198 replies to this topic

[DGTLDaemon]

mogs01gt, on 06 January 2017 - 08:03 AM, said:

You need to compare MWO to lore and in lore, it took shots to the same spot to penetrate armor(depending on the mech). We do not have real armor in MWO.

If I am not mistaken, in lore we had a lot of 1v1 duels, while in MWO we have a lot of focus fire. Moreover, focus firing is actually considered one of the fundamental skills of any good MWO pilot. The very mechanics of this game promote firing on the same target with your buddies and discourage exposing yourself to fire from several enemy mechs at the same time, and this will inevitably bring down TTK. In a 1v1 duel, things are considerably different. We do a lot of Zell dueling in our unit (actually, you have to win a duel to get into the unit), and I have to say that those duels last pretty long. It takes a while to strip the armor off the enemy mech and then go through components, even if both opponents are piloting lights. So there are at least two different kinds of TTK that we should be considering: 1v1 TTK and group TTK. And in a group, TTK will always be lower because of focus fire.

[Trollfeed]

Small maps that prevent proper positioning will make you feel that you died too fast. And those 50-60 point alpha strikes at 500m.

[Kimberm1911]

I used to think that time to kill was far too low, and it really annoyed me. However. I think it's actually at a good place right now. As an assault pilot, I finally Don't get instagibbed if I walk around the wrong corner, and feel like my armor actually means something. Sure, it might be nice for TTK to be a bit higher, but how tough do we make mechs before they are too tough? 1 v1, there isn't much that can take down an assault much on its own, and the more we need weapons, the more powerful the boating heavies and assaults become. If we increase TTK, mediums and lights become even less effective then they are now. While I'm glad we'be moved away from the instagib laser vomit meta, I think that mediums and lights need to be effective on the battlefield so that people will play them. Sure, it feels fun to play the invincible Kodiak or MAD IIC, but other means on the battlefield need to have their roles. As of late, it feels like assaults and heavies are a bit too effective in the current meta.

[Monkey Lover]

Get used to it, alpha warriors will never allow nerfs.

[MechaBattler]

Time to kill being higher would give mechs with limited firepower a chance to be more relevant. Though it depends on how they achieve that. Lowering cooldowns just puts those mechs further into the depths of irrelevance.

During the PTS. Energy Draw only really addressed extreme alphas. And not really enough in my opinion. So they tried lower heat cap and higher dissipation. They even raised dissipation further because people complained. I honestly feel the cap should have been even lower. There was also an imbalance issue where Clans had higher dissipation due to being able to cram more heatsinks in. The IS conversely could boat a lot of single heatsinks on assaults and get really high heat caps.

I think they need to continue this line of testing.

[nehebkau]

@ op

It is WAYY to low. These things are like WW2 battleships. It took a shitton of damage to sink one and they only went down easy if you got very very very lucky. Think of how much it took to kill the terminator robot in the original movie -- battle mechs should be the same way.

[Vxheous]

mogs01gt, on 06 January 2017 - 08:03 AM, said:

Why are you comparing a video game to real life?

You need to compare MWO to lore and in lore, it took shots to the same spot to penetrate armor(depending on the mech). We do not have real armor in MWO.

lol lore, but I will respond to this. In lore, a single AC/20 is crippling to a mech, so no, it does not take multiple shots to penetrate armor. In fact, it take multiple shots to penetrate armor now, if you are dying to one shot, something is seriously wrong with your mechlab abilities.

Snazzy Dragon, on 06 January 2017 - 08:07 AM, said:

peek
alpha
pull back
cool off and reposition
peek
alpha
pull back
cool off and reposition.....

Peeking at the right time, when to peek, when to not peek, when to hold your position, when to twist, how to effectively trade, all these things take thinking and experience. If all it took was walk out shoot, walk back, then everyone would be amazing at this game. Understanding optimal range of your weapons vs opponents weapons, how to maximize your damage on target while minimizing damage taken back, that requires thinking.

TTK is just fine, because each individual mech can survive a long time depending on positioning, etc. TTK only seems low if you derp and decide to charge a firing line head on (which in lore, you would also get instagibbed)

Edited by Vxheous Kerensky, 06 January 2017 - 10:56 AM.

[Snazzy Dragon]

Vanguard836, on 06 January 2017 - 08:09 AM, said:

So tell us how would you do it, how would you improve ttk.

I would start with the heat scale-- alpha striking was a latch ditch move in a lot of cases, and rarely resorted to. In MWO, it is the norm.

In BattleTech rules the heat cap never exceeds 30 units on a battlemech but in MWO we can easily reach more than double that, and we have far less heat generation because of general heat reductions and heat reduction quirks.

I would start by soft capping heat capacity at 35 and hard capping at 45, and making heat dissipation much better. We could still alpha but it would not be wise on a lot of our current builds. With higher dissipation to make up for it sustained DPS mechs would still be relevant and laser boats would be able to cool off after attacking still.

Yes there would still be gauss + PPC, but firing once with 2 ER PPCs would put them close to 30 heat, very close to the maximum cap.

Proper heat penalties would also be in order; if you are constantly pushing your mech up to 90% you should be suffering from reduced mobility and stressed heat sinks that are not quite as effective as they would be normally.

TTK would not be dramatically lower but it would be lower-- and we didn't have discuss something crazy like non-automatic convergence or energy draw.

Edited by Snazzy Dragon, 06 January 2017 - 08:25 AM.

[Sylonce]

I'll take the unpopular stance in saying TTK is too high. The primary reason I say this is because when you have a 12v12 battle, the moment one team loses 3 or so 'mechs, the game is pretty much lost at that point with a few exceptions. The winning team becomes an armored wall that progressively becomes harder to tap even if individuals are trying to be tactically clever.

MWO already doubles armor values out of the whole mechwarrior series, and there are already gimmicks in place to reduce high damaging alphas in an effort to increase TTK (e.g., ghost heat). In my opinion, the problem lies in the real twitch mechanic of optimizing this game to have precision aiming with a mouse, which contributes to quick deaths. I find MWO to be the easiest Mechwarrior game to aim.

Edited by Sylonce, 06 January 2017 - 08:37 AM.

[mogs01gt]

DGTLDaemon, on 06 January 2017 - 08:14 AM, said:

If I am not mistaken, in lore we had a lot of 1v1 duels, while in MWO we have a lot of focus fire. Moreover, focus firing is actually considered one of the fundamental skills of any good MWO pilot. The very mechanics of this game promote firing on the same target with your buddies and discourage exposing yourself to fire from several enemy mechs at the same time, and this will inevitably bring down TTK. In a 1v1 duel, things are considerably different. We do a lot of Zell dueling in our unit (actually, you have to win a duel to get into the unit), and I have to say that those duels last pretty long. It takes a while to strip the armor off the enemy mech and then go through components, even if both opponents are piloting lights. So there are at least two different kinds of TTK that we should be considering: 1v1 TTK and group TTK. And in a group, TTK will always be lower because of focus fire.

1v1 existed in Lore due to honor, lance vs lance combat and large battlefield areas. The question is, should we base balancing on focus fire or 1v1? IMO the answer to the question is focus fire. Most other FPS's typically do not run into our focus fire issue.

Vxheous Kerensky, on 06 January 2017 - 08:21 AM, said:

lol lore, but I will respond to this. In lore, a single AC/20 is crippling to a mech, so no, it does not take multiple shots to penetrate armor. In fact, it take multiple shots to penetrate armor now, if you are dying to one shot, something is seriously wrong with your mechlab abilities.

That is a bit incorrect. The issue being not all ac/20 weapons were created equal. Example would be a light mech only taking one round out of a burst from the Pontiac 100. It could survive that one round but not the burst. Also, armor was different in lore and AC weapons were traditionally armor piercing.

Edited by mogs01gt, 06 January 2017 - 08:37 AM.

[Appogee]

Snazzy Dragon, on 06 January 2017 - 07:30 AM, said:

HOW DO YOU FEEL ABOUT THE CURRENT TTK?

It's much too short ... when people are shooting at me.

But it's much too long ... when I'm shooting other people.

[Almond Brown]

Kaspirikay, on 06 January 2017 - 08:05 AM, said:

this game is a thinking mans shooter

Sadly, way to many players first thought is "I think I will hide over here just for a little bit!" It definitely increases their time to get killed but also reduces everyone else's on the Team.

Edited by Almond Brown, 06 January 2017 - 08:51 AM.

[DGTLDaemon]

mogs01gt, on 06 January 2017 - 08:35 AM, said:

Most other FPS's typically do not run into our focus fire issue.

Because in most other FPS's players have a lot better mobility. In a typical shooter, if you round a corner and see three enemies standing there, you may be able to duck back into cover before they fire on you if you're quick enough. In MWO, your mobility is much more limited, unless you're piloting a very fast light mech. Generally, if you find yourself in a situation where you have several enemy mechs staring at you, you will take fire from them no matter how good your reflexes are, and that will result in major damage to your mech due to focus fire. However, if we accept massive focus fire as an MWO reality and start balancing our TTK around it, it will inevitably become way too long for smaller engagements (1v1, 2v2 etc.). You simply can't balance the survivability of a mech on the assumption that half the enemy team will be firing at it... despite the fact that this is exactly what competent players will strive to achieve.

Edited by DGTLDaemon, 06 January 2017 - 08:50 AM.

[Sjorpha]

It's kinda ok IMO, it could be a little higher.

There are some downsides to increasing TTK too, the snowballing effect gets stronger the higher TTK is, focus fire is more important with higher TTK so flanking get's nerfed by increasing it. And also it's harsher on new players because experienced players will be able to leverage it while new players will get focused down almost as quickly as now.

In short the higher TTK is the greater the divide between good and bad players and the harsher the new player experience, and the stronger the snowballing effect so you will also see more one sided stomps.

This may sound unintuitive to some but it is the true effects of high TTK.

So increasing TTK is very much a mixed bag. I'm still in favor of increasing it a little because I'm fine with those effects.

[mogs01gt]

DGTLDaemon, on 06 January 2017 - 08:48 AM, said:

Because in most other FPS's players have a lot better mobility. In a typical shooter, if you round a corner and see three enemies standing there, you may be able to duck back into cover before they fire on you if you're quick enough. In MWO, your mobility is much more limited, unless you're piloting a very fast light mech. Generally, if you find yourself in a situation where you have several enemy mechs staring at you, you will take fire from them no matter how good your reflexes are, and that will result in major damage to your mech due to focus fire. However, if we accept massive focus fire as an MWO reality and start balancing our TTK around it, it will inevitably become way too long for smaller engagements (1v1, 2v2 etc.). You simply can't balance the survivability of a mech on the assumption that half the enemy team will be firing at it... despite the fact that this is exactly what competent players will strive to achieve in matches.

Thanks Captain obvious. Do you want the game to be balanced or not? There are 3 options for balancing TTK, 1v1, lance vs lance or 12v12. Pick and move on.

Edited by mogs01gt, 06 January 2017 - 08:56 AM.

[Monster Ultra Zero]

Way too fast.

[DGTLDaemon]

mogs01gt, on 06 January 2017 - 08:51 AM, said:

There are 3 options for balancing, 1v1, lance vs lance or 12v12. Pick and move on.

I say - balance based on 1v1, because this is the only reliable baseline, and let players leverage the focus fire mechanic to the best of their ability. In other words, if 4 mechs from one team manage to get a drop on 1 mech from the other team and annihilate it in seconds, it should be viewed as "good teamwork, well played", and not as "oh crap, TTK is so low, that mech died in seconds".

[mogs01gt]

DGTLDaemon, on 06 January 2017 - 08:59 AM, said:

I say - balance based on 1v1, because this is the only reliable baseline, and let players leverage the focus fire mechanic to the best of their ability. In other words, if 4 mechs from one team manage to get a drop on 1 mech from the other team and annihilate it in seconds, it should be viewed as "good teamwork, well played", and not as "oh crap, TTK is so low, that mech died in seconds".

That is how I see it. We pick one and move forward the issue then remains that our weapons systems arent balanced.

[Appogee]

Almond Brown, on 06 January 2017 - 08:41 AM, said:

Sadly, way to many players first thought is "I think I will hide over here just for a little bit!" It definitely increases their time to get killed but also reduces everyone else's on the Team.

Too true.

I think it's less "thinking man's shooter" and more "unthinking man's hider".

[Gas Guzzler]

mogs01gt, on 06 January 2017 - 08:03 AM, said:

Why are you comparing a video game to real life?

You need to compare MWO to lore and in lore, it took shots to the same spot to penetrate armor(depending on the mech). We do not have real armor in MWO.

Not really. You don't compare a real time first person shooter to books, especially when the books are wildly inconsistent about how long it takes to destroy/disable mechs.

Frankly, TTK is pretty high compared to every other PVP shooter I have played. If you are out of position and half the other team sees you, you probably won't last long, although I have walked away from those situations before, it all depends. I don't really think any action is needed on PGI's part to lengthen TTK, its long enough, and this game plays NOTHING like CoD, so those comparisons can be thrown out the window. The problem is, a lot of players are short on the "thinking" part of this game, so they end up in bad situations very frequently. You can't play the game mindlessly because you can't just kill mechs instantly by yourself like in other shooters, but if you face 6+ mechs, they can kill you in short order.