50 replies to this topic

[Gyrok]

I think we should open a discussion about alpha strikes for a few reasons:

1.) Power Draw vs Ghost Heat.

2.) Reality of circumstances

Every shooter you have ever played is balanced around alpha strikes.

Let that soak in for a minute.

Yes, every shooter.

CoD/BF4/CS:GO/Mass Effect/The Division/Rainbow Six/Fallout you name it.

Why?

Well, great question. Here is why: because shooters are about one thing, and only one thing. Kill the opponent. You can argue semantics about game modes all you want, but the reality is that shooter games are specifically designed with eliminating the enemy while preserving your own life.

In most of those other shooters, you have some kind of weapon that is constrained by one or more things. Most of them are constrained by ammo, not all.

In a low TTK game like BF4/CoD/CS:GO/R6, your gun is firing an alpha strike every time it fires. The number of alpha strikes, and the rate at which it can fire those alpha strikes, are limited by the controlling factors.

In higher TTK games like the division, or MWO, you have the same concept, but it takes more DPS to burn down enemies because of total values for ablation/reduction of damage. In long TTK games the high burst damage weapons tend to reign king because they make that window as short as possible for killing the enemy.

So what is the deal with MWO? Well, glad you asked. People are confused about MWO because they think on one of 2 premises:

- Other shooters only allow one weapon at a time, that should be valid here.

Well, it actually is not valid here, because this is closer to futuristic world of tanks with multiple weapons to bring to bare on the opponent.

- Table Top blah...

Well, this is not tabletop. That game is coming from Hare Brained Schemes, and you can still back it through backerkit and get closed beta access and the full game. This is an arena shooter, and should be treated as such.

So, in this game, people should consider ALL OF THEIR WEAPONS to be a single weapon system they are using to eliminate the enemy with extreme prejudice.

To prove my point, I am going to ask you all 1 question:

If you killed the entire enemy team inside 5 minutes with no casualties on your side, is it impossible for you to win any game mode?

If your answer to that is "No, you will win every match, even if your team is brain dead but they are all still alive" (and I know it is...), then the issue with alpha strikes is not alpha strikes themselves; on the contrary, the issue is with the way you perceive what those alpha strikes are.

One last point:

If an intruder entered your domicile with intent to kill you, would you slowly fire a pellet gun at him one at a time, or, would you grab the biggest, baddest, hardest hitting piece of hardware in your immediate vicinity and plant as many rounds as it took to drop them in the center of mass to protect yourself and/or your family?

[RestosIII]

What's with all the hyperbole in your posts recently? Also, are you saying every time you fire it should be an alpha strike? 'Cause that's all I'm getting from this, and it's legitimately hilarious if that's the case. If that's not your point, please explain what you're actually trying to convey with this post.

[Random Carnage]

Flawed logic G.

Just because you can fit x amount of total fire power on a chassis does not mean that the chassis is optimised to fire them all at once.

Sure, it can do it, but it can't sustain it. That's exactly the way it should be.

By your thinking, total weapon capacity should be reduced to a level were it is sustainable to fire everything at once.

[El Bandito]

Gyrok is omitting one big part of why MWO is different than other CoD shooters. Damage vs. sustainability.

His thread is not worth looking unless he properly addresses that.

[TheLuc]

Sorry Gyrok, you really have no clue what is Battletech.

[Hit the Deck]

Gyrok, on 24 August 2016 - 09:28 PM, said:

...This is an arena shooter, and should be treated as such.

Arena shooters are cool, so are other game (modes). This is a game so we can try to make it to our liking. Some people may not agree with your taste and try to change it to suit theirs.

I like my 'Mechs to look and feel cool and when the games promotes peek a boo alpha warrior too much (some is okay) then it's cool no mo.

[kesmai]

I thought you almost quit the game?
Why all this fervor?

[MadcatX]

kesmai, on 24 August 2016 - 10:17 PM, said:

I thought you almost quit the game?
Why all this fervor?

I've been wondering the same.
A sudden desire to reach Bishop's post count perhaps?

[Stone Wall]

INB4 my Assault can't Alpha for 110 anymore

[Chados]

There it is. Gyrok wants CoD. With mechs.

Thanks, Obama.

[Kmieciu]

Gyrok, on 24 August 2016 - 09:28 PM, said:

Fallout

To be fair Fallout 3&4 is more about DPS the longer you play. Your heath, as well as enemy health rises every time you level up. Because of level scaling enemies become bullet sponges that take 10+ headshots to kill.

And I absolutely hate that in a FPP shooter game because it ruins the suspension of disbelief. It feels like people shooting each other with BBguns.

But in a game about futuristic war machines, especially with no respawns I want the fight to last a bit longer.

[Mechi Messer]

Ok, we have a game of big *** mechs with armor, components and stuff. I don't care about TT, lore or fluffy unicorns but why should MWO become more like COD or real shooters like Quake 3 and Unreal tournament?. It doesn't have to. Besides, Arena shooters are usually not about "alpha-strikes" but more often combinations of hits with different weapons. 1. railgun then lightning for example (Quake 3). Or Snipershot then ASMD or minigun (UT). You switch weapons for that. I'm not talking CoD, because it is not worth talking about.
If I fancy fast arena shooters with relatively low ttk I play Quake 3 or UT. Because they are the best (not only balancewise). If I want to whittle Mechs to smithereens and stomp around I play MWO. That's what makes MWO fun in my opinion. When I pilot a sluggish assault mech I don't want to get one- or twoshotted because it just doesn't feel right. Less alphastrikepotential = higher ttk. I don't get whats so bad about it.

[Khobai]

Quote

because shooters are about one thing, and only one thing. Kill the opponent.

this is the problem

mechwarrior games shouldnt be just about killing the opponent, but about completing objectives. enemy mechs are generally just obstacles in the way of completing the objective but not the objective itself.

the gamemodes in mwo need to transition away from just killing the enemy team and focus more on objective based play. the whole issue of TTK wouldnt matter at all anymore if we just had better gamemodes (possibly with ticket-based respawns) that focused on completing the objectives rather than killing the enemy.

Edited by Khobai, 25 August 2016 - 04:24 AM.

[Hit the Deck]

Khobai, on 25 August 2016 - 04:21 AM, said:

this is the problem

mechwarrior games shouldnt be just about killing the opponent, but about completing objectives. enemy mechs are generally just obstacles in the way of completing the objective but not the objective itself.

the gamemodes in mwo need to transition away from just killing the enemy team and focus more on objective based play. the whole issue of TTK wouldnt matter at all anymore if we just had better gamemodes (possibly with ticket-based respawns) that focused on completing the objectives rather than killing the enemy.

Gyrok wants MWO to stay as an arena shooter, duh.

[Khobai]

mwo fails miserably as an arena shooter IMO

when PGI said they were revamping the assault gamemode to have destructible walls, turrets, and generators that got me hopeful because thats exactly what the game needs.

[Alistair Winter]

Here's the TL;DR version:

• Mechwarrior is a game with 100 ton mechs armed with up to 20 different weapons. It's very different from Doom 2, where you are playing a space marine with a shotgun. Ergo, Mechwarrior Online should be more like Doom 2.
  
• If someone robbed your house, would you alpha strike them? Probably, yes. Therefore, Mechwarrior Online should be more like when you're beating a burgler with a baseball bat.
  
• Mechwarrior Online should not look to the Battletech tabletop game from whence it came. It shouldn't even look to older Mechwarrior games. Because this is an arena shooter. So MWO should be more like Quake Arena.

Gyrok, please edit your post to include my TL;DR. Thanks.

Edited by Alistair Winter, 25 August 2016 - 04:37 AM.

[Hotthedd]

Gyrok, on 24 August 2016 - 09:28 PM, said:

...
So what is the deal with MWO? Well, glad you asked. People are confused about MWO because they think on one of 2 premises:

- Other shooters only allow one weapon at a time, that should be valid here.

Well, it actually is not valid here, because this is closer to futuristic world of tanks with multiple weapons to bring to bare on the opponent.

...

So, in this game, people should consider ALL OF THEIR WEAPONS to be a single weapon system they are using to eliminate the enemy with extreme prejudice.

You contradict yourself.
By making all of your weapons into, effectively, one big weapon, you are doing exactly what you claim to be an invalid reason later in your own post.

[Dolph Hoskins]

Alistair Winter, on 25 August 2016 - 04:36 AM, said:

• If someone robbed your house, would you alpha strike them? Probably, yes. Therefore, Mechwarrior Online should be more like when you're beating a burgler with a baseball bat.

Freaking hilarious man

It seems really easy for people to lose sight of the feel that the game is going for by the subject matter. It is a sci fi vehicular combat game, but vehicles are the vessels of the action first and foremost. So I would think that gameplay should always focus on that. The efforts of detail, action, and depiction should make it seem like you are inside a large war machine fighting other war machines that are blasting pieces off of each other. Sometimes it happens quickly, sometimes you slowly shred or get shredded. The more that people want to make this into any other type of shooter the more that is lost from the entire subject of MWO...Obviously right?

Anyways we're just lucky that tac com has decided to do these conflicts 80's style. Drop a squad of a similar composition into the same zone and get you some As opposed to EMP blasting or tactical nuking the whole area.....or sending in drones with mech busting missiles, or some sort of orbital deathray or some such thing.

[RF Greywolf]

TLDR:


And





I do miss your posts Gyrok, always gave me a good laugh during the workday.

Edited by RF Greywolf, 25 August 2016 - 06:50 AM.

[AlphaToaster]

@OP

I've always thought alphastriking in an arena shooter is emptying your magazine, throwing all your grenades and flashes, deploying every deployable you have on you as fast as you can, then you stand there with your d*** in your hand for a couple seconds reloading, out of ammo, while the smart player on the other team plants a killing headshot with 1 shot or a controlled burst. The overheating equivilent in an arena shooter is that reload time, which is why LMG have long reloads, and Rawket launchas limited ammo on top of that.

Also your example of the division is poor but that's OK if you haven't played it in a while either so you probably don't know about the stickybomb meta that went around the dz for a while (I think it's more about stickybomb the other teams reclaimer now first is who wins). I can also tell you aren't a gun owner by your completely off base home intrusion example. If you have kids and family you love in your home, you would absolutely have fire dicipline, you would not hose down the hallway in the middle of the night.

But even after all that, I don't think limiting alphastrikes is a good idea because it will favor long range peek and poke more so. The whole idea behind SRM/s and small lasers and small pusle having a high dps, is that it's got to be a trade off for getting in range. By normalizing the alpha/ ED across both long and short range mechs, the mech at range will end up with the advantage. The short range mech won't have the burst dps to kill the other once he does get in range.

Think of it like this. In what I think PGI is trying to do, they want it so every mech survives 10 seconds under sustained fire. Just throwing out a number for an example. It can be 10 seconds, 20 seconds, whatever, but it's clear they're aiming at target duration of interaction between taking fire and spectating, and they want that number higher than 0 or 1 seconds.

Mech A, has optimal range of 600M w/ a 30dam sustained alpha under ED. Mech B is a SRM brawler with 300M range w/ 30dam sustained alpha under it's ED. See where this is going? If the mechs have the same TTK of 10 seconds, the time it takes for Mech B to close works against it. Say it takes 3 seconds, Mech B will now be 3 seconds behind firing it's normalized 30 dam alpha and end up losing most of the time. Remember ED heat is normalized, so firing the 600M weapons at 300M is no hotter so we're talking about normalized heat here.

No reason at this point to run high alpha, short range feast or famine brawlers when statistics would say you would win more exchanges by starting the other guys TTK timer before he's in range of you to start yours. At the same time the targeted changes are stopping high alpha long range feast or famine snipers, so that's good right?

Normalizing will make combacks near impossible, and not reward the pilot who has to close distance and go through all the trouble of using terrain and such to close distance. It'll just become easier to sit back and trade. It will be much harder to overcome the difference between the TTK timers that started ticking when damage was incoming.

This is just a rough example I'm trying to convey and I'm sure it's not a perfect example. All mechs are not created equal so I feel it's ultimately going to hurt the game if we try to move toward normalizing them. I feel we would see more of a balance by ranking mechs the way Warthunder ranks their vechicles. I jump in a commando and I'm now in a Teir5 game, I jump in my ACH I'm now in a Teir 1 game.

TL:DR:

If we can't make ED something that is a set formula that's clear and easy to understand that is consistent across all weapons types and mechs, we should look elsewhere to balance the matches. Doing otherwise we're balancing out each weapons inherent strenghts which effects mechs and their intended roles.

Balance mechs/matches by teir like warthunder as alternative. Can't balance a bi-plane with a Jet fighter.

Edited by AlphaToaster, 25 August 2016 - 07:25 AM.