Posted 11 June 2021 - 09:27 AM
The issue is that in BattleTech-the-tabletop-game, targeting computers significantly increased your chance to hit. They cost weight and slots like a weapon - a large one, in many cases - but they made your other weapons much more likely to work. They were extremely powerful and desirable because they could make a lower-heat loadout hit like a higher-heat one by eliminating unnecessary redundant shots.
In MWO-the-video-game, targeting computers cannot make any improvement at all in your chances to hit. They can offer any number of targeting-adjacent benefits, but they cannot directly improve your firepower at all because you'll be just as terrible a shot with a T-Comp 7 as with no T-Comp at all. There's no reason to equip targeting computers because they cannot aid you in your targeting.
Targeting computers would, effectively, have to offer increasing levels of automated aim assist in order for their TT functionality to be restored and for them to start being worthwhile at any level above 2ish. One can imagine what "equip this item for soft aimbotting!" would incite in all the Church of Skill jackwads, though. They already flip their gourds over lock-on missiles, allowing an item to grant aim assist to direct-fire weapons would basically cause them all to go thermonuclear on the spot.
Unfortunately this means it's not really possible to make targeting computers relevant, as no amount of passive bonus is going to be worth seven slots and seven tons on anything but a meme build. No amount of extra shot velocity or faster paperdoll acquisition is going to balance out against losing an entire PPC, or most of an AC/5, or the seven medium lasers you could've used instead.
Ironmically? if the Church of Skill folks hadn't decided to handicap the game by insisting on a perfect pinpoint crosshair, where all BattleMech weapons are unnaturally accurate and strike true to exact pixel-perfect point of aim 100% of the time? if instead we had reticle bloom dependent on weapons equipped, 'Mech speed, chassis type, and all those other cool, lore-appropriate factors? Targeting Computers could've been extremely valuable for shrinking that bloom and making your weapons more accurate without the need for aim assist, fulfilling their canonical role of making longer-ranged weapons much easier to hit with and favoring heavy weapons. They would've worked pretty much exactly like their TT counterparts do.
But nah. Church of Skill says reflexive snapshot Call of Overwatch twitch aim is more important than a properly immersive, objectively better BattleTech game.
God I hate Church of Skill people...T_T...
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