56 replies to this topic

[1453 R]

Mystere, on 21 August 2016 - 07:23 PM, said:

Good. You finally see one of the problems people are trying to solve.

Horses***. My point is that there is a significant area between propensity - which is arguably where we're at right now - and absence - which is where you want to be.

I like the fact that alpha strikes, and/or other heavy salvoes of fire, are now a more tactical, in-the-moment decision you make based on the needs and dictates of the fight at hand. That feels like smart play, and a lessening of binary yes/No "decision"-making which already infects this game to a far greater extent than it should as it is. You want everyone to fire in chainfire mode from now until the end of time because theoretically that would be more A BattleTech Game™-y.

Screw that garbage.

Mystere, on 21 August 2016 - 07:23 PM, said:

You could not be more wrong. But because you still seem to require to be reminded, start here and here.

Don't care. Have had the Cone of Failure debate with you more times than the has risen in the sky. No point in it anymore.

Mystere, on 21 August 2016 - 07:23 PM, said:

And this is a really bad idea. The whole point of testing is to get things right. That is when one should start experimenting, not in a live system.

Uhh...yeah?

What I meant, and believed to be obvious, is that I'm actually kinda excited to see where this goes and watch it go live. I haven't been excited over MWO in quite some time now. Last time I felt any real excitement was getting into my Vipers for the first time, and that was a momentary thing that was also a payoff for a 20-month old thread of mine. I'm pissed as hell over the treatment of the Marauder-IIC and the expunging of virtually the entire Clan FutureTech offering, and the Round Table was very depressing given Russ' all-but-blatantly-stated desire to throw the rest of the game in the trash and focus exclusively on Faction Play.

But this has injected a little bit of hope back into my stagnant, heading-south BadDecisionWarrior Online. I like this. It may not be the solution to every problem, but it has me thinking positive things about the game again. That's worth something, at least to me.

[Gyrok]

1453 R, on 21 August 2016 - 10:34 AM, said:

This is explicitly not the point of Energy Draw.

To quote:



The write-up indicates that the developers do not wish to utterly and completely eliminate all alpha strikes from MWO forever and ever and ever and ever and EVER, the way many people arguing for higher penalties are stating. Arguments claiming "This system is a waste of time because it doesn't do what it was supposed to do, which is STOP ALL ALPHAS FOREVER!" are incorrect because that's not what Energy Draw is supposed to do.

Energy Draw is meant to do the following:
A.) more uniformly address super-high mixed-weapon alphas that were previously laughing at Ghost F***mothering Heat due to non-Euclidian Max Alpha Math. All weapons now fall under the same umbrella, and you're no longer able to push 90 damage out of your mech with one configuration and generate less than 40% heat, while another 'mech configuration pushes the same 90 damage and goes thermonuclear for it because it got its math wrong.

This is the single greatest change Energy Draw needed to make, and it makes it very well.

B.) be more intuitive and obvious to the player than Ghost F***mothering heat. This is accomplished via the smoothed-out mechanics of energy usage rather than non-Euclidian Max Alpha Math under Ghost Heat's hard caps, and the presence of player-facing U.I. This goal has not yet been perfectly achieved as the U.I. is 1.) not fully implemented, and 2.) not quite there yet. But it's a goal, and they've made strides towards it.

C.) Increase Time To Kill. This is debatable, but frankly so is the need to increase TTK. Most people who hate all alphas the way a certain infamous historical madman hated people of the Book do so because they feel, very strongly, that TTK is too short. They feel this way, in general, for one of two reasons:

1.) they walked out in front of three Dire Whales, two Maulers, two King Crabs, and an UrbanMech and melted in a second under concentrated fire. They do this repeatedly because they are either unobservant, drunk, or just bad at MWO, and they don't like it. Tabletop lore has informed them that 'Mechs are supposed to be nigh-immortal juggernauts of the battlefield which do not get instagibbed under any circumstances (and never mind that walking out in the open in front of three Whales, two Maulers, two Krabs, and an UrbanMech in TT would result in a Long Tom-level instagib in TT), and so they want weapon convergence removed, alphas destroyed, weapons nerfed, Clans, nerfed - anything and everything required in order for them to walk out in front of as many assault 'Mechs as they want and survive the experience. Because That's How TT Works, Right?

These people, clearly, do not deserve an opinion on game balance systems.

2.) these are actual old tabletop players who are not dumb as a bag of hammers, but they're used to TT rules. They're used to 'Mechs with one AC/5, one LRM-10, one SRM-4, one Streak SRM-2, two medium lasers, a machine gun, and a flamer being good. That's the sort of thing TT players want because those 'Mechs are (theoretically) flexible, versatile, and at least a little bit useful in any mission their campaign can throw at them. MWO, of course, consists of short, one-shot, fully-supplied skirmishes between two forces comprised entirely of 'Mechs - TT "a gun for every mission" rules most thoroughly and emphatically do not apply here. The Solaris-ized hotrods MWO features offend every last sensibility old TT players have; they're looking for any possible conceivable way they can to try and force some BattleTech™ back into their A BattleTech Game™, which means forcing everyone to use 'proper' weapons loadouts. A.K.A. horrifyingly awful FrankenMech abominations.

'Solving' the boating issue and subsequent/derived "AlphaWarrior Online" problem is these players' top priority because they feel that if boating is a capital-B Bad Idea, then the only recourse is not boating. I.e. the "a gun for every mission" loadouts that is only right and proper.

These guys are playing the wrong game. The game they want is played in the den over the weekend with a crate of beer and a lot of dice. Alternatively, the game they want is currently being developed by Harebrained Schemes (and it's looking really good! Should be an excellent complement to MWO, the MechCommander we haven't had in for-sacking-ever). They play MWO because it's the only game in town, but it's not really the game they want to play.

Those folks will be out of here faster than your in-laws when it comes time to do the Thanksgiving dishes when HBS:BT releases. Given that, I don't particularly feel like giving their opinions primacy on a strictly MWO game systems/balancing issue.

TTK, right now, is actually pretty good. It's really low if you're stupid (or unlucky), but pretty high if you're not either of those things, and that is as it should be. I believe Energy Draw helps this out; not by Disabling All Alphasa Forever, but by smoothing out the overall spikeyness of the game to a much greater extent than Ghost F***mothering heat does. With the exception of Gauss Rifles (which need their charge cycle back really badly), Energy Draw encourages players to use what alpha damage they do have tactically rather than as a default mode of operation, or to alternatively build low-alpha, high-DPS builds which ignore the mechanic (and lose out a lot of pressure or killshot opportunity because of it).

While some previously-feared alpha builds are now more possible than they used to be - the oh-so-terrifying Three IS PPC builds, WHOOOO SCARED - damage in the PTS seems to come in smaller but more frequent packets. Gone are 80-damage laser strikes every six seconds - those 80-damage strikes are still here, but there's no way to build a 'Mech that can sustain them anymore. They've become a calculated measure taken by a pilot attempting to accomplish a specific tactical goal, not the pilot's default attack.

That is Mission: Successful for Energy Draw. There are certainly still kinks to work out - the U.I. for ED, at the moment, is really not very helpful, certain weapons could probably use higher or lower ED values, and we still don't know how well varying things like energy pool, recharge rate, and other factors on a 'Mech by 'Mech basis works - but the core idea seems to be very sound.

Unless you're one of those people who just cannot tolerate someone firing in anything but chain fire at any time for any reason. In which case...well, HBS:BT comes out next year. I'll see you there.

I simply do not think this is a better system than ghost heat.

I would rather they spend an entire months worth of resources on making ghost heat more visible in the UI. It does what it was intended to do equally as well as this system...there are just a few holes left in it that PGI never bothered to close.

Edited by Gyrok, 22 August 2016 - 10:53 AM.

[Vincent Quatermain]

1453 R, on 21 August 2016 - 08:28 PM, said:

Don't care. Have had the Cone of Failure debate with you more times than the has risen in the sky. No point in it anymore.

Cone of Failure, lol. Personally, I prefer to call it Ghost Aim. Either way, it's a bad idea.

1453 R, on 21 August 2016 - 08:28 PM, said:

But this has injected a little bit of hope back into my stagnant, heading-south BadDecisionWarrior Online. I like this. It may not be the solution to every problem, but it has me thinking positive things about the game again. That's worth something, at least to me.

I kind of agree. I admit that I really wanted to hate Energy Draw, and the current PTS draw values are garbage, but it really does show promise.

Edited by Vincent Quatermain, 22 August 2016 - 11:28 AM.

[Wibble in a Clan can]

@ Gyrock

Quote

it does what was intended to do equally as well as this system

OK- even its detractors acknowledge power draw is as good as a balance as Ghost heat

Quote

...there are just a few holes left in it that PGI never bothered to close

Actually- GH is not so much a "system" at all- its all holes patched a little bit. What "few" modifications would you make to patch GH ?

....Do enough patching and you may get something that looks awfully like P D....Cause Power Draw is very much Ghost Heat with all the holes patched up. Taking the basic premise of GH as a balance mechanism, but applying it in a more systematic, more adjustable manner to close the loopholes- and eliminating the silly tables needed to understand it while applying an in game weapon stat and mechanism that can be "more visible in the UI" - everything you just asked for (including I dare say the months worth of resource investment).

It even plays similarly- but has a comprehensible internal logic rather than add hoc invisible rulings.

Don't get me wrong, I never liked Ghost Heat- and power draw would not be my first choice. But PGI obviously like that type of balance mechanism and it isn't hard to see that Power Draw is pretty much just Ghost heat applied in a way that answers most of its first iterations criticisms. It isn't perfect, but its definitely better

Edited by WibbsScrapMerc, 23 August 2016 - 08:00 AM.

[Gas Guzzler]

WibbsScrapMerc, on 23 August 2016 - 07:52 AM, said:

OK- even its detractors acknowledge power draw is as good as a balance as Ghost heat

False. There will undoubtedly be worse balance with energy draw compared to Ghost heat on the live servers now.

[Wibble in a Clan can]

@Gas Guzzler

Quote

.....False. there will undoubtable be worse balance with energy draw compared to ghost heat on the servers now

LOTS of room for doubt there.
But even if what you say is true (and I cant say categorically it is not) then energy draw is still much easier to manipulate for balance than ghost heat. It was in fact crafted with that in mind. Obviously it has not had as much play time to tweak balance with yet though.

Edited by WibbsScrapMerc, 23 August 2016 - 08:14 AM.

[davoodoo]

WibbsScrapMerc, on 23 August 2016 - 08:10 AM, said:

@Gas Guzzler

LOTS of room for doubt there.
But even if what you say is true (and I cant say categorically it is not) then energy draw is still much easier to manipulate for balance than ghost heat. It was in fact crafted with that in mind. Obviously it has not had as much play time to tweak balance with yet though.

Name me 1 way ed can balance for uac while leaving ac untouched??
Cause ghost heat can easily do that...

[Gas Guzzler]

WibbsScrapMerc, on 23 August 2016 - 08:10 AM, said:

@Gas Guzzler

LOTS of room for doubt there.
But even if what you say is true (and I cant say categorically it is not) then energy draw is still much easier to manipulate for balance than ghost heat. It was in fact crafted with that in mind. Obviously it has not had as much play time to tweak balance with yet though.

You might be able to balance what weapon is boated, but there is nothing to stop the mass boating of one weapon type (but seriously how long did it take to get us to the point we are now with ghost heat? 3 years? Even if it takes half that, that is another 1.5 years of no variety and poor balance. No thank you!!) due to all damage now being linked for ghost heat. There is literally no reason to consider breaking up synergy with Energy Draw, which is boring and means that only mechs with boatable hardpoints (NOT mixed bag hardpoints) will be preferred.

[Wintersdark]

davoodoo, on 23 August 2016 - 08:17 AM, said:

Name me 1 way ed can balance for uac while leaving ac untouched??
Cause ghost heat can easily do that...

... by adjusting draw on UAC, not on AC? It's pretty trivial.

Ghost Heat can only account for boated weapons, at best boated within a group. That's the whole problem, it cannot account for cross-group situations. Maybe you feel that there should be zero restriction on cross-group situations, but clearly PGI disagrees. (And, incidentally, so do I)

Ghost Heat's problem is that either:
1) AC and UAC are in the same group. In this case, any changes to AC ghost heat ALSO impact UAC ghost heat, so you cannot adjust them independantly.

2) If AC and UAC are in separate groups, then you can boat lots of AC+UAC's, and thus may as well not be bothering with GH at all.

ED can target specific weapons, and as such can be fine tuned much more accurately. While you theoretically can adjust the GH multipliers per weapon in a group, any firing always uses the highest multiplier and applies it to every weapon (assuming you understand how GH heat multipliers are used in the first place; few do, and simply relegate any GH penalized situation to being a hard cap).

THAT is why ED is better. It needs tuning, and I suspect we'll see a new PTS today or tomorrow with, at the VERY least, an overdraw:heat penalty ratio of 1:1.

Seriously, though, I *STILL* don't understand people's assertions that using mixed weapons is somehow harder than the same weapons; damage is damage, overdraw is controlled by damage, there's no difference for ED between (as a random example) 2AC10/2LPL and 4LPL. Any difficulty in managing that is, as far as I can see, wholly attributable to incompetence.

[GZBLASTERMASTER]

All this deliberation, let's just cut to the point:

This is Part A meddling so some Part B "much needed patch" can be dropped around the holidays to address the problems that did not exist prior to said meddling. You thank PGI once again for getting the rights from IGP....ooops, my bad, wrong hustle...I meant you thank PGI for being so gracious and wonderful in addressing the whining and crying, you feel grateful and go buy more MC with a coincidental "sale" and Double XP weekend to boot, lol like seriously, wake up. One second they claim to make arcade quarter slot changes to attract more players, now it's a proposed sim aspect for dedicated mech sim fans, I mean which is it, what's next, get the right from Sega and put VR Temjin from Virtual ON in the game...throw some Zakus in there that only run on biodiesel with a 70/30 ammonia/nitrogen -30C atmospheric pressure mix, next patch allows hydrogen modules in loot crates...
$5 says right after Thanksgiving, place your bets...

"We're going to build a wall, a really really great wall, everybody is gonna love it, an excellent wall, the playerbase is gonna pay for it, you'll love it"

Why PGI....why....

[Wintersdark]

1453 R, on 21 August 2016 - 08:28 PM, said:

I like the fact that alpha strikes, and/or other heavy salvoes of fire, are now a more tactical, in-the-moment decision you make based on the needs and dictates of the fight at hand. That feels like smart play, and a lessening of binary yes/No "decision"-making which already infects this game to a far greater extent than it should as it is.

Exactly. I love the notion that it's a choice, and ideally a hard choice. Right now, it's not really. You alpha as much as you can, because that's the best decision, and 99% of the time, hardpoints allowing, you build your mech in such a way as to avoid ghost heat. Ghost heat works at it's limited goal there (preventing specific combinations of weapons to be used in an alpha strike past a certain threshold) but that only restricts the game, it doesn't allow more interesting emergent gameplay.

With ED, I get moment-to-moment weighting. I drop down into a brawl, starting at low heat. Do I fire my SRM's and ERSL's together, hoping to disable or kill my target before he can fire back at me? Or do I fire one then the other, preserving more heatcap for my next attacks, because either I'm not going to be able to disable/kill with the alpha and/or I need more endurance because of other nearby OpFor.

That's good gameplay.

Under Ghost Heat, I'd ALWAYS alpha there, I'd never even consider otherwise unless I lacked the heat at that moment to fire everything. There's no reason not to.

Under ED, it's not that simple. There are choices to be made, and those choices help separate stronger players from weaker ones.

As much as the Mechlab is my favourite part of gameplay, choices made in the mechlab can be choices made by other players - you can be terribad, but copy someone elses' build and call it a day there, so good mechlab choices are not inherently reflective of good players. Choices made under pressure on the battlefield, though, those are all yours.

Quote

Don't care. Have had the Cone of Failure debate with you more times than the has risen in the sky. No point in it anymore.

I'd love situational Cone Of Fire, but ultimately it's pointless to bring it up in ED PTS's because ED is developed, situational CoF is not. All these people suggesting wholly different mechanics are wasting everybodies time, because even if these suggestions are great (and I can think up MANY thing's I'd prefer to ED, even though I like ED) ED is what PGI's invested development time into, and it's what's being worked on now. PGI isn't going to scrap it and replace it with any sort of CoF (and indeed, Russ has been pretty clear all along he's directly against CoF) so that's that.

Quote

But this has injected a little bit of hope back into my stagnant, heading-south BadDecisionWarrior Online. I like this. It may not be the solution to every problem, but it has me thinking positive things about the game again. That's worth something, at least to me.

Me too. It's the first time I've been genuinely excited to log in and test stuff, and for how the game can be, in some time as well.

[davoodoo]

Wintersdark, on 23 August 2016 - 09:56 AM, said:

... by adjusting draw on UAC, not on AC? It's pretty trivial.

IF everything have have its own value for ed then its turned into gh...

ED is based on damage and not individual weapons...

Edited by davoodoo, 23 August 2016 - 10:16 AM.

[Wintersdark]

davoodoo, on 23 August 2016 - 10:15 AM, said:

IF everything have have its own value for ed then its turned into gh...

ED is based on damage and not individual weapons...

That doesn't make any sense. Every weapon can have it's own draw, but all those draw from the same pool. Thus, you can adjust weapons individually.

You cannot adjust weapons individually under Ghost Heat, nor account for weapons not in the same group. I repeat:

Quote

Ghost Heat's problem is that either:
1) AC and UAC are in the same group. In this case, any changes to AC ghost heat ALSO impact UAC ghost heat, so you cannot adjust them independantly.

2) If AC and UAC are in separate groups, then you can boat lots of AC+UAC's, and thus may as well not be bothering with GH at all.

ED can target specific weapons, and as such can be fine tuned much more accurately. While you theoretically can adjust the GH multipliers per weapon in a group, any firing always uses the highest multiplier and applies it to every weapon (assuming you understand how GH heat multipliers are used in the first place; few do, and simply relegate any GH penalized situation to being a hard cap).

ED is based on damage modified by that weapons draw. For example, in the current PTS1, SRM's are at 0.85. Thus, doing 10 damage with SRM's draws 8.5 energy.

You can adjust specific weapons' draw under ED. You can't do that under Ghost Heat, for the reasons above.

Is something unclear here?

[Lostdragon]

davoodoo, on 23 August 2016 - 10:15 AM, said:

IF everything have have its own value for ed then its turned into gh...

ED is based on damage and not individual weapons...

It is going to wind up that ED has different values for different weapons, which is just qnother reason it is a poorly designed bandaid for a heat system that actually works and does what it is supposed to do.

[Wintersdark]

This leads to problems where:

Fire 3 LRM5's, no ghost heat.

Fire 2 LRM20's, no ghost heat.

Fire 1 LRM20, 2 LRM5's, you get a massive ghost heat penalty, because the multiplier is based off mounting 3xLRM20's, even though you can run 3 LRM5's without penalty, or 2 LRM20's (which is 10 MORE tubes).

That's not fixable under Ghost Heat, it's just how the system works, and that's only dealing with a single weapon group. In order to have LRM5's treated differently, they'd need to be in their own group, but if you did that, you could run 3xLRM5 and 2xLRM20 without ghost heat, which is undesired.

Lostdragon, on 23 August 2016 - 10:24 AM, said:

It is going to wind up that ED has different values for different weapons, which is just qnother reason it is a poorly designed bandaid for a heat system that actually works and does what it is supposed to do.

Wait, the heat system works and does what it's supposed to do? So we don't need Ghost Heat? Because THAT is a poorly designed bandaid for a heat system that doesn't work.

Sure, I'm in agreement that they should fix the god damned heat system, but that's apparently not an option.

ED is a bandaid, yes. But it's a better bandaid that allows more tuning, for a better overall system vs. ghost heat.

[Lostdragon]

Wintersdark, on 23 August 2016 - 10:28 AM, said:

This leads to problems where:

Fire 3 LRM5's, no ghost heat.

Fire 2 LRM20's, no ghost heat.

Fire 1 LRM20, 2 LRM5's, you get a massive ghost heat penalty, because the multiplier is based off mounting 3xLRM20's, even though you can run 3 LRM5's without penalty, or 2 LRM20's (which is 10 MORE tubes).

That's not fixable under Ghost Heat, it's just how the system works, and that's only dealing with a single weapon group. In order to have LRM5's treated differently, they'd need to be in their own group, but if you did that, you could run 3xLRM5 and 2xLRM20 without ghost heat, which is undesired.


Wait, the heat system works and does what it's supposed to do? So we don't need Ghost Heat? Because THAT is a poorly designed bandaid for a heat system that doesn't work.

Sure, I'm in agreement that they should fix the god damned heat system, but that's apparently not an option.

ED is a bandaid, yes. But it's a better bandaid that allows more tuning, for a better overall system vs. ghost heat.

Let me clarify that what I meant is ED is addressing the symptoms and reworking the heat system is what I think needs to be done to address the root cause. Current heat system is all kinds of goofy and broken.

[Wintersdark]

Lostdragon, on 23 August 2016 - 10:34 AM, said:

Let me clarify that what I meant is ED is addressing the symptoms and reworking the heat system is what I think needs to be done to address the root cause. Current heat system is all kinds of goofy and broken.

I don't disagree. However, they're not going to do that, for reasons best described as "Paul".

Edit: For some clarity, some time ago Paul actually answered that he was directly against a low-cap high-dissipation heat system because, and I quote, "it would allow people to make heat neutral builds". That's a stupid rationale, of course, because while you certainly could, it would only allow low heat builds to be heat neutral - you're still capped by heat, you're just choosing to keep your max heat generation low in the mechlab. But, that's that.

As such, I'm taking the next best thing.

Edited by Wintersdark, 23 August 2016 - 10:40 AM.

[davoodoo]

Wintersdark, on 23 August 2016 - 10:20 AM, said:

That doesn't make any sense. Every weapon can have it's own draw, but all those draw from the same pool. Thus, you can adjust weapons individually.

You cannot adjust weapons individually under Ghost Heat, nor account for weapons not in the same group. I repeat:

http://mwo.smurfy-ne...eapon_heatscale

cac5 cuac5 got penatly and they arent even linked, lb5x got none.
You can individually adjust weapons...

Weapons adjusted individually and within specific groups...

Want to stop ghost heat medlas llas mixed builds??

You link large lasers large pulse lasers medium pulse lasers and medium lasers together now you cant fire that mixed alpha without gh...

Edited by davoodoo, 23 August 2016 - 10:48 AM.

[Mystere]

Wintersdark, on 23 August 2016 - 10:08 AM, said:

I'd love situational Cone Of Fire, but ultimately it's pointless to bring it up in ED PTS's because ED is developed, situational CoF is not. All these people suggesting wholly different mechanics are wasting everybodies time, because even if these suggestions are great (and I can think up MANY thing's I'd prefer to ED, even though I like ED) ED is what PGI's invested development time into, and it's what's being worked on now. PGI isn't going to scrap it and replace it with any sort of CoF (and indeed, Russ has been pretty clear all along he's directly against CoF) so that's that.

Well, there is a precedent: the information warfare PTS.

We also know that PGI will eventually buckle under constant whining/complaints/pressure. As proof I give: artillery and air strikes.

Wintersdark, on 23 August 2016 - 10:20 AM, said:

That doesn't make any sense. Every weapon can have it's own draw, but all those draw from the same pool. Thus, you can adjust weapons individually.

What davoodoo is probably saying is that ED can potentially end up as complicated as GH if each weapon eventually gets its own draw.

Edited by Mystere, 23 August 2016 - 10:48 AM.

[davoodoo]

Mystere, on 23 August 2016 - 10:44 AM, said:

What davoodoo is probably saying is that ED can potentially end up as complicated as GH if each weapon eventually gets its own draw.

More?? no, if you start adjusting everything it will however end like this
http://mwo.smurfy-ne...eapon_heatscale

But with every weapon linked together...