120 replies to this topic

[adamts01]

Laser spamming is a problem. Every mech that is complained about is a laser spammer. Cheetah, Firestarter, timber, crow... Ghost heat is a simple thing to lessen those alphas. I say more ghost heat. The other mechanic that sounds great is a cone fire that increases with number of lasers fired within 1/2 second. The reason both these mechanics are ideal is that they don't punish the crappy mechs that only have 2 or 3 lasers the way these targeting solutions do and they would be easy to introduce. With the new range mechanic, how do you counter snipe a 3L? You can't lock him. He'll always out range you by 40%. They'll be everywhere. And that's not good. And I'm not hating on laser spammers, they're just broken. With the sad state of the Oceanic server and the lopsided matches I resulted to waiting linger for a match and only using my Timber so it would be easier to carry a bad team. So yeah, ghost heat, bring it on. With that happening and the ECM nerf missiles will be a great alternative to stacking lasers. And mixed builds are good for game play.

[FupDup]

The fastest way I can sum it up is that it punishes the wrong builds, for the wrong reasons, using the wrong methods.


Wrong builds: Remember how the AC/2 used to have Paranormal Heat? Even today most of the weapons on the list have never needed it...I can understand PPCs, AC/20, and Clan lasers, but no missiles or other ballistics should have it.

Wrong reasons: So what if they fire their guns at the same time? Why wouldn't they? Chainfiring everything makes them more vulnerable to getting shot back, not to mention it's more likely to spread damage on their targets.

Wrong methods: PGI likes to rely on heat as their predominant "balancing" mechanism, as seen by some previous statements such as Paul's stance in Ask The Devs #43 (he thinks heat efficient mechs would be highly exploited).


It's also counter-intuitive. Let's pretend that I fire Weapon X, and Weapon X generates 3 heat per shot. So, if I fired 2 of Weapon X, I would logically expect 6 points of heat. If I fired 3 of them, there would be 9 heat. Etc. But nope, wraiths from the metaphysical dimension decided to give me random excess heat from the nether.

Edited by FupDup, 15 October 2015 - 08:41 PM.

[Cyborne Elemental]

Because weapons are just about hot enough that they really don't need ghostheat to regulate things anymore.

I see Ghostheat as a big obstacle in the way of actually balancing on a weapon-by-weapon basis, instead of trying to balance things as a group.

And weapons like AC-20, do not need ridiculous Ghost heat, they just don't.

If ghostheat was gone, and we had a small heatcap like we're supposed to, we wouldn't have any need for it in the first place.

[MischiefSC]

FupDup, on 15 October 2015 - 08:40 PM, said:

The fastest way I can sum it up is that it punishes the wrong builds, for the wrong reasons, using the wrong methods.


Wrong builds: Remember how the AC/2 used to have Paranormal Heat? Even today most of the weapons on the list have never needed it...I can understand PPCs, AC/20, and Clan lasers, but no missiles or other ballistics should have it.

Wrong reasons: So what if they fire their guns at the same time? Why wouldn't they? Chainfiring everything makes them more vulnerable to getting shot back, not to mention it's more likely to spread damage on their targets.

Wrong methods: PGI likes to rely on heat as their predominant "balancing" mechanism, as seen by some previous statements such as Paul's stance in Ask The Devs #43 (he thinks heat efficient mechs would be highly exploited).


It's also counter-intuitive. Let's pretend that I fire Weapon X, and Weapon X generates 3 heat per shot. So, if I fired 2 of Weapon X, I would logically expect 6 points of heat. If I fired 3 of them, there would be 9 heat. Etc. But nope, wraiths from the metaphysical dimension decided to give me random excess heat from the nether.

Without ghost heat a 4 or 6 LL Stalker would be stupid dangerous. I dislike the mechanic. I'm not sure what to replace it with to keep boating big guns from being exploited the holy living **** out of. I'm not however so sure it needs to be as broad as it is. I'm tempted to say revisit the AC20 ghost heat. Possibly even PPCs. Again though, small steps on changes. That's what we asked for and we need to stick to it.

Whatever other complaints we may have we got a relatively simple, iterative build on the PTS. No quirks, just the IW and some basic laser stuff. That's it. I get we want a lot of changes. Mine is literally pages long. Don't throw the list away but let's try this iterative thing so long as they're willing to do it.

[Kiiyor]

Er... I....


Don't hate it.





I was incredibly skeptical when it was announced, but after playing, I thought it was... well, a good move. Are there better solutions out there? Probably, yes. Are there solutions that are easier to implement, from a build and coding standpoint? Probably not. Maybe. Who knows.

The thing I don't like about it, is the lack of feedback to the player, and how unintuitive it is. The only way to know you've hit the ghost heat threshold is to read about it before hand and know exactly what you can fire, or to explode.

With a game mechanic as important as ghost heat, it needs to be communicated to the player each time it effects them. A blinking light. A verbal warning. Something on the hud. Heck, I even 'shopped a use for it into a mech's monitor once:



While there are undoubtedly more elegant solutions out there, we probably aren't going to get them in the forseeable future. I think we need to polish what we have, and in-game feedback (IMHO) is the best way to do that.

[Accused]

MischiefSC, on 15 October 2015 - 08:45 PM, said:

Without ghost heat a 4 or 6 LL Stalker would be stupid dangerous. I dislike the mechanic. I'm not sure what to replace it with to keep boating big guns from being exploited the holy living **** out of.

Let them explode.

Fire a single small laser over that redline and kaboom. No hand holding, no warning, just dead.

[SaltBeef]

Why do you Hate to step in Dogs hit barefoot?

[Amsro]

The problem lies in being able to have too much heat.

You don't need ghost heat if the max heat you can have is 30.

Lowering the heat cap would also increase TTK.

But why do any actually baseline balancing when you can just throw fairy dust and bandaids over it all.

[Deathlike]

FupDup, on 15 October 2015 - 08:40 PM, said:

The fastest way I can sum it up is that it punishes the wrong builds, for the wrong reasons, using the wrong methods.


Wrong builds: Remember how the AC/2 used to have Paranormal Heat? Even today most of the weapons on the list have never needed it...I can understand PPCs, AC/20, and Clan lasers, but no missiles or other ballistics should have it.

Wrong reasons: So what if they fire their guns at the same time? Why wouldn't they? Chainfiring everything makes them more vulnerable to getting shot back, not to mention it's more likely to spread damage on their targets.

Wrong methods: PGI likes to rely on heat as their predominant "balancing" mechanism, as seen by some previous statements such as Paul's stance in Ask The Devs #43 (he thinks heat efficient mechs would be highly exploited).


It's also counter-intuitive. Let's pretend that I fire Weapon X, and Weapon X generates 3 heat per shot. So, if I fired 2 of Weapon X, I would logically expect 6 points of heat. If I fired 3 of them, there would be 9 heat. Etc. But nope, wraiths from the metaphysical dimension decided to give me random excess heat from the nether.

It would just be easier to say..

Short answer: Because Paul

Long answer: It's a bad design since it's a bandaid for one issue, but obfuscates other issues with existing gameplay mechanics. Adding complex fixes instead of more sensible and more logical/viable options (like actual heat penalties like a slower mech, slower dissipation, HUD scrambling) that have been used in previous MW games have been totally ignored.

Try to explain "Ghost Heat" to your friends that don't play this game... and see if they don't laugh @ you outright.

Edited by Deathlike, 15 October 2015 - 09:03 PM.

[MischiefSC]

Kiiyor, on 15 October 2015 - 08:54 PM, said:

Er... I....


Don't hate it.





I was incredibly skeptical when it was announced, but after playing, I thought it was... well, a good move. Are there better solutions out there? Probably, yes. Are there solutions that are easier to implement, from a build and coding standpoint? Probably not. Maybe. Who knows.

The thing I don't like about it, is the lack of feedback to the player, and how unintuitive it is. The only way to know you've hit the ghost heat threshold is to read about it before hand and know exactly what you can fire, or to explode.

With a game mechanic as important as ghost heat, it needs to be communicated to the player each time it effects them. A blinking light. A verbal warning. Something on the hud. Heck, I even 'shopped a use for it into a mech's monitor once:



While there are undoubtedly more elegant solutions out there, we probably aren't going to get them in the forseeable future. I think we need to polish what we have, and in-game feedback (IMHO) is the best way to do that.

That's the thing though. That's what makes IW work. You have the *potential* of useful information - game changing information. Powerful, useful information. You then sell it to the player for investing in IW resources. Be that tonnage and crits for BAP/TC/CC or module slots or effort or communication or picking their mech for the role or, well, something.

You don't give them that info for free anymore. That's a big part of the issue that made IW seem impossible - we got all the info of C3 master/slave network plus every other possible HUD info and feedback for free just by powering up. So what value was IW?

I get that having info sources taken away sucks. Keeping the effects of IW nebulous though is part of what makes it work. You don't KNOW when getting lased how much damage it did without looking. It makes exploiting IW consistently and repeatably difficult, very difficult.

This, in turn, makes creating a consistently performing min/maxed build difficult. That's hugely important - it's what keeps a meta from being as utterly dominant as we've had. I get that it will piss off a lot of number-crunching players who like to grind out an absolute munchkin superpower concept and just roll it consistently and expect consistent results but that, in turn, poisons the well of overall asymetric weapon balance.

We can't have Clans and IS, lasers, ballistic and missile weapons balanced in a FPS by straight stats. We've seen that, screwed with it, tried to get it to work but you bundle that with all the variants, weapon mounts, chassis, omnipods and map variables we've got and you end up with a hot mess. Someone grinds down the optimal stats, identifies how they are best exploited and BOOM. You've got a machine you feed matches into and get consistent performance out of. You make exact performance difficult to predict and you make that ubermech build more difficult to identify and the meta, weapon balance itself, more fuzzy.

I'm a numbers guy. I get an eye twitch at the concept I admit. However for balance in this sort of environment it has a lot of merit. IW, deployed ruthlessly and in ways that kick the chair out from under people, has the potential to keep that apple cart reasonably upset. It lets you build niches for weapons that can be exploited consistently enough to let them compete with other completely different builds.

That's still a long way from the current PTS iteration but it's now living at an address that we can navigate to from here. Before it was just... this hope without a method. Nobody is going to like any method that gets there because it means they don't get a consistent best option. Same reason a lot of people hated gauss/PPC nerfs and hate Clan nerfs. They want a go-to best option that is always best.

Also, people hate change. We won't get productive on these changes until ~ Saturday. We hate change for about 72 hours, give or take. It's that fingers in the ear LALALA period we all get. Props to you for being willing to consider them rationally. There is... potential here. It's not an end result but I see the seed of a good idea here. I haven't seen that in a big change in MW:O in a good long while. I want to water it and play it classical music and see if it can be made to grow into something pretty.

[Tarl Cabot]

Amsro, on 15 October 2015 - 09:02 PM, said:

The problem lies in being able to have too much heat.

You don't need ghost heat if the max heat you can have is 30.

Lowering the heat cap would also increase TTK.

But why do any actually baseline balancing when you can just throw fairy dust and bandaids over it all.

Hardcap the Heat Scale, be it 30, 40, 50. Include a few other thresholds of the Heat Scale concerning mech speed and agility. 2 to 3 threshold points and they did not need to start at the lowest point from the Battletech Heat Scale. Add one more override Shutdown threshold.

With the above, if PGI still wanted to keep Ghost Heat, set it at a lower level. It could also be set to start when firing 2+ weapons of anything. Example - IS Medium Laser has a 4 heat. Fire one laser = 4 heat, fire two lasers = 9 or 10 heat. Set it at a percentage of the base heat to accumulate based on the number of weapons being fired.

Many options but without the a valid Heat Scale with its effects on throughout the range, it is just an on/off switch. Keep doing stuff til your heat hits max. Until hitting max, it is like running a mech on the MW4 no-heat servers. For this game it really does not make any sense.

Edited by Tarl Cabot, 15 October 2015 - 09:20 PM.

[InRev]

Because it's a very poor band-aid that doesn't fix the underlying causes of the problems in the first place, thus leading to the need of even more band-aids.

If this game had: 1) a proper heat scale, heat cap and heat dissipation; and 2) proper convergence mechanics, then obtuse, convoluted and unnatural mechanics like Ghost Heat™, Ghost Shields™, gauss charge-up etc would not be necessary.

Instead, what we have is a fundamentally broken game with a crap-ton of silly papering over the cracks every time a meta emerges. I'm morbidly curious to see what absurd Ghost Mechanic™ they will dream up next in order to nerf the meta that emerges if/when the current PTS changes go live. I'm sure it will be as asinine as their previous ideas.

[FupDup]

MischiefSC, on 15 October 2015 - 08:45 PM, said:

Without ghost heat a 4 or 6 LL Stalker would be stupid dangerous. I dislike the mechanic. I'm not sure what to replace it with to keep boating big guns from being exploited the holy living **** out of. I'm not however so sure it needs to be as broad as it is. I'm tempted to say revisit the AC20 ghost heat. Possibly even PPCs. Again though, small steps on changes. That's what we asked for and we need to stick to it.

Are you seriously worried about the Stalker boogeyman when we already have much deadlier things walking around daily?

If you seriously "have" to, you can just bump down or remove the quirks on Stalkers.

[MischiefSC]

FupDup, on 15 October 2015 - 09:21 PM, said:

Are you seriously worried about the Stalker boogeyman when we already have much deadlier things walking around daily?

If you seriously "have" to, you can just bump down or remove the quirks on Stalkers.

It's not the quirks - it's boated lasers. Stalkers are just an example. Same with PPCs. IT's not a boogyman - it sorta sucked and it just promotes more identical boating. Synergy, etc.

A heat scale fix would be awesome. Magical even. I'd take that and wrap it up with love and adoration. I'm not game for just tossing ghost heat without some other option for managing boated big weapons in place.

[Random Carnage]

The heat scale hard cap should also scale with the size of the chassis, such as 1 point per tonne for example. Larger mechs have far better passive cooling simply from the surface area. This system would also help address the issue of Assaults not being able to maintain any more dps than Heavies, and would limit potential alphas for each weight class.

[Khobai]

Quote

Why Does Everyone Hate Ghost Heat?

1) it doesnt work. people circumvent it by using combinations of weapons with similar properties that are in different ghost heat groups. CERML and CLPL for example. And it was AC5/PPC before that and Gauss/PPC before that... before PPCs were nerfed into obsolescence.

2) it unfairly punishes weapons like SRMs that dont need ghost heat limits. Is it really necessary to punish people for firing x4 SRM4s which only do ~34 SPREAD damage? Especially since CERML/CLPL combopacks do upwards of 50+ PINPOINT damage and arnt penalized AT ALL? Its ridiculous.

3) the mechanic feels artificial and contrived. Its not intuitive at all. Its way too overcomplicated with its cross reference chart of linked weapon groups, weapon quantities, and heat penalties. They cant even explain properly how it works in-game and it confuses the HELL out of new players.

4) despite the implementation of ghost heat and other equally goofball ideas we still have a massive problem with high damage pinpoint alphas. because the #1 weapon balance problem, convergence, has never been properly addressed. Instead the problem has been completely sidestepped with bandaids that dont work. So naturally people are going to be resentful of such bandaids like ghost heat.

Edited by Khobai, 15 October 2015 - 10:12 PM.

[LordNothing]

i liked the ghost part, not necessarily the heat part. i would prefer something more like ghost duration instead. if you fire too many of them at once the fire control system puts the lasers into a low power mode to keep the heat down. so you get a long slow burn that ends up making it harder to deliver a high alpha (also giving the target a chance to spread the damage).

[El Bandito]

Energy draw system is what I advocate. If the total weapons fired exceeds energy draw requirements (exact value is subject to change) then the computer will force chain-fire the excess weapons. Easier on the newbies, easier to remember the value, and much less convoluted.
In addition, it can take care of Gaussvomit cheese, and dual Gauss Direwhale, something GH cannot do at all.

Edited by El Bandito, 15 October 2015 - 09:59 PM.

[FupDup]

MischiefSC, on 15 October 2015 - 09:28 PM, said:

It's not the quirks - it's boated lasers. Stalkers are just an example. Same with PPCs. IT's not a boogyman - it sorta sucked and it just promotes more identical boating. Synergy, etc.

A heat scale fix would be awesome. Magical even. I'd take that and wrap it up with love and adoration. I'm not game for just tossing ghost heat without some other option for managing boated big weapons in place.

As long as the individual weapons themselves aren't omnipotent, then they can just be countered by a mech designed accordingly.

E.g. a laser boat should probably be countered by a PPFLD peeker of some kind that can take a shot and hide before the laser boat can get a full beam fired, or a PPC boat getting countered by people that get in close range where it can't sustain its heat and has min range, etc.

Boating magnifies the strengths of the weaponry being boated, but it also magnifies their weaknesses.

Edited by FupDup, 15 October 2015 - 09:50 PM.

[adamts01]

The lower heat scale with a faster cooldown would fix a lot of the issues but we still would need ghost heat. I run the 2lpl &5med timby with 24 total heatsinks. A 61 point alpha brings me up to 50% heat. Even if my heat scale was cut in half I'd still be able to do that alpha then maintain firepower with my pulses. As a response to FupDup, yeah, it's the best build because I limit my exposure and trade better than anything. But it's not good for the game. I feel dirty every time I one shot a light or 1 shot a medium in the back st. I only drop in that thing when it's one of those nights and I need a win. A lower heat cap won't fix my Cheetah. If a mech doesn't die after 2 or 3 shots to the back I normally have to bug out anyway and go find another poor unsuspecting target. I could still knock out those 3 rapid alphas of 30 damage with my heat scale halved. A light shouldn't have that kind of firepower. From a balancing standpoint I just think ghost heat solve a lot of problems. But yes, it should be explained precisely in game.