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#201 Quicksilver Aberration

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Posted 13 September 2016 - 06:54 PM

View PostKaptain, on 13 September 2016 - 06:39 PM, said:

So you get what he is saying you just don't like what he is calling it?

All he is describing is the MW4 heat scale essentially (though the penalty portion was not 30 heat, but 50% of your safe heat capacity), but his is separated into two bars, but the dissipation rates would be the same it is just one of the bars is essentially overflow and it would take priority over the safe heat in regards to which is dissipated first (which is why it makes sense as the same bar). The best way I can put it is in Comp Sci terms, it is a stack. First In, Last Out.

Edited by Quicksilver Kalasa, 13 September 2016 - 06:56 PM.


#202 ScarecrowES

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Posted 13 September 2016 - 06:56 PM

View PostWintersdark, on 13 September 2016 - 06:18 PM, said:

Avoiding the TT argument, because dumb, I *would* like to see penalties for running too high of heat. That's also something people have been asking for since forever, but Russ has addressed that directly - and recently - with a solid no. *sighs*


I dunno... that really was before they did all the work. ED is directly convertable to TT. The mechanics are all in place. We just need the penalties.

Even without the penalties, as I've shown, it STILL applies restrictions on burst damage, DoT, etc. While you don't get all the movement penalties and such that come with it, because of the way the penalty bar dissipates, once you get near shutting down, if you keep firing, you're always in danger of triggering that. You still have the pure alpha reduction. It's not much beyond what's practical, but it's something. And really, most people aren't looking for much beyond what's practical. They just kinda want what's practical. This does that, at a minimum.

It's just a better way to do it.

And moreover: And a HUGE selling point here...

It's cheaper to implement.

Unlike ED, this requires no real changes to any of the other live server systems. You can plop this right onto the live server with all your current weapon values intact and they'll all function with the same degree of balance they currently do. It's a LOT less work-intensive to make work.

I have two primary concerns that all my internal tests have NOT answered for me:

1) The effective heat cap for low-cap mechs will be lowered compared to their current MWO levels. You're basically stripping down to the bare system here. That means that Kodiak-3 gets a nerf. But it might mean lights get a nerf too. I was actually surprised how much firepower lights put down during testing on the live numbers due to their buffed heat cap. I do not know if the slightly lower values for these mechs will greatly effect their total output. IF their output is unduly nerfed by restoring uniform valuing, I suggest actually buffing cap/dissipation by weight. 100-tonners would get nothing... plain cap. 20-tonners might get a noticable but not UNFAIR bump. Just to ensure their output remains a little higher. This is something I just can't test for. This is one that's more on what FEELS true, because you really don't want to make lighter mechs less effective, even if it's fair.

2) Effective dissipation rates for the penalty bar are still tied to the effective heat cap. Mechs that have higher dissipation rates (more sinks) will likely spend less time under penalties if this rate stays equal. My question would be... is it fair for mechs that invest more into their heat cap to spend less time being penalized? This, too, is an intangible. Mechs with high heat caps will tend to break into penalties more often and more easily than low-cap mechs by the nature of their weapons. You'd be into and out of trouble with regularity. If you're going to exceed your cap, you'll probably do it by more in a high-cap build, and thus high penalty dissipation is fair. You may likely spend just as much time penalized overall.

However, is the total amount of time being penalized more important, or the time it takes to SHED penalties once you've taken them on more important? If it is the latter, then rather than a rate of 1/10th of your unused heat cap, I suggest a rate of the percentage of your unused cap times a fixed rate of all mechs of 3pts/second (or whatever works best). This is a small buff to the amount of time low-cap mechs spend penalized, and a nerf to high-cap mechs. However, in this regard, they're actually being treated 100% equally. Heat cap and dissipation variable by mech, penalty cap and dissipation fixed by mech might be more fair.

And a final note about adding utility to SHS. To give these new life and to offer the low-cap, high dissipation folks the alternative they want, I suggest doubling the dissipation rate of SHS... effectively keeping their cap at 1pt per sink, but making them dissipate at the rate of doubles. All sinks will dissipate at the same rate, but only truedubs will give you extra capacity. This means you dissipate your half-sized heat cap in 5 seconds instead of 10.

This needs a LOT more testing. I've only run it on a few builds with fairly encouraging results. But this SHOULD give some mechs an alternative means of setting up their firing rates. I'm looking at the Awesome here. Double dissipation is just a starting thought. Maybe 1.5 would be better. This requires testing.

#203 ScarecrowES

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Posted 13 September 2016 - 07:13 PM

View PostKaptain, on 13 September 2016 - 06:44 PM, said:


This is because any "extra cooling" you have in capacity is applied against the penalty scale but the amount is spread over 10 seconds?


Yes, more or less.

The theory behind the penalty system in TT is that your mech chassis can pretty much only get rid of an amount of heat into the atmosphere equal to what it basically takes to keep the mech standing upright and turned on. If your chassis takes on too much heat, you start to fry components, cook the pilot, lower the efficiency of your myomers and actuators, etc. It doesn't take a lot of heat to fry electronics or cook a human, so mech chassis are very sensitive to heat. Moving around, firing your weapons generate additional heat that the chassic alone cannot dissipate. Even the temperature of the environment can affect this. As such, all mechs need a minimum of 10 sinks for normal operations.

When you move, fire, whatever... they heat produced is sucked up by your sinks and dissipated into the environment. We say in TT that this is instantaneous, but technically a TT turn is supposed to represent 10 seconds of time. So technically, the rate per second is 1/10th. If you do more than what your sinks can handle, the heat gets pushed out into your chassis instead.

You can't pull that heat back out of the chassis unless you have some unused capacity in your sinks. If you keep putting out as much as your sinks can handle, the heat you built up in your chassis stays there... and you continue to suffer those effects. If you back off a lil bit, your sinks will start pulling heat back out of the chassis, and those effects you were suffering will go away. How fast they go away is dependent on how much you back off.

In TT, there are a LOT of different effects, but many are a bit random... you roll dice to see if that effect actually happens. This means you could randomly shut down early, or one of your ammo crits could explode. Noone likes randomness, so I don't suggest those sorts of penalties in MWO. Better to have penalties that hurt how you can fight than cheesy explosions out of nowhere. But what this means is, if you get to the point where you've accumulated enough heat to have to roll for that random shut down, and you keep your heat maxxed anyway, you'll have to roll to prevent that shut down every single turn. Huge deal.

In TT, shutting down automatically comes at the very end. And really, if you've gotten to this point, your mech is probably screwed anyway. You'll have had to do a lot of firing in a short time and suffered through a lot of penalties to get here. Your mech is moving slowly, your pilot is probably hurt, you've probably had random explosions. Shutting down shouldn't be what you fear most. It's a very minor penalty if you didn't suffer anything else to get there.

#204 ScarecrowES

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Posted 13 September 2016 - 08:10 PM

Oh... Sorry for the triple post, but a link to the ED to TT conversion topic I posted, for those who want to get more into it.

http://mwomercs.com/...em/page__st__60





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