56 replies to this topic

[Khobai]

heatsinks are fine theyre not the problem

even if you lower heatcap and increase dissipation the actual problem of pinpoint convergence still exists

it makes more sense to fix the actual problem then to fix imaginary problems

[Ultimax]

MustrumRidcully, on 15 May 2017 - 06:33 AM, said:

Even the TT "Alpha Strike" just means firing all your guns in a 10 second turn. It does not neccessarily suggest that mechs are (always) capable of firing all their weapons in one instant.

The concept of an alpha-strike is understood to be firing all of your weapons at once, whether or not TT actually spells that out.

http://tvtropes.org/...ain/AlphaStrike


Also, the upcoming BT game also clearly shows an Alpha Strike to be a mech firing everything at once.


Just a nitpick.




Also, nice to see you posting again, Mustrum "Back from a long hiatus" Ridcully.

[Mystere]

Mawai, on 15 May 2017 - 06:21 PM, said:

I find the vitriol on this topic quite interesting.

No kidding. <smh>

Mawai, on 15 May 2017 - 06:21 PM, said:

All of these differences mean that MWO is NOT Table top.

My take in all of this is that a whole lot of people -- on both sides of the TT argument -- are taking TT and its values and mechanics too literally (e.g. "It's all based on random numbers. Ergo, TT is shats for an FPS game."). Lace that with near-religious beliefs about "game design" () and it's nothing but idiocy and/or ignorance at its very finest.

Why not instead identify the underlying principles behind the abstractions used to simplify and build the TT game and use those?

[Mystere]

Khobai, on 16 May 2017 - 08:29 AM, said:

heatsinks are fine theyre not the problem

even if you lower heatcap and increase dissipation the actual problem of pinpoint convergence still exists

it makes more sense to fix the actual problem then to fix imaginary problems

I'd very much prefer that too. Of course, mention "convergence" or worse "CoF" and certain characters suddenly go into fits.

Having said that, I think making some changes to the heat system (e.g. lower heat threshold, faster dissipation rates) are also in order.

[Pjwned]

Mystere, on 16 May 2017 - 08:26 AM, said:

If PGI can deviate from TT with regard to weapons damage, heat, and most especially firing rate, why can't they deviate as well with heat dissipation rates, by making heat sinks dump heat faster?

That should take care of your PPC "problem".

I'm not saying they can't do that, but I don't see why they should or would. Along with flattening the heat capacity, the only thing that would really accomplish is screwing over energy boats because it would be impossible for them to alpha strike past a certain point.

Heat dissipation would also need to be absurdly high to make it worthwhile to bring more than a couple of high heat energy weapons. If you bring 4 ER PPCs and fire 2 at a time with a flattened heat capacity then that's almost instant shutdown right there, so the dissipation rate would need to be high enough to wait a significant amount less time (let's say 50% less) than it would take to just wait for your 2 ER PPCs to cool down again, because otherwise it wouldn't be worth the tonnage & slots to bring anything beyond 2 ER PPCs.

Let's use this 28 DHS 4 C-ER PPC Warhawk as a convenient example. You fire 2 of the C-ER PPCs, instantly generate 28 heat which is almost immediate shutdown from 0 heat, and have to wait a bit to cool off before you can fire the other 2 C-ER PPCs safely. The cooldown on the C-ER PPC is 4 seconds, so again let's say you expect to wait half that time in order to make it worthwhile to even bother equipping those other 2 C-ER PPCs.

In order for 28 DHS--which is a lot of heatsinks by the way--to dissipate 28 heat in 2 seconds, they would need to dissipate 140 heat over 10 seconds, or in other words 7x as much as in lore.

Meanwhile, in the current heat system, that Warhawk is reasonably sustainable even when firing all 4 of its PPCs due to extra heat capacity, which I sure would hope is the case with that many heatsinks and also because that's pretty much how it's supposed to work.

How about instead of changing things around so that energy boats are disproportionately screwed over, we just add some actual heat penalties before maxing out heat? Sounds a lot less dumb to me.

Edited by Pjwned, 16 May 2017 - 08:34 PM.

[Pjwned]

The other alternative, if we absolutely must have a lower heat capacity, is to remove the base 30 heat capacity from every mech so that both dissipation and capacity are entirely dependent on heatsinks. This is still a pretty dumb idea that runs into some similar problems actually not that bad of an idea after thinking about it more, partly because energy boats aren't inordinately screwed over this way, and if we're not going to have heat penalties anyways then the best way of decreasing heat capacity would be to just remove the 30 heat buffer that only ever comes into play when a mech reaches 100% heat i.e is pretty much irrelevant.

Edited by Pjwned, 17 May 2017 - 09:07 AM.

[Alan Davion]

Pjwned, on 16 May 2017 - 10:34 AM, said:

How about instead of changing things around so that energy boats are disproportionately screwed over, we just add some actual heat penalties before maxing out heat? Sounds a lot less dumb to me.

Only problem is we've already seen how Clanners react to the increased heat and reduced speed when they lose a ST, and it wasn't very well when it happened.

Imagine getting those penalties without losing a ST. The Clanners would lose their flipping minds.

[Pjwned]

Alan Davion, on 17 May 2017 - 07:51 AM, said:

Only problem is we've already seen how Clanners react to the increased heat and reduced speed when they lose a ST, and it wasn't very well when it happened.

Imagine getting those penalties without losing a ST. The Clanners would lose their flipping minds.

You mean those penalties that would affect both sides equally? Wow, what a disaster that would be for Clans...

[Alan Davion]

Pjwned, on 17 May 2017 - 09:11 AM, said:

You mean those penalties that would affect both sides equally? Wow, what a disaster that would be for Clans...

You know as well as I do that somehow, someone would find someway to make those penalties affect the IS worse than they affect the Clans.

As in, cue the Soundwave "Clan tech Superior, IS tech Inferior" argument all over again.

[Requiemking]

Alan Davion, on 17 May 2017 - 10:19 PM, said:

You know as well as I do that somehow, someone would find someway to make those penalties affect the IS worse than they affect the Clans.

As in, cue the Soundwave "Clan tech Superior, IS tech Inferior" argument all over again.

Ah, but in order to do this, they would have to invert the current heat gen advantage.

[MauttyKoray]

Valhallan, on 15 May 2017 - 05:19 AM, said:

To be fair, while in TT heatsinks did not "technically" increase heat capacity, in function they did since they sunk the heat as soon as it was applied. That being said since we don't have any of the penalties associated with the 30 heat tree, and some people don't want to see such things/don't believe pgi could code it, it would be better imo to just cut the penalty parts of the table off, so all mechs start at 10 heatcap, and the majority of your heatcap will have to come from your heatsinks (functionally this would copy BT's system which replaced all the penalties with slowly ramping internal damage), with such a system we probably could get rid of spooky heat too, which would be a good thing.

Negative. 'Over the period of 10 seconds.' is what occurs. So in 10 seconds the mechs would fire weapons, gain heat, and dissipate heat. It was a cumulative effect to simulate a spread period of time.

It can be compared to any number of things. How far does a car move and how much gas does a car use over 10 seconds going at 55kph? Same concept.

[Pjwned]

MauttyKoray, on 17 May 2017 - 10:46 PM, said:

Negative. 'Over the period of 10 seconds.' is what occurs. So in 10 seconds the mechs would fire weapons, gain heat, and dissipate heat. It was a cumulative effect to simulate a spread period of time.

It can be compared to any number of things. How far does a car move and how much gas does a car use over 10 seconds going at 55kph? Same concept.

I do find it funny, by the way, when people bring up 10 second turns as an excuse for denying something that's factually obvious, like heatsinks in TT effectively granting extra heat capacity, despite those "10 second turns" being irrelevant because they could be "1 second turns" or "100 second turns" and nothing would change, so actually the only sensible way of defining it is "over the course of 1 turn."

But they never seem to care too much about applying that same standard for weapons generating heat gradually, because whenever this stupid "fixed 30 heat capacity" meme comes up it's just about making alpha strikes useless to push their overtly biased agenda and not about making changes within any realm of reason.

Not sure if you fall into that camp or not, but I hope you don't since it's demonstrably stupid.

[Jungle Rhino]

How to fix the game: Add meaningful choice

Exhibit A - Cone of fire or cross hair jiggle/bob tied to percentage of maximum speed. Stand still = pinpoint accuracy, moving fast = bounce/spread. This makes for tactical choices - sacrifice speed for accuracy vice versa

Exhibit B - Throw a huge recharge on the Guass weapons so that they maintain their massive punch however suffer from very poor sustained damage. This again makes for a choice - you will have a mighty alpha - but you will get wrecked in a brawl.

Exhibit C - Heat and heat management is vey poorly implemented and binary. The TT system is actually a 2 stage heat bar - there is a heat buffer that is equal to the number of heatsinks - stay under this and you have no adverse effects. Then on top of that number there is a flat value of 30 for all mechs which adds penalties as you go higher up the scale. These include inaccuracy, speed reduction, physical damage to the Mechwarrior and the 'Mech itself. There is so much opportunity for PGI to make this a really compelling risk/reward system.

Exhibit D - Critical hits. Where is the degradation from Gyro, Actuator, Engine & Cockpit hits? It could be so much better...

I could go on but nobody will read this and it is too long to post to Russ' Twitter account...

[Alan Davion]

Requiemking, on 17 May 2017 - 10:41 PM, said:

Ah, but in order to do this, they would have to invert the current heat gen advantage.

Do you really think someone at PGI hasn't thought of that by now? Cause I'd bet dollars to donuts someone has.

Pjwned, on 17 May 2017 - 11:38 PM, said:

I do find it funny, by the way, when people bring up 10 second turns as an excuse for denying something that's factually obvious, like heatsinks in TT effectively granting extra heat capacity, despite those "10 second turns" being irrelevant because they could be "1 second turns" or "100 second turns" and nothing would change, so actually the only sensible way of defining it is "over the course of 1 turn."

But they never seem to care too much about applying that same standard for weapons generating heat gradually, because whenever this stupid "fixed 30 heat capacity" meme comes up it's just about making alpha strikes useless to push their overtly biased agenda and not about making changes within any realm of reason.

Not sure if you fall into that camp or not, but I hope you don't since it's demonstrably stupid.

Well, you know, that might be because, and I'm just spit balling here...

YOU'RE NOT SUPPOSED TO FIRE EVERY FLIPPING WEAPON YOU HAVE BACK TO BACK TWO OR THREE TIMES IN SUCCESSION WITHOUT HARDLY ANY PENALTY WHATSOEVER~!

Do you play much TT BT? If so, next time you do play, try telling them you want to play with MWO rules, including alpha striking every few seconds with hardly any penalty, see what kind of reaction you get.

Edited by Alan Davion, 18 May 2017 - 06:42 AM.

[Khobai]

Quote

YOU'RE NOT SUPPOSED TO FIRE EVERY FLIPPING WEAPON YOU HAVE BACK TO BACK TWO OR THREE TIMES IN SUCCESSION WITHOUT HARDLY ANY PENALTY WHATSOEVER~!

why not? you can do it in battletech

the problem has never been alphastriking

the problem is all your weapons converging on one hit location.

the solution is quite simple: more game mechanics that forcibly spread out damage. and no im not talking about stupid crap like cone of fire. im talking about mechanics that already exist like beam duration, burst fire, splash damage, ripple fire, etc... those types of mechanics just need to be applied to more weapons. The biggest offender right now being the gauss rifle.

Quote

Exhibit D - Critical hits. Where is the degradation from Gyro, Actuator, Engine & Cockpit hits? It could be so much better...

not sure how that makes the game better. why would you wanna play with a crippled mech?

As an aesthetic thing, I would like cockpit glass to crack when you get shot in the head though.

Edited by Khobai, 18 May 2017 - 07:13 AM.

[ArmageddonKnight]

Aim-Bot, on 15 May 2017 - 04:34 AM, said:

As title says. Pls remove 1,5 heat capacity from double heat sinks. they are not supposed to work like this. You made the High Alpha problem and the low TTK yourself when you added heat capacity to Double heat sinks and you try to balance it by using any sort of strange ghost heat system. JUST FINALLY REMOVE HEAT CAPACITY!

THIS !

I've always said that the high heat capacity is the primary reason for the stupid level of alpha damage in the game atm.

Put heat cap at TT levels, add heat cooling efficny bonus to coutner the faster ROF of weapons vs TT and be done.

Edited by ArmageddonKnight, 18 May 2017 - 08:11 AM.

[Pjwned]

Alan Davion, on 18 May 2017 - 06:42 AM, said:

Well, you know, that might be because, and I'm just spit balling here...

YOU'RE NOT SUPPOSED TO FIRE EVERY FLIPPING WEAPON YOU HAVE BACK TO BACK TWO OR THREE TIMES IN SUCCESSION WITHOUT HARDLY ANY PENALTY WHATSOEVER~!

I never disputed that there should be penalties for going crazy with your weapons and building up a lot of heat as a result, I just don't want asinine garbage like fixed 30 heat capacity because people literally do not understand a damn thing about the system they claim to understand but very evidently do not.

Quote

Do you play much TT BT? If so, next time you do play, try telling them you want to play with MWO rules, including alpha striking every few seconds with hardly any penalty, see what kind of reaction you get.

Well it wouldn't be hard to just run a hot mech, alpha strike a few times, and then deal with the huge heat penalties.

The only part that MWO really gets wrong is the lack of heat penalties before shutting down, and I'm not defending that.

And like I mentioned earlier (as well as somebody else earlier in the thread too, apparently) if we're not going to have heat penalties then maybe just removing the 30 heat buffer from every mech is the answer, so that both dissipation and capacity are entirely dependent on the number of heatsinks, which is a somewhat similar result to what people (idiots) are clamoring for except it's not as braindead *****ed because energy boats don't get completely screwed that way.

Edited by Pjwned, 18 May 2017 - 02:25 PM.