819 replies to this topic

[Dingo Battler]

Not the people who actually can play. TTK is just right, and weapon diversity is to the point where only a few weapons, LBXs, AC2 and PPCs are crap.

This feels like catering to the bads, who think if TTK is lowered, they'll hop into their mech and magically become a mechwarrior god, shrugging off pathetic 30 point alpha while they chainfire their enemies to death. The meta will change, TTK will be the same, and weapon diversity will be lowered.

I think the meta will shift to rapid fire weapons, like small lasers, UACs, smaller ACs, or long ranged weapons like gauss, 2xcLPL, etc. Bread and butter weapons like medium lasers and SRMs will die. Brawling will also completely die. Why poke people to death with a puny 30pt alpha at close range when you can poke them to death at far range?

For me? I'll just hop into my KDK3 more often, which is already the best mech in the game. 2xUAC5s, 2xUAC10s, 30 alpha on the dot. Then I'll continue killing the bads. Only thing is I wasted money on the SB, which will be absolute crap in the 30 alpha fiasco.

[Wintersdark]

KBurn85, on 15 June 2016 - 05:40 PM, said:

Not the people who actually can play. TTK is just right, and weapon diversity is to the point where only a few weapons, LBXs, AC2 and PPCs are crap.

This feels like catering to the bads, who think if TTK is lowered, they'll hop into their mech and magically become a mechwarrior god, shrugging off pathetic 30 point alpha while they chainfire their enemies to death. The meta will change, TTK will be the same, and weapon diversity will be lowered.

Don't be an ***. Everyone in this thread understands that fundamentally, good players will remain good, and bad players will remain bad. Mechanics changes never change that. This sort of statement is both useless and needlessly inflamatory; essentially trolling.

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I think the meta will shift to rapid fire weapons, like small lasers, UACs, smaller ACs, or long ranged weapons like gauss, 2xcLPL, etc. Bread and butter weapons like medium lasers and SRMs will die. Brawling will also completely die. Why poke people to death with a puny 30pt alpha at close range when you can poke them to death at far range?

SRM's? No. If you'd taken the time to read before you ranted on, you'd know that tied in is a spread factor, with spread weapons counting as half damage to the alpha. A Spirit Bear with an LBX20 would count as firing a 24+10=34 pt alpha; a very small extra bit of heat. A UAC20 SB would probably want to offset it's SRM's and UAC's, though.

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For me? I'll just hop into my KDK3 more often, which is already the best mech in the game. 2xUAC5s, 2xUAC10s, 30 alpha on the dot. Then I'll continue killing the bads. Only thing is I wasted money on the SB, which will be absolute crap in the 30 alpha fiasco.

Note that while a UAC SB is going to want to spread it's fire in two bursts, so is everyone else, so it's not the disadvantage you make it out to be.

[Moldur]

I agree that changing the mechanics of the game won't make players doing well do worse, or players doing badly do better. It will just change the dynamic of the game. I am hopeful that everyone here is in agreement, and has no delusions or ulterior motives on that facet. It's not like huge alphas will go away and all of the sudden everyone will be on an even playing field.

In other words, if one's issue is dying, then they're still going to die except they'll die differently.

[Andi Nagasia]

Moldur, on 15 June 2016 - 06:17 PM, said:

I agree that changing the mechanics of the game won't make players doing well do worse, or players doing badly do better. It will just change the dynamic of the game. I am hopeful that everyone here is in agreement, and has no delusions or ulterior motives on that facet. It's not like huge alphas will go away and all of the sudden everyone will be on an even playing field.

In other words, if one's issue is dying, then they're still going to die except they'll die differently.

well Players that already Pack Small Alphas will probably do better as those Alphas wont Change,
also Mechs that can only Pack Small Alphas(LCT ect), will likely get better,

[Zolaz]

Andi Nagasia, on 15 June 2016 - 08:05 PM, said:

well Players that already Pack Small Alphas will probably do better as those Alphas wont Change,
also Mechs that can only Pack Small Alphas(LCT ect), will likely get better,

[Andi Nagasia]

Zolaz, on 15 June 2016 - 08:32 PM, said:

Cant win in a Underwhelming LCT?
1) its you! Become a Better LCT Pilot?
2) its the LCT! Choose another Light?
Nether is Acceptable(Just an Example),

if the Current System is Flawed, and Exploitable you have Choices as well,
1) Just Get Good and Exploit the System like Everyone Else, because you Can & Because you Need to, to Win,
2) fix the Problem so you Dont need a PHD and Study the Exploits to Figure out which is the Best Combination,
ill be taking Fix the Problem, and not Ignore it till it goes away(Problems Never Go away if Ignored)

@Zolas,
Not Commenting against you Personally,
Just Commenting in General, to the Picture,

[Jungle Rhino]

The fundamental problem here is that PGI have taken Battletech and gone and made some messed up Counterstrike twitch shooter with mech skins. I want to see a big fat targeting reticule which my shots land *somwwhere* inside. I want to see massive explosions rip across a mech and armour being slewed off of various body parts. These are giant 80Ton battle robots - not precision laser scalpel surgeons!

PGI added super accuracy - which made front load weapons OP. They also trivialised heat management with the ridiculous pilot skills. This made high heat weapons OP. So we are left with this bandaid system because PGI is so stubborn and insists on preserving the mythical 'skill' of pointing a reticule at the enemy.

What would make this game require more skill would actually be longer weapons cooldowns, meaningful heat management, and the removal of ultra long range precision sniping to allow for more mobility rather than ridge humping sniper duals.

[SplashDown]

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.

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?

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.

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."

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.

Sure why not..everytime that pro game designer RUSS comes out with a new brain storm the server numbers drop a bit more and more....cuz you know..russ is pro game designer who knows everything while the PLAYERS know nothing..hahah.....jeese i crack myself up.

[Satan n stuff]

Appogee, on 14 June 2016 - 01:46 PM, said:

CT+LT+RT+RA+LA+HD = 6 potential reticles to track and converge. I assumed you'd have the arms converged already and Hd+CT converged. So that's 4 reticles to track.

So, however much network traffic it takes to track one magically insta-converged reticle, it would take 4X that to track 4 non-converged reticles.

Of course, a Mech that doesn't have weapons mounted in four unique locations would have fewer to track.

Yeah... that's not how it works unless the programmer is an idiot.

You don't send data for every single firing point, you send the convergence distance and periodically send a log to make sure the number isn't being manipulated, the server verifies the log and checks if the number is within an acceptable range, then it calculates the rest the same way it's done client side.

[Appogee]

Satan n stuff, on 16 June 2016 - 04:25 AM, said:

Yeah... that's not how it works unless the programmer is an idiot.

You don't send data for every single firing point, you send the convergence distance and periodically send a log to make sure the number isn't being manipulated, the server verifies the log and checks if the number is within an acceptable range, then it calculates the rest the same way it's done client side.

There are four guns - A, B, C and D - which, until they are converged, are aimed at different points on the screen.

If those guns are converged when fired, then great, there's only one "aiming point" to be communicated to the server, for calculation of where the weapons will hit.

However, if the player fires those guns when they are not converged, then there would be four separate points for the client to calculate where the weapons will hit. I guess I can use an algorithm to combine those four aiming points (and also the differing points in time when all the weapons will hit due to differing velocities) but then, decoding that algorithm would still add to the server load.

If there's a different and more network- or server-efficient way of doing this, please do tell.

Your explanation above doesn't make sense to see me because four weapons on their way to tracking to one convergence point is still four pieces of data, or would still require a calculation to combine into one datapoint for network traffic, then being decoded at the other end.

Edited by Appogee, 16 June 2016 - 05:37 AM.

[Mawai]

Jungle Rhino, on 16 June 2016 - 12:21 AM, said:

The fundamental problem here is that PGI have taken Battletech and gone and made some messed up Counterstrike twitch shooter with mech skins. I want to see a big fat targeting reticule which my shots land *somwwhere* inside. I want to see massive explosions rip across a mech and armour being slewed off of various body parts. These are giant 80Ton battle robots - not precision laser scalpel surgeons!

PGI added super accuracy - which made front load weapons OP. They also trivialised heat management with the ridiculous pilot skills. This made high heat weapons OP. So we are left with this bandaid system because PGI is so stubborn and insists on preserving the mythical 'skill' of pointing a reticule at the enemy.

What would make this game require more skill would actually be longer weapons cooldowns, meaningful heat management, and the removal of ultra long range precision sniping to allow for more mobility rather than ridge humping sniper duals.

PGI did not ADD any of these features. The ability to AIM has been a fundamental aspect of MechWarrior games since MW1. MW2, MW3 and MW4 which I played including all their expansion packs ... all mapped Battletech rules into a first person shooting game where aim matters. NONE of these games used random damage allocation as occurs in table top.

So before you go blaming PGI ... you need to check your history.

I will also add that, in my opinion, most of the folks here want to play a Mechwarrior shooting game and not a first person Battletech sim. Without aiming or some sort of skill, a first person battletech sim is mostly luck and boredom. I think the Battletech effort from HareBrainedSchemes will be a much better reproduction of table top and in that game you field a lance of mechs at a time ... but they are completely different games.

Next, pilot skills have a limited effect on heat these days since they massively nerfed them some months ago just before the Steam release .. have you played recently? On the other hand, the entire skills system is a closed beta placeholder that has never been updated, contains skills that do nothing and is in general need of a major overhaul.

That said, there are tons of issues that can be raised with PGI regarding their design decisions, there are many different opinions on what they should do and PGI doesn't share any of the rationale behind any of the decisions they do make (which would actually go a long way towards eliminating or at least reducing the complaints) ... but the two items you particularly mention aren't among them.

[meteorol]

Can't wait to see if PGI is really batsh*t crazy enough to create a system in which you can fire 5xAC 5 for 25 dmg every like 1.2 seconds but can't fire 2 CLPL and a single ERSL without penalty.

History says they are. Can't wait to see the forum going down in a dumpster fire.

[Johnny Z]

Mawai, on 16 June 2016 - 05:41 AM, said:

PGI did not ADD any of these features. The ability to AIM has been a fundamental aspect of MechWarrior games since MW1. MW2, MW3 and MW4 which I played including all their expansion packs ... all mapped Battletech rules into a first person shooting game where aim matters. NONE of these games used random damage allocation as occurs in table top.

So before you go blaming PGI ... you need to check your history.

I will also add that, in my opinion, most of the folks here want to play a Mechwarrior shooting game and not a first person Battletech sim. Without aiming or some sort of skill, a first person battletech sim is mostly luck and boredom. I think the Battletech effort from HareBrainedSchemes will be a much better reproduction of table top and in that game you field a lance of mechs at a time ... but they are completely different games.

Next, pilot skills have a limited effect on heat these days since they massively nerfed them some months ago just before the Steam release .. have you played recently? On the other hand, the entire skills system is a closed beta placeholder that has never been updated, contains skills that do nothing and is in general need of a major overhaul.

That said, there are tons of issues that can be raised with PGI regarding their design decisions, there are many different opinions on what they should do and PGI doesn't share any of the rationale behind any of the decisions they do make (which would actually go a long way towards eliminating or at least reducing the complaints) ... but the two items you particularly mention aren't among them.

That's right. Keep it simple. MechWarrior Online doesn't like complicated. Especially customer service.

[Mawai]

Appogee, on 16 June 2016 - 05:26 AM, said:

There are four guns - A, B, C and D - which, until they are converged, are aimed at different points on the screen.

If those guns are converged when fired, then great, there's only one "aiming point" to be communicated to the server, for calculation of where the weapons will hit.

However, if the player fires those guns when they are not converged, then there would be four separate points for the client to calculate where the weapons will hit. I guess I can use an algorithm to combine those four aiming points (and also the differing points in time when all the weapons will hit due to differing velocities) but then, decoding that algorithm would still add to the server load.

If there's a different and more network- or server-efficient way of doing this, please do tell.

Your explanation above doesn't make sense to see me because four weapons on their way to tracking to one convergence point is still four pieces of data, or would still require a calculation to combine into one datapoint for network traffic, then being decoded at the other end.

The easy way to do convergence is with a targeting radius ...

Draw an aiming reticle with a circle around it on the screen. The circle represents the unconverged distribution of weapons fire.

The longer your reticle remains on the target then the smaller the radius gets until full convergence is reached. It is a design decision whether the converged radius is zero or just a smaller number.

When fired, all weapons are assigned a randomly determined target point within the convergence circle, and weapon trajectory tracking is calculated from the firing position to the target points. With a zero radius full convergence then this will focus on the point under the reticle.

When the reticle moves off a target onto another (probably defined by a significant change in range to reticle target point) then the weapons lose convergence at a specified rate. They would not instantly lose convergence since it wouldn't make sense and it would allow for wobbling off an on a target to not be a huge penalty.

In any case, this requires only one more piece of data to be sent to the server - the current value of convergence radius.

However, the problem arises in preventing hacking. An instant convergence hack that tells the server that every shot is fully converged or even just occasional shots are fully converged when they weren't would require tracking the client aim point server side which is probably too much data. On the other hand, the server could either sample aim point data at something less than the convergence time or have random sampling. The client has to return an aim point and if this doesn't agree with later firing data and convergence criteria then you find someone who has a hacked client.

Basically, in a server authoritative system, you can't trust any data coming from the client ... so you have to minimize the calculations that it is allowed to make.

[Gas Guzzler]

Andi Nagasia, on 15 June 2016 - 09:22 PM, said:

Cant win in a Underwhelming LCT?
1) its you! Become a Better LCT Pilot?
2) its the LCT! Choose another Light?
Nether is Acceptable(Just an Example),

if the Current System is Flawed, and Exploitable you have Choices as well,
1) Just Get Good and Exploit the System like Everyone Else, because you Can & Because you Need to, to Win,
2) fix the Problem so you Dont need a PHD and Study the Exploits to Figure out which is the Best Combination,
ill be taking Fix the Problem, and not Ignore it till it goes away(Problems Never Go away if Ignored)

@Zolas,
Not Commenting against you Personally,
Just Commenting in General, to the Picture,

Im not seeing a problem or an exploit. All I'm seeing is a handful of people who want the game to cater to their specific desires.

I just want a diverse "meta" and abhor any mechanic that specifically exists to nuke any meta loadout that requires a sizable alpha strike. It is completely lopsided and is 100% a net loss for this game.

[Chuck Jager]

Andi Nagasia, on 15 June 2016 - 09:22 PM, said:

if the Current System is Flawed, and Exploitable you have Choices as well,
1) Just Get Good and Exploit the System like Everyone Else, because you Can & Because you Need to, to Win,
2) fix the Problem so you Dont need a PHD and Study the Exploits to Figure out which is the Best Combination,
ill be taking Fix the Problem, and not Ignore it till it goes away(Problems Never Go away if Ignored)

I plan on finding ways to exploit the new system too.

3ppcs on Shadow Hawks
Gauss Charge while lasers
Eat the the penalty on the UAC10 like I already do. Probably a bit hotter on 2ppc and Gauss. Weapons with lower heat can afford the penalty. I have a feeling that with the KDK3 this may be addressed, but not holding my breath.

OR MACRO EVERYTHING with the HOPEFULLY .5 sec barrier that is used for Ghost Heat. Folks switched from PPT damage because of ghost heat, but have added extra weapons that still take a penalty. There will still be combinations that will now become the META or EXPLOITABLE (depending on viewpoint), because of or even with the penalty. Yes super high alphas will drop, but maybe folks will learn that killing quickly with ppt is better than getting ego damage scores. SRMs will be what gets the hardest (lrms too, but &*&$*# ).

[Lehmund]

Mawai, on 13 June 2016 - 06:38 PM, said:

To be honest, I haven't seen enough detail on how the energy draw system would work in order to tell whether it will be any better, worse or just different from Ghost heat.

Personally, I am not stuck on any particular set of values or specific game mechanics for any weapons. I'd like to see a slightly longer overall time to kill along with a good balance between weapon choices across most mechs. I'd like to see a situation where both boating and mixed builds are viable, where lasers, ballistics, and missiles can all contribute with sufficiently different mechanics that they all feel different but one doesn't offer a huge advantage over the other.

Getting the balance even approximately "right" is a huge challenge in and of itself.

Anyway, I have no objections to an energy draw system if it is relatively easy to understand for new players, allows greater build flexibility while limiting repeated large alpha strikes in a convincing and logical way.

This.

I'd like to see FW viable mechs that:

• Utilize all available weaponry, yes, even the LRMs, if possible, for variety of strategy's sake.
  
• allows people to boat multiple versions of high power weapons (UAC20s, ERLPL etc....) in a much better way than ghost heat, while still keeping these large weapon boats from overshadowing other builds.

Basically, I want to be able to be creative with my builds and feel like I can take almost any sensibly set up mechs in FW and perform somewhat well.

[DarthHias]

Chuck Jager, on 16 June 2016 - 06:33 AM, said:

Gauss Charge while lasers

I use my Gauss that way most of the time

[BattleBunny]

I'll just say it.

Im old

I dont want to relearn this game again. I dont want to break current habits to relearn new ones.

Spend 3 years learning the game as it is.

I hope this system goes the way of the laser-lock-on system and the dodo.
I was prepared to take an extended, possibly permanent break if that laserlockthing made it past the PTS. I feel the same way about this power draw system.

What saddens me the most is all the wasted manhours and resources on these "systems". They could be making maps or even add new weapons to spice things up. Or you know, try and save CW after they killed it with the latest good idea.

[Mechwarrior1441491]

What the game needs and what we want are different.