113 replies to this topic

[stjobe]

Krivvan, on 22 September 2015 - 02:27 PM, said:

I really think they're just out of touch with how good every weapon and playstyle actually is. Their experiences seem to mostly come from their own semi-internal squirrel server stuff (which is probably terribly biased and not indicative of the live server now; with a closed environment like that you lose touch with the actual game, plus I doubt the better testers are likely to stick around as much as the ones that don't understand the game much) or low tier live games.

Personally, I think they're just incompetent and too full of hubris to know it.

A few quotes from (current and previous) employees seem to bear that idea out:

Quote

I have been working at Piranha Games full-time (More than 5 years)
Pros
Great team of friendly and talented artists, engineers and designers. Well stocked kitchen.
Cons
Employees have been leaving in droves, many of them key elements in the critically diminished team, because HR and management consistently fail to do their job and nurture the talented and dedicated staff. You'll hear the same story from many ex-employees. Right now only the momentum of past achievements keeps the place going.
Advice to Management
Pointless to give advice, as their hubris precludes them from listening or learning from their appalling mistakes.

Quote

I worked at Piranha Games full-time
Pros
There are very many intelligent, talented and hard working people employed at Piranha Games who you can learn a lot from.
Cons
The company values are "Creativity, Passion and Humility." It's sad that people in charge contradict their own set of values. They stifle creativity by shooting down ideas because their egos get in the way, effectively killing any passion for the work. I have never ever seen management show any kind of humility, just a lot of bitterness and arrogance.
Advice to Management
Trust and respect the great people that you have working for you and get rid of terrible, selfish leads who care more about power than producing an amazing product.

Quote

I worked at Piranha Games part-time
Pros
- They provide free meal for every employee. - First or last Friday of the month, they have beers in the office.
Cons
- Worst HR and management ever. - People there have no idea of what they're doing

Quote

Pros
I work at Piranha Games full-time Small studio, growing smaller. Friendly employees (what's left.)
Cons
Bigoted, back thinking, Management with what seems no concept of what needs doing. CEO, is as incompetent as made out to be. Terrible reputation within AFC. NO opportunities for varied projects. (Wasting Finances) Poor salary grade for positions.

Quote

I worked at Piranha Games full-time (More than 5 years)
Pros
A great group of people to work with and free soda and sugary products. The extended health package is pretty good and transit is paid for.
Cons
The management treat employees as disposable tools, and under value them. The compensation is well below standards and management has expectations of their staff that they themselves are not willing to live up to. There is zero thought to career development at this company. You will get pigeon holed into a position until they have no further use for you, at which point they will try to rip you off and not pay your legally earned severance

Quote

Pros
A relatively flat structure means lots of room to advance. Leads are promoted from within if they can do their jobs, and many employees have been in the company for a very long time (for this industry), ie, 5+ years.
Cons
Working on crappy product with the advantage of the wannabe-designer owner poking his fingers in adding things. Combined they can be pretty bad.
Advice to Management
Stop trying to design games or manage production when you can't do either. Hire a designer. Hire qualified production leads. Stop trying to do those things.

Edited by stjobe, 22 September 2015 - 02:46 PM.

[Krivvan]

Deathlike, on 22 September 2015 - 02:33 PM, said:

Gets feedback from Squirrels
Ignores Feedback from Tier 1+2
Applies All Feedback from Tier 4+5

I'm guessing you can apply 2 and 3 to the squirrels as well.

Edited by Krivvan, 22 September 2015 - 02:47 PM.

[Y E O N N E]

Krivvan, on 22 September 2015 - 02:11 PM, said:

The ERLL Locust is actually a very good poker. Its acceleration and decceleration along with low laser duration is so good that it can poke VERY safely.

The problem is that that locust can only hold one laser. A single ERLL. Which means although it's such a good poker, it can't output enough damage in a game to be impactful. Frequently gives you the "holy crap I did so well that game.....only 400 damage?!?!?" game.

The SPL Locust actually does have enough damage output to be impactful, but its chassis strengths are at range, not up in brawls where it is very liable to get one-shot.

I don't know how you truly fix the Locust without adding hardpoints and increasing tonnage (changing engine heatsink restrictions). Any more maneuverability doesn't help its core problems. And it's been discussed ad nauseum why throwing on huge infotech quirks don't make a bad mech good.

I don't think you can, or even should, make the Locust as good as an FS9 without massive armor quirks, but one if its primary issues at present is that the most effective payloads are rather binary. You either go all-in on close-range with SPL and run the tremendous risks associated with brawling in something as durable as tissue paper...or you stick the big laser on and try to poke. Boating Mediums is, frankly, too hot. You can do it, but it suffers from low sustainability. Dropping to five from six gets you better sustainability, but now you're teetering over the threshold where alpha damage transitions from effective to ineffective given total cycle rate and range. Four...is not quite punchy enough, but the weight is right.

If we had a good medium-range weapon that wasn't too hot or too heavy, the Locust would be much more serviceable. Simply dropping MedLas heat to 3 would be a good place to start.

Honestly, if I could max armor and still fit a 180 engine in, I'd always bring 4xMPL. It's the best combination of heat, damage, range, and cycle by far given present behavior stats and range quirks.

[Mcgral18]

Krivvan, on 22 September 2015 - 02:27 PM, said:

I really think they're just out of touch with how good every weapon and playstyle actually is. Their experiences seem to mostly come from their own semi-internal squirrel server stuff (which is probably terribly biased and not indicative of the live server now; with a closed environment like that you lose touch with the actual game, plus I doubt the better testers are likely to stick around as much as the ones that don't understand the game much) or low tier live games.

It is amazing how many positive changes could come from .XML edits.
It's astounding how rarely they occur.

Made a bit of a write up, and most of the following changes are .XML based and almost exclusively re-using current code.

You mind reading and giving your opinion? Or just the TL:DR, it is quite a lot of fluff for little content.

Mcgral18, on 12 September 2015 - 06:16 PM, said:

TL;DR summary at the bottom.


It seems your starting algorithm was...a strange thing. It nerfed some of the worst mechs in the game, removing their Quirkening buffs, then still removing agility via Nega-Quirks.

Then, on the other side of things, you, against all logic and sound reasoning, have significantly buffed the TimberWolf and Dire Whale. Double digits buffs.



Then you've got the Myth Lynx and SadCat that are shafted:



I mean, that heat efficiency is totally worth it!
Unlike the God Tier robots, those mechs cannot pick from a large variety of effective pods. They lack hardpoints to do that.


This is the issue with Clam CT Omnipod quirks...they stack lots of NegaQuirks on the CT, then positive ones on the other Pods.

The result was taking the CT with the least amount of NegaQuirks, then mounting the hardpoints needed, then start offsetting the NegaQuirks with spare Pods. As seen above, you can min max the hell out of it, making them far better than the current Live server, while the Myth Lynx above is a fair bit worse.


Solution? Don't NegaQuirk the hell out of the CTs for no good reason.
Let's take a look at the Cute Fox Prime-CT:

-<component name="centre_torso">
<Quirk name="torsoangle_yaw_additive" value="-30"/><Quirk name="torsospeed_yaw_multiplier" value="-0.2"/>
<Quirk name="accellerp_all_multiplier" value="-0.2"/><Quirk name="decellerp_all_multiplier" value="-0.1"/>
<Quirk name="turnlerp_all_multiplier" value="-0.05"/><Quirk name="targetscantime_short_multiplier" value="1"/>
<Quirk name="targetscantime_medium_multiplier" value="0.33"/><Quirk name="targetretentiontime_additive" value="-2"/>
<Quirk name="targetacquisitiondelay_additive" value="3"/>
</component>

-30 to Torso Yaw...which starts at 120. It gets cut down to Assault level twist distance (Current KCrab starts at 100), with no good reason to do that.

The above Whale has nearly the same torso yaw, for reference.



A better solution? Don't quirk every single omnipod. Give Nega-Quirks to the Pods that need it, and to the CT of the mechs who need it, exclusively. Don't Nega-Quirk every single mech in the game...except for the God Tier ones. That's just ridiculous, on so many levels.

Example? Give the Timby a 20% twist speed Nega-Quirk, on every CT. No getting around it. See how that pans out. It would marginally decrease damage spread ability, but all it does is remove the Double Basics efficiency (making it the same twist speed as a Trial Timby, but faster and it still twists further).

Not a small increment by any means, but a single, easy variable. Not something that can be completely avoided, as seen above.

For the Whale? Dunno. Maybe twist range. It's already very restricted, and cutting it further would make spreading damage very hard. It has the firepower to facetank anything and kill it, but focus fire would take them down even faster than present.
It can sword and board nearly all the firepower, so it can tank quite a bit with the current twist range and speed, but not sure what the proper nerf would be. Test Servers are good for that...


As for Inter Faction balance, without quirks, it's rather rubbish. Worse, you've nerfed some of the worst mechs out there, for no good reason. Negative Turn speed on a Commando? Negative sensors on Light Mechs? Slow Accel on a LOLcust? It's insane.

To try and fix the Inter Faction balance, perhaps you should try to do one of Paul's favourite things:


Well, perhaps not all of them. In fact, let's start with only 1 thing. Extra Light engines.

The cXL is one of the largest differences between Clam and IS balance. It allows you to safely take more firepower, which is always a good thing. Currently, the Clam XL gets a minimal 20% heatsink nerf with CT loss, to the heatsinks located in the CT (TrueDubs and External). isXL gets death.

Normalize that part. Give the isXL 50% penalties, and cXL 75% penalties. Extend the penalties to Speed and Agility (Twist speed, Accel) as well.

Start at those numbers, and see how things match up.

To prevent STD engines from being obsolete, give them incentive. Not having essentially single heatsinks when Sword and Boarding is nice, but certainly not the biggest factor. Give them significant Structure buffs (yes, not as good as armour, but still something). Either exclusively to the CT, to the tune of 30, or also to the STs (since you could reinforce the STs because the XL engine isn't there?). Make it significant enough, even Clam Battlemechs are tempted to put one in, occasionally (Single Ballistic Hunch IIC? It has the CT mounts).

Also greatly increases TTK. IS mechs won't be bringing more firepower than the Clams currently do, but everything would die slower (headshots aside).



Weapon wise, well, if you're complaining about laservomit, it's pretty damn obvious why it's at the top. Everything else has been rendered garbage. AC2 nerfs? MG nerfs? Over 20% straight up damage nerfs to both those weapon systems. Missiles? Utterly rubbish in comparison. You get worse performance than lasers at much shorter range, without the ability to pinpoint your damage, on top of having to work with slow travel speed.

SRMs with Artemis used to have a large amount of skill to how effective they were. They flew in and out, converging at a set distance, potentially hitting as few as a single hitbox on large mechs. Deadly, but incredibly short range. A nice Risk to Benefit ratio, no?
You've changed SRMs to be nearly static in spread after the initial large jump. Past 10M, you have nearly max spread immediately, nearly a 12M CoF on the cSRM6. That's from head to knee on an Atlas, from 30M or 200M.


Solution? There are a few options. Reduce spread, return of the old Artemis flight path, damage buff, travel speed buff.

All are nice. 2.5 damage, 500M/s, with In and Out Artemis Flight Path (and smaller base spread)? Beautiful. Give that to isSRMs, and smaller buffs (travel speed and spread only?) to Clam SRMs. Half weight shouldn't have the same effectiveness, but they still need to exceed Lasers at 20M.


LRMs are rubbish, and with the Jesus Box, there's too many variables when you throw these sensor Nega-Quirks in. Allow LoS locks, like in MWLL. It avoids that issues nicely, if you're in range and can see the mech, you can lock on. Indirect firing is something someone else can discuss.


Machine Guns took that 20% nerf, and retained the 3M CoF. Remove one or both of those nerfs, for Clam and IS MGs. Keep the CoF on the Clam to account for half weight? It was a pointless nerf, that ruined an already mediocre weapon system.

AC2s could have their cooldown brought back down, on top of having their heat reduced. 4 DPS, they were still bad weapons. You decreased that to under 3. Bring it to 3.5, with 0.8 heat per shot as a starting point. Less worthless, but still pretty bad.

Flamers? Buff the ******* damage. You've kept them worthless for YEARS. If you don't want them to have a noticeable effect on the enemy heat, let them be damage dealers with a sub 100M range. FFS, you can't possibly make a weapon worse than this...aside from that time you did. When all missiles were affected by the cLRM damage reduction min range...gotta love 0.05 damage SRMs at 10M.

Give Flamers 2 DPS. Yes, 0.2 Damage per tenth of a second, up from 0.07. That's if you keep their ridiculous heat gain, and short range while also being a constant fire DoT weapon. An easy change for you to make, literally change this:

-<Weapon faction="InnerSphere" HardpointAliases="Energy,Flamer,ISFlamer" name="Flamer" id="1007">
<Loc iconTag="StoreIcons\Flamer.dds" descTag="@Flamer_desc" nameTag="@Flamer"/>
<WeaponStats maxDepth="10.0" volleydelay="0.25" speed="100" lifetime="1.0" duration="-1.0" tons="1" maxRange="90.0" longRange="90.0" minRange="0" ammoPerShot="0" ammoType="" cooldown="0.0" heat="1.0" impulse="0.0" heatdamage="0.0" damage="0.7" numFiring="1" projectileclass="" type="Energy" slots="1" Health="10" maxheight="0" critChanceIncrease="0.14,0.08,0.03" critDamMult="1.1" trgheatinctime="3.0" heatinctime="6.25" coneoffire="10"/>

to this:

-<Weapon faction="InnerSphere" HardpointAliases="Energy,Flamer,ISFlamer" name="Flamer" id="1007">
<Loc iconTag="StoreIcons\Flamer.dds" descTag="@Flamer_desc" nameTag="@Flamer"/>
<WeaponStats maxDepth="10.0" volleydelay="0.25" speed="100" lifetime="1.0" duration="-1.0" tons="1" maxRange="90.0" longRange="90.0" minRange="0" ammoPerShot="0" ammoType="" cooldown="0.0" heat="1.0" impulse="0.0" heatdamage="0.0" damage="2.0" numFiring="1" projectileclass="" type="Energy" slots="1" Health="10" maxheight="0" critChanceIncrease="0.14,0.08,0.03" critDamMult="1.1" trgheatinctime="3.0" heatinctime="6.25" coneoffire="10"/>

WOW, that was hard.



From there, there's the cERML issue. One strange suggestion I've heard, and not minded? Change the 2x range max from Clam lasers to 1.5x.

405-810 for the cERML changes to 405-607.5M.
That's as opposed to an unquirked isML at 270-540.
Less damage, but also less heat. It's a starting point, to be adjusted upon. Start with it affecting all Clan lasers?

Not sure how easy a change that is, but it might be as easy as this:

-<Weapon faction="Clan" HardpointAliases="Energy,Laser,MediumLaser,ERLaser,ERMediumLaser,ClanLaser,ClanMediumLaserFamily,ClanMediumLaser,ClanERLaser,ClanERMediumLaser" name="ClanERMediumLaser" id="1212">
<Loc iconTag="StoreIcons\ClanERMediumLaser.dds" descTag="@ClanERML_desc" nameTag="@ClanERML"/>
<WeaponStats maxDepth="10.0" volleydelay="0.0" speed="0" lifetime="0" duration="1.15" tons="1" maxRange="810" longRange="405" minRange="0" ammoPerShot="0" ammoType="" cooldown="3.0" heat="6.0" impulse="0.0" minheatpenaltylevel="7" heatpenalty="1.4" heatdamage="0" damage="7" numFiring="1" projectileclass="" type="Energy" slots="1" Health="10" visRange="1500" heatPenaltyID="10"/>

to

-<Weapon faction="Clan" HardpointAliases="Energy,Laser,MediumLaser,ERLaser,ERMediumLaser,ClanLaser,ClanMediumLaserFamily,ClanMediumLaser,ClanERLaser,ClanERMediumLaser" name="ClanERMediumLaser" id="1212">
<Loc iconTag="StoreIcons\ClanERMediumLaser.dds" descTag="@ClanERML_desc" nameTag="@ClanERML"/>
<WeaponStats maxDepth="10.0" volleydelay="0.0" speed="0" lifetime="0" duration="1.15" tons="1" maxRange="608" longRange="405" minRange="0" ammoPerShot="0" ammoType="" cooldown="3.0" heat="6.0" impulse="0.0" minheatpenaltylevel="7" heatpenalty="1.4" heatdamage="0" damage="7" numFiring="1" projectileclass="" type="Energy" slots="1" Health="10" visRange="1500" heatPenaltyID="10"/>

There may be other implications, but I don't know them.
The cLPL would go to 900, which is still pretty damn significant, but lets work on starting points to begin with. Test Server can resolve the iterations.



Well, all that text and it can be summed up pretty easily.
TL;DR?

• Don't NegaQuirk bad robots. Nega-Quirk God Tier robots
  
• Normalize XL engines
  
• Give STD engines significant Structure bonuses (CT at minimum, possibly ST)
  
• Buff SRMs, LRMs, MGs
  
• ******* buff Flamers
  
• Change the 2x Extended laser range for Clan Lasers to 1.5x (as a starting point)

[sycocys]

stjobe, on 22 September 2015 - 12:18 PM, said:

Yeah, no. I love Commandos and have played them extensively over the last three years. They are not on par with the FS9, the Cheater, or the Jenner. Not even close.

The Commando is the ONLY light I run when I'm not leveling them. Top speed is only a part of the equation, it's acceleration/decel and turning radius literally turn the thing into a ninja. None of the other light mechs can even come close to its mobility. You don't need jacked up structure in this mech, you shouldn't be getting hit with anything more than a glancing shot in the first place.

But if you are sacrificing speed and the additional movement ratio increases by running a smaller engine I can see where you'd run into a problem with not being able to scratch the eyes out of the other lights.

[GreyNovember]

Right. So. Back on the topic of buffing Commandos and Lynxes.

The current consensus for commandos is a generous missile quirk to encourage it's use. Shall we say that this quirk is best suited to being Velocity/Spread/Cooldown, with the degree of about 30%? Giving us chassis that have, seperately:

• 30% Velocity/Spread/Cooldown on all Dumbfired SRMs.
  
• 30% Velocity/Spread/Cooldown on all LRMs.
  
• 30% Velocity/Spread/Cooldown on all SSRMs.

And to quirk it's armor. Arms perhaps, to encourage the need for it to twist and shield, as opposed to facetank.


What about the Lynx then?

My previous suggestion, apart from just being colder and more agile, was that it would have the ability to just blatantly, straight up ignore ECM from enemy mechs. It's simply not affected by it, regardless of how many there are. 750m away, and you have three ECM kit foxes escorting you? Nope. Lynx can still target each one of you, and gain that loadout data as if you were buck naked.

This however, sounds more of a chore than just straight up quirking. I don't support Sensor range or Sensor time, simply because I don't feel the change to be gameplay changing.

[Krivvan]

Mcgral18, on 22 September 2015 - 03:10 PM, said:

Made a bit of a write up, and most of the following changes are .XML based and almost exclusively re-using current code.

You mind reading and giving your opinion? Or just the TL:DR, it is quite a lot of fluff for little content.

I've read that before, or something similar, and it mostly mirrors my own view. Use as few quirks as possible, favor tweaking global attributes first (like making SRMs as desirable as lasers), balance far-reaching things before tiny things (Clan vs. IS before individual variants), give clan XLs somewhat more of a penalty, and etc. made up my feedback to PGI for the PTS.

[DivineTomatoes]

Mcgral18, on 22 September 2015 - 12:11 PM, said:

I don't like people who say this.

Your ability to like it doesn't concern me in the slightest.

[GreyNovember]

Krivvan, on 22 September 2015 - 04:39 PM, said:

I've read that before, or something similar, and it mostly mirrors my own view. Use as few quirks as possible, favor tweaking global attributes first (like making SRMs as desirable as lasers), balance far-reaching things before tiny things (Clan vs. IS before individual variants), give clan XLs somewhat more of a penalty, and etc. made up my feedback to PGI for the PTS.

Balancing on the Macro like that may have unintended consequences, however. The CERLL being nerfed into it's long duration, for example, or general CERML heat increase.

[stjobe]

sycocys, on 22 September 2015 - 03:19 PM, said:

The Commando is the ONLY light I run when I'm not leveling them. Top speed is only a part of the equation, it's acceleration/decel and turning radius literally turn the thing into a ninja. None of the other light mechs can even come close to its mobility. You don't need jacked up structure in this mech, you shouldn't be getting hit with anything more than a glancing shot in the first place.

But if you are sacrificing speed and the additional movement ratio increases by running a smaller engine I can see where you'd run into a problem with not being able to scratch the eyes out of the other lights.

Why do you think the Mando is never used competitively when the FS9 and ACH is? Is it because it's just as good as those two, or is it because it's not?

I've dropped over a thousand times in the chassis; it's not like I don't know how agile these things are. I've ran them with everything from XL170s to XL210s, and with just about any load-out you can imagine fitting on a Mando, and probably some you wouldn't.

I ran one as a ghetto Panther before we actually got a Panther. I've ran ECM+3xSSRM-2 before SSRMs were nerfed (it felt like cheating it was so easy - still, the RVN-3L did it even better), I've ran everything from 2xLL to 3xSRM-6. 3xMPL? Check. Stock load-outs? Check.

It's my favourite 'mech in MWO, dropping in it feels like coming home.

But it is not "on par with the FS9 and ACH". Not even close.

[Torric]

Krivvan, on 22 September 2015 - 02:11 PM, said:

The ERLL Locust is actually a very good poker. Its acceleration and decceleration along with low laser duration is so good that it can poke VERY safely.

The problem is that that locust can only hold one laser. A single ERLL. Which means although it's such a good poker, it can't output enough damage in a game to be impactful. Frequently gives you the "holy crap I did so well that game.....only 400 damage?!?!?" game.

Nice to see this issue mentioned. I don't play that much, but the mech i play most is the LCT 1V (P). I think the best i ever did in it was 629. DAMAGE, not matchscore. And you do not get that matchscore in a "normal" game, because the majority of games is over long before you can even mathematically get that much damage done with your single weapon
Also not likely to get many killing blows with your alpha strike of... 9.

With the PSR being what it is, an extension of your damage meter, there is pretty much only ONE way it is going to go while playing that specific mech, and it is not up.

Edited by Torric, 23 September 2015 - 10:07 AM.

[Blackhound]

Not sure if anyone posted this yet, because the thread is too long to scan just for this one observance, but the Arctic Cheetah was designed to replace the Mist Lynx so obviously it's going to be better. Many of these 'Mechs were built later down the road to be superior than the previous ones.

[JC Daxion]

The biggest problem with commando's is Hard point location...


the 2D, needs all missile points in the torso.. (having one in the arm screws up aiming big time)

the 3A, needs the chest moved to the arm.. Make it the more maneuverable firing mech..

1D and Deaths Kneel are pretty good.. Though perhaps a better movement quirk and energy heat gen quirks


All commando's could use an AMMO quirk, that would give a bonus for every ton.. perhaps instead of counting as 1 ton, it counts as 1.5

[Brizna]

MLX?? Change that forced cAP for a forced MASC. But please make it do something, and while you are at it improve SCATS MASC too, it does nuthing.