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It's important to note that by sized hardpoints I do not mean limiting where equipment can be placed, because that's stupid. What I mean by sized hardpoints is that, very similar to how missile tube sizes already work, weapons should be less effective if they're too big for the hardpoint they're placed in, and this would be accomplished by spreading out their damage more than usual.
We already have this system in place for missiles like I said, so aside from some missile hardpoint tube sizes that should be adjusted (*cough* VTR-9S *cough*) it's pretty much fine and that only really leaves energy weapons and ballistics. For lasers, it's pretty simple because the only needed adjustment would be longer beam duration, so if you fit a large laser into a hardpoint meant for medium lasers or smaller then the large laser would have a duration penalty. As for ballistics, autocannons would be the only real consideration for sized hardpoints and all it would take is increasing the number of projectiles, so if you fit an AC20 in a hardpoint meant for AC10 or smaller then you get 2 projectiles; clan autocannons and especially (clan) LB-X cannon(s) are a bit more complex to deal with so I'm not going to dwell on that much right now.
In the somewhat unique case of the gauss rifle, it would just need to be considered a small weapon to retain its pinpoint nature, which it should not really lose ever except perhaps in the case of a gauss spider or something equally ridiculous. For PPCs which are also somewhat unique, I've read suggestions to spread its damage out by having a stream following behind the main projectile, so for example (numbers are purely hypothetical) the projectile would do 8 damage on impact and the stream following behind it would do the remaining 2 damage over 0.3 seconds; I think something like this would be a pretty good adjustment if PPCs were crammed into a hardpoint that was too small.
I'm still not entirely sure how much (if at all) clan laser vomit should be nerfed (though I have and still will take the piss out of people for throwing a huge shitfit about it) but what I can say is it seems really inappropriate to instantly blanket nerf a mech for having an omnipod equipped regardless of how the pilot intends to use it. With the current method, it hurts builds that make perfectly legitimate use (i.e not cheesy excessive laser vomit) of an omnipod with even a single energy hardpoint, and that is really dumb even if the penalty is fairly small in that particular case with of course more energy omnipods making the situation even worse.
So how does this all apply to addressing clan laser vomit? Well, simply giving problematic omnipods small enough hardpoints would work, so for example only 2-3 C-ER medium lasers would be fully effective on the SCR-B right arm or only 1 C-ER LL would be fully effective on the TBR-A left torso. You could still stick more of the same lasers in the rest of those hardpoints of course, and that's intentional, but you would be seeing decreased performance and have to downsize your additional lasers to something smaller if you want optimal performance.
Also, I don't mean to suggest that only a select few mechs should deal with sized hardpoints, but the recent controversy with clan laser vomit nerfs really highlights the issue again. I know that I'm asking a lot (more than likely too much) and it will probably fall on deaf ears because PGI has consistently shown they are incompetent, but I suppose there's a small chance something might change if I bring up the idea again and it sure as hell seems like a better idea than what we have now.
P.S: The idea of sized hardpoints as suggested is not originally mine, somebody else posted it a while ago and I liked the idea quite a bit.
Edited by Pjwned, 07 June 2015 - 01:41 AM.
