88 replies to this topic

[MischiefSC]

Hit the Deck, on 24 January 2016 - 11:10 PM, said:

How does Warhammer (40k etc.) fare with asymmetric balancing? If they can survive then why did FASA have to apologize for what they have done?

Cuz they didn't? Not very effectively. There's not a lot of 'balance' in the asymetric engagements. It's generally a stomp. Orks with no bigguns vs Space Marines?

It gets closer though by a huge increase in volume. 36 vs 128 is a whole easier ball of math to balance in a RNG dice game than 8 v 12. Law of averages plays a way bigger role in Warhammer than it does in Battletech. Generally what you had though was a mix of comparable units; Space Marines plus Army on one side and Orks with Nobs, Boyz and a mix of units. Some pretty comparable to a Space Marine on their own.

Tell you what though - try to get someone to play 8 Space Marines vs 12 Ork Boyz. In fact ask them to play 1,000 matches with you where they are the Ork Boyz and you're the Space Marines. Being the Space Marines is going to be a lot more fun, isn't it?

Apples to oranges in the end. If you tried to make a Warhammer 40K FPS you'd need to do it with comparable units. Which, by the way, exist in every faction. Every faction has units at pretty comparable performance levels and most games involve pretty balanced 1 to 1 engagements in that regard.

[Gvix]

As someone that played quite a bit of tabletop battletech I think that piloting a mech feels right. A LOT of things just can´t translate right when you go into first person mode, but I think that what I experience playing the game is a pretty good representation of what a pilot might experience. The assaults are satisfyingly slow and ponderous, the lights are zippy. It brings back that feel of moving my lead and pewter pieces around.

Your complaints about gunnery don´t make a lot of sense. You aim, you shoot, its a first person game, how else would it work? Even in the low tech days of 3025 they had computers that aided mechwarriors in shooting and with weapons convergence. You know how hard it is to hit a light running between buildings with a tree in the way? There you go.

The clans were a BAD idea from day one. They´re especially bad for a one on one pvp game like MWO. I think the devs have come up with an elegant solution to what was a massive screw up by FASA all those decades ago. In what universe does a game where the clans dominate everything and can take two or three times their tonnage in IS mechs work for a game like MWO? Heck, it didn´t really work on the tabletop either. Over the years there were several point and cost based systems but ultimately none felt satisfactory when trying to balance the clan and the IS forces. Unlike the books, MWO is not a combined arms forces game. IS players can´t call in accurate Arrow 4 fire on clan mechs, or depend on cheap combustion engine vehicles with LB-10xs to overwhelm clan mechs. the balance has to be one mech on one mech. Perhaps players that want to play clan mechs should abide by the clan bidding and honor systems? Would that work at all in MWO? The clans should´ve been NPC opponnents at best on MWO, but I don´t think that would´ve worked out too well either, or made clan fans happy at all.

I get the feeling that what you want is more of a hardcore sim experience. I don´t think you´re wrong to want that, but I don´t think that´s what MWO could ever be, not this late in its life cycle.

[Brandarr Gunnarson]

Mystere, on 24 January 2016 - 11:03 PM, said:

The only thing you did by that quote is show me how the use of quirks is very "unfair".

Yes, this is part of it. They are unfair and contribute to the state of imbalance we have, even as they are used to try and mitigate it.

But the use of Quirks like this is symptomatic of underlying imbalance.

Prosperity Park, on 24 January 2016 - 11:19 PM, said:

I would not play a game of "8 really cool Mechs vs 12 meh-Mechs" because everyone in their right mind would want to play only with the cool ones.

^ This.

Even if it were 10 cool 'Mechs vs 12 "meh" 'Mechs, everyone would want to play the cool ones.

[Mystere]

Johnny Z, on 24 January 2016 - 11:19 PM, said:

Which is why most players wanted this to be a 3025 game. To this day its the best Battletech aside from MechWarrior Online that wanted the Clans to be added and not toally ruin any chance at multi player including the Inner Sphere.

This is a huge topic that effects the turn based Battletech game being made and also any movie if one ever gets made.

I am not so sure about the "most" part. When someone gifted me Armorcast figurines, it was a Timber Wolf and a Mad Dog. Also in 1999, I don't even remember what movie I was watching then, but this was one of the advertisements shown prior to the movie:




There is a reason 3050's BattleTech has mass appeal. And those "lowly masses" called them the "Mad Cat" and "Vulture".

Edited by Mystere, 24 January 2016 - 11:48 PM.

[Elyam]

Well, I haven't posted one of these in a while. Used to comment on it often in the early days. Last year I left for a few months then returned, accepting it for what it is since i's what we have right now and it does meet a great deal of what makes BT, BT.

I've said countless times - the primary decision keeping this from honestly realizing BT is the choice to ignore the fallen-tech realities of the BTU that effect targeting more obviously than anything else in order to bridge in FPS fans (lobbed in now under the e-sports moniker) and the hordes of online players who demand faster play. I can't blame the devs at all on the financial choice, but I wish different server types would be offered running what could be called the 'classic' gameform.

I remain confident that at some point someone will pull together a working, viable and complete translation of the BTU. For now, MWO does at least try to keep many parts of it alive, and I have learned to be grateful for that.

edit: as for the discussion of the general mistakes inherent to the post-3025 BTU...I lived through it in TT as it happened. I continue to like the notion of the return of the descendants of Kerensky and the Exodus - like it a great deal, including the role the Dragoons played as a general thing, not necessarily the way it was written. I don't like much of the new culture and society approach that was taken (not to mention all the made-up terms) with the Clans. I like Stackpole's writing (the Warrior series is superb), but not this stuff, no matter if the source was him, Weisman or whomever. As for the tech, evolving the 2750 tech into what the returners might be using is a fine idea, but the iteration they decided on gave too many advantages. Double heatsinks were too great a boost, and then the half-weight missile racks and single-crit location ERLLAS and all the other space advantages. And while an ultra-5 could be tolerated - an ultra-20? Not to mention the arms race of overpowered gear spawned during the following years.

I'd still rather be in 3025-35 and the 4th Succession War than any other period.

Edited by Elyam, 24 January 2016 - 11:59 PM.

[Mystere]

Brandarr Gunnarson, on 24 January 2016 - 11:29 PM, said:

Even if it were 10 cool 'Mechs vs 12 "meh" 'Mechs, everyone would want to play the cool ones.

Everyone? Please, let us not deal with absolutes. The rebel and non-confirmist in me and many others just screams otherwise. I have to silence it from time to time.

Edited by Mystere, 24 January 2016 - 11:49 PM.

[Brandarr Gunnarson]

Mystere, on 24 January 2016 - 11:41 PM, said:

Everyone? Please, let us not deal with absolutes. The rebel in me and many others just screams otherwise. I have to silence it from time to time.

It's a turn of phrase called "overstatement", typically used to enlarge importance.

Let's not deal with semantics; huh?

Edited by Brandarr Gunnarson, 24 January 2016 - 11:49 PM.

[Queen of England]

I think the biggest thing for me is how tough 'mechs seem to be in MWO compared to table top. Double armor/stucture, structure quirks, 60% reduced damage transfer, no through-armor criticals, dramatically increased head structure, ammo explosion chance reduced by 90%, no gyro crits, no engine crits, no actuator crits, no cockpit crits, items have hit points instead of being instantly destroyed, no heat-induced ammo explosions, no pilot damage, etc. That there's no chance at all that an undamaged Atlas will be destroyed by a single AC/2 shot irritates me.

Also, I once kicked the head off an Atlas with an Awesome standing on a level 1 hill. This is, in my opinion, the most BattleTech thing ever, and nothing like it can happen in MWO. PGI needs to fix their weird teleporting collisions and let us start beating on each other!

Edited by Queen of England, 24 January 2016 - 11:59 PM.

[Red Shrike]

Prosperity Park, on 24 January 2016 - 11:19 PM, said:

I would not play a game of "8 really cool Mechs vs 12 meh-Mechs" because everyone in their right mind would want to play only with the cool ones.

I would play the meh mechs. Probably even more than the cool mechs. Uphill battles are my kind of battles.


You guys speak of of competitive play and FPS like it's all there is to it. From a grand perspective, I feel this is one of MWO's flaws.
When I play Battlefield, I don't feel angry or frustrated when out of 6 soldiers charging a hill, I'm the one to catch a bullet. Because I know my 5 teammates will get the job done. It feels like a team effort, rather than a solo effort.
MWO on the other hand, is all about the solo effort. In MWO, there is no "team" in I, just 11 randoms who impede your path to victory.

MWO needs to feel like a team effort.

[Salvag3]

@ Shrike
I think you have a good point here, and I know what you mean. But I also strongly feel that it could be done so it didn't feel like 13 meh Mechs, but rather like battlefield when a squad of 3 ( support, medic, eng ) attack a tank. Fighting it one at a time is a hopeless battle, but working as a team they effective destroy it but it's still by no means going to be a for sure victory.

[Salvag3]

I also think that my idea that one it would not be limited to a fixed number like 8-12 every time is being over looked, that it would take a dynamic matchmaking system that could match a huge mix of game mode and objective based mission types.

And that in the case of fighting on the side of the more powerful clan mechs, it wouldn't feel like you were more powerful so to speek because you would round a corner and be looking at 3 mechs or fighting on all sides, yes ton for ton you would be better but you would never get that fight.

[Ruslan Savelyev]

Gvix, on 24 January 2016 - 11:21 PM, said:

I think the devs have come up with an elegant solution to what was a massive screw up by FASA all those decades ago.

FASA took a huge step forward in their art with the introduction of the Clans, but a huge step back in game play. I think the Vulture/Mad Dog is the best looking 'Mech ever designed, but as far as games go, no one I knew in TT played with Clan tech because the RNG damage was so high that the game became more about rolling dice than moving around the board. As someone who played a ton of the text based BattleTech MUSE games in the late 90s, the most popular tended to be '25 tech rulesets, and the only one that featured Clans was more of a roleplay environment.

I think this feels in many ways like what FASA should have done with their post '50 game direction. The IS improving upon designs and construction in some ways, while Clan engineers improved along other lines. Are the MWO systems perfect? No, but they work pretty well and open up interesting options. House specific variants with alternate quirks? I think which faction you represent should be an ideological choice, not one base on damage per mouse click.

As far as overall immersion goes, I think the things that end up bothering me would be the over customization of mechs combined with the comparative ease of laser damage.

For those who mentioned piloting skill, adding actual damage for slamming face first into buildings or cliffs at high speeds could be an amusing start.

Red Shrike, on 24 January 2016 - 11:54 PM, said:

When I play Battlefield, I don't feel angry or frustrated when out of 6 soldiers charging a hill, I'm the one to catch a bullet. Because I know my 5 teammates will get the job done. It feels like a team effort, rather than a solo effort.
MWO on the other hand, is all about the solo effort. In MWO, there is no "team" in I, just 11 randoms who impede your path to victory.

I believe that this feeling is due more to a lacking social UI than anything inherent in the gameplay. I would like to see the training segment of the game introduce you lightly to lore, have you pick a faction(if temporarily), and if nothing else, at least put a faction chat window on the basic screen. Do more to bring people together casually before the more formal transition into a unit is made.

Edited by Ruslan Savelyev, 25 January 2016 - 12:39 AM.

[Red Shrike]

Ruslan Savelyev, on 25 January 2016 - 12:37 AM, said:

I believe that this feeling is due more to a lacking social UI than anything inherent in the gameplay. I would like to see the training segment of the game introduce you lightly to lore, have you pick a faction(if temporarily), and if nothing else, at least put a faction chat window on the basic screen. Do more to bring people together casually before the more formal transition into a unit is made.

Another thing that helps reinforce the feeling of a team effort, is that I sometimes spend an entire hour with my teammates rushing objectives and defending them on a map that is relatively speaking twice if not thrice the size of Polar Highlands. Battlefield also does a far better job at conveying scale than MWO.

In MWO you're in and out of combat at such a pace, that you don't even get the chance to "connect" with your teammates. Even less so when it's all about the mechs and not the pilots. Your pilot doesn't feel very persistent either, rather, he feels like a throw-away, just like the mechs themselves.

I remember Closed Beta, when you had to pay for repairs and ammo. Back then I only had a Raven RVN-4X, but it actually felt like I owned it, that I had to care for it the way a soldier cares for his gun. These days my mechs feel just as throw-away as the paper towels I use to blow my nose.

[Johnny Z]

Red Shrike, on 24 January 2016 - 11:54 PM, said:

I would play the meh mechs. Probably even more than the cool mechs. Uphill battles are my kind of battles.


You guys speak of of competitive play and FPS like it's all there is to it. From a grand perspective, I feel this is one of MWO's flaws.
When I play Battlefield, I don't feel angry or frustrated when out of 6 soldiers charging a hill, I'm the one to catch a bullet. Because I know my 5 teammates will get the job done. It feels like a team effort, rather than a solo effort.
MWO on the other hand, is all about the solo effort. In MWO, there is no "team" in I, just 11 randoms who impede your path to victory.

MWO needs to feel like a team effort.

Your wrong but you did bring up an important point. Battletech is about 31st century knights/samurai. Always was. Its about individual pilot skills/experience and armament. The push for what ever some mean by a team game has only come from some MechWarrior Online players.

When ever a team of players drops on the same side that's a team game. So its really an irrelevant call from some players other than some frustration that some players are playing how ever they want in stead of being forced to play like some others want them to.

Anyway its all about individual experience in the end. That MechWarrior Online keeps in mind its about 31st century armoured combat is a good thing.

This is a new game coming out that knows. https://youtu.be/buFBQAoA2YM

Edited by Johnny Z, 25 January 2016 - 04:33 AM.

[Red Shrike]

Other than winning, there is no team-oriented objective. It's all about earning those C-Bills and XP. Which is done through individual action, not team action. Dying in the first 5 minutes so your team can secure a win gets you nothing in this game. And that's what I feel is one of the things that makes Quick Play less enjoyable.

In CW, the team effort is pushed a lot more to the forefront. Dying so your team can secure the win or take the objective is a lot more rewarding (imo), partly because it persists. Once the battle is over, the battlefield isn't reset like in Quick Play.

Johnny Z, on 25 January 2016 - 03:54 AM, said:

It's about individual pilot skills/experience and armament.

That may be true, but it is detrimental to the rest of the team. When you run off to preserve your K/D while your contribution may have won you the game at the cost of your mech.

I like CW because it focuses less on individual performance and more on your team's performance. Sadly the sorry state of CW keeps driving me away.

Never, at any point in MWO, did I have the feeling I was a part of something larger, such as a Merc Company, Great House or Clan. I hope later iterations of CW remedy this.

[MeiSooHaityu]

Well I'll say this, it definitely feels like a MechWarrior game. I've been playing MechWarrior titles since MechWarrior 2 and this feels at home with those.

MWO is far from perfect, but other MechWarrior titles have never been perfect anyway.

MechWarrior 3 was probably the closest at delivering the best experience. By the time MechWarrior 4 came out, they were already skimping on a lot of stuff. The only bright point of MW4 was that it acknowledged hard points. Other than that, MW3 was the superior title.

To me MWO feels like a natural evolution of MW4 with a lot of the immersion of MW3 being Lostech lol.

[Johnny Z]

Red Shrike, on 25 January 2016 - 04:38 AM, said:

Other than winning, there is no team-oriented objective. It's all about earning those C-Bills and XP. Which is done through individual action, not team action. Dying in the first 5 minutes so your team can secure a win gets you nothing in this game. And that's what I feel is one of the things that makes Quick Play less enjoyable.

In CW, the team effort is pushed a lot more to the forefront. Dying so your team can secure the win or take the objective is a lot more rewarding (imo), partly because it persists. Once the battle is over, the battlefield isn't reset like in Quick Play.


That may be true, but it is detrimental to the rest of the team. When you run off to preserve your K/D while your contribution may have won you the game at the cost of your mech.

I like CW because it focuses less on individual performance and more on your team's performance. Sadly the sorry state of CW keeps driving me away.

Never, at any point in MWO, did I have the feeling I was a part of something larger, such as a Merc Company, Great House or Clan. I hope later iterations of CW remedy this.

For me this game is less than half done at the moment. It really depends on what additions are made or not. I am in constant amazement how long its taking to get MechWarrior in even a basic state completed.

Tons of maps half done. No presentable or proper skill tree and the list goes on.

No form of repair and rearm or other must haves like pilot eject animation. No famous NPC's like the faction leaders.

Anyway the only thing that makes me feel better at all about MechWarrior Online is that they are working on like 15 projects at a time. Maybe there will be a lot of updates with serious content additions and feature additions some time.

[oldradagast]

A few points:

- Yes, the gunnery is wrong in this game. That's about my only real complaint with it; the instant convergence on a single pixel which thus rewards long-range, hit-scan weapons. That's the main reason laser vomit is superior, and anything that fixes that will simply shift the meta to the next method of putting the most damage from the same weapons on a single pixel in an instant. Now, I don't feel the game needs 1 crosshair per weapons or some other overly complex system, but a small cone of fire that is influenced by things like: heat, distance to target, etc. would make sense. It would end the idiocy of a pair of Gauss rifles or a pile of lasers magically all hitting the same location every time at long range. Sure, you might still get hit by almost all the shots, but at least the damage would scatter.

- I don't feel the game needs pilot checks, because any system that makes piloting more difficult is just going to encourage people to play mechs that rely less on mobility and more on raw firepower and armor. So, the light queue - which is already nearly empty - would be a wasteland, and the game would degenerate into nothing but huge, slow mechs carefully walking slowly towards each other and holding down the fire button. I also personally hate it when games throw in random mechanics that require totally different button combinations out of nowhere. Too many console games pulls this crud: first you're in normal mode, than you're suddenly driving a tank, then you're suddenly guiding a remote-controlled bat-a-rang, then you're doing something else totally different... it's confusing.

- As for Clan tech vs. IS tech, what works in table top will not work here. In table top, both sides usually have multiple mechs to control, and Clans had fewer mechs. They gave up on the fewer mech idea a while ago, and nobody wants to play cannon fodder. You can't just toss in "scrap" IS mechs against "boss" Clan mechs and hope the IS pilots enjoy dying pointlessly in the hopes that a bunch of them together may take down a single Clan mech. That's no fun at all for the IS pilots - nobody wants to play "red shirts" or cannon fodder. In table top, nobody cares if the pilot of the Locust that dies turn 2 was having fun or not because it was just one mech of several controlled by one player. Here, where everyone gets 1 mech per match, that actually matters.

[grendeldog]

The question you should be asking yourself is whether this feels like a Mechwarrior game. It didn't purport to be Battletech Online, it is Mechwarrior Online. Other Mechwarrior games should be the point of comparison.

[Barantor]

Was thinking about this the other day....

Gunnery IMO has been wrong from the beginning, it should've been more like WoT with some skills that make your cone of fire smaller and some modifiers that make it smaller too. Standing still, low heat, not taking fire and having mastered the mech should make you almost shoot like it is now, but the more of those you don't have, the less likely it is to hit where you want. Beyond the clan mechs, these machines are old, rebuilt a hundred times, flawed or all of the above, they are not necessarily 100% accurate.

Piloting checks aren't something that is easily done. I've always liked the way that the pilot skill is for mastering a mech, but I think it should be both more diverse and more in depth to the specific mech. Lights should have a lot of movement upgrades before they are as agile as they are currently and specific mechs like a Raven 3L can have more scouting upgrades, whereas a mech like a Jenner could have more harasser perks. When all the mechs have the exact same upgrades it makes them all feel more generic.

Speaking of generic, quirks should either be rolled into the skill trees or just dropped altogether. Quirks for specific mechs shouldn't be available right from the start, let folks get used to the base line mech before throwing in so many modifiers. Make them work for something because beyond CW it is just more mechs atm. It is hard to be loyal to one mech when it only takes a week to master and move on to the next.

I want the end game to be myself as a Pilot mastering my one specific mech to the best of my ability, not having a hotwheels collection box full of fancy stuff I use occasionally. I would rather them sell me weapon packs with small modifiers like that old browser mech game or an MMO with weapons than have a revolving door of new mechs. I want more longevity with the mech I have.

I don't mind what we have now, I just want them to focus less on the arena and more on what is beyond it. The mech, the men (or women) and the setting. That will give this game a lot more longevity and make it where piloting my Atlas doesn't feel as lifeless as playing the Heavy from Team Fortress 2....