325 replies to this topic

[C337Skymaster]

Void Angel, on 31 August 2023 - 01:28 PM, said:

You're making huge assumptions that are not factually true. The math is simple: players do not select things they like at random. They select them based on their own subjective criteria, but those criteria are weighted by how well the 'mech in question actually performs for them. You don't see an even distribution of available 'mechs in any weight class. You, personally don't; I don't; no one does. Because the 'mechs aren't all created equal. If you see someone piloting a Battlemaster 1D today, that person is a masochist - take it from a Phoenix Project owner. The handful of high weapon mounts are offset by the 'mech's unfortunate architecture. So while it's fun to have a RAC that never jams, the chassis just isn't the equal of a Stalker, which carries similar loadouts in the same weight class, but does literally everything better. This will push players against playing certain 'mechs, so the assumption that people are going to pick 'mechs by some kind of stochastic variation isn't valid, and your reasoning falls apart after that.

You're not saying the same thing that I am in the second point either. 'Mechs shouldn't be balanced to shore up weak player skills (like with Mages in WoW.) They should be balanced against the performance of players who have achieved general competence in MWO. A Tier 4 who hasn't developed the skills to maneuver his Assault (not to mention possible marksmanship deficiencies) fighting a Tier 2 Light pilot abusing a meta build to farm that poor semi-newbie just isn't a good measure of relative balance. You need to be looking at matches between T1-T3 players for a truer picture of how the 'mechs fare against each other.

I play stock 'mechs, and I'm not the only one. Masochists exist, and they play the 'mechs they remember liking from TT, or from MW2 or from HBS Battletech, for the love of the game, and the love of the 'mech's history, or lore, or being good elsewhere, and its performance in MWO's "meta" be damned.

Not everybody wants to be a meta-tard, running only what's the latest and bestest and doesest the mostest damagest. A lot of us just want to have fun and have a personal connection with some 'mech or another for one reason or another which is different from person to person.

I love Adders, because in MW4 they were very good. They're not quite as good in any other game, but they were amazing in MW4, so I like them regardless. I like Bushwackers, because that's the starting 'mech in MW3. I like the Timberwolf-D, because when I played Ghost Bear's Legacy on Windows XP, it had a glitched 'mechlab, forcing me to only play what was pre-loaded in the game, and I used that build in a trial of position and did really well. I was able to recreate it in MW4, and it does well there, too, and it does really well in MWO, once I got here. I never tried it in MW3 because LRMs are the absolute king in that game, so why would you run anything else unless you didn't salvage enough ammo? I'm tempted to play that one again and use anything and everything besides LRMs, just to see how I do, though.

There's almost a third as much again of any weight class more than there are lights in MWO, meaning the selection pool is smaller, and the options for running lights in the first place are less. There are some light 'mechs that are absolutely broken OP, so if all anyone wanted to do was run the latest meta, those would be just as popular as any heavy or assault, and are frequently seen because of that. But people want to play what they like, not just what does well, and therefore we see Battlemaster 1D's, and Bushwacker S2's, and Timberwolf Primes, regardless of how poorly they might perform in a straight up fight compared to other variants of their same chassis, never mind completely different 'mechs, altogether.

I have two Battlemasters. One was an event reward (1G) the other was the heaviest 'mech I could buy in Solaris Tier 5 or 6, or something too stupid for there to be an assault 'mech in that tier, but I was getting my *** kicked by whatever the meta was, so I grabbed it to give it a try, and it did halfway decently (I think it's the 1S, or 3S, or something. I have to double-check, I just know it's the Steiner Battlemaster). Both of those 'mechs are stored in their stock configuration. They're both mastered, and skilled for their stock config, and if ever I were to run them, that's how I'd take them out. I'm nearing 500 'mechs in my 'mechbay, though, and I barely have time in the day to run the dozen or so that aren't mastered, let alone every single 'mech I've ever bought. I widen my horizon by role playing 'mechs that would have been in the Ghost Bear Touman and call it a day.

EDIT: alright, logical thought exercise:

There is ONE assault, ONE heavy, and ONE medium in the game, but there are 100 light 'mechs. The Heavy, Assault, and Medium are stupendously spectacular in their performance. What weight class do you see most often? Lights drastically outnumber every other weight class, so they naturally show up more often simply because people like variety. Nobody's going to run the same three meta 'mechs when there are so many options to choose from in the lightweight category, simply because they're going to get bored after awhile, and want to mix it up.

Same thing is already going on, but in reverse. There is a dearth of lights compared to the other weight classes (not necessarily PGI's fault, either: if you look through any online listing of 'mechs in existence, there are less lights than other weight classes), so they get played proportionally to their number, and come up short in the comparison.

Edited by C337Skymaster, 31 August 2023 - 08:00 PM.

[C337Skymaster]

One other key ability which is missing from MWO that technically balances the Light vs Assault circle-jerk fight that everyone hates so much, is the ability for the Assault 'mech to reach out and slap the light 'mech. Give it a good drop-kick and push it back out into effective weapons range. Stick out a leg, trip it, and then blast it in the back as it runs by.

Things that humanoid robots should be able to do, if they're really mimicking human movement, but which requires a LOT more input controls than we have on a computer, some of which are straight up fictional.

[martian]

C337Skymaster, on 31 August 2023 - 08:03 PM, said:

One other key ability which is missing from MWO that technically balances the Light vs Assault circle-jerk fight that everyone hates so much, is the ability for the Assault 'mech to reach out and slap the light 'mech. Give it a good drop-kick and push it back out into effective weapons range. Stick out a leg, trip it, and then blast it in the back as it runs by.

Things that humanoid robots should be able to do, if they're really mimicking human movement, but which requires a LOT more input controls than we have on a computer, some of which are straight up fictional.

Physical attacks were possible in MWO only for a short period (and I guess that the majority of the currently active playerbase has not experienced physical attacks in MWO) and very probably they will not be added. Also, when those physical attacks were possible, they created a lot of problems.

[Void Angel]

C337Skymaster, on 31 August 2023 - 07:51 PM, said:

Not everybody wants to be a meta-tard, running only what's the latest and bestest and doesest the mostest damagest. A lot of us just want to have fun and have a personal connection with some 'mech or another for one reason or another which is different from person to person.

EDIT: alright, logical thought exercise:

There is ONE assault, ONE heavy, and ONE medium in the game, but there are 100 light 'mechs. The Heavy, Assault, and Medium are stupendously spectacular in their performance. What weight class do you see most often? Lights drastically outnumber every other weight class, so they naturally show up more often simply because people like variety. Nobody's going to run the same three meta 'mechs when there are so many options to choose from in the lightweight category, simply because they're going to get bored after awhile, and want to mix it up.

Same thing is already going on, but in reverse. There is a dearth of lights compared to the other weight classes (not necessarily PGI's fault, either: if you look through any online listing of 'mechs in existence, there are less lights than other weight classes), so they get played proportionally to their number, and come up short in the comparison.

No, they do not. You're falling into a common fallacy, of interpreting data toward your conclusion. Do a real experiment: Take a screenshot of the 'mechs at the end of your matches for a while, and then make a simple bar graph illustrating by chassis how many times you're seeing those 'mechs. You will not see those 'mechs distributed evenly according to available chassis in class. You will not see 'mechs within a class evenly distributed. Even in Tier 5. What you're going to see is a lot of variation, but with more powerful 'mechs standing out. Sure, you'll see some iconic 'mechs more often; 'mechs like the Catapult and Hunchback are popular for emotional reasons - same reason I play my Locust and Shadow Hawk. But you should recall that there are very strong 'mechs which are also iconic in the core IP. You can control for that in various ways, but it's still a confounding variable.

You're actually arguing against your own opinion, here! If players play some 'mechs over others for any reason, your fantasy of random distribution of 'mech choices is false! It doesn't matter if I play my Locust 1V because I really enjoyed the Crescent Hawks' Inception, or because I have good memories from the Project Phoenix release and faction/comp play, or if I find it to be more powerful than my Spider. All of those are possible at once, if you didn't pick that up, and other players will have siimilar preferences - and there is no reason whatsoever to think that those preferences will be randomly distributed across all possible 'mechs. That is ack-basswards logic, and it is emphatically wrong.

[Void Angel]

martian, on 01 September 2023 - 06:03 AM, said:

Physical attacks were possible in MWO only for a short period (and I guess that the majority of the currently active playerbase has not experienced physical attacks in MWO) and very probably they will not be added. Also, when those physical attacks were possible, they created a lot of problems.

Heheh. So. Many. Problems:

That's not even the worst bit I've seen, but I can't find "Jenner Football" on Youtube any more.

[smokefield]

martian, on 29 August 2023 - 10:56 AM, said:

You can find combat-oriented light 'Mechs in all BattleTech eras. Not every light 'Mech must be like the stock tabletop Raven or Ostscout.


As for MWO, the game is advertised as "a tactical, 'Mech-based online shooter". See? "Shooter" ... And people play this game to shoot other 'Mechs.

Since the very beginning of MWO, light 'Mechs have been used in direct combat.

Depriving light 'Mechs of their combat ability would mean that there would be no reason to take them because they would not be viable in MWO.

there were other good answers on why lights need to be reviewed, but i just want to point out a couple of things.

while its true some light mechs were used for combat, they were never meant to "assault" the enemy team. for that we have a dedicated category.

adding to this the word you intentionally "forgot" from that advertisement - tactical - Now becomes much more clear why lights don't play their intended role at all - they miss(mostly not all) both the tactical scope as the game intended, as well the fighting role. there is nothing tactical in charging a slow assault or heavy in a light and kill him while speed, buffs and hitreg make you as strong as a medium if not more. not to mention when that happens to a group of slow mechs and the light manages to get away barely scratched.

i am not saying to deprive them of combat ability, i am asking that mwo creates a role for lights, where lights are actually needed and can be used, the best choice because of what those mechs are, not because of buffs and poor hitreg. but that would mean to change things in the game, and if that did not happen until now, weak chances to see it in the future...

[martian]

Void Angel, on 01 September 2023 - 03:46 PM, said:

Heheh. So. Many. Problems:

Void Angel, on 01 September 2023 - 03:46 PM, said:

That's not even the worst bit I've seen, but I can't find "Jenner Football" on Youtube any more.

Paul Inouye was not pleased with the "Dragon bowling"..

Edited by martian, 02 September 2023 - 12:16 AM.

[martian]

smokefield, on 01 September 2023 - 08:37 PM, said:

there were other good answers on why lights need to be reviewed, but i just want to point out a couple of things.

while its true some light mechs were used for combat, they were never meant to "assault" the enemy team. for that we have a dedicated category.

In BattleTech, all 'Mechs - including light 'Mechs - do what the situations demands. Just open some scenario books and you will find how one mixed force (light, medium and heavy 'Mechs) attacks the opposing force (also composed of light, medium and heavy 'Mechs).

And this is exactly what we have in MWO.

smokefield, on 01 September 2023 - 08:37 PM, said:

adding to this the word you intentionally "forgot" from that advertisement - tactical - Now becomes much more clear why lights don't play their intended role at all - they miss(mostly not all) both the tactical scope as the game intended, as well the fighting role. there is nothing tactical in charging a slow assault or heavy in a light and kill him while speed, buffs and hitreg make you as strong as a medium if not more. not to mention when that happens to a group of slow mechs and the light manages to get away barely scratched.

If it is not "tactical", what is it then? Strategic?

And that a light 'Mech uses its mobility to defeat some assault 'Mech? No problem. These things happen in BattleTech. I have just read a book in which a light 'Mech fights that way and kills Davion Templar III.

smokefield, on 01 September 2023 - 08:37 PM, said:

i am not saying to deprive them of combat ability, i am asking that mwo creates a role for lights, where lights are actually needed and can be used, the best choice because of what those mechs are, not because of buffs and poor hitreg. but that would mean to change things in the game, and if that did not happen until now, weak chances to see it in the future...

You just admitted that no big rework of MWO is in sight.

Thus, light 'Mechs must be viable in the game as it currently is, and that means that they must be capable of killing other 'Mechs.

[smokefield]

yeah, unfortunately... that it means, but that happens for the wrong reasons, this is what a lot of people try to say. and we should not agree with it just because devs cannot offer more.. some people still hope

[JumpingHunter]

martian, on 30 August 2023 - 12:03 PM, said:

Those things that you described (consumables calling in infantry or light vehicles, etc.) have never been in MechWarrior Online and almost certainly they will never be. Thus, it would be a nonsense to balance light 'Mechs with the respect to such scenarios.

As I said, in the current MWO light 'Mechs must be able to kill enemy 'Mechs. Nobody would buy and pilot light 'Mechs geared towards situations that can not happen in MWO.



How often do you pilot light 'Mechs? I guess you do not spend too much time using them in MWO.

If you wish to complain that light 'Mechs are OP and should be nerfed, the right thread is here: Light Mechs Are Screwed Up

As a heavy or Assault 'Mech player, you can kill or cripple them with one shot.

And by the way, thanks for giving me a good laugh. This is the "horrifically overquirked and overarmored" PIR-1 Piranha:



This "overquirked" 20-tonner has one Operations quirk. The "overarmored" Piranha can carry massive ... 138 points of armor and those additional armor quirks make no big difference in the battle. Not in the game where 50-point alpha strikes are nothing unusual.

Yep, i screwed up with piranha quirks, not gonna lie, but if there is so many people who tell that piranha is overarmored, and if from my personal experience i can't reliably damage it and other faster lights even when my shots connect, then there is definitely something wrong with either it's hitboxex or it's armor. Trust me, there were far less times where i actually DID get any results from direct Heavy Gauss, Heavy PPC or laser array precisely tracked burn on piranha than times when i didn't deal any significant damage to it. I don't know if it's the hitboxes or if it is an armor that makes it so durable and undamagable, but if i don't have perfect ping around 20-30 at worst (which is extremely rare with PGI servers location) i tend to see my shots deal either no damage or severely reduced damage if it's a laser burn, no matter how precisely i shoot. If you tell me that the hitboxes being broken or abused to this level is viable way to balance out the mech, then i dont even know what is not a viable way to balance mechs out.

As for piloting lights, i own 3 of them, and i pilot them sometimes - stealth and NARC raven, Wolfhound and Panther. Yes, i never did pilot mechs like piranha or mist lynx or arctic cheetah, but i've seen enough of them and fought enough of them in my experience to know how them feel from outside their cockpit.

And about these consumables i made up - i only made an examples of things that light mechs would be very good at doing, and the fact that PGI zealously refuse to add any more depth in game process of MWO, combined with ongoing streak of unnecessary light mechs buffs, shows why exacly MWO feels stale sometimes, especially when you get 5 or 10 loses in a row because there's FP light mech pilots everywhere running in packs of 4-6 and killing everything with no losses to their numbers.

Edited by JumpingHunter, 03 September 2023 - 02:20 AM.

[JumpingHunter]

Void Angel, on 01 September 2023 - 03:46 PM, said:

Heheh. So. Many. Problems:

That's not even the worst bit I've seen, but I can't find "Jenner Football" on Youtube any more.

Despite all the problems with that, for me as a player who never saw that before it looks so damn hillarious, also the mechs getting up animation is very good looking!

And judging by the video, i think problems with melee damage would have been able to be fixed if mechs didn't fall over so easily, pretty much how melee works in Mechwarrior 5 (dont remember if it's a mod or not). And in general it would just make the game much more in-depth if you could kick some annoying piranhas in their butt for coming too close and abusing their small size and big mech's legs. That would make a good portion of funny moments!

[JumpingHunter]

martian, on 01 September 2023 - 06:03 AM, said:

Physical attacks were possible in MWO only for a short period (and I guess that the majority of the currently active playerbase has not experienced physical attacks in MWO) and very probably they will not be added. Also, when those physical attacks were possible, they created a lot of problems.

I would argue that despite all the problems that the melee has created in early MWO it could have been fixed in one way or another, and at the same time it would fix a lot of arguable and discussed issues with light mechs (if so much people actually do argue about that, it means that there're at least some problems with light mechs balance). Assaults or Heavies being able to kick or slap lights to show them their place when they start abusing their legs and big size again would be a good thing, because it would not just be a "screw you specifically" option against light mechs, but a general mechanic applicable in any combat scenarios. I would have love to see some sort of brawling Atlas going insane and beating the sh!t out of few hostiles on battlefield, or a charger literally charging in someone and causing the snowball of mechs.

[martian]

JumpingHunter, on 03 September 2023 - 02:17 AM, said:

Yep, i screwed up with piranha quirks, not gonna lie, but if there is so many people who tell that piranha is overarmored, and if from my personal experience i can't reliably damage it and other faster lights even when my shots connect, then there is definitely something wrong with either it's hitboxex or it's armor. Trust me, there were far less times where i actually DID get any results from direct Heavy Gauss, Heavy PPC or laser array precisely tracked burn on piranha than times when i didn't deal any significant damage to it. I don't know if it's the hitboxes or if it is an armor that makes it so durable and undamagable, but if i don't have perfect ping around 20-30 at worst (which is extremely rare with PGI servers location) i tend to see my shots deal either no damage or severely reduced damage if it's a laser burn, no matter how precisely i shoot. If you tell me that the hitboxes being broken or abused to this level is viable way to balance out the mech, then i dont even know what is not a viable way to balance mechs out.

As for piloting lights, i own 3 of them, and i pilot them sometimes - stealth and NARC raven, Wolfhound and Panther. Yes, i never did pilot mechs like piranha or mist lynx or arctic cheetah, but i've seen enough of them and fought enough of them in my experience to know how them feel from outside their cockpit.

Try it.

Buy PIR-1 Piranha (it costs 3 721 292 C-Bills, a half of that sum when it is on sale) and use for a month exclusively. Then you will know firsthand if the Piranha's armor is broken, MGs are OP, etc.

JumpingHunter, on 03 September 2023 - 02:17 AM, said:

And about these consumables i made up - i only made an examples of things that light mechs would be very good at doing, and the fact that PGI zealously refuse to add any more depth in game process of MWO,

It is pointless to talk about the things that have never been in MWO and probably never will be in MWO.

JumpingHunter, on 03 September 2023 - 02:17 AM, said:

combined with ongoing streak of unnecessary light mechs buffs, shows why exacly MWO feels stale sometimes, especially when you get 5 or 10 loses in a row because there's FP light mech pilots everywhere running in packs of 4-6 and killing everything with no losses to their numbers.

As I said, buy the Piranha and try how easy it is to "kill everything with no losses."

JumpingHunter, on 03 September 2023 - 02:37 AM, said:

I would argue that despite all the problems that the melee has created in early MWO it could have been fixed in one way or another, and at the same time it would fix a lot of arguable and discussed issues with light mechs (if so much people actually do argue about that, it means that there're at least some problems with light mechs balance). Assaults or Heavies being able to kick or slap lights to show them their place when they start abusing their legs and big size again would be a good thing, because it would not just be a "screw you specifically" option against light mechs, but a general mechanic applicable in any combat scenarios. I would have love to see some sort of brawling Atlas going insane and beating the sh!t out of few hostiles on battlefield, or a charger literally charging in someone and causing the snowball of mechs.

That train departed ten years ago. Adding various physical attacks now would require adding new movement animations for 120 'Mechs in the game - and that would be something, what PGI with its limited resources could hardly manage.

Also, MWO and MW5:Mercs both use different game engines.

[Void Angel]

People who claim that Lights can't be damaged are almost never Light pilots. Hit registration errors do occur, but they're not a significant damage loss. To give the devil his due, a known instance of hitreg issues (the Raven) was caused by hitboxes overlapping during animation - it caused the game engine to become confused as to where the damage landed, sometimes failing to assign the hit at all. That got fixed years and years ago, though; it's possible that some cases still occur, or that latency and packet loss cost people damage... but most of the times I see people whine about hit registration in a game, either they're using lasers or burst-fire weapons that spread damage all over the target, or I watch them miss, and they still claim hit registration errors. Meanwhile, I plaster the 'mech with an AC/20, and it folds: "huh; hitreg works for me..."

PGI tried for years to implement physical attacks in Cryengine. Didn't work for them with the way the rest of the game works - it was tied to the broken collision system, and and Crytek didn't give them much support a lot of ways. Some critics appointed themselves as backseat programmers - claiming that any good devs could have made it work easily, whilst farting rainbows and sunshine - but such arrogant Internet Experts are a dime a dozen; talk is cheap, and none of them I saw ever applied to PGI.

[Der Geisterbaer]

JumpingHunter, on 29 August 2023 - 01:00 PM, said:

Your claims that lights being comparable with heavies and assaults by firepower and armor while also being 2-3 times faster and having hitreg screwed 50 times over on them is completely ok in FPS game are also useless too then.

~hmmm~ Would you care to provide citations of any "claims" that I allegedly made with regards to Lights being "comparable" to heavies and assaults? Then show me any "claims" about Lights that I made where hit teg was involved. Once you've done that we can talk about the uselessness of said claims again. Prediction: You will fail just as you failed with these strawman accussations.

JumpingHunter, on 29 August 2023 - 01:00 PM, said:

Here is a useful suggestion - make a tonnage limit for the teams and let players pick mechs after the map is selected, like it is in Faction Play, and THEN make light mechs actually be not overbuffed and closer to their canonical design, and then give them, lets say, 2 times more XP and CBills rewards for everything, like how frontline Landsknechts got 2 times more money for being at the risk all the time.

Let's ignore the fact that your suggestion is entirely unrelated to everything I commented on so far. Let's also ignore the fact that you are now asking a complete overhaul of this game's design and let's just look at what you are claiming (again without proof): Lights are allegedly "overbuffed" yet going by the actual statistics they are still the least played weight class with the lowest average damage/match score ratings ... and your suggestion is to pay them with more (in the long term useless) XP and C-Bills. I hate to break it to you but you suck at game design even more than you suck at fighting in or against light mechs.

JumpingHunter, on 29 August 2023 - 01:00 PM, said:

Lights were supposed to be a hard mode in fighting,

Care to provide any relevant design document for either MW:O or the original Battletech that says that Lights "were supposed to be the hard mode in fighting"? Or is that just more of the same made up nonsense like the allegedly hyper-quirked PIR-1?

JumpingHunter, on 29 August 2023 - 01:00 PM, said:

so why not make them generously payed hard mode, instead of overbuffing them over any common sense.

I guess now is as good as any other time to introduce you to a piece of wisdom: Do not appeal to common sense ... for it is neither common nor does it actually make sense.

Edited by Der Geisterbaer, 04 September 2023 - 07:46 AM.

[KursedVixen]

C337Skymaster, on 31 August 2023 - 08:03 PM, said:

One other key ability which is missing from MWO that technically balances the Light vs Assault circle-jerk fight that everyone hates so much, is the ability for the Assault 'mech to reach out and slap the light 'mech. Give it a good drop-kick and push it back out into effective weapons range. Stick out a leg, trip it, and then blast it in the back as it runs by.

Things that humanoid robots should be able to do, if they're really mimicking human movement, but which requires a LOT more input controls than we have on a computer, some of which are straight up fictional.

unfortunatly that may be harder to code, though we do have alot of weapons that are Useless at 0 meters (until the last patch) but we still have ATMs that are useless at 0 meters, which is a reason i don't typically use them.

Edited by KursedVixen, 04 September 2023 - 07:10 AM.

[nopempele]

C337Skymaster, on 31 August 2023 - 08:03 PM, said:

the Light vs Assault circle-jerk fight that everyone hates so much

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.

Edited by nopempele, 04 September 2023 - 08:23 AM.

[Der Geisterbaer]

C337Skymaster, on 29 August 2023 - 04:57 PM, said:

Reason #1 that light 'mechs are the least played 'mechs in the game: they are the least numerous 'mechs in the game.

Try to actually prove that claim because ...

C337Skymaster, on 29 August 2023 - 04:57 PM, said:

If every 'mech received exactly the same quantity of playtime, lights would be the least played 'mechs in the game, because there are the least number of them, and by a substantial margin.

... this is just an assertion - that while at least logically consistent - hinges on one very particular premise: Lights - and for that matter all weight classes - being played with an equal amount of playtime. For that premise to work it would require that all weight classes are equally "well liked" / "powerful" in every regard because otherwise you cannot expect an equal amount of time spent among them (on average).

C337Skymaster, on 29 August 2023 - 04:57 PM, said:

So Lights can't help but be played the least, even with the ever elusive "perfect balance" achieved.

But in that hypothetical situation they would still be exppected to have average match scores / damage scores as the other weight classes ... which by all available data they don't. Against Mediums and Heavies their scores have to artificially inflated by about 10% and against assaults even 15% to make them "comparable". That's not just "margin of error" that's "significant" and in direct contrast of all claims being made that Lights are "too powerful" / "overpowered" or whatever other ill-informed label some people want to apply.

C337Skymaster, on 29 August 2023 - 04:57 PM, said:

As for lowest average damage: I feel as though that's averaging Tier 5 with Tier 1. In Tier 4 where I am, and Tier 3, where I've been, and Tier 1, where I was before the PSR reset, Lights frequently outperform assaults for raw damage numbers. Overall, apart from your one or two meta outliers (8x LBX/2 DWF, for example), Assaults tend to be the least damage dealing 'mechs in most of the matches I play.

And you just started out reasonably well just to drop the ball with anecdotal evidence that is additionally clouded by rampant confirmation bias

C337Skymaster, on 29 August 2023 - 04:57 PM, said:

In the words of everyone's favorite 'mech combat trainer: "In battlemech combat, speed is life. You go slow, you die". Tier 5 is the home of everyone learning the game who may have never played any previous MechWarrior title, before. It's the home of everyone who's taking in the sights and seeing what's what, learning their way around, etc. And thus, Tier 5 is the home of the light 'mechs that stand still and stare while they line up a shot.

Let's just say that whoever this allegedly "favorite mech combat trainer" is supposed to be: This statement is ignorant of the fact that Tier 5 also includes "experienced" players that - for better or for worse - do belong there and still get deleted in their Lights without "standing still and stare while they line up a shot".

But hey, let's not stop here with the fallacies but instead ..

C337Skymaster, on 29 August 2023 - 04:57 PM, said:

Conversely, most Tier 1 light 'mech pilots are capable of using their 'mech's size, speed, and hitreg issues to prevent themselves from taking any damage or losing any components, internal or external.

... go with a non-sequitur and gish-galloping by adding more and more claims about the alleged but unproven super-powers of Lights and then top the entire thing off with ..

C337Skymaster, on 29 August 2023 - 04:57 PM, said:

I have personally seen a Flea get 1500+ dmg in QP, and have heard of one achieving 1900 dmg in QP.

... yet another instance of useless anecdotal evidence. But just for the fun of it: How often did you see an assault break those 1000 or 1500 points of damage and how often have you heard of one breaking the 2000 points of damage barrier? Going by my own stictly anecdotal experience: About 200 to 300 times more often

C337Skymaster, on 29 August 2023 - 04:57 PM, said:

For these reasons, I don't especially trust the statistics in either Tier 1 or Tier 5 to be wholly representative of the 'mech, so much as they're representative of the pilots in those tiers, and unless you can give statistics which only cover Tiers 2, 3, and 4, I'm going to be suspicious of the results, "average" or not. (The median statistic might be more representative than the mean, because if we've got 100 pilots in Tier 5 for every one pilot in Tier 1, it's going to skew the results down).

Well done, telling me that you don't understand statistics without saying that you don't understand statistics and going with the old "I don't trust statistics that I haven't forged myself". I'll put it this way: The publically available data (be it here or on sites like Jarl's) does not support anything you have claimed.

Edited by Der Geisterbaer, 04 September 2023 - 08:11 AM.

[Void Angel]

Der Geisterbaer, on 04 September 2023 - 08:10 AM, said:

Let's just say that whoever this allegedly "favorite mech combat trainer" is supposed to be: This statement is ignorant of the fact that Tier 5 also includes "experienced" players that - for better or for worse - do belong there and still get deleted in their Lights without "standing still and stare while they line up a shot".

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

[C337Skymaster]

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.

Just for the sake of Void Angel's curiosity: I rarely see 1000+ damage numbers outside of Faction. Seeing anything above 1200, even then, is once-a-year, at best. Thus seeing a Flea get 1500 was testament to the pilot, and proof (to me) that they can perform exceptionally well when in the hands of a skilled pilot, and their shortcomings aren't necessarily the fault of the 'mech, but the lack of pilot specialization and expertise.

Edited by C337Skymaster, 04 September 2023 - 07:53 PM.