619 replies to this topic

[Kiiyor]

MechaGnome, on 12 June 2021 - 02:26 AM, said:

Yes sure keep BSing, after all these years and you still don't.. And MWO Host State Rewind is garbage and doesn't work right..

I'm... not so sure about that.

I've been playing since Dragon bowling was considered a sport and 7MPL XL400 Awesomes were one of the greatest terrors on the battlefield, and I can say with complete confidence that they were 0.1% as terrifying as encountering a Raven if you had more than 150 ping. I had to aim 3-4 mech lengths in front of them with lasers to even consider making a hit. Back in the dark days of the goonswarm, lagravens were effectively immortal up against us poor Australians.

There's been a lot of stuff added to the game that i've liked and disliked, but I'd choke down triple LRM damage and a return of Dragon Slayer poptarts before I considered giving up HSR.

[D A T A]

Dogstar, on 12 June 2021 - 01:11 AM, said:

Data/Ash - do you know if the sensor range of mechs can be changed in xml or is it set in code?

The reason I ask is because while there is a lot of debate about lights most of the solutions involve rescaling (not likely to happen), increasing hardpoints(definitely not happening), increasing armour (debateable in it's effectiveness), or nerfing the outliers (how?), but we haven't talked about other solutions for improving lights.

Firstly, I think one problem is that lights don't score/reward as much in matches because the way matches are scored/rewarded is poor. I don't think that can be changed but maybe we could improve light mech scores by giving them quirks to make them better at scoring and better at earning rewards. I'd like to see light mechs get a straight up buff to XP and income.

Secondly, light mechs don't usually have the tonnage to fit all the tasty goodies needed to fulfil any sort of scouting/EW role. If it's possible, adding an ECM slot to _all_ light mechs would vastly improve the class. Additionally is it possible to quirk lights to give them easier access to AMS/BAP/TC/TAG/etc? i.e. reducing tonnage requirements or increasing effectiveness? Consumable limits could also be increased for lights.

Lastly, and the reason I asked about the sensor ranges, would it be possible to increase light mech sensor range? This would help them be more useful on the battlefield and kind of give them an actual scouting role, which might improve their popularity.

sensor range quirks are easy to give
i always wanted light mechs more focused on scouting/info warfare role rather than ninja killer role like flea and piranha, infortunatelly the rest of the cauldron disagrees that some lights are too strong and is against (for now) nerfing the offensive capabilities of some lights
the plan for now is providing sensor quirks to useless ******** lights like spider anansi for example

[Storming Angel]

MechaGnome, on 12 June 2021 - 02:20 AM, said:

Lore wise the Atlas was 11-12 meters tall.. Banshee should be bigger than Atlas.

https://bg.battletec...ght-(dimensions)-of-mechs-and-vehicles/
https://mwomercs.com...ers-or-bananas/
https://www.reddit.c...on_mech_height/
https://steamcommuni...46342859589242/

This is the problem I'm referring too all different sources, with different answers to the same thing. They really should go over their lore and sort this out too be fair as scaling seems to be all over the place at the moment.

Which is funny as you would think height would be one of the few things that would of been done from the get go, as on sarna as well there's no height stat for any of the mechs.

[Khobai]

dario03, on 11 June 2021 - 10:51 PM, said:

Sure, because they have the most armor. They also have the most firepower. Both things that make them very good.

they dont really have the most firepower because of heat caps and ghost heat limits

a lot of the time you can build a heavy with the same firepower that goes way faster and is more survivable

thats why heavies are the most popular weight class and not assaults. if assaults did the most damage and were the most survivable they would be the most popular weight class not heavies.

Storming Angel, on 12 June 2021 - 04:33 AM, said:

https://bg.battletec...ght-(dimensions)-of-mechs-and-vehicles/
https://mwomercs.com...ers-or-bananas/
https://www.reddit.c...on_mech_height/
https://steamcommuni...46342859589242/

This is the problem I'm referring too all different sources, with different answers to the same thing. They really should go over their lore and sort this out too be fair as scaling seems to be all over the place at the moment.

Which is funny as you would think height would be one of the few things that would of been done from the get go, as on sarna as well there's no height stat for any of the mechs.

the height range of battlemechs is generally given as 8m-14m

which means the tallest assault is only about twice as tall as the shortest light

obviously assaults are way bigger than that in MWO. since making lights bigger would be impractical its safe to say its very much an assault scaling problem.

Edited by Khobai, 12 June 2021 - 05:55 AM.

[Der Geisterbaer]

MechaGnome said:

Lore wise the Atlas was 11-12 meters tall.. Banshee should be bigger than Atlas.

Lore wise the Atlas never had an exact height given ... at least not one that wasn't contradicted by other sources directly within said lore.

There is a Technical Readout that included a general size comparision of vehicles / tanks vs. four mechs of each weight class vs. some dropships vs. a male human being. Now the interesting part is of course the height of the human being in that scale (which the picture in question unfortunately doesn't give) but there are known heights for the dropships. With the known heights of both the Overlord and Union dropships that human turns out to be about 1.8m in height ... which is slightly higher than the average across the world but is decent enough for further calculations. With those 1.8m of the male soldier in mind you'll roughly get these height valuses for the mechs in that same picture:

Light => Commando (25 ton) = 9.2 m
Medium => Enforcer (50 ton) = 12.1 m
Heavy => Grashopper (70 ton) = 13.9 m
Assault => Banshee (95 ton) = 15.1 m

Now there are several interesting things to note here:

• The entire premise of Battletech was never to actually represent the tech involved with at least a small modicum of physics accuracy when it comes to dimensions (volume) and / or material density. The game is all about stompy robots killing other stompy robots under rules that watered all those persky physics down to a "convenient" set of rules (by 80ies standards "simple" by present day standards "convoluted").
  
• The picture in question explicitly states "Although sizes varies individually among units, this scale shows the relative size difference in each weight class" => One can argue that an Atlas' height is below the Banshee but within the given constraints one would rightfully expect it to still be at least as tall as the Grasshopper (or better above) otherwise the given premise simply doesn't work any more.
  
• People regularly confuse the heavily abstracted combat rules of the TT with "lore". In this particular instance it's the height values given for gameplay in terms of partial and full cover: 6m for terrain height 1 (partial cover) and 12m for terrain height 2 (full cover). These values are regularly interpreted as to mean that Assault mechs simply cannot be larger than 12m in height because otherwise terrain height 2 (seemingly) wouldn't be able to fully hide a 15m high Assault mech and in reverse that also means that all mechs must be significantly larger than 6m otherwise the whole partial cover thing would fall apart as well. But what people fail to recognize is that those 6 and 12m are just an abstracted approximation that ignores relative distances (between observer, obstruction and target), actual observer heights and a whole lot of other variables in order to prevent player from having to do time consuming geometric calculations. Those values were never meant to be precise measurements against actual mech heights.
  
• To make things worse: As time went by the (changing) Battletech makers and artists themselves fell into the pit trap that I mentioned in point 3. Particlarly artwork on newer clan (onmi) mech design was drawn and scaled to sizes that didn't really fit with the relative sizes of the original Inner Sphere mechs but instead put the majority of them right around that 12m mark accross the board. Clan lights - with few exceptions - ended up with medium sizes, Clan medium came closer to heavies, Clan heavies somehow stayed within the upper values of heavies and Clan assaults ended up around the "normal" Assault heights as well with a stronger tendency towards those "magical" 12m. Later introduced IS models then followed that trend => Most of the newer designs ended up with somewhat "canonical" heights around 11-12 meters.
  
• Using a not upright standing soldier in many of the clan related size comparisons certainly didn't help to make it better either.

=> The attempt to properly scale the mechs in MW:O according to "lore" is already highly questionable, because "lore" itself as well as the TT rules don't really give a ****. Additionally attempting to also scale them properly in terms of balance in an FPS game just throws everything in total chaos then.

Edited by Der Geisterbaer, 12 June 2021 - 06:41 AM.

[Khobai]

no one has abstracted anything. the lore says battlemechs are 8m-14m tall. thats the range.

so if an assault is ever more than twice the height of a light then its not accurate to the lore.

since you know the height range of mechs scaling the mechs should be a fairly simple matter.

20 ton mechs are 8m tall
100 ton mechs are 14m tall

everything else is proportionally in between based on tonnage

its easy. PGI just screwed it up.

which is why we have an atlas thats 18m-20m tall and is something like 30% bigger than it should be. the king crab is probably the worst offender its like 40% oversized.

Edited by Khobai, 12 June 2021 - 06:37 AM.

[Darian DelFord]

D A T A, on 12 June 2021 - 04:27 AM, said:

sensor range quirks are easy to give
i always wanted light mechs more focused on scouting/info warfare role rather than ninja killer role like flea and piranha, infortunatelly the rest of the cauldron disagrees that some lights are too strong and is against (for now) nerfing the offensive capabilities of some lights
the plan for now is providing sensor quirks to useless ******** lights like spider anansi for example

Role warfare is dead in this game, it really is, we had a chance at the beginning to make something of it and PGI and IGP completely screwed the pooch on it. The game is now all about damage.

Honestly sensor quirks on lights ain't gonna fix anything. However a problem that I have been trying to get addressed since beta, is sensor profile. A 20 ton mech should not be radar BEEP'ed just as easily or as quickly as a 100 ton mech. Lights try to get behind the heavier mechs. However to do that, we have to transverse a large swathe of terrain. The problem is when we are in FOS just for a split second, we get a Radar Ping.

Something to the effect of 1000 meters for assaults, 900 Meters for a heavy, 800 for a medium and 700ish for a light or some such.

Edited by Darian DelFord, 12 June 2021 - 06:55 AM.

[Verilligo]

MechaGnome, on 12 June 2021 - 02:26 AM, said:

I never said they were easy to play.. i said they are overpowered when used right. Agility is meaningless with out mech re-scales.. until we can effectively shoot light mechs in front of us we are screwed by lights.

They are all op because of the speeds they can do and the crappy servers cannot keep up.. Obviously things like urbies and Adders aren't as dangerous speed wise but can still boat a medium to heavy amount of damage.


Yes sure keep BSing, after all these years and you still don't.. And MWO Host State Rewind is garbage and doesn't work right..

If you can't hit lights, the servers have nothing to do with it. If you strike a light, the light WILL take damage. Host rewind works and the servers are fully capable of handling a reasonable (~250 ms) level of ping. If you cannot shoot a light, it's because your aim was not good enough to shoot that light. That is not to say it's entirely your fault for not having enough skill because even the MOST skilled players cannot always shoot a light. It's by design, because the only way of making lights playable in a game where they have so little armor (which is double what it originally would have been) is to make them able to juke damage through skillful evasive play.

If you want to talk about servers that couldn't keep up with lights and where lag shields actually DID exist, then the games you want to talk about are literally every Mechwarrior game before MWO. MW3 and 4 were notorious with regards to lag shields and having to aim whole mech lengths ahead of where the target was.

Khobai, on 12 June 2021 - 06:30 AM, said:

no one has abstracted anything. the lore says battlemechs are 8m-14m tall. thats the range.

so if an assault is ever more than twice the height of a light then its not accurate to the lore.

since you know the height range of mechs scaling the mechs should be a fairly simple matter.

20 ton mechs are 8m tall
100 ton mechs are 14m tall

everything else is proportionally in between based on tonnage

its easy. PGI just screwed it up.

which is why we have an atlas thats 18m-20m tall and is something like 30% bigger than it should be. the king crab is probably the worst offender its like 40% oversized.

Lore must, in all cases, be subjugated in the interests of game balance. Lore may be used to inform game balance, but no further. This is especially true with Battletech, which is notorious for having inconsistent lore and a storied history of author's pets (until they get unceremoniously killed, sometimes by some other author). Perhaps some assaults are oversized, yes, but that is a form of balance in and of itself, along with attempting to imbue them with a sense of spectacle. The fact that lights are viable at all in a game where every past entry has had bigger ALWAYS being better is a testament to good balance, not bad.

[Khobai]

Verilligo, on 12 June 2021 - 07:12 AM, said:

If you can't hit lights, the servers have nothing to do with it. If you strike a light, the light WILL take damage. Host rewind works and the servers are fully capable of handling a reasonable (~250 ms) level of ping. If you cannot shoot a light, it's because your aim was not good enough to shoot that light. That is not to say it's entirely your fault for not having enough skill because even the MOST skilled players cannot always shoot a light. It's by design, because the only way of making lights playable in a game where they have so little armor (which is double what it originally would have been) is to make them able to juke damage through skillful evasive play.

If you want to talk about servers that couldn't keep up with lights and where lag shields actually DID exist, then the games you want to talk about are literally every Mechwarrior game before MWO. MW3 and 4 were notorious with regards to lag shields and having to aim whole mech lengths ahead of where the target was.


Lore must, in all cases, be subjugated in the interests of game balance. Lore may be used to inform game balance, but no further. This is especially true with Battletech, which is notorious for having inconsistent lore and a storied history of author's pets (until they get unceremoniously killed, sometimes by some other author). Perhaps some assaults are oversized, yes, but that is a form of balance in and of itself, along with attempting to imbue them with a sense of spectacle. The fact that lights are viable at all in a game where every past entry has had bigger ALWAYS being better is a testament to good balance, not bad.

While I 100% agree with you that game balance trumps lore. In this case I fail to see how having massively oversized assaults benefits game balance.

[Verilligo]

Khobai, on 12 June 2021 - 07:15 AM, said:

While I 100% agree with you that game balance trumps lore. In this case I fail to see how having massively oversized assaults benefits game balance.

It is a means of improving the other weight classes. Typically in Mechwarrior games, assaults are always the best mechs to be using. The combination of highest armor and biggest weapons payload makes them naturally the most attractive in a game about destroying the enemy and preventing your own destruction. Size therefore is one way of making lighter mechs, even within the assault mech bracket itself, more viable because you can better make use of cover and have a smaller profile in comparison with the 100-tonners.

Like, even if you disagree with my conclusion, does my train of thought at least come across? I will admit that some of the oversizing is likely because it gives a better sense of weight and spectacle, and we haven't always had the best success rate with balance team decisions in the past (particularly at rescale), but size differences are absolutely a valid means OF creating a balance.

[martian]

MechaGnome, on 12 June 2021 - 02:26 AM, said:

I never said they were easy to play.. i said they are overpowered when used right. Agility is meaningless with out mech re-scales.. until we can effectively shoot light mechs in front of us we are screwed by lights.

They are all op because of the speeds they can do and the crappy servers cannot keep up.. Obviously things like urbies and Adders aren't as dangerous speed wise but can still boat a medium to heavy amount of damage.


Yes sure keep BSing, after all these years and you still don't.. And MWO Host State Rewind is garbage and doesn't work right..

Can you name light 'Mechs that you consider to be OP, please?

[Khobai]

Verilligo, on 12 June 2021 - 07:39 AM, said:

It is a means of improving the other weight classes. Typically in Mechwarrior games, assaults are always the best mechs to be using. The combination of highest armor and biggest weapons payload makes them naturally the most attractive in a game about destroying the enemy and preventing your own destruction. Size therefore is one way of making lighter mechs, even within the assault mech bracket itself, more viable because you can better make use of cover and have a smaller profile in comparison with the 100-tonners.

Im not saying assaults shouldnt be bigger than other weight classes.

Im saying theyve made them disproportionately bigger to such an extent that its detrimental.

[Verilligo]

Khobai, on 12 June 2021 - 07:41 AM, said:

Im not saying assaults shouldnt be bigger than other weight classes.

Im saying theyve made them disproportionately bigger to such an extent that its detrimental.

Yes, I know. I'm saying the fact that it's detrimental to them was the entire idea. It's intended to be a detriment.

Now there is definitely a discussion that could be had about whether the average player (and more importantly a player's team) is able to cope with that detriment effectively. NASCAR is a problem brought on by a combination of map design and player behaviors. Big, slow mechs that are unwieldy to pilot are intended to do certain things very well, but those things are not always compatible with the game's structure unless it is purposely bent by players on a per match basis.

That generally doesn't happen, though. So even if a mech is balanced absolutely perfectly, that balance may be edged out by not having the support that it's expected to receive. Given everyone typically agrees that map design in MWO could be improved, though, I would prefer to give the new map designer time to try and make their adjustments before attempting to remold assault mech size balance.

[Darian DelFord]

Khobai, on 12 June 2021 - 07:41 AM, said:

Im saying theyve made them disproportionately bigger to such an extent that its detrimental.

And the Jenner, Panther, Wolfhound, Firestarter, Raven, are not?

martian, on 12 June 2021 - 07:40 AM, said:

Can you name light 'Mechs that you consider to be OP, please?

Yeah waiting on this one to. No one EVER includes specifics

[Moldur]

If you look at the player metrics, most of the top K/D W/L players in the game with long records almost exclusively pilot assaults. There are very few light mains with as high of success.

People can say whatever they want with anecdotals and how it feels to them (emotionally based argument), but the numbers don't lie.

[Khobai]

Darian DelFord, on 12 June 2021 - 08:51 AM, said:

And the Jenner, Panther, Wolfhound, Firestarter, Raven, are not?

are you joking?

assaults like the king crab are way more massively oversized

youre crying because your firestarter is like 10%-15% bigger than it should be. boo hoo.

a friggin kingcrab is like 40% bigger than it should be. do you realize how utterly massive king crabs are compared to anything else? its ridiculous.

the problem with scaling is much more pronounced in assaults than any other weight class.

Moldur, on 12 June 2021 - 08:53 AM, said:

If you look at the player metrics, most of the top K/D W/L players in the game with long records almost exclusively pilot assaults. There are very few light mains with as high of success.

because lights dont do as much damage as assaults.

however being successful in a light often means doing things that arnt quantified by stats or the scoring system

like when a light turns an enemy around so teammates can shoot it in the back. do you get credit for that? no.

is shooting an enemy in the back worth more than shooting an enemy in the front? no lights get punished for killing enemies by doing less damage while assaults get rewarded for killing enemies the hard way through the front.

do lights get anywhere near the points they should get for capping? no.

when you get half the enemy team to pull off the front line to chase you. is that worth anything for scoring? no. the chaos and discord that lights sew in the enemy ranks doesnt get accurately reflected in stats/scoring.

trying to say lights are inferior because their stats are inferior is dumb. the stats dont accurately reflect what good lights are doing in the game to help their team win

the problem with lights isnt that theyre not good. its that theyre not properly rewarded for being good. because damage done is the primary metric the game uses for determining match score and everything else is worth almost nothing.

stats also get distorted by playing in a group vs playing solo. someone who plays in a group is going to have a way higher W/L ratio and a higher KDR than someone who plays solo. the game really should differentiate between group stats and individual stats. thats another reason why stats mean absolutely nothing.

Edited by Khobai, 12 June 2021 - 09:53 AM.

[1453 R]

So...the whole summation of this new argument, Khobai, is:

"I wanna pilot assault 'Mechs, and then be completely invincible because assault 'Mechs should be the best, strongest, shootiest, armor-iest combat monsters in all of BattleTech and it's Just Not Fair™ that these little things so much smaller than me are allowed to threaten me. Assault 'Mechs deserve to have no good counterplay and to be the pinnacle of MWO, and I just don't like that assault 'Mechs are supposed to have drawbacks."

Is that about right? Because that's really what this latest pointless tangent on scaling is coming off as.

[Khobai]

except I dont even pilot assault mechs

[FupDup]

Khobai, on 12 June 2021 - 09:19 AM, said:

except I dont even pilot assault mechs

Jarl's List says otherwise.

[Khobai]

FupDup, on 12 June 2021 - 09:22 AM, said:

Jarl's List says otherwise.

theyre not the main weight class I pilot though

im sure everyone pilots all four weight classes to some degree

the current rankings for this season shows I pilot lights and mediums way more than assaults.

because I think assaults are absolutely terrible in the current meta. theyre bad at poking. and its a poking meta.

Edited by Khobai, 12 June 2021 - 09:55 AM.