2
EDIT: Also, I don't really have anything against these strategies. I was the worst offender, I know how well they work because I used them all the time in MW4. I'm suggesting these ideas as a 'balance' but no matter how the game turns out, I'll find the most effective strategies, sniping or not.
EDIT: A lot of these suggestions are based off the mechanic of a 10 year old game. It wouldn't surprise me if MWO functioned so differently that a lot of these suggestions were moot anyway. Even still, I think the "Topographical and Physical Dynamics" section is more relevant, and it addresses circle strafing, which is an ongoing discussion.
Premise
We all know how cover+snipe dominated MW4. What I'm proposing here is a few ways we can perhaps 'balance the equation' and to allow players on the wrong side of cover to be able to compete against this strategy. What I propose here are theoretical game mechanics that could possibly (all things permitting) to be able to reduce the effectiveness of these strategies. It almost goes without saying that 3rd-person-view was a major contributor to the effectiveness of these strategies, however, my proposals allow for 3rd-person-view to remain as will be explained. I've broken down my ideas into two major sections; the first one for hill-sniping and the second one for jump-sniping.
The Effectiveness of Hill-Sniping
To address it, we have to look at the fundamentals of MW4 that made it so effective. In my experience, the major factors behind this were 3rd person view, the acceleration/deceleration rates of the mechs, and radar active/passive toggling.
Traditionally what a sniper would do was to use 3rd-person-view and deactivate their radar. Normally, having each other on radar would allow the person in the open to be able to 'track' the target as it moved around behind the hill, allowing them to line up their shot against the sniper as he/she popped from cover and fired a salvo. However, snipers adapted to this by deactivating the radar, moving their position behind the hill and only activating their radar while they were rolling up the hill so they could line up their shot. The target out in the open did not have the advantage of being able to constantly track their target because of the sniper's proximity to the cover. By the time the sniper popped out, it was often too late to make a shot, let alone an accurate one against the sniper. The attacker would be out, firing and then press the button that inverts the throttle intsantly which would drop the mech back into cover lightning-fast.
Mechanics That Could Reduce Hill-Sniping Effectiveness
The first proposal is the most obvious; change the acceleration/deceleration speeds of large mechs. Reducing acceleration alone would not be adequate, because a sniper would just start at a lower point on the hill/cover and use the added distance to get up to speed so that by the time he/she cleared the hill, the mech was moving sufficiently fast to be a difficult target. What needs to be done is to change the reverse-gear speed. Reverse itself could be just as fast as it always has been, but make makes decelerate slower so that throwing the throttle all the way into reverse means the mech takes longer to slow down and thus, being exposed for longer. Further, limit a mechs acceleration and top-speed when going up an incline. These two things in tandem could signifantly negate the advantage of hill-sniping.
Scenario: Sniping mech runs up hill, shoots and throws throttle into reverse. Mech is decelerating but still actually making forward progress as the drivetrain progressively drives into reverse. By virtue of this mechanic, all mechs clearing a hill will end up somewhat over-exposed, giving the target more time to acquire a return-shot. If a sniper takes the alternative route of slowing-down by the time they clear, they'll still take more time to pop up and 'expose' or 'clear' their guns, giving the the the person out in the open more time to get a shot readied as the slowly rising mech gets its actual gun barrels into a line-of-sight shot with its target. If the sniper fires prematurely, he/she will dump a salvo into the hill while being partially exposed to their intended target.
Under this scenario, mechs with weapons placed high on their torsos (Nova Cat) have an advantage. However if tweaked properly, it shouldn't matter that much. Most of the weapons that tend to have a high clearance on a mech are missile pods, and for obvious reasons, they don't work in the same way beam and ballistic weapons do. I believe radar active/passive adds more complexity to the game so simply removing that ability is too crude a measure to reduce the efficacy of sniping. I believe it can actually play a role in bringing an advantage to players in the open as I will explain in the case of jump-sniping.
The Effectiveness of Jump-Sniping and Possible Remedies
Prevent Jump-Crouching
Jump-sniping's efficacy was fundamentally similar to hill-sniping in that deactivating the radar and using 3rd-person-view were huge advantages. Instead of using incredibly fast acceleration/deceleration to his/her advantage, the jump sniper would crouch and jump. The crouching before firing allowed the sniper to 'spring' up, significantly increasing the speed in which they cleared the hill, allowing their guns to clear the hill and lay a shot on their target before the target could adequately place a return-shot. Because the jump-sniper uses jump jets instead of legs to clear the hill, the slope and acceleration/deceleration over terrain mechanics don't quite work the same. However, the concepts applied are easily made to fit the jump-sniper. Again, the most obvious thing to do is to make the acceleration, or the ascent of jump jets, a more gradual process. Second, compensate for the crouching that a mech is doing by making the un-crouching in tandem with jump-jetting a slower process.
Create a Smoke Plume Animation for Jump-Jets
There are other ways of negating the sniping advantage. Because we're using a newer, more sophisicated game engine, why not design a plume animation for mechs that are engaging jumpjets. In this case, a jump-jet mech may be obscured by its cover but the exhaust and smoke/plume billowing up over the ridge can act as a giveaway to a mech's location, therefore giving the pilot out the in open a chance to figure where the mech will be clearing the cover.
Turn Jump-Jetting Into Radar Bait
Another feature that could negate the efficacy of jump-sniping from cover could be that firing jump jets while on passive radar would automatically expose you to enemy radar, effectively making you... not passive. Think about it, a mech blasting a steady stream of thousands of degrees of engine exhaust right out the back should light up thermal sensors like a Christmas tree. I don't have an exact formula but larger mechs should be exposed at greater distances because of assumed greater exhaust emissions, therefore making ranged sniping more of a niche focus for smaller mechs. This way, frustrating passive jump-sniping is more of a harass maneuver than a domination strategy. Smaller mechs have less firepower and hiting moving targets at greater distances is harder so these factors are good compensators for the fact that a jump-jetting passive small mech is attacking you at range.
Certain small mechs not only excelled at this in MW4 becuase of their loadouts, but also because of their designs. Mechs like the Shadow Cat had guns and a cockpit at more or less the same height, therefore it could 'clear the guns' a lot faster. Perhaps the animators coud use artistic license with a practical bent to have most weapons sit a little lower than other parts of the mech. It may not seem like much, but even the fractions of a second that a sniping mech is partially exposed before it clears its guns makes a difference in my experience, especially when the it comes to skilled players.
Topographical and Physical Dynamics
MW4 had topographical design that made for a lot of hills and ridges that functioned more as 'natural barriers'; steep inclines that functioned essentially as walls that made it easy to hill-snipe and even easier to jump-snipe. Instead of a prevalence of steep slopes, make them more rare, and create terrain that has a more gradual, sloping feature to it (if this wasn't already in the playbook, though I suspect it is). Gradual slopes would make it harder to engage in hill sniping because the lower gradient would make the time between initial mech exposure and clearing of the guns take even longer. Gradual slopes put the advantage back with the guy on the low ground. In tandem with the reduced speed and acceleration mechanic on hills, it'd make pilots use terrain in more a selective, tactical manner.
For jump-snipers, this makes little difference though. If a jump sniper is far back enough, the time it takes for them to clear their guns is much smaller since they're doing directly up and down, not gradually exposing themselves as they climb up a hill. However, the aformentioned plume graphics and radar exposure mechanic should negate this (in theory).
Knockdown Calculator
Spending all day with a securities book in front of you gets you re-acquainted with math fairly quickly (I'm studying for a securities designation, that's why I'm on here posting at all hours of the day). What I made here is a calculator for knockdown. Why did I make this thing? To illustrate the interplay that the slope of terrain has with other mechanics in contributing to a greater chance of being knocked down, therefore making the player more mindful of where he/she is running around. I made a few key benchmarks and then tweaked the formula from there. There are a few basic criteria that I tried to meet when making this formula (that I've now more or less forgotten now that I actually finished the calculator). The first premise was that 3 LBX 20s would have an arbitrary 'force' value of 135 (3x45), not damage, force. I wanted it so that a 100 ton mech standing still would not get knocked down, but a 45 ton mech standing still, would. I also wanted a 100 ton mech standing still to get knocked down while standing still but on a hill of roughly 40 degrees of incline or greater. From there I spent most of my time calibrating the thing so that 5 variables in the formula worked in fairly balanced way. As you'll see in the formula, the value of 17000 is the treshold for whether a mech gets knocked down or not. The Force of the shot and the final number are relatively immaterial and far more arbitrary. They were used more as guidelines to determine what factors were over or under-represented in the formula. It still isn't perfect.
Link to Excel document: http://www.usaupload.net/d/p54but1vdqe
The formula takes into account 5 variables:
1. Force - An alpha from 3 LBX 20 is equal to 135, it will not knock a 100 ton mech down standing still, but it will knock a 45 ton mech down that is standing still.
2. Mass - The more massive the mech, the less likely it is to be knocked down.
3. Speed - The faster the mech is moving towards you, the shooter, the less likely it is to be knocked down because the force from your shot is countered by its movement towards you. A 45 ton mech moving relatively slowly will no longer worry about having to get knocked down as long as it is moving straight.
4. Strafing angle - I made the strafing angle subordinate to speed so to speak. If a mech is strafing you at an angle within 60 degrees or less, the greater the speed, the less likely it is to get knocked down. However, as the mech strafes at an angle greater than 60 degrees, it is more likely to get knocked down, compounded with speed. That's right, this formula has a built-in penalty for, you guessed it, circle strafing.
5. Terrain slope - This formula treats sloping terrain as a hazard. The greater the slope of terrain after all other factors (except for the force of the incoming shot), the greater the risk of being knocked down. The hazard is greater for smaller mechs because they reach the 17 000 value threshold soooner.
This formula isn't perfect. It assumes that only the strafing mech is at an angle, and that the shooter's shot isn't coming from any offsetting/exacerbating angle. Secondly, if a mech is moving backwards and gets shot in the face, it is more likely to fall down, as it should. However, this formula does not take into account where the shot came from. A shot coming from directly behind a reversing mech would have the exact same effect as a shot coming from directly in front of it according to the formula. This formula isn't perfect and I had to spend a decent amount of my time learning how to use Excel so that people could actually play with the variables themselves. One little bonus that you may notice if you **** the spreadsheet off is that I prevented people from entering in slope and shot angles greater than 0.9.
Edited by GaussDragon, 10 December 2011 - 09:04 AM.
(again, the self-quote outlines my philosophy) Thank you for reading this thing BTW, I know it's kinda... long.
Well, at least that's why this thread is here. Out of curiosity, what weight class of mech did you use the most?
