even remotely feasible solution? Because there’s no universe in which BV is a feasible solution for a constantly tweaked and updated PC game like this.

[Agent 0 Fortune]

Unlimited customization, even in 3025 TT, can lead to very broken builds. And adding a time factor or R&R multipliers will end up creating a P2W situation.

Where this could work is a campaign mode (like CW), where all participants start with a stock mech, and are allotted downtime after engagements to perform upgrades. A CW campaign could go on for several months with mechs becoming more customized over time (but everyone on the same customization time limiter). Then when the campaign is over, clear the mechs and start a new campaign.