Quicksilver Kalasa, on 29 September 2016 - 06:45 AM, said:
Yes, it actually it is, it is a bad balancing mechanic because of how far on the power curve it can swing. Having the ability to double 4 UAC10s three consecutive times is incredibly powerful, but having 4 UAC10s jammed after trying to fire 2 consecutive double taps is absolutely horrible in a fire fight. RNG that can swing so far around the power curve is just bad gameplay, both for the user and the receiver have a bad time.
This.
Consider, if you will, the UAC20.
If it doesn't jam, it's dropping 40 damage every time it fires. This is pushing a single UAC20 mech to the damage potential of a dual AC20 Jag.
Now think about adding an IS UAC20. Two IS UAC20's would be brutally effective, and would swing between crushingly powerful and utterly useless depending on luck.
The jam mechanic is a poor balancing mechanic, because the swing is too large.
To illustrate why this is a problem:
Consider traditional RPG combat, with a player having a random chance to hit.
Lets assume the enemy has 100 HP.
If a player hits 100% of the time, and does 10 damage per hit, it'll take him 10 hits to kill his opponent.
If a player hits 50% of the time, and does 20 damage per hit, it'll take him (over enough fights) an average of 10 hits to kill his opponent. However, in the case of a particular match, he could kill his opponent in 5 consecutive hits (half the time as the former example) or literally never if he's sufficiently unluckly.
In the first case, the player's performance is 100% skill based; he wins or loses based on his ability to make those attacks, not RNJesus. In the second, while overall wins and losses will tend to balance themselves out, he's going to have some battles where he loses even though he outplays his opponent simply because he misses too much due to RNJesus.
Now consider a player hitting 10% of the time, for 100 damage. You're still averaging 10 hits to kill, but now potentially killing in one attack, or again possibly never.
RNJesus is great for tabletop games, where you don't have the same skill gating on aiming, but once you start adding manual aiming in a game the abstraction of the random generation is no longer necessary and instead is actively disadvantageous unless you actually want your game to have a random buffer to reduce skill level disparity. That's not necessarily bad, but it's a deliberate choice one should make, because that's the game design you want.
The same applies with damage, really. The more randomisation you put into play, the more difficult it is to balance, and the more random luck impacts the progress of a battle.
As a rule of thumb, in competitive PvP games, random number generation is a very, very bad thing. People get very annoyed when they outplay their opponent but still lose because RNJesus hates them.
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