Wow.
Even just buzzing through a few pages here, some of the assumptions people are making about how power draw will work are...just...wow.
Couple points:
1. “WHY DON’T THEY JUST USE THE %&$&@^$*&#^#&@$&@*&$*@&$*@*$^&ING TABLETOP HEAT SCALE ALREADY!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!!!!!!!???!!!!11!1!??!111oneone!”
Because a strict 30-point heat scale would be the death of MechWarrior Online
no matter how high dissipation got. Firing one medium laser one time in a ‘True to TT’ heat scale puts you at risk of shutdown and ammo explosion, which is clearly and obviously not true to the
spirit of the tabletop rules. Remember – the TT scale sinks heat before it has a chance to affect the generating ‘Mech, and only leftover heat over the ‘Mech’s
HEAT SINKING CAPACITY (familiar term, that…) is rolled against the heat scale. To properly simulate this, there would have to be a buffer zone between resting heat and “you’re in trouble” heat. A 60-point heat scale, with thirty points of ‘free’ heat, would be more true to the intended spirit of the TT ruleset. But we can’t have that because lore grognards with no understanding of how real-time games work
insist that anything but a copy/pasted 30-point heat scale ripped straight out of a sourcebook is a Horrible Abomination of All Things “A BattleTech Game™”
As for why they’ve never tried the 60-point scale, or anything like it? Maybe they focus-tested a similar effects table for high heat and found out that rather than being the Golden Solution armchair devs espouse it as, it turned out to suck all the fun out of a fight and frustrate players with randomized, poorly-explained effects they could do little to mitigate? Perhaps coding a dozen completely different randomized events to happen based off randomized rolls on a heat scale is a technical challenge they don’t like (though that is admittedly a rather weak excuse, if so)? Perhaps they just like energy draw better? Who knows.
2.) “Energy Draw is sh!t because it wasn’t in TT< and anything that wasn’t in TT is sh!t.”
Ahem:
For Balance, Corerule Ignore. TT is a dice-rolling game played over the course of several hours/days/weeks/years where one man acts as the central hive mind for his legion of mind-controlled ‘Mech-driving drone pilots; MechWarrior Online is a real-time combat game where you are one guy in one ‘Mech. There are incompatibilities between those two mediums and methods which every other MechWarrior game to date has had to take liberties to address.
Energy Draw is not sh!t because it does not yet exist.
Ghost Heat is sh!t, and has been sh!t since its introduction. It’s simply sh!t that has gotten old enough to petrify and stop actively stinking; we’re all used to the smell and the presence of this old, petrified sh!t in the middle of our gaming space, but that does not stop Ghost Heat from being sh!t. As has been said a few times herein: anything is better than Ghost Heat.
3.) “But I don’t want a system where my available power is based on the square of my engine rating divided by the number of heat sinks in my ‘Mech to the 0.5
th power of the Chassis Modifier where my recharge is based on the average plotted position of the day/night map cycle multiplied by ambient heat and divided by cloud coverage and a random variable rolled at the start of the match which represents available fuel for ‘Mech reactors, and…!”
What in the actual unholy banana-cream hell are you people talking about?
Seriously. I’ve seen so many people build their own personal Energy Draw systems with these incredibly, unrealistically baroque requirements, effects, calculations and modifiers, when the stated intent from Piranha is to
streamline and simplify the Ghost Heat penalty. You know what the system is most likely to be?
“You have [X] power available. Every weapon consumes its own value of [Y] power when it’s fired. Fire enough [Y] in a single shot to exceed [X] and you trigger an extra heat spike. ”
That is, I’d bet, going to be pretty much it. The idea was to make it simple. Easy. And universal. All this Panic math people are doing is just
weird. it makes no sense on its own, and it makes no sense that Piranha would implement that sort of ridiculous system when the chief complaint over Ghost Heat – the complaints that finally got Piranha to investigate alternative ideas – has
always been “this system is too weird, opaque and complicated.”
4.) “But…but…but…!”
Chill. This isn’t a ‘Mech-balancing issue. Not really. It’s a systems issue, and given how long they’ve been plinking away at it, you can rest pretty much assured that it’s not a knee-jerk nonsense-thing they’re throwing at the wall to see if it sticks.
Wait for the next Russcast. Let him give his take before you guys bust out the pitchforks and the anti-sky umbrellas.
Edited by 1453 R, 14 June 2016 - 10:03 AM.
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Alan Davion, on 14 June 2016 - 08:54 AM, said:
