150 replies to this topic

[SQW]

LordKnightFandragon, on 08 April 2017 - 03:11 AM, said:

Lol, just stop, dont argue against the meta in this game, any and all attempts to change it have failed and been shot down in flames. Just let this game die in its PPFLD, 2 second TTK misery.

I just hope that HBS adds heat penalties in their turn based game of BAttletech. Something to make you actually think about your shots, instead of just "fire all the things"...somehow I doubt thats gunna happen though, people love to melt mechs in 2 shots and if the game lasts more then 3 minutes, its so long and their gold fish attention span breaks.

HBS's game does incorporate heat scale penalty. The lack of heat penalty in the form of mobility, aiming and ammo explosion is what makes MWO almost arcade like. PGI (or its initial incarnation) must have made a conscious decision between hardcore TT rules and mass appeal. Unfortunately, MWO end up with neither proper sim rules nor large number of casual players.

So much missed opportunity.

[Cy Mitchell]

Too many people just want to play this as a first person shooter game. Any attempt to add a mechanic that is going to interfere more with just mashing the buttons to shoot is going to encounter a lot of resistance from that crowd. They do not want to have to watch a heat gauge, deal with slowed speed and less agility, work with loss of sensors/targeting or increased jam chance and lower rates of fire. All of these would be possible consequences of abusing your heat and that would involve too much thought and would interfere with their fun. It is much better to let them just continue to push the Override button at the beginning of the match and then mash those fire buttons. You do not want to think too much in "The thinking man's shooter!"

I have given up all hope that this game will ever be anything more than it already is. There is too much resistance from certain very outspoken members of the community about any change. Most of those that wanted more than a simple FPS game have long since left. The rest of us just accept it for what it is. I do not even blame PGI. They have given us exactly what we have shown that we will accept; no change.

Edited by Rampage, 08 April 2017 - 07:57 AM.

[Willard Phule]

For what it's worth, if you try to explain how PGI operates heat in MW:O using published BT rules, it's a combination of two factors. First, they appear to be using Solaris rules as opposed to standard BT rules. Standard BT rules are based on the concept of weapons being able to fire once per "round"...however that equates to time in general. In Solaris, weapons can be fired up to 4 times during that standard "round," giving serious heat management issues. It's far more intense with Solaris rules.

Secondly, they seem to have simply built upon an already flawed system that's been with the MechWarrior game franchise since the beginning. BT is based on the concept of a 30 point heat system. That's the absolute maximum heat it can take before it blows itself up. As you get hotter, you get penalties to both targeting and movement. In the MW franchise, it's always been on or off...heat shutdown or explosion. Especially PGI's version.

Not sure why they can't program movement penalties in, they did it for losing legs and terrain. Not sure why they can't have the HUD fade in and out as heat climbs into the red. No crosshair, unable to zoom, locks taking longer or fading in and out means more likely to miss, etc....

[MechaBattler]

BLOOD WOLF, on 07 April 2017 - 11:47 PM, said:

dude is literally by admissions stating that he doesn't want to change the dynamic because it suites his play style. Major problem when do do come to test solutions to the alphawarrior problem. He and his flock of never change are going to be screaming as hard as they can so that things stay the way they are use to

Yeah pretty much. It's not really good or bad. It's a different play style. So everyone gets all belligerent whenever anyone tries to take anything away from the current style.

[Amsro]

Weeee double the post for fun!!

Edited by Amsro, 08 April 2017 - 09:52 AM.

[Amsro]

Mystere, on 08 April 2017 - 03:36 AM, said:

Ok. Let us remove it then and have an anything goes attitude to boating.

Yes remove Ghost Heat and Lower the Heat Cap. It was a bad idea to balance like that.

The insanely high heat cap is what makes boating and alphaing possible.

I still boat 6 LPL and wreck face regularly. I don't think Ghost Heat deals with the issue in the way you think it does.

Shifty McSwift, on 08 April 2017 - 12:05 AM, said:

IKR, but think about it for a day or two, while considering the nature of the growing boating possibilities and massive weapon loadouts. also consider the idea that it would only be noticable when mass firing, the rates would be negligible for a lot of combinations, and with quirking potential, some mechs could be specialised for it.

I know, and appreciate the gif 100%, but really consider it beyond how annoying ghost heat has been considered up until now, in the personal sense as a player.

A heat scale that starts causing issues would be neat. Lower Heat cap could work. But not more Ghost Heat. Remove that ugly beast.

[Magnus Santini]

Should mention that this game does have one interesting heat effect on shutdown when convergence is lost and weapons supposedly fired at the same time have their shots go wild, e.g. by arms relocking. Also the pilot always turns off the night vision lights before bed.

[Deathlike]

SQW, on 07 April 2017 - 09:33 PM, said:

Chain fire is only bad now because thanks to PGI, there's no penalty to fire everything and ride that 90% heat warning. If your mech slows down by 30% at 50% heat and your reticle floats all over the place at 75% heat, then the trade-off between group fire and chain fire becomes apparent.

That's why BT came with a heat SCALE rather than a simple on/off switch at 100% heat.

Chain Group fire was the optimal method of dishing damage, and has been the case since MW2 (specifically Mercs).

The difference between a video game and TT is that TT treated your alpha strike like a potato would fire any weapon in random succession at random locations. In a game where group fire make a whole lot of sense from a logical and tactical manner, it is literally to your own detriment to try to reinvent the wheel... in this case.. how previous MW games had this become an accepted mechanic because it made too much sense.

Mystere, on 08 April 2017 - 03:31 AM, said:

How about proposing an alternative solution to mitigating the AlphaWarriorOnline gameplay prevalent today?

You can't mitigate the alphas, but you CAN mitigate the frequencies by manipulating cooldowns in the form of penalties. That would be far more preferable to increased heat generation. Brawl weapons will have less of a penalty while sniping weapons would have a greater penalty. It's not perfect or ideal, but all heat generation penalties do is make cool shots great again.

Edited by Deathlike, 09 April 2017 - 07:38 PM.

[Revis Volek]

Amsro, on 08 April 2017 - 12:00 AM, said:

He meant Energy Draw

[FupDup]

Deathlike, on 08 April 2017 - 12:21 PM, said:

Chain fire was the optimal method of dishing damage...

Um, that looks like a typo...

[SQW]

FupDup, on 09 April 2017 - 07:12 PM, said:

Um, that looks like a typo...

He meant in single player MW games where chain fire was the optimal way of dishing out dmg while keeping heat down because you don't have to worry being cored by a meta AI TBR laser boat or 4 UAC10 KDK.

Back in those days, taking out just one leg will kill any mech so not the tallest yardstick to be measuring against balance wise.

[Valhallan]

TT only had penalties if you stacked heat on the scale, in MWO terms if it were xfered over you would only start getting a penalty for the 10th heat point after you minus the heat by the amount of heatsinks you got slapped on. So its really less on forcing everyone into ac's and chainfiring and more on actually building relatively cool builds rather than alpha warrioring, for example my current mad2c is boating 6xspls and 2 lpls with 28 sinks alphaing is 38 heat so i only just get the penalty for a split second before my heat drops and im cool again. Most current ac builds are also relatively hot with poor sink counts meaning even ac builds would have to adjust or they won't be able to keep the dakka going, esp since the ammo mechs had less move on the heat scale because ammo cooking off came much earlier than engine melting. Gauss was always a problem in every mw, if its too strong in such a situation then just keep nerfing that cd till it isn't an always take (would people still run it if it had 10 sec cd? ).

[Deathlike]

FupDup, on 09 April 2017 - 07:12 PM, said:

Um, that looks like a typo...

Fixed.

SQW, on 09 April 2017 - 07:22 PM, said:

He meant in single player MW games where chain fire was the optimal way of dishing out dmg while keeping heat down because you don't have to worry being cored by a meta AI TBR laser boat or 4 UAC10 KDK.

Back in those days, taking out just one leg will kill any mech so not the tallest yardstick to be measuring against balance wise.

I meant to say group fire.

The most efficient way of killing your target was to group fire... which ended up being a full alpha in the original MW2. Pulse lasers cycled (the weapon cooldown) pretty quickly and legging mechs to disable them was effective (the AI didn't use their JJs frequently, but they always responded to them when LRMs or PPCs were used).

Chain fire was always woefully inefficient in any notable MW game.

[cazidin]

Russ tweeted that there IS the code necessary to add heat penalties. That was dropped a few weeks before energy draw and never touched again, like Info Wars.

[Mystere]

Deathlike, on 08 April 2017 - 12:21 PM, said:

You can't mitigate the alphas, but you CAN mitigate the frequencies by manipulating cooldowns in the form of penalties. That would be far more preferable to increased heat generation. Brawl weapons will have less of a penalty while sniping weapons would have a greater penalty.

You're assuming the constant alpha gameplay is not the problem. But it looks like a significant number of people think it is the problem (especially when coupled with automatic pinpoint convergence, anyway).

Deathlike, on 08 April 2017 - 12:21 PM, said:

It's not perfect or ideal, but all heat generation penalties do is make cool shots great again.

Why do you sound as if you are afraid of something that can be used at most twice?

Edited by Mystere, 09 April 2017 - 08:23 PM.

[Khobai]

the game doesnt need heat penalties. no one wants to play a game where they cant move or fire weapons because of cumulative penalties. that is boring.

what the game needs is more internal structure so mechs live longer and critical hits occur more often.


and if you want to discourage alphastrike warrior then youve gotta nerf the offending weapons. PPCs and Gauss probably need longer cooldowns like they have in other mechwarrior games. They have longer cooldowns in those games for a reason because frontloaded pinpoint damage is very powerful. And those weapons currently make the game too standoffish with not enough brawling IMO.

The other option is more damage spreading mechanics. The entire battletech armor system is based on the idea of damage being spread around. So any weapon or group of weapons that does all its damage to one location is potentially broken in a system that relies on damage being spread.

PGI obviously understands this because they introduced weapon mechanics like splash damage, beam duration, ripple fire, and burst fire. The problem is they didnt apply that concept to all the offending weapons in the game. We still have weapon groups like dual cerppc and dual clan gauss that are completely overpowered and break the current armor system because they dont spread damage around as much as they should.

Edited by Khobai, 09 April 2017 - 08:51 PM.

[Tarl Cabot]

Quote

A heat scale that starts causing issues would be neat. Lower Heat cap could work. But not more Ghost Heat. Remove that ugly beast.

And scale back the cooldown effect on the longer range/heavy hitting weapons. In early closed beta cooldowns, iirc, were closer to the Solaris VII delays (cooldowns) but Friends/family complained mechs were not dying fast enough.... THEN mechs were dying too fast so the Armor, and as a consequence Internal Structure was doubled, allowing the trigger happy Friends/Family happy times...

But we are at a point where the alphas are 2x-3x higher than back then. Pointing out that those who bring long range, hard hitting weapons should have to consider not just the heat effect but the actual delay/cooldown effect, to bring med/short range weapons as backup.

[Deathlike]

Mystere, on 09 April 2017 - 08:20 PM, said:

You're assuming the constant alpha gameplay is not the problem. But it looks like a significant number of people think it is the problem (especially when coupled with automatic pinpoint convergence, anyway).

Right now, I don't think it necessarily is a problem. However, accelerating killspeed (or lower TTKs) isn't a good thing in a 1v1 environment. However, you do deserve to die if you walk into a firing line.

It matters that these things are differentiated.

Quote

Why do you sound as if you are afraid of something that can be used at most twice?

If your aim is any good, that's probably all you need to end most mechs on the battlefield.

[Mystere]

Khobai, on 09 April 2017 - 08:23 PM, said:

the game doesnt need heat penalties. no one wants to play a game where they cant move or fire weapons because of cumulative penalties. that is boring.

Why would, for example, loss of agility, vision impairment, or HUD disruption be boring? Or does "boring" actually mean "I just don't want to deal with it" for some people?

Khobai, on 09 April 2017 - 08:23 PM, said:

what the game needs is more internal structure so mechs live longer and critical hits occur more often.

I'm not a fan. Damage is king in this game and I fear that will just bone lights more than they already are.

Khobai, on 09 April 2017 - 08:23 PM, said:

and if you want to discourage alphastrike warrior then youve gotta nerf the offending weapons. PPCs and Gauss need longer cooldowns like they have in other mechwarrior games. They have longer cooldowns in those games for a reason because frontloaded pinpoint damage is very powerful.

I'd rather heat thresholds are drastically reduced first (to 20, for example), and have heat sinks increase dissipation rates instead.. Then we add those long cooldowns as may be needed, especially to cool-running weapons like gauss rifles.

[Valhallan]

All consumables are basically BS, i really do not see the issue if a heatscale would make coolshots "good", sync artilleries free popup scouting uav's all "free" consumables should not be factored in since none of these should be in there in the first place.