478 replies to this topic

[Prototelis]

^ Prove the King Crab and Atlas have sufficiently disparate amounts of surface area.

[Nightbird]

Dimento Graven, on 22 January 2020 - 03:40 PM, said:

I think you're intentionally missing the points I've made.

However, I'll break it down:

1. Not every 'mech in this game is a Commando, or an Atlas.
2. There are 'mechs with more surface area than the Atlas.
3. There are 'mechs with smaller surface area than the Commando.
4. A flat 4 to 1 ratio doesn't work.
5. Even at the current 4 to 1 armor ratio, assaults are effectively less armored than lights due to lack of speed and the hit box size differences and how damage is registered and applied in game.

I notice it at least 4 or 5 times a night, say, once an hour, at least.

Set up some actual rules and logic around knockdowns, what 'little' warping there is (and again even at its worst it was minimal, with minimal shifts) and in the end there probably wouldn't be that much more of a difference.

Either assaults are correctly armored, as we are using surface area scaling now, or they're under armored, because volumetric scaling has assaults be much smaller. You can't have it both ways.

Edited by Nightbird, 22 January 2020 - 03:42 PM.

[Dimento Graven]

Prototelis, on 22 January 2020 - 03:40 PM, said:

^ Prove the King Crab and Atlas have sufficiently disparate amounts of surface area.

The shape for one thing. The Atlas may have an upper and lower CT torso area, however the KGC has a front CT, TOP CT, and UNDERSIDE CT area.

The front CT can literally very easily be hit from being positioned slightly above and behind it.

Nightbird, on 22 January 2020 - 03:42 PM, said:

Either assaults are correctly armored, as we are using surface area scaling now, or they're under armored, because volumetric scaling has assaults be much smaller. You can't have it both ways.

Surface area is the starting point, and needs to account for each individual 'mech's actual surface area, as well as additional factors added to the formula to account for how hit registration/damage is applied.

[Prototelis]

Dimento Graven, on 22 January 2020 - 03:49 PM, said:

The shape for one thing. The Atlas may have an upper and lower CT torso area, however the KGC has a front CT, TOP CT, and UNDERSIDE CT area.

So you don't actually know lol

[Nightbird]

Dimento Graven, on 22 January 2020 - 03:49 PM, said:

Surface area is the starting point, and needs to account for each individual 'mech's actual surface area, as well as additional factors added to the formula to account for how hit registration/damage is applied.

And after such adjustments, would assaults be smaller?

[dario03]

Dimento Graven, on 22 January 2020 - 02:56 PM, said:

While I agree that quite a few people don't shoot at lights, I do disagree with labeling them as "low priority targets".

I do see part of what you're saying in my matches. It's frustrating as heck watching some potato chase after some weaponless medium/large, all the while they're being shot in the *** by a light 'mech.

I do not count light 'mechs as 'low priority' though. If there's an assault that's not firing at me, and light that is, or is attempting to move around me, I will prioritize on the light, since he's allowed to leg hump with impunity I want to encourage him to stay as far out from me as possible.

As far as lights being "low performers" that's only on the alpha side of the scale. With boatable MG's and microlasers, there's a few builds that have higher sustained DPS's than any assault.

Even then, I'd wager you take an Atlas, give it the exact same speed, movement, and weapons profile as an MG/micro laser boating light, and the Atlas would STILL be significantly easier to kill just because of the extreme difference in hit box sizes.

Ok if we went through and asked people what mechs they prioritize I'm sure "the mech that is shooting me" will be at the top of most peoples list. But if 2 enemies come around a corner and start shooting a friendly, the bigger mech will more often than not be the priority.

And even if we look at specifics like something like a Piranha with its high sustained dps it only gets that by giving up a lot of things like range, armor, possibly ammo count. Sure you could strip all the armor and run a 12hmg 3micropulse build but you would only get a few tons of ammo and even then I'm pretty sure you could still build a few assaults that would out sustained dps it while still having most of their armor and more ammo. Not to mention that infinite sustainable dps is only one part of firepower.
But more importantly when I said assaults are more powerful I didn't mean alpha or sustained dps, I meant just higher performing overall. For instance how they have basically always had the highest average match score. The thing that in the end actually matters.

[Nightbird]

Nightbird, on 22 January 2020 - 03:51 PM, said:

And after such adjustments, would assaults be smaller?

Since Dimento didn't reply, I'm gonna TL:DR the duscussion

Surface area scaling: big assaults with paper armor, also what we have today
Volume scaling: small assault with tanky armor

Dimento complained that assaults were too weak, but also wanted surface area scaling, a contradiction


Finally, you guys discussing lights and hit reg, always ask for a video. 99% of the time, hit reg is failure to put crosshair over mech. Also, move it to another thread. Thank you

[Brauer]

Assaults are the top performers, so buffing them is.....questionable.

[Nightbird]

Brauer, on 22 January 2020 - 05:00 PM, said:

Assaults are the top performers, so buffing them is.....questionable.

Some of them are top performers, many are trash tier. For the top performers with super high mounts, I will start another thread soon about agility and physics so please look forward to it.

[Brauer]

Nightbird, on 22 January 2020 - 05:02 PM, said:

Some of them are top performers, many are trash tier. For the top performers with super high mounts, I will start another thread soon about agility and physics so please look forward to it.

I don't really care about physics, I care about game balance and mechanics. If that meshes well with physics that's great.

[Dimento Graven]

Nightbird, on 22 January 2020 - 03:51 PM, said:

And after such adjustments, would assaults be smaller?

Not necessarily, but some Assaults would end up with more armor to compensate for the hit box profiles.

If we decide the Atlas's armor as the "starting point" for 100 ton 'mechs (and I'm not saying that it's currently a good starting point, but using it as an example), then mechs like the Awesome, KGC, Corsair, and 'mechs like them might end up with higher armor values to compensate for the 'extra hittable' hit boxes.

Edit: None of this requires the sizes/scaling of 'mechs to be changed, just values in the XML files...

Edited by Dimento Graven, 22 January 2020 - 09:11 PM.

[Dimento Graven]

Nightbird, on 22 January 2020 - 04:50 PM, said:

Since Dimento didn't reply, I'm gonna TL:DR the duscussion

I'm not sitting here 100% of the time waiting with bated breath for your replies...

Had to stop to do RL things and then start my stream...

Quote

Dimento complained that assaults were too weak, but also wanted surface area scaling, a contradiction

Surface area scaling is the starting point, and you have to do it to the actual in game 'surface area' so that 'mechs with larger CT's, with more surface area end up with more armor, to balance performance.

Quote

Finally, you guys discussing lights and hit reg, always ask for a video. 99% of the time, hit reg is failure to put crosshair over mech. Also, move it to another thread. Thank you

I now submit them, direct to PGI. Every f'ing time I've posted vids in forums that CLEARLY show a problem, the white knights come out and start saying "very round thing in front of you is NOT a circle, it is a triangle", basically lying every way possible to deny, deny, deny...

It's obfuscating BS like that is why it took so long to get 'mechs with very broken hit boxes (ala: Spider) looked at and fixed.

Sure enough nearly 24 months after release it was largely fixed so that **** wasn't always flying through it.

[Prototelis]

lol

[KhanBhacKeD]

Nightbird, on 22 January 2020 - 01:29 PM, said:

Nan it's surface area scaling then their judgement.

I mean so they just lie when when they say they use cubic measurement at start...

https://mwomercs.com...-1473-21jun2016

PS : remember they put their judgment in so technically that just altered the result on some. Mechs. Plus they just use non uniform rescale on some parts. So everything still volume based when I read that patchnote.

Or maybe I misunderstood your point.

Edited by KhanBhacKeD, 22 January 2020 - 09:40 PM.

[Nightbird]

KhanBhacKeD, on 22 January 2020 - 09:38 PM, said:

Or maybe I misunderstood your point.

It was tongue in cheek... I didn't want to say they're either don't know math or are lying, because no adjustment can make them so wrong lol

[Nightbird]

Dimento Graven, on 22 January 2020 - 09:09 PM, said:

Edit: None of this requires the sizes/scaling of 'mechs to be changed, just values in the XML files...

Surface area scaling is the starting point, and you have to do it to the actual in game 'surface area' so that 'mechs with larger CT's, with more surface area end up with more armor, to balance performance.

Atlas already gets 25% bonus free armor, balance achieved? Or still trash?

Edited by Nightbird, 22 January 2020 - 10:01 PM.

[KhanBhacKeD]

Nightbird, on 22 January 2020 - 09:58 PM, said:

Atlas already gets 25% bonus free armor, balance achieved? Or still trash?

Trash cause engine desynch!?

I mean imo pretty sure that hurted the atlas more than rescale. But not the place to discuss that.

@dimento : yeah Plz give moar armor according to surface Plz buff my whale ct and side armor. Wait a minute 20% of zero for side still give zero... Damn...
I mean here I'm agreeing with Nightbird demanding a surface scaling armor is just not going to save the atlas is main problem is not cause of surface it's cause of hitboxes... Just like fafnir for exemple.

You can give him 50 more armor ct some players will continue to drill your CT from every angles
Same goes for kgc.

Edited by KhanBhacKeD, 22 January 2020 - 10:25 PM.

[ShiverMeRivets]

Brauer, on 22 January 2020 - 05:00 PM, said:

Assaults are the top performers, so buffing them is.....questionable.

People keep repeating that. This is because assaults throw out more damage, not because they actually achieve more. Assults are also the main providers of score for the enemy. It typically takes somewhere in the range 600–800 damage before an assults is destroyed in QP. You can’t do that kind of damage to a light mech. This means that everyone light and heavy are shooting the fat mechs and harvest their damage scores from them - assault shooting assault will harvest more damage than a light shooting assault. Also keep in mind that assults tend to carry a lot of splat weapons while lights carry pinpoint weapons, so assaults strip a lot of amor from other assaults needlessly - good for score, but ineffective.

Lights are also a lot more survivable than many of those that pilot them care to admit. Sure they cannot take a lot of hits, but then again they don’t take a lot of hits, and those they do take are randomly distributed over their tiny components. Their pilots only remember that dual heavy gauss hit they took 50 games ago. 1 assault vs. 4 enemies in open ground, the assault with all its armor will not last 10 seconds. 1 20/25 tonner vs. 4 enemies usually takes a lot longer to kill it, and it has a good chance to disengage entirely and drag the game for long minutes - this is the typical ending of most QP games that end with “hunt the locust/flee/commando/piranah/etc”. The little bugger can even win when the enemies are already open, which attests to a great skill by the light pilot, but also shows that the light is not so easy to kill - and even in such a game the face-value damage statistics will tend to favor the assaults that did random damage and died 8 minutes ago.

[_Magno_]

Nightbird, its a nice discussion, but as an engineer who has worked on vehicles, missles, satelites, planes and construction equipment, the assumption of uniform density is very simplistic.

Your volumetric comparison relies more on uniform integration of structure, components, hydraulics, armor, etc..

Which easily is not going to be the case. Each Mech is designed with different objectives in mind; speed, firepower, armor, etc..
Profile and silhouette are also a big design consideration.

Known as attribute or parameter balancing. With assaults, you're not often favoring small profile, you're favoring armor and firepower and heat efficiency. The return on maximizing those attributes are easier to obtain rather than forcing a bad integration.

So the way the structure is composed, the engine laid out, and integrated can easily and often provide for strange negative spaces inside the mechs. This in turn will affect volume.

On the small mechs, the objective is to accommodate speed, profile, etc.. So the designers will place more effort in compacting the design.

[Brauer]

ShiverMeRivets, on 23 January 2020 - 01:09 AM, said:

People keep repeating that. This is because assaults throw out more damage, not because they actually achieve more. Assults are also the main providers of score for the enemy. It typically takes somewhere in the range 600–800 damage before an assults is destroyed in QP. You can’t do that kind of damage to a light mech. This means that everyone light and heavy are shooting the fat mechs and harvest their damage scores from them - assault shooting assault will harvest more damage than a light shooting assault. Also keep in mind that assults tend to carry a lot of splat weapons while lights carry pinpoint weapons, so assaults strip a lot of amor from other assaults needlessly - good for score, but ineffective.

Lights are also a lot more survivable than many of those that pilot them care to admit. Sure they cannot take a lot of hits, but then again they don’t take a lot of hits, and those they do take are randomly distributed over their tiny components. Their pilots only remember that dual heavy gauss hit they took 50 games ago. 1 assault vs. 4 enemies in open ground, the assault with all its armor will not last 10 seconds. 1 20/25 tonner vs. 4 enemies usually takes a lot longer to kill it, and it has a good chance to disengage entirely and drag the game for long minutes - this is the typical ending of most QP games that end with “hunt the locust/flee/commando/piranah/etc”. The little bugger can even win when the enemies are already open, which attests to a great skill by the light pilot, but also shows that the light is not so easy to kill - and even in such a game the face-value damage statistics will tend to favor the assaults that did random damage and died 8 minutes ago.

I mostly played assaults in MWOWCS, I am fairly familiar with the class.

The idea that they mostly carry sandblasting weapons seems pretty misguided to me. It's super easy to drill CTs with IS uacs, which lots of assaults use, for example. Assaults give a much more stable gun platform, so placing shots is generally easier. Particularly since you aren't typically gonna be one-shot by just about any mech in the game because you stood still for a moment.

Assaults also often run DHG builds built around precise pinpoint. Sandblasting assaults, say LBX10 builds, or those big mrm/lbs builds either deliver awesome dps which wrecks mechs really fast, or can provide such a high alpha (like 90-120 damage) that they are effective despite a lack of precision and can kill other assaults in only a couple of shots.

When I say assaults are top performers I mean they are the easiest class to rack up damage and kills in. It's a heck of a lot harder to drop 1000 damage in a light than an assault. This is why people generally focus assaults, they are typically the highest threat targets available.

I am not saying lights are garbage, which seems to be what you are implying I argued. I don't have a problem with lighter and faster mechs being able to kite and win a match if played skillfully. In fact the win seems like a good reward for the performance there. I also think you should consider that in the same situation an assault might be able to just solo the 4 damaged mechs, and the fact that a light has a lower chance of doing that is why it must kite and use it's speed and evasion to try to win.