134 replies to this topic

[Heavy Money]

The6thMessenger, on 03 March 2021 - 08:19 PM, said:

I wish you just see that.

I do see that. I'm with you on this one. The Gulag is the right move for them to make right now. I'm just pointing out that they are in a catch-22 again, and people will continue to be unhappy regardless of what they get.

I agree with the rest of what you're saying here.

[The6thMessenger]

Heavy Money, on 04 March 2021 - 12:52 AM, said:

I do see that. I'm with you on this one. The Gulag is the right move for them to make right now. I'm just pointing out that they are in a catch-22 again, and people will continue to be unhappy regardless of what they get.

I agree with the rest of what you're saying here.

You're right, they will be unhappy regardless of what they get -- so just do it.

Edited by The6thMessenger, 04 March 2021 - 01:32 AM.

[Ekson Valdez]

A friendly warning to @everyone. Please tone down the aggressiveness in general and against staff personnel in particular. Thank you.

[Dozer6]

Inb4block.

[Absaint]

I am just a new player, but as someone who is a fan of battletech for a long time, i would love to see a fully funtional crit system in MWO.

Crits in the engine and you overheat, overheat might leat to ammo emplosions, arm actuators become damaged and you cant track as well, overheat and get pilot damage that hampers vision. It really would give the feeling of a giant machine breaking down bit by bit.

See the mechanics implemented in Roguetech as an example, everytime you do critical damage on a mech you get the indication of what specificaly happened. You would have to have status for your mech and enemy mech, or at least for yours letting you know all of these things.

BUT I do understand that many players might not enjoy this level of detail and would add another level of complexity for new players as well.

So is it a good idea for the game? Maybe not, but i would enjoy it immensely.

Edited by Absaint, 04 March 2021 - 07:00 AM.

[AnAnachronismAlive]

MyriadDigits, on 03 March 2021 - 11:54 PM, said:

Players always request conflicting things. Even those of us wanting the Gulag proposal accepted (for instance, myself and 6th), don't agree with every single change within. As I understand it even the Gulag itself wasn't unanimous with the values that made it to the final proposal.

The issue however comes down to the majority. Alongside not agreeing on anything a large part of why that is is because most players aren't looking beyond their own cockpit. We've got people asking for blanket nerfs on lights because they main assaults and don't know how to fight back. People asking for AC2 to lose a ton because they want to use ACs on small mechs, without even a fragment of a thought spared for how such a change would affect AC2 boating. People asking for missiles to lose the min range because they lack the positioning skill to work around it. Some people are out there asking for changes based solely on "its stats are different in tabletop". So on, and so on.

Gulag, if nothing else, made efforts to consider balance from multiple perspectives. The casual and the competitive. The new and the old. The light and the assault. Gulag values aren't made in a vacuum, they are made with every other suggested change, to mechs, quirks, and weapons considered. Does this make it perfect? Absolutely not. However, it puts it leagues above literally every other suggestion out there.

Now sure, you could say the point of the balance thread is for PGI to in essence put together their own Gulag, but the issue there lies in the fact that PGI has time and again including in recent months demonstrated they are out of touch to an incredible degree. On top of that, nearly every suggestion made in the balance thread is made in a vacuum. So we'd have people that don't truly understand how their game is played, making changes based on suggestions with little to no thought on how such changes would impact the rest of the game, and that my friend, is a recipe for disaster. Might as well leave balance to a room full of monkeys and keyboards.

Thank you, good sir. So rare to experience postings with a macro- or at least mutual view on issues nowadays!

[LordNothing]

until the gulag sees testing in a live environment its just a spreadsheet.

[AnAnachronismAlive]

LordNothing, on 04 March 2021 - 01:20 PM, said:

until the gulag sees testing in a live environment its just a spreadsheet.

The gulag (especially Navid) playtested the status quo in plethora of hours within proving grounds as far as I know. If I recall correctly, he has even been diving into the game's code itself. So spreadsheet or elitist-/comp-bias or not, their comprehensive approach - by effort alone - is likely to contain a lot of thought and assessment (at least more than "Buff/Nerf LURMS!-onliners do). To keep the big picture in mind is the task to be dealt with here, that is why 'em been stating several times that overhauling the scale, quirks and weapons gotta go hand in hand. Since this seems to be a too big/risky endeavour for PGI to handle atm, I would still appreciate the incorporation of their weapons proposals for a little more variety in play at least.

Don't get me wrong => this is not about sacrosancting their proposals as flawless. It has to be tested, but I don't see any reason why we should not give this full extent approach a try. Adaptations can be done afterwards anyhow.

And for those in fear of being farmed by the top5% ... they farm us anyhow, if they want to ... no matter the actual state of weaponry.

Edited by AnAnachronismAlive, 04 March 2021 - 11:35 PM.

[Elizander]

AnAnachronismAlive, on 04 March 2021 - 11:26 PM, said:

The gulag (especially Navid) playtested the status quo in plethora of hours within proving grounds as far as I know. If I recall correctly, he has even been diving into the game's code itself. So spreadsheet or elitist-/comp-bias or not, their comprehensive approach - by effort alone - is likely to contain a lot of thought and assessment (at least more than "Buff/Nerf LURMS!-onliners does).

Don't get me wrong => this is not about sacrosancting their proposals as flawless. It has to be tested, but I don't see any reason why we should not give this full extent approach a try. Adaptations can be done afterwards anyhow.

PGI could never get enough mileage out of their test server, but to be honest, downloading another copy of MWO is a pain. If they can make their 'Event Queue' have different XML data from Group/Faction then they can turn testing these changes into an event that's in the main client, so they can add incentives for people to actually try it out without all the hassles of downloading MWO again.

[Lanzman]

A word on tabletop vs MWO values for stuff.

Tabletop values for things like weapon range and damage, armor values, etc, should be the base from which we start. But obviously, very obviously, tabletop values largely won't work in this setting. But they should still be the base that is worked from. And what I mean is that a small laser has less range and damage than a medium laser, and weighs less. A large laser has greater range and does more damage than a medium, and weighs more. In other words, the general characteristics for the various weapons, not the specific values.

A pulse laser weighs more and has a shorter range than the standard version, but has a shorter duration, does more damage, and generates more heat. An ER laser does the same damage, has the same weight, but has longer range and more heat. And so forth.

Clan weapons should be lighter and have longer range than the IS equivalent.

That's my view on "tabletop values" in MWO. Those values would be more about differentiating the various weapons from one another than requiring the exact numerical values from the tabletop rules.

[LordNothing]

AnAnachronismAlive, on 04 March 2021 - 11:26 PM, said:

The gulag (especially Navid) playtested the status quo in plethora of hours within proving grounds as far as I know. If I recall correctly, he has even been diving into the game's code itself. So spreadsheet or elitist-/comp-bias or not, their comprehensive approach - by effort alone - is likely to contain a lot of thought and assessment (at least more than "Buff/Nerf LURMS!-onliners do). To keep the big picture in mind is the task to be dealt with here, that is why 'em been stating several times that overhauling the scale, quirks and weapons gotta go hand in hand. Since this seems to be a too big/risky endeavour for PGI to handle atm, I would still appreciate the incorporation of their weapons proposals for a little more variety in play at least.

Don't get me wrong => this is not about sacrosancting their proposals as flawless. It has to be tested, but I don't see any reason why we should not give this full extent approach a try. Adaptations can be done afterwards anyhow.

And for those in fear of being farmed by the top5% ... they farm us anyhow, if they want to ... no matter the actual state of weaponry.

still without a live environment testing, with actual players who can twist and shoot back, its all just theory. im not saying that the work they did was flawed or bad or anything, just that it needs practical testing. more practical that what can be run in a modded client. its a multiplayer game so it needs multiplayer testing. theres just a bit of danger living in theory land that reality will rear its ugly head and rip your hard work to shreds if you aren't aware of it.

if it was put up on a pts id jump at the chance to test it. a small change from pgi to let players run modded clients in say unranked custom matches. perhaps an 'upload custom xml' button in the custom game menu, such that the client itself can be unmodified. or even a pts session, would be really nice to haves.

i worry more about unfunning the game than i do about buffing the already top players. excessive balance or lack of novel mechanics can do that.

Edited by LordNothing, 05 March 2021 - 02:14 PM.

[Vlad Ward]

Chris Lowrey, on 03 March 2021 - 08:14 AM, said:

Regardless of my own personal feeling on the matter, this is not what the team has, or will be focusing on for the foreseeable future, as like I said, Its a huge amount of work, for potentially little gain. But it is something that I am always curious to check the temperature on.

I feel this. There are a lot of low hanging fruit to tackle right now. I'd love a proper engine overhaul, eventually. I think far too many game mechanics inherited baggage from Tabletop.

Weapon convergence used to keep me up at night. I don't feel like the combination of Mechs being big, slow, and having pinpoint perfect accuracy results in a mechanically challenging experience. As a result, we've gone through years of weapon nerfs and double armor and quirks trying to keep people from dying too quickly in a system where it's really, really easy to shoot people.

Anyway, let's just implement the Gulag. Worst case if the game implodes you can revert to the previous build.

[FupDup]

Vlad Ward, on 05 March 2021 - 02:28 PM, said:

Weapon convergence used to keep me up at night. I don't feel like the combination of Mechs being big, slow, and having pinpoint perfect accuracy results in a mechanically challenging experience. As a result, we've gone through years of weapon nerfs and double armor and quirks trying to keep people from dying too quickly in a system where it's really, really easy to shoot people.

Ironically, mechs in MWO can actually survive longer than they can in the HBS turn-based game with random hit locations. Oneshotting a fresh Atlas through the CT is quite easy over there.

[Brauer]

FupDup, on 05 March 2021 - 02:33 PM, said:

Ironically, mechs in MWO can actually survive longer than they can in the HBS turn-based game with random hit locations. Oneshotting a fresh Atlas through the CT is quite easy over there.

True. Especially with how common ammo explosions are in BT. One-shotting Thunderbolt CTs with laser vom is incredibly common in HBS Battletech. It makes me think the TDR is one of the more common enemy mechs in BT because it's so bad stock.

[MyriadDigits]

Brauer, on 05 March 2021 - 03:19 PM, said:

True. Especially with how common ammo explosions are in BT. One-shotting Thunderbolt CTs with laser vom is incredibly common in HBS Battletech. It makes me think the TDR is one of the more common enemy mechs in BT because it's so bad stock.

Headshots as well. I'm not ashamed to admit I've done a lot of save scumming thanks to a Gauss Hollander in zimbabwe scalping one of my mechs before they even fired a shot.

Edited by MyriadDigits, 05 March 2021 - 03:24 PM.

[FupDup]

MyriadDigits, on 05 March 2021 - 03:23 PM, said:

Headshots as well. I'm not ashamed to admit I've done a lot of save scumming thanks to a Gauss Hollander in zimbabwe scalping one of my mechs before they even fired a shot.

You mean Highlander, right? Unless somebody modded in the Hollander or I missed some patch notes.

[Vlad Ward]

FupDup, on 05 March 2021 - 02:33 PM, said:

Ironically, mechs in MWO can actually survive longer than they can in the HBS turn-based game with random hit locations. Oneshotting a fresh Atlas through the CT is quite easy over there.

In the era of doubled armor, nerfed weapons, armor quirks, and armor skill trees I'd be amazed if they didn't.

[East Indy]

Chris Lowrey, on 03 March 2021 - 08:14 AM, said:

This is needless to say, less than ideal when it comes to average players who do not spend time in these forums or spreadsheet warrior through every minute game mechanic in this very mechanically dense game. As for those that don't know any better, this is just one instance of basically being presented with a coin-flip option that has a 1/2 or 2/3rds chance of picking the wrong option. With potentially huge ramifications to in-match performance. Which is something that can be discouraging for those players who will never enter the forums, or look up you-tube build videos.

If engine choice rates that deep of a concern over unclear choices and traps, could we shift the topic to Skill Tree?

[TheArisen]

PGI needs to really seriously go over the Gulag if for nothing else it has a fair bit of support. I'd bet on it bringing people back and could help with the level of frustration/apathy in the player base.

[Gas Guzzler]

The6thMessenger, on 02 March 2021 - 11:23 PM, said:

Eh well, my concern with IS Omnis is that they get locked with slow-speed and unsurvivable torso, the BJ-Omni, while yes technically could be godquirked so that it's survivable that it's basically a 45-ton heavy, like the Urbanmech is a 30-ton medium. But I'm not really in for Quirks-For-Balancing because that sets a dangerous precedent of the illusion of balance by individual mechs, but a gaping chasm between Techbase. A matter of polarized balance that adheres completely to min-maxing.

A single torso-blowout leading to death is NOT FUN. I mean imagine an XL Engine on a King-Crab, now that's asking for a bad day.

Couldn't we just make IS XL torso survivable as LFE/CXL? Just make it like losing a leg or something. It's not like IS XL would make other engines completely useless, some weapons need a certain engine, or certain mechs could stand less free tonnage over slots. Except Standard, apart from the HGR -- and the IS LB20X that has no business being 11-slots when there's no Crit-splitting, that guy needs +30 to structure or something.

Instead of just focusing on the issue of Omnis with XL, why not just improve XL Engine as a whole for the rest of the mechs, and fix IS Omnis with it?

Honestly I wish these sentiments would go away. The only IS omni assaults with XL engines that are even possibly on the radar are mobile assaults at 65 kph (Sunder and Templar). With a combination of durability quirks and agility its easy to make up for ST death. Stop overcomplicating the problem.