53 replies to this topic

[Gretik]

I've recently returned to MWO and I was surprised by how seriously and personally people have taken recent and proposed changes. I can see that there are issues and that there are a wealth of conflicting ideas over how to rectify the issues. So I'll throw my two cents in, for what it's worth - I hope someone from PGI can give it a glance as I still love the game and I want to see it succeed. (Ignoring PSR and matchmaking balance, as I think the community is pretty agreed on the proposed solutions.)

The big consternation seems to be large, accurate alphas. Why not incorporate a table top mechanic that applies fairly to all 'Mech chassis, encourages less min-maxed builds and doesn't impact brawlers anywhere near as heavily as it does stand off builds?

My suggestion is a scaling accuracy debuff, proportional to your heatscale. In table you you suffer a gunnery penalty as your heat rises. This can be blamed on heat expansion warping weapon mounts, heat haze and smoke interfering with sensors and sensitive electronics struggling to cope with thermal overload.

In practice, I'd suggest this take the form of a wandering crosshair - similar to MASC but smoother and more even with larger sweeping loops rather than a seizure inducing stutter. To keep it balanced for LRM and ATM's, I'd suggest losing locks over a certain threshold and making acquiring lock take longer as heat builds up.

Gauss rifles already have an inherent inaccuracy, charge time and recoil, that can be overcome with skill. A strong but relatively predictable motion of the crosshairs would still be managed with a skilled and steady hand, but repeated high alphas at range without cooling down will become less effective.

Light and medium 'mechs that rely on hit and run, or getting into knife fighting range would be relatively unaffected as long as the crosshair sway is smaller than "Arc of 'Mech" at point blank range. Brawlers will get a better chance to close, but high heat brawlers will still suffer slightly. LRM 'mechs will just need to throttle their fire more to manage their heat.

This doesn't require a change to ghost heat. I'd also suggest allowing targeting computers to reduce crosshair sway. Encouraging tonnage to be spent on something other than more weapons.

Edited by Gretik, 31 July 2018 - 04:38 AM.

[El Bandito]

Instead of making the cursor sway like a drunkard, just make it a CoF, where heat and sustained fire can affect it. Perhaps even speed, as well.

Edited by El Bandito, 31 July 2018 - 06:22 AM.

[Gretik]

That could work, but people seemed opposed to their shots going anywhere other than their cursor pointer - so making the pointer move randomly (within an expanding cone) should satisfy both sides. Factoring speed would penalize lights too much.

[Edustaja]

Heat affected accuracy would actually encourage huge alpha peek and hide gameplay.

[process]

Edustaja, on 31 July 2018 - 06:56 AM, said:

Heat affected accuracy would actually encourage huge alpha peek and hide gameplay.

That's my feeling too, but I could see a scenario where the sway kicks in as soon as the heat increases, unlike a Gauss rifle's post-shot recoil, so that it affects lasers as they burn and is only mitigated through fire control. If the sway were kept to a constant minimum, the effect could be almost negligible at close range, sweeping over a single component, but at ranges of 500+ meters, it would sweep across most of a mech. Wouldn't do much for PPCs though.

I dunno, I don't really like these sorts of mechanics, but it's interesting to think about.

Edited by process, 31 July 2018 - 07:59 AM.

[Gretik]

It's the kind of thing that timing and good hand eye co-ordination could overcome, but it would slow down accurate firing at range at high heat, like charge slows down gauss rifles. Personally I'd be more willing to charge at a laser boat that just went full nuclear, if I knew it's aim was going to be all over the show. In the games I've played (admittedly lowish tier) hide and peek seems to be the default until a murder ball forms, or more rarely people communicate and use the dreaded teamwork to outflank and shred the enemy.

Low heat weapons would see a stealth buff, but they're often not pinpoint to start with (lbx/etc).

[Mystere]

I still say a convergence-based solution is the answer. The current automatic, near-instant, pinpoint, pixel-perfect convergence system really needs to go the way of the dodo bird.

El Bandito, on 31 July 2018 - 06:22 AM, said:

just make it a CoF

I hope you have a flak jacket on.

[Khobai]

No thanks. the poke and hide meta is bad enough already. it doesnt need to be any worse.

It makes more sense to buff brawling weapons so the reward is worth the risk.

Bringing brawling back into parity with poking/sniping would help restore the meta to a healthier state.

Mystere, on 31 July 2018 - 07:33 AM, said:

I still say a convergence-based solution is the answer. The current automatic, near-instant, pinpoint, pixel-perfect convergence system really needs to go the way of the dodo bird.

isnt that what increased beam durations on lasers does? which is exactly what PGI is doing.

all they need to do now is undo the agility nerfs. torso twisting is what allowed mechs to disperse damage across different locations. removing the ability for certain mechs to torso twist has negatively impacted the game and it needs to be undone.

Edited by Khobai, 31 July 2018 - 07:39 AM.

[Gretik]

Peeking and shooting happens at relatively close ranges too, with pinpoint brawling weapons doing better out of it than others. Peeking and hiding seems to me to be caused by the mind sets of the players and their inherent aversion to risk, increasing the DPS of close ranged weaponry won't prevent that.

[El Bandito]

Mystere, on 31 July 2018 - 07:33 AM, said:

I hope you have a flak jacket on.

MWO forums are like kindergarten to me.

[Mystere]

Khobai, on 31 July 2018 - 07:36 AM, said:

isnt that what increased beam durations on lasers does? which is exactly what PGI is doing.

all they need to do now is undo the agility nerfs. torso twisting is what allowed mechs to disperse damage across different locations. removing the ability for certain mechs to torso twist has negatively impacted the game and it needs to be undone.

It's not enough.

[Prototelis]

Might be cool if running the threshold or unleashing a huge alpha limited your mobility until you cooled some.

[Lykaon]

Edustaja, on 31 July 2018 - 06:56 AM, said:

Heat affected accuracy would actually encourage huge alpha peek and hide gameplay.

But,the hide portion allows brawlers time to close by reducing the ability for the peeker to apply repeated frequent alphas.

It may take some time for the players to adjust to having to utilize role warfare to counter specific strategies but, the logical counter to a mech that spews out a massive alpha strike but then needs to go to ground to cool off is to rapidly close with a mech that has sustained close range firepower.

Once the peeker has their cover negated by a brawler flushing them out they will no longer be playing to their strengths but forced to fight in a situation that favors a brawler.

[Gretik]

I agree with the above!

[Spheroid]

Terrible idea. You would destroy non-boating ranged builds. ER Cheetah would be worthless. Same for the Raven.

RAC-2 or UAC-2 builds would cease to be useful at the ranges they were built for.


Why invent new mechanics? Linked ghostheat does limit alphas. The problem is with those balancing it, not the mechanism.

[Gretik]

How would it significantly affect any particular build, other than making it trickier to line up laser and other weapon types with a travel time? (Especially worth noting that the effect would drop to marginsl at close to mid range.) It would apply universally to any 'Mech over a certain heat threshold. I'm not a fan of ghost heat, because I think it's an arbitrary and abstract solution to a problem that needs an analogue solution. RAC/UAC's would suffer just as much as any laser sniper and have the advantage you can just stop mid stream whenever you want, unlike a laser that you need to hold on target after you press fire or waste the heat you've built up for the shot.

Edited by Gretik, 31 July 2018 - 09:26 AM.

[Spheroid]

Your system punishes all heat. It is entirely possible to run hot with many, many builds that are nowhere near 2x HLLAS + 4x er mlas.

Why do you want to punish 2x ER LLAS? Why do you want to punish 2-4 LLAS or 2x LPLAS? I don't see the merit in that. Anything that mounted PPCs would suffer as most of the shots would miss. All PPC builds should be running hot by design.

All mechs regardless of their build should be striving for their thermal redline. You would make redlining worthless.

Edited by Spheroid, 31 July 2018 - 09:44 AM.

[Brauer]

Spheroid, on 31 July 2018 - 09:31 AM, said:

Your system punishes all heat. It is entirely possible to run hot with many, many builds that are no where near 2x HLLAS + 4x er mlas.

Why do you want to punish 2x ER LLAS? Why do you want to punish 2-4 LLAS or 2x LPLAS? I don't see the merit in that.

All mechs regardless of their build should be striving for their thermal redline. You would make redlining worthless.

In addition to this concern, and the many others raised, this idea seems like it would provide a huge incentive to run gauss rifles, particulalry if the cof/reticle movement/whatever is particularly punishing.

[Ryoken]

That heat gradually lowers the performance of a mech by reducing accuracy and movement speed is a basic mechanism to keep the firepower of battlemechs in control.

That this basic mechanism is not reflected in this game, together with the fact that one can boat weapons and pinpoint shoot them with an accuracy that does hurt the games design of seperate hitboxes makes the problems PGI is struggling with.

If we would implement a Cone of Fire as many - also very popular esport games have - this would allow for more soft/gradually increasing heat scale effects.

If we get cone of fire we could slowly reduce accuracy, movement speed and Torso/Arm speed with increasing heat scale levels. So firing one alpha would make the second alpha less effective and the third or forth even more ineffective. By this players that manage to keep heat low and do damage continously would be rewarded and still it would be viable to fire an alpha to finish off an allready wounded enemy - but it would be a gamble as the mech firing the alpha would be less capable of moving/shooting after that.

If the implementation of a cone of fire does require to much work right now PGI could alternatively reduce the damage of weapons or the recycling time of weapons with increasing heat until cone of fire can be implemented.

The basic mechanism of slowly decreasing a mechs performance with increasing heat is missing and might be what is hurting the game.

Edited by Ryoken, 31 July 2018 - 09:50 AM.

[Gretik]

Brauer, on 31 July 2018 - 09:44 AM, said:

In addition to this concern, and the many others raised, this idea seems like it would provide a huge incentive to run gauss rifles, particulalry if the cof/reticle movement/whatever is particularly punishing.

I agree with Ryoken more or less, though I'm not sure if an RNG cone of fire is the best solution - I'd be happy with it but I know that quite a few people feel like removing any chance of a shot going anywhere other than where the crosshair is pointed is heresy. Gauss rifles are and always have been the long range, low heat option for BattleTech - however they have enormous weight and critical slot requirements that put them on par with energy weapons that are accompanied by a sufficient number of heatsinks to make them sustainable in terms of heat.

What I think most people would end up doing is treating the threshold for when their accuracy (and anything else) begins to degrade as their new maximum heat threshold and only exceed that when they absolutely need to. Absolute time to kill would remain relatively unchanged, after all you could fire as many shots after the change as you could before, but overall time to kill would go up a bit because people would be less likely to willingly fire that many shots (and risk overheating penalties).

I mean heck, we don't even have to worry about ammunition cooking off!

Spheroid, on 31 July 2018 - 09:31 AM, said:

Your system punishes all heat. It is entirely possible to run hot with many, many builds that are nowhere near 2x HLLAS + 4x er mlas.

Why do you want to punish 2x ER LLAS? Why do you want to punish 2-4 LLAS or 2x LPLAS? I don't see the merit in that. Anything that mounted PPCs would suffer as most of the shots would miss. All PPC builds should be running hot by design.

All mechs regardless of their build should be striving for their thermal redline. You would make redlining worthless.

The reason people strive for the thermal redline is because there is no incentive to not ride the top of your heatscale. If you put in penalties for going above 50%, 75% and 90% heat people will decide what is acceptable, given their current situation and adapt their builds and playstyles accordingly. PPC builds do run hot, if they eschew packing heatsinks in order to take that extra PPC. As Ryoken said, the heatscale (in tabletop) is a way to deter simply packing the largest number of weapons into your 'Mech and firing until the enemy goes away - you'll render your own 'Mech combat ineffective for several turns if you try just through the overheating penalties (ignoring the fact your ammunition might just blow up).

Edited by Gretik, 31 July 2018 - 10:06 AM.