AnTi90d, on 13 June 2016 - 06:25 PM, said:
So, I saw that this was just Tweeted:
..all the while I haven't heard a single positive thing about the incoming power draw mechanic from any player.. only negative.
1. So, does this community really want an Energy Draw system? Do you guys think it would be good for this game to have a system that prevents players from firing all of their weapons due to some invisible mechanic that has never existed in all of Battletech / Mechwarrior?
2. I mean, Novas are historically known as a mech that carries more weapons that it can keep firing, but that's why alpha-strikes exist.. and Novas shutdown after they alpha-strike.
3. Now, we're going to have another invisible system that surely won't be explained one iota in-game that will alienate and frustrate new players and likely cause existing players to just say, "screw this, they changed the game too much and now it isn't something that I want to keep playing. All the mechs in my garage have been ruined."
4. Personally, I'd rather they got off of their sidetracked asses and rolled FP back to phase 2. They've already rolled out feature after feature that the playerbase didn't want, didn't ask for and didn't like.. and that has done possibly irreparable damage to the FP participation numbers.
This new feature sounds like a horrible pain in the *** and a generally terrible idea.. in a long line of pains in the asses and terrible ideas.
Numbered for ease of reference.
1 and 2 kind fit into the same category for me. From a lore perspective, you aren't supposed to be firing all your weapons all the time. As for "an invisible mechanic that has never existed to prevent people from alpha striking"... I have to ask where you got that from.
The table top system alone has more than enough power to stop a person from alpha striking. Random dice roll determining where you hit the enemy, or if you hit them at all, and a much more punishing heat system that actually then plays back into the dice rolling making it harder to actually hit your enemy, and actually making it all the more likely that YOU will be hit.
Accuracy loss, speed loss, pilot health check, shutdown override. All these things add modifiers to your dice to make it harder for you to hit the enemy, and because of your speed loss, and possibly the pilot health checks, add modifiers to your enemies dice making it easier for them to hit you.
Unless you choose the right sort of mech and build them to be heat neutral, you run a lot of risks, and at the same time, running a heat neutral mech has its own risks. You're probably carrying fewer weapons which means you won't be dealing as much damage, meaning it will take longer to kill your enemy than it might take them to kill you.
The problem is, and has always been, MWO has NONE of these penalties. It has always been pinpoint accurate, able to boat large numbers of powerful weapons able to melt your enemies if you so much as LOOK at them.
Yes that is an exaggeration, but it fits the point I'm trying to make.
If a min/maxed MWO mech were to meet a min/maxed TT mech of the exact same model, lets say a Warhammer just for the fun of it, the MWO mech would win hands down because of how absurdly powerful the rules have made it.
Doubled armor/structure, absolutely no heat penalties. It would literally look at the TT mech and just melt it into slag.
MWO has gotten so far away from the rules it was based on it's just laughable. MWO needs to go back to basics and start over with the core game mechanics.
As for the Nova... No body, and I mean no body in their right mind would ever just alpha away with a Nova, one shot and you'd probably go so far past the 30 point heat cap you'd just boil your pilot alive before the mech just explodes.
3. I've said this once before in a thread about the energy draw system. Every weapon system will be given a number that it will draw from whatever "power pool" your engine is capable of supplying. The bigger the engine, the larger the pool probably. The same can be said of weapons, the bigger or more powerful a weapon, the more energy it will draw.
Ballistics will probably draw the least power, lasers will probably draw the most, missiles will be somewhere in between I imagine.
So, let's say an AC2 draws .25 power, an AC5 draws 1 power, an AC10 draws 5 power, and an AC20 draws 10 power.
Let's say an LRM5 draws .5 power, an LRM10 draws 1.25 power, an LRM15 draws 6 power, and an LRM20 draws 12 power.
Let's say a small laser draws 1 power, a small pulse draws 2.5, a medium draws 4, a medium pulse draws 9, a large draws 8 and a large pulse draws 17.
Keep in mind these are completely off the wall, spit balled numbers here.
Now, let's say we're building a Warhammer, the 6D specifically, with 8 energy hard points. Now, let's say you want to fill those 8 hardpoints with mediums, regular or pulse, doesn't matter, we'll go with each for now.
So, 8 medium lasers requires 32 power, 8 medium pulse lasers require 72 power.
Now, let's say the 6Ds stock engine, a 280, is capable of putting out 72 power, because it mounts PPCs when stock, and I'm willing to bet PPCs are real power hogs.
So, you would still be able to fire off all 8 MPLs, but you would probably only get to do it once before you were risking a shutdown, while the 8 normal MLs would be able to fire twice in succession, with a little bit of leeway given that 72 power divided by 32 is 2.25, so you would still have power left over.
If you fired your 8 MLs the right way, accounting for the weapons cooldowns and time for energy to recharge, you might be able to fire them off 3 times before you're risking a shutdown.
You would still be able to alpha strike, but you'd actually have to WEIGH THE RISK of doing so, something MWO has needed for years now.
Finally, 4. Let's be honest here, CW/FW was doomed from the start. It was too big a gamble on PGI's part and they rolled a snake eyes. The maps are choke pointy in the extreme, always have similar elements across all the maps... Yes they maybe laid out differently and look different, but they all PLAY exactly the SAME. Variations on a theme do not make a good game mode.
At least in QP the games are similar, but never EXACTLY the same.
Maps in CW/FW should have been much, much bigger, had more open areas to encourage scouting and LRMing, maybe a city or a base or something to brawl around/inside, and sure there could be a choke point here or there, but they should not have been the dominant features of the map and the ONLY way to get to the objective. That's where the mode really falls on its face. The only way to get to the objective is to go through the meat grinder, or go the long-flipping-way-around and HOPE that you catch the enemy off guard.
There are far, far too many problems with CW/FW to list them all, which is part of why the game mode is the flipping ghost town that it is, aside from the ultra-hardcore teams that always complain about only facing each other. Guess what, it's a ghost town of your own making. You clubbed the seals, they complained and left, you complained there's no one to play with, and you say it's boring fighting the few who you do play against, so PGI rolls out a CW/FW event to get people back into it. And you just start the cycle all over again.
Splitting the CW/FW queues was a good idea, but again, the problem had already gotten too large by that point, so when PGI "checked the numbers", yeah, big surprise there's hardly anyone playing, because not only is the game mode itself bad, but there just aren't enough total players in MWO to make it a viable system.
Just yesterday I was playing World of Warships, and they have a player counter right up in the menu bar. They had like 10-12k players at one point when I was on, and even at like 1 AM there were still about 8k players playing.
I'd honestly be surprised if MWO had even 4k players on at peak hours, and I think that's being ludicrously optimistic. 2k players at peak hours is still being overly generous.
The game is literally hemorrhaging players, and I think that's part of why PGI decided to add in this stupid lockbox mechanic, to try and draw in people from games that already have that mechanic. It might work for a little bit, but it's just one more on the list of bad ideas that should not have even been thought of to begin with, on top of all the broken mechanics the game has at its core.
That's it, that's my spiel.
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