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[Spankter]

On Boating:

To put it bluntly, 'boating' is an exploit. Yes, Yes, I know.. it's not a prohibited exploit, but that doesn't mean it's not exploitative. It's advantageous, or people wouldn't do it, and like anything else in a competitive environment that confers an advantage, an element of the player base will latch on to that advantage and seek to multiply it to whatever extent they can to gain against those who do not. Next step is that people start jumping on the bandwagon, and soon whatever advantage that's being exploited comes to be the very foundation of play style, and then one element of the player base complains and has hard feelings whether it gets disturbed, or gets left alone.

Look at all the balance changes that get regularly made to compensate for that exploitative behavior. Twiddle this, tweak that, the Clan Micro Pulse Laser shows a 0.06% better damage output and suddenly the matches are clogged with DireWolf chassis sporting 12 of them and an ER Large Laser... And rebalancing the weapons over and over isn't going to 'fix' it, because as soon as you squeeze the balloon in one place, another one bulges out. I don't believe the 'solution' to the 'boating issue' is going to come from years of analysis and weapon re-balance, and it's certainly not going to come about from people complaining about it either, so let's take a look at some things that have been done, and what still might be done.

I hate the hardpoint system, but I get it. if you don't want the game to devolve into 34,000 players all piloting a Vapor Eagle (or whatever the Min/Max crowd settles on as having the fastest, most maneuverable, ECM-capable with 0.2 tons more available for weapons and armor chassis out of the bunch), the Tabletop option of 'put anything anywhere' had to go. Who wants to see an Atlas with 34 Heavy Machines Guns anyway? The hardpoint system limits things to a point, and it's a key limit given observation of how the player base tends to gravitate toward particular chassis with particular types / numbers / locations of Hardpoints. It's also one that's going to be very, very hard to change without really tipping the boat over for plenty of people. That one should probably be left alone. Likewise monkeying with weapon tonnage or crit space footprints has too many repercussions for existing designs, stock and otherwise, to really be a reasonable option.

An adjunct to weapon balancing that's already been added to the game is the 'Ghost Heat' mechanic. Love it or hate it, this is another mechanic that's done good service to help marshal a disparate, tough-to-balance weapon systems into a sembance of an even playing field. This mechanic is clearly and specifically targeted at boating, and it does a fair job of providing a diminishing return (or increasing disadvantage) to piling half a dozen or more identical (or similar) weapon systems into a single chassis. It's a good tool, but it might need a companion. To get there, we might take a look at WHY people group large numbers of identical or similar weapons together in one chassis. Simplicity is a factor, whether it's the elegance and symmetry, or to bridge the skill defecit of players who can't manage more than two (or, egad, one...) fire button, but I think it's far more telling to look at that synchronicity as a technique to exploit pinpoint damage.

Now I'm not arguing that a good Alpha Strike (or large weapon grouping) applied to a single component isn't satisfying, in fact the usefulness of many builds desperately depend on it (Pirhana anyone?). We see it applied to deliver what amount to 'serial Alpha Strikes' again and again to a target, forcing players to move rather than stand still, to torso twist rather than be cored, to pilot rather than just button-push... But it does wear old, after a bit. Maybe this is somewhere that we can gently nudge the mechanic that should have a minimum of effect on the pilot who manuvers and times his shots, yet rounds the point of the scissors a bit for the design that relies on 'Point the reticle on the target and lean a brick on the mouse button'.

Cooldown Variability. Add a slight variation to weapon cooldown cycles, tie it to the number of weapons of the same Ghost Heat grouping, and make the randomness a function of the number of weapons mounted. Justify it as computer system load if you like, mitigate it with Targeting Computer tonnage, maybe even make it skillable in the future. For each weapon of a given group beyond the second, give a +/- 0.01 sec random variability per weapon to the cycle time. Sporting 4 IS Large Lasers? They might all come online at 3.5 secs (Cooldown bonus notwithstanding), or they might come back online at 3.50, 3.50, 3.54 and 3.58 secs. If you wait for them to all be 'up' before you pull the trigger again, you have a pure Alpha Pinpoint. If you just propped a brick on your fire button and went for a cup of coffee, well, you'll get a bit more 'smeared' application of damage.

This would go a long way, I think, to putting some damper on the "I'm going to kill you by having 97 ducks all nibble you at exactly the same time in exactly the same spot" strategy that seems to drive some of the potato 'boat' builds.