grendeldog, on 14 April 2015 - 09:42 PM, said:
Hey there. So I have seen numerous threads suggesting that the pinpoint elite skill does nothing, and a few that say that the fast fire skill does nothing. The thing is that all these threads are from 2012 or 2013, so I don't know if they're relevent to the state of the game today. I did in fact 'use the effing search engine' as they say, but found nothing recent.
So to answer this once and for all: does pinpoint do anything? Does fast fire do anything?
And if pinpoint does in fact do something, my understanding is that it allows your weapons to converge at whatever you're targetting, so that if you have, say, 3 MPL in the torso and four in the arms, and your target is only 50 or 100 meters away, they all hit one component instead of being spread out over several. Is this indeed how pinpoint works, if it works at all?
Thanks a lot guys!
As has been hashed out extensively above, fast fire DOES work - and
pinpoint does not. At all. period. The reason for this lies in the netcode and developer resources. Back in the Bad Old Days before the netcode was fixed (and trust me, it is fixed; hitreg is a different issue, still much improved - but I digress) they had non-instant convergence for a while. Personally, I like the idea, for much the same reason I liked Counterstrike's accuracy system; however, because of the netcode they inherited with CryEngine, people were taking different amounts of time to converge based on their
ping. This was
bad; it's a world without Host State Rewind where even your
accuracy suffered a penalty if the other guy had a lower ping to the server - since they hadn't fixed HSR yet, there was no immediate remedy, and many players were severely affected. Thus, they made the decision to simply remove instant convergence, particularly since the current piloting skill trees were intended to be overhauled (if I recall correctly) at some point anyway.
Now HSR is fixed, at long last, and there was much rejoicing (except from those who affect total "disappointment" and "loss of faith" in the game and its developers, and yet who
still will not go away - but again, I digress.) It follows that delayed convergence
MAY now be feasible to implement again; whether or not it
actually can be implemented depends on how the two sets of code interact and how many resources are available to throw at it - software engineering is still engineering, and engineering is the science of compromises. Those who blithely assume that pinpoint convergence (or some other favored feature) can be "brought back" with no significant difficulty should not be taken seriously on that point, and their credibility should be questioned.
So to summarize, Pinpoint doesn't work now, but it might be able to - and now might be a good time to
ask the devs rather than assuming that it can or cannot be done. Personally, I'd pitch it as a possible avenue to balance the Clans and Inner Sphere, while revitalizing certain pieces of equipment (what if the Command Console increased convergence speed for the
entire team as long as it was active?) - but that truly is another thread. =)
Tim East, on 18 April 2015 - 08:00 PM, said:
Old PP skill is apparently not feasible in this engine according to the devs. There was a brief mention of this in a rather large and flame-tastic thread in the general discussion section recently.
Could you link it? I think I missed that one - I just know there were nontrivial technical issues with pinpoint (or knockdown for that matter.)