20 replies to this topic

[KRZZPFFF]

Dear community,

I will post below parts of a mail I just wrote to MWO concerning an alternative game mode without ghost heat, delayed gauss firing and the inability to fire a certain amount of the same weapons at the same time.
My Idea was that the players can choose which mode they want to play in with other players in the same mode.
I would call the new mode the BADASS MODE.

This is my try to get everybody the option to play the way they want so please don't hate me if you do understand Battletech better than me and therefore think my idea is stupid.

What do you folks think about this?

Here is what I wrote to them:


Ladies and gentlemen,

Concerning physics there is this one single topic that is probably one of the most discussed topics in the MWO community: Ghost heat.

I am very sure you invested lots of thinking and testing in the balance the way it is now.

However, many players, including myself, think that ghost heat is very hard to justify regarding laws of physics and also the technically advanced state the Battletech universe is set in.

So here is my suggestion: What would you thingk about giving the players the ability to choose between two game modes. The one that is standard now and a second one that I will call the "Badass mode" for now.

The Badass mode would not have any ghost heat, delayed gauss firing, or inability to fire a certain amount of the same weapons simultanousely. Also you could take a look backwords in your mech. When you are in badass mode of course you can only do gameplay with players which have cosen this mode as well.

This might be a way to give everybody the chance to play the way he or she believes is right and have people stop complaining.

Also older Mechwarrior games (actually I am referring to Mechwarrior 4 Mercenaries) had no ghost heat as well and it worked fine.There was not too much boating and at least I had created tons of variants for each chassis that were all interesting.

The only side effect was indeed that there were some weapons that nobody used because other weapons were just plain better.

But since in MWO weapons have a very high diversity in firing patterns and other things I believe this would not even be an issue.

Edited by KRZZPFFF, 15 October 2016 - 05:46 AM.

[Remover of Obstacles]

Very interesting.

Would at least warrant a week of live server time in early April.

I am not very good with gauss rifles, but I can appreciate the charge up mechanic for the sake of the game.

KRZZPFFF, on 15 October 2016 - 05:42 AM, said:

Dear community,

I will post below parts of a mail I just wrote to MWO concerning an alternative game mode without ghost heat, delayed gauss firing and the inability to fire a certain amount of the same weapons at the same time.
My Idea was that the players can choose which mode they want to play in with other players in the same mode.
I would call the new mode the BADASS MODE.

This is my try to get everybody the option to play the way they want so please don't hate me if you do understand Battletech better than me and therefore think my idea is stupid.

What do you folks think about this?

Here is what I wrote to them:


Ladies and gentlemen,

Concerning physics there is this one single topic that is probably one of the most discussed topics in the MWO community: Ghost heat.

I am very sure you invested lots of thinking and testing in the balance the way it is now.

However, many players, including myself, think that ghost heat is very hard to justify regarding laws of physics and also the technically advanced state the Battletech universe is set in.

So here is my suggestion: What would you thingk about giving the players the ability to choose between two game modes. The one that is standard now and a second one that I will call the "Badass mode" for now.

The Badass mode would not have any ghost heat, delayed gauss firing, or inability to fire a certain amount of the same weapons simultanousely. Also you could take a look backwords in your mech. When you are in badass mode of course you can only do gameplay with players which have cosen this mode as well.

This might be a way to give everybody the chance to play the way he or she believes is right and have people stop complaining.

Also older Mechwarrior games (actually I am referring to Mechwarrior 4 Mercenaries) had no ghost heat as well and it worked fine.There was not too much boating and at least I had created tons of variants for each chassis that were all interesting.

The only side effect was indeed that there were some weapons that nobody used because other weapons were just plain better.

But since in MWO weapons have a very high diversity in firing patterns and other things I believe this would not even be an issue.

[Domenoth]

KRZZPFFF, on 15 October 2016 - 05:42 AM, said:

Dear community,

I will post below parts of a mail I just wrote to MWO concerning an alternative game mode without ghost heat, delayed gauss firing and the inability to fire a certain amount of the same weapons at the same time.
My Idea was that the players can choose which mode they want to play in with other players in the same mode.
I would call the new mode the BADASS MODE.

This is my try to get everybody the option to play the way they want so please don't hate me if you do understand Battletech better than me and therefore think my idea is stupid.

What do you folks think about this?

Here is what I wrote to them:


Ladies and gentlemen,

Concerning physics there is this one single topic that is probably one of the most discussed topics in the MWO community: Ghost heat.

I am very sure you invested lots of thinking and testing in the balance the way it is now.

However, many players, including myself, think that ghost heat is very hard to justify regarding laws of physics and also the technically advanced state the Battletech universe is set in.

So here is my suggestion: What would you thingk about giving the players the ability to choose between two game modes. The one that is standard now and a second one that I will call the "Badass mode" for now.

The Badass mode would not have any ghost heat, delayed gauss firing, or inability to fire a certain amount of the same weapons simultanousely. Also you could take a look backwords in your mech. When you are in badass mode of course you can only do gameplay with players which have cosen this mode as well.

This might be a way to give everybody the chance to play the way he or she believes is right and have people stop complaining.

Also older Mechwarrior games (actually I am referring to Mechwarrior 4 Mercenaries) had no ghost heat as well and it worked fine.There was not too much boating and at least I had created tons of variants for each chassis that were all interesting.

The only side effect was indeed that there were some weapons that nobody used because other weapons were just plain better.

But since in MWO weapons have a very high diversity in firing patterns and other things I believe this would not even be an issue.

I agree people should be able to play the way they want. But there's been enough history to know this is not good for the mainstream health of the game. Sounds like a perfectly reasonable request for private matches though. So in that capacity, I could support this type of request.

The other scenario I could lend support to this idea would be if you could somehow increase the MWO population by about 100,000 or so. That way we'd definitely have enough people to populate two entirely segregated game modes, one of which is guaranteed to be playable by only 1/4-ish of the Mechs (3 hodgepodge hardpoint variants are useless in a land of Quad Gauss, 6 Large Pulse, or 12 ER Medium Laser alpha strikes).

So, if you're really really into this idea, better start signing up all your friends and your friends' friends, and your friends' friends' friends...

Remover of Obstacles, on 15 October 2016 - 10:53 AM, said:

Would at least warrant a week of live server time in early April.

Sorry, I disagree. We had a couple years of live server time back before Ghost Heat was implemented. We've already got the data. That's like saying "Only 8 Mechs to choose from? Sounds interesting. Let's try a week of only being able to choose the Commando, Atlas, Jenner, Dragon, Hunchback, Catapult, Awesome, and Centurion."

EDIT:
Even in early April, I still think it's a bad idea

Edited by Domenoth, 15 October 2016 - 12:34 PM.

[StonedDead]

Domenoth, on 15 October 2016 - 12:31 PM, said:

Sorry, I disagree. We had a couple years of live server time back before Ghost Heat was implemented. We've already got the data. That's like saying "Only 8 Mechs to choose from? Sounds interesting. Let's try a week of only being able to choose the Commando, Atlas, Jenner, Dragon, Hunchback, Catapult, Awesome, and Centurion."

EDIT:
Even in early April, I still think it's a bad idea

It seems to me like those old 8 mech matches lasted longer in the beginning, man that was fun. No DHS, no quirks, no endo/ferro, no need for GH at all. All that data and I actually enjoy the game much less all these years later.

[Remover of Obstacles]

I would imagine that TTK with 8 man matches would be much higher just due to 4 less mechs of firepower on the field.

PGI seems to be stacking the deck on the EDPT server to show that TTK is better than with Ghost Heat.

If PGI doesn't scrap ED now and start working on something fun or beneficial, maybe we will see 12 vs 12 faction play on the test server.

[Tibbnak]

Russ is very fond of his 'buckets' term and in this case he vehemently says 'no more buckets'. They specifically are going out of their way to reduce separation of the community and have been since a year or so ago.

What MWO needs is 30 total heat cap, better heat dissipation and no added capacity on heatsinks, and scaling heat penalties starting at about 50% total that reduce aim and mobility.

PGI dev team is too afraid to make that decision, however.

[Reno Blade]

First:
This is too close to asking for No-heat mode. Yes I am considering a no-GH environment similar evil as No-heat-no-ammo mode.

Second:
fixed total 30 cap will never work if we increase dissipation too high. and if we keep dissipation low (close to what we have now) energy weapons will just vanish from 90% of the builds.

Imagine our current heat dissipation with 2 ERPPCs alone. You would generate 30 heat and shut down if you fire them together.
Even firing one would put you at 50% and give you penalty and you would need to cool completely to fire another one so you don't get penalties.
Yea, tell me that people want this...

with 10x true-dubs (2.0 dissipation per second) you would need 15 seconds, and with 20 true-dubs that would be 7.5 seconds.
Building your 20DHS and 2x ERPPC mech would be spiking heat penalties and being able to fire one ERPPC every 3.25 seconds already without overheating.

Now lets imagine the "higher dissipation" where you can actually fire these 2 ERPPCs on Cooldown without caring for the heat at all, as you cool down that fast.
So 4 second cooldown of ERPPCs means you need to dissipate 30 heat in 4 seconds, or 7.5 heat per second.
Even with 20DHS that would require 0.375 dissipation (compared to 0.2 for true-dubs) for DHS !
Yea,... we did it? anything cooler than these and you can spam your weapons all day long.

... oh you want something in between?
hmmm lets imagine the middle in between being able to dissipate 30 heat per cooldown (4seconds) and being able to dissipate 30 heat in 7.5 seconds (true-dubs) ... so something like 5 seconds?
about 0.3 dissipation per DHS then?
So now you would be able to fire weapons for 30 heat every 5 seconds such as these WITHOUT SHUTTING DOWN EVER:
2x ERPPC = 4 dps
3x PPC = 6dps
7x ML = 7 dps
5x cERML = 7dps
7x SRM6 = 16.8dps
7x LRM10 = 14 dps
30x UAC5 = 30dps
10x UAC10 (4x cUAC10 on cooldown) = 20 dps
5x UAC20 (1 UAC20 each second) = 20 dps


Please tell me that you also see the imbalance betwen energy and ballistic even increasing under such a system...

[Cold Darkness]

the ammount of "TT"warriors that do not understand why heatsinks in mwo have heat capacity is scary.

[Tibbnak]

Reno Blade, on 16 October 2016 - 09:20 AM, said:

...[derp]...

Well yeah, That's how it was in the table top.

AS a matter of fact, both the IS and CLAN er ppc are supposed to be 15 heat, with the clan doing 15 precision damage and no splash and ic doing only 10. 15 heat in TT was literally half your heat cap. ER ppcs are supposed to be long range engagement energy weapons that you use sparingly and spend time cooling down between turns (with more heat sinks helping this a lot)

The IS also had access to heavy ppcs, light ppcs, snub nosed ppcs, and normal ppcs, all of which had less range but better DPS profiles, and a limiter you could disengage to hit below minimum range if you were ballsy and didn't mind risk blowing up your weapon.

Gauss and gauss derivatives and the Sniper artillery piece have always been king of the precision damage high range world if you don't have time to cool down, in battletech. The major tradeoff is that you have to spend money and tonnage getting ammo for it, and have to have the supply lines to actually get them.

As to your argument in terms of ranged dps, with the combination of the innate slight spread that UAC should have had from the start that PGI omitted adding, and the progressive accuracy penalties from going above 50% heat, this should never have been a problem in the first place. The balance bear exists only due to PGi's incompetence.

[Widowmaker1981]

Tibbnak, on 15 October 2016 - 07:40 PM, said:

Russ is very fond of his 'buckets' term and in this case he vehemently says 'no more buckets'. They specifically are going out of their way to reduce separation of the community and have been since a year or so ago.

What MWO needs is 30 total heat cap, better heat dissipation and no added capacity on heatsinks, and scaling heat penalties starting at about 50% total that reduce aim and mobility.

PGI dev team is too afraid to make that decision, however.

Do you really, truly think that is a good idea? Really, have you considered the effect it would have?

30 total max heat cap, with penalties starting at 15 - firing a single ERPPC would give you penalties instantly and, assuming full 2.0 dissipation, you would have to wait for ~4 seconds before firing another one (on a mech with 20 DHS) in order to avoid getting more penalties. This, in a game where 1 heat Gauss rifles exist, and 1 heat AC5/UAC5s. Do you really think that the high heat energy weapons could compete? Because i don't - i know for a fact in a system like that, i would only run ballistic boats.

[Tibbnak]

Widowmaker1981, on 17 October 2016 - 03:49 AM, said:

Do you really, truly think that is a good idea? Really, have you considered the effect it would have?

30 total max heat cap, with penalties starting at 15 - firing a single ERPPC would give you penalties instantly and, assuming full 2.0 dissipation, you would have to wait for ~4 seconds before firing another one (on a mech with 20 DHS) in order to avoid getting more penalties. This, in a game where 1 heat Gauss rifles exist, and 1 heat AC5/UAC5s. Do you really think that the high heat energy weapons could compete? Because i don't - i know for a fact in a system like that, i would only run ballistic boats.

Innate progressive spread to UAC that should be there per TT rules. If pgi bothered to read them they were a lot less accurate than their single shot analogue and progressive firing could cause excessive vibration leading to even more accuracy and even in some extreme cases, damaging the weapon.
That in itself would push the envelope more towards lbx and ac..

and then PGI should severely reduce the ammo per ton for both missiles and ballistics. I'll give you an example of how liberal PGI has been with how much ammo you get per ton.. You know Long range missiles? In TT for LRM5, you only got 24 per ton. 24 MISSILES per ton. that's ALMOST but not quite 5 shots. *looks at mwo, notices their 180 missile bulge. OwO*

Memes aside though. If they really wanted to increase TTK they'd do that. You'd have to weigh the heat disadvantages of the more all-at-once precision energy weapons vs the intense tonnage useage of ballistics.
Turns out, lasers are pretty common in the tabletop rules for a reason.

And if you would argue you'd consider tabletop rules hardly applicable, I would like to counter that the original mission goal of mwo and kickstarter was to make a game based on battletech rules, and also that battletech developers actually knew what they were doing and had years to balance and refine a highly complex system, whereas PGI has not.

One thing they could do is put ammo per ton back in line with TT, but have little capturable bases on the map that you can re-arm and get minor structural repairs at if you're unaccosted for a little bit. Not something you can do very well while getting shot at, of course.

Edited by Tibbnak, 17 October 2016 - 05:55 AM.

[Widowmaker1981]

Tibbnak, on 17 October 2016 - 05:47 AM, said:

Innate progressive spread to UAC that should be there per TT rules. If pgi bothered to read them they were a lot less accurate than their single shot analogue and progressive firing could cause excessive vibration leading to even more accuracy and even in some extreme cases, damaging the weapon.
That in itself would push the envelope more towards lbx and ac..

and then PGI should severely reduce the ammo per ton for both missiles and ballistics. I'll give you an example of how liberal PGI has been with how much ammo you get per ton.. You know Long range missiles? In TT for LRM5, you only got 24 per ton. 24 MISSILES per ton. that's ALMOST but not quite 5 shots. *looks at mwo, notices their 180 missile bulge. OwO*

Memes aside though. If they really wanted to increase TTK they'd do that. You'd have to weigh the heat disadvantages of the more all-at-once precision energy weapons vs the intense tonnage useage of ballistics.
Turns out, lasers are pretty common in the tabletop rules for a reason.

And if you would argue you'd consider tabletop rules hardly applicable, I would like to counter that the original mission goal of mwo and kickstarter was to make a game based on battletech rules, and also that battletech developers actually knew what they were doing and had years to balance and refine a highly complex system, whereas PGI has not.

One thing they could do is put ammo per ton back in line with TT, but have little capturable bases on the map that you can re-arm and get minor structural repairs at if you're unaccosted for a little bit. Not something you can do very well while getting shot at, of course.

Lol, ok. TT rules for all.

Excuse me while i sell all my mechs that cannot mount two or more gauss rifles.

Also, last time i checked, AC5s got 20 shots per ton in TT, which is increased to 30 in MWO due to the doubled armour, which i assume you also want to get rid of since its not TT rules.. yeah. I guess you will want to go with all weapons having the same cooldown too?

Can i suggest that what you want is going to be released by HBS soon? Please stop trying to turn this into 'can never shoot your weapons ever online walking simulator'

Edited by Widowmaker1981, 17 October 2016 - 06:30 AM.

[Tibbnak]

As it turns out, constantly adding power creep and then piling on bandaids to try and fix it ends up in perpetually ******** game design.

[Widowmaker1981]

Tibbnak, on 16 October 2016 - 08:44 PM, said:

Well yeah, That's how it was in the table top.

This isn't tabletop, and it doesn't take a genius to realise you cannot literally translate the rules of a turn based dice rolled tactical board game verbatim to a real time first person shooter, because they are such different mediums.

Tibbnak, on 16 October 2016 - 08:44 PM, said:

AS a matter of fact, both the IS and CLAN er ppc are supposed to be 15 heat, with the clan doing 15 precision damage and no splash and ic doing only 10. 15 heat in TT was literally half your heat cap. ER ppcs are supposed to be long range engagement energy weapons that you use sparingly and spend time cooling down between turns (with more heat sinks helping this a lot)

The IS also had access to heavy ppcs, light ppcs, snub nosed ppcs, and normal ppcs, all of which had less range but better DPS profiles, and a limiter you could disengage to hit below minimum range if you were ballsy and didn't mind risk blowing up your weapon.

There are many mechs in TT that can fire multiple ERPPCs every turn, due to heatsinks effectively giving cap in a turn based system. Your system, in MWO, would just make energy weapons go unusued vs ballistics, unless you increase dissipation so high that energy weapon dps is high enough, which is a far more dangerous environment than we have now.

Tibbnak, on 16 October 2016 - 08:44 PM, said:

Gauss and gauss derivatives and the Sniper artillery piece have always been king of the precision damage high range world if you don't have time to cool down, in battletech. The major tradeoff is that you have to spend money and tonnage getting ammo for it, and have to have the supply lines to actually get them.

Except those aren't actual ingame tradeoffs that even vaguely account for a long range precise 15 damage for 1 heat, in a heat system as punitive as yours, and as such your plan would turn this into Gauss warrior online. Bring two, or go home.

MWO has a heat cap for a reason, to provide balance between heavy, low heat ballistics and lighter, hotter energy weapons. It allows the energy weapons to fill the role of burst damage, against the ballistic role of sustainable DPS - and we have sniper weapons with both low heat high tonnage and vice versa. If there is no heat cap, the ballistics can equal the energy burst and thus there is no role for energy weapons (and of course equalising cooldowns a la TT would kill all low damage ACs off)

Edited by Widowmaker1981, 17 October 2016 - 10:43 AM.

[Dreammirror]

Omg, giving players options? Heresy! I see no problem for this in private matches as an option setting. The general population prob would hate it. As things stand now, ballistic builds are king of dps & this would rock the boat of pgi balance.

[feeWAIVER]

Tibbnak, on 15 October 2016 - 07:40 PM, said:

.... and scaling heat penalties starting at about 50% total that reduce aim and mobility.

PGI dev team is too afraid to make that decision, however.

I don't want to play wobble warrior online.

[S 0 L E N Y A]

I love Badass mode.

I think it also has the perfect name.

However, that would invariably create a new "badass bucket"

And PGI is clearly anti-new buckets right now.

[KRZZPFFF]

Folks,

I see there are quite som sceptic opinions as well. So there is one thing I am trying to understand:
What do you think why other Mechwarrior games (I am referring to Mechwarrior 4 Mercenaries, that's what I played most) were cool without ghost heat? Or do you think those games were not that good?

Just trying to figure this out!

[Taxxian]

Normaly I would say:

This is nonsense, another sepparated GameMode is spreading the players to much... there are not enough players!

After I thought about it:

All Players playing this Mode will soon be fed up with playing the same 4 Mechs all over every time and dieing within 5s after first seeing an enemy... And they would finaly accept that we need something like Ghostheat!

What will it be like to play this Mode?

There will be the 4 Gauss 60 Pinpoint Kodiak 3 that kills everything with one or two shots... the only way to couter him is a fast jumpsniper or a extremely fast brawler. So we will basically play:

Lots of Kodiak 3s and some suicidal Lights like: 6 SRM6 Jenner IIC or 2 (C)(ER)PPC Light, Thats about it, no reason to ever play some other Mech!

This will be a short lived no fun at all game mode!

[Cementi]

Yep one button builds are bad *** man.

Why not get rid of heat and ammo while you are at it?