159 replies to this topic

[CreativeAnarchy]

Turn based table top games don't really translate well into real time games and if they do try to keep things very table top, the RNG factor tends to annoy the players because shooting at a spot but the game registering a miss because of a dice roll is frustrating when you clearly see that you hit and are well within range.

I don't care to be trying to hit at an arm of a mech and the game telling me my last 10 shots were a miss because of a dice roll when I'm clearly close enough and the cross hairs are right on the spot.

Edited by CreativeAnarchy, 29 February 2016 - 09:30 AM.

[Mcgral18]

Mawai, on 29 February 2016 - 06:49 AM, said:

MWO follows far more TT than it ignores in my opinion.
- most of the mech construction rules ... tonnage, weapons etc are all from TT.
- most of the weapon damage and heat values started at TT numbers
- most of the speeds for mechs start from TT values

Most of what MWO does NOT use from TT is due to the fact that it is a real time aimed computer game and not a dice resolved TT board game.
- AIMING ... damage goes where it is aimed (this is a major change from TT and is the primary reason why all the TT numbers are at best a rule of thumb and at worst useless when mapped to MWO).
- MWO is real time ... very early in the design process they made (in my opinion) an incredibly stupid decision. They took the TT damage values but changed ALL of the weapon fire rates in unrelated ways. TT is supposed to be based on a 10s game turn. It would have likely been better to keep the TT DPS values as a starting point for balance rather than the damage number.
- Using damage numbers rather than DPS and increasing rate of fire necessitated doubling the armor values from TT in order to increase time to kill to a reasonable level.

Some folks complain about ballistics with multiple rounds adding up to 20 damage for example. This feature is actually part of the lore of Battletech. AC20s were basically a class of weapons that would do 20 damage in a 10s game turn .. some of these would fire a single round while others might fire several smaller caliber rounds. MWO is completely justified in using multiple projectiles, at least from a lore perspective.

So ... MWO uses quite a bit of the numbers from TT ... and as some folks have mentioned there are varying opinions as to whether they chose the right ones. Unfortunately, we are pretty far past the time when they can make sweeping changes.

Also, keep in mind to that part of the "balance" of weapons has been affected by improvements to netcode/addition of Host State Rewind/hit registration over the years. Whatever "balance" was determined in closed beta was obsolete by the time these improvements rolled out a year or two later.

Construction is partially TT, but it ignores some heavy restrictions (engine size) as well as using the build-a-mech rules and not the field refit sort of thing (that one being entirely optional, of course)

Weapons start FAR from TT weapons, case in point our 14 ton AC60.
ACs are rated over their damage dealt over 10 seconds, or whichever firing period.

This ties into one of your secondary arguments...but 3x RoF, 2x Armour and 1x(roughly) dissipation are not TT stats, but PGIs vision of them...which are quite different.


PPCs were absolute rubbish before HSR, hence their superbuffs (2KM/s travel speed, 8 heat, 3s recycle), and the moment ballistic HSR came in, they went to become THE best weapon for months on end...
Yep, that is a solid point.



I'm not asking for TT stays at this point, of course (unless we could customize the Private Match lobby stats, import our own .XMLs with fixed HoverJets, non-rubbish balance, and for the stock crowd, their preferred TT interpretation).

As I said, they took some TT rules, but ignored many others which balanced them. Engine size being a pretty significant one.

[Wolfways]

Pjwned, on 29 February 2016 - 09:20 AM, said:

No actually it DOES NOT need to reflect that.

It does and is. Pgi just chose to ignore that if you increase the RoF of a weapon (which they did with all weapons) you also need to reduce the heat generation and dps by the same percentage. Then you balance from there.

[Savage Wolf]

If you reflected TT completely you would also end up with all balance of TT. That includes totally useless AC2 and OP Gauss. It also means that an Atlas is strictly better than an Locust. In TT this was fine as it was also more expensive, so you could have multiple locust per Atlai. In MWO it's 12 v 12 so every mech needs to be similarly useful or everyone would pilot 100t mechs like in MW4 multiplayer.
It's not just a translation from boardgame to computer game. It's top down to first person. It's 1v1 to 12v12. It's ressource limited to single mech limited. There are soooo many differences that a direct translation in any way or form would never work.

[ChapeL]

keith, on 27 February 2016 - 05:29 PM, said:

thats y MW4 online part was fun, if u played with heat and ammo. they knew form the start following TT was going to be meh, so made it fun. u have to either go full sim or fun. this is neither...

MW4 multiplayer was nothing but ErLL and Light gauss/ Clan Gauss spam because nothing else was worth the hassle.

[Sandpit]

Pjwned, on 29 February 2016 - 09:20 AM, said:

No actually it DOES NOT need to reflect that. You're comparing combat between a turn-based board game and a real-time video game and that makes no sense whatsoever.

yes it does lol
You can't just click a weapon and the target take damage without having some sort of impact. You can't expect players in an FPS game not to need visual representation of weapon fire of some kind.
I don't see how you can expect players of an FPS not to want or expect visual representation of that

Pjwned, on 29 February 2016 - 09:20 AM, said:

How do you even accomplish that without screwing up balance horribly?

There's literally no reason to have "10 second turns" as a basis for damage output in MWO.

yes there is. It's what the game is based on now. It's based on PGI's best interpretation of the damage output from the TT game converted to a real-time FPS game.

[Lugh]

Pjwned, on 29 February 2016 - 09:20 AM, said:

A turn lasting 10 seconds in Tabletop is strictly fluff, it never affected how the game plays and it's not comparable in the least to MWO.

I guess logic is hard...for you.

How do you even accomplish that without screwing up balance horribly?

There's literally no reason to have "10 second turns" as a basis for damage output in MWO.

I'm guessing it's even harder for you. As you aren't understanding any of the arguments put forth in this thread that the MATH is the important part.

The 10 second turn was derived to help understand the movement mechanics within the game board abstraction.

[color=#000000]"It's the same for all units. A hex is 30 meters across. A turn is 10 second long. If you move one hex, you've moved 30 m / 10 s = 3m/s. 3 meters per second equals 10,800 meters per hour, or 10.8kph."[/color]

http://www.sarna.net...956/Main/172944

That's the easy part.

Rate of fire meets your definition for fluff. It doesn't matter if it fires once or 10 times in 10 seconds as long as damage at the end of the 'turn' i.e. 10 seconds is 5 for the medium laser.

Same for the Auto cannon 5. It could be portrayed exactly like the warthog's chain gun. It DOES NOT MATTER as long as in 10 seconds it does 5 damage.

PGI FAILED UTTERLY with the mathematical translation of those values to real time.

It's not that it cannot be done. It's that to do it DIRECTLY leads to boring and hard for the idjit simpletons playing your game that the 1000s rounds you just fired did (5) damage to that mech over that last 10 second period.

The EASIEST way to obfuscate the BOREDOM or PERCEIVED Tedium of the death by 1000 papercuts in a video game it to abstract the math to give: big *** numbers to everything. Sono one is tempted to dig deeper because they are busy going did you see that Shot it did 30000 damage to that mech, look at the hole it put in it. When that match divided back to the 10 second interval equals the .006 thousandth part of the 5 damage called for in the TT.

You can set the rate of fire to WHATEVER THE HELL YOU WANT IT TO BE SO LONG AS the numbers all come back to the TT values.
Give a weapon 5x the rate of fire, give the armor and structure the same adjustments to resist it.
I wouldn't care if lasers are constantly washing over my mech as long as the values for the armor it subtracts and the time it takes to kill any given mech are the samish as TT.

We don't have that here.

[Cy Mitchell]

Damn, I must be the only person that thinks MWO is a good game. Sure, It is a compromise. It has to be. No,. it will not satisfy the extremist on either side of the BT vs FPS issue but nothing ever will. Yes, there are things I would like to see improved. But that is subjective and based upon my likes and dislikes. All and all I think MWO is a very good computer game adaption of the Mech combat portion of the BattleTech universe. I am glad and thankful that it exist.

[Sandpit]

Lugh, on 29 February 2016 - 10:56 AM, said:

Rate of fire meets your definition for fluff. It doesn't matter if it fires once or 10 times in 10 seconds as long as damage at the end of the 'turn' i.e. 10 seconds is 5 for the medium laser.

This is essentially what some of are saying in regards to this. It doesn't matter what the RoF is, the thing that matters is the amount of damage done in a certain timeframe.

I don't think anyone expects an exact replica for this, but it's a basis to use in order to help balance the game and weapons

[Quicksilver Aberration]

pbiggz, on 27 February 2016 - 05:20 PM, said:

The more experienced I get the more i understand why MW4 abandoned TT build rules. They didn't necessarily do a perfect job, but I get why they did it.

This, MW4 got a lot of flack for doing what it did, but after the course of this game, the more the changes MW4 made make sense.

[CDLord HHGD]

TT should be the basis from which they build from. Problem right now is they chose to ignore some pretty big things from TT and now we are paying the quirk price. I'll argue for a reset to TT, an implementation of those missing TT features, THEN a balancing based off that solid TT foundation.

[Pjwned]

Sandpit, on 29 February 2016 - 10:38 AM, said:

yes it does lol
You can't just click a weapon and the target take damage without having some sort of impact. You can't expect players in an FPS game not to need visual representation of weapon fire of some kind.
I don't see how you can expect players of an FPS not to want or expect visual representation of that

Maybe I emphasized the wrong part then because the point was that MWO doesn't need to be constrained by 10 second turns, not that there doesn't need to be a visual indication of weapons fire.

Quote

yes there is. It's what the game is based on now. It's based on PGI's best interpretation of the damage output from the TT game converted to a real-time FPS game.

Right, but it's not based on 10 second turns (because that doesn't make sense) and weapon systems don't need to be changed to reflect that.

Lugh, on 29 February 2016 - 10:56 AM, said:

I'm guessing it's even harder for you. As you aren't understanding any of the arguments put forth in this thread that the MATH is the important part.

The 10 second turn was derived to help understand the movement mechanics within the game board abstraction.

[color=#000000]"It's the same for all units. A hex is 30 meters across. A turn is 10 second long. If you move one hex, you've moved 30 m / 10 s = 3m/s. 3 meters per second equals 10,800 meters per hour, or 10.8kph."[/color]

http://www.sarna.net...956/Main/172944

That's the easy part.

Right, those numbers are still fluff because really you just moved one hex and that's it.

Quote

Rate of fire meets your definition for fluff. It doesn't matter if it fires once or 10 times in 10 seconds as long as damage at the end of the 'turn' i.e. 10 seconds is 5 for the medium laser.

Same for the Auto cannon 5. It could be portrayed exactly like the warthog's chain gun. It DOES NOT MATTER as long as in 10 seconds it does 5 damage.

PGI FAILED UTTERLY with the mathematical translation of those values to real time.

They didn't fail to translate those values, they were simply discarded in favor of those damage numbers being delivered in a shorter period of time, because unlike in a board game that sort of thing is more than just fluff and actually affects how the game is played.

Quote

It's not that it cannot be done. It's that to do it DIRECTLY leads to boring and hard for the idjit simpletons playing your game that the 1000s rounds you just fired did (5) damage to that mech over that last 10 second period.

The EASIEST way to obfuscate the BOREDOM or PERCEIVED Tedium of the death by 1000 papercuts in a video game it to abstract the math to give: big *** numbers to everything. Sono one is tempted to dig deeper because they are busy going did you see that Shot it did 30000 damage to that mech, look at the hole it put in it. When that match divided back to the 10 second interval equals the .006 thousandth part of the 5 damage called for in the TT.

You can set the rate of fire to WHATEVER THE HELL YOU WANT IT TO BE SO LONG AS the numbers all come back to the TT values.
Give a weapon 5x the rate of fire, give the armor and structure the same adjustments to resist it.
I wouldn't care if lasers are constantly washing over my mech as long as the values for the armor it subtracts and the time it takes to kill any given mech are the samish as TT.

We don't have that here.

The whole point is that it isn't needed.

Is there any obligation to even attempt to base damage output in MWO on a "10 second turn" basis? No, because that was based on a board game where such concepts literally mean fuckall except as fluff and it wasn't made with a video game in mind.

This sort of thing is precisely what the thread is about--not adhering to Tabletop values just because Tabletop said so.

[Sandpit]

Pjwned, on 29 February 2016 - 12:16 PM, said:

Maybe I emphasized the wrong part then because the point was that MWO doesn't need to be constrained by 10 second turns, not that there doesn't need to be a visual indication of weapons fire.



Right, but it's not based on 10 second turns (because that doesn't make sense) and weapon systems don't need to be changed to reflect that.

I don't think anyone realistically expects a 10 second timer, but the entire premise and question asked in this thread is "Should MWO be based on TT rules"

[nehebkau]

When dealing with the TT rules one must always ask this question:

Does that rule make sense in a real-time simulation?

Therein lies the key, a simulation is what we are playing and, as such, we should strive to be as close to what you would really expect in real life. Now I know this game is make-believe but you should strive to have as much realism as you can reasonably put in. Its not just TT "stuff" that may need to be discarded but some BT universe stuff is pretty out there too. For example: "... His awesome mech-fu took over and he pirouetted the 100 ton mech across the battlefield spraying hot death. In the end all 20 of his enemies were dead and he, barely injured..." This type of BT novel garbage would not translate well into a simulation.

Now, this gets us to lore. Lore is all well and good until lore gets in the way of enjoying a larger game. Likewise, some aspects of Lore can't be incorporated into the game because of design, game-play or other factors and we need to be willing to accept that adjustments need to be made. We all know that lore has clan mecs being stronger -- but PGI's game design doesn't allow for that now, and without great player restrictions, won't allow it in the future. We have to accept that the train of clantech being super-powerful has left the station and it's not coming back -- crying about PGI game design decisions half a decade ago isn't going to change that simple fact.

We should base the game on lore, but not be afraid to write new lore that better suits a real-time simulation. TT rules should be considered as the starting point not the ending point kept, bent, broken or replaced entirely where needed.

Edited by nehebkau, 29 February 2016 - 12:46 PM.

[Pjwned]

Sandpit, on 29 February 2016 - 12:29 PM, said:

I don't think anyone realistically expects a 10 second timer, but the entire premise and question asked in this thread is "Should MWO be based on TT rules"

And the answer in this particular case is "no."

[Mead]

"simulation"

lol

[Lugh]

Pjwned, on 29 February 2016 - 12:16 PM, said:

Maybe I emphasized the wrong part then because the point was that MWO doesn't need to be constrained by 10 second turns, not that there doesn't need to be a visual indication of weapons fire.



Right, but it's not based on 10 second turns (because that doesn't make sense) and weapon systems don't need to be changed to reflect that.



Right, those numbers are still fluff because really you just moved one hex and that's it.



They didn't fail to translate those values, they were simply discarded in favor of those damage numbers being delivered in a shorter period of time, because unlike in a board game that sort of thing is more than just fluff and actually affects how the game is played.



The whole point is that it isn't needed.

Is there any obligation to even attempt to base damage output in MWO on a "10 second turn" basis? No, because that was based on a board game where such concepts literally mean fuckall except as fluff and it wasn't made with a video game in mind.

This sort of thing is precisely what the thread is about--not adhering to Tabletop values just because Tabletop said so.

You have 30 years of play testing and balance concerns addressed in the Board game.

Do the math right and you satisfy EVERYONE.

Even the people (like you) that can't see what the math has to do with the problem.

Those FLUFF values ARE displayed for unimaginative people like yourself in real time here. What the uber necks beards are attempting to impress upon you is that they have translated the math wrong so the FLUFF is currently like throwing concrete at a pile of FLUFF.

If the MATH was done correctly then all the FLUFF and Bluster is negated because 'IT FEELS RIGHT' to have this jenner take 10-15seconds to core out an atlas instead of the 4-6 seconds it needs now.

You know why? Because TIME, even REAL TIME, is represented BY BASIC FRIKKING MATH.

Do the math right and everyone can nod and agree. Do it wrong. And Boy have they done it wrong. And you have threads like this..

Pjwned, on 29 February 2016 - 01:05 PM, said:

And the answer in this particular case is "no."

You still could not be more wrong if you tried.

Edited by Lugh, 29 February 2016 - 01:29 PM.

[Pjwned]

Lugh, on 29 February 2016 - 01:29 PM, said:

You have 30 years of play testing and balance concerns addressed in the Board game.

Do the math right and you satisfy EVERYONE.

Even the people (like you) that can't see what the math has to do with the problem.

Those FLUFF values ARE displayed for unimaginative people like yourself in real time here. What the uber necks beards are attempting to impress upon you is that they have translated the math wrong so the FLUFF is currently like throwing concrete at a pile of FLUFF.

The "math" was discarded because it doesn't fit in MWO, which I've already explained why that is.

Quote

If the MATH was done correctly then all the FLUFF and Bluster is negated because 'IT FEELS RIGHT' to have this jenner take 10-15seconds to core out an atlas instead of the 4-6 seconds it needs now.

Nice boogieman argument there, but I think I'm going to take arguments based on reality more seriously because an Atlas doesn't die to a Jenner in 4-6 seconds, especially not with all the insane structure quirks it has now.

Quote

You know why? Because TIME, even REAL TIME, is represented BY BASIC FRIKKING MATH.

Do the math right and everyone can nod and agree. Do it wrong. And Boy have they done it wrong. And you have threads like this..

Your only argument for the math being "wrong" is based on "10 second turns" from TT despite that being irrelevant and is not a valid basis for damage output in MWO.

Quote

You still could not be more wrong if you tried.

Literally nothing you have said is convincing in any way. You are just foaming at the mouth about being told that you're wrong about "10 second turns" being irrelevant, because they are irrelevant.

Edited by Pjwned, 29 February 2016 - 01:51 PM.

[Roadkill]

Wolfways, on 29 February 2016 - 08:54 AM, said:

That makes no sense as weapons in TT didn't fire every 10 seconds. The damage number is how much damage a weapon did within those 10 seconds no matter how many time the weapon actually fired.

Ah, so somehow, magically, all 20 damage from an AC/20 always manages to hit the same location? But LRMs specifically spread based on a separate mechanic?

I know what the current official story is, but I'm not buying it. You get to fire your weapons once every 10 seconds no matter what fluff they spin around it.

[CDLord HHGD]

Roadkill, on 29 February 2016 - 01:54 PM, said:

Ah, so somehow, magically, all 20 damage from an AC/20 always manages to hit the same location? But LRMs specifically spread based on a separate mechanic?

I know what the current official story is, but I'm not buying it. You get to fire your weapons once every 10 seconds no matter what fluff they spin around it.

They've already countered the 10 second turn though by doubling armor. Either double armor again, or half damages, or increase cooldowns to 5 seconds across the board (though this will hurt the AC2 and ammo would have to be increased more, etc.).