259 replies to this topic

[PocketYoda]

Tarteso, on 11 May 2021 - 10:42 AM, said:

With heat penalty removed, both micro lasers and micro pulse lasers are overperforming in the pyr-2 (mostly the only mech taking advantage of this change): 14 microl +1 micropl grant 6 alphas before shutdown and it can kill or leg any mech easily and keep running, a bit too much IMO

I saw a stormcrow today using them messing all sorts up.

[pbiggz]

MechaGnome, on 14 May 2021 - 12:49 AM, said:

I saw a stormcrow today using them messing all sorts up.

Good

[1453 R]

So. First post in quite a dang while after dropping this game for...****. Two, three years? Longer? But I ended up getting dragged back in by a couple of buddies a couple of weeks ago and have been spending time trying to remember how to shot web. Apparently Piranha has given up entirely on balancing and adjusting the game themselves and have assigned this task to a group of players with a couple of codemonkeys with XML edit permissions?

Okay. Sure. Why not.

Ignoring the whole "respawns are good/bad" argument for now, figured I'd take some time to try and organize my thoughts as a recently returning player playing in this New Patch environment with a small group of friends (me, my brother, and our Texan redneck attack doge) in the slums of T5 Puglandia.

1.) AMS is freaking everywhere. When I played a few years ago, teams would have maybe two AMS units per twelve-'Mech side. Nowadays it feels more like there's two AMS units per 'Mech. I understand AMS got enormously buffed in this Cauldron patch folks're talking about and apparently it works now. Yay. But man...I tried piloting some of my old favorite 'Mechs, most of which centered on ATMs, and ATM launchers are pretty much entirely useless at this point. Shoot one guy, watch 8+ AMS launchers chew your missiles to bits practically before they're finished leaving the tubes. It's wild. I've started working with LRMs again just because smaller-count launchers never seem to accomplish anything. That sucks, considering how difficult it already is for Clan 'Mechs to make use of small numbers of missile hardpoints. The ATM-20 was basically the only weapon worth taking a one-off of back in the day, and now it's just...not.

In related sadness:

1a.) Small missile launchers still ******* suck unless you use lots of them. There's no real point in running an ATM-3 or two on a light 'Mech, or playing with LRM-5s or LRM-10s unless you can stack up 5+ of the damned things. It annoys me and I hate it, but I can't think of a way to fix it with nothing but XML edits. I've pondered for a while on whether a 'Guidance Strength' mechanic might be useful for missile creeps. Rather than having all missiles behave identically, give each 'Mech a Guidance factor on missiles it can effectively lock on with and guide. Firing more than that reduces the tracking strength of each missile, since you're overloading your targeting systems with more warheads than it can effectively control. If we could do that and limit most 'Mechs to 20 or fewer warheads they can guide before losing strength, then the base performance of missiles could be improved and AMS could be reined in some because firing a giant fuckoff splathorde of homing munitions would be significantly less effective than firing smaller numbers of warheads more often. it'd be a saturation or desperation tactic, or the sort of thing that only works if you've got TAG and NARC in effect to offset the lost performance.

Obviously the number of warheads any given 'Mech could have in the air at once is specific to each 'Mech and there'd have to be fiddling and experimentation that we're never gonna get...but hey. Pie in the sky dreams, eh?

2.) Micro lasers somehow became usable? They were always a super weird weapon in the tabletop fluff, something that you could put on 'Mechs if you were a weirdo but were invented mostly for the sake of battle armor. I came back, all my old 'Mechs sucked, but then I decided to try a 'Mech I almost never used back in the day on a lark - a Black Lanner fitted with micro pulse lasers and machine guns, after a pack of three of them ripped me an astonishing number of new ********. That thing has been, far and away, my top performer since I came back. It makes me wish the arms didn't come off of my old Vipers as easily as the tabs on a soda can, I miss my Vipers. Only 'Mechs in MWO that ever actually JUMPED when you pushed the "Jump" button.

Nevertheless, I saw a lot of mentions of uPLs basically being way too good and needing to get reined in. Okay, I guess, but can I throw my vote behind the idea one previous poster had about repurposing them? Super-short cycle rate and burn time, lower the damage a lot, and turn them into laser machine guns, like back in Ye Olden Times of MW2. I really like that there's plenty of options for smaller, faster 'Mechs to run with now, instead of "you boat cERSL or you put this 'Mech away" and would prefer to see a diversifying of roles rather than just "welp, these need to suck again." I get that micros step on smalls, that's kinda what happens when you get four grades of a thing, but that energy machine gun concept sounded awesome.

3.) Are PPCs really an issue again? Full disclosure, I'm absolutely in the bottom of the barrel down in T5 Puglandia, nobody here is known for their superlative accuracy...but most of the time when I get hoosgow'd by giant splattery alphas from fat 'Mechs with giant PPFLD guns, it's because I poked my nose out where that nose had no business being and I paid the price. Occasionally I pilot a fat 'Mech that can't duck and weave well and I get smeared by enemies, but that still feels more like poor positioning and the natural drawback of piloting some ungodly overweight monstrosity with more guns than a Soviet training camp instead of my usual svelte little cruisers. I've rarely encountered a situation where I died to PPFLD and could not directly attribute that death to either my own ineptitude or the attrition of a match leaving me in a position to get smeared.

It's more been interesting to see PPCs again at all, they'd practically disappeared from existence back when I played. It's one of the relatively few things MWO ever managed to do well - as an almost purely Clan pilot I'm desperately jealous of light PPCs and MRMs, and only somewhat less jealous of rotary autocannons. I'd skin a hundred squirrels to be able to stick a rotary AC/2 on my spiffy new Hellfire, and I'd skin even more squirrels to have the option of light PPCs for things like the Black Lanner, Arctic Cheetah, and other non-Piranha smolbois.

4.) M.A.S.C. feels great. I'm not sure what happened in the long years I've been out, but I've been getting so much use out of M.A.S.C. on the 'Mechs that have it that I find myself jamming the M.A.S.C. button on 'Mechs that don't, instinctively trying to get that mobility boost. it's not even the speed so much as it is the physics-defying, G-force-inducing instant reverses you can pull off. If M.A.S.C. is this good on everything, the Sucksecutioner or Spirit Bear may even be worth piloting again. I mean...I know better, but still. if jump jets could get this same treatment please, that'd be awesome. And I know the Cauldron team is stuck with just XML edits and can't do anything major, but it'd be super nice if we could get a few M.A.S.C. nodes in the skill tree in the pipe-dream future. Splice them into the Mobility tree somewhere near the bottom, maybe. **** like increased cooldown or increased effect, some way to really double down on M.A.S.C. the same way you can with almost everything else.

5.) Bolt-ons are ugly and obnoxious and they make you look like a jumped-up Periphery robber baron wannabe with delusions of hardkorness. So...a perfect addition to MWO, really. I will never buy them but they make it ever so much sweeter when I kill somebody whose 'Mech looks like a rejected extra from Mad Max 3099.

6.) If all we're doing is XML edits, how the hell is the Cauldron expected to rescale 'Mechs the way everybody says is happening later? And why are we rescaling 'Mechs at all? We did that once before and it accomplished exactly frick-all. Geometry has always mattered far more than sheer size unless you're unrealistically tiny or outlandishly huge, and very few 'Mechs fall into either end. If the tabletop art designed by people who never had to think for more than three minutes about whether this particular design is remotely viable on a real battlefield dictates that your 'Mech has absolutely terrible geometry or hardpoint placement, no amount of scaling will fix it. Your knee-mounted guns and glass shoulders will still get you killed.

And just because, I suppose I can throw out whatever-it's-worth comments on the whole respawns thing. Again.

7.) Respawns won't "fix" stomps in Quick Play. Stomps happen because of the snowball effect of people's stupidity. People poke at the wrong time, get their nose shot off, and then get scared and timid and refuse to engage properly for the rest of the match. Stomps happen because the "sniper" in the back who's fired his weapons three times in twelve minutes thinks he's ever so much smarter than all the people who died trying to carry his worthless *** to victory. Stomps happen because the over-aggressive players who hate watching a team **** off and shimmy and dither away its chances for victory by humping rocks instead of fighting tried to dive too soon and got themselves extinguished for their efforts (gulty ).

Giving stupid people more 'Mechs doesn't fix stomps. It just means stomps last longer and the winners have to chew through more 'Mechs to do it. Which is super cool for the stompers, I suppose, but does nothing save prolonging the pain of stompees. Nah. Better to try and tutorialize newer players into not growing up into those *** tumors in the back that think it's okay to put one RAC/2 and two LRM-10s on an Atlas and spend the whole game trying to avoid taking damage. The Cauldron can't do that and Piranha doesn't care to, so mebbe take some newbies under your wings and mentor them? Who knows.

...I think that's everything I can reasonably talk about, and this is enough words as it is. No telling if I'll stay for long this time, but hey. Hi, everybody. This game still sucks, but at least the inmates have a say now, eh?

[Gas Guzzler]

Weren't the AMS changes just buffing ammo and reducing LAMS heat?

AMS was everywhere before the Cauldron patch, but they actually buffed missile health almost across the board I thought? Or at least for sure on ATMs.

Their stated goal is to make ATMs and LRMs more consistent and less feast or famine. And also not unfun (for the missiler, OR the missilee)

[pbiggz]

1453 R, on 14 May 2021 - 12:17 PM, said:

Respawns won't "fix" stomps in Quick Play. Stomps happen because of the snowball effect of people's stupidity. People poke at the wrong time, get their nose shot off, and then get scared and timid and refuse to engage properly for the rest of the match. Stomps happen because the "sniper" in the back who's fired his weapons three times in twelve minutes thinks he's ever so much smarter than all the people who died trying to carry his worthless *** to victory. Stomps happen because the over-aggressive players who hate watching a team **** off and shimmy and dither away its chances for victory by humping rocks instead of fighting tried to dive too soon and got themselves extinguished for their efforts (gulty ).

Any game that doesn't have respawns means one team getting one kill is also the other team losing a player. Small mistakes can snowball into absolute seal clubbings. That is one of the reasons many people feel stomps are pervasive, even if they arent actually that widespread.

Focusing on the cause of stomps actually ignores a greater issue. People are interested in stomps for a specific reason. That reason, whether people realize it or not (and most of the mech dads do not) is death also, essentially, ends your gameplay for that match. People want to spend time shooting mechs, not staring at a queue, and getting into a match after 10 minutes in queue, only to get cored out by 3 snubby/AC20 blappers feels extremely gross. It feels bad because your last 10-15 minutes was just wasted, and now you get to watch your friends, or randos, clobber each other to death in a similar fashion, before the cycle begins anew.

Respawns whether it be by dropdeck, or simply by letting players respawn in the mech they already selected, are one way to address this problem, because it tips the balance of a player's game time towards shooting, and not waiting.

I don't usually play this card, but I studied this as my major in university, so I kind of know what I'm talking about.

1453 R, on 14 May 2021 - 12:17 PM, said:

Giving stupid people more 'Mechs doesn't fix stomps. It just means stomps last longer and the winners have to chew through more 'Mechs to do it. Which is super cool for the stompers, I suppose, but does nothing save prolonging the pain of stompees.

Your analysis relies too heavily on this notion that every player is trash and is playing wrong. While its true that the general skill level of this community is, shall we say, lower than the average FPS, it would be more productive to draw a parallel between bad play, and unconventional play. Alot of people know that their mixed builds are trash. They run them because they have fun in them. The point of the game is to have fun, and a responsible developer must acknowledge, not how they imagine the game should be played, but how the game is actually being played.

In this respect PGI has struggled greatly, as Paul Inouye's design approach considered neither, and was mostly just him capriciously nerfing things that killed him whenever he bothered to log in, while Chris Lowrey's approach has been to artifically extend time to kill by making weapons do less damage and fire less often, which is one of the primary reasons brawling is so prevalent these days.

Respawns won't stop a team from winning, it also wont stop blowouts. That's not the point. The point is that even if there is a blowout, that blowout wont be a totally trash play experience for the losing team. You still get money. You still get to shoot mechs. You get a second, third, and fourth chance to perform in a match even after your first death, so one mistake is not a complete catastrophe, denying you the chance to play the game for another 20 minutes. With 10 or 15 minute limits on match times, ended by an objective that can be reached even sooner, matches will still be fast.

This proposal needs to be critiqued with realistic realistic goals here. This is a PVP team based game. Somebody has to lose in the end. Respawns are not a proposal meant to magically make nobody lose. This proposal is meant to ensure that losing doesn't feel as punishing as it does now. You arent getting free ponies and ********.

1453 R, on 14 May 2021 - 12:17 PM, said:

Nah. Better to try and tutorialize newer players into not growing up into those *** tumors in the back that think it's okay to put one RAC/2 and two LRM-10s on an Atlas and spend the whole game trying to avoid taking damage. The Cauldron can't do that and Piranha doesn't care to, so mebbe take some newbies under your wings and mentor them? Who knows.

...I think that's everything I can reasonably talk about, and this is enough words as it is. No telling if I'll stay for long this time, but hey. Hi, everybody. This game still sucks, but at least the inmates have a say now, eh?

So far as I know, the cauldron is involved in a new player experience, and you are absolutely right that the near complete lack of one hurts this game significantly, but this is a very complex game compared to other shooters. 80% of your next match is decided in the mechlab, before you even drop. The character controller, while smooth by our standards, is clunky and unwieldy compared to other shooters. Its an acquired taste at best, and, this community, mech dads in particular are overwhelmingly hostile to new, and especially younger players, because those who do play this game, who are of the younger generations, tend to be more skilled players than them, and mech dads have a powerful victim complex, fed by outrage about new, younger players, coming in with their meta builds and their competitive smurf group accounts to abuse innocent solo queue players.

As long as feverish conspiracy theories like this abound, this is not a game or community new people will want to have any part in. We're the image of the repulsive neckbeards at the comic book and games store, scaring away kids who just wanted to sit down to play a new game because it makes us feel superior, if for a moment.

Edited by pbiggz, 14 May 2021 - 12:54 PM.

[pbiggz]

Surefoot, on 13 May 2021 - 11:53 PM, said:

Like i said before, having a single 'mech drop choice before QP match may be an idea, but a full respawn drop deck is not, for starters beginners will be really at a disadvantage, moreover respawn means having some proper tactics for reinforcements, and as we know "tactics" and "QP" do not go well together at all...

Lets not get it twisted. If it puts beginners at a disadvantage its because this game already is hostile to beginners. We should be advocating for closing that gap by making it easier for beginners to learn this game, and making the community a more welcoming one, rather than putting the kibosh on potential new features because people aren't good enough to understand them.

[1453 R]

Hm. All right.

'Mech Dads (what a delightful term) are indeed an issue, though I would not classify myself as one. I'm one of those bizarre, alien folks who's been a longtime, long-term fan of the BattleTech franchise for most of my life without ever having once played the tabletop game. I've played every 'MechWarrior since the original 2 save for 5, I've read many, many novels, I've owned a few TROs primarily for the lore and robit listings. I played the WizKids clix game before Wizards of the Coast decided it wasn't profitable and murdered it, was actually quite good at that one. But I'm not one of those who's going to grognard my way into rejecting changes simply because they don't match the rules of a game from an entirely different medium which has not seen significant rules revision in nearly forty years. That's a recipe for stagnation and death, and I get legitimately upset at 'Mech Dads who snarl rabidly over any deviation from canon even by people who're doing it intelligently and with love. People ripped Jordan Freaking Weissman several new rectums for changing the build rules and the base numbers in HBS' BattleTech game, despite the fact that just about every change they made improved the core game.

I'm mostly not a fan of the idea of respawns because this is pretty much the one shooter game in the whole market where death matters.

All the zippy bang-bang OverTitanCods out there expecting you to score fifty kills a game feel almost entirely mindless. There's no real tactics, no strategy, no pausing to reassess and re-engage - the goal is simply to respawn, rush back into the fight as fast as humanly possible, and rely on nothing but sheer, reflexive twitch snapshot skill to emerge victorious. I am super well aware that tactical/strategic thought is a rarity in MWO as well, but unless you're playing Domination individual pilots or small groups of friends on comms can make tactical decisions in this game. You simply can't do that in a CoD clone or any of the other freespawn fast-paced zippybang shooters.

If death doesn't mean you're done, you won't be afraid of it. And that means the derps will derp even harder, though maybe they'll at least start derping in a slightly more correct direction, i.e. towards the enemy.

And irrespective of game design philosophy, there's also the sheer fact of HP to consider. Light 'Mechs, or fast, lightly armed mediums like the Viper or Black Lanner (that is, the best 'Mechs), already have a very difficult time scoring meaningful numbers in a game. It takes a small, fast 'Mech many times longer to successfully engage and defeat a Larj Stompi Boi with a three hundred and seventy-pi damage alpha strike as it is, and that fast 'Mech only has to **** up once to fail as opposed to the Larj Stompi Boi needing to **** up constantly for several continuous minutes. That means matches are ridiculously top-heavy even in the slums of T5. If the small, fast 'Mech who manages to defeat a larger, deadlier opponent after two or three minutes of tense, adrenaline-pumping hit-and-fade dogfighting is told "Cool! Now do it three more times before it counts!", how many small, fast 'Mechs do you expect you'll see?

You're asking people to kill four times the current weight of metal in any given match, assuming it's not simply a matter of Free Infinite Respawns for Everybody. That's going to push people into Big Damaj Alfa Gai play even harder than the game already does. Do we really want that, as a playerbase who are theoretically at least concerned with diversity of options?

Edited by 1453 R, 14 May 2021 - 01:46 PM.

[pbiggz]

Those are legitimate concerns, but you're thinking in terms of current quickplay, and neglecting that we have gamemodes.

Except our game modes are 5 different flavours of skirmish right now, because death matters too much. With the possible exception of assault, (maybe, and in the most unfun way possible), killing off the enemy team is always the fastest way to win the match, and far and away the most rewarding. A base rush on assault rewards like a quarter of the cbills and score that a smooth brained brawl does.

If respawns were to find their way into quickplay, then matches would be much more centered around their actual objectives. Here are some examples:

• fighting over the bases in assault; Right now base caps are literally frowned upon and rightly so, respawns would mean a concerted rush on a base would be met with a wave of fresh mechs in the worst case scenario that the entire defending team got dropped, or a split push that might pull attackers away from base to head off another base rush in response. These are all strategies that do not happen in assault right now, because the game mode is clearly meant to function with respawns.
  
• Holding territory on conquest; conquest in quickplay is basically skirmish with extra steps right now. The few edge cases where a team that loses the brawl ends up winning on caps are just that: edge cases. If respawns were the law of the land, then the win condition on conquest would actually be conquest.
  
• longer period trades over the domination point; popping the auxiliary generators actually ends up being a strategic choice rather than a last ditch effort when your team is down 8 mechs, and in the worst case scenario that there's a blowout, the defenders on the domination point will have to deal with another wave of fresh mechs, meaning a legitimate back and forth.
  
• Incursion??; It's very clear that incursion was meant to be part of faction play at some point. Respawns would be a natural part of the game mode and it feels very clumsy without them. Again its just skirmish, but whoever survives the brawl at the end limps over to the enemy base to finish out the game. No fun, no action. Those walls never get used because defense is not a valid strategy without respawns.
  
• Skirmish would be the least effected for sure, but at the very least, it would just be a good old deathmatch where the first team to a certain number of kills wins, and really I disagree with your writing off of other shooters as totally mindless, because the people who play those shooters are frequently much better at games than any of us.

Its weird to think about because we've technically had game modes since the beginning, but without respawns, they really have always been 5 different flavours of skirmish.

Skirmish itself got added because people were tired of light rushes on assault. That fact in of itself, is an admission that the game modes were incomplete and at least partially non-functional. We can do better.

Edited by pbiggz, 14 May 2021 - 02:49 PM.

[Scout Derek]

pbiggz, on 14 May 2021 - 02:47 PM, said:

Those are legitimate concerns, but you're thinking in terms of current quickplay, and neglecting that we have gamemodes.

Except our game modes are 5 different flavours of skirmish right now, because death matters too much. With the possible exception of assault, (maybe, and in the most unfun way possible), killing off the enemy team is always the fastest way to win the match, and far and away the most rewarding. A base rush on assault rewards like a quarter of the cbills and score that a smooth brained brawl does.

If respawns were to find their way into quickplay, then matches would be much more centered around their actual objectives. Here are some examples:

• fighting over the bases in assault; Right now base caps are literally frowned upon and rightly so, respawns would mean a concerted rush on a base would be met with a wave of fresh mechs in the worst case scenario that the entire defending team got dropped, or a split push that might pull attackers away from base to head off another base rush in response. These are all strategies that do not happen in assault right now, because the game mode is clearly meant to function with respawns.
  
• Holding territory on conquest; conquest in quickplay is basically skirmish with extra steps right now. The few edge cases where a team that loses the brawl ends up winning on caps are just that: edge cases. If respawns were the law of the land, then the win condition on conquest would actually be conquest.
  
• longer period trades over the domination point; popping the auxiliary generators actually ends up being a strategic choice rather than a last ditch effort when your team is down 8 mechs, and in the worst case scenario that there's a blowout, the defenders on the domination point will have to deal with another wave of fresh mechs, meaning a legitimate back and forth.
  
• Incursion??; It's very clear that incursion was meant to be part of faction play at some point. Respawns would be a natural part of the game mode and it feels very clumsy without them. Again its just skirmish, but whoever survives the brawl at the end limps over to the enemy base to finish out the game. No fun, no action. Those walls never get used because defense is not a valid strategy without respawns.
  
• Skirmish would be the least effected for sure, but at the very least, it would just be a good old deathmatch where the first team to a certain number of kills wins, and really I disagree with your writing off of other shooters as totally mindless, because the people who play those shooters are frequently much better at games than any of us.

Its weird to think about because we've technically had game modes since the beginning, but without respawns, they really have always been 5 different flavours of skirmish.


Skirmish itself got added because people were tired of light rushes on assault. That fact in of itself, is an admission that the game modes were incomplete and at least partially non-functional. We can do better.

Game modes have always been a glaring issue of making objectives secondary play in QP to be quite fair, they do play somewhat of a role in Faction Play, but it's not as active as QP is so naturally not a good comparison to bring up if others do.

I honestly would prefer if objectives rewarded more, then there would be a reason to play said objectives.

Otherwise people are basically saying "I like to ruin other people's fun at the expense of my own" when they attempt to play the objective, moreso assault than anything. Conquest is second to this but it's more based on your team's composition and skill to fight the enemy than it is mindlessly rushing a single spot on the map.

Third would be domination, but I think that can be fixed with future map updates and circle locations. I wanna say Incursion would be higher but many people hate that gamemode and prefer to fight, hell, I'd say incursion is like assault, you get people who are big brained; at least with incursion there is time to counter the base attack depending on the map size though.

[FupDup]

Scout Derek, on 14 May 2021 - 02:59 PM, said:

I honestly would prefer if objectives rewarded more, then there would be a reason to play said objectives.

It's not just end of game payouts that are the issue. It's also just a lot less fun to cap oil rigs than it is to shoot robots.

[1453 R]

Conquest is my favorite game mode in MWO, and I would argue the best game mode in MWO. Not because I have an especial love of standing next to oil rigs, but because Conquest forces a group of players to maneuver instead of Merderball. Domination, for the same reason, is the worst game mode in the history of video gaming because it strictly prohibits teams from maneuvering - you stand on that hill and you bloody die there or you lose, and every single time a fresh batch of idiots is all "Ohh, Domination, yay!", it makes me sad because an adorable puppy beloved by a little girl somewhere in the world explodes.

Seriously. Voting for Domination means you're voting for puppy explosions, people. Stop voting for Domination.

Regardless. Forcing teams to split up to avoid losing should be the point of game objectives. Absolutely nobody, and I mean nobody, likes 12v12 murder fragballs where twenty-four nitwits all jockey to not be the one in the reticle. Poking your noodle around a corner and getting blown to Madagascar because you found every single member of the entire enemy team having a circlejerk is not, and never will be, fun. No matter how many times a match you get to do it. Games are better when 'Mechs engage each other multiple times across the whole map in smaller numbers, which currently only ever really happens in Conquest games.

Respawns would not fix the fact that twelve 'Mechs can kill one 'Mech too fast for the one 'Mech to do a damn thing about it, and that is the core issue behind "Unfun Play Experiences". Redesigning MWO to require teams to break up and maneuver rather than just clump up like cheap cat litter and hope they don't snowball first is the way to fix Bad Play Experiences. Not giving you three extra chances to get your nose scraped off your face by twelve schmucks standing in each other's jockstraps.

[pbiggz]

Respawns wouldn't lower time to kill, but they would make it matter less. I think thats the way to go, because raising TTK too much has problems of its own.

Largely i think most of you guys are on a pretty similar wave length about this. There's alot we could do better.

[Leone]

1453 R, on 14 May 2021 - 03:14 PM, said:

Seriously. Voting for Domination means you're voting for puppy explosions, people. Stop voting for Domination.

I'm more of a cat person, personally. I guess I should vote domination more then?

1453 R, on 14 May 2021 - 03:14 PM, said:

Regardless. Forcing teams to split up to avoid losing should be the point of game objectives. Absolutely nobody, and I mean nobody, likes 12v12 murder fragballs where twenty-four nitwits all jockey to not be the one in the reticle.

This is actually why I play CW. 12v12 Invasion scrims. Glorious.

~Leone.

[pattonesque]

Gas Guzzler, on 14 May 2021 - 12:38 PM, said:

Weren't the AMS changes just buffing ammo and reducing LAMS heat?

AMS was everywhere before the Cauldron patch, but they actually buffed missile health almost across the board I thought? Or at least for sure on ATMs.

Their stated goal is to make ATMs and LRMs more consistent and less feast or famine. And also not unfun (for the missiler, OR the missilee)

AMS ammo also no longer explodes, which made it way less of a risk. lots of builds can now find that 1.5 tons to make missiles less effective

[Gas Guzzler]

pattonesque, on 14 May 2021 - 07:58 PM, said:

AMS ammo also no longer explodes, which made it way less of a risk. lots of builds can now find that 1.5 tons to make missiles less effective

So am I a filthy casual for still not bothering? Especially when it’s just one AMS?

[Leone]

Honestly I usually just use 1 tonne and two slots. Half tonne of ammo's enough to get me inna the brawl.

~Leone

[Surefoot]

pbiggz, on 14 May 2021 - 04:37 PM, said:

Respawns wouldn't lower time to kill, but they would make it matter less. I think thats the way to go, because raising TTK too much has problems of its own.

Largely i think most of you guys are on a pretty similar wave length about this. There's alot we could do better.

Am still not on a similar wave here - QP and its semi-random match maker will often put me in company of completely passive teams, that get stomped without mercy once reds have understood they can push without any punishment. I want out of these games as fast as possible. A 0-12 to 3-12 stomp would become a 0-48 to 9-48. The really miserable PUG experience in FP would then transfer into QP, I'm not sure that will ensure its success given how FP looks now.

[MrTBSC]

1453 R, on 14 May 2021 - 12:17 PM, said:

In related sadness:

1a.) Small missile launchers still ******* suck unless you use lots of them. There's no real point in running an ATM-3 or two on a light 'Mech, or playing with LRM-5s or LRM-10s unless you can stack up 5+ of the damned things.

to be fair ... that´s the point .. you stack 4 to 6 low tube launchers for the lower cooldown compared to single high tube launchers ... .. as for small to medium mechs if you can´t put an Lrm 15/20 or 2 Lrm 10 into it but still want to use it in a long range build you better use a single lrm 5 or 10 (or similar lowtupe missilaunchers for other builds) as additional damage but not as your primary damagedealer ...

[pattonesque]

Gas Guzzler, on 14 May 2021 - 08:05 PM, said:

So am I a filthy casual for still not bothering? Especially when it’s just one AMS?

haha, I think the filthy casuals may be the ones doing it!

it is interesting though, if you coordinated everyone to take AMS you'd basically invalidate any lurmers on the other team, yeah? I don't think there's a build out there that could meaningfully bypass a 12AMS umbrella

[Dogstar]

Over time the balance between missiles and anti-missiles waxes and wanes, right now AMS is pretty prevalent, but it will subside once more if you wait it out. It's like the rising and the falling of the tides.