390 replies to this topic

[Odanan]

Marcel Bekker, on 22 January 2016 - 05:08 AM, said:

Some modules are nearly useless... others are almost mandatory, it seems. This needs to be adressed.

That I can agree.

[Goolduck]

its nice to have a map where you're not banging your elbows on everything.

also, 'most arrogant thread title of the year' contender, surely?

Edited by Goolduck, 22 January 2016 - 05:36 AM.

[Nick86]

1Grimbane, on 22 January 2016 - 12:03 AM, said:

oh me oh my is this thread still going lol polar is polarizing i guess, i suggest for a month pgi rescale polar to redonkulously big... (8x's larger than it is now) and run a tukayyid type event called "hope you enjoy this map cuz we do" first prize.. actually all the prizes are chances to play more polar... only polar.. forever

I hope they run just Polar and Alpine for all of December this year. Merry Christmas that'll be! Hehehe!

[Nuebot]

Widowmaker1981, on 22 January 2016 - 03:53 AM, said:

Except there is plenty of space to move unseen, just use the gullys. Even the tallest mechs are easily concealed in most of them.

You mean the gentle, mild inclines that don't even inconvenience a king crab let alone any kind of weapon fire? That's the biggest problem with the map. There is cover, but it's all tiny and very ineffective as cover. Anything bigger than a light mech will still be able to get shot at around or over it because none of it is deep, large or sharp enough to actually use unless someone's trying to snipe from the absolute maximum range. The only solid cover are the isolated buildings scattered around that no one's ever near.

[Dimento Graven]

Nuebot, on 22 January 2016 - 02:38 PM, said:

You mean the gentle, mild inclines that don't even inconvenience a king crab let alone any kind of weapon fire? That's the biggest problem with the map. There is cover, but it's all tiny and very ineffective as cover. Anything bigger than a light mech will still be able to get shot at around or over it because none of it is deep, large or sharp enough to actually use unless someone's trying to snipe from the absolute maximum range. The only solid cover are the isolated buildings scattered around that no one's ever near.

As long as you're not under a UAV, TAG'd, NARC'd, or being spotted by an enemy, the gullies and slopes are fine for dodging missiles.

You just have to know:

1. WHEN to get out of sight.
2. HOW to get out of sight.
3. How to move once you are out of sight.

[Solis Obscuri]

1Grimbane, on 21 January 2016 - 08:09 AM, said:

yeah frozen city night has good visibility as well i forgot that map speaking of... was there ever meant to be a terra therma day lol

I thought that was what daytime looked like in Mordor Terra Therma...

[Lyoto Machida]

Dimento Graven, on 22 January 2016 - 02:59 PM, said:

As long as you're not under a UAV, TAG'd, NARC'd, or being spotted by an enemy, the gullies and slopes are fine for dodging missiles.

You just have to know:

1. WHEN to get out of sight.
2. HOW to get out of sight.
3. How to move once you are out of sight.

Nice work in the STK-5Ms last night, btw...was fun seeing all those TAG beams from our team.

[Dimento Graven]

Lyoto Machida, on 22 January 2016 - 04:09 PM, said:

Nice work in the STK-5Ms last night, btw...was fun seeing all those TAG beams from our team.

LOL, yeah it was hilarious:

Here it as again, if you want to relive the missile madness:

[Solis Obscuri]

Random Carnage, on 21 January 2016 - 07:37 PM, said:

As for this...

If a battle comes to you, you're either in a base or in the near surrounds in which case you're familiar with the area and the general conditions and have adapted your load out to suit, or you spend weeks and perhaps months in a drop ship between planets specifically heading for an assault zone, in which case you have time to prep for your destination.

Either way, the assaulting side will have prepared, and the defending side will be ready. Where two sides come together in the middle of nowhere, they both would have already kitted their mechs for the area they're in.

The situation we have in MWO is more like what you'd get if two opposing drop ships collided on a random planet while heading to a different area entirely. Not likely.

I think if you look at the actual logic/fluff behind Battletech 'mech designs and how the game plays in the original tabletop incarnation, most 'mechs (and variant loadouts) are designed to fit a certain range, damage, and heat efficiency/sustained fire profile, and intended to be effective regardless of climate. The heat sinks are built to dissipate waste heat efficiently regardless of the environment, and actually function as sort of a heat pump. As a result, battlemech loadouts don't tend to be changed frequently, in much the same way a military doesn't decide to issue a different type of standard battle rifle every time the weather changes. Major loadout changes are also expensive and technically difficult, usually requiring lengthy factory refits to accomplish. A good analogy might be refitting the 120mm smoothbore main gun on a tank with a 155mm howitzer because, after seeing the enemy position, you find they have less heavy armor and more entrenched infantry than you'd expected... it's going to require major modifications to the turret, the suspension, what have you... not gonna happen overnight. And with the battlemech itself able to operate efficiently in almost any environment, including extreme heat, extreme cold, hard vacuum, corrosive environments, underwater... refits are pretty infrequent.

What is supposed to happen, though, are a series of adjustments made to the computers governing the movement and fire control for a battlemech establishing looser or tighter limitations on safe operation based on the environment they are expected to fight in. These can typically be accomplished over the course of the jump and dropship travel to a new location. Also, most environmental conditions in TT play reflect a fairly modest adjustment to heat sink performance. Fiction pieces and the MW video games have tended to exaggerate this effect, sometimes in nonsensical ways (e.g. the vacuum of space being a "cold" environment). They also have neglected the various penalties to movement rate and weapon accuracy that plague hot-running designs in TT play, meaning that players tend to tax their heat systems in MW video games in ways that would often be tactically unwise in a TT battletech match - mobility and accurate direct artillery fire being the prime benefits of armored cavalry, after all.

Additionally, a single planet may have a variety of climate biomes, and battles during a raid or invasion may be fought in a variety of places - we have a handful of continually reused maps in MWO that are described as a specific place but meant to approximate a variety of planets and conditions - it's unlikely there would be any planet that was all wavy snow dunes, or all volcanoes and toxic waste, or all forests and coastline, or all scorching basalt desert, and with 'mech forces moving around fluidly, weapon refits mainly available at a few (increasingly rare) factory locations, and jumpship travel taking weeks or months, any force is typically going to be configured for some kind of "average" predicted conditions. You could try to do some field refits under the repair rules, of course, but you needed to have really good master techs and there was a moderate chance of something getting screwed up, and the 'mech getting resulting negative quirks (like being unbalanced and more likely to fall, or difficulty targeting with an added weapon, or a weapon that produces extra heat... all of which would be really cool in a logistical campaign setting, but which don't really work out in standard PUG arena fights in MWO).

Considering the high battlefield value of 'mechs and their relative scarcity, even units strongly associated with a certain planet or city location could be called away to fight elsewhere at almost any time, so heavy specialization of loadouts isn't super common canonically. Particularly considering how many 'mechs are old, salvaged designs - the nearest analogy might be if every army in the world today was equipped with a mishmash of every kind of tank produced between WW1 and the Vietnam conflict, plus a few "LosTech" 1980's designs, and you might have a missile-launcher M551 Sheridan fighting alongside a battlescarred 1917 British MkIV covered with all sorts of armor upgrades and a new engines crammed in sometime in the 1950s, next to a frequently-repainted WW2 German Jadpanther with an upgraded main gun. Just because that's what had been acquired in the armory over decades centuries of trade and conflict.

And, tbh, what real-world military isn't equipping it's troops for the next war based on the lessons of the last war (or projected conflict)? Weapons programs can take decades to develop. Just in my lifetime, the US went into the first Gulf War with forces equipped mainly around fighting massive incursions of soviet armor through valleys in central Europe and delivering massive counterstrikes, discovered it was an expensive pain in the *** to haul all that stuff to the four corners of the earth, and retooled with a bunch of new weapon systems based on mobility over armor and role flexibility to deal with emerging threats in the global policeman role. After a few years in the second gulf war, they wound up deciding all those light, mobile vehicles that were easy to ship around the world didn't deal quite so well asymmetrical warfare in hostile urban settings during an occupation, and bid out a bunch of new equipment to deal with those threats. A few years in the future the US will probably wind up fighting in a tropical swamp somewhere, wishing all the big heavy MRAPs didn't sink into the muck so fast and wanting some amphibious light tanks or shallow-drafted boats instead...

Armies are predictive to what degree they can be, but you can't call a do-over after the surveying the battlefield and deciding you'd like to launch a new acquisition program for new specialized vehicles and spend the next decade retraining your troops with different weapons and doctrines in order to better min/max this one coming battle. That is often "video game logic", though, but it's something I find unimaginative as a mechanic. Spreadsheet matches don't challenge players to be adaptive and think on their feet. And I think that "make the best you can out of what you have" military necessity is part of the gritty charm of the Battletech setting. It's something that unfortunately hasn't been captured well in all the past MW video games, though, and trying to cleave to that unlimited-customization outlook while also trying to bring back more of the spirit of traditional BT has always made MWO somewhat the servant of two masters.

[Obelus]

It's my least favorite map so I'm not playing atm cus everyone keeps picking it. I'll come back in a week or so when things have calmed down.

[Heuvadoches]

Map sucks. It needs more cover to make it great. Otherwise, it's a stupid LRMfest.

Edited by Heuvadoches, 22 January 2016 - 06:54 PM.

[oldradagast]

Originally, I like the new map since it was something different. Right up until people started bringing out nothing but LRM's and voting for it every time... blah, it gets boring fast.

That, and the map seems to encourage stupid plays, like fast mechs running off and dying a km from the rest of the team, or slow mechs camping in a random spot "just in case" something happens, which it never does.

Finally, all the flaws of Assault mode are painfully apparent on this map. The last 2 times Assault Polar Highlands came up, it became a mindless race to the cap zone, much like the old circle-jerk games on Alpine where the two teams missed each other and just go around and cap each other out.

It's not a BAD map per-say, but it encourages certain types of play that tend to get boring quickly. It's also a map where carrying your team becomes A LOT harder since they can be scattered all over the place. Such is PUG life, I guess.

Edited by oldradagast, 22 January 2016 - 06:55 PM.

[oldradagast]

Of course, far worse than the map issues are the idiots who assume anyone who doesn't like it "doesn't know how to play' the game. Newsflash: people can have differing opinions about a game, and it can have nothing to do with skill levels. I swear, sometimes it seems like everything is an epeen competition around here...

Edited by oldradagast, 22 January 2016 - 07:07 PM.

[RussianWolf]

Mcgral18, on 20 January 2016 - 02:42 PM, said:

Why?

It's obvious his EXP bar is far from full, because he's whining about the third worst weapon system in the game.

because the one has nothing to do with the other and you know it, yet you poke fun at his assumed rating.


why do I even bother.

[Kjudoon]

Radagast... That's a community problem not a map problem.
I just have more reason to bring mixed loadouts and faster mechs.  I Love my medium lrmishers on this map though.

Edited by Kjudoon, 22 January 2016 - 07:52 PM.

[Mcgral18]

RussianWolf, on 22 January 2016 - 07:14 PM, said:

because the one has nothing to do with the other and you know it, yet you poke fun at his assumed rating.


why do I even bother.

What do you mean? It's exactly what it means: He's inexperienced.
I'm calling him a new player, and there's no doubt about that.

You need a few good matches to Tier up.


Most people can comprehend that.

[Mead]

Tripzter, on 19 January 2016 - 10:47 PM, said:

This map is by far worse than Alpine.

It's wide open, no where to hide.. Took my LRM boat on it to get my 2x xp.. Without even breaking a sweat i did over 1200 dmg. Did you guys seriously think a flat map is a good idea?

Looks like the map stays. Does that give you heart palpitations? Ingest more potassium. Carrots and broccoli. It'll help.

[wanderer]

Cobra Snake, on 21 January 2016 - 07:28 PM, said:

I stopped playing for a year got back into it. They introduced this map and now am I am done again. It wouldn't be so bad if people weren't trying to play it so much. I started playing along time ago and the goal was to avoid Lrms the best you could. with this map its near impossible. Incoming missile pisses me off and and I don't want to hear the "play smart" and blah blah blah. You all are ar tards and need to get your chromosome count checked again. Solo Pug drop forget it. I never write posts and nothing has ever made me more angry than this map. I don't ever comment or write ****. I buy the occasional MC but this thing is just intolerable.

SO basically, you've managed yet another edition of the "I am bad with dealing with lurms, let me show you with my high salt content" post here.

Hint: If the majority of players aren't getting murdered in the lurm rain, that you're getting massacred indicates the lack of smarts lies within you, Grasshopper.

Marcel Bekker, on 22 January 2016 - 05:08 AM, said:

AMS and Cover usage are a given, but I have to comment on the Radar Derp... it is 15000 GXP to unlock and 6kk cbills to buy. And that is to equip ONE mech, unless you want to swap modules every time you take a different mech.

My point is, having Radar Derp as sort of a prerequisite to not get swamped by LRMs or ambushed constantly is kind of... off-putting for newer players, quiaff? If they even know about its importance... I am not that new anymore, and just now I am close to unlocking that module. There were so many other mechs and interesting things that grabbed my attention before, and until I noticed how important this module actually is, it was too late to quickly get it.

Some modules are nearly useless... others are almost mandatory, it seems. This needs to be adressed.

Actually, I go on Polar without radar dep all the time. Or ECM. Or AMS.

But I'm so used to -launching- missiles that I have a very good grip on how to avoid them. And considering one of those Mechs mounts nothin' but standard large lasers- not ERLLs, regular ones - it's not like I can dance around at 1000m and outrange them.

If lil ol' Tier 3 me can manage it, so can you.

[Red Shrike]

Solis Obscuri, on 22 January 2016 - 05:49 PM, said:

I think if you look at the actual logic/fluff behind Battletech 'mech designs and how the game plays in the original tabletop incarnation, most 'mechs (and variant loadouts) are designed to fit a certain range, damage, and heat efficiency/sustained fire profile, and intended to be effective regardless of climate. The heat sinks are built to dissipate waste heat efficiently regardless of the environment, and actually function as sort of a heat pump. As a result, battlemech loadouts don't tend to be changed frequently, in much the same way a military doesn't decide to issue a different type of standard battle rifle every time the weather changes. Major loadout changes are also expensive and technically difficult, usually requiring lengthy factory refits to accomplish. A good analogy might be refitting the 120mm smoothbore main gun on a tank with a 155mm howitzer because, after seeing the enemy position, you find they have less heavy armor and more entrenched infantry than you'd expected... it's going to require major modifications to the turret, the suspension, what have you... not gonna happen overnight. And with the battlemech itself able to operate efficiently in almost any environment, including extreme heat, extreme cold, hard vacuum, corrosive environments, underwater... refits are pretty infrequent.

What is supposed to happen, though, are a series of adjustments made to the computers governing the movement and fire control for a battlemech establishing looser or tighter limitations on safe operation based on the environment they are expected to fight in. These can typically be accomplished over the course of the jump and dropship travel to a new location. Also, most environmental conditions in TT play reflect a fairly modest adjustment to heat sink performance. Fiction pieces and the MW video games have tended to exaggerate this effect, sometimes in nonsensical ways (e.g. the vacuum of space being a "cold" environment). They also have neglected the various penalties to movement rate and weapon accuracy that plague hot-running designs in TT play, meaning that players tend to tax their heat systems in MW video games in ways that would often be tactically unwise in a TT battletech match - mobility and accurate direct artillery fire being the prime benefits of armored cavalry, after all.

Additionally, a single planet may have a variety of climate biomes, and battles during a raid or invasion may be fought in a variety of places - we have a handful of continually reused maps in MWO that are described as a specific place but meant to approximate a variety of planets and conditions - it's unlikely there would be any planet that was all wavy snow dunes, or all volcanoes and toxic waste, or all forests and coastline, or all scorching basalt desert, and with 'mech forces moving around fluidly, weapon refits mainly available at a few (increasingly rare) factory locations, and jumpship travel taking weeks or months, any force is typically going to be configured for some kind of "average" predicted conditions. You could try to do some field refits under the repair rules, of course, but you needed to have really good master techs and there was a moderate chance of something getting screwed up, and the 'mech getting resulting negative quirks (like being unbalanced and more likely to fall, or difficulty targeting with an added weapon, or a weapon that produces extra heat... all of which would be really cool in a logistical campaign setting, but which don't really work out in standard PUG arena fights in MWO).

Considering the high battlefield value of 'mechs and their relative scarcity, even units strongly associated with a certain planet or city location could be called away to fight elsewhere at almost any time, so heavy specialization of loadouts isn't super common canonically. Particularly considering how many 'mechs are old, salvaged designs - the nearest analogy might be if every army in the world today was equipped with a mishmash of every kind of tank produced between WW1 and the Vietnam conflict, plus a few "LosTech" 1980's designs, and you might have a missile-launcher M551 Sheridan fighting alongside a battlescarred 1917 British MkIV covered with all sorts of armor upgrades and a new engines crammed in sometime in the 1950s, next to a frequently-repainted WW2 German Jadpanther with an upgraded main gun. Just because that's what had been acquired in the armory over decades centuries of trade and conflict.

And, tbh, what real-world military isn't equipping it's troops for the next war based on the lessons of the last war (or projected conflict)? Weapons programs can take decades to develop. Just in my lifetime, the US went into the first Gulf War with forces equipped mainly around fighting massive incursions of soviet armor through valleys in central Europe and delivering massive counterstrikes, discovered it was an expensive pain in the *** to haul all that stuff to the four corners of the earth, and retooled with a bunch of new weapon systems based on mobility over armor and role flexibility to deal with emerging threats in the global policeman role. After a few years in the second gulf war, they wound up deciding all those light, mobile vehicles that were easy to ship around the world didn't deal quite so well asymmetrical warfare in hostile urban settings during an occupation, and bid out a bunch of new equipment to deal with those threats. A few years in the future the US will probably wind up fighting in a tropical swamp somewhere, wishing all the big heavy MRAPs didn't sink into the muck so fast and wanting some amphibious light tanks or shallow-drafted boats instead...

Armies are predictive to what degree they can be, but you can't call a do-over after the surveying the battlefield and deciding you'd like to launch a new acquisition program for new specialized vehicles and spend the next decade retraining your troops with different weapons and doctrines in order to better min/max this one coming battle. That is often "video game logic", though, but it's something I find unimaginative as a mechanic. Spreadsheet matches don't challenge players to be adaptive and think on their feet. And I think that "make the best you can out of what you have" military necessity is part of the gritty charm of the Battletech setting. It's something that unfortunately hasn't been captured well in all the past MW video games, though, and trying to cleave to that unlimited-customization outlook while also trying to bring back more of the spirit of traditional BT has always made MWO somewhat the servant of two masters.

+1

[The Hig]

I personally enjoy the new map as many others have stated due to the variety it brings. Its large. It has trenches and structures for cover and open rolling terrain as well. Yes slower mechs will be landing platforms for LRMs unless you coordinate, maneuver and protect against it. Different map requiring different tactics. Huge step in the right direction!

I have had a great time flanking wide in a fast hvy or med , finding the LRM boats on the enemy team and brawling them to death for not having enough friendly support or backup weapons. Remember to face hug that LRM boat and make them pay for only leaving tonnage for a couple of MLasers. Good times.

Lastly, as suggested by others, choosing a mech after map choice is locked would be interesting but would add more pre match time. How about building a drop deck for every match not just CW and after map is chosen you take just one of your mechs from your deck? I'm not sure if group drops could do that and enforce the weight limits but interesting suggestion none the less. MM may be a pain then too also.

Cheers!