135 replies to this topic

[Hauptmann Keg Steiner]

MyriadDigits, on 06 August 2021 - 10:17 AM, said:

MWO actually has more restrictions than Tabletop Battletech does thanks to having hardpoints. TT actually doesn't have hardpoints at all, so the only thing stopping from giga-boating whatever you want is just money, facilities (depending on the "complexity" of the changes being made), skill rolls, and whether or not you mind the mech becoming a miniature star when you pull the trigger.

There's also a hard limit of 16 weapons per mech in MWO. Granted, that's rarely an issue anyway thanks to hardpoints, but then you come across stuff in the books like the Linebacker with 20 machineguns. Being an infantryman really doesn't pay in BT.

[Richard Jaeger]

The Basilisk, on 08 August 2021 - 02:02 AM, said:

Ppl who try to justify the hillarious take on mech customization of the MW series (except MW5!!!) with the "HURDUR it haz mechlab in TT too, red tha roolz book bro" argument always forget the main balancing point of BATTLETECH.

100% your opinion. There are many ways to play the TT game, and I'm glad the MW video games offer some, but not nearly all, the customization you can get from TT.

[pattonesque]

The Basilisk, on 08 August 2021 - 02:02 AM, said:

Half of my mechs (everything below 75T mostly) sitting in my mech bays and gather dust since even a bad luck hit will twohit them.
And no, not by beeing focused down by half of the enemy team, but simply by getting a good salvo from a halfway "decently" build anything.

"bad luck hit" in this case means someone shot you and you didn't twist I'm guessing

[1453 R]

Hauptmann Keg Steiner, on 08 August 2021 - 03:26 AM, said:

There's also a hard limit of 16 weapons per mech in MWO. Granted, that's rarely an issue anyway thanks to hardpoints, but then you come across stuff in the books like the Linebacker with 20 machineguns. Being an infantryman really doesn't pay in BT.

There's a Septicemia on the books (a 55-ton Jihad-era Homeworlds OmniMech built by rogue scientists) with three Clan plasma cannons (a heat-based ammunition-fed weapon with roughly the range of a medium laser that deals significant heat damage to 'Mechs and *utterly horrific* damage to vehicles and infantry) eight AP gauss rifles (anti-infantry razorblade rail shotguns using Gauss technology), and eight machine guns in two arrays. As well as four medium pulse lasers just in case it encounters harder targets.

23 total weapons, and also it's a walking 55-ton war crime. People think the Piranha is so horrifying? Imagine something with 25% MOAR dakka, the ability to flamer-violate you from ~240 meters, and four medium pulse lasers to open up holes for the dakka. Endo, Ferro, cXL275 w/ its integrated heat sink. By my calculations the blurdy thing has twenty-nine frickin' tons of available pod space (based on back-hacking the tonnage required for the canon Bravo-Z variant, which Sarna lists the entire pod loadout for. 14 tons of laser with a TC, so TC3, a light TAG, a Nova CEWS, three extra heat sinks, seven improved Jump jets. 12 + 2 + 3 + 1.5 + .5 + 3 + 7 = 29).

This thing exists, for real. So does the Nova CEWS, i.e. a Beagle Active Probe, Guardian ECM, and Improved C3 Link in one single piece of one-slot, one-point-five ton gear. Tabletop gives no ***** about your sense of propriety and will raise you this medium OmniMech that can either genocide an entire small town or gut a Timber Wolf with a single close-range alpha.

Edited by 1453 R, 08 August 2021 - 07:43 AM.

[MyriadDigits]

The Basilisk, on 08 August 2021 - 02:02 AM, said:

Availability of tech, costs and availability of a skilled/educated workforce.

Is it really so hard to accept that MWO is making the assumption that you have engineers at your disposal that can tell a crayon from a screwdriver?

[Nightbird]

People forget that while in Table top, Battletech, MW5, the damage every mech receives is automatically randomized, in MWO it is the pilot's responsibility to randomize the damage by twisting and jumping. Most players in the game stand still, which is equivalent in the other games to powering down and giving the other party a free called shot on your CT or Cockpit.

[MechNexus]

The Basilisk, on 08 August 2021 - 02:02 AM, said:

Yea waited for *that* argument.

Ppl who try to justify the hillarious take on mech customization of the MW series (except MW5!!!) with the "HURDUR it haz mechlab in TT too, red tha roolz book bro" argument always forget the main balancing point of BATTLETECH.

Availability of tech, costs and availability of a skilled/educated workforce.

And yea if you would have read the rules carefully and with eye to the spirit of the rules one of the first things stated in each and every itteration of the construction rules is that they are for flavor only and otherwisely have to be governed by the tech and availability rules of the extended campaigns section of the rules book.

So to put it even more clear: "If you used construction rules to minmax your mechs or your Units you basicaly played against the rules."

So how often will you encounter deliberately "tuned" mechs or top of the line Units like a Pillager, a Devestator or a Thunderhawk except in major storry line engagements ? Well 1 in a 1000 if at all.
How often would you meet a perfectly tuned to the likings of its pilot Omnimech in the Clan Tumans?
More often than in the IS but still a rare sight since Omnis are mostly configured for certain scenarios or simply according to supply and availability situations.(remember the first rule of all Clans is not make it dead but do not waste anything)

So, yes, the original opener of this post is right, the overoptimisation, the overboating and the completely hillarious powercreap that came into play with the last patches is just ridiculous and while entertaining for the lulz purposes quite boring in the long term.
Half of my mechs (everything below 75T mostly) sitting in my mech bays and gather dust since even a bad luck hit will twohit them.
And no, not by beeing focused down by half of the enemy team, but simply by getting a good salvo from a halfway "decently" build anything.

The only way to get halfway entertaining, interesting and enjoyable Matches atm is to deliberately stay below T3 since ppl there tend to use voice, use more than the center of any given map and do not just deathball and nascar each other to death within 2mins after the initial encounter.

And to get even clearer:

" HEY YOU METAFARMERS at the top of the foodchain with your so called meta (aka abusing inherent lack of gamedesign) you are boring the sh...out of everyone else "

Some problems:

1. How would you propose making "Availability of tech, costs and availability of a skilled/educated workforce" a factor in a multiplayer arena shooter without making the game horifically hostile to new players or crazy grindy? There's a reason why Clans are considerably toned down compared to the tabletop.

2. You would see custom mechs all the time. Hell, omnimechs are designed to be rapidly refit for a different situation, so it's not unreasonable to suggest that a Clan Mechwarrior would swap out a given weapon for something they prefer. Also, the Bounty Hunter has an impressive collection of custom mechs (two of which being in MWO) so once again - Enforcing stock mode because muh lurr is incorrect.

3. Metagame is an aspect of every single game, even IRL sports. People will always gravitate toward the best and most efficient equipment and strategies, and will always strive to optimise their play to get an edge. This isn't abusing a lack of game design, this is playing to win. There's nothing wrong with playing casually, but don't expect to win all the time if you're not playing to get that result.

My take on all this is that cries for "stock mode only because muh lurr" are just excuses for being willfully ignorant about game mechanics and outright refusing to understand how to better oneself, instead preferring to drag down everyone else to their level.

.... which also wouldn't work, because even if you got your stock mode fantasy, you'd still get sweeped by good players (because, shock horror, they're good players) who gravitate to the best mechs available to them, like the Awesome 8Q, Any DHG fafnir, Warhawk Prime, Adder Prime, MAD-BH2, Champion 1NB... List continues.
Participants of the 2018 world championship can probably shed more light on how this would go, because they went through it and absoloutely hated it. Not to mention the people PGI were trying to attract never showed up...

[1453 R]

Some people aren't after the expansion of stock mode because they believe it will "fix the meta". They just have no interest in a 'Mechwarrior' game where everyone is running around in hyper-optimized 'Mechs with no real commonality or continuity with their canonical loadout. it doesn't feel like BattleTech to them; it's more like a bunch of Call of Duty teenyboppers in cheap BattleTech Halloween costumes. To those folks, the essence of BattleTech is gritty slugfests between ancient, barely-functional machines piloted by ancestral nobleman-soldiers. Wham-bam-swiggety-swooty machines outfitted within an inch of their lives, beyond what even the most successful Solaris superstars could manage, and games where any given player owns between fifty to eight hundred priceless and irreplaceable war machines just doesn't work for them.

Admittedly, there's no way to make a competitive arena game out of that vision of BattleTech. But I try to remember that 'Mech Dads aren't necessarily terrible people for prioritizing the lore over competitive realities. The game just doesn't feel fun to them if it's entirely divorced from lore, and in their defense Piranha promised them a whole lot more lore for their founder's dollars way back in the day. I don't think anyone's satisfied with what MWO has turned into, and denigrating lore nerds out of hand feels disingenuous. We all want a better MWO, ne?

[Spheroid]

MechNexus, on 08 August 2021 - 10:17 AM, said:

Metagame is an aspect of every single game, even IRL sports. People will always gravitate toward the best and most efficient equipment and strategies, and will always strive to optimise their play to get an edge. This isn't abusing a lack of game design, this is playing to win. There's nothing wrong with playing casually, but don't expect to win all the time if you're not playing to get that result.

Other games do employee mechanisms that subvert peak meta though. Look at BF4, every weapon has an award or trophy associated with it. People invest time and effort chasing the awards associated with sub-par weapons like impact grenades or the PP-2000. People chasing these rewards on different timelines has the effect of diversifying and lowering the average battlefield lethality instead of running nothing but the AEK-971 etc.

Since this game's income is highly dependent of mechbay sales it makes no sense to promote only the dozen or so top of the food chain mechs. Do you agree with this assessment? Some mechanism needs to exist to incentive pokemech beyond lame monthly events. I don't care if it is logistics, lore, trophies or something else. Maybe the leaderboards should be shut off to foster more casual play and spending.

Edited by Spheroid, 08 August 2021 - 06:02 PM.

[YueFei]

1453 R, on 08 August 2021 - 03:36 PM, said:

Some people aren't after the expansion of stock mode because they believe it will "fix the meta". They just have no interest in a 'Mechwarrior' game where everyone is running around in hyper-optimized 'Mechs with no real commonality or continuity with their canonical loadout. it doesn't feel like BattleTech to them; it's more like a bunch of Call of Duty teenyboppers in cheap BattleTech Halloween costumes. To those folks, the essence of BattleTech is gritty slugfests between ancient, barely-functional machines piloted by ancestral nobleman-soldiers. Wham-bam-swiggety-swooty machines outfitted within an inch of their lives, beyond what even the most successful Solaris superstars could manage, and games where any given player owns between fifty to eight hundred priceless and irreplaceable war machines just doesn't work for them.

Admittedly, there's no way to make a competitive arena game out of that vision of BattleTech. But I try to remember that 'Mech Dads aren't necessarily terrible people for prioritizing the lore over competitive realities. The game just doesn't feel fun to them if it's entirely divorced from lore, and in their defense Piranha promised them a whole lot more lore for their founder's dollars way back in the day. I don't think anyone's satisfied with what MWO has turned into, and denigrating lore nerds out of hand feels disingenuous. We all want a better MWO, ne?

You could get a taste of that Battletech setting with proper logistics, with a true MMO environment. Problem is, that would limit you to having 1, maybe 2 battles per day. Matches might feel more like ARMA with lengthy setup, marching for 30 minutes, etc.

I remember getting a small taste of this in a player-run league that used Mech4 to conduct battles, and we were not only constrained in the mechs we had available, but also what weapons, because there was a limited stockpile and the factories could only churn out so much at a time. A mech that was destroyed in a match was gone, your team couldn't take that mech into the next battle.

Maybe if an MWO2 is ever made, it can have the arena combat as we have now, with magically instant-repaired mechs for free, with its own separate currency (V-Bills instead of C-Bills, for "virtual" currency). And then feature a separate MMO environment with its own economy. You'd need to worry about spare parts, ammo, fuel, food, water, etc., and this would prevent a group of players from spamming more matches into "ghost drops" like what we saw happen in Faction Warfare in MWO. At the conclusion of a battle you'd need time consolidating, repairing mechs, re-arming them, bringing up supplies, etc.

I guess you could time-compress a little bit so that Jumpships don't need to literally sit in the sun for 1 week to recharge the KF drive. You could compress it down to 1 day, or maybe a few hours. But that means players have to carefully consider travel time just to get to the desired star system they want to fight at.

So the Quickplay would be where you go to mess around, blow off steam, no serious lasting consequences. And the MMO play would be where every battle is different, and has higher stakes and consequences, and at the end of a battle, win or lose, time must be spent to regroup and repair. During that waiting time, instead of doing nothing, players could go back to Quickplay.

Edited by YueFei, 08 August 2021 - 05:54 PM.

[Gagis]

1453 R, on 08 August 2021 - 03:36 PM, said:

To those folks, the essence of BattleTech is gritty slugfests between ancient, barely-functional machines

What bothers me with this is that this is not really what the board game describes.

The board game describes fast, agile, nimble mechs constantly moving, twisting, turning and evading. When a mech stops, it gets rapidly destroyed since mechs don't have that much armour, especially later on in history as advanced technology makes mechs carry more and more firepower, not to mention land and air vehicles with their own devastating firepower. Likewise, when an enemy gets in the rear arc, even assault mechs fall to much smaller, faster, enemies. Mechs stay alive trough good positioning and trough all of that agile movement keeping them very hard to hit, which is what the damage spread mechanic simulates.

That sounds much more like MWO than the weird ideas people have about slow stompy mechs with infinite armour and peashooter weapons. Use cover, keep moving, and twist incoming damage to different components, and MWO is much like Battletech lore is. Stationary mechs not being quickly destroyed by accurate weapons fire is not Battletech.

Edited by Gagis, 08 August 2021 - 11:07 PM.

[My Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ]

Quote

Smaller, quicker 'Mechs - which, oh-so-coincidentally, carry less firepower - are suppressed in a game which cares nothing about any objective save "Blow Up Enemy".

Yes lights have less firepower and armour than an assault however through skill you can leverage the mobility of lights and perform very well, lights simply have a higher skill floor and I'm going to presume that since you're T5 you're not seeing good light play.

Gagis, on 08 August 2021 - 11:05 PM, said:

The board game describes fast, agile, nimble mechs constantly moving, twisting, turning and evading.

To double down on this, even in lore mechs are described as being extremely agile and capable of acrobatic feats. The idea that battlemechs are these lumbering machines that can barely move seems to be a product of the imagination and honestly further cements the idea in my head that mechdads don't want Battletech and instead their warped head cannon of what the IP is to them based on a book or two and a few TT matches they played back in the '80s.

Edited by My Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, 08 August 2021 - 11:20 PM.

[MechNexus]

Spheroid, on 08 August 2021 - 04:39 PM, said:

Other games do employee mechanisms that subvert peak meta though. Look at BF4, every weapon has an award or trophy associated with it. People invest time and effort chasing the awards associated with sub-par weapons like impact grenades or the PP-2000. People chasing these rewards on different timelines has the effect of diversifying and lowering the average battlefield lethality instead of running nothing but the AEK-971 etc.

Since this game's income is highly dependent of mechbay sales it makes no sense to promote only the dozen or so top of the food chain mechs. Do you agree with this assessment? Some mechanism needs to exist to incentive pokemech beyond lame monthly events. I don't care if it is logistics, lore, trophies or something else. Maybe the leaderboards should be shut off to foster more casual play and spending.

You are aware that the cauldron are in the process of buffing the less favourable mechs, right? We've already had an agility pass which set the timberwolf from "trash tier" to "unironically the best clan heavy in the game" and a quirk pass is around the corner, one that prioritises the weakest mechs again much like the agility passes before it. Making every mech worth taking in some way will go far further than forcing anything.

[pbiggz]

Without responding to anyone in particular...

You cannot argue for things you don't like to be removed from the game simply because you think you'll win more matches if it's removed. That goes for snipers vs brawlers, that also goes for the literal existence of the mechlab.

The mechlab has been a part of mechwarrior since it's inception. No its not *exactly the same* as what appears in tabletop/lore, but its not far off; its also, far and away, one of the most fun parts of the game.

Other mech shooters (hawken) played more smoothly, but lacked the customization. Mechassault on the Xbox was an absolute hoot, but without the lab, it didn't have the staying power of older games. Living legends has so many different prebuilt variants it almost sidesteps that issue, but not quite. You play it and something is still missing. The lab is part of what hooks people in. It lets you make the game your own; wins and losses. It's part of what makes mechwarrior what it is.

Any arguments in favour of clamping down on, or removing functionality in the mechlab should be dismissed immediately.
You cannot in good faith argue for half the game to be removed because you think you'll loose fewer matches. That is what we in the business call, ********.

[Capt Deadpool]

Dogstar, on 07 August 2021 - 11:43 PM, said:

A fair point, but 1453 R is right in general, one thing that has happened over the last few years, and was finalised by the Cauldron changes is that damage across the board has gone up and as a result light and medium mechs have become somewhat redundant. When a heavy mech can hit 80kph and mount a 50 point laser vomit (I think, no specific examples here) then most of the time light mechs are cannon fodder and medium mechs are pinatas.

I run my lights nowadays when I want to drop down PSR, because it's often difficult, without going total meta, to do enough damage to go up in PSR even on a win, and frankly, most of my medium mechs are the same.

I know it is tough for us light-lovers, but if you look at many of the posts The Cauldron folks have made, it is absolutely not their intention to nerf lights harder than they already were before the weapon buff. They are, as we speak, working on a consensus for light class defensive quirks (ostensibly armor and agility) to likely make them perform less badly relative to other classes than they did even before the weapon pass. The eventual rescale will also increase survivability.

Patience is required; remember PGI isn't paying them. I can still make lights work, but they indeed require more caution and therefore put out even less damage than before. If any light folks are disgruntled for the time being, I'd suggest stepping up to some medium chassis for the time being, as I'd disagree that the weapon buff affected them as much as lights. Indeed some of them have benefited from weapon buffering, and can somewhat emulate a light-style of play without getting insta-deleted.

[Novakaine]

I'm kinda insulted he didn't mention lurm spam.
Almost as if it doesn't exist.

Edited by Novakaine, 09 August 2021 - 10:37 AM.

[The Basilisk]

Gagis, on 08 August 2021 - 11:05 PM, said:

What bothers me with this is that this is not really what the board game describes.

The board game describes fast, agile, nimble mechs constantly moving, twisting, turning and evading. When a mech stops, it gets rapidly destroyed since mechs don't have that much armour, especially later on in history as advanced technology makes mechs carry more and more firepower, not to mention land and air vehicles with their own devastating firepower. Likewise, when an enemy gets in the rear arc, even assault mechs fall to much smaller, faster, enemies. Mechs stay alive trough good positioning and trough all of that agile movement keeping them very hard to hit, which is what the damage spread mechanic simulates.

That sounds much more like MWO than the weird ideas people have about slow stompy mechs with infinite armour and peashooter weapons. Use cover, keep moving, and twist incoming damage to different components, and MWO is much like Battletech lore is. Stationary mechs not being quickly destroyed by accurate weapons fire is not Battletech.

Well you're right there...and thats the reason why BATTLETECH rapidly declined after the Introduction of the Clans, Jihad completely did not happen within most BT Fan circles and one of the many reasons nobody cared about MW-Darkage.

You could see the same thing in MWO if you would just stop refusing to look.
Game became faster and faster and the more elitists showed up the more general players got gone.

What some people call developing skill gap that the "weaker" players seem to refuse to bridge by "learning" those very players might deam a degeneration of the game towards a pretty poor random comp shooter.

Edited by The Basilisk, 09 August 2021 - 11:33 AM.

[The Basilisk]

Novakaine, on 09 August 2021 - 10:37 AM, said:

I'm kinda insulted he didn't mention lurm spam.
Almost as if it doesn't exist.

Sorry dude...lurms have simply not the time to get annoying cuz most ppl making big enough errors to get lurmed are long dead when the lurms start to hit.

[D A T A]

Thorqemada, on 08 August 2021 - 01:20 AM, said:

Imo both sides are right in their assessment in regard to high alpha builds and the muderball.

I have experienced the time when Mechs had 30 to 35 points of damage alphas and it was 8 vs 8 so the murderball was at most 6 mechs as at least 2 would allways scout, hang back, afk, wahtever so the oportunity to advance was much bigger and often rewarded taking the initiative.

These days the Alphas more probably be around 50 to 60 with some players exceeding even 100 points of damage and the murderball is at least 10 Mechs so the amount of firepower one faces today is roughly 2 to 3 times bigger depending if you face a single Mech or the Murderball PLUS the cooling is better, damage and crit multipliers have grown etc.
HSR has increased the ability to hit a Mech bcs ping differences no longer leave an uncertainte where to aim for as long its in the window of the HSR limitations.
So very probably its more 3 to 5 times the potential damage compared to MWOs beta days.

The protection has not kept up with that it is 5 points here, 10 points there...

The destructive power in the game has outgrown the protective strength of its targets by far!

You have a coverhopping playstyle left if you play with random people so you are less organized.
If you are very organized you can also play a rolling barrel style of advance by forcing the opposition to stay in cover and be unable to shot back.
Its both a rather lackluster style of gameplay in regard to the inherent entertainement value.

The entertaining low intensity high engagement small scale encounters of the beta days and early lifetime of the game are gone - its Mechmob vs Mechmob with no place for individuality...

when exactly? when mechs had litterally half the armor they had now and stalkers alphastriked 6 PPCs all day and all night?

[ScrapIron Prime]

My Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, on 08 August 2021 - 11:19 PM, said:

To double down on this, even in lore mechs are described as being extremely agile and capable of acrobatic feats. The idea that battlemechs are these lumbering machines that can barely move seems to be a product of the imagination and honestly further cements the idea in my head that mechdads don't want Battletech and instead their warped head cannon of what the IP is to them based on a book or two and a few TT matches they played back in the '80s.

In lore, sure, but not in the rules.

Take for example the Grey Death Legion. In the Verthandi campaign there’s a Stinger pilot (whose name escapes me) who is said to be a master of Quik Kill martial arts, and who can pull this off in his Battlemech, making this little 20 ton, half repaired 3025-tech scout mech some kind of ninja terror. Only there’s no rules for that. None. The dude literally just has a +1 to piloting rolls and does no extra damage.

Nor is there any way to avoid fire or get dodgy in the crunch of the game. The gracefulness of battlemechs is all poetry and prose, but you see none of it in play.