37 replies to this topic

[Toothless]

So when I get hit by dual RAC's, it pretty much completely blinds my field of view. Is that how its supposed to be or is this an issue with particles? It doesnt matter if I torso twist, its pretty much all out obscured field of view.

Im on a pretty beastly computer, everything has been maxed out for two years on it and still going strong, but hopefully its a graphical issue and not design because that would be pretty stupid.

[El Bandito]

Depends on where you're hit. If they are anywhere close to the torsi, RACs will blind you hard, even with the lowest graphical settings. PGI is just not good at balancing effects and shakes.

For example, LRM5 has the exact amount of shake and bake effect as that of LRM20. Which is utterly idiotic, since it allowed chainfired LRM5s to "stunlock" a target. PGI, in their infinite "reverse wisdom", had nerfed every aspect except the shake of LRM5, as response.

I suppose they can blame the mess of a code this game is built on.

Edited by El Bandito, 03 November 2017 - 03:16 AM.

[Zoeff]

This is one of the few useful things regarding RACs, they're honestly quite horrible for anything else.

Having said that, for low end systems the FPS drop can make it hard to even retreat... >_<

[Shifty McSwift]

Zoeff, on 03 November 2017 - 03:10 AM, said:

This is one of the few useful things regarding RACs, they're honestly quite horrible for anything else.

Having said that, for low end systems the FPS drop can make it hard to even retreat... >_<

Then is it really a useful thing? Or just a bonus side effect for the firer that sucks for most people getting hit? Why do RACs do this effect best? Surely the point might be to make them a decent weapon rather than a mostly trolling gun right?

Fk it nevermind whatever.

[Sjorpha]

Shifty McSwift, on 03 November 2017 - 03:32 AM, said:

Then is it really a useful thing? Or just a bonus side effect for the firer that sucks for most people getting hit?

Blinding enemies is clearly a really useful ability to have, so I'm not sure how there is a distinction between them.

[Toothless]

For once I didnt expect the answer to be "Because PGI". Should have known.

GG PGI

[Shifty McSwift]

Sjorpha, on 03 November 2017 - 03:37 AM, said:

Blinding enemies is clearly a really useful ability to have, so I'm not sure how there is a distinction between them.

If I design a gun to kill people via firing bullets and it ends up instead killing its users by exploding.. I mean I could remarket it as a suicide device, or juts admit that I messed up the design there a bit.

Is blinding supposed to be an effect? Are RACs for some reason supposed to be better at blinding effects than all other guns? I mean do you even allow room for expansion? A new gun comes out it has a relatively strange side effect, someone points that out and a slew of people who sound like I am trying to **** their dog, come out screaming bloody murder. So, IDK, I dont really care, the blinding effect itself can be ignored, and personally I have noticed it in about 2 out of 500 games, so meh, whatever, enjoy your rapid fire sort of blinding machine.

[Trissila]

Given how long it's been since RACs were released, all evidence points to the blinding being intentional. Each shell explodes, and RACs fire shells very, very quickly.

They kind of need it, given that they're a 100% facetime stream weapon in a game that's heavily biased towards frontloaded peek-and-slap. You can put in some decent work with dual RAC-5s (a pair of them spits out around 20 DPS, which is just about as high as you can get in the game), but it requires you to stare targets down head-on for seconds at a time, so you need that extra buffer of them not getting clear shots at their component of choice.

[Shifty McSwift]

So facehuggin enemies is a good thing, because blinding... LoL ok then

[Trissila]

Shifty McSwift, on 03 November 2017 - 04:28 AM, said:

So facehuggin enemies is a good thing, because blinding... LoL ok then

It is if it gets the job done.

Which it does.

Heaven forbid there be more to this game than "load up your biggest PPFLD and snipe people all day".

Yeah, it "sucks for the people being hit". So does instantly losing your ST out of nowhere from a gaussvomit alpha. Maybe they shouldn't sit there and take it if they don't like being blinded by it.

[Sjorpha]

Shifty McSwift, on 03 November 2017 - 04:02 AM, said:

If I design a gun to kill people via firing bullets and it ends up instead killing its users by exploding.. I mean I could remarket it as a suicide device, or juts admit that I messed up the design there a bit.

Bad analogy is bad as RACs blind the enemy not you. If a gun both hurts and blinds your opponent that would be a good thing for you it even if the blinding was unintentional.

Quote

Is blinding supposed to be an effect?

Who knows? It doesn't matter though, what matter is if we as players want it to be an effect or not. Clearly you don't and I do, a simple matter of opinion.

Quote

Are RACs for some reason supposed to be better at blinding effects than all other guns?

That word again "supposed", supposed by who and what difference does it make to a thing being good or bad for the game?

Quote

I mean do you even allow room for expansion?

I don't understand what you mean by this? Expansion what?

Quote

A new gun comes out it has a relatively strange side effect, someone points that out and a slew of people who sound like I am trying to **** their dog, come out screaming bloody murder. So, IDK, I dont really care, the blinding effect itself can be ignored, and personally I have noticed it in about 2 out of 500 games, so meh, whatever, enjoy your rapid fire sort of blinding machine.

I don't see any reactions like this, in fact you seem the most upset person in this thread.

The point is that some people like effects like this and some don't. I want flamers to be powerful so you can shut people down with them, I want missiles to shake people so they can't aim, I'm fine with rapid fire weapons having a blinding effect and so on. I think it's good for the game to have this kind of effects in it. People who dislike it will call them "trolling" I guess, this difference exists in many games. For example in magic the gathering I like playing prison decks designed to lock down the opponent from doing anything until they are forced to concede the game, many people dislike and rage about it and many others find it interesting.

[Shifty McSwift]

Trissila, on 03 November 2017 - 04:36 AM, said:

It is if it gets the job done.

Which it does.

Heaven forbid there be more to this game than "load up your biggest PPFLD and snipe people all day".

Yeah, it "sucks for the people being hit". So does instantly losing your ST out of nowhere from a gaussvomit alpha. Maybe they shouldn't sit there and take it if they don't like being blinded by it.

So you are fine with it basically becoming another potato masher weapon? Great against noobs who refuse to move or twist when being railed, mostly useless against at least half brained targets.

We already have a number of facetanking guns that don't need blinding effects to be remotely useful. And again, I think more importantly is the fact the blinding effect can mostly be bypassed by using the UI/Hud, and the blinding effect is not at all predictable or reliable. Which makes it feel like an accidental effect of the gun even moreso than normal.

[Sjorpha]

Shifty McSwift, on 03 November 2017 - 04:43 AM, said:

So you are fine with it basically becoming another potato masher weapon? Great against noobs who refuse to move or twist when being railed, mostly useless against at least half brained targets.

I agree, that's a problem.

The blinding effect should clearly be strong and reliable enough to have competitive value, just like the shake of LRMs and the heating up from flamers should be strong enough to be competitive choices.

Sadly PGI never dares to make anything other than direct fire powerful. I'd rather have these effects a bit unreliable and weak than not have them at all though.

So the solution here is to make the blinding effect not weaker, but rather predictable and reliably strong at all graphic settings right?

Edited by Sjorpha, 03 November 2017 - 04:53 AM.

[Shifty McSwift]

Sjorpha, on 03 November 2017 - 04:43 AM, said:

That word again "supposed", supposed by who and what difference does it make to a thing being good or bad for the game?

Supposed by logic? One guy says it makes sense because of exploding shells, but what are missiles? What about airstrikes? These directly involve what are in effect bigger explosions, that have less of an overall blinding effect than RACs.

Sjorpha, on 03 November 2017 - 04:43 AM, said:

I don't understand what you mean by this? Expansion what?

As in somewhere to go, room for change to systems etc. A bunch of people seem to think that because it came out with this effect it MUST be the guns main usage, there couldn't possibly be an error in design that needs addressing, so people who mention these things must be just raging and mad cos they died to the gun, rather than annoyed that it doesn't have real functionality or really compare to what already exists.

Sjorpha, on 03 November 2017 - 04:43 AM, said:

The point is that some people like effects like this and some don't. I want flamers to be powerful so you can shut people down with them, I want missiles to shake people so they can't aim, I'm fine with rapid fire weapons having a blinding effect and so on. I think it's good for the game to have this kind of effects in it. People who dislike it will call them "trolling" I guess, this difference exists in many games. For example in magic the gathering I like playing prison decks designed to lock down the opponent from doing anything until they are forced to concede the game, many people dislike and rage about it and many others find it interesting.

Crowd control can be done in various ways that don't involve just straight up screwing one out of 24 players, which is why I would think we don't have things like stunning effects in game as part of weapons, flamers can cause shutdowns, but they can also just cause overheat damage. Blinding effects might not be as severe but it is still pretty basic stuff.

And you like lock down decks in magic, that's great, did you take note when almost all land domination was removed from the standard (most popular) variant of the game, because of the lack of effort involved and the lack of fun for responding players? Makes for a pretty good example of retroactive change for the better of all.

Sjorpha, on 03 November 2017 - 04:43 AM, said:

Bad analogy is bad as RACs blind the enemy not you. If a gun both hurts and blinds your opponent that would be a good thing for you it even if the blinding was unintentional.

Because it is not a comparative analogy of the weapons, it is an analogy of response to unexpected design quirks.

[El Bandito]

Sjorpha, on 03 November 2017 - 04:51 AM, said:

I agree, that's a problem.

The blinding effect should clearly be strong and reliable enough to have competitive value, just like the shake of LRMs and the heating up from flamers should be strong enough to be competitive choices.

If you want it to be competitive, at least make it skill based, of sorts. Right now, even when the RACs are hitting nowhere near the cockpit, the receiving player still get blinded by it. It should only blind when you actually aim at the cockpit area.

[Sjorpha]

El Bandito, on 03 November 2017 - 05:15 AM, said:

If you want it to be competitive, at least make it skill based, of sorts. Right now, even when the RACs are hitting nowhere near the cockpit, the receiving player still get blinded by it. It should only blind when you actually aim at the cockpit area.

Fair enough, you could make it depend on location if the effect was a bit stronger. I personally think the effect is fine and the only problem with RACs right now are that they are way to weak and needs their DPS buffed.

[Sjorpha]

Shifty McSwift, on 03 November 2017 - 04:59 AM, said:

And you like lock down decks in magic, that's great, did you take note when almost all land domination was removed from the standard (most popular) variant of the game, because of the lack of effort involved and the lack of fun for responding players? Makes for a pretty good example of retroactive change for the better of all.

I think standard without viable control lists are much more boring, current standard is all aggro at comp level and has been for a good while now. A healthy metagame has at least one control or prison deck being viable, and there should also be viable combo, midrange and tempo decks.

Modern is much more healthy right now with a very varied top level metagame, and prison decks like lantern control, sun and moon etc are a big reason it's so healthy, those decks police the aggro and combo decks so they have to run interactive spells and sideboards. Modern is also the most popular format, more popular than standard, as in more people play it casually and modern events have higher turnout etc. Standard only dominates competitive play because WOTC wants it that way so they can use it as marketing for new sets.

I like land destruction/disruption, you still have a lot of that in Modern and it's all the better for it. None of these strategies are dominating top tier play, but they are there to punish players if they don't plan to beat them and that's very good. If you run too few basics you lose to blood moon, which keeps the and bases from getting too greedy etc.

Compared to standard where it's basically who can play the biggest or most creatures faster, the fact that standard has no good counterspells and no good land or graveyard hate is really bad for it. This is what happens when a company caves in to this kind of complaints, it dumbs the game down.

Also in magic playing control takes a lot more skill than aggro, it's a lot harder to play a competitive reactive game plan than a proactive one. This includes land distruption and other lockdown strategies, it's not easy to pull off which is why they have never been competitively dominant to any large degree even in metas where control is strong. Aggro is more popular precisely because it's easier to play.

Edited by Sjorpha, 03 November 2017 - 06:51 AM.

[Toothless]

I come here pointing out PGI douchebaggery and you guys turn it into magic the card game discussion, I dont know which is worse.

[Sjorpha]

Well the important thing to me is that counterplay and answers is the key to a health metagame, magic can be used as an example.

MWO has a severe lack of counterplay and answers to strategies. It's mostly a race to what weapons and geometry are the best for killing fast and accurately, but there is no dynamic that punishes those best builds for being the best, there are no counters.

Let's say for example we had 3 types of armour that each gave 60% damage resistance to a weapon type (energy/ballistic/missile), and you had to choose one.

That's a lot, and initially everyone would bring the anti-energy armour. This would make people move away from energy boating, initially towards boating one of the other which in turn would make some people switch to those armour types. In the end boating a single weapon type would no longer be as good because you'd get punished hard for it when up against the wrong armour type.

The result would be a healthier metagame where diversifying your weaponry could be a good idea, and boating for max alphas could be allowed to be powerful because you could be punished for it.

Now alternate effects like shaking, blinding, heating mechs up, indirect fire and so on are in the same category, they come on weak weapon systems that are designed to punish the more effective ones in different ways. Or to simply punish certain plays like crossing open ground carelessly (LRMs) or staying too near max heat (Flamers) etc. Even if they can be annoying they are ultiately very good for the game, and it's important that they are powerful enough to actually do the policing they need to do.

Right now they are clearly too weak since for example you never have to worry about being flamer locked when firing big laser alphas, if that was a real threat in a large percentage of matches people might be more careful with their heat. And if LRMs were good then maybe people would actually use the counters to it and so on. Basically it is the lack of counterplay that leads to the one sided metas like laservomit.

[Nema Nabojiv]

Sjorpha, on 03 November 2017 - 06:33 AM, said:

I personally think the effect is fine and the only problem with RACs right now are that they are way to weak and needs their DPS buffed.

One RAC5 have, according to smurfy, dps of 10.91. Thats like the highest in the game at the moment, and its roughly equiualent to 4x ERPPCs or 2x LRM20. And people usually bring two which does the dps of what, 8 erppc.

Of course there are downsides such as heat and jam bar and accuracy, but still it is very strong DPS-wise and it has blinding effect on top of that. So, yeah, lets push for dps buff because the highest dps is apparently "too weak"

Also, clan RAC or riot.