51 replies to this topic

[1453 R]

AnTi90d, on 25 August 2016 - 07:42 AM, said:

Hell.. I'd be happy as **** if they turned the 10 second TT turn system into a 5 second MWO system.. set the cooldown of all weapons to 5 seconds.. allowed UACs to do a double tap every 2.5 seconds.. and had HS/DHS cool a mech at a rate of 1/2 every 5 seconds.

It seems like a hell of a lot easier to maintain balance between the weapon types and keep the lore-dogs happy at the same time.. firing a full alphastrike would guarantee non-UAC mechs to have nothing else to fire for five whole seconds.. so that would discourage fully committing all of your weapons to an alpha, unless you were just a peeper.. It would 100% solve the problem of 6 PPC or laser assault mechs alphastriking, as they'd die from it.

So.. no more alphawarrior.. high CD means no DPSwarrior.. the game might just be.. Mechwarrior..

Nothing in what you said:

A.) makes any sense

B.) does anything at all to discourage not hitting as hard as you can in as short a window as possible.

C.) makes any sense

[Gas Guzzler]

cazidin, on 24 August 2016 - 07:25 PM, said:

Why isn't it fun for you on the PTS?

Its just not. I like MechWarrior, not Watch-the-ManaEnergy-Bar Online. It honestly feels like something that belongs in MechAssault or some game where there isn't a heat scale, or some other gimmicky generic robot shooter. Then there is the balance of it. I'm never going to get onboard with limiting absolute alpha strikes like this, it is asking for poor balance, and to have to literally destroy certain weapons just so they are "balanced" is not desired. I think the live game just needs balance tweaks.

Edited by Gas Guzzler, 25 August 2016 - 08:05 AM.

[ScarecrowES]

Gas Guzzler, on 25 August 2016 - 08:04 AM, said:

Its just not. I like MechWarrior, not Watch-the-ManaEnergy-Bar Online. It honestly feels like something that belongs in MechAssault or some game where there isn't a heat scale, or some other gimmicky generic robot shooter. Then there is the balance of it. I'm never going to get onboard with limiting absolute alpha strikes like this, it is asking for poor balance, and to have to literally destroy certain weapons just so they are "balanced" is not desired. I think the live game just needs balance tweaks.

To piggyback on this, there's no arguing against the idea that balance and build variety is strictly better on Live under ghost heat than on the PTS under ED.

In fact, there's no arguing against the idea that build variety and balance on the Live server is the best it's ever been.

I struggle to find anything that ED provides that's undeniably better than what we see on the live server.

This pursuit of alpha limits is, and has always been, built on the fallacy that alphas are somehow bad. They're not. And for what it's worth, PGI seems to only be addressing that begrudgingly, and half-heatedly... noting ED was never designed to curb alphas.

And yet, all tuning of the system was focused on this and on reducing the effectiveness of specific build types. Pointless.

TTK? Never a problem. 1-on-1 TTK is ridiculously long. People die quickly because they run out in front of the entire enemy team and expect not to be punished for their mistake. Attempting to reduce TTK is merely an effort to draw any semblance of intelligence out of combat. Instead of forcing some player to get smarter or face failing, it's just pushing all players to play dumb.

Sorry... I'm not into the whole "chain fire death ball thing".

[davoodoo]

Gas Guzzler, on 25 August 2016 - 08:04 AM, said:

Its just not. I like MechWarrior, not Watch-the-ManaEnergy-Bar Online. It honestly feels like something that belongs in MechAssault or some game where there isn't a heat scale, or some other gimmicky generic robot shooter. Then there is the balance of it. I'm never going to get onboard with limiting absolute alpha strikes like this, it is asking for poor balance, and to have to literally destroy certain weapons just so they are "balanced" is not desired. I think the live game just needs balance tweaks.

This is first time ive heard about mech assault, oh god my eyes.

[AnTi90d]

1453 R, on 25 August 2016 - 08:02 AM, said:

Nothing in what you said:

A.) makes any sense

B.) does anything at all to discourage not hitting as hard as you can in as short a window as possible.

C.) makes any sense

A) Then you've never played Battletech or any previous BT/MW games.

A 31 heat cap means you can't fire 4PPCS or any combination of weapons that give you more than 30 heat.. without risking blowing your mech up. Limiting heat directly limits the ability to alphastrike. The #1 complaint that people had about MWO's ghost heat is that it allows you to fire 3LPL/4+ML at the same time.. which is impossible with a low heat cap.

C) I'm sorry for your family that you have a learning disability. Maybe you should ask an adult for a lollypop and stay off of the internet.

[1453 R]

AnTi90d, on 25 August 2016 - 09:13 AM, said:

*generic internet insults*

The fact that you honestly believe a true-to-TT 30-point heat scale with heat effects starting at five heat is anything but an absolute disaster waiting to happen is really all I need to know.

No arguing with those types of guys. It never goes well, and logic is always the first casualty.

[davoodoo]

1453 R, on 25 August 2016 - 10:20 AM, said:

The fact that you honestly believe a true-to-TT 30-point heat scale with heat effects starting at five heat is anything but an absolute disaster waiting to happen is really all I need to know.

No arguing with those types of guys. It never goes well, and logic is always the first casualty.

Yea it could happen ive got rdy formula...

It aint even that hard, just accurate interpretation of tt rules...

Edited by davoodoo, 25 August 2016 - 10:32 AM.

[Tiantara]

- Heat limit... ok... but what happens on hot map? Where say... you got only toothpick to figth? Oh, you really want that old days when on terra therma only MG and AC2 mech can walk and all laser mech blows after single fire from LL?
With same idea you can advice make ED - coolant buffer after depleting which you get heat and coolant brings back only when you stop shooting, stop your mech or manually shut it down. Why not. Lets make game even slower or disbalanced.
Why spend time to test already created tool and make normal logical tweaks in it.

[ScarecrowES]

1453 R, on 25 August 2016 - 10:20 AM, said:

The fact that you honestly believe a true-to-TT 30-point heat scale with heat effects starting at five heat is anything but an absolute disaster waiting to happen is really all I need to know.

No arguing with those types of guys. It never goes well, and logic is always the first casualty.

Remember that heat scale and sinks work differently in TT. Heat sinks work against the heat built up that turn. Any heat in excess of your sink capacity in a turn gets added to your heat scale. Any unused capacity in your heat sinks in a turn reduces your heat scale by that amount.

Example.... you have a clan mech using 6xERSL and the minimum 10 sinks. If that mech fires all lasers, it incurs 18 heat - excluding any other factors including movement. If he's using standard sinks, that means those sinks take 10 heat away from what he uses, and so his heat scale moves up by 8 out of 30 - or slightly less than 1/3 of his heat scale.

If he's running at the time, it takes more.

In this sense, heat sinks in BT work much like the energy draw meter in MWO. Exceed more heat than your mech can dissipate in a given amount of time, and you accumulate heat - for which you then get penalized.

More or better heat sinks increases the size of that meter.

Honestly, adapting the TT heat system to MWO is very easy now that we have the meter mechanic in place... and certainly this system is more intuitive than Energy Draw without that system's drawbacks.

[1453 R]

ScarecrowES, on 25 August 2016 - 10:47 AM, said:

Remember that heat scale and sinks work differently in TT. Heat sinks work against the heat built up that turn. Any heat in excess of your sink capacity in a turn gets added to your heat scale. Any unused capacity in your heat sinks in a turn reduces your heat scale by that amount.

Example.... you have a clan mech using 6xERSL and the minimum 10 sinks. If that mech fires all lasers, it incurs 18 heat - excluding any other factors including movement. If he's using standard sinks, that means those sinks take 10 heat away from what he uses, and so his heat scale moves up by 8 out of 30 - or slightly less than 1/3 of his heat scale.

If he's running at the time, it takes more.

In this sense, heat sinks in BT work much like the energy draw meter in MWO. Exceed more heat than your mech can dissipate in a given amount of time, and you accumulate heat - for which you then get penalized.

More or better heat sinks increases the size of that meter.

Honestly, adapting the TT heat system to MWO is very easy now that we have the meter mechanic in place... and certainly this system is more intuitive than Energy Draw without that system's drawbacks.

The problem with this is that now we have heat sinks that can Predict The Future™ and absorb heat before it's generated. In a turn-based game that makes perfect fine-and dandy sense because the TT ruleset is a loose abstraction of what is, theoretically, real-time actions. Also because it's a few guys sitting around a table who can punch each other over rules disputes until somebody wins.

MWO? Your heat would essentially be invisible to you until such time as you're rolling for heat disasters. You could go from zero heat on the bar, cool as a cat and chill as a fridge, to "OH MY GOD MY AMMO'S EXPLODING MY HEAT SINKS ARE MELTING MY 'MECH CAN'T MOVE ANYMORE i THINK I'M HAVING A HEAT STROKE WAAAAAAH SAVE ME SANTA" with literally zero warning. Not to mention wildly different thresholds on a per-'Mech basis given Quantum Prediction Future-Nullifying heat sink allocation, and thus the highly variable threshold between invisible "you're fine, keep shooting" and the five-heat "EVERYTHING'S ON FIRE!!" mark.

It's, somehow, even more unintuitive and awkward than Ghost Heat, which I would've figured any game system would be really hard-pressed to do.

[davoodoo]

Instead of heat dissipation, heat sinks got fixed amount of heat absorbtion and cooldown during which they get rid of it.

We take cooldown of ppc as baseline and copy it to heatsinks. Now when you fire 30 points of heat and you got only 10 dhs, all of them go on cd and you generate 10 heat, after they go off cd, 5 of them go on cd again and you drop to 0 heat. if dhs absorbs only 1 heat it goes on half cd.

**** even movement heat can be done by simply locking 1 of your dhs during movement or simply permamently locking 1 up for the sake of movement heat buffer.

You can even add indicator on top of heat bar showing xx/yy of free/all heatsinks or even use the bar actually used for ed to show cd.

Edited by davoodoo, 25 August 2016 - 11:24 AM.

[ScarecrowES]

1453 R, on 25 August 2016 - 10:59 AM, said:

The problem with this is that now we have heat sinks that can Predict The Future™ and absorb heat before it's generated. In a turn-based game that makes perfect fine-and dandy sense because the TT ruleset is a loose abstraction of what is, theoretically, real-time actions. Also because it's a few guys sitting around a table who can punch each other over rules disputes until somebody wins.

MWO? Your heat would essentially be invisible to you until such time as you're rolling for heat disasters. You could go from zero heat on the bar, cool as a cat and chill as a fridge, to "OH MY GOD MY AMMO'S EXPLODING MY HEAT SINKS ARE MELTING MY 'MECH CAN'T MOVE ANYMORE i THINK I'M HAVING A HEAT STROKE WAAAAAAH SAVE ME SANTA" with literally zero warning. Not to mention wildly different thresholds on a per-'Mech basis given Quantum Prediction Future-Nullifying heat sink allocation, and thus the highly variable threshold between invisible "you're fine, keep shooting" and the five-heat "EVERYTHING'S ON FIRE!!" mark.

It's, somehow, even more unintuitive and awkward than Ghost Heat, which I would've figured any game system would be really hard-pressed to do.

I think you misunderstand. Heat sinks in TT work like the Energy Draw meter in MWO. Heat is figured out AFTER you fire in TT... just like in MWO. In essence, your sinks can dissipate a certain amount of heat per turn, just like the ED bar can only handle a certain amount of damage in a given time period.

If we translated BT heat in terms of the ED system... the meter represents your heat capacity as determined by the number and type of heat sinks on your mech. Like the ED meter, it will cool down at a predetermined rate, the time from Max to min representing one turn in TT.

Like in ED, if you exceed what your bar can handle, it adds to the heat scale. However, this is direct heat, not a conversion of damage into a penalty.

Further, your heat scale itself will only reduce if you have unused capacity in your meter. If you keep applying heat to hold your meter high, your heat scale will not reduce.

There is nothing invisible about the system. You're merely using heat instead of damage for the ED meter, and Max capacity of the meter is related to your build, not an arbitrary 30pts. The only points applied to the heat scale itself would thus be "penalties" for exceeding the dissipation capability of your mech - for which you will then have to reduce or eliminate any additional heat you're applying so your mech can "work off" those penalties.

It's a lot more intuitive. Plus, I think that this will be more or less self-limiting and won't need a lot of special ghost heat-like rules to make it work like ED does.

I think I'll do a full write up about it. This might actually be the solution that will make everyone happy.