Johnny Z, on 09 October 2015 - 08:48 AM, said:
BOARD GAME MECHANICS CANNOT BE USED FOR A FPS SIM COMPUTER GAME BY DEFINITION.
True they can't be directly carried over, but a number of things could have been much more intelligently converted. The critical system was more or less disregarded, the heat/time/damage scaling was warped, etc etc. I don't really agree with the OP alot of points but it's clear he's given more thought to the problems in MWO's core game mechanics than PGI has or ever will. Even if he's reached what I consider to be the wrong conclusion in many cases I can respect the effort.
RedMercury, on 09 October 2015 - 08:35 AM, said:
1. Weapon cooldown. A standard Battletech round represents 10 seconds of real time. Movement, heat dissipation, and weapon recycling times are all based on this. By making weapons recycle in 2 to 4 seconds, the effective firing frequency was increased up to 4x, (to make the game more arcade-like, because MWO is a thinking man's shooter). This broke:
A. balance between heat generation and heat dissipation [Result: everyone runs hot]
B. balance between heat intensive (energy) weapons and low heat (ammo) weapons, which are heavier.
C. Ammo counts [Result: ammo runs out sooner]
D. Balance between fast mechs which rely on speed to avoid firepower, and slower mechs, since fast mechs can now be shot at more often [Result: lights are less survivable]
1 - The problem is less the faster rates of fire than the the excessively large heat capacity 'Mechs get to alpha with, but yes the heat dissipation rate is about half what it should be to balance against the increased firing rates and doubled armor. The heat system also uses rate of heat application much less effectively than it could in balancing weapons.
2 -
Pin point -
There's been a good thread or twelve dozen discussing how to do convergence, and the overwhelming response from PGI has been "Hey, who wants to fund this cargo culting shovelware title?".
3 - Armor, speed, hit boxes and mobility are all very hard to balance in a system where meny of the aforementioned issues aren't solved. Lights aren't really meant to be as effective or survivable as heavies, but no one wants to play a less effective 'Mech in the current system. For one, rewards and matchmaking aren't adjusted to reflect a pilot doing "well for a panther" versus "well for a Timberwolf".
4 - More or less. None of the overheat penalties like movement got carried into MWO. This goes back to the bad heat cap/dissipation balance. Part of the huge heat cap we have was originally supposed to be reserved as part of the overheat penalty scale with movement penalties and such leading up to full shutdown. Back in open beta people at PGI said stuff like "we'd like to make a complete heat system but we're working on blah blah blah" and then eventually the bolts holding the open beta sign on rusted through and now they won't admit that it's not a good or complete heat system.
5 - Yes the critical system's another thing that got badly mangled. PGI gave criticals 10 hit points so that things like lasers could cause partial critical damage, and that was smart, but then they didn't extend that to it's logical conclusion. If a medium laser's as good as a PPC at causing a critical hit than a medium laser should do 2 critical damage per structure damage, and a PPC should do one. A SRM should do 2.5 crit/per damage, an LRM should do 2, an LB-X should do 10. If that kills criticals too fast then augment the critical health of components like you did for armor.
6 - You're more or less right on why LRMs can be powerful but pretty dead wrong on how to handle it. If the trouble is that multiple people can leverage one spotter (in BT they cant, one spotter one IDF) then just set it up so only one person can launch missiles at a target per TAG maybe two for a NARC, and take out passive spotting altogether. Once the heat system's fixed, then you can make LRMs faster without making them overpowered. AMS doesn't need a buff, it needs to be scaled so it's more effective against lots of missiles and less effective against small numbers of launchers. Right now an LRM5 hitting an AMS is an LRM 0, and an LRM20 hitting an AMS is a LRM 12. That needs to be changed so a LRM 5 is and LRM4 and aLRM 20 is a LRM 16. Overlapping LRMs need to not cut that lower than 2 for the LRM 5 and 8 for the LRM 20.
7 - Clan and IS never should have been fighting in the same pool. They should have split it into ISvIS, ISvClan and ClanvClan and let asymmetric force sizes handle the balance. Rewards could have then be flavored to encourage clan like play, and repairs and such could have added flavor.
Alistair Winter, on 09 October 2015 - 10:40 AM, said:
In other games, there's a risk-reward calculation based on things such as repair & rearm, but we no longer have that in MWO. 99% of the MWO population considered R&R a bad thing and 99% of the MWO population were dead wrong. IMHO
To be completely fair, while R&R is a great idea and should be implemented, the way it
was implemented in MWO was really, really terrible.
Edited by no one, 10 October 2015 - 04:30 PM.
2
RedMercury, on 09 October 2015 - 12:35 PM, said:
