266 replies to this topic

[Betrax]

pls add LEG skill point

[ScrapIron Prime]

Navid A1, on 21 August 2021 - 08:43 PM, said:

I'm actually an electrical engineer, specialty being electromagnetics and power generation.

I can comment on realism on this case
You would never build your power loads right on top of the power source... you'd want those in a safe distance from each other, both to allow protective and control gear and to have a physical safe distance (depending on multiple factors, from arc distance to security). Also when it comes to high power antennas, the distance also ensures minimized EM interference.

Also making a reactor underground is a pretty common practice to minimize exposure to the open area around (both from inside perspective and outside), and to maximize security when a military target is involved.


The old HPG map was completely unrealistic both in terms of communication reliability, EM disturbance cause by the reactor, Structural stability with a giant mass being placed over a hollow cavity with physical restraints and supports being located inwards towards the center rather than outwards like a pyramid. Also since this is a military target, it means destroying the antenna from orbit also nukes the power source, making it very costly to unearth the reactor to rebuild



I hope I could bring some immersion into the discussion.

EE club! Shout out!

Just remember, it’s not people’s GRASP of technology that is important in fiction, it’s their PERCEPTION of technology. It’s not a computer if it doesn’t have blinky lights, it’s not fast if it isn’t loud, the dude is not a computer expert if he doesn’t type super fast. You get the idea.

It doesn’t break immersion for ME if there need to be transmission lines from elsewhere, but the average person expects to see it all in frame.

[Nightbird]

Arkhangel, on 21 August 2021 - 11:32 PM, said:

Good to see another of one of the worst maps get a nice redo (and honestly most of the complainers are folks who liked taking advantage of WHY they were bad maps in the first place).

Well, it is one of the top two most voted for maps in the game. From a game perspective, I understand the arguments of people that don't like it. From a business perspective, I find it strange to have a goal of making more popular things less popular - catering to the minority.

[RickySpanish]

Navid A1, on 21 August 2021 - 08:43 PM, said:

*helpful commentary*

I hope I could bring some immersion into the discussion.

ScrapIron Prime, on 22 August 2021 - 05:35 AM, said:

EE club! Shout out!

Just remember, it’s not people’s GRASP of technology that is important in fiction, it’s their PERCEPTION of technology. It’s not a computer if it doesn’t have blinky lights, it’s not fast if it isn’t loud, the dude is not a computer expert if he doesn’t type super fast. You get the idea.

It doesn’t break immersion for ME if there need to be transmission lines from elsewhere, but the average person expects to see it all in frame.

This is actually true. For example if you watch Terminator 2 where Sarah Connor runs down the asylum corridor her footsteps make the sound of heels, yet she is bare foot. The perception of reality is often more important than reality itself and this is what immersion in a video game tends to be about. Another example - 3rd person games like World of Warcraft have their worlds scaled up, especially indoors. Why? Because the camera works better and players get a better sense of space even though the world is wrong. People with requisite real world experience enter the world of entertainment like games and film, making funny comments like Navid - and yes, very informative as it is Navid, your sarcasm missed the point a little.

Edited by RickySpanish, 22 August 2021 - 09:48 AM.

[Arkhangel]

HPG Manifold and Polar Highlands were voted for because they were easy and meant people didn't have to manage their heat.

The changes they got, like Canyon Network, were basically just adding stuff that was complained about the most about them. I.E. the little bugger on a wall drawing out the match on Manifold, or the lack of non-trench cover on Polar Highlands and stupidly-high proliferation of LRM-only builds because of it. Having them re-done means people'll either have to learn to use LRM builds properly, or actually start fitting some backup weapons, since mid- and Short-range builds have some cover to use to close with. CN's main change was really just the fact that anything bigger than 70 tons got stuck on a cliffside, hence the new ramps.

Nightbird, the changes happened because PGI is actually catering to the Majority. One of the biggest complaints that cost the game PLAYERS was playing on the same freaking map 90% of the time.

The minority that's complaining about it are just vocal about it. Like Straw Feminists or QAnon supporters.

Edited by Arkhangel, 22 August 2021 - 09:52 AM.

[Steel Raven]

Nightbird, on 22 August 2021 - 07:49 AM, said:

Well, it is one of the top two most voted for maps in the game. From a game perspective, I understand the arguments of people that don't like it. From a business perspective, I find it strange to have a goal of making more popular things less popular - catering to the minority.

As someone who has voted for HPG in the past: It's not popular because it's well designed, it's popular because it's easy. Take the top = win. Same with old Terra Therma, same with Caustic Valley until they turned up the heat in the creator. While it's far from a bad map (Alpine Peaks really, really needs to be re done. I love the idea but dear lord, it's painful to play) it gets boring after a few years of take the top=win game play. If you cant take the top, Nascar and Pop-tarting is your only option as staying the enemy team now has a demanding field of fire over the center of the map. The team that takes the top can only loose if they are very bad shots and loose with every trade of fire.

[Arkhangel]

Exactly.

And I agree AP needs a re-do. Or even being split into two smaller maps.

[Nightbird]

Steel Raven, on 22 August 2021 - 10:02 AM, said:

As someone who has voted for HPG in the past: It's not popular because it's well designed, it's popular because it's easy.

I never said why it is popular, it's just indisputable that it is. And the goal of the re-design is to remove that popularity.

[KursedVixen]

I don't see anything to this patch that I don't like, (except the fact that alot of IS mechs get -5% heat Why???) the buffs are all around both sides Dire wolf is made more tanky like it should be, arctic cheetah get's a little more armor.... the only thing that could best this is to make the old kit fox the tanky light it's suppose to be and to make it have diffrent values than the cheetah and mist lynx... but really PGI why do ANY IS mechs need heat quirks?

Edited by KursedVixen, 22 August 2021 - 10:25 AM.

[Arkhangel]

Nightbird, on 22 August 2021 - 10:08 AM, said:

I never said why it is popular, it's just indisputable that it is. And the goal of the re-design is to remove that popularity.

No, the goal of the redesign was to remove the most commonly complained-about parts of the map.

Which it did.

And anyways, a Map being TOO popular is a problem too, given, as repeatedly mentioned before, it makes the game stale, and costs it players to other games.

Pretty much the same reason Meta-Builds get nerfed. So the game stays fresh.

Which literally every MMO has done for decades now, and has proven it works.

Edited by Arkhangel, 22 August 2021 - 11:47 AM.

[Nightbird]

Arkhangel, on 22 August 2021 - 11:40 AM, said:

And anyways, a Map being TOO popular is a problem too, given, as repeatedly mentioned before, it makes the game stale, and costs it players to other games.

We could make the other maps more popular, or we could make a current map less popular. A business usually chooses 1 not 2, that's all I am saying is weird.

[justcallme A S H]

RickySpanish, on 22 August 2021 - 09:46 AM, said:

making funny comments like Navid - and yes, very informative as it is Navid, your sarcasm missed the point a little.

Well you, and others, talked about realism / real world (in a make-believe video game universe) being important from a map perspective.

Navid gave you some proper school on realism and the fact HPG originally wasn't 'real' and now it makes far, far more sense to everything.

You now have your realism but are still, thinking, it missed the point? Come on dude... Navid didn't miss the point at all, a few guys complaining about realism, did.

[Gas Guzzler]

Navid A1, on 21 August 2021 - 08:43 PM, said:

EM disturbance cause by the reactor,

Not to mention terawatts of RF energy giving all the mech pilots and installation personnel cancer.

[Navid A1]

RickySpanish, on 22 August 2021 - 09:46 AM, said:

This is actually true. For example if you watch Terminator 2 where Sarah Connor runs down the asylum corridor her footsteps make the sound of heels, yet she is bare foot. The perception of reality is often more important than reality itself and this is what immersion in a video game tends to be about. Another example - 3rd person games like World of Warcraft have their worlds scaled up, especially indoors. Why? Because the camera works better and players get a better sense of space even though the world is wrong. People with requisite real world experience enter the world of entertainment like games and film, making funny comments like Navid - and yes, very informative as it is Navid, your sarcasm missed the point a little.

I didn't miss the point. Changes to HPG manifold was done to improve gameplay. One person said that it is unrealistic to move the antenna away from the reactor, and I explained that it's more "realistic" than you think.

In BT and MWO concept of reality is fake and made up. It was "realistic" in people's minds because it was designed like that in the first place. If HPG was designed like the new modified one from the get go, and we wanted to change it to how it is now, you'd still think it's going to be unrealistic, since you've already formed your image of realism after years of seeing the map in a specific arrangement.

Even if we put aside "realism" and gameplay, a giant HPG hub as a backdrop is far more visually appealing and logical than 24 herp derps slamming LRMs into one of Comstar's most valued assets in the world left and right. Forget Comstar, in BT lore factions actually avoid damaging hpg hubs.

Edited by Navid A1, 22 August 2021 - 08:03 PM.

[C337Skymaster]

Steel Raven, on 22 August 2021 - 10:02 AM, said:

(Alpine Peaks really, really needs to be re done.

Please don't. That map is visually interesting, diverse, and dynamic. What needs to be done is there needs to be a reason to travel the map. The Conquest Cap points should be spread out a bit more (or put on a randomly rotating list of 20 possible locations). The Domination point should move around, so we have reason to play on different areas of the map. But the map itself is realistic (despite the ramp they already added to the backside of the mountain), and it would absolutely ruin it if it suddenly has arena-ramps all over the damn place.

[C337Skymaster]

Navid A1, on 21 August 2021 - 08:43 PM, said:

I'm actually an electrical engineer, specialty being electromagnetics and power generation.

I can comment on realism on this case
You would never build your power loads right on top of the power source... you'd want those in a safe distance from each other, both to allow protective and control gear and to have a physical safe distance (depending on multiple factors, from arc distance to security). Also when it comes to high power antennas, the distance also ensures minimized EM interference.

Also making a reactor underground is a pretty common practice to minimize exposure to the open area around (both from inside perspective and outside), and to maximize security when a military target is involved.


The old HPG map was completely unrealistic both in terms of communication reliability, EM disturbance cause by the reactor, Structural stability with a giant mass being placed over a hollow cavity with physical restraints and supports being located inwards towards the center rather than outwards like a pyramid. Also since this is a military target, it means destroying the antenna from orbit also nukes the power source, making it very costly to unearth the reactor to rebuild



I hope I could bring some immersion into the discussion.

And I'm actually a Mechanical Engineer. That giant dish on the side of the map is much less efficient than 20 smaller dishes working in unison. Even in a low gravity environment, the torque generated by the radius of that dish, every time you try to move it, is going to mean it takes three hours to reposition it instead of a couple of minutes, every time you need to send your message to a different planet.

You also wouldn't put your most valuable and delicate piece of equipment outside of your defensive perimeter. Nor would your defensive perimeter have nearly as many holes in it as the original map did. Every single one of those gates where we can get into the facility in the first place wouldn't exist, because the whole point of those walls would be to keep battlemechs out. ALL battlemechs, every single one from every faction, because you're right: under no circumstances would two factions be battling it out around something as valuable and delicate as an HPG Relay. The entire fight would take place in the moon-scape terrain outside the walls, in the craters and around the meteor debris boulders, well away from any of the equipment associated with the operation and maintenance of the relay station.

Thus, ADDING access points is only ruining the realism further, rather than improving any part of it. There should be no ramps at all in that facility, because it shouldn't be designed for battlemech travel. If you want a realistic moonscape artificially constructed facility to fight in, then maybe it needs to be a military base, or industrial complex, or something (like Mining Collective).

As to the generator underneath, you wouldn't have an exposed flame reactor just hanging from the ceiling, but since it IS just hanging from the ceiling, then it's the ceiling that needs to have a clear conduit path traveling directly to the dish if you want people to believe the power is generated remotely and transmitted to that huge honking dish on the side of the map. ('mechs in this game, when compared to cars, or viewed from "human" height in the 'mech lab, are already way too big. They're supposed stand 10-12 meters tall, and humans are already 2 meters, so 1/5-1/6 of the battlemech's total height. Currently, the cars are 1/50th and the humans are about a 1/20th of the height of our battlemechs. And that dish is going to be that much bigger?)

[John Bronco]

So then, it seems we've all agreed that making some complaint about "realism" is folly. Glad that's resolved.

Can't wait to try it out tomorrow!

[Navid A1]

C337Skymaster, on 23 August 2021 - 03:06 AM, said:

And I'm actually a Mechanical Engineer. That giant dish on the side of the map is much less efficient than 20 smaller dishes working in unison. Even in a low gravity environment, the torque generated by the radius of that dish, every time you try to move it, is going to mean it takes three hours to reposition it instead of a couple of minutes, every time you need to send your message to a different planet.

You also wouldn't put your most valuable and delicate piece of equipment outside of your defensive perimeter. Nor would your defensive perimeter have nearly as many holes in it as the original map did. Every single one of those gates where we can get into the facility in the first place wouldn't exist, because the whole point of those walls would be to keep battlemechs out. ALL battlemechs, every single one from every faction, because you're right: under no circumstances would two factions be battling it out around something as valuable and delicate as an HPG Relay. The entire fight would take place in the moon-scape terrain outside the walls, in the craters and around the meteor debris boulders, well away from any of the equipment associated with the operation and maintenance of the relay station.

Thus, ADDING access points is only ruining the realism further, rather than improving any part of it. There should be no ramps at all in that facility, because it shouldn't be designed for battlemech travel. If you want a realistic moonscape artificially constructed facility to fight in, then maybe it needs to be a military base, or industrial complex, or something (like Mining Collective).

As to the generator underneath, you wouldn't have an exposed flame reactor just hanging from the ceiling, but since it IS just hanging from the ceiling, then it's the ceiling that needs to have a clear conduit path traveling directly to the dish if you want people to believe the power is generated remotely and transmitted to that huge honking dish on the side of the map. ('mechs in this game, when compared to cars, or viewed from "human" height in the 'mech lab, are already way too big. They're supposed stand 10-12 meters tall, and humans are already 2 meters, so 1/5-1/6 of the battlemech's total height. Currently, the cars are 1/50th and the humans are about a 1/20th of the height of our battlemechs. And that dish is going to be that much bigger?)

Comparisons are made between moving the big dish from one place to another, not comparing it with 20 smaller ones (Your view of efficiency is also debatable... it's not just data transfer volume, it's power requirement and signal to noise)... so yeah, you gotta accept that you gonna move around that giant mass around.

Also it's funny that you think the walls are defensive.... you know in a low gravity environment against battlemechs that have jump jets. It's not a medieval castle. That massive dish overlooking the base is in no bigger danger than before. If destroying the hub was an objective you would not send mechs, you nuke it from orbit. And capturing the hub is through its control center, not mechs humping the antenna.

Interestingly, most antennas of these type are often placed in the middle of nowhere to minimize interference... so... even being on the outside like that is no ideal... it has to be a kilometer or so away from the base. But we have to accept compromises for the sake of visuals.

Overall... it's all in your head... You think too much about power conduits and less about playing the game.

[Half Ear]

A mechanical engineer, an electrical engineer and a mathematician all walk into a bar.....

Edited by Half Ear, 23 August 2021 - 05:53 AM.

[Roodkapje]

Scout Derek, on 20 August 2021 - 12:53 PM, said:

Time for Chadturion to return to MWO officially.

Please explain the joke...

Scout Derek, on 20 August 2021 - 01:13 PM, said:

Considering it's a redesigned map as opposed to a brand new map, I don't really see that happening in the future.

I hope you are wrong

Horseman, on 20 August 2021 - 01:54 PM, said:

Therma Classic and a Solaris volcano duel pit when?

One day... or perhaps never ?!

Thorqemada, on 20 August 2021 - 02:38 PM, said:

My first instinct is telling me people will increase the usage of the HPG encircling wall...

Those walls need to be part of the out of bounds area! PERIOD.

/me really hates Shadow Camper Cats

Gas Guzzler, on 20 August 2021 - 02:45 PM, said:

Good then it won't just be ECM Shadow Cats, Spiders, and that one 2 ER LL Cheetah guy just running around the wall for 5 minutes at the end of the game.

If you use the Cheetah like that your MWO account should be INSTANTLY BANNED!!!

The Spider is USELESS!!!

So that leaves us with those damned Shadow Camper Cats...

ScrapIron Prime, on 20 August 2021 - 08:00 PM, said:

it’s only the “best” map if you like circling the obstacle in the center. Every. Single. Time.

this redesign breathes life into the map. Nascar will not be the default mode and more mechs will have the ability to use the walls.

Actually I am seeing less and less NASCAR crap on HPG lately so I guess the MWO Player Base is improving ?!

Jon McFuzzy, on 20 August 2021 - 08:20 PM, said:

+ Engine sales please. Lots of poor souls out there with very limited C-billz.

NOFI, but you are doing something horribly wrong then...?!

With all the Events stuff constantly going on you should have plenty of C-Bills

C337Skymaster, on 20 August 2021 - 09:01 PM, said:

Not recently, for a few reasons: first and foremost, I've finished leveling up those 'mechs, and the ones I still have to master aren't capable of that tactic. But secondly, I haven't seen that tactic be anything more than simply annoying in a couple of years. Sure, it's fun if you can get up there and stay unnoticed, but players are very attentive, these days, and there's typically a sufficient volume of accurate long-range firepower that can be directed at wall-snipers to discourage them from continuing in that role. Rather than having ramps up the outside of the wall so I can chase some Shadow Cat in my Dire Wolf, I'd rather just snipe them from the center platform with PPCs or ERLL, or something. More often than not, I can out-trade anything that can get up there, with something that can't, and can force the wall-sniper to find a different position.

Add to that the prevalence and power of air and artillery strikes, and wall snipers aren't the "giant threat" they were 5 years ago.

I wish you were right!

Monkey Lover, on 20 August 2021 - 10:05 PM, said:

Lets play a game how many ramps can you count? I count 27 in the first picture.

I almost did a ROTFLMAO here! NICE!

Seems like MWO is becoming RWO : RampWarrior Online

RickySpanish, on 21 August 2021 - 09:56 AM, said:

Ah, looks like the Spider 5V, with its worst loadout of all the other Spiders, was just too OP to receive anything more than a useless overheat damage reduction. Why's it useless you ask? Because it cannot actually overheat - it doesn't have enough hardpoints.

IMHO the whole Spider family needs a complete redesign to be a lot more similar to the Arctic Cheetah family

And YES, I know that would suck because of lore stuff, but really : The poor things are USELESS!!!

Scout Derek, on 21 August 2021 - 02:07 PM, said:

Still don't know how it'll fair against an Assassin in terms of SRM vs SRM only, but I know other combos will likely wreck the Assassin in general.

Talk about stuff that needs fixing : The hitboxes of the Assassin!

I have seen people with decent/good aim shoot the crap out of them and those damn things just survive... ?!?!

It's like your cheating the whole time, without actually cheating!

Steel Raven, on 22 August 2021 - 10:02 AM, said:

As someone who has voted for HPG in the past: It's not popular because it's well designed, it's popular because it's easy. Take the top = win. Same with old Terra Therma, same with Caustic Valley until they turned up the heat in the creator. While it's far from a bad map (Alpine Peaks really, really needs to be re done. I love the idea but dear lord, it's painful to play) it gets boring after a few years of take the top=win game play. If you cant take the top, Nascar and Pop-tarting is your only option as staying the enemy team now has a demanding field of fire over the center of the map. The team that takes the top can only loose if they are very bad shots and loose with every trade of fire.

Talk about horrible maps...

Is there any redesign planned it anytime soon ?!

Arkhangel, on 22 August 2021 - 11:40 AM, said:

Pretty much the same reason Meta-Builds get nerfed. So the game stays fresh.

Which literally every MMO has done for decades now, and has proven it works.

MWO != MMO but I get what you are saying

Gas Guzzler, on 22 August 2021 - 06:16 PM, said:

Not to mention terawatts of RF energy giving all the mech pilots and installation personnel cancer.

Ehm...

As far as I know we are already sitting on top of a nuclear reactor in our mechs the whole time ?!