38 replies to this topic

[Mole]

Novakaine, on 28 October 2016 - 02:18 PM, said:

Overpowered Clan mechs is one of the main reasons FW has all but died.
Not the only reason but right there in the top 3.
ED was simply meant to level the playing field somewhat.
If it was up to me, I'd let the Clans be exactly what they're supposed to be - overpowered.
But it would be 2 Clan Stars vs 1 IS Battlemech company.
But I'm sure people would even poo-poo on that one also.

I like that idea but there's no way to really make this work in quick play, so they kinda have to be somewhat balanced.

[GreenHell]

Nothing OP... nothing.

PGI just need to bite the "we aren't tabletop" bullet, and balance the weapons for realtime gameplay.
That's it. That is all. Thank you, and good day sir.

[Mcgral18]

Change how the penalties are applied
Right now, it IS Ghost Heat Mk2, because it takes input from the weapons fired, and outputs X heat instantly according to the parameters.

'minheatpenalty=7' is no different than 'EnergyDraw'=5
(though currently 4.5 for the ML)

It gives a heat penalty after 30 damage, or 6 isMLs. GHMk2 could be more easily calculated...but then they changed that too, and there's no documentation in game. Was it 1.5 heat for every point of energy exceeded in the most recent iteration?


What would make me hate it less?
Different penalty
Heat over time still punishes DPS, without killing you outright (due to being shut down)
They did take your face out of RNGeesus' wrath, which is nice

Cooldowns is the other option. Hard limit the DPS, rather than having the ability to Coolshot it away (once)
Allows for full power LOLphas, at the risk of being helpless. Plus X seconds cooldown for weapons fired in the time frame of initial overcapacity (and not to any additional weapons fired if the bar is still exceeded)


That would make me hate it less. A penalty that isn't death, but is still a penalty.




Combine that with more radical values for Energy Draw.
Short range weapons should not have the same Draw formula as long range weapons.
The isML should not be the same 90% of the cERLL (especially not the buffed one)

The isSL could very well have 0 Draw with how useless it is (MG and Flamer are listed at 0 draw, should be no issue there)
Same goes for SRMs, 75% is still pretty limiting, 20 tubes (or 18 for IS) is less than your ideal SRM brawler would bring...on top of other weaponry.
See the Atlas
Somewhere around 50% damage would fit their Risk VS Reward, and bring the Atlas to 44 Draw (VS the current 50)...which means the AC20 also needs to go down (same range, slow velocity, same Risk VS Reward not being fulfilled)


Long Range benefits most from ED, in its current form.
I'm not particularly a fan of it, as it restricts the pool of available weapons (some which have been excluded for years, due to being trash without and ED or Ghost Heat involved)

But, that would make me hate it less.
Not instant heat applied, or affecting cooldowns instead of the heat bar, alongside not hurting short range weapons more than long range weapons

[C E Dwyer]

Duke Nedo, on 28 October 2016 - 01:13 AM, said:

OP post the kitty stays I like Kittens and my daughter wouldn't talk to me for days if I delete one.

I firmly believe that there is no need for it, or ghost heat for that matter.

Lower the heat threshold, increase dissipation, a lot of the issues for which P.G.I have added GH and tried to add ED, is corrected by these actions.

Not everything, it's far from an instant cure.

I have only one thought on why they won't do this, and why they have tried to nanny state the entire game, with a hard cap damage.

They're scared that if new starts come along they will FIRE AL THE WEAPONS BOYZ die and quit, before they understand that generating lots of heat is a bad bad thing to do.

ED was supposed to be a set of training wheels, and words out now how much it's despised by enough of the population, it's probably going to be dropped, on the grounds of, we're likely to lose more people than we attract with the system in place.

Give it another nine months or maybe a year, and PGI will come up with another flashy over complex design that people will hate, because it restricts more than it controls just like ED does in it's current form.

The short history of this games development tells us P.G.I will do anything flashy, rather than try altering the heat baseline, which is likely to be far more successful, and popular with everyone

Edited by Cathy, 28 October 2016 - 02:47 PM.

[Dr Wubs]

Duke Nedo, on 28 October 2016 - 02:02 PM, said:

Yes and no sort of. I don't think ED is a magic bullet to fix all things, but I do think ED could be a way to integrate ghost heat into the HUD and rationalize the way diminishing returns for Energy weapons work. Ideally I would not like to change balance, just make ghost heat comprehensive and more consistent.

To be fair, the idea of integrating GH into the HUD is a mildly interesting prospect.

Honestly, it ranks about 117th in priority for what I'd like to be done with our anorexic dev resources and time.

And our meager dev resources and time is a serious, if not potentially fatal, flaw at this point in a 4-year-old game.

Consider the massive amount of time and effort that went into developing CW. That was supposed to be this year's big thing. If things went to plan, we'd all be blissfully having at each other in a sophisticated, compelling battle for the universe. Instead, this system is sitting there broken while this outfit flailingly tries to venture into esports and fiddles with ED on the PTS.

And again, tell me what the end result of being hell-bent to implement ED will be. What important itch is going to be scratched v what blister is going to be popped. The real answer to your initial question is that it would take a version of ED widely accepted/supported by a vast majority of the community. I don't think that exists now or is going to exist in the future simply because vast numbers of people are not interested in which flavor of ED will be implemented. They're not interested in ED being implemented at all. Can you change that prevalent attitude?

[Johnny Z]

Cathy, on 28 October 2016 - 02:47 PM, said:

I firmly believe that there is no need for it, or ghost heat for that matter.

Lower the heat threshold, increase dissipation, a lot of the issues for which P.G.I have added GH and tried to add ED, is corrected by these actions.

Not everything, it's far from an instant cure.

I have only one thought on why they won't do this, and why they have tried to nanny state the entire game, with a hard cap damage.

They're scared that if new starts come along they will FIRE AL THE WEAPONS BOYZ die and quit, before they understand that generating lots of heat is a bad bad thing to do.

ED was supposed to be a set of training wheels, and words out now how much it's despised by enough of the population, it's probably going to be dropped, on the grounds of, we're likely to lose more people than we attract with the system in place.

Give it another nine months or maybe a year, and PGI will come up with another flashy over complex design that people will hate, because it restricts more than it controls just like ED does in it's current form.

The short history of this games development tells us P.G.I will do anything flashy, rather than try altering the heat baseline, which is likely to be far more successful, and popular with everyone

That would work but hard shutdowns being the only limiting factor is not good enough for a real time first person game in 2016/2017.

Edited by Johnny Z, 28 October 2016 - 09:42 PM.

[Duke Nedo]

MrJeffers, on 28 October 2016 - 02:17 PM, said:

It's still a fundamental flaw in the system. To get around that you need to get into the convoluted steps of Weapon A only counts as .75 damage to ED scale, Weapon B is .3 damage to ED scale, Weapon C is .5 damage to ED scale, etc. It very quickly becomes unmanageable and even less intuitive than GH.

Yes, LESS intuitive than one of the least intuitive mechanics I have seen in a game. There isn't a fix for that dilemma. Splitting it into semi-linked weapon pools by weapon type only further exacerbates the problems, it doesn't make it better.

The argument against just doing weapon tuning like increasing cool downs is that it doesn't eliminate that big first strike, but then need more time before you are effective again. But so what, that method *does* work, look what happened on the live servers when Gauss cooldowns went to 6 seconds - they became practically extinct overnight.

Reducing damage per weapon is something else that people have mentioned, like normalizing the damage to TT's 10 second turns. E.g. Gauss would be like 5 (or 7.5 depending on your point of view) damage per shot because it can fire roughly three times in a 10 second window (first shot + 2 cool down periods).

These, and many more suggestions, all working with the existing systems and requiring nothing more than editing XML values are far better solutions than ED.

Cathy, on 28 October 2016 - 02:47 PM, said:

I firmly believe that there is no need for it, or ghost heat for that matter.

Lower the heat threshold, increase dissipation, a lot of the issues for which P.G.I have added GH and tried to add ED, is corrected by these actions.
.....

Thanks for many good replies during the night, I'll try to comment during the day.

What both of you touch upon here is whether or not we need Ghost heat all all. What ghost heat really is is a system for diminishing returns, right, or in other words a stacking penalty. When it was introduced, as I remember it, it was because after the arrival of the Stalker with 6E hardpoints on an assault it could boat LL, LPL or PPCs and instapop people. I wasn't one of them that cried to nerf big alphas then, but I can see the point of having stacking penalties in games where you can customize your rides. I'd guess it's more common than not in these types of games. That said, I think the need for a stacking penalty is bigger today than it was when it was introduced because now we have several (omni-) mechs that would be much more scary than the Stalker with up to 13 or 14 E hardpoints is it?

Extreme examples: 13x cSPL = 76 damage for 39 heat or 4x cUAC20 doubletap = 160 damage for 56 heat. (may not fit btw, just extrapolated from 4x gauss kodiak but probably wont work with UACs.... anyways you can imagine similar stuff).

Even if one lowers the heat cap significantly these are still as much of outliers compared to weapons with more heat per damage. Not to mention Gauss with 15 damage per heat but that's a special case that is hardcapped at 2, but still, we want to avoid making Gauss+other weapons a mandatory combination.

So, if the consensus is that a stacking penalty is needed and we want it to achieve:

1. Diminishing returns when alphaing a large number of similar weapon types
2. Less diminishing returns when alphaing two different types of weapon systems (not avoid making mono-stacks the best stacks), but still an effect large enough so that you can't get around the system completely by splitting your large stack into the two stacks that syncs the best

If we want to achieve this there really is no choice but to use several layers. ED can be one of these layers and is suitable for any combinations of hitscan weapons. ED could have weaker contributions from B and M as spillover, but it can't be as strong a limitation as it is for E weapons. The troublesome outlier here I believe is the PPCs because they are E projectiles so some extra precaution would have to be taken not to OP PPC+Ballistics. I am convinced that ED can be tuned to mimic the current Ghost heat effect for E weapons almost perfectly (i.e. 0.5s recharge, ED similar to heat values), with the exception that small E would stack with large E and treat for example LPL+ML the same as only LPL or only ML. A more consistent E stacking penalty simply. The benefit being HUD integration and that ED of weapons and mechs can be used as balance parameter to fine tune things.

Question for me is, can other layers be applied to mimic GH mk1 for Ballistics and Missiles? Can these layers work in harmony with ED to produce the effects listed above in points 1-2?

Edited by Duke Nedo, 29 October 2016 - 12:04 AM.

[Kin3ticX]

Salvage the flame icon that flashes from the PTS1-5 and the sound

-triggering mild heat scaling makes that tiny electric sound

-triggering heat scaling that is greater than 70-80% of the pool makes a minor alarm sound

-trigger heat scaling that is instant shutdown makes and even more severe alarm sound (even more severe sound and flash indication than a normal overheat)

[Sjorpha]

In my opinion it is ridiculous to have a special dedicated extra system only to punish high simultaneous damage, there shouldn't be such a system.

There should simply be a less forgiving heat system with lower heat capacity and incremental penalties for being hot, more armour/structure in relation to the damage output of weapons, and if needed longer cooldowns on low heat weapons.

All the tools to create a higher ttk environment where alphas are less dominating is right there in the basic gameplay systems and the different parameters of the weapons.

There is absolutely no need to a completely redundant and unintuitive separate system taking up HUD space and player attention just to achieve one minor goal that could be achieved without it. It's such bad game design philosophy.

But if you absolutely have to have something like that, just keep the current ghost heat. It's alright, we're used to it by now. ED isn't better and just wastes our time with a huge process that could be used on much more important things.

Edited by Sjorpha, 29 October 2016 - 04:15 AM.

[CheeseThief]

I'd raise the Energy Draw cap to 40 then add it on top of what we have currently with Ghost Heat 1. Basically have it as a safety net to cap the more egregious examples of getting around Ghost Heat like Clan laser vomit or 2cGauss+2cERPPCs, or Kodiak levels of dakka.

Tripping a Ghost Heat penalty would instantly drain the Energy Draw bar to show a visible indicator that something has gone wrong.



Basically I'm happy with what we have now and want another little bar on my hud that goes up and down meaningfully.

[Dr Wubs]

Duke Nedo, on 29 October 2016 - 12:00 AM, said:

So, if the consensus is that a stacking penalty is needed and we want it to achieve:

1. Diminishing returns when alphaing a large number of similar weapon types
2. Less diminishing returns when alphaing two different types of weapon systems (not avoid making mono-stacks the best stacks), but still an effect large enough so that you can't get around the system completely by splitting your large stack into the two stacks that syncs the best

If we want to achieve this there really is no choice but to use several layers. ED can be one of these layers and is suitable for any combinations of hitscan weapons. ED could have weaker contributions from B and M as spillover, but it can't be as strong a limitation as it is for E weapons. The troublesome outlier here I believe is the PPCs because they are E projectiles so some extra precaution would have to be taken not to OP PPC+Ballistics. I am convinced that ED can be tuned to mimic the current Ghost heat effect for E weapons almost perfectly (i.e. 0.5s recharge, ED similar to heat values), with the exception that small E would stack with large E and treat for example LPL+ML the same as only LPL or only ML. A more consistent E stacking penalty simply. The benefit being HUD integration and that ED of weapons and mechs can be used as balance parameter to fine tune things.

Question for me is, can other layers be applied to mimic GH mk1 for Ballistics and Missiles? Can these layers work in harmony with ED to produce the effects listed above in points 1-2?

You're being very polite and diplomatic about this and all, but what you're also doing is this:

Numerous Posters: We don't want time and resources spent jacking around with a new system. Those time and resources are best spent on other things.

Nedo: OK, so the best way to implement ED is...

[Duke Nedo]

Dr Wubs, on 29 October 2016 - 05:00 AM, said:

You're being very polite and diplomatic about this and all, but what you're also doing is this:

Numerous Posters: We don't want time and resources spent jacking around with a new system. Those time and resources are best spent on other things.

Nedo: OK, so the best way to implement ED is...

Except that a lot, perhaps most, of the resources to code this has already been invested, so it's more like I want to salvage what could be useful...

[DiabetesOverlord Wilford Brimley]

https://youtu.be/L0MK7qz13bU

[Duke Nedo]

Mcgral18, on 28 October 2016 - 02:35 PM, said:

Change how the penalties are applied
Right now, it IS Ghost Heat Mk2, because it takes input from the weapons fired, and outputs X heat instantly according to the parameters.

'minheatpenalty=7' is no different than 'EnergyDraw'=5
(though currently 4.5 for the ML)

It gives a heat penalty after 30 damage, or 6 isMLs. GHMk2 could be more easily calculated...but then they changed that too, and there's no documentation in game. Was it 1.5 heat for every point of energy exceeded in the most recent iteration?


What would make me hate it less?
Different penalty
Heat over time still punishes DPS, without killing you outright (due to being shut down)
They did take your face out of RNGeesus' wrath, which is nice

Cooldowns is the other option. Hard limit the DPS, rather than having the ability to Coolshot it away (once)
Allows for full power LOLphas, at the risk of being helpless. Plus X seconds cooldown for weapons fired in the time frame of initial overcapacity (and not to any additional weapons fired if the bar is still exceeded)


That would make me hate it less. A penalty that isn't death, but is still a penalty.




Combine that with more radical values for Energy Draw.
Short range weapons should not have the same Draw formula as long range weapons.
The isML should not be the same 90% of the cERLL (especially not the buffed one)

The isSL could very well have 0 Draw with how useless it is (MG and Flamer are listed at 0 draw, should be no issue there)
Same goes for SRMs, 75% is still pretty limiting, 20 tubes (or 18 for IS) is less than your ideal SRM brawler would bring...on top of other weaponry.
See the Atlas
Somewhere around 50% damage would fit their Risk VS Reward, and bring the Atlas to 44 Draw (VS the current 50)...which means the AC20 also needs to go down (same range, slow velocity, same Risk VS Reward not being fulfilled)


Long Range benefits most from ED, in its current form.
I'm not particularly a fan of it, as it restricts the pool of available weapons (some which have been excluded for years, due to being trash without and ED or Ghost Heat involved)

But, that would make me hate it less.
Not instant heat applied, or affecting cooldowns instead of the heat bar, alongside not hurting short range weapons more than long range weapons

Thanks for a good post, to the point.

You suggestions there would differentiate ED from GH, which could be a good thing but might not allow for the removal of GH then... I suspect allowing full lolpha would and only penalizing it by weapon lockout would make people use that quite often with some weird results on gameplay....

I am totally for gradual penalties for high heat and/or high ED and/or other potential stacking penalties like recoil, reload time, recharge time (PPCs), missile spread etc. Flicker HUD, lost locks, lost ECM effects, lost spotting, reduced agility, reduced stability etc comes to mind.... many opportunities that could be good for both game play and immersion.

There's nothing that says GH and ED couldn't work in parallel though, like was suggested here:

CheeseThief, on 29 October 2016 - 04:30 AM, said:

I'd raise the Energy Draw cap to 40 then add it on top of what we have currently with Ghost Heat 1. Basically have it as a safety net to cap the more egregious examples of getting around Ghost Heat like Clan laser vomit or 2cGauss+2cERPPCs, or Kodiak levels of dakka.

Tripping a Ghost Heat penalty would instantly drain the Energy Draw bar to show a visible indicator that something has gone wrong.



Basically I'm happy with what we have now and want another little bar on my hud that goes up and down meaningfully.

That sort of... has a brutish elegance to it. I mean, I don't hate GH1 or anything, and I would be quite happy as long as we can get some kind of HUD integration for it. The only big pitfall with your suggestion I think is that it would effectively nerf laservomit so some adjustments to ballistics would probably be needed. Nothing xml-edits couldn't manage.

I think that ED could in principle be tuned by just changing numbers to behave like GH1 for all energy weapons. The main problem to also mimic the behavior of GH1 for Ballistics is that some weapons have a really steep exponential, like AC20's. For these having old GH1 still in play could be an option. Sort of like a minimal viable solution, it's bound to happen lol...

Whatever they settle on, one thing that I would really like to have though is a function in the mechlab where you can simulate firing the different groups of weapons you have and observe effects on heat and any other penalties in real time. That would help a lot for new players I imagine.

[Davers]

This is such a controversial topic. We can't even get the players to agree that there needs to be any kind of limitations on weapons in the first place.

[DAYLEET]

Johnny Z, on 28 October 2016 - 11:59 AM, said:

I doubt they have much of an ego if they are using easy mode mechs.

This will be completely irrelevant to the thread topic but... Are you fkn serious? people using easy modes in every fps ever are the one talking the louder. Who think they are always right based on their stats vs yours and they will remind you they play with the "best" when needed. Try and balance anything and you are the baddie that should play in their limited way.

[Duke Nedo]

Summarized the constructive suggestions offered here at the bottom of the OP. Some interesting points, may try to mash up something for fun from them. Thanks for the input!

[Tristan Winter]

Duke Nedo, on 28 October 2016 - 09:29 AM, said:

Too much text or too few insults? Or there's only interest in complete burial of every change?

Yeah, a lot of people think it's fundamentally flawed.

The goal should be to reward mixed builds, because the natural tendency in any system is to boat weapons for maximum effectiveness. There are two ways to reward mixed builds. One option is that every weapon has to be balanced with massive drawbacks, so players are basically forced to use mixed builds (e.g. ppcs and lasers, missiles and ballistics, ballistics and lasers, etc) unless their mech has really special quirks that allow boating a single weapon type (e.g. Nova, Supernova, CPLT A1, etc).

Another option is to create a superstructure (like Ghost Heat) that arbitrarily incentivizes mixed builds by penalizing boating.

The problem with ED is that it removes the current superstructure and PGI has no plans of completely changing all the weapon stats in the game. So, TL;DR, there will be lots and lots of boating. No reason to mix lasers and missiles on omnimechs like the Timber Wolf, or mix ballistics and lasers on the Hellbringer or Dire Wolf, which have more hardpoints than they'll ever need.

From everything I've seen, ED is one step forward and five steps backward. Time to reboot the LL Stalkers from 2013.

[Duke Nedo]

Tristan Winter, on 31 October 2016 - 04:17 AM, said:

Yeah, a lot of people think it's fundamentally flawed.

The goal should be to reward mixed builds, because the natural tendency in any system is to boat weapons for maximum effectiveness. There are two ways to reward mixed builds. One option is that every weapon has to be balanced with massive drawbacks, so players are basically forced to use mixed builds (e.g. ppcs and lasers, missiles and ballistics, ballistics and lasers, etc) unless their mech has really special quirks that allow boating a single weapon type (e.g. Nova, Supernova, CPLT A1, etc).

Another option is to create a superstructure (like Ghost Heat) that arbitrarily incentivizes mixed builds by penalizing boating.

The problem with ED is that it removes the current superstructure and PGI has no plans of completely changing all the weapon stats in the game. So, TL;DR, there will be lots and lots of boating. No reason to mix lasers and missiles on omnimechs like the Timber Wolf, or mix ballistics and lasers on the Hellbringer or Dire Wolf, which have more hardpoints than they'll ever need.

From everything I've seen, ED is one step forward and five steps backward. Time to reboot the LL Stalkers from 2013.

Hey, that's exactly what the OP is trying to discuss. I fully understand what you're saying, that's why I write that ED is not a single solution for all weapon types, exactly because it would not give any benefit at all to mixed builds over boating.