85 replies to this topic

[Insanity09]

I would have thought alphas, function and definition, were fairly well understood, but recent posts have suggested that is not the case.

Typically, an alpha strike is thought of as firing ALL your weapons at once. (check the urban dictionary)

Energy based mechs tend to have the highest alphas (best damage per ton), but pay for it with high heat (oft risking shutdown).

Alpha strikes, theoretically, are for when you face likely quick death and need to do as much damage as you can before you die. In practice, many players/mechs simply use alphas constantly, particularly those that boat energy weapons. For general use, it was (mistakenly?) thought that you would be firing only portions of your weaponry at a time. Instead, alpha-ing seems the norm.

Heatsink buffs (particularly for clan) make alphas more viable, rather than less.

Ghost heat was added to discourage an alpha by making shutdowns and the possibility of heat damage more likely.

Chain fire, and weapon grouping to some degree, is designed, kinda, to allow people to rapidly fire large numbers of weapons without inflicting quite the heat burden from simultaneous fire. Both effectively lower alphas.

Energy Draw (as I understand it, I never played on the pts), was basically set up as a capacitor system, only so much power could be delivered at once, so it limited how many weapons could be fired in a given time period (kind of an alternate and mandatory chain fire). Again, the idea was to rein in the alpha strike, because you simply couldn't fire that many weapons at once. People apparently hated it (I suspect for one or two reasons, possibly both: one, poor implementation, possibly unreasonably limiting; two, it actually did its job and prevented high alphas, which caused all sorts of mental strife and mandated {unwanted} play style changes)

One of the subcurrent concepts here is that people seem to be unwilling or unable to restrict their weapon usage to mellow out heat and burst/alpha voluntarily. So PGI tries to do it artificially.

High alphas (or just say initial burst damage) have the effect of decreasing the survival time of every type of mech, but particularly those of lower weight. Especially with focus fire, high burst damage can down any size mech with surprising speed.
Results? Light/medium mechs are played less often. Quirks to improve durability (armor/structure buffs) are rampant. Boating to allow simple (and massed) weapon groups is common (range specialists, rather than a mixed load). Ghost heat. Weapon nerfs. Forum threads to discuss various related topics (like this one ) are common.

I personally would prefer more of a tactical match, less of a rapid delivery slugfest, so I favor limiting alphas somehow.

[Gentleman Reaper]

Small vs large engine balance: Decouple movement buffs (aside from accel/decel) from engine size, and tie it to the chassis. Possibly also induce structure buffs for smaller engines, so a std 60 Urbie gets a decent buff to CT and maybe STs.

Lighter vs heavier mech balance/ arm mounted weapons vs torso mounted weapons: Global reduction in torso twist rates. This makes it harder for heavier mechs to engage faster/lighter mechs, and gives a better rock/paper/scissors roles for weight classes. Slower torso movement also benefits arm mounted weapons, as they can better track a moving mech.

Boating weapons: Add some kind of dynamic quirk system that provides a negative quirk for every weapon of the same type (2 gauss gives +15% cooldown time, 4 gauss gives +30%), give a global cooldown decrease to compensate. This means that mixed builds can fire more often and therefore get higher DPS to offset weapon desync issues.

High mounted hardpoints: Only system I can see to curb this is sized hardpoints, where bloat hardpoints get limited to smaller weapons, and lore high-mounted hardpoints can't mount anything larger than the lore weapon.

[MechaBattler]

Gas Guzzler, on 13 January 2017 - 11:49 AM, said:

Mixes of ballistic and energy, and ballistic and missiles, and energy and missiles often work out fine. The Vindicators issues is the low placement of hardpoints and being a 45 tonner is kind of an awkward tonnage range. The Wolverine's issue is all the lasers in the right arm. Which if you'll remember was rectified for a time when the WVR-6K was one of the best mediums in the game. But it was deemed over quirked and was subsequently overnerfed. The -7K is still a solid SRM brawler, but there are better options due to better quirks. Back to the -6K, getting a bit of quirks back might make it worth it again.

"Alpha's shouldn't be used all the time" is said because in the novels (fluff) weapons were described to fire at different times a lot because its more interesting to read. Some authors still have characters alphaing all the time. Either way, that is just BS rationale that is spouted by people who want people to chainfire all the time because that is what MechWarrior is about in their opinion. Yet... the MechWarrior franchise has a history of people alpha striking frequently, with no mechanics to stop you from doing so. Maybe some players chose not to play that way, and now that they have to play in the pool with all the other kids see that people DO play that way, they have issues with it because it interferes with their private Mech fantasy. Sorry, but I DGAF about someone's private mech fantasy in a PvP game.

You also have to define what an alpha is. For some mechs an alpha is 2 PPCs or 3 Large lasers. In some lore builds, those loadouts would be mixed with other weapons, so firing all of them wouldn't be considered an alpha. Yet now that we have to strip other weapons to stack heat sinks to be more efficient, it suddenly is an alpha. In other words, what an alpha is, is entirely arbitrary. So you don't like big groups of weapons firing at once? Frankly, a Vindicator can run 2 PPCs and do okay, its just worse than the BJ-3 at exactly the same thing. The firepower is identical, but the Vindicator has bigger arms and low mounted hardpoints. It needs to have something to make up for its disadvantages. Energy Draw does nothing to address this. Vindicators can run 3 LPLs too.

The big alpha discussion doesn't REALLY come into play until you get to the Heavy class.... but most heavy mechs don't have an issue with numbers of hardpoints and being able to put out big damage. Literally every single one can do big powerful "alphas". What makes them different is high tightly their hardpoints are spread (poor CTF), or their geometry, or their quirks, or low vs high hardpoints. None of which is addressed by anything other than qu
.irks. Energy draw won't fix it.

The best mediums already just have 2 PPCs, or 4 SRM packs. There is no way they can power creep mediums beyond the HBK-IIC... with all of its high hardpoints, and Energy Draw does NOTHING to address that.

I'll concede that the Vindicator's issues stem more from hard points and hitboxes. Same with wolverine, don't know why it doesn't have torso structure quirks. So quirks would still have to be a thing, even if we went ED route.

I like how you insinuate that people are basically Role-playing in matches. I can just imagine them dress up like Dane with his M.Bison hat or whatever is. Which isn't anything against him, the more
immersion you can wring out of the game.

But at the same time, I don't think there's anything wrong with wanting that style. You'd still have twitch based combat, you'd still have organized play dominate pugs. It would literally just mean waiting .5 of a second to fire your next volley of whatever you have equipped.

Energy draw didn't change much during the PTS. Mostly weapon values and even heatsinks. You could give PPCs an energy recharge penalty, higher with ERPPC, higher with C-ERPPC. There's other avenues that can be explored. But that for whatever reason they decided to ignore and just change existing values.

I'm not saying ED is a fix all to be used in lieu of quirks or other balance mechanics. But I think it can help with overall balance.

[Insanity09]

@ Gentleman Reaper, I liked the anti-boating quirk idea, I don't believe I've seen it before. The numbers would need to be played with a bit, but it has possibilities. It wouldn't prevent an initial alpha, but it would slow down multiples, and that would help.

[Bud Crue]

How would I address balance?


Well, sometime this month I would fix some odd AMS behavior and then rather than make IS XL engines be a bit more durable, I would come up with some odd heat performance formula characteristics to apply to clan XLs because nerfing something is always better than buffing something...customers love that.

Then sometime in February, I would completely rework the skills tree, giving the community only vague hints and contradictory statements about what that skills tree is going to be like before dumping it on them in a PTS...customers love it when a beloved product is changed in some way with no real guess as to how that change will impact them and then making them test it for you with no incentive is a bonus.

Then at some unknown point in the future I would introduce a new mode, one that was supposed to drop last October, with a new name (cuz incursion sounds cooler than assault I guess) and new mechanics that are different than the old mode it is replacing -but somehow the same- but since it is different, I'd keep the old mode that nobody likes. Since that dislike was the impetus that got the new version of the mode to be developed, keeping the old mode ensures that customers will be disappointed no mater what...customers like it when you are consistent that way.

Then I'd also make some vague assurances that CW is a priority in 2017.

Then I'd make another assurance that IK is still on the radar despite also saying back in July that it would be released by last October, thus assuring customers that we really don't have a clue how to do this. Customers like that sort of backhanded, veiled, "honesty".

Then despite a year where seemingly every mech, weapon, and damn near every performance criteria in this game needed to be tweeked -often repeatedly- I would announce that I am dumping new tech, weapons and mechs on top of all the rest of this stuff to make absolutely sure that no one is even tempted to think about how balance in this game is about to be flushed even further down the toilet.

That's how I'd balance the game...If I were PGI.

https://mwomercs.com...ary-and-beyond/

[East Indy]

Currently in MWO, power priorities are essentially hardpoint number > free tonnage > hardpoint location > geometry/hitboxes > engine cap > quirks. Heat mechanics are backloaded and Heat Scale is porous, so it's all about the alpha. While that is reminiscent of a bang-you're-knocked-out tank game, the franchise offers so much more.

I've read some interesting arguments for reviving and expanding mega-quirks (see: DRG-1N, Grid Iron, etc.) lately, and as effective as that can be, the community seemed to be weirded out by the anomalies. Like, the quirks were trying so hard to get around the system just to make a chassis enjoyable to play.

Insanity09, on 13 January 2017 - 05:07 PM, said:

People apparently hated it (I suspect for one or two reasons, possibly both: one, poor implementation, possibly unreasonably limiting; two, it actually did its job and prevented high alphas, which caused all sorts of mental strife and mandated {unwanted} play style changes)

It was both. PGI blinked on strength (generous weapon modifiers) at the same time it overlooked details (high regeneration rate), so right away you had 40-point PPFLD shots and 80-point laser volleys. Even in a testing environment that's a shaky first step. Then, instead of just turning dials on Energy Draw, the devs monkeyed like crazy with individual weapons. Players justifiably became concerned about a lack of control variables, as well as (to be fair, most devs') classic treat-the-symptom engineering that never works out.

The Timmies were going to complain no matter what, but PR cascaded and most vocal players became skeptical. I personally thought the direction was rebounding, punishing mindless alphas and rewarding actual discipline — and opening up the game to more choices — but PGI cut its losses and implemented those weapon changes over the next few patches instead.

Ultimately, it comes down to whether people are serious about check-and-balance mechanics. The silver lining is that as imperfect and "dumb" to min-maxing as Heat Scale may be, it spares MWO from totally broken gameplay without bothering players enough to stop logging in — so it's ready and waiting to be improved.