325 replies to this topic

[C337Skymaster]

nopempele, on 04 September 2023 - 08:01 AM, said:

When did that become an issue? I for one love this. And no, I am not good enough at lights to properly do this, but I think it is a totally legit move.

The only assaults which are prone to this strategy are lame C-Gauss/ERPPC Direwolves and such, with pilots of those tending to ignore the team completely, hug the map border/high points and see their frag count go up from a safe distance of 1+ km. I would not shed a tear for them and lights are a proper counter to such fun-killing M_E_T_A exploitation.

Ignoring the team? Get punished.

Also, not sure about other players, but I usually play lights/medium solely for the freedom of maneuver. This is crucially important if you play with a bunch of random people of random skill (as opposed to say premade teams on VoIP). With assaults you usually do no have an option to disengage, the cost of error can be fatal and your calls for help are largely ignored by PUGs. But this has nothing to do with the game balance.

It's an issue for every single assault pilot who's ever had some tiny insect running circles around them faster than they can turn to track the target, forcing them to reverse their turn (which, if the light pilot is on their game and has a fast enough 'mech, they can often match, to stay out of the line of fire). Having friends nearby with anything other than streaks can often be useless, too, because if the light 'mech is moving fast enough, it can be hard to put effective damage on it. Especially without damaging the slow assault that it's trying to kill.

If the assault has slow-loading PPFLD weapons (IS AC/20's, for example), it can be rewarding to land a shot on a leg, but it can be pure luck as to whether you'll hit the 'mech at all, what with range, convergence, hitreg, ping, muscular response from a finger, and a whole host of other factors.

Can you tell which 'mech I'm usually in in these situations? I play Lights, too, but mostly Adders, Kit Foxes, and Ravens: more reliant on positioning and firepower, and less on twitchy, speedy jerking around (I can't see what's on my screen when I'm moving like that, let alone shoot anything, but I'm well aware that there are pilots who can, and extremely effectively, at that).

[Void Angel]

C337Skymaster, on 04 September 2023 - 07:52 PM, said:

So my main point, that got lost in my tendency to ramble, is that trying to claim "lights are underpowered because they're the least played weight class in the game" is also using a metric which cannot be asserted, because they're the least represented 'mechs in the game, so even if they weren't underpowered, they'd still be least played.

I'll back off every other assertion, but I'm sticking to that one: claiming that their being least played is evidence of their being weak is failing to account for their comparable dearth of options.

Once the frack again: the available number of chassis has nothing to do with how likely people are to play the weight class in the long run. People are not picking 'mechs out of their stable to play with a random number generator! They are not using a dart board and blindfold, or reading tea leaves while they deal out the Tarot deck - they are playing 'mechs based on what they enjoy playing, and for the vast majority of players they are trying to play what works. This will be the case if they have only one fracking Light 'mech, or if they have bought the entire possible array of Battlemechs. It will also be the case if they are making decisions based on sentimental value or roleplaying - just as I drag out my Locust from time to time to try and make it work.

I have explained all of this to you above, and you just... ignored it. But ignoring the truth doesn't make it go away.

Your Flea's unicorn match is a testament to the skill of the Flea's pilot, true. It's also a testament to the skill of every other pilot on the both teams, because Fleas aren't that hard to murder with heavy guns, and 1500 damage is a simply insane amount of damage when you factor in the possible durability involved. For your typical well-built Atlas, all three torsos together is only 519 damage. Looking at it another way, for any Flea that's not ammo-dependent, the highest sustained dps is probably the FLE-17, at 6.6 dps. That's 220.6 seconds of active combat at less than 185m from the enemy team, not including time to cool down and reposition - and nobody just shot this guy? Forget that you're basing a sweeping misconception of balance on an event you claim might happen once a year- you're completely misunderstanding what happened in your own anecdotal story about this match... for which you have not provided a screenshot, by the way.

You are talking to a pilot with extensive esperience and expertise playing fast combat Lights. When the locust first came out, I had a guy tell me I was the first time he was ever scared of one (possibly, it was the last time, too .) Currently there are only a few chassis that are even effective to play against skilled players, and it's a hard row to hoe. Those chassis can be successful, especially if the pilot has a microphone and uses it to relay enemy positions and activities, but it's still harder than just slapping down a Marauder or something and dealing consistent damage. So, the weight class isn't useless, but it's underplayed for a reason - and a wrong answer in misapplied statistics isn't one of your options.

[Void Angel]

Edit:

C337Skymaster, on 04 September 2023 - 08:04 PM, said:

[bolding added for emphasis]
It's an issue for every single assault pilot who's ever had some tiny insect running circles around them faster than they can turn to track the target, forcing them to reverse their turn (which, if the light pilot is on their game and has a fast enough 'mech, they can often match, to stay out of the line of fire). Having friends nearby with anything other than streaks can often be useless, too, because if the light 'mech is moving fast enough, it can be hard to put effective damage on it. Especially without damaging the slow assault that it's trying to kill.

If the assault has slow-loading PPFLD weapons (IS AC/20's, for example), it can be rewarding to land a shot on a leg, but it can be pure luck as to whether you'll hit the 'mech at all, what with range, convergence, hitreg, ping, muscular response from a finger, and a whole host of other factors.

Can you tell which 'mech I'm usually in in these situations? I play Lights, too, but mostly Adders, Kit Foxes, and Ravens: more reliant on positioning and firepower, and less on twitchy, speedy jerking around (I can't see what's on my screen when I'm moving like that, let alone shoot anything, but I'm well aware that there are pilots who can, and extremely effectively, at that).

My dude. You just declared yourself an underskilled player. I mean, that sounds harsh, but there's no kinder (and several less kind) way to put it. It's not "luck" if you hit the enemy that you are aiming at. People do it all the time! The biggest part of learning to play a Light properly is to avoid giving people good shots at you - and running around an Assault in a Newbie Strafe isn't one of those methods. You should have no trouble hitting a Light that's doing this.

"But Void Angel, how do I do that? They're moving so fast!"

Well, I'm glad you asked! There's a very useful concept here called a "tangent." In math, that's a line drawn from a point on a circle that's perpendicular to a radius drawn to that point. A 'mech engaging a circling Light along a tangent will have a zero-deflection shot during that window, trivializing the Light's velocity in respect to weapon projectile speeds for most weapon systems. In Mechwarrior English that means, "when you see a Light death circling an Assault, aim at the outside of the circle and his speed won't matter for most guns."

But there's a bigger problem here, and I hope you can overcome it: you're reporting way more trouble than you should be having here, both in tracking Lights to hit them, and in tracking what's going on when you play a fast-moving Light. If the problem is your base reflexes, well, bad news: youmight be in trouble compared to most people there. But it could also be a matter of your FPS: I had a buddy who bought a "computer" with an integrated graphics "card" on it instead of springing for a real graphics board. He blasted my Spider in the back with like 4 ERPPCs (this was a while back...) leaving a couple of smoking legs behind, because his frame rate was tanking in close combat. Same could be happening to you; run your graphics card's overlay and check your fps when stuff is flying around on-screen close to you.

Another option is cognition bias, specifically learned helplessness. If you think you can't hit Lights effectively, it can stop you from practicing the skills necessary to get it done - like getting a feel for your AC/20's travel time, and "not pulling the trigger when your teammate is behind the target." If you're suffering from slower than average reflexes and hand-eye coordination, it may take you longer to learn these skills, but unless you've got MS or something, it can be done.

Edited by Void Angel, 05 September 2023 - 01:38 PM.

[KursedVixen]

nopempele, on 04 September 2023 - 08:01 AM, said:

When did that become an issue? I for one love this. And no, I am not good enough at lights to properly do this, but I think it is a totally legit move.

The only assaults which are prone to this strategy are lame C-Gauss/ERPPC Direwolves and such, with pilots of those tending to ignore the team completely, hug the map border/high points and see their frag count go up from a safe distance of 1+ km. I would not shed a tear for them and lights are a proper counter to such fun-killing M_E_T_A exploitation.

Ignoring the team? Get punished.

Also, not sure about other players, but I usually play lights/medium solely for the freedom of maneuver. This is crucially important if you play with a bunch of random people of random skill (as opposed to say premade teams on VoIP). With assaults you usually do no have an option to disengage, the cost of error can be fatal and your calls for help are largely ignored by PUGs. But this has nothing to do with the game balance.

yeah i call for help all the time and i never get help meanwhile i always get dogpiled by two mechs on the other team...

C337Skymaster, on 04 September 2023 - 08:04 PM, said:

It's an issue for every single assault pilot who's ever had some tiny insect running circles around them faster than they can turn to track the target, forcing them to reverse their turn (which, if the light pilot is on their game and has a fast enough 'mech, they can often match, to stay out of the line of fire). Having friends nearby with anything other than streaks can often be useless, too, because if the light 'mech is moving fast enough, it can be hard to put effective damage on it. Especially without damaging the slow assault that it's trying to kill.

If the assault has slow-loading PPFLD weapons (IS AC/20's, for example), it can be rewarding to land a shot on a leg, but it can be pure luck as to whether you'll hit the 'mech at all, what with range, convergence, hitreg, ping, muscular response from a finger, and a whole host of other factors.

Can you tell which 'mech I'm usually in in these situations? I play Lights, too, but mostly Adders, Kit Foxes, and Ravens: more reliant on positioning and firepower, and less on twitchy, speedy jerking around (I can't see what's on my screen when I'm moving like that, let alone shoot anything, but I'm well aware that there are pilots who can, and extremely effectively, at that).

in the right speedy light mech i can do it ex, piranha , arctic cheetah, jenner IIC and such.

[Der Geisterbaer]

Void Angel, on 04 September 2023 - 06:51 PM, said:

It's a quote from Unther, an NPC in Mechwarrior 2.

So it would appear that the guy indeed wasn't my "favourite mech combat trainer" because I barely remember the name and certainly not the statement despite spending several hundreds of hours on that game (but mainly in its expansion Ghostbear Legacy)

************************************************************

C337Skymaster, on 04 September 2023 - 07:52 PM, said:

So my main point, that got lost in my tendency to ramble, is that trying to claim "lights are underpowered because they're the least played weight class in the game" is also using a metric which cannot be asserted, because they're the least represented 'mechs in the game, so even if they weren't underpowered, they'd still be least played.

And that point got "lost" for simple reasons:

• You are actually strawmaning the original argument that said that despite allegedly being overpowered they are the least played and have the lowest average match scores / damage per match. So not only did you reverse the part about relative power from a positive to a negative but also simply ignored "50%" of the actual argument. The thing you claim cannot be asserted was never asserted to begin with.
  
• Your strawman is additionally built upon an entirely incorrect premise of its own that goes into special case pleading: Your stipulation only works in the unrealistic edge case of identical power levels in conjunction with players not having any actual preferences and thus randomly choosing mechs across all weight classes at any given time. The fact of the matter however is that players choose particular mechs for various reasons and relative power is just one of them (although a very influential one). And their statistically evidenced weakness is what leads to them being chosen less often.

C337Skymaster, on 04 September 2023 - 07:52 PM, said:

I'll back off every other assertion, but I'm sticking to that one: claiming that their being least played is evidence of their being weak is failing to account for their comparable dearth of options.

And you'll die a useless death on that hill because your own assertion is far more lacking than this misrepresentation of the actual argument.

C337Skymaster, on 04 September 2023 - 07:52 PM, said:

Just for the sake of Void Angel's curiosity: I rarely see 1000+ damage numbers outside of Faction.

I on the other hand see 1000+ damage quite regularly in QP but certainly not in a majority comming from Lights.

C337Skymaster, on 04 September 2023 - 07:52 PM, said:

Seeing anything above 1200, even then, is once-a-year, at best.

Now I'm kind of "sorry" that I don't screenshot my own matches these days anymore ... because - in the absence of screenshots you may want to believe it or not - I certainly managed to pull off 1200 matches in a Light twice already this year and my stats certainly and correctly state that I'm not really a "good pilot". Interestingly enough the last one happened this Monday on Alpine and I have yet to even show up on the leaderboards for this month.

C337Skymaster, on 04 September 2023 - 07:52 PM, said:

Thus seeing a Flea get 1500 was testament to the pilot,

While such a result certainly is a "testament to the pilot" it is also a "testament" to various parameters all aligning in favour of said pilot:

• opponents not properly shooting / hitting the mark thus giving ...
  
• ... the flea the opportunity to spread large numbers of damage accross multiple hit locations before actually getting a kill all while ...
  
• ... his team mates didn't score hits / kills themselves either.

C337Skymaster, on 04 September 2023 - 07:52 PM, said:

and proof (to me) that they can perform exceptionally well when in the hands of a skilled pilot,

And your "proof" is still flawed due to how you ignored additional parameters and thereby is somewhere between a systematically flawed conclusion and a non-sequitur. And from here ...

C337Skymaster, on 04 September 2023 - 07:52 PM, said:

and their shortcomings aren't necessarily the fault of the 'mech, but the lack of pilot specialization and expertise.

... you just go deeper into the non-sequitur area.

Edited by Der Geisterbaer, 06 September 2023 - 08:16 AM.

[DAEDALOS513]

So when are HAG's getting nerfed?