466 replies to this topic

[El Bandito]

Kroete, on 15 March 2018 - 04:31 AM, said:

I dont say they are good,

I have a lot more fun to use a "bad" weapon and do ok with,

End of discussion right there. We are not talking about fun factor. We are talking about effectiveness. And LRMs come up short. End of discussion.

Edited by El Bandito, 15 March 2018 - 05:17 AM.

[Curccu]

Kroete, on 15 March 2018 - 04:45 AM, said:

His numbers showed that he can do better with meta then lrms.
Nothing less, but also nothing more.

Your numbers only show that by Jarl's list that ranks by matchscore (which you get by doing damage, that spread damage is easy'ish to get with LRMs without showing yourself to enemy) is top 10% nothing less, but also nothing more?

[Lykaon]

Kroete, on 15 March 2018 - 02:31 AM, said:

Please show me an evidence why lrms are bad,
if you can catch up with more then 90% of the playerbase with them.

Just a little statistic or at least some numbers?

Evidence you can clearly see.

Get a group of friends together for a private match and have them bring 3 AMS then repeat the match without AMS and mark the effects on your damage output. Repeat several times if you want to increase your sample numbers.

Now you may say something like "nobody uses AMS" but the truth is nobody CAN use an anti LASER system because there isn't one.

Another experiement is also private match based. Take a properly skilled LRM boat into a match (properly skilled is target retention nodes + velocity nodes etc) Have your friends use mechs they own with radar deprivation and keep track of lost locks before volley impact. Repeat on the same map with target mechs without any radar deprivation.

Get a friend and try a face off. you use the same chassis one is built as an LRM specialist the other is a direct fire specialist. now begin with a face to face trade at 500m until one mech is destroyed. Count how many times it's the LRM specalist mech that is destroyed first. No ECM or AMS should be used during this test. Then you can try dueling one v one to simulate evasion and active cover use the one "rule" is neither mech can be closer than 200m to the other (to negate the min. range of LRMs from being the trigger for the win condition)

Repeat the above but anything goes. Any mech combinations ECM AMS closing under LRM min. range etc.

You will start to see some clear evidence begining to pile up.

[Zergling]

cougurt, on 15 March 2018 - 03:30 AM, said:

that speaks more to the skill level of the average player than it does the effectiveness of LRMs.

And how little skill LRMs require.

[MischiefSC]

Vellron2005, on 15 March 2018 - 12:38 AM, said:

You know guys...

After reading some of the comments and opinions here, it is clear to me that literally NO AMMOUNT of success with LRMs will convince some people that LRMs are just as good, useful and fun as any other weapon.

Some poeple will just always hate the system and the playstyle, and have an overwhelming need to put down those that use it.

Literally no ammount of great matches and stats will persuade them.. they will only care about top-tier stats, WL/KD ratios and average matchscores..

However, those with half a brain will always know a simple fact - fun cannot be measured in stats. And fun is the only thing that really matters in a videogame.

So no.. NOBODY can give me crap about LRMs.. they can only express their opinion, and just like they choose to ignore mine, I shall ignore theirs.

This is absolutely false.

Actual consistent viable success with LRMs would change everyones mind because it would represent the weapons being viable and change the nature of the conversation.

The entire point, the whole point of the discussions over LRMs is that for the same effort they do not drive wins. One of the better ranked players (at least according to Jarls List) with LRMs also brags that 'armor sharing is a myth' and has a low end of mediocre win/loss rate while padding damage stats by hiding in the back pretty much every game.

Nobody using LRMs wins matches consistently. They don't win matches. They lose matches that, with the same effort from the player with direct fire, would statistically have been more likely to have driven a win.

In the end the only metric that matters is win/loss. What wins, what loses. LRMs lose matches. Using LRMs reduces your win/loss relative to the same effort with direct fire.

That's been shown and can easily be shown in the stats available in Jarls List or the leaderboards where those stats are kept. Sort by win/loss, ask the players who win. I don't even mean the top 1%. Take the top 10%. Top 20%. Nobody who wins consistently is saying 'LRMs are good weapons/can perform well'. They're effective based on the skill of who you're playing against. They are good for farming bads, which you can do with any weapon but LRMs let you farm bads while playing with your foot sort of low effort.

They teach bad habits and promote bad gameplay both at an individual and a team level. Good teams use them sometimes for a giggle, that's it.

However LRMs lose matches that you should have won. They trade sandbagging your teams success for padding your own damage stats. Given that this game is a team game of course people who understand the games mechanics well enough to drive wins consistently are going to object to that. Take LRMs to Solaris when it comes out. Then you're only gimping yourself.

[Xiphias]

Vellron2005, on 15 March 2018 - 12:38 AM, said:

You know guys...

After reading some of the comments and opinions here, it is clear to me that literally NO AMMOUNT of success with LRMs will convince some people that LRMs are just as good, useful and fun as any other weapon.

You can convince people with success that LRMs are good. Win the WC, dominate comp play, and top the leaderboards while running LRMs. Guess what? You will convince everyone that LRMs are good and people will be falling over themselves to bring them. You don't though because you can't, in fact nobody can because LRMs are just not good enough to compete at that level.

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Some poeple will just always hate the system and the playstyle, and have an overwhelming need to put down those that use it.

Some people hate the system, but that has no bearing on whether or not they are good. The reason many people hate the playstyle and system is because it is bad (and on their team) not that they claim it's bad because they hate it (though you see that in the low tier LRMs are OP threads). Look at poptarting in its prime. People hated (and still do) the system and playstyle, but no one was saying that pop tarting was bad, they were saying that it was too good and that it was not fun.

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Literally no ammount of great matches and stats will persuade them.. they will only care about top-tier stats, WL/KD ratios and average matchscores..

Good matches alone don't do anything to prove that LRMs are good. You need to directly compare them against their competition. Competitive play does that and the fact that the best players in the game use non LRM weapons to win and perform consistently at the top speaks for itself. If you could get a group of LRM players to consistently score great WLRs, KDRs, and MS and be on top of the leader-boards every month you'd convince people. As it stands, for every great match that gets posted with LRMs someone could easily post a terrible match with LRMs and half a dozen great matches with direct fire matches.

In the games that I play I consistently see direct fire weapons and not LRMs winning matches. I also see LRMs losing matches that direct fire mechs could have won.

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However, those with half a brain will always know a simple fact - fun cannot be measured in stats. And fun is the only thing that really matters in a videogame.

Fun and good are no the same thing. No one here is arguing that LRMs can't be/aren't a fun weapon. That's subjective. Some people may find them fun, some may hate them. What's being argued is that they aren't good. How good a weapon is isn't a matter of feelings, it's a matter of facts and performance. Don't confuse fun and good. They aren't the same thing.

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So no.. NOBODY can give me crap about LRMs.. they can only express their opinion, and just like they choose to ignore mine, I shall ignore theirs.

If you want to say LRMs are fun no one can argue that other than giving their opinion. I could argue a case for why LRMs make the game less fun, but again that would be my opinion.

If you start claiming that LRMs are good though now you are entering the realm of disprovable facts. People can and will give you crap if you start spewing it. You can't say that LRMs are good and then complain when people disprove your claims with counter examples. When I state the fact that LRMs weren't used to win the WCs that isn't my opinion, that is a fact. Guess what, the best team in MWO uses direct fire weapons and not LRMs when they are playing seriously to win. That's a fact and the reason they don't is because LRMs aren't a good weapon. This isn't opinion, it's just how it is. Unless you can demonstrate that LRMs can directly compete at that level LRMs are going to remain exactly what they are, a bad weapon that can be effective in certain situations or against certain enemies.

[Brain Cancer]

Vellron2005, on 15 March 2018 - 12:38 AM, said:

You know guys...

After reading some of the comments and opinions here, it is clear to me that literally NO AMMOUNT of success with LRMs will convince some people that LRMs are just as good, useful and fun as any other weapon.

Sure it will.

Show me where LRMs are successful in competitive levels of play, which is where you can determine a weapon is actually good. Because at that level of play, people discard bad weapons without a second thought.

And a lot of weapons are good and useful. You even see unironic use of flamers in comp play.

LRMs didn't even make a blip there. An LRM is a functional weapon, in the sense that you can fire it and hit something.

It's horridly inefficient compared to anything else considered "balanced" or played with by top players. And that's from someone who plays LRMs at levels your videos don't even come close to. They are not "good" by any measure, or they'd be an actual part of the meta. People would be advising you to use AMS and other counters beyond "just find a rock" regularly. The amount of raw hits (and hence, ammo) to kill a target with LRMs is immense- although you'll certainly get KMDDs a lot because you wasted dozens if not hundreds of missiles hitting everywhere else but the killbox. It doesn't turn your target into a shiny metal donut with a hole where it's CT used to be. You can't aim them to focus on a weakened hit location. And they don't do enough damage to compensate for their obscene levels of spread.

Are they fun? Sure, I played LRM boats for months. I worked my butt off to gitgud with them. And there's a wall created by their stats- you can only inflict effective damage so quickly with LRMs, and that means blasting every inch of your target with LRMs until they expire from being bludgeoned to death by missiles and stripped naked of armor and structure alike across the board.

Fun does not mean good, or effective though. LRMs can be fun, and I get an extra bit of fun murdering an enemy with them knowing that I took the biggest stinker of a weapon system in the game and clubbed them to death with it.

But if I want guided missiles that actually kill someone and are also fun, I load up my ATMs and watch a saturation weapon that actually delivers enough damage to do it's job in a timely manner blow things up. And I don't feel like I'm deliberately using a poor weapon to do it.

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Some poeple will just always hate the system and the playstyle, and have an overwhelming need to put down those that use it.

Literally no ammount of great matches and stats will persuade them.. they will only care about top-tier stats, WL/KD ratios and average matchscores..

Because strangely enough, those are the people who most accurately determine how good a weapon is, because you get those top-tier stats from being a good pilot AND running the best builds. But hey, I -am- a top-tier stat player. Overall, I'm in the top 3% of the playerbase, top 1500 players.

LRMs don't compete and have been systematically weakened over and over again as I've gone from T4 to T1. They are not good. They were once decent,. but have slid lower and lower on maximum effectiveness over time until they've become effective only at slowly killing the most incompetent of players. And that's the way Paul likes it- a weapon that cannot be good because he's right in the skill range of people who get rained to death regularly, to the point where he can't even design Trials that are equipped to handle it.

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However, those with half a brain will always know a simple fact - fun cannot be measured in stats. And fun is the only thing that really matters in a videogame.

So no.. NOBODY can give me crap about LRMs.. they can only express their opinion, and just like they choose to ignore mine, I shall ignore theirs.

However, are you measuring it in "your fun" or the team stuck with you? That's what drove me to push the envelope with LRMs as far as I could, and why I stopped using them. I enjoyed the gameplay, but I was stressing out my team.

[Brain Cancer]

Zergling, on 15 March 2018 - 07:54 AM, said:

And how little skill LRMs require.

People say that, but good grief. Try to do consistently well with LRMs.

You will gitgud in ways that you never imagined.

[Kroete]

Brain Cancer, on 15 March 2018 - 11:30 AM, said:

Show me where LRMs are successful in competitive levels of play, which is where you can determine a weapon is actually good. Because at that level of play, people discard bad weapons without a second thought.

Until now i just read, that their are bad in compplay/cw.
But thats 90 or less % of the played matches and players.

Now you need also to show why there are also bad in 90% of the other cases.
And why is it possible to get in the 10% with them.

And maybe read something about bell curve, normal distribution and a little statistic to see that this "evidence" has nearly no worth and why are the 90% matter more then some special snowflakes in the big whole.
The top and bottom 2-7% are special snowflakes, if you see it through some numbers in a table.

El Bandito, on 15 March 2018 - 05:05 AM, said:

End of discussion right there. We are not talking about fun factor. We are talking about effectiveness. And LRMs come up short. End of discussion.

Are you from the us?
Would explain your style of discussion and why you missed a lot to explain the meaning.

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I dont say they are good,
but saying lrms are bad is also false,
they are still good enough to fight against the majority of player.
If someone claims they are bad, they should bring some evidence with numbers.

So tell me, is it trolling, trumping or just a drinking straw to leave a discussin where you cant give evidence for your claim?

Edited by Kroete, 15 March 2018 - 12:12 PM.

[Brain Cancer]

It's just most obvious at the top, to be honest.

Since you don't eliminate people playing unproductive designs from anything else tournament style, you can't as accurately measure what kind of drag LRMs put on a team over the long run.

LRMs are best when your opponents are the worst, and comp teams don't have spots for bad players for long. Anywhere else, it's less obvious because yes, you can kill people with LRMs.

You just can't do it quickly or efficiently compared to anything else. The longer it takes to kill or cripple a target with your guns, the more time they have to hit your team with theirs (and if they're faster, that means they at least take one or two with them, a trade that you don't ever want). I've actually had my Supernova pummeled down to 17% by nothing but LRM fire on Polar before.

I ended up with four ATM/laser kills and had everything still functional at the end of the match, because being sandblasted doesn't really reduce your ability to function and where they were padding damage, I was hitting their team-mates so hard there wasn't much left after the second salvo. That slow DPS and easily spread damage meant those LRM boats were giving their team less help than the Supernova in our back lines that was calmly burning holes in things with his six-pack of ERLLs.

Again, just because you can do it doesn't mean it's done good or done well, and the modern lurmboat tends to be a drag on their teams at this point.

[Kroete]

Brain Cancer, on 15 March 2018 - 12:14 PM, said:

Again, just because you can do it doesn't mean it's done good or done well, and the modern lurmboat tends to be a drag on their teams at this point.

But then it is not the weapon, but the players.
And with this you are right,
most people dont use them proper and pgi promoted this even futher with their artemis and arc nerf.

[cougurt]

Kroete, on 15 March 2018 - 12:06 PM, said:

Until now i just read, that their are bad in compplay/cw.
But thats 90 or less % of the played matches and players.

Now you need also to show why there are also bad in 90% of the other cases.
And why is it possible to get in the 10% with them.

this is a meaningless metric by which to judge their performance, as has been repeatedly stated. i could use any number of terrible mechs, weapons or builds and achieve an average match score in the top 10% if i really wanted to, it doesn't make them any less terrible.

[Brain Cancer]

cougurt, on 15 March 2018 - 12:29 PM, said:

this is a meaningless metric by which to judge their performance, as has been repeatedly stated. i could use any number of terrible mechs, weapons or builds and achieve an average match score in the top 10% if i really wanted to, it doesn't make them any less terrible.

If anything, the higher you tend to rank up, the more of an understanding of just what doesn't work well follows along.

LRMs are functional. Outside of when they were bugged, they've never been good, and they've actually gone downhill pretty steady as everything else have been "balanced".

[roekenny]

you want math he's the maths
https://martin-uedin...pons/index.html

Bear in mind this raw damage (and tad old) not focused damage what can kill a mech as every missile has a 50% chance of hitting a dead zone fresh. Dead zones been arms, 1 leg, head (you give me a vid of a lrm boat killing a light via a head shot I will give you £50.) Could also include 1 side torso for clans or both for standard engine builds but I'm going on lowest things a lrm has to eat thru to tilt it as hard as I can in your favor. So at best LRM's drop about 40% of their damage (and that is been generous and that is if they do focus down 1 guy not spread it around l what is not helpful, and while others are also opportunist and spread the love they have the potential to straight up murder someone if they have a opportunity not kill it with a thousand paper cuts.)

We will not go into time to kill either as that is a no brainier faster you drop something less damage if can dish back, and since you drop 40 damage per 100 your doing on a clean volley 60. 60 is the minimum alpha for mechs in any LRM's mechs weight class and if it's not they are dakka builds what churn out damage it out faster and longer than a LRM boat can (my mauler says hello with it's 6 ac 5's 30 pinpoint damage every 2 seconds and can sustain that forever, or my h-gauss version what drops 80 of pinpoint instant where the **** has my leg gone dammage.) And if you say but you can't get it consistently on one component I will say I can get 80% of my damage on 2 components 90% of the time how about you?

Do you also want me to find the link where devs purposely said they have gimped LRM's to help T5-3 to make them less viable? Now you show me no US how LRMs any good (not not fun as they can be as all have our guilty pleasures.)

[Burke IV]

Before all they "new game" happened, back before the tree, everybody said all the same stuff about LRMs but it was really easy to just ignore it. Then PGI made all that come true, they carefully altered the game so that lobbing massive vollys is the logical way to play LRMs. Its so boring, not even worth trying. You cant really blame LRMs or pilot skill when PGI made it happen. Before they killed off LRM5s you could stun lock an assult mech, assults were the easiest to stun lock of all and there was this kind of rock paper scissors thing going on where LRMs did what they did. Now its gone, all the LRM haters are happy and will never have to stunlocked ever again. yay

Anyway dont listen to me i hvt played in ages.

BTW Sunspider is an LRM mech.. 5x15 and your choice of ecm or ams + tag.

Edited by Burke IV, 15 March 2018 - 01:03 PM.

[Burke IV]

I forgot to mention ammo. Doublling LRM ammo values would help out alot. Whats the point in excluding LRMs from the last third of the game.

[Xiphias]

Kroete, on 15 March 2018 - 12:06 PM, said:

Until now i just read, that their are bad in compplay/cw.
But thats 90 or less % of the played matches and players.

Now you need also to show why there are also bad in 90% of the other cases.
And why is it possible to get in the 10% with them.

If you look solely at group and quick play and then find the players that have the best stats you will find that the majority of them are not running LRMs consistently if at all. Similarly, if you look at players running LRMs a lot you will find that they tend to have poorer stats.

Is it because the good players decide not to run LRMs? If so why don't they run LRMs? If you take two equally skilled players who are good at the game and give one LRMs and the other meta weapons the one with the meta is going to have better stats overall because they can contribute more, not based on skill but because of the weapons used.

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And maybe read something about bell curve, normal distribution and a little statistic to see that this "evidence" has nearly no worth and why are the 90% matter more then some special snowflakes in the big whole.
The top and bottom 2-7% are special snowflakes, if you see it through some numbers in a table.

I'm not sure what you're arguing here. Are you trying to say that LRMs are a good weapon in the middle of the bell curve, but not at the top of the bell curve? E.g. if you are an average player fighting average players you are better off using LRMs than meta weapons?

If that's the case I agree with you to a point, but overall still disagree with you. If a player is really bad at aiming direct fire weapons they may do better running LRMs. In that case LRMs are a good weapon for them. Similarly, if a player has amazing aim then direct fire weapons will be better for them than LRMs because they can focus damage more effectively.

The problem is when you try to generalize this approach to overall weapon balance. A good weapon is the weapon that is most effective when used properly. It is the theoretical maximum achievable performance between weapon stats and player skill. Having a weapon be better at lower skilled play is less about being good and more about being less bad.

Consider the case of a formula one car vs. a high end sports car. Which car is a better racer? Obviously (on a track) the F1 car is far better and will easily beat a sports car. However, if you were to put an average driver in an F1 car they likely wouldn't have the skills to control it and would be better in the sports car. Does that mean that the F1 is no longer the better car? No, clearly the F1 is still better overall it's just that the average driver can't take advantage of it, the sports car is better for them, but not the better car.

Do I have hard stats on which players use LRMs and what their stats are? No. What I do have is examples of competitive matches which demonstrate why LRMs aren't a good weapon. The same principles don't go away in solo queue. They may be harder to see, but they still apply.

On a more anecdotal front I've played a lot of matches and I've played with/against a lot of good/top players in the game. I know that the vast majority of them don't use LRMs and consider them to be a bad weapon. Jman is probably the only player I could name who I would consider notable and who actually uses LRMs in any sort of serious fashion. While this is indirect I think the burden of proof is on those stating that LRMs are good when the conventional wisdom is that they are not and the evidence that I can see points to this being true.

As BC said, LRMs are functional, but they aren't good weapons.

[Kroete]

Xiphias, on 15 March 2018 - 01:22 PM, said:

Consider the case of a formula one car vs. a high end sports car. Which car is a better racer? Obviously (on a track) the F1 car is far better and will easily beat a sports car. However, if you were to put an average driver in an F1 car they likely wouldn't have the skills to control it and would be better in the sports car. Does that mean that the F1 is no longer the better car? No, clearly the F1 is still better overall it's just that the average driver can't take advantage of it, the sports car is better for them, but not the better car.

Depends on the races?
Lets do a f1 car, a highend sports car and an old unimog the paris/dakar race.
I think, the unimog will win with its 80kph.
Will the f1 be better at nascar then the sports car?

Xiphias, on 15 March 2018 - 01:22 PM, said:

I'm not sure what you're arguing here. Are you trying to say that LRMs are a good weapon in the middle of the bell curve, but not at the top of the bell curve? E.g. if you are an average player fighting average players you are better off using LRMs than meta weapons?

If a weapon is bad against the 5-10% top players, they must not be bad against the other 90% and they can be also op against the lowest 5-10%.
Thats why saying lrms are bad is as false as saying they are op, they are both, they can be both, if you consider the circumstances.

But in the big picture the cant be bad or op, if they are good or at least average in the average play and thats why i want evidence that they are bad in the average play if someone claims they are bad, because that is what matters.
Not the opinion of the specialsnowflakes in the upper/lower 5-10%.
For that we have the new players and compplay sections of the forum.

[Brain Cancer]

Burke IV, on 15 March 2018 - 01:18 PM, said:

I forgot to mention ammo. Doublling LRM ammo values would help out alot. Whats the point in excluding LRMs from the last third of the game.

It'd basically save a few tons, as I already built things with a full game in mind. If you're running dry, you're shooting too many tubes and not enough ammo to feed them.

[roekenny]

Kroete, on 15 March 2018 - 02:25 PM, said:

But in the big picture the cant be bad or op, if they are good or at least average in the average play and thats why i want evidence that they are bad in the average play if someone claims they are bad, because that is what matters.
Not the opinion of the specialsnowflakes in the upper/lower 5-10%.
For that we have the new players and compplay sections of the forum.

Stop trying to deflect the discussion by saying wrong part of the forum as shows how weak your argument is.

I just posted the raw stats of the dam things and be it damage per ton heat per second or dps they are bottom of the missile group or bottom on weapons what do the same damage. So tell how is a weapon good if it is statistically proven to be a piece of **** in every regard with just numbers alone not including the rng nature of what those missiles hit?

*edited in to hammer a nail in this coffin once and for all*

Or to put it a better way why would I use LRMS when if I poke for just a moment as long as I'm 500 mtrs away I have the potential to do over 100+ damage into someones center mass with any of the following combos (2x MRM 30 + 1 uac20), (2x MRM 40 + 6 med las), (6x MRM 20) (4x AMT 12 3x MPL) or if get a bit closer 3x SRM6 + 10 HSL on a storm crow? And are many viable 80+ builds and can get lights what do 72 (I love my jenner ICC when have a MG buddy with me.) May notice a LOT of missiles in that list yet for some reason there is one system (minus rockets as well rockets) missing from those combos why is that?
On that note best pure LRM mech seen can do is 80 but goes 41pkh and no backup weapons and good at long range, but again why use that when better faster and stronger builds what good at ALL ranges

Bare in mind fun is not the same as good.

Edited by roekenny, 15 March 2018 - 04:53 PM.