173 replies to this topic

[Davers]

Jman5, on 07 May 2016 - 02:27 PM, said:

Russ complained about how players are insisting on complexity,

Can I get some context for this? I haven't heard this one before.

[nehebkau]

Gyrok, on 07 May 2016 - 09:36 AM, said:

Why do you think alpha strikes are currently an issue?

What would you do to change them, and why?

My thoughts run to the issue being with the extremely short duration of IS lasers meaning mechs can put 58 damage onto a single component faster than someone can twist to spread that damage.

I think if the egregiously short burn duration was mitigated, it would become less painful to take a laser alpha. They *are* supposed to be DoT...the clan lasers are clearly nearly twice the burn time, why should IS lasers be half the burn for 90% of the damage?

B33F demonstrated the insanity of alpha strikes when he did the (granted ridiculously overboard) Direstar.
Problem being if you can boat enough weapons you can kill an enemy before they have a chance to respond -- this goes against what Mechwarrior is about. Mechs are supposed to take a ton of punishment, not go down like a COD head shot victim.

Now lets not get into the clan IS debate, clans will almost always have a higher alpha because they can usually put more weapons on their rigs, IS has other benefits. Problem being that the alpha meta has turned the game into a PEEK-A-SHOOT game.

How would I change it? I really don't know a way to handle it aside from making it impossible to fire more than a specific amount of energy weapons at one time (power limitation based on engine?) and adding an accuracy decrease the more auto cannons you fire (shake and recoil?) I really don't know.

[Pjwned]

UncleTouchy, on 07 May 2016 - 02:15 PM, said:

Please understand this is not a board game.
At its base this is a FPS.
Please start any first person shooter game you may have on your pc or console.
Launch into a multiplayer game.
Walk or Run to an enemy, see enemy, stand still, exchange fire. Tell me how that goes for you.

Deal with the reality of the game you've been given by the developers.
I like that there are so many voices that speak to an issue. This developer dosent. How so,they havent given hide nor hair in terms of convergence. Maybe a mumbled sentence in a town hall or two as of late. In the past it was a hard no or they dont know how.

I'm not trying to turn MWO into a board game or add random cone of fire BS or destroy convergence entirely or anything like that, but the always perfect, instant, pinpoint convergence on every weapon causes and has caused some major issues and it needs to be toned down.

Time to kill in MWO is supposed to be fairly high (especially compared to other shooter games) with all the hit locations and limited weapon ranges and ammo and heat and critical hits and all that other stuff, but if the TTK plummets because everybody can easily focus all of their weapons onto 1 hit location at all times then that screws everything up.

Gyrok, on 07 May 2016 - 02:26 PM, said:

Convergence is not an issue, if DoT weapons function in a manner that allows them to be DoT.

It's not an issue except for when it's an issue, which is apparently pretty frequently, but let's just keep ignoring the real issue anyways.

Quote

PPFLD is the only thing where convergence becomes an issue, and IS has that by the ton. I am not really all that concerned about it at the moment though...the bigger issue is a laser DoT alpha that is applied so quickly that by the time your brain takes ~0.3 seconds to recognize the issue, and another ~0.2 seconds to react, you have already been hit with the full alpha to a component.

At that point, it essentially becomes PPFLD.

The shorter burn duration, especially in regards to how fast you can react to it, is only a real problem if you're standing still because the damage is spread out when you're moving; the rest of the problem is all those weapons being focused on 1 spot i.e convergence. If you need a reference for how to better handle DoT weapons in particular, then look at light mechs.

It sounds like you expect to be able to sit there moving very slowly/not at all and have lasers burn for so long that you can reliably react to twist away from it every time no matter how bad lasers would be as a result; how about you just try to stay moving instead if that's the issue? Meanwhile addressing convergence would still tone down massive laser vomit alphas, but it would do that in a way that actually makes sense instead of WEAPON SO OP NERF NERF NERF!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! only to have that happen again to PPCs/ACs if lasers just get **** on because people foam at the mouth about lasers while ignoring the real issues.

I will mention though that I wouldn't be against sized hardpoints as a way to increase laser duration, but I support that idea because (among other reasons) it's not just a NERF LASERS INTO THE GROUND proposal.

[MischiefSC]

There are a lot of good fixes for it.

we will never see any of them.

All we can do is wait and see how to adjust to the one PGI gives us.

[GreenHell]

MischiefSC, on 07 May 2016 - 03:37 PM, said:

There are a lot of good fixes for it.

we will never see any of them.

All we can do is wait and see how to adjust to the one PGI gives us.

Like power draw? (Ghost Heat 3.0 lol)

[LordNothing]

this is one of the reasons i suggested ghost duration as a possible fix. far better than solutions involving negative quirks. it really shouldnt matter how many lasers you got, just how many you try to use at once. throw on about 2.5% extra duration for every point above 30 damage. so firing 6 cmpls will result in an extra 45% duration, or an extra 5% if you fire 4 at a time (120% if you alpha 6spls and 6erml, such as on gargles). do something stupid like firing 12 lasers, and your blast may very well take 3 seconds to complete. of course this has the side effect of spreading heat over time actually making those long burn alphas viable, but you do have time to spread it out so its not as bad on the receiving end.

Edited by LordNothing, 07 May 2016 - 05:15 PM.

[MischiefSC]

GreenHell, on 07 May 2016 - 03:40 PM, said:

Like power draw? (Ghost Heat 3.0 lol)

Probably. I'm expecting it to be a stone cold mess with modifiers you don't see in the GUI and are totally counter-intuitive and are mostly bad copies of mediocre mechanics seen in other games.

Admittedly I'm not feeling optimistic after seeing what we got from FW3.

[Jman5]

Davers, on 07 May 2016 - 03:20 PM, said:

Can I get some context for this? I haven't heard this one before.

It was in the last townhall, but I can't give you a timestamp. Long of the short of it, he was complaining that the hardcore players want more complexity, but it doesn't make the game good for non-hardcore. I forget what the exact context was. Some question asked from the audience.

[Novakaine]

G-rock my man I saying they offset each other.
What you and your ilk want is to have your cake and eat it too.
Not very fair for the IS no?
Don't be willfully obtuse.

[Davers]

Jman5, on 07 May 2016 - 04:16 PM, said:

It was in the last townhall, but I can't give you a timestamp. Long of the short of it, he was complaining that the hardcore players want more complexity, but it doesn't make the game good for non-hardcore. I forget what the exact context was. Some question asked from the audience.

Methinks he is confusing complexity with depth.

Thanks for the reply.

[GreenHell]

Just wanted to put this out there.

http://mwo.smurfy-ne...4528b4ccdd68ca7

Mechs like this one can still pump out 40 damage at 600m, while producing 54 at optimal. IMHO, that timber is "better" than the BK. Just my opinion, but there it is.

[KahnWongFuChung]

The Problem Gyrok is Alpha strikes have ruined MWO as far as being any type of Battletech game.

This subject has been going on for 4 years and the devs still will not remove the alpha strike mechanism from the game like they should.

But who gives a shitt now the game is all but dead and the devs are not smart enough to figure out balance in any form.
Alpha strikes are bad enough with just 1 mech shooting you now multiply all that damage by x2-x12 and you see why MWO balance fails.

I say after 4 years of watching MWO go downhill just let it die so someone else can buy the IP rights and do a MechWarrior or BattleTech game right.

[Cy Mitchell]

Tristan Winter, on 07 May 2016 - 02:15 PM, said:

I doubt that has been confirmed yet. Russ has said that it's delayed and that it's tricky getting it to work, but I haven't seen any real information about it being scrapped.

He said that what they had been working on and talking about was not going to work but that he thought they would have a new system in by the end of the summer ie July or August.

[Aresye]

GreenHell, on 07 May 2016 - 04:50 PM, said:

Just wanted to put this out there.

http://mwo.smurfy-ne...4528b4ccdd68ca7

Mechs like this one can still pump out 40 damage at 600m, while producing 54 at optimal. IMHO, that timber is "better" than the BK. Just my opinion, but there it is.

If your argument is about damage, then your argument is false, and I proved why that argument is false on the previous page, using an EBJ build that actually has 1 more CERML, in addition to none of the negative quirks the TBR still as (especially with the A left torso).

With only 54 damage instead of 61, your TBR build will only do 54 damage up to a range of 446m (w/ CERML Range 5 Module). That's 1.57 damage/tick, compared to the Black Knight which does 1.95 damage/tick at the same range.

If you're wondering how I'm getting those numbers, read my post on page 3, but no, that TBR build certainly will not beat the BK, even at that TBR's optimal range. The BK literally does more damage for every tick that the server calculates its lasers being on target.

[Gyrok]

L3mming2, on 07 May 2016 - 03:17 PM, said:

FFR's stats are no way near those of the cjf csj. and if all the strong merc units are on the clan side (even when the new reward system discourages that) dont you wonder why?

Really....the fact that they are second overall to CJF must be a misprint. That similar K/D and W/L must have been a figment of my imagination as well.

Additionally, most of the mercs probably went clans finally because they had all been IS side for so long their clan mechs had started to get dry rot in the mech bays. Expect that to change soon.

Quote

the FW stats may be far from perfect to juge ballance, but they are the only stats. comparing weaponstats wile ignoring a host of other variables (engines/ weight / 2 vs 3 critslot DHS/.... endo and ferro with 6 or 12 critslots..../ TC's ect...)
its like comparing appels and oranges, and grade them on how orange they look...

Actually...they are not. We have math for that, I know math is hard...but them's the breaks.

[Aresye]

Using FW stats for balance purposes is incredibly stupid, as there is no way to account for skill distribution for any particular point in time.

PGI though apparently has no issues using this incredibly inconsistent data to balance the game, to the point you can literally see dropdeck tonnages change, and sometimes even quirk passes come in, based off the movement of a single unit.

[MischiefSC]

Well, for players who have good twist reflexes and can exploit a .4 seconds advantage on burntime for twisting to win that trade.

For perspective the players who can consistently do that could all road trip on the same tour bus.

David Bowie has, without question, banged more people than that includes.

[Ex Atlas Overlord]

I don't understand by PGI doesn't simply increase cool down times across the board?

I know I for one, would spend less time spraying whenever I could for free damage, and only shooting when I knew the shot would count.

Edited by Ex Atlas Overlord, 07 May 2016 - 06:23 PM.

[Gyrok]

Ex Atlas Overlord, on 07 May 2016 - 06:22 PM, said:

I dont' understand by PGI doesn't simply increase cool down times across the board?

That is a legitimate and valid point.

[Triordinant]

MischiefSC, on 07 May 2016 - 06:18 PM, said:

David Bowie has, without question, banged more people than that includes.