845 replies to this topic

[SilentScreamer]

Tarl Cabot, on 19 August 2018 - 08:57 AM, said:

Just to note, PGI tried buffing IS with quirks :) then reduced most of the quirks to a sliver.. Though to be fair, Chris wasnt working for them at the time and several of their decisions had plagued us for awhile.

Having the meta change with every quirk pass was annoying, though it created some interesting dropdecks. Thunderbolts with ERPPCs at half heat reduction and locusts/commandos with 50% range boosts to ER Large Lasers. As others have said, this practice was a band-aid fix which made specific builds on specific mechs viable.

Tarl Cabot, on 19 August 2018 - 08:57 AM, said:

Lets be fair. What if PGI had started off with Clan base instead of IS base, would they have tripled the armor instead of doubling it after slashing the cooldowns? Then when PGI added IS base, would the isXL have been setup to destroy an IS with the loss of one side torso?

I believe the flaw in tech base balance is that PGI still believes 1 ton Clan should equal 1 ton IS. Leting go of that preconception would help MWO.

[Stealth Fox]

I'm not sure if any one has said this already, I'm not reading through 41 pages of venom and dislike to PGI not being able to get their own dang game right, but here's my suggestion.

You wanna stop high alphas? You gotta stop it on both sides. Here is how you do that and let us still play in a fun and engaging style.

Cut the heat scale in half and then increase heat dissipation by double or about that. You wanna high damage alpha? Sure, but you only get to do it once and then you need to wait for your heat to drain all the way before you can do it again.. or guess what, you're going to shut down or explode. Tough nuts, Alphas are suppose to be last ditch hail Mary's not the standard Game play.

Kill ghost heat. Blanket Nerfs are like mass punishment, It never actually works, it only makes people either hate the one who is screwing up.. or ..if the one screwing up is not a person or the person is trying their best.. the one giving out the punishment. Why should my mech be punished for what some other different mech is doing? It's not fair, it sucks, and it never works the way you think it will.

Bring back mech agility. Why can't we mitigate the High damage alpha? because we can't torso twist for crap any more. this makes Assaults NOT able to do duel heavy Gauss pretty dang worthless. And PLEASE.. make hill climbing not such a pain in the butt. I have a Mech, this mech has legs.. why can't I just STEP UP OVER stuff instead of needing some bull crap running start?

Next.. when you have a high heat? Slow down the mech. If my mech is running at 80 percent heat? It shouldn't be running totes ok. It should be feeling slow, sluggish, burdened by the fact that I'm RUNNING HOT. The cooler your mech, the better you run. make it so Mechs start suffering performance issues at say.. 65.. 70 percent heat. "Run Hot Or Die" use to mean "get good at the disadvantages your mech will suffer when running hot to keep the fire on" Not "Just run hot with no reason or fear to not do so."

Shorten Clan Laser duration for the love of God! This faction is suppose to be built around one on one dueling with laser and AC knife fights and they currently SUCK at that. When you run into an IS assault with two heavy Gauss, you may as well just put down the mouse and keyboard and give up, you CAN'T Chew through all that armor before they rip off your side torso. They get in, They brawl, they have to keep their heat down, they can't high alpha poke 3 times in a row, it will be better.

Make the Clan ACs .. you know. .. good? At least somewhat good? Clans as they have it already have the easiest to counter ACs, Missiles, and Gauss. The ONLY thing they have going for them is their year long duration lasers.

Also you might want to think about how convergence in this game is bull crap. Every weapon on my body should not be able to pin point focus on a mech that is super close to me. yeah, ok , sure, have them focus in somewhat, but not to the extent they do. Arms focusing in is fine, but not to the extent that they are all hitting the exact same spot. That would allow people to have damage spread to other areas and increase TTK with out nerfing all the things. And a mech should not be able to focus everything onto one component in the exact same spot at 50 meters in, That's some bull crap.

In short, We get it, you hate Clans. I'm sorry they ruined your table top game way back in the day, but you have to be more responsible than this. A lot of us came into the game from MW2, and thus love the clans, you're making that entire section not want to play when you hit us over the head with the "Don't have fun" bat because you can't figure out how to get this to work like MW3 or 4 did.

We already don't have Clans in MW5. Throw us a bone here.

[Cy Mitchell]

@ Chris: Are there any thoughts, data, conclusions, next phases or future plans that you would like to share with us as a result of the five PTS sessions that we participated in?

[Tarl Cabot]

Rampage, on 07 September 2018 - 11:58 AM, said:

@ Chris: Are there any thoughts, data, conclusions, next phases or future plans that you would like to share with us as a result of the five PTS sessions that we participated in?

https://mwomercs.com...ts-and-roadmap/

[Sable Dove]

The problem is not so much big numbers as big numbers that all go to one point. Which is to say pinpoint alphas.

60 damage hurts. 60 damage to one component is capable of killing or crippling mechs in one or two shots.

I've seen maybe two Hunchbacks in the last 6 months. Their main issue being that 90% of their weaponry is in one component, and even with armour and structure quirks, assaults and heavies can easily disable them in two shots from medium range. Even a modest pinpoint alpha of 30 will strip them in 2 hits, at which point a quarter of a second from a Piranha or other MG-boat light will just destroy all of their weapons.

Bringing clan alphas down to 60 will do virtually nothing to fix the pinpoint alpha problem if nothing is done to address the pinpoint aspect.

Since there's an unhealthy attachment to high-damage alphas, and an equally-unhealthy attachment to firing all of your weapons at once, the only thing left to change is the pinpoint aspect.

Getting rid of torso- and head-weapon convergence would be a start. Other possibilities include degrading accuracy based on heat, or just plain less-than-perfectly-accurate weapons. Of course, neither of these alternatives is very popular.

Honestly, I'm not sure how MWO will ever be improved if certain arbitrary aspects are sacrosanct. Can't have a low heat cap, can't have chainfire be useful, can't require more than one weapon group, can't restrict alphas below 60 damage, can't have any sort of inaccuracy because it's too luck-based (but random bonus damage crits are fine somehow).

How is MWO going to improve when everything that holds it back is apparently written in stone?

[Thorqemada]

You assume that all People want MWO to improve...some do...some simply want to secure the way to play they have become used to...some simply want to secure their place in the foodchain…some want simply to oppose...some simply want what they are told from their superiors/Influencers/peers should be wanted...etc.

That is why in the end the developer has to take very carefully anything said from any side even from the own devteam into big picture consideration and gameplay target consideration with someone at the helm that is intimate with the underlying gameplay mechanics and origins but open minded to ensure the Interpretation of the rules lead to a progressive but consistent gameply experience feeling true bot not slavishly following to a given lore.

Edited by Thorqemada, 09 September 2018 - 11:25 PM.

[Tiamat of the Sea]

I'm actually going to weigh in in brief this time- I know, it's not like me, usually when I speak I speak a lot, but...

Given that the majority of the problem here is laser-based high-heat alphas (with Gauss generally popping up only when there's spare tonnage after installing said heat-centric alpha), several+ indicators that a big issue is high heat capacities and powerful Cool Shots allowing rapidfire use of alpha strikes, I'm going to dip into the tabletop for a concept- but not necessarily for its execution- much like others have.

Put in penalties for having high heat percentage.

As things stand currently, riding the high end of the heat curve simply doesn't hurt enough to matter. Tiny amounts of structure damage from using shutdown override are simply not enough of a drawback to reduce the use of override to function at 101% heat (or brief spikes beyond that), and the only penalty for running less hot than that is having to wait a little. If you have a big heat spike but don't end up beyond 100% heat cap, there's no penalty at all.

Given alpha strikes and the fact that they're the largest impactor here, it would make more sense to put in some kind of increasing penalty for being over, say, 50% heat. Tabletop uses chances to explode ammo, reduced aim (equated by reduced twist/arm speed in MWO), and reduced speed. Mechwarrior 2 and 3 used partial disintegration of the UI, most notably including the minimap and paperdolls.

You are demonstrably able to apply dynamic (or sufficiently small-stepped to appear dynamic) hindrances- demonstrated by the slowdown caused by 'mechs ascending slopes- so use that. Make heat matter at values below 100%. That will achieve a lot.

[Y E O N N E]

Quickdraw Crobat, on 15 September 2018 - 10:46 AM, said:

Make heat matter at values below 100%. That will achieve a lot.

Nah, it'll just make whatever percentage below 100 that has a tactically untenable penalty become a soft maximum, and the results will be the same as if you had just lowered the cap outright.

KISS.

[justcallme A S H]

Yeonne Greene, on 16 September 2018 - 06:13 PM, said:

Nah, it'll just make whatever percentage below 100 that has a tactically untenable penalty become a soft maximum, and the results will be the same as if you had just lowered the cap outright.

KISS.

100%.

Adding more complexity to a game that already has a very steep learning curve?

No thanks... And that is coming from someone who has learnt it all, even if the excecution lacks at times.

[Reno Blade]

On the other hand, if the heat penalties are gradual instead of binary at the 100% mark, the whole system feels more fluent, softer, more forgiving...

Yes, it would be a soft-cap where you have your sweet spot where you feel you have a great blend of agility and dps/alpha.
You could get much more risk-vs-reward feeling than the binary shutdown-and-die we have now.

And the best part: this would allow (and even require to some degree) to buff agility for all mechs, so that the penalties can be distributed more evenly and have some meaningful difference between the 50% heat and 90% heat effects.

I think that a large heat scale with the soft penalty distribution feels more natural than a very short one (e.g. 40cap of PTS2.0)

[Tiamat of the Sea]

Yeonne Greene, on 16 September 2018 - 06:13 PM, said:

Nah, it'll just make whatever percentage below 100 that has a tactically untenable penalty become a soft maximum, and the results will be the same as if you had just lowered the cap outright.

KISS.

I'm not sure whether to say "exactly" or "no, you don't get it".

Let's say we want to go with a speed/agility penalty only. If you've got a stepped penalty set- say -5% speed/turnspeed/armspeed/torsospeed per 10% heat over 50%, or -1% per 2% heat over 50%, depending on how small a step is considered acceptable.

Where's the untenable point? First of all, that's going to change based on the build and the player, because different players are going to consider different degrees of loss untenable, and different builds will have different engine sizes. Second of all, that's going to change depending on the situation, so that soft cap isn't going to be the same as lowering the hard cap- as Reno has pointed out. Third and lastly, yes in some regards it would be the same as lowering the cap outright, which is in many of those ways very much what we need.

For whatever reason PGI has hard-committed to having increased heat sinks increase capacity and dissipation rather than just dissipation, which is part (most) of why operating at very high heats and alpha-striking regularly is even viable. So any attempt to solve the issue is going to have to accept that fact to some degree and attempt to work with/around it. Creating a soft-cap that's below the hard-cap is probably the simplest way to do so without actually removing the scaling from the hard cap.

It's kind of like the skill tree- like it or not, PGI has hard-committed to having a set of large skill shrubs with lots of nodes for lots of gradation and customizability at the expense of simplicity, so any changes to the skill system proposed need to work with that fact, and that can include things like changing the values of nodes or adding or removing individual nodes, but a complete overhaul of the core tenets of the system is basically not on the table. In this case, it's vanishingly unlikely that a change to the shutdown/damage hard-cap being a ) high and b ) based on heat sink quantity is going to happen, especially after PGI's response to PTS 2.0, so a solution has to work with that, and a soft cap below the hard cap with a percentage-based penalty does that.

Edited by Quickdraw Crobat, 18 September 2018 - 07:28 AM.

[Tesunie]

Quickdraw Crobat, on 18 September 2018 - 07:26 AM, said:

I'm not sure whether to say "exactly" or "no, you don't get it".

It's very much like LRMs or PPCs (i'll stick to LRMs for more recent game mechanic). With LRMs, you have two classes, Clan and IS (go figure). On average, Clan are considered better because they have no hard minimum range, but instead a soft minimum range. Even if they drop their damage quickly, and have a place where they become "untenable"after a certain range inside their minimum, it's still considered better than IS LRMs (in short range regards). Being able to cause some damage is better than no damage at all. I've taken out targets at near point blank, where I know my CLRMs aren't doing squat for damage, because they where so badly damaged.

A soft heat cap penalty will open up a similar scale for people. Hitting agility and movement speeds would be good as you get hotter. Even if there is a point where the stacked penalties might be considered "too punishing" once you hit there (thus reducing the "effective" heat cap), it would create more dynamic heat scale than we have now. People could, just like with CLRMs minimum range, go over that heat sweet spot for a risk/reward situation. OR they could choose to "play it safe" and attempt to make builds that never leave the sweet spot of the heat scale.

There is potential with the heat scale penalty system, depending upon how it is done and how it can be used/abused. Is it better than other ideas? Just like with any concepts, there are pros and cons. It's a matter of if the pros out weigh the cons.

[Y E O N N E]

Quickdraw Crobat, on 18 September 2018 - 07:26 AM, said:

I'm not sure whether to say "exactly" or "no, you don't get it".

I can't answer that for you, but have you considered the mirror in front of you? Like, really study the system, because you don't appear to fathom the intricacies between how it works mechanically and how that fits into the way the game must be played. The key takeaway is that people tend to, on the aggregate, make the simplest and most effective choices. That means the heat penalties are basically going to be treated as "DO NOT CROSS" lines.

Quote

Let's say we want to go with a speed/agility penalty only. If you've got a stepped penalty set- say -5% speed/turnspeed/armspeed/torsospeed per 10% heat over 50%, or -1% per 2% heat over 50%, depending on how small a step is considered acceptable.

It's not as dynamic as you think it is. Big slow 'Mechs don't lose much with that scalar, so they will probably keep their alphas to around 75-80%.

Fast Lights lose a lot more, so they are going to try and keep it to 50-65%.

The irony is that your theoretical system is having the exact opposite of the desired effect of this thread: big alphas tend to not exceed 80% anyway and they cool off so fast (at least Clan, IS to a lesser extent) that you don't remain slowed for long; that accel and decel is along a curve (AKA they are faster initially and slow down as your speed increases) only serves to make the penalty all the more irrelevant. It's the small alphas on the small 'Mechs (or the bigger, DPS-oriented 'Mechs...or IS 'Mechs in general) that cool-off slowly that are going to really hurt. This is true regardless of how well your DHS dissipate or how large your heat cap is.

And all of that brings up the next point: you have to make those penalties even stiffer if you really want them to mean anything, which makes determining what's "tenable" even easier.

Edited by Yeonne Greene, 18 September 2018 - 01:38 PM.

[Tiamat of the Sea]

Tesunie, on 18 September 2018 - 07:48 AM, said:

There is potential with the heat scale penalty system, depending upon how it is done and how it can be used/abused. Is it better than other ideas? Just like with any concepts, there are pros and cons. It's a matter of if the pros out weigh the cons.

True enough- personally, I'll always take the more dynamic version because it allows for and in some ways encourages more variation.

Yeonne Greene, on 18 September 2018 - 01:33 PM, said:

argument based specifically on the value of mobility reductions

You.... seem to have stepped around what I was trying to say? Or I miscommunicated? Not sure which.

What I was trying to say is probably better encapsulated with this:

If the penalties are graded, increasing with point on the heat scale, what an individual's threshhold will be will vary based on the individual and situation, not just the build.

What the exact penalties are was not the point of what I was saying, and I'm sorry that I used that example in a way that mislead you as to what part I actually considered important. I was using mobility as an example, because I know that that's something I've seen vary a lot in valuation from one pilot to another.

Internal damage from overheating could work just as well- the example there that immediately springs to mind is myself vs. Baradul, just because I've watched a lot of his videos lately. Bara runs in overheat large portions of the time (and fairly deeply at that), and frequently runs 'mechs with heat load to sinking proportions I would never consider, because I rarely run into situations where I feel willing to sacrifice any real amount of durability to squeeze out a little extra damage when I could instead evade/enter cover and cool off for a bit. Given that the rate of internal damage for being overheated currently is scalar, to the amount of heat beyond cap, this works as an example in a similar vein to what I was saying before- the issue being that that scale starts being triggered much too late to matter in the way we need it to to mitigate repeat-alpha-striking.


Addendum: Furthermore, if what you purport (that most people will make the simplest choice and just agree on a single 'do not cross' heat line) is true (and this seems plausible, if not likely), the net result still winds up being less powerful and/or less frequent alpha strikes, so goal accomplished?

Which is why I wasn't sure to whether to say 'you don't get it' or 'exactly', because the result is in any individual case either a more nuanced methodology (which you seem to either be dismissing or expecting to be in the minority) or a flat out reduced frequency/strength of alpha strike (which you are highlighting), both of which achieve the intended result?

Edited by Quickdraw Crobat, 18 September 2018 - 05:13 PM.

[Quicksilver Aberration]

Quickdraw Crobat, on 18 September 2018 - 04:59 PM, said:

If the penalties are graded, increasing with point on the heat scale, what an individual's threshhold will be will vary based on the individual and situation, not just the build.

What you didn't seem to get from his post is that's not how it will work in practice. All heat penalties are is soft caps on heat. At some point there is a penalty that is simply to risky to go over so it is treated as shutdowns are, in other words: something you should avoid at all times. At a certain point the cost outweighs the benefit.

Hell, MW4 had heat penalties and a low cap yet it didn't stop 7 ERLL Nova Cats from dominating the game or ninja ERLL SCat/Ryo teams from picking apart opponents.

Either way, it doesn't do anything a lower actual cap can't do outside of maybe add some "immersion" which really could just be visual effects for all I care.

Edited by Quicksilver Kalasa, 18 September 2018 - 05:23 PM.

[Tiamat of the Sea]

Quicksilver Kalasa, on 18 September 2018 - 05:04 PM, said:

What you didn't seem to get from his post is that's not how it will work in practice. All heat penalties are is soft caps on heat. At some point there is a penalty that is simply to risky to go over so it is treated as shutdowns are, in other words: something you should avoid at all times. At a certain point the cost outweighs the benefit.

No, I get that. I don't expect variation on that point to be more frequent than people picking a standard- but a sliding scale of effects encourages that variation to be more frequent than it is currently. Any more frequent is better than no more frequent in this case.

Quicksilver Kalasa, on 18 September 2018 - 05:04 PM, said:

Hell, MW4 had heat penalties and a low cap yet it didn't stop 7 ERLL Nova Cats from dominating the game or ninja ERLL SCat/Ryo teams from picking apart opponents.

I wasn't in a position to ever play MW4 until after MWO was released, so I wouldn't know that. I do have to ask, though, why was that a thing in MW4 and isn't now? It's not as though you couldn't mount a squillion ERLL and heat sinks on a Nova Cat currently. And you definitely could still equip a bunch of SCats and Ryoken with ERLL right now and run them together in a similar situation. So why isn't that dominant currently?

Quicksilver Kalasa, on 18 September 2018 - 05:04 PM, said:

Either way, it doesn't do anything a lower actual cap can't do outside of maybe add some "immersion" which really could just be visual effects for all I care.

It permits more variation than a straight-up lowered shutdown cap can, because there's varying tradeoffs rather than just a point where if you go over it you're completely turned off for a while. Per what I was saying about the override and structural damage currently. It's readily apparent right now that different people vary on how acceptable they find different amounts of structural damage from overheating, even if they are using copy-paste builds, so even though there's lots of use of shutdown override, how long any given pilot spends actually using that and how much damage they take from it varies.

Edited by Quickdraw Crobat, 18 September 2018 - 06:41 PM.

[Y E O N N E]

Quickdraw Crobat, on 18 September 2018 - 04:59 PM, said:

If the penalties are graded, increasing with point on the heat scale, what an individual's threshhold will be will vary based on the individual and situation, not just the build.

Not really; there will be good pilots who understand and bad pilots who don't. The penalty will be treated like we treat override now; only doomed pilots will ever really feel the effects, doomed because they are going out swinging as the last man standing or doomed because they didn't really know what they were doing anyway.

Quote

What the exact penalties are was not the point of what I was saying, and I'm sorry that I used that example in a way that mislead you as to what part I actually considered important. I was using mobility as an example, because I know that that's something I've seen vary a lot in valuation from one pilot to another.

The penalty has to be to an attribute crucial to performance, or it won't matter. The penalty also has to be more than token, or it won't matter. Like, a MAD-IIC with the October numbers is going to have a heat dissipation of 7.502 and a heat cap of 65. 80% of that is 52, 50% is 32.5; the delta is 20.5. It takes you all of 3 seconds to go from penalty to no penalty. Unless you plan on freezing the 'Mech in place, mobility won't do anything because it doesn't have far to go to get back into cover. Turning the HUD off won't matter, because it can't shoot again anyway. You can start cooking off ammo or blowing up weapons, if you want. In the end, it doesn't matter because it makes my point for me:

This alpha strike is going to get fired, and whatever penalty you place to discourage it from being fired is meaningless because of the nature of the build unless it is super strict, at which point you may as well have simply dropped the cap.

Quote

Addendum: Furthermore, if what you purport (that most people will make the simplest choice and just agree on a single 'do not cross' heat line) is true (and this seems plausible, if not likely), the net result still winds up being less powerful and/or less frequent alpha strikes, so goal accomplished?

Goal accomplished, but not through the addition of heat-scale penalties. In essence, you've just lowered the cap and then piled on a layer of coding garbage that serves no function. You've increased complexity without adding depth and the addition of depth was part of your goal, was it not?

Quote

Which is why I wasn't sure to whether to say 'you don't get it' or 'exactly', because the result is in any individual case either a more nuanced methodology (which you seem to either be dismissing or expecting to be in the minority) or a flat out reduced frequency/strength of alpha strike (which you are highlighting), both of which achieve the intended result?

The nuance is a red herring, is what I'm saying. Like I said above, there will be good pilots who figure that out and bad ones who don't. You may decrease the frequency of alpha strikes, but purely as a function of the reduced usable cap.

[Quicksilver Aberration]

Quickdraw Crobat, on 18 September 2018 - 06:40 PM, said:

I wasn't in a position to ever play MW4 until after MWO was released, so I wouldn't know that. I do have to ask, though, why was that a thing in MW4 and isn't now? It's not as though you couldn't mount a squillion ERLL and heat sinks on a Nova Cat currently. And you definitely could still equip a bunch of SCats and Ryoken with ERLL right now and run them together in a similar situation. So why isn't that dominant currently?

ERLL in MW4 were hitscan PPFLD but that's a moot point, the point was that high heat high damage loadouts were still powerful in that game too despite a lower heat cap and penalties. As Yeonne mentioned, the penalties really didn't do anything other than punish lighter mechs who couldn't mount the heat sinks to dissipate once hot and really nothing else since shutdowns were much harder to recover from in that game making them a definite hard cap.

[Holy Jackson]

I JUST WANT TO THANK PGI FOR MY 56 POINT LASER ALPHA PIRANHA! THIS CLEARLY FIXES THE LASER META!

[Sable Dove]

Hmmm. I wonder what the P in PGI stands for...

Oh.