286 replies to this topic

[Lily from animove]

Johnny Z, on 03 March 2016 - 06:08 AM, said:

COF is just bad. A player can aim as good as a bot, bots big advantage is it doesn't aim it actually attaches to the target. Players cannot correct recoil or cof problems nearly as well. Bots big advantage vrs players is this and "aiming" before the target is visible and firing just as it becomes visible.

Well, no a cone of fire would even apply to bots because its a fixed value. Convergence would be just broken by client-server delay and screwing ovr bad connection, lags and for peopel with higher latency. And IF you make convergence only client sided, then it will be possible to cheat convergence to be 100% accurate at any time.

But i think aiming is part of pilot skill, and so surely there should be nothign done against proper aiming. But the ROF, and high Heatscale issues bringin us the high alphas that we cna pinpoint into opponent mechs need a solution. lower alphas would be better, because it adds more pew pew with chances to make poke-mech behavior less and creates more twist vs aim competition.

[GreenHell]

Welp... someone posted this in the last thread, and now I think it's appropriate.

[Omaha]

Wut did he tweet? Weapons using energy? I better be able to equip some batteries!

[Lily from animove]

Widowmaker1981, on 03 March 2016 - 06:03 AM, said:

My point is, in the actual game, you don't get targets vanishing before you can fire all your guns at them. In order to get the same 'feel' here, you need to be able to alpha. That 10 second value in TT is just fluff, it has no impact. You could change that to 0.1 seconds, or 17 years, and it wouldn't actually change the gameplay at all.

sry this is again not true^at all.

It does on the TT not chaneg the amount of turns, thats true. But it does in MWO actually totally change the gameplay because a 4 PPC wahrwahk is by gamepaly different from a 10 PPC warhawk. Yes same equipment as TT yet with altered values in MWO it is simply fielding 2.5 as much firepower and 2x as much heattreshold.

Alos the TT interweapon balance is differen, because a single ER Large laser shot ONCE in a turn, and a small one too. While in MWO a small laser basically shoots nearly twice. And this does alter the gamedesign in "turns" because no matter if you make a turn 10 secs or 100secs ot 1000 years. the MWo "turn" plays different due to the fact that within this turn the damage is not in the same relation to armor or heat as the TT intended. that si oen reasn why PGI needs to get rid of trying to stay close to the TT values. because on weapons and their damage they try to stick with them, while they entirely violated RoF and heat. And therefore initially broke the system to a degree that armor had to be doubled.
But around 30 heattreshold will be needed o keep high alphas in check unless PGI heavily upgrades the wepaons heat.

[Idealsuspect]

New age of balance a new system is rising ...



MOuhahahahahahahaah

[Johnny Z]

Lily from animove, on 03 March 2016 - 06:27 AM, said:

sry this is again not true^at all.

It does on the TT not chaneg the amount of turns, thats true. But it does in MWO actually totally change the gameplay because a 4 PPC wahrwahk is by gamepaly different from a 10 PPC warhawk. Yes same equipment as TT yet with altered values in MWO it is simply fielding 2.5 as much firepower and 2x as much heattreshold.

Alos the TT interweapon balance is differen, because a single ER Large laser shot ONCE in a turn, and a small one too. While in MWO a small laser basically shoots nearly twice. And this does alter the gamedesign in "turns" because no matter if you make a turn 10 secs or 100secs ot 1000 years. the MWo "turn" plays different due to the fact that within this turn the damage is not in the same relation to armor or heat as the TT intended. that si oen reasn why PGI needs to get rid of trying to stay close to the TT values. because on weapons and their damage they try to stick with them, while they entirely violated RoF and heat. And therefore initially broke the system to a degree that armor had to be doubled.
But around 30 heattreshold will be needed o keep high alphas in check unless PGI heavily upgrades the wepaons heat.

Really the 30 heat cap sounds great. Not sure why it hasn't been tried yet. Maybe because of guass? Seriously, its tough to see why not.

Would a 30 cap be for all classes of mech or would heavier mechs get a higher thresh hold?

Edited by Johnny Z, 03 March 2016 - 06:43 AM.

[Duke Nedo]

Lily from animove, on 03 March 2016 - 05:28 AM, said:

we could start with 30 heat. How many of each wepaons? that depends on what you want. or balance needs. After this you cna simply adjust heatvalues as well. DO you want to allow 2gauss and 1 PPC or not?

But with currently 40-60 heattreshold nearly ANYTHING goes, because it virtually has no limit without ghostheat unless you create are direstar.

30 heat means notthing more than 2 PPC's (but woudl require to prevent runnign heating up the mech). But even with ehating up form walkign you cna shoot 2 ERPPC' in quick succession.

Then you tets this stuff for a while and see whcih combination appear that are considered as "problematic" and you either up the heat of some components involved in thes eproblems, or you downscale heat a bit more.

The real question is at which size do you consider an alpha as "OK", then you just take a look around which combinations exceed these value.

Exactly, that's my point. There is no one value that will work for all weapons.

If we want to use a hard or semi-hard heat cap to prevent alphas, we need to adjust the heat of most weapons. If we are allowed to do that, who cares what the heat cap value is, we are adjusting weapon heat values so we can do anything we want. That's really what it boils down to, if we don't want any kind for ghost heat or power draw or whatever, we need to rebalance all weapons to ignore TT rules and only obey the MWO reality.

Because of stock builds, lore and TT, I guess we need some kind of system to address high alphas in MWO. Call it an turn-based:FPS adapter if you want.

[Widowmaker1981]

Lily from animove, on 03 March 2016 - 06:27 AM, said:

sry this is again not true^at all.

It does on the TT not chaneg the amount of turns, thats true. But it does in MWO actually totally change the gameplay because a 4 PPC wahrwahk is by gamepaly different from a 10 PPC warhawk. Yes same equipment as TT yet with altered values in MWO it is simply fielding 2.5 as much firepower and 2x as much heattreshold.

Alos the TT interweapon balance is differen, because a single ER Large laser shot ONCE in a turn, and a small one too. While in MWO a small laser basically shoots nearly twice. And this does alter the gamedesign in "turns" because no matter if you make a turn 10 secs or 100secs ot 1000 years. the MWo "turn" plays different due to the fact that within this turn the damage is not in the same relation to armor or heat as the TT intended. that si oen reasn why PGI needs to get rid of trying to stay close to the TT values. because on weapons and their damage they try to stick with them, while they entirely violated RoF and heat. And therefore initially broke the system to a degree that armor had to be doubled.
But around 30 heattreshold will be needed o keep high alphas in check unless PGI heavily upgrades the wepaons heat.

If you keep the mantra from TT that some weapons are low tonnage, high heat and others are high tonnage, low heat, and then set a 30 heatcap, you just make it so the only relevant mechs are the ones that can boat the high tonnage, low heat ones. I.e. You make it so the only relevant large mechs are ballistic boats. If you increase the heat on Ballistics to account for that, you make them useless (because high tonnage high heat sucks compared to low tonange, high heat)

Johnny Z, on 03 March 2016 - 06:41 AM, said:

Really the 30 heat cap sounds great. Not sure why it hasn't been tried yet. Maybe because of guass? Seriously, its tough to see why not.

Would a 30 cap be for all classes of mech or would heavier mechs get a higher thresh hold?

4xUAC5 Mauler. Does not care about your silly heatcap.

Where is your god now, energy mechs?

Thats why.

[Johnny Z]

Widowmaker1981, on 03 March 2016 - 06:49 AM, said:

If you keep the mantra from TT that some weapons are low tonnage, high heat and others are high tonnage, low heat, and then set a 30 heatcap, you just make it so the only relevant mechs are the ones that can boat the high tonnage, low heat ones. I.e. You make it so the only relevant large mechs are ballistic boats. If you increase the heat on Ballistics to account for that, you make them useless (because high tonnage high heat sucks compared to low tonange, high heat)



4xUAC5 Mauler. Does not care about your silly heatcap.

Where is your god now, energy mechs?

Thats why.

Well energy does rule now. But this problem mentioned above would effect the energy pool avenue also.

[Lily from animove]

Widowmaker1981, on 03 March 2016 - 06:49 AM, said:

If you keep the mantra from TT that some weapons are low tonnage, high heat and others are high tonnage, low heat, and then set a 30 heatcap, you just make it so the only relevant mechs are the ones that can boat the high tonnage, low heat ones. I.e. You make it so the only relevant large mechs are ballistic boats. If you increase the heat on Ballistics to account for that, you make them useless (because high tonnage high heat sucks compared to low tonange, high heat)

not necessarily, because speed is life, thats what every light pilot knows. And so what can't hit you with the big booms doesn't hiurt you. there are still plenty other possibilities that factor into balance. Speed and geometry and hardpoins are major factors in shooters.

Widowmaker1981, on 03 March 2016 - 06:49 AM, said:

If you keep the mantra from TT that some weapons are low tonnage, high heat and others are high tonnage, low heat, and then set a 30 heatcap, you just make it so the only relevant mechs are the ones that can boat the high tonnage, low heat ones. I.e. You make it so the only relevant large mechs are ballistic boats. If you increase the heat on Ballistics to account for that, you make them useless (because high tonnage high heat sucks compared to low tonange, high heat)



4xUAC5 Mauler. Does not care about your silly heatcap.

Where is your god now, energy mechs?

Thats why.

this build requires facetime and would be counterable with various tactics.
But UAC 5's are for example soem of those wepaons who do have a balanc eproblem if you comapre them with Ac2 and ac 10's because they are way too cool for the damage they deal. And their reccle time is alos too low in comparison to the scaling of the other Ac's.

Edited by Lily from animove, 03 March 2016 - 07:00 AM.

[Gas Guzzler]

I love the assumption here that ANY time dakka boats step out to take shots, the enemy team INSTANTLY aim bot's to their location so they get shot any time they do damage. This is not how it goes, unless your that guy who is just a little too eager at the beginning and becomes the center of attention. Want to see DPS ballistics instantly take over? Lower the ability of lower DPS higher heat weapons to do their damage at once.

All you lore buffs with your TT comparisons and "alphas shouldn't happen" are full of crap. The books don't hold true to the 10 second arbitrary time period, nor do they care about the quantifiable heat cap. Hang "hang the meta" Mehta herself alphas 2 ER PPCS and 2 cLPLs in her EBJ upwards of 10 times in the book I just read, sometimes three times in a row (as in fires, gets a return fire and screams with rage and fires again, then repeat. No 10 second wait was described). Try doing that in MWO. Or TT. I don't get why there is this law that a turn based board game or fiction books should quantitatively dictate the mechanics of an online FPS based on the BattleTech universe. That 10 second turn was just an arbitrary number, stop using it to justify anything in this game. If you try to argue that it wasn't arbitrary, show me the math or logical reasoning for a "turn" being 10 seconds.


Inb4 "well if it doesn't follow BattleTech rules by the letter it's not BattleTech and they should remove 'A BattleTech Game'"

Get over yourself and shave the neckbeard. It's set in the BattleTech universe, as are all other MechWarrior games.

Edited by Gas Guzzler, 03 March 2016 - 07:36 AM.

[Lily from animove]

Gas Guzzler, on 03 March 2016 - 07:34 AM, said:

I love the assumption here that ANY time dakka boats step out to take shots, the enemy team INSTANTLY aim bot's to their location so they get shot any time they do damage. This is not how it goes, unless your that guy who is just a little too eager at the beginning and becomes the center of attention. Want to see DPS ballistics instantly take over? Lower the ability of lower DPS higher heat weapons to do their damage at once.

All you lore buffs with your TT comparisons and "alphas shouldn't happen" are full of crap. The books don't hold true to the 10 second arbitrary time period, nor do they care about the quantifiable heat cap. Hang "hang the meta" Mehta herself alphas 2 ER PPCS and 2 cLPLs in her EBJ upwards of 10 times in the book I just read, sometimes three times in a row (as in fires, gets a return fire and screams with rage and fires again, then repeat. No 10 second wait was described). Try doing that in MWO. Or TT. I don't get why there is this law that a turn based board game or fiction books should quantitatively dictate the mechanics of an online FPS based on the BattleTech universe. That 10 second turn was just an arbitrary number, stop using it to justify anything in this game. If you try to argue that it wasn't arbitrary, show me the math or logical reasoning for a "turn" being 10 seconds.


Inb4 "well if it doesn't follow BattleTech rules by the letter it's not BattleTech and they should remove 'A BattleTech Game'"

Get over yourself and shave the neckbeard. It's set in the BattleTech universe, as are all other MechWarrior games.

wow stop using the books, the damn books are fantastic stories, they are not an environment of a proper game and its desing. a game needs mechanics and thoe mechanics need to be Your book is in no relation to what any games work like. 10 alpahs of 2 LPL and 2 PPC's wow great that is 4 dead mechs already on agood skilled palyers level. The books are abyssimal unrealistic by people not able t hit the broadside of a barn when the author decides and still snipe the toenails off a fly when needed. Books are the leats workign concept ever.

alphas as they happen now ruin a lot gameplay, because they make it a dull one button warrior game. together wih teamcoordination it just makes mechs pop like made of rubber than actually beign giant heavry armored robots.

And as long as PGI creates mechs thats tonnage, style and equip, as well as wepaons thats tonnage and slot requirements stay at the TT values you will always have the related "opportunatey costs" of scale these weapons will have to eahc other. And that these mechs have to each other, and their hardpoints and geometry. And this will in many cases force a lot similarities in revealing numbers to the TT by scale. A Pulselaser is more accurate than it's standard version, but my accuracy doesn't alter, now no matter whan PGI does they need to justify that weight delta if they want to generate balance. And this will always be rather similar since PGi never will adjust slot or tonnage requirements for these 2 systems.

[Gas Guzzler]

Lily from animove, on 03 March 2016 - 07:46 AM, said:

wow stop using the books, the damn books are fantastic stories, they are not an environment of a proper game and its desing. a game needs mechanics and thoe mechanics need to be Your book is in no relation to what any games work like. 10 alpahs of 2 LPL and 2 PPC's wow great that is 4 dead mechs already on agood skilled palyers level. The books are abyssimal unrealistic by people not able t hit the broadside of a barn when the author decides and still snipe the toenails off a fly when needed. Books are the leats workign concept ever.

alphas as they happen now ruin a lot gameplay, because they make it a dull one button warrior game. together wih teamcoordination it just makes mechs pop like made of rubber than actually beign giant heavry armored robots.

And as long as PGI creates mechs thats tonnage, style and equip, as well as wepaons thats tonnage and slot requirements stay at the TT values you will always have the related "opportunatey costs" of scale these weapons will have to eahc other. And that these mechs have to each other, and their hardpoints and geometry. And this will in many cases force a lot similarities in revealing numbers to the TT by scale. A Pulselaser is more accurate than it's standard version, but my accuracy doesn't alter, now no matter whan PGI does they need to justify that weight delta if they want to generate balance. And this will always be rather similar since PGi never will adjust slot or tonnage requirements for these 2 systems.

Is lore not used as a justification for why alpha strikes are rare? "Alpha strikes almost never happen in the lore" is something people say all the ******* time, and its ******** because it is false, AND because books shouldn't dictate FPS mechanics. TT board games shouldn't dictate FPS mechanics either. The "feel" is brought over, but the numbers themselves of course are going to need adjustment.

The pulse laser accuracy mechanic is decreased duration. And it works. LPL is better than the LL, but I would rather have 3 LLs than 2 LPLs, because more damage and longer range is more valuable than the .33 second reduction in burn time.

So it is your belief that without alphas, TTK would be higher? I have news for you. Alpha strike builds keep Dakka builds in check, but if no one can alpha and EVERYONE has to commit face time to use their weapons, the mechs that will take over are the extreme DPS dakka builds, and TTK will be, at best, the same as it is now. Anything with 3-5 AC5/UAC5s is going to melt through armor very quickly.

[LordKnightFandragon]

Johnny Z, on 03 March 2016 - 06:08 AM, said:

COF is just bad. A player can aim as good as a bot, bots big advantage is it doesn't aim it actually attaches to the target. Players cannot correct recoil or cof problems nearly as well. Bots big advantage vrs players is this and "aiming" before the target is visible and firing just as it becomes visible.

I am playing another not well known but very modern game against a lot of bots lately and their behavior is such. This game has recoil but no cof and the bots are nearly eliminating recoil.

PLaying against bots in this game would be fruitless, since every shot they ever fire would go right into your CT and given that they alpha everything, the entire team would be dead inside of a few minutes vs a team of bots. Its crazy enough already fighting those bots in the battlegrounds.....they wreck my mech in seconds even when I move around and twist.

[Lily from animove]

Gas Guzzler, on 03 March 2016 - 08:01 AM, said:

So it is your belief that without alphas, TTK would be higher? I have news for you. Alpha strike builds keep Dakka builds in check, but if no one can alpha and EVERYONE has to commit face time to use their weapons, the mechs that will take over are the extreme DPS dakka builds, and TTK will be, at best, the same as it is now. Anything with 3-5 AC5/UAC5s is going to melt through armor very quickly.

No extreme dakka builds only take over if the ballistics are too strong. And CW for example will still bring the limited ammo issue. Dakak also requires weight, not every mech can do this + enough ammo. Dakkas already work, so why should alphas keep them in check? thats nonsense. Dakak will only dominate if TOO MUCH nerfing happens. and a lot chassis now already play with like 5 lasers that a 30heattreshold woudl allow, they will still work. only the HUGE alpha builds would vanish. And this would help the underpopulated lights and emdiums that are Alpha-kills to come back. They disappeared because of all those high alpha PP FLD stuff.

[Pjwned]

Lily from animove, on 03 March 2016 - 04:40 AM, said:

No isn't difficult, adjust ehta for wepaons beign too cool, lower heatscale to prevent 70+ alphas. it is NOT hard. look at MW3 30 heat in the treshold, and you couldn't pew pew around like in MWO: heatscale down, heatdissipation up, this makes us shoot still a lot, but less alpha. Then adjust ehat probably on gauss and give it like 5. which still si rather cool, and you prevent stupid alphastrikes.



This is WRONG.

in TT your turn is 10seconds. so firing these 4 C-ER-PPC's does not happen AT ONCE: it happens during these 10 seconds. Your turn just sums up what happened AFTER those 10 seconds ends. which means,

heat from firing the peps + cooling. since MWO isn't turnbased its clustered to realtime. But this is what and why MWO failed to properly balance TT to the RT-shooter.

Our wepaons in MWO cycle faster than TT (way below 10seconds). And the higher heattreshold allows us to fire way more often. calculate with the current MWO PPC vlues how often your warhawk of 4PPC's actually could shoot in MWO, to understand that transferred back to TT you actually have 10CERPPC's equipped. And other wepaons have even less cooldown.
Together with the ehatscale WAY above TT values we can push out a load more damage than TT ever intented. Ontop of the too accurate aim we have this made original TT armor not being enough to prevent mechs from instapoppoing. And so PGI had to upgrade armor by factor 2. If now PGI would readjust heat to use heat as a forcing method to limit what we can shoot within 10 seconds then we would be bakc to a better state. And when PGI limits what you can fire at ONCE then the alpha issue is gone.

with 30 heattreshold, a WH could only fire 2 PEPS at once. then with 20DHS he would cooldown 40heat. within the next 10 seconds. (given we had true TT values) which means after firing 2 peps the next 2 peps would be fired after 7.5 seconds.
BUT, the problematic lowered rates of fire MWO has chosne would show you that with this cooling only 2 CERPPC's would be sufficient, because their ROF is 4 seconds. That emans to make a 4 CERPPC Warhawk work with all weapons, the game would need ROF's beyong the cooling so basically 10 seconds would be a good spot again. But I guess for too many palyers this would be a "too low" firerate and caled boring. But the current firerates make us virtually laod more than 2x as much wepaons with a heastcale soemtimes more than 2x. Which in the end makes us fire more than 4x as much as TT ever was designed to do.

Not all TT values fit to the FPS nature of MWO. But the way PGI reshaped these values are the cause of the high alpha nature we have. And "ghost heat" was a measuremant to fix 2 mechanics of this bad transition

the PPdamage, which the dice prevented, and the "too high" heatscale the TT never had. But this only applied ot soem assorted wepaons. Now when PGI wants to truly!!! end these two issues they need lower the heatscale. because it will make us use smaller alphas, and chainfire more often which also solves a big part of the PP damage by allwoing peopel to twist away between constant sterams of fire.

But a big part of this community and unfortunately also PGI isn't able to properly transport this abstraction of the TT to the FPS game. because they don't understand what mechanics the realtime transition needs to simulate this abstracted model correctly.

It would still work if heat was changed to be generated over time rather than instantly.

But that's my point, after thinking about it the realization comes that without making some real changes first it doesn't work to just slam the heat threshold down to 30 because energy weapons (and energy weapon reliant mechs) get screwed royally that way.

[RedDragon]

RedDragon, on 02 March 2016 - 03:42 PM, said:

Btw that's exactly how I imagine Garth lost his job.

[Hydrocarbon]

This isn't far off from how Eve Online operates. You can physically put nearly any weapon on any ship, but each weapon requires a certain amount of "power grid" and "cpu" to actually enable it. Then as you use them they draw energy, heat in our world, from a capacitor that slowly recharges.




The problem is that PGI is not known for "nailing it" the 1st, 2nd or even 3rd revision. EVE's system evolved over several years in a game with 10x as many people online any given time vs MWO (currently more like 20x).




Here is what I fear - a small laser will count as 1 unit of draw (can still boat) while a large pulse will count as 15 units of draw, ERPPC will count for 17, and gauss 25 units. UAC5 will count as 12 units while an AC5 counts as 11. Then make max draw/sec 30. The way they'll probably do it will make it stupid to equip 2+ gauss, 2+ UAC5, 3+ AC5, 3+ LPL, 2+ ERPPC, etc.

This is certain to break MANY mechs. Not just builds or variants, but an entire chassis - unless they quirk it. Mechs quirked due to low numbers of hardpoints will become gods, and even sorta-vomit mechs will become trash. Queue the next waveS re-quirkening...

What PGI really needs to do is help teach the community how to not die to alphas. Don't fly around corners blindly, twist your torso, front-load armor & watch your rear, build decent mechs...

[Gas Guzzler]

Hydrocarbon, on 03 March 2016 - 12:48 PM, said:

What PGI really needs to do is help teach the community how to not die to alphas. Don't fly around corners blindly, twist your torso, front-load armor & watch your rear, build decent mechs...

That's obviously too much to ask...

[Hydrocarbon]

Another thing to worry about is how complex this "simplicity" will be. MWO already has a steep learning curve.


(internal dialogue) So I'm at 75% heat, that means I can fire, umm... 2 medium lasers? Wait, maybe 3. Hold on, as I was thinking it's dropped down to 50%. Maybe I can fire 5 of my 6? Lets do it!

*overheats from 25pnt alpha*

(internal dialogue) CRAP! I forgot 4 maxed this mech's power draw, it was my OTHER mech that can shoot 5!

*blam, overheat-induced headshot*

*Damage dealt: 68, kills: 0*

RUSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS!!!!!! *ragequit/returns to CoD*

Edited by Hydrocarbon, 03 March 2016 - 01:19 PM.