153 replies to this topic

[a 5 year old with an Uzi]

LordNothing, on 21 August 2025 - 12:41 AM, said:

ok, i give. it took seeing them in action to change my mind. these railguns are gon get nerfed. smoke em while you got em.

mechs themselves are kind of meh. you buy the railguns.

Seeing more and more games where people have clearly figured out how to best use them.

The timing of these legendaries' launch just... yeah I'm pretty annoyed and maybe a bit concerned.

[LordNothing]

a 5 year old with an Uzi, on 21 August 2025 - 07:12 AM, said:

Seeing more and more games where people have clearly figured out how to best use them.

The timing of these legendaries' launch just... yeah I'm pretty annoyed and maybe a bit concerned.

there does seem to be something off though. were playing around with 8v8, paywalled urbie, population numbers down, exotic obvious p2w weapons start showing up (i tiered up during an event ffs). it looks like activity but it reeks of desperation.

[w0qj]

If MWO does nothing: folks say that "MWO is declining".

If MWO gets mechs out, folks say "P2W", "money grab", and some may even say that their F2P rights are violated.

Darned if you do, and darned if you don't.

I actually feel sorry for the folks at MWO/Piranha.

[Moadebe]

Samziel, on 20 August 2025 - 11:39 PM, said:

I was responding to a comment about the pinpoint aspect specifically. The splash is nothing to ignore ofc.

If you add PPCs to the mix you get quite a lot of ghost heat or less ppfld if staggering. I dont own the thing so cant test how viable those builds are. DPS will be much lower anyway.

I have the clan version kitted out with JUST 2xERPPCs and the Railcannon. You can literally "alpha" it by just having it all bound to one button ----> initial press fires the ppcs -----> after initial press hold button down for that half second and letter rip.... Yeah you are exposing just a tad longer but the point is there. I switched it to a left right scheme of just ppcs on one and rail on another.

Averaging on a decent match over 700 damage with at least a kill or two. Bad matches where its just a clusterF and a stomp one way or anything at least 300. And this is with my aim that tends to be a tad shaky and over thought. I could easily add more weapons and do better....

[Moadebe]

1453 R, on 20 August 2025 - 05:59 PM, said:

Holy hell, now we're considering splash damage to somehow be better than direct, aimed damage JUST so we can kvetch about how borked and unacceptable the railgun is?

God damnit, MWO. God damnit.

Nah ive been griping about splash for awhile. Because high damage splash is a problem. It is purely skill-less damage that can punish good play.

I already know that for this topic we probably wont be able to discuss it cause right now we are both looking at eachother as if the other grew a second head. So...good day to ya.

Have fun out there!

[Moadebe]

w0qj, on 21 August 2025 - 08:05 AM, said:

If MWO does nothing: folks say that "MWO is declining".

If MWO gets mechs out, folks say "P2W", "money grab", and some may even say that their F2P rights are violated.

Darned if you do, and darned if you don't.

I actually feel sorry for the folks at MWO/Piranha.

Its the powers that be is the problem. They have effectively optimized the fun outta this game. When you equate fun = numbers and ONLY see numbers it sucks all character out of a thing.

We cant retain new players because of this. Ive seen plenty of new people come in and be extraordinarily excited to find this gem of a game. Go through the tutorial geeking out at it. Get into games and start having fun. Make it outta their 25 games and still try.

Then they hit the brick wall. Dying without the ability to see what happened (usually a shot from somewhere they cant tell or see because they didnt see a mech there.) Small mistakes are punished MUCH more now than they used to. Used to you could make a mistaken and still learn from it and recover. Now its just frustration for em.

They bring it up and then while there are alot of good people in the community that want to help...the GIT GUD crowd are sadly louder...and in charge. So the newbie gets even more frustrated and just hangs it up. I see it countless times.

Dont get me wrong. Mistakes should be punished and should be a learning experience. I agree with that. I also agree that not everyone should be listened to. Some people have some really bad takes that just shouldnt be followed or cant be followed no matter how good it sounds. Not everyone can agree on all things (lets look at this thread as an example.)

But when multiple people say the SAME THING "hey there is a problem here ---->" and point at it....some even give ideas about it, and even offers fixes. But ignored because of egos, fear of losing what is familiar, and a disconnect between different minded people. Oh and because on paper it doesn't click in their heads. (Which is one of the more egregious issues in this game...a HUGE rule in game dev....crap can look great on paper and concept, but if its not fun to play in game its a problem.)

[Void Angel]

Cajun Tuna, on 21 August 2025 - 04:12 AM, said:

Really who here wants to get blasted over and over again from max range. This thing 3 shots Atlas ST. It will one shot basically anything 30t and lighter if shot lands on the Torsos.

This is a math problem with graphics, and you have the wrong answer. About the only thing you've gotten right is that there's more to a weapon than dps. The rest is either misunderstanding other people's points of view, or else empirically incorrect. Now, you almost had two things right, when you pointed out that comparing just one weapon to another 'mech's entire loadout won't capture the whole picture - but that's what you did first thing in this post!

You start off by saying the Railgun isn't comparable to other weapons, and then try to demonstrate this by comparing it to a single weapon system. I mean, yes, a 12-slot, 30-ton weapon system outperforms a 7-slot, 15-ton weapon system. What... was your point? And it doesn't outperform in all metrics even then - the railgun produces twenty times the heat of the Gauss Rifle, a significant balance constraint. If you actually compare equivalent tonnages, dual Gauss weighs exactly the same, does 25% less up-front pinpoint damage, but massively out-performs the Railgun for DPS based on that metric. The splash damage matters, of course, but are you more concerned with taking 12 damage to an arm, or 40 damage to the side torso - more to the point, is the sniper that concerned? He wants to deal damage to a single location, because that's where his kills come from, and his dps is always going to be low.

In any case, you do have to compare loadout to loadout - and while the Marauder II does have 37.5% less alpha strike than my War Ghoul, it's also got jump jets, better damage-spreading architecture, and ECM. Those things matter, too - because you have to compare the whole capabilities of the 'mech. And when you compare the War Ghoul and Void Killer to other, similar loadouts their performance is more in line with their close substitutes than you obviously believe.

Even just looking at weapons, my Void Killer has an 82-point alpha at long range, with 4 cERLLs that it cannot fire at once. My War Ghoul: 80 points with 2ERPPCs that will require it to shut down to avoid annihilation if I screw up and fire them too close together. That's significantly more alpha strike at long range than something like the Marauder 4L... But like DPS, alpha strike damage is not the whole story. That Marauder II's sustained damage output is a "whopping" 9.3dps - which is higher than either Railgun build's maximum output. But you made the argument that the Railgun's raw punch damage outweighs any limitations that pre-existing sniper builds may have...

So now we get to the empirically incorrect parts of your post. The railgun doesn't do anywhere near what you claim it does. It will not kill "anything under 30t," it will not "3-shot an Atlas' side torso" - in fact it's not going to do anything of the sort. An Atlas is going to have somewhere in the neighborhood of 186 armor in its side torsos. Not total durability. Armor. That will take the Railgun, with perfect accuracy, almost forty seconds to chew through (37.5 to be precise.) And that's just to start touching the 56 structure. Overall time to a side torso kill (still assuming supernatural accuracy,) is 52.5 seconds - but with my Railgun builds' AtO of 3.2 and 2.3, you're going to melt down long before you get even halfway to armor strikethrough.

Similarly, that railgun round isn't going to be one-shotting any light in the game from the front torsos. Even a Flea has more than 40 points of side-torso durability from the front. You can leg it, I'll give you that; you can leg a Piranha or Firemoth, too - but you're not legging a Locust. Or an unskilled Commando. Or literally anything heavier than 20t - certainly not any 30-tonners. You made up that claim based on the feels, and you need to stop and think about that.

Now, before you respond with a logorhreic diatribe that misconstrues the point - I'm not saying that the Railgun needs a buff, or that it's overpowered. What I AM saying is that you can't just ballpark stuff with a gut feeling and expect to be accurate with your claims - you have to look at the numbers pulled down by the best builds that use the weapon, and then compare them to other builds of the same class. In short: do science, not polemics. Balance is ultimately about math applied to the real world.

[a 5 year old with an Uzi]

w0qj, on 21 August 2025 - 08:05 AM, said:

If MWO does nothing: folks say that "MWO is declining".

If MWO gets mechs out, folks say "P2W", "money grab", and some may even say that their F2P rights are violated.

Darned if you do, and darned if you don't.

I actually feel sorry for the folks at MWO/Piranha.

The SHD IIC had me pretty jazzed. 8v8 went from hate to maybe to adapting and can live with to gone. This? I loathe it and I'm going to do my best to start hunting/singling them out on Red. I have no idea where they can even go with balance on these weapons if they need tweaking, they sit in such an extreme niche. You can't mess with the weapon without messing with the viability of the entire chassis because hardlocked, plus there is clearly a difference between VK and WG.

This implementation, at this time, was not a good move imo.

Edited by a 5 year old with an Uzi, 21 August 2025 - 11:40 AM.

[Wraith 1]

The railgun is insanely powerful for such a long-range weapon, but I think it's somewhat reasonably balanced compared to other big gauss builds like JM6-DE, HAG40 boats, etc. It could maybe use a little bit more heat to limit what combos with it.

If anything's blatantly OP about the VK/WG, it's the mount points and convergence. The MAD-4L and KGC-KJ have good mounts for the torso weapons, but they have to expose with low-slung arms to do a full 50 point alpha. Even with staggering shots to avoid GH, it's way safer to fire a full salvo with the BSK.

edit: forgot gauss was in arms on MAD-4L

Edited by Wraith 1, 21 August 2025 - 01:48 PM.

[Rabid Imp]

Never been killed so much with single "alpha"s as with the launch of the railgun. Sure there are alphas that can reach that damage (and more), even at this range but not to this level of pinpoint; this kills most lights in a single hit from the back and cores them from the front at 800m.

Edited by Rabid Imp, 21 August 2025 - 03:56 PM.

[LordNothing]

w0qj, on 21 August 2025 - 08:05 AM, said:

If MWO does nothing: folks say that "MWO is declining".

If MWO gets mechs out, folks say "P2W", "money grab", and some may even say that their F2P rights are violated.

Darned if you do, and darned if you don't.

I actually feel sorry for the folks at MWO/Piranha.

the pricing wont kill the game, the shark jumping wont kill the game, but the declining population will. jury is still out on whether or not the current strat will work. look forward to seeing those august numbers. i guess catch 22 land is where games die. the thing that really irks me is that urbie, after years of being the "good" f2p game its doing bad things again. how many mech packs do you need to buy to complete the game?

and really i dont blame pgi at all. they do good with what they have. most of the mistakes were made early on. key on that list is not maintaining the codebase and keeping in house knowledge of the inner workings of the game in human experience format. i feel this new stuff is probibly heat from eg7. like they've been given a deadline to turn it around.

[LordNothing]

Moadebe, on 21 August 2025 - 08:49 AM, said:

Its the powers that be is the problem. They have effectively optimized the fun outta this game. When you equate fun = numbers and ONLY see numbers it sucks all character out of a thing.

We cant retain new players because of this. Ive seen plenty of new people come in and be extraordinarily excited to find this gem of a game. Go through the tutorial geeking out at it. Get into games and start having fun. Make it outta their 25 games and still try.

Then they hit the brick wall. Dying without the ability to see what happened (usually a shot from somewhere they cant tell or see because they didnt see a mech there.) Small mistakes are punished MUCH more now than they used to. Used to you could make a mistaken and still learn from it and recover. Now its just frustration for em.

They bring it up and then while there are alot of good people in the community that want to help...the GIT GUD crowd are sadly louder...and in charge. So the newbie gets even more frustrated and just hangs it up. I see it countless times.

Dont get me wrong. Mistakes should be punished and should be a learning experience. I agree with that. I also agree that not everyone should be listened to. Some people have some really bad takes that just shouldnt be followed or cant be followed no matter how good it sounds. Not everyone can agree on all things (lets look at this thread as an example.)

But when multiple people say the SAME THING "hey there is a problem here ---->" and point at it....some even give ideas about it, and even offers fixes. But ignored because of egos, fear of losing what is familiar, and a disconnect between different minded people. Oh and because on paper it doesn't click in their heads. (Which is one of the more egregious issues in this game...a HUGE rule in game dev....crap can look great on paper and concept, but if its not fun to play in game its a problem.)

people are quoting sun tsu (and other military theory) on the forum now. great work for military scholars, but seems a little excessive for playing a video game. i think people have forgotten that its supposed to be a recreational activity.

pgi painted themselves into a corner early on, the current employees and cauldron members who still work on the game are not to blame for that though. fp shows what happens to a game when the bar to entry is too high. im sure the cauldron is aware of that. they have shown they are not afraid to oust anyone whos doing it for selfish reasons.

Edited by LordNothing, 21 August 2025 - 04:45 PM.

[Quicksilver Aberration]

IDK why anyone is complaining about the TSP urbie, it's not that good. That said, plenty of good mechs have been paywalled historically, this is nothing new (I was around for the Dragonslayer/Ember era and the Ilya was borderline in the early early days).

Ever since we entered the Legends era of MWO, we hit what I consider the modder era. Limited ability to change things and no longer beholden to lore as much, we are getting more and more designs that are less bound by tradition. That's both good and bad, in the sense some are more limited than typical mechs but others have floated some really powerful nonsense (like the D03 Commando). Given how PGI pigeon-holed themselves on revenue stream for this game mostly being mechs they've continued to float the P2W line especially since these legends aren't ever available for c-bills. Regardless of how many events provide MC this is still a bad practice. It's just as easy to also sell heroes/legends for insanely prohibitive c-bill amounts and not hurt the financials (the pricing scheme of MWO as a whole is also a sour spot).

LordNothing, on 21 August 2025 - 04:38 PM, said:

people are quoting sun tsu (and other military theory) on the forum now.

The last BT kickstarter also provided an Art of War copy which irks me. I feel like that's what everyone reads and immediately thinks they're a tactical genius enough that it's always a bad sign when it's quoted at you (typically an example of the Dunning-Kruger effect).

Edited by Quicksilver Aberration, 21 August 2025 - 07:00 PM.

[MechMaster059]

Moadebe, on 21 August 2025 - 08:49 AM, said:

Its the powers that be is the problem. They have effectively optimized the fun outta this game. When you equate fun = numbers and ONLY see numbers it sucks all character out of a thing.

We cant retain new players because of this. Ive seen plenty of new people come in and be extraordinarily excited to find this gem of a game. Go through the tutorial geeking out at it. Get into games and start having fun. Make it outta their 25 games and still try.

Then they hit the brick wall. Dying without the ability to see what happened (usually a shot from somewhere they cant tell or see because they didnt see a mech there.) Small mistakes are punished MUCH more now than they used to. Used to you could make a mistaken and still learn from it and recover. Now its just frustration for em.

They bring it up and then while there are alot of good people in the community that want to help...the GIT GUD crowd are sadly louder...and in charge. So the newbie gets even more frustrated and just hangs it up. I see it countless times.

Dont get me wrong. Mistakes should be punished and should be a learning experience. I agree with that. I also agree that not everyone should be listened to. Some people have some really bad takes that just shouldnt be followed or cant be followed no matter how good it sounds. Not everyone can agree on all things (lets look at this thread as an example.)

But when multiple people say the SAME THING "hey there is a problem here ---->" and point at it....some even give ideas about it, and even offers fixes. But ignored because of egos, fear of losing what is familiar, and a disconnect between different minded people. Oh and because on paper it doesn't click in their heads. (Which is one of the more egregious issues in this game...a HUGE rule in game dev....crap can look great on paper and concept, but if its not fun to play in game its a problem.)

Banger post.

Adding a long range, high pin-point, high splash damage weapon was literally the worst thing they could have done to the meta. Sad.

Edited by MechMaster059, 21 August 2025 - 07:45 PM.

[Void Angel]

a 5 year old with an Uzi, on 21 August 2025 - 09:46 AM, said:

I have no idea where they can even go with balance on these weapons if they need tweaking, they sit in such an extreme niche. You can't mess with the weapon without messing with the viability of the entire chassis because hardlocked, plus there is clearly a difference between VK and WG.

Cooldown, primary damage, splash damage, and heat - ammo as well, but the thing fires so slowly it's hard to run out. Hard-locking the system into the chassis will actually make it easier to balance, because there are fewer possible weapon combinations.

[Void Angel]

Quicksilver Aberration, on 21 August 2025 - 06:54 PM, said:

The last BT kickstarter also provided an Art of War copy which irks me. I feel like that's what everyone reads and immediately thinks they're a tactical genius enough that it's always a bad sign when it's quoted at you (typically an example of the Dunning-Kruger effect).

Right There With You. Though I think there's selection bias at work - the people who don't understand the work tend to quote it improperly to shore up their tactical opinions.

Edited by Void Angel, 21 August 2025 - 07:42 PM.

[Quicksilver Aberration]

Void Angel, on 21 August 2025 - 07:41 PM, said:

Though I think there's selection bias at work - the people who don't understand the work tend to quote it improperly to shore up their tactical opinions.

Maybe, I do think there are better works though to be fair I haven't read any of them just going off second hand opinions from a variety of folks. From what I've heard On War is better but much harder to digest read.

Edited by Quicksilver Aberration, 21 August 2025 - 09:31 PM.

[Lollerisms]

Quicksilver Aberration, on 21 August 2025 - 09:30 PM, said:

Maybe, I do think there are better works though to be fair I haven't read any of them just going off second hand opinions from a variety of folks. From what I've heard On War is better but much harder to digest read.

On War is better as a theoretical work because On War is a theoretical work while Art of War is much more of a "hey random courtier, here's how you pilot the army you've been assigned to without starving the troops, yourself, or the countryside you're moving through." Very different books targeting very different audiences.

[Saved By The Bell]

w0qj, on 21 August 2025 - 08:05 AM, said:

If MWO does nothing: folks say that "MWO is declining".

If MWO gets mechs out, folks say "P2W", "money grab", and some may even say that their F2P rights are violated.

Darned if you do, and darned if you don't.

I actually feel sorry for the folks at MWO/Piranha.

yep, this superb game, you can get almost all just fighting in any trash mech (I have 539 mechs now)

Just watched old Votoms (think about urbies, the same). The hero took broken Votom from garbage, spent some time on repairs and got so-so usable mech for fight. Was so cool. May be MWO should be like this, no easy things for free.

Edited by Saved By The Bell, 22 August 2025 - 04:29 AM.

[Moadebe]

LordNothing, on 21 August 2025 - 04:38 PM, said:

people are quoting sun tsu (and other military theory) on the forum now. great work for military scholars, but seems a little excessive for playing a video game. i think people have forgotten that its supposed to be a recreational activity.

pgi painted themselves into a corner early on, the current employees and cauldron members who still work on the game are not to blame for that though. fp shows what happens to a game when the bar to entry is too high. im sure the cauldron is aware of that. they have shown they are not afraid to oust anyone whos doing it for selfish reasons.

No. I'm not quoting sun tsu. Just stating things as seen and truth.