Domenoth, on 11 May 2015 - 06:43 PM, said:
Edit:
And I do realize you did mostly focus on the complexity, but it's like guilt by association. Because you also said it would be no better than tonnage, your other valid arguments are likely to get dismissed.
Yeah, you're right. The complexity of arriving at the correct numbers are what makes it impractical. After all, would anyone argue that the current game balance is amazingly great, and all the weapons have appropriate stats? And this is after 3 years of tweaking.
My meaning, was that tonnage
isn't particularly good, and isn't because it's essentially an arbitrary number without a strong connection to how effective the mech actually is - that's determined almost entirely by hardpoints and physical geometry. Likewise, a point based scoring system like TT's BattleValue would be very similar in that you'd arrive at a totally arbitrary number that doesn't actually reflect the real effectiveness of a mech.
But, you're absolutely right, and I'd hate to get drawn into a moronic argument about why BV is better than tonnage or whatever, when that wasn't really my point in the first place.
It's
enormously complex to rate effectiveness in MWO, far more so than in Tabletop. After all, in TT, you know exactly what percentage of the time a PPC will hit it's target, so you can map out it's DPS very accurately. In MWO, the likelyhood of a PPC hitting it's target are far more complex. Flight time directly impacts accuracy, but to different degrees for different players. Weapon location is critically important: A Firebrand can fire it's PPC's while peeking just a bit of it's geometry out, often easily firing over cover, but a Banshee needs to expose a huge portion of it's structure to do it. An Atlas firing it's gorilla arm mounted PPC's will often have a far more difficult time hitting targets (particularly small ones) on broken terrain due to tiny rocks blocking shots.
Then, a change to PPC velocity happens, and increases it's accuracy... but how much? how much do you change it's score by? What about quirks, do you count them? How? PPC's vary in effectiveness
dramatically between mechs. What about modules? Do you count modules in BV too? How many points is a PPC worth vs. a PPC cooldown module? Does it scale based on how many PPC's you have equipped? After all, a PPC Range Increase module is vastly more valuable on a mech with 4 PPC's than on a mech with one.
So... yeah, horrifically complicated.
I just get annoyed, because people spout off with this whole "Oh, we just need BattleValue, then everything would be Awesome!" but that's a
huge can of worms. It's not at all something that can just be plugged in.