945 replies to this topic

[TheSprinkle]

Fact is, something does need to change when the battle queue has been 35%+ heavies for the last few months. In a canon deployment, it would be closer to 25% lights, 35% mediums, 25% heavies and 15% assaults.

[Vorian Butler]

Have to concur in regards to BAPs. They're already enough of a niche item, no need to nerf them range wise. I really like the proposal someone had in thread regarding different weight/slot ECMs. I mean it makes sense for someone driving an assault command type mech to maybe want to sacrifice a bunch of slots or weight to give an umbrella like now especially in CW. While a light scout would be more prone to take a 'personal' ECM with significantly less weight and slot constraints. I also like the idea of having passive and active modes. Where active could give significant advantages but generate heat. (possibly instead of the current ECM toggle ie make ECM only anti sensor or anti ECM or require multiple systems)

[Clownwarlord]

Well now that it has been awhile ... I still do not notice a difference because so many pilot ECM mechs on their own so doesn't matter how much you shrink ECM.

[SCHLIMMER BESTIMMER XXX]

Drunken Skull, on 08 August 2015 - 06:54 PM, said:

A similar limitation to AC20 Auto-Cannon and Gauss-Cannon placement should also be implemented to counter the unrealistic use/boating of these massive weapons systems, This would give these weapons a much more realistic and true to Btech feel, where a mech is literally built around these massive weapons systems (Goliath with Gauss cannon for instance). Recoil from the firing of these weapons should be massive and make it a challenge to stay upright, let alone on-target, and firing more than one at a time or within the recoil effect of another should result in displacement of the mech with a chance of being knocked down. Furthermore, Light and medium mechs fielding these weapons should have to take on a special stance beforehand to brace themselves sufficiently before firing, or risk being displaced with a chance of being knocked down by the recoil. Any mech being hit by a AC20 or Gauss should also run the risk of being displaced and possibly knocked down, depending on the size/weight/motion of the mech.

Proper balance between Inner Sphere and Clan should be achieved by allowing the Inner Sphere mechs to deal MELEE damage in combat, through punching, kicking, using an equipped weapon(Hatchetman for example) or debris as a club where hand actuators are present in the mechs design, also by Charging towards a target or by Death From Above.

The different classes of mechs should have varying degrees of MELEE damage strength and differing mechanics in terms of what constitutes a makeshift weapon. The punch or kick of an assault mech should be as formidable as an AC20 damage-wise(this would lessen the leg-hugging behaviour of light mechs in close quarters combat). A light mech might use a light pole as a club, where as a heavy or assault mech would be able to use much larger pieces of debris as a makeshift weapon.

Clan mechs are incapable of MELEE Combat, however their weaponry is superior. The Clan counter to their Mechs not being able to deal MELEE damage is the use of the Elemental who can deal MELEE damage (and also whose use will lower the Clan Dropweight, allowing for more balance in Clan Vs Inner Sphere firepower dominance). The Counter to being infested by Elementals is the Anti-Personnel Pod. This is the BTECH Canon approach (and it would be fun to pilot a Wasp or Stinger with a light pole as a club, or start peeling off the enemies armour plates as an Elemental).

also a mech pilot shoud be vulnerable to massive headache what reduces the abillity to aim, controling the mech is nearly impossible then because of extreme loud sledgehammer punching sounds, even with toned down speakers you are forced to lay your hands over your ears to not get deaf.But you can equip headache pills (they are a mech module).Also before each match the server shoud do a dice roll for every player if his pilot is a male or a female.Female pilots are extreme vulnerable to headake + if another roll that is gettin tested when you lose(win) first roll your female pilot is pregnant.You then only have 5% of your normal view and your hemorrhoids making aiming nearly impossible.And when you get headache you are in serious trouble, you coud take headache pills but then you are a bad mother and all your pilot skills get nerfed to the ground cause
because of feeling of guilt.
To round up the improvement of mechwarrior in-depth gameplay, when you make a comment in chat and get positive response of minimum 4 team mates your pilot gets the "i am happy buff".All your pilot skills are multiplicated egyptian style.
By the way, if one player from enemy team give you positive feedback on your text message you get the multplyer instantly,
but only the ethiopien version...

There is also a roll at match start if your pilot has older children allready.This occures only in assault matches.If yes you have allways to be ready to head back to base where they are, cause when you some distance away from them without line of sight they start to do stupid things like capping own base for the enemy team or launching air strikes/artillery strikes at your team mates and when one get killed your
name shows up as the team killer.In best cases 2 pilots are dropping into a match as parents cause then
you have the dad, which only needs to come 500 m near the base and the childs stop doing dumb stuff
immediately.The mother can buy cool and expensive stuff in nearby placed wallmarts or steal them at the enemy base from their children and giving the toys to their own, preventing them also from doing stupid stuff.
Single parents have a noticable nerf in authority skill so they need to date their team mates and hope
the children accept....

Edited by shr84, 20 August 2015 - 01:48 PM.

[H i e u]

do not touch ecm.
assault should have ability to crush light when light wanna hug.
collision at high speed can destroy mech like car crash. so stupid when a light do circle without care of his road.
controlable jumping.
make more maps.
change mechsize. kitfox, raven are too big, catapults are too big, awesome....
many thing should be fixed but you, pgi wanna change ecm.

[Greyboots]

Arctic Cheetas with their relatively short-ranged weaponry will be able to get a lot closer to many mechs without being detectable by the ECM disruption and be much closer to or in optimal range by the time anyone knows they are there.

While I haven't read the whole discussion I find myself wondering whether the instances where ECM will actually become more powerful through these changes has been considered and discussed.

I don't want to accuse almost the entire dev team of being linear thinkers but the more we see these undiscussed aspects of changes the more I wonder whether the devs have actually considered their effects on gameplay.

I am not against the changes but I do want to have a confidence in the devs about it that I'm not getting from their comments about this change. It seems they have a laser focus on stopping a couple of mechs from shielding an entire team and damn the consequences.

[Jungle Rhino]

I was really excited when I saw that there was a 'big change to ECM'. I thought hey they are stripping this back down for a complete overhaul yay!

But no...

Opportunity lost - ECM will still remain a complete no brainer that everybody will automatically take. To put it simply:

ECM will not be balanced until you see an ECM capable mech that chooses to not slot the module.


Not wanting to be purely negative here is my suggestion: make it a soft counter - increase missile lock time/decrease accuracy, make it so you only show up as a target from half the distance (400m rather than 800m) - or even make it scale with a probability chance to detect based on range to target (not saying do all of this just some ideas). There is no need for such a simplistic hard counter system.

Edited by Jungle Rhino, 20 August 2015 - 02:10 PM.

[Bloodweaver]

The main problem with this "fix" to ECM is, in fact, a continuation of the same problems that plague it in the first place.

Nerfing the range only makes one of ECM's beneficial traits less potent.

The real problem with ECM, though, is that it has no cost. Sure, 1.5 tons and 2 slots for Inner Sphere, 1 and 1 for Clan... that's not a cost. Not really. Not compared to what it provides. ECM is way more valuable than an extra ton and a half of ammo, or an additional medium laser and small laser.

ECM needs to have drawbacks to use. Give it some sort of actual drawback, and you will see it becoming balanced. Lowering a benefit is not the same as giving it a negative effect.

[NeoRocket]

Sadist Cain, on 15 July 2015 - 02:42 PM, said:

make it 60m you wuss

Sounds good, bring the heavy hand down, the game needs it.

Actually I would be ok with making ecm a true personal cloak. Nerfing to 30m radius would accomplish that. I would LOVE a 30m rad ECM with say a 180m radius counter ecm.

Anyways it looks like the devs are looking at 90m so enough jibber jabber...

WHEN is it gonna happen? I dunno why but somehow I was under the impression with the Aug 18 patch and was very dissapointed to not see it happen. So... Next patch maybe?

[NeoRocket]

Hieu Le, on 20 August 2015 - 01:31 PM, said:

do not touch ecm.
assault should have ability to crush light when light wanna hug.
collision at high speed can destroy mech like car crash. so stupid when a light do circle without care of his road.
controlable jumping.
make more maps.
change mechsize. kitfox, raven are too big, catapults are too big, awesome....
many thing should be fixed but you, pgi wanna change ecm.

Actually all good points I do agree with. MAKE those changes. Oh and the one point I disagree is the "do not touch ecm". Make ALL those changes including NERF that ecm down to a 30m radius and the game would be better. Let every mech have ecm option. A 30m radius ecm or even 20m making every ecm a TRUE PERSONAL ecm. Oh... And if I kick a light with my Dire that's trying to hump my leg like an amorous chihuahua then it should fly crumpled like a pop can.

[Spleenslitta]

NeoRocket, on 22 August 2015 - 01:11 AM, said:

Actually I would be ok with making ecm a true personal cloak. Nerfing to 30m radius would accomplish that. I would LOVE a 30m rad ECM with say a 180m radius counter ecm.

Anyways it looks like the devs are looking at 90m so enough jibber jabber...

WHEN is it gonna happen? I dunno why but somehow I was under the impression with the Aug 18 patch and was very dissapointed to not see it happen. So... Next patch maybe?

Yeah....i think they announced the change waaaay too early. It's true they got a better impression of the community's opinion this way but i think they are taking it too far.
They also promised changes to the quirk system...but not a peep of what those changes would be.

[IusSanguine]

only a idear to balance ECM:

1. ECM dont hide mechs but you can not get informations from ECM-Shilded Mechs (Weapons, and Armor so you dont know the damaged zones, maybe in future heat level of enemy mech)

2. AMS Support: same Rockets 25-50% get Jammed and lose controll and goes down to ground and detonate on way to target (in ECM Bubbel). this can do by aktiv pressing a butten or as pasiv ability of an ECM .

3. Enemy Scanner Range geting reduce for the objekts under the ECM Bubble (-20-30% sensor enemy sensor Range) so you can see enemy at 500m but not at maybe 600-700m for exemple. (on this way the sniper can still use the ECM)

4. reduce the ECM rang to 90m is a good idear too i think

sorry for my bad english it`s not my first language.

[Gremlich Johns]

Bloodweaver, on 20 August 2015 - 08:12 PM, said:

ECM needs to have drawbacks to use. Give it some sort of actual drawback, and you will see it becoming balanced. Lowering a benefit is not the same as giving it a negative effect.

Real ECM the way PGI has implemented is

1) too heavy
2) barrage ECM, and should make it so nothing works optimally, even for the team that is using ECM
3) ostensibly a cloak

[Docta Pain]

why pgi no more talk ecm?

dividing by two way too difficult?

too much code to divide by two?

maybe next patch...

[Neput Z34]

Here is a thought:

New ECM, just hides your mech.

New ECM + Command Console = Current ECM bubble.

Clan fanboys: "Waaah Clans don't have Command Console waaaah it is not ballanced"
Me: I thought Clans were about individual pilot skill, and not about combined arms tactics.

Edited by Neput Z34, 22 August 2015 - 01:26 PM.

[Peiper]

This thread was started on July 15th? Did Paul go on vacation ever since? Come on! Lay 60m ECM on us already! We're ready! There's 42 pages worth of people begging for changes on this thread. Throw it on the wall, see if it sticks!

[Bloodweaver]

Neput Z34, on 22 August 2015 - 01:24 PM, said:

Here is a thought:

New ECM, just hides your mech.

New ECM + Command Console = Current ECM bubble.

Clan fanboys: "Waaah Clans don't have Command Console waaaah it is not ballanced"
Me: I thought Clans were about individual pilot skill, and not about combined arms tactics.

This... is actually not bad. Command Console is supposed to give benefits to the whole team, right?

I really dislike the suggestion some people are making to remove the ECM bubble completely. A full rework of how sensors work would be much more satisfying. Allowing you to lock on to ECM-protected enemies, but not allowing you to share those targets with allies, would be a very nice secondary option, if simplistic. What you've posted is even more simplistic, but also elegant. And like you said, it reinforces both command roles and Clan playstyles.

[Logan Frost]

Lock ECM to four mechs per side per game. Too many ECM's in game? Well too bad, yours doesnt work until someone else with ECM goes down. This isnt to say multiple ECM mechs will be booted from a match to keep things congruent, but simply that there will be a wait list for ECM mechs to activate it.

That, or make it act as its supposed to by lore. Its not supposed to be some magical box of confusion and when its on every other mech in a match its next to impossible to enjoy the game. You might as well remove the minimap and indicators entirely.

Simple idea, make it a timed usage. One minute on, two minutes off? Thats plenty of time to get a lance across an opening protected without hiding them the entire match. It should also be plenty of time to break away from an ambush without taking too many missile hits.

Alternatively to the above, leave it as is, but give us C3 computers. Allow one mech with visual on an ECM protected bubble to relay its findings to the rest of a lance(Or units in a certain diameter of the spotter with C3 equipped as well.) if not necessarily targeting data as this would make Narc and TAG less desirable.

Simply stop the ECM completely hiding a mech. Formulate a simple, basic equation using tonnage (And maybe current heat levels.) of a mech and use that to determine just how well an ECM covers a mech. In this case, you could leave ECM open to all mechs and simply have the effect stack in smaller increments(Much like how a DHS outside of the engine is only doing 1.4 instead of a full 2.).

Edited by Logan Frost, 22 August 2015 - 10:40 PM.

[jay35]

Wow, 43 pages of insanity. Thanks for the link, Tennex, lol.

Neput Z34, on 22 August 2015 - 01:24 PM, said:

Here is a thought:

New ECM, just hides your mech.

New ECM + Command Console = Current ECM bubble.

Here's a thought: Mechs with ECM are already sacrificing tonnage and slots to carry it. Forcing them to bring the massively over-rated CC on top of that is absurd, especially for IS mechs that already have the short-end of the straw with how much equipment weighs. So that short-sighted idea is about par for the course around here, huh.

Anyway, if they change the functionality of ECM, then as long as they actually added Active/Passive radar functionality alongside that change to ECM, I'd be okay with it. So long as there is some replacement mechanic to avoid lock-on missiles and retain stealth, it's cool. I'd actually prefer the active/passive MW4 Mercs MekTek style radar modes because you lose something in order to gain something. You can shut off your active radar but you lose significant detection range but you gain stealth. And the simple but really well-balanced setup they had for how all the electronics interacted was fantastic for adding variance and depth

.
For that chart:
A = Active Radar mode
B = Beagle Active Probe (or Clan equivalent) onboard
E = ECM onboard
P = Passive Radar mode
SD = Shut Down
And the two columns are the mechs and what they're carrying / their sensors state, and then the range in meters at which they can detect the opposite mech.

So for example, in the first line, a mech with Active Radar, BAP, and ECM could detect a normal active-radar-using target out to 1200m but could only be detected within 650m by that mech. On the second line, we see that adding BAP to the second mech essentially adds 150m to the detection range at which that second mech can see the ECM-carrying, active-radar-using mech. And the chart goes on from there, showing all the various combinations of equipment and radar states.

The actual ranges (the hard numbers) might need some tweaks, but the overall concept was sound and added a bit of depth to electronics and stealth warfare.

Edited by jay35, 15 September 2015 - 08:09 PM.

[Mr Andersson]

ViridianKnight, on 20 August 2015 - 06:17 AM, said:

Lesser ECM effect will just produce more whining about "OP" LRM`s !

So lower LRM damage a bit. Fixed.