149 replies to this topic

[Mystere]

1453 R, on 12 February 2016 - 03:11 PM, said:

The point, Wanderer, is how is the pilot going to feel when his opponent has a cherry-red CT, he himself has orange armor over his CT...but he still dies because for a solid minute and a half, RNGsus decides he doesn't get to land the one shot he needs to finish his enemy off while the other guy manages to get the good rolls and hit him fine?

Missing for a solid minute and a half in an R95 system? Don't make me laugh.

Edited by Mystere, 12 February 2016 - 03:19 PM.

[Troutmonkey]

Widowmaker1981, on 12 February 2016 - 12:40 AM, said:

*I* don't personally think we need anything really, im fine with what we have no in terms of convergence. - though i would definitely advocate for convergence set to locked target even if it stays as it is currently for unlocked, because its unfair to projectile weapons at the moment. Lasers are hitscan, and therefore benefit 100% from instant perfect crosshair distance convergence, where lead time ballistics only benefit from it if the target is not moving laterally (and are completely fubar with wide mounts like the KGC if your target is skylined - convergence to infinity makes it literally impossible for both arms to hit the same mech.)

That would be awesome for my KGCs arms, but it also runs into the problem of shooting at targets you're not locked on to. If the locked target is closer than where I want to shoot, the convergence is going to be even worse than it is now. There's just no good fix for this scenerio

[wanderer]

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Unfortunately, nobody will like being unable to aim, either. And the whole "convergence only on lock!" doesn't work, because what happens when you lock a nearby Fatlass, converge your guns...then take a long-distance shot at the Spider 600 meters away behind the Fatlas? How does the game know you're not just taking a horribly-aimed shot at the Fatlas you're supposed to be converging on, rather than the Spider? or what happens if you're in a scrum, surrounded by targets on all sides, and are shooting everything that ends up in front of your guns with converged shots because the one target you have locked is in the middle of the pack?

Welcome to being in precisely the same boat as the guy firing LRMs or SSRMs, albeit to a lesser degree since you can still reasonably fire. You lose the ability to snapshot with maximum accuracy- that is, it actually takes you more time than zero to reline up a best-odds shot. Drop the lock and get default convergence, deal with the inaccuracy of your current sensor lock, or swap locks and accept the delay between target A and target B being so far apart. Your choice. Heaven help us that you might have to actually take time to change focus.

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Yes, clearly an exaggerated outlier example...but it becomes a distinct possibility in the randomized-fire idiocy people going on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and ON and ON and OOONNN about. Randomized fire, by definition, means the player is no longer in control of his machine in combat - he's giving it directions, not piloting it.

Yet that's exactly what LB-X and LRMs do and SRMs have to mega-stack into splatbuilds to deal with. They are, basically, dealing with the randomized damage delivery you revile. This makes the former two meaningless in the meta and the latter packing 24+ missiles into salvos because frankly,anything less than 16-18 or so is garbage barring massive overquirking and outdone by ye olde medium lasers. And even THEN, SRMs benefit from convergence narrowing spread.

If even slightly randomized damage means the player is no longer in control, then half the weapon systems in the game are literally garbage for life, trying to compensate for spread by overkill.

[Troutmonkey]

1453 R, on 12 February 2016 - 03:11 PM, said:

The point, Wanderer, is how is the pilot going to feel when his opponent has a cherry-red CT, he himself has orange armor over his CT...but he still dies because for a solid minute and a half, RNGsus decides he doesn't get to land the one shot he needs to finish his enemy off while the other guy manages to get the good rolls and hit him fine?

Yes, clearly an exaggerated outlier example...but it becomes a distinct possibility in the randomized-fire idiocy people going on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and ON and ON and OOONNN about. Randomized fire, by definition, means the player is no longer in control of his machine in combat - he's giving it directions, not piloting it.

I get that nobody likes lasers. Everybody* wants lasers to go back to being awful horrible garbage weapons no one sane ever put on a 'Mech, like they were for the entire history of MWO prior to the Clan release. Nobody likes alpha strikes (and never mind that heat-neutral alpha smashers were pretty much standard in TT with any amount of customization, or in any time period post-3025). Nobody likes taking damage.

Unfortunately, nobody will like being unable to aim, either. And the whole "convergence only on lock!" doesn't work, because what happens when you lock a nearby Fatlass, converge your guns...then take a long-distance shot at the Spider 600 meters away behind the Fatlas? How does the game know you're not just taking a horribly-aimed shot at the Fatlas you're supposed to be converging on, rather than the Spider? or what happens if you're in a scrum, surrounded by targets on all sides, and are shooting everything that ends up in front of your guns with converged shots because the one target you have locked is in the middle of the pack?

Seriously. Just...stop. Stop trying to tell players that aiming is bad.



*and by 'everybody' I mean everybody else, because the very notion is utterly ridiculous and I don't know why so many people support it.

You've clearly not read my proposal because that situation could never happen under the CoF system that I have set up.
Everyone that I've seen against CoF is under the impression that all shots would be randomized, and that movement/heat/shooting would increase the cone. They also seem to think the cone would work like the LBX where fire sprays from the weapon point, getting worse the further it is away. All of these assumptions are wrong for what I'm proposing.

In my system, all weapons would be assigned a value. Whenever you shoot, all the values of the weapons you are shooting are added up. If you are under the set limit, all your shots will hit exactly where you aim. If you are over that limit, your shots will be randomly off by Xm from the point where you were aiming. The more you exceed the limit, the larger the accuracy penalties. Because the distance is a sphere around where you were aiming (and not a true "Cone" of fire) it wouldn't matter if you were 100m or 1000m from the target, the offset would be the same. This way, the system rewards smaller groups of weapons being fire with accuracy, and lets high damage alpha strikes happen, but with their damage spread over the target mech.

You can find the full write up in my thread.
http://mwomercs.com/...video-and-demo/

[wanderer]

Quote

The point being, that you say that all damage hitting one-pixel is the bane of MWO, yet these weapons don't and never have.

They're compensating by putting so much damage into the general vicinity that it might as well be. If they actually got pixel-perfect accuracy, the SRM would be godmode. An AC/40's worth of damage for 12 tons? Thankfully, they DO spread some of that out. And if convergence wasn't perfect, that damage would be spread even further.

[Pjwned]

Mystere, on 12 February 2016 - 02:47 PM, said:

Everybody? Really?

Yes, considering how much harder it would be (with that solution) to shoot weapons that weren't arm mounted with LAA (aside from LRMs and SSRMs I suppose?) with anywhere near as much accuracy, it would be pretty much everybody.

It would be a case of the haves and have-nots. Maybe if delayed convergence could work then we could settle with that and simply give LAA arms instant convergence, but if it's a case of certain mechs having instant, perfect convergence and everything else doesn't then it's very lame for reasons that should be fairly obvious.

[1453 R]

Here's a weird question. All these moronic convergence threads work under the same fundamental assertion - "WE GOTTA STOP TEH ALFAZ! WE GOTTA STOP ALL TEH ALFAZ! WE GOTTA MAEK IT SO NO 1 EVER ALFAZ AGAIN!"

...why?

In MWO, your basic goal in combat is to eliminate your opponent before your opponent eliminates you. One of the most fundamental ways of doing so is to do more damage at once than your opponent does, whether that be through focused fire, TEH ALFAZ, or some other means. This fact will not change even if weapons fire goes thirty degrees off-bore every time you so much as dare to twitch a leg while shooting, have more than eight percent heat in your bar, or assume that the two medium lasers in your Victor's left arm are, shockingly enough, designed to be fired in a pair.

Whatever you do to try and make firing more than five damage at a time prohibitively impossible, someone will find a way to do it anyways and you'll all start b!tching mercilessly about that. LBX/SRM builds suddenly become Cheat Mode, because even though they're useless scattershot guns, at least they scatter enough shot to partially hit where you're aiming and so they become the go-to weapons. Point-blank bearhug idiot-brawls become the norm, with none of the battles of maneuvering or positioning we have now because nobody can hit a damn thing from more'n 200 meters out. Even then - EVEN THEN - there will be a Meta. It will involve firing more than one weapon system simultaneously. Because killing your enemy before he can kill you is, in fact, the entire point.

You're never going to stop group fire from being better than chain fire. So why break the game in half to try?

[Pjwned]

1453 R, on 12 February 2016 - 03:11 PM, said:

And the whole "convergence only on lock!" doesn't work, because what happens when you lock a nearby Fatlass, converge your guns...then take a long-distance shot at the Spider 600 meters away behind the Fatlas? How does the game know you're not just taking a horribly-aimed shot at the Fatlas you're supposed to be converging on, rather than the Spider?

Perhaps not everybody who supports convergence on lock thinks this way (although I would think that they do because you bring up a valid point, and this is something else that I've been wanting to address) but when I think of convergence on lock, what I'm actually saying is "your weapons would converge at the range where your locked target is" and not simply "if you have a target locked then your weapons converge on your crosshair."

It wouldn't just be an on/off switch for perfect convergence on your crosshair if you have a target lock because obviously(?) the intent is that your weapons converge on your target, and if you could simply lock onto an Atlas to shoot at a Spider that's much farther away then that would be cheating the system, or at least that's how I would think of that.

Quote

or what happens if you're in a scrum, surrounded by targets on all sides, and are shooting everything that ends up in front of your guns with converged shots because the one target you have locked is in the middle of the pack?

I'm a little more confused with this example...

1. Why are you surrounded by targets on all sides? Unless I'm missing something, that kind of sounds like somebody playing badly and thus not an example that's really worth worrying about(?); a picture of this scenario would probably help.

2. Keeping in mind that convergence on lock would not just be an on/off switch...If I'm to understand correctly, the locked target is within fairly close range of all the other targets surrounding you, right? I'm not seeing the problem here that if you're locked onto a target that you're not firing at (for some reason or another) and something else runs in front of you and takes damage from your weapons converged at a range not much further away...what's the problem here? In this example, it seems like even if convergence on lock was just an on/off switch, it would barely make any difference because the locked target and the actual target would be so close together, but again I'm not really understanding this scenario fully (or if I am, then I'm not seeing the problem).

[1453 R]

Pjwned, on 12 February 2016 - 04:40 PM, said:

I'm a little more confused with this example...

1. Why are you surrounded by targets on all sides? Unless I'm missing something, that kind of sounds like somebody playing badly and thus not an example that's really worth worrying about(?); a picture of this scenario would probably help.

2. Keeping in mind that convergence on lock would not just be an on/off switch...If I'm to understand correctly, the locked target is within fairly close range of all the other targets surrounding you, right? I'm not seeing the problem here that if you're locked onto a target that you're not firing at (for some reason or another) and something else runs in front of you and takes damage from your weapons converged at a range not much further away...what's the problem here? In this example, it seems like even if convergence on lock was just an on/off switch, it would barely make any difference because the locked target and the actual target would be so close together, but again I'm not really understanding this scenario fully (or if I am, then I'm not seeing the problem).

This subject always gets my goat up; my apologies for the ambiguity. It's hard to be precise when you keep having to make the same arguments to the same people every third thread - after a while you start wearing your own words too smooth to grasp properly.

Anyways. better example: you crest a hill/turn a corner find two 'Mechs - the Quickdraw you were chasing/locked onto, and a Warhawk 'bout sixty meters away from him; turned the other way, missing limbs, pouring smoke and obviously on his last legs. You decide on the spur of the moment that finishing the busted-up Warhawk is more important than running down a significantly fresher Quickdraw, so you swing your crosshair over to the Warhawk and let 'er rip.

What happens?

According to the folks who believe weapons should fire where they're pointed, that Warhawk drops like a sack of meat because you caught him flat-footed and dead to rights.

According to deconvergence folks, that Warhawk gets off the next best thing to scot-free because your weapons scatter wildly against an unlocked target - even one fairly close to your original mark, and the size of a Warhawk, in reasonably close range. You might tag it on a remaining leg or something if you're lucky, or if you've burned the appropriate incense and left a big enough donation in the offertory box at the Shrine of RNGsus, you might actually hit it in a torso and meaningfully damage it.

I'm curious which end your ideal proposal swings to.

Edited by 1453 R, 12 February 2016 - 04:51 PM.

[Pjwned]

1453 R, on 12 February 2016 - 04:09 PM, said:

Here's a weird question. All these moronic convergence threads work under the same fundamental assertion - "WE GOTTA STOP TEH ALFAZ! WE GOTTA STOP ALL TEH ALFAZ! WE GOTTA MAEK IT SO NO 1 EVER ALFAZ AGAIN!"

If that was the intention then why go after convergence? Just cut out the middleman and nerf alpha strikes into the ground, such as stupid threads like this linked thread suggest.

The main issue is that convergence is too strong.

[Pjwned]

1453 R, on 12 February 2016 - 04:50 PM, said:

Anyways. better example: you crest a hill/turn a corner find two 'Mechs - the Quickdraw you were chasing/locked onto, and a Warhawk 'bout sixty meters away from him; turned the other way, missing limbs, pouring smoke and obviously on his last legs. You decide on the spur of the moment that finishing the busted-up Warhawk is more important than running down a significantly fresher Quickdraw, so you swing your crosshair over to the Warhawk and let 'er rip.

What happens?

According to the folks who believe weapons should fire where they're pointed, that Warhawk drops like a sack of meat because you caught him flat-footed and dead to rights.

According to deconvergence folks, that Warhawk gets off the next best thing to scot-free because your weapons scatter wildly against an unlocked target - even one fairly close to your original mark, and the size of a Warhawk, in reasonably close range. You might tag it on a remaining leg or something if you're lucky, or if you've burned the appropriate incense and left a big enough donation in the offertory box at the Shrine of RNGsus, you might actually hit it in a torso and meaningfully damage it.

I'm curious which end your ideal proposal swings to.

A) I think you're really overestimating how inaccurate your shots would be in that situation on the Warhawk there. Of course the damage would be more spread out than otherwise, but I have no reason to believe the shots would "scatter wildly" in a situation where your weapons are set to converge only 60m off.

B) If you were so concerned about your shots being accurate enough to finish off the Warhawk quickly, why not just have a target lock on it to finish the job while you're firing at it?

[Summon3r]

SHOULD CONVERGENCE REQUIRE TARGET LOCK?


Yes

though non lock should have some type "cone or fire" yes i said cone of fire lol

[1453 R]

Pjwned, on 12 February 2016 - 05:05 PM, said:

A) I think you're really overestimating how inaccurate your shots would be in that situation on the Warhawk there. Of course the damage would be more spread out than otherwise, but I have no reason to believe the shots would "scatter wildly" in a situation where your weapons are set to converge only 60m off.

If you were so concerned about your shots being accurate enough to finish off the Warhawk quickly, why not just have a target lock on it to finish the job while you're firing at it?

Assuming that 'convergence on lock' requires TIG, elsewise it largely defeats the purpose. Recall that convergence folks would prefer for it to take forty-five minutes to realign "THIRTY TONS OF GUNS" on a new aimpoint, because apparently that's more realistic. Simply tapping R for convergence wouldn't really do anything other than p!ss people off when their guns acted weird for no easily discernible reason against unlocked targets (Ghost Range, from the PTS?).

Anyways. If TIG is required, then the Warhawk likely gets away while you're waiting on your TIG lock, especially if/when Information Warfare returns and some 'Mechs end up with 10+-second TIG timers. By that point, the Warhawk has probably killed you.

[Troutmonkey]

1453 R, on 12 February 2016 - 04:09 PM, said:

Here's a weird question. All these moronic convergence threads work under the same fundamental assertion - "WE GOTTA STOP TEH ALFAZ! WE GOTTA STOP ALL TEH ALFAZ! WE GOTTA MAEK IT SO NO 1 EVER ALFAZ AGAIN!"

...why?

In MWO, your basic goal in combat is to eliminate your opponent before your opponent eliminates you. One of the most fundamental ways of doing so is to do more damage at once than your opponent does, whether that be through focused fire, TEH ALFAZ, or some other means. This fact will not change even if weapons fire goes thirty degrees off-bore every time you so much as dare to twitch a leg while shooting, have more than eight percent heat in your bar, or assume that the two medium lasers in your Victor's left arm are, shockingly enough, designed to be fired in a pair.

Whatever you do to try and make firing more than five damage at a time prohibitively impossible, someone will find a way to do it anyways and you'll all start b!tching mercilessly about that. LBX/SRM builds suddenly become Cheat Mode, because even though they're useless scattershot guns, at least they scatter enough shot to partially hit where you're aiming and so they become the go-to weapons. Point-blank bearhug idiot-brawls become the norm, with none of the battles of maneuvering or positioning we have now because nobody can hit a damn thing from more'n 200 meters out. Even then - EVEN THEN - there will be a Meta. It will involve firing more than one weapon system simultaneously. Because killing your enemy before he can kill you is, in fact, the entire point.

You're never going to stop group fire from being better than chain fire. So why break the game in half to try?

Before you throw any more slander (libel) towards the CoF camp and "oh people will just abuse it" please please read through my proposal, watch the video, play the demo. It doesn't work anywhere like what you think it will. It can't be abused, and it will make players make a choice between "shooting everything" and "shooting accurately". In a duel it will come down to each player knowing when is the right time to fire everything hoping to do lots of damage or instead firing just some of their weapons to finish off a cored out opponent.

Link in sig

[Pjwned]

1453 R, on 12 February 2016 - 05:13 PM, said:

Assuming that 'convergence on lock' requires TIG, elsewise it largely defeats the purpose. Recall that convergence folks would prefer for it to take forty-five minutes to realign "THIRTY TONS OF GUNS" on a new aimpoint, because apparently that's more realistic. Simply tapping R for convergence wouldn't really do anything other than p!ss people off when their guns acted weird for no easily discernible reason against unlocked targets (Ghost Range, from the PTS?).

Anyways. If TIG is required, then the Warhawk likely gets away while you're waiting on your TIG lock, especially if/when Information Warfare returns and some 'Mechs end up with 10+-second TIG timers. By that point, the Warhawk has probably killed you.

Yes, I'm assuming that target info gathering would be expanded, but unless that was completely FUBAR I don't see how it would take 10+ seconds to get a target, or if it ever did (in any situation ever) then it certainly would not take that long in your example.

My claim also still stands that the Warhawk would not get off "scot-free" in that example because the weapons would not miss their target to such an extent.

Edited by Pjwned, 12 February 2016 - 06:39 PM.

[1453 R]

Why wouldn't it get away scot? Didn't Troutmonkey post that convergence test video that showed that even tiny variations in convergence produce clean misses at distances of, like...a dozen meters?

I'm sick and at work, I don't honestly remember who posted that video or where, but it should be a real eye-opener for the DISABLE CONVERGENCE PERMANENTLY FOREVER bunch.

[Mystere]

1453 R, on 12 February 2016 - 04:09 PM, said:

Here's a weird question. All these moronic convergence threads work under the same fundamental assertion - "WE GOTTA STOP TEH ALFAZ! WE GOTTA STOP ALL TEH ALFAZ! WE GOTTA MAEK IT SO NO 1 EVER ALFAZ AGAIN!"

Did anyone propose the alpha strike button to be removed. No? They you're just being silly.

[Mystere]

Pjwned, on 12 February 2016 - 05:05 PM, said:

A) I think you're really overestimating ...

He's not overestimating. He's wildly exaggerating to "prove" his point, so he gets to keep the automatic near-instant pixel perfect convergence he desperately relies on as a crutch ... because it really seems a number of people are using it as such.

Troutmonkey, on 12 February 2016 - 05:23 PM, said:

Before you throw any more slander (libel) towards the CoF camp and "oh people will just abuse it" please please read through my proposal, watch the video, play the demo. It doesn't work anywhere like what you think it will. It can't be abused, and it will make players make a choice between "shooting everything" and "shooting accurately". In a duel it will come down to each player knowing when is the right time to fire everything hoping to do lots of damage or instead firing just some of their weapons to finish off a cored out opponent.

Don't waste your time on him. He's not interested. He'll just keep on making things up to preserve a crutch he desperately relies on.

1453 R, on 12 February 2016 - 05:13 PM, said:

take forty-five minutes to realign ...

Do you now see what I mean?

Edited by Mystere, 12 February 2016 - 06:27 PM.

[Mystere]

Pjwned, on 12 February 2016 - 05:38 PM, said:

Yes, I'm assuming that target info gathering would be expanded, but unless that was completely FUBAR I don't see how it would take 10+ seconds to get a target, or if it ever did (in any situation ever) then it certainly would not not take that long in your example.

My claim also still stands that the Warhawk would not get off "scot-free" in that example because the weapons would not miss their target to such an extent.

Notice he only mentioned 60m but did not state what is the distance between you and the target, an important figure that he intentionally left out. That's because he's not interested in anything other than preserving his crutch.

Pjwned, on 12 February 2016 - 03:48 PM, said:

Yes, considering how much harder it would be (with that solution) to shoot weapons that weren't arm mounted with LAA (aside from LRMs and SSRMs I suppose?) with anywhere near as much accuracy, it would be pretty much everybody.

It would be a case of the haves and have-nots. Maybe if delayed convergence could work then we could settle with that and simply give LAA arms instant convergence, but if it's a case of certain mechs having instant, perfect convergence and everything else doesn't then it's very lame for reasons that should be fairly obvious.

My Mechs with clustered high torso mounts say "Hi!".

[Quicksilver Aberration]

wanderer, on 12 February 2016 - 03:44 PM, said:

They're compensating by putting so much damage into the general vicinity that it might as well be.

This statement makes no sense. This is going to be the case for any weapon that suffers from spread, alpha based meta or no.