16 replies to this topic

[Robert Knight]

I'm an Inner Sphere merc ,and I have been one since Battledroids in 1984. that being said all of these things are part of the battle tech universe. If they are treated a serious as they were when they were balanced in the TT game then.... awesome. And I have played every MW/BT game ever and at no time did I ever feel that one of these things hurt the game. If you don’t like them the you probably don’t like BT. just my thought.

[Kenyon Burguess]

many of these issues can be balanced out in a mission thru tactics and use of the terrain. it will be very interesting this month to read how information warfare can be used to the average players advantage. after all, you cant snipe if everyone knows where you are. and you cant run up and perform a missle boat attack if you get sniped first.

edit- i dont love the clans but i hope to at least see them as NPC's

Edited by Geist Null, 03 January 2012 - 03:42 PM.

[Volume]

Boating is canonical (Nova, Swayback, Longbow, Rifleman II-C)
I started with MW:2, as did many PC Gamers, and they know only combat with the clan 'mechs (even MW:2 Mercs had them eventually and in multiplayer).
Sniping is a tactic.



Really though - boating needs to be addressed, especially the way it was handled in MW4 (3 CLBX20 and 2 CLBX10 "Daishi" (Dire Wolves)? 4 CGAUSS JJing "Gladiator" (Executioners)? LOL). Half the configs in that game are simply impossible with the canonical, correct tonnage/critical system, especially factoring in heat sinks, jumpjets, ammunition, and other equipment such as ECM/BAP/MASC.

Boating is not inherently something that shouldn't exist, but it should be noted that the 'Mechs that are boats play a very specialist role, and the penalty for overheating/shutting down should be high (ie: MW3 "I blew myself up" not "10K heat? shut down, flush, do it again in 3 seconds" MW4).

Sniping isn't a problem. Jumpsniping can be a problem. A whole team Jumpsniping in 3rd person while having permanent target lock even though Line of Sight is broken IS a problem. First person only, reticle-shake upon JJ (like MW:LL), ECM/Information Warfare, and other such skillcap raisers can balance this.

Clan 'Mechs, well, we won't have those for several months after launch, but I did hear in the Three Moves Ahead Podcast that the dev team is considering the "all carrot no stick" approach for handling Clan warriors - ie: Get more experience/honor/whatever for following Zellbrigen by challenging players in-game to 1v1 duels, or something along those lines. Perhaps eventually Clan 'tech will be available for Mercs and Lone Wolves (at some point, probably for a significant cost). Either way, Clan 'Mechs might not need to break the game. Bigger is not always better (or cost effective), and "This is not your Father's MechWarrior™"

Some people love or hate all of these things to different degrees, and many people here are divided on the subjects or how they should be handled, but they are all here debating because they love Battletech, love MechWarrior, and want this game to be the best it can be.

Cheers,
Vol

[Dihm]

I think the main reason people react so violently against these things is simply the way they've been portrayed in the MechWarrior games, not that they in and of themselves are bad. It's all about implementation.

Hopefully they follow Randall's desires with jump jets, and the table top rules, and make your aim rather shaky while in the air. During ascent it should be the worst, with it being best at apex when the jets cut off, and then horrible again at the end when the jets fire to cushion the landing. That's always how I pictured "jump sniping" being done in the lore. All about timing.

Edited by Dihm, 04 January 2012 - 04:20 AM.

[William White]

Pop up attacks (in this case just targetting) have been common and have been hammered by "overwatch rules" as in you wait for them to jump and hammer them flat but this is limited to long range mechs really. Target lock should not apply if the target cannot be "seen" either by the firer or a spotter and the spotter should only work for indirect fire such as LRM or artillery.

[William White]

Your favourite drink is "campar"ia

[Fence]

As long as we don't get infested with Hillbugs, I think sniping is fine...

Was seriously annoying in MW4 Veng when you were running the flag in CTF and would then just blow up because that one nova you never saw popped up and hillbugged you.

Those were the days...

[CoffiNail]

I like a, as some word it schizophrenic load out, multiple ranges, for multiple groups.

Thiough my fav boat wasd on mw2 netmech, with NHUA, i prefer to play with heat and limited ammo, but I had a engine stripped dire wolf with 4 UAC20 and 4 UAC2 one ton of ammo shared for the two sizes. Slow walking turret... i catch you around a corner, kapow!

[Zanga]

Robert Knight, on 03 January 2012 - 03:18 PM, said:

If you don’t like them the you probably don’t like BT. just my thought.

To say that people don't like BT/MW because they have something against rampant boating and godlike jump sniping is a gross generalization and a fallacy in reasoning. Most of these people have these issuses because boating and jump sniping have not been handled properly and do not make sense. Whether it be from a canon point of view, or even as a simple game balancing issue, these are only problems when not handled properly.

I do agree with the OP though that boating, jump sniping, and the Clans are here to stay and are an essential part of the Battletech Universe. We can, however trust in the good people at Pirahna to provide a balanced and fun game that takes these things into account.

[John Clavell]

It's call human nature to find the shortest, easiest and most effective (sometimes lazy) way to get the most of your character, Battlemech, or whatever else you can think of, for your personal gain. MWO is coming, let the min-maxing commence!

Edited by John Clavell, 13 January 2012 - 01:07 PM.

[Elizander]

If they allow light and medium mechs to out maneuver other larger ones and get shots in from behind in a makeshift pincer while they engage the others then there will be some merit to using them.

If they allow for accurate missile bombardment behind cover as long as a fast mech can get los and relay data then you will certainly think twice about bringing four slow assault mechs and camping behind a mountain. If there are capture objectives spread over the map, you will certainly want something fast to get to them quickly for your team and hold out until the heavier mechs get there for defense.

A lot of it relies on map and gameplay design, not particularly with the mech performance themselves. ]

All that said, if they allow boating then I cannot blame people for going for that. Weapons have different ranges and travel times. Stocking up on the same weapon makes it easier to aim because there is only one type of weapon that you have to get used to.

[ELHImp]

And I think we need more customisation. If somebody stupid, and can't thought new loadout it dosen't mean any other must suffer with crappy stock mechs.

[Pariah Devalis]

Honestly, as have been stated earlier, I agree with that boating in and of itself is fine. It's even canonical. The problems are the limitations (or lack thereof) shown in the last installments of Mechwarrior.

Laserboats should be pulling a tremendous risk every time they alphastrike. Ballistic snipers shouldn't be capable of functioning effectively at closer ranges and, conversely, close ranged brawler boats should suffer tight range limits as well as either mobility or ammunition issues.

Or, more ideally, go back to the MW2/MW3 mechlab where obscene configurations were more difficult to throw together.

Either that or downright limit the configurations of mechs to canon variants. That would certainly make for more interesting gameplay other then "load mech out with as many ERPPC/Gauss/ERLL as I can cram in there and two shot everything!"

[Tannhauser Gate]

ELH_Imp, on 14 January 2012 - 05:44 AM, said:

And I think we need more customisation. If somebody stupid, and can't thought new loadout it dosen't mean any other must suffer with crappy stock mechs.

Not This

Pariah Devalis, on 14 January 2012 - 09:33 AM, said:

Either that or downright limit the configurations of mechs to canon variants. That would certainly make for more interesting gameplay other then "load mech out with as many ERPPC/Gauss/ERLL as I can cram in there and two shot everything!"

This.

Im all for TRO variants with limited, reasonable ability to customize.

Edited by LakeDaemon, 14 January 2012 - 09:55 AM.

[Ilithi Dragon]

Personally, I don't have any problem with boating. I don't think that anyone who doesn't like boating doesn't like BT/MW (that's just silly, like saying the clanmate I had in MW4:Mercs who absolutely hated LRMs with a passion didn't like MW4:Mercs, even though he played it in the majority of his spare time between work and sleep), but there definitely is justification for people to be leary about it, considering some of the spectactular demonstrations of poor balancing in MW4 and MW3.

In Mercs, I tended to run on NHUA maps (I was in a NHUA clan - one of the things I loved about MW4 was that players could switch heat and ammo on and off on the servers themselves and change up the gameplay, allowing for wider varieties of gameplay), and I ran with a Black Knight loaded with 4 ERPPCs, an ERLL, BAP, ECM, JJs and enough engine power to run at 93kph. Now, even without the need for heat sinks, I still only got all that by sacrficing very heavily on armor - I had less armor than most medium mechs on a 75-ton heavy. Now, I was not a sniper or poptart - I rarely sat behind a hill and popped up and dropped back down. I was a skirmisher. I still engaged from long range, but on the move, popping up from behind hills and firing 4 ERPPCs at a target at 800-900 meters, while running sideways at 93kph, often in the opposite direction that my target was moving (all to avoid getting hit - my defense was speed and agility and terrain, not armor - and that ERLL was there to aid with that, because at closer ranges I would pop that off first to knock the target and throw off any fire they threw at me before I could bring my PPCs on target, a tactic that saved my life innumerable times).

Now, I know that that specific loadout is ridiculously impossible in real BT rulesets, and will probably be the same in MWO if they get the balancing anywhere near right (unless they give us the option to go NHUA in non-ranked player-hosted matches or some such), but that's not the point. The point is that it was a specific design that boated to fill a specific role - lots of firepower in a very mobile, but lightly armored platform. It filled a fairly specific role, and it was a terrible mech outside of that role. I could engage at close range with that mech, and often did close to point-blank range, using JJs and my absurd mech speed (plus some rather fancy piloting on my part) to dance around bigger daisies and haupmans, etc. I would NOT state there, however. I would run in, hit them in the *** a time or two, and then run the hell away behind the nearest hill. I could not stay engaging at close range, because I just did not have the armor to do it. So close-quarters maps, like the arena brawl maps or the city maps, I did not take that mech, because it was not designed for those types of engagements.

Boating mechs should be much the same way. They should be specialized, role-specific mech designs that excell in the specific role they fill, such as the Longbow just dumping obscene amounts of LRMs into a target in a dedicated fire-support role, but that perform terribly (or at best with mediocrity, depending on the circumstances and role) outside of their specialized role or specialized battle conditions. The Longbow would be a terrifying fire-support mech, but any half-decent medium mech slipping in on its flank should be a serious threat to it at close range, and it would be all but useless in a close-quarters city map.

Preventing these specialized boating configurations from being over-balanced is childsplay (safe-fire ranges on the LRMs where the missiles don't arm inside of that range, and reduced-output on PPCs at close range to prevent feedback surges into the weapon, which can be overridden with special weapon brands at the risk of close-range splash damage, missile fratricide out of the launch tube, and greater risk of ammo explosion, or high risk of feedback surges causing serious damage to the PPC and the mech wielding it, etc. etc.).

The danger of unbalanced boating comes with omni-capable boat configurations that excell in any role. An Annihilator with a ridiculous number of ERMLs, for example. MW3 had some especially spectacular examples of balance fail.


There definitely needs to be a limit to the insane boat systems, but much of that will come with properly implementing the BT ruleset (which MW3 and MW4 both did not do). Locking players into a handful of pre-set 'stock' designs is not the answer. That's just the easy way out, and it cuts out the mechlab, which is a HUGE part of any MW/BT game. Players should have a selection of stock configrations for buying a mech, but they should be able to make modifications to them in their own mechlab (balanced with a maintenance cost for the work, and for more significant changes (like swapping out an arm or re-arranging the internals of the torso and swapping out the engine), a 'downtime' cost that makes the mech unavailable for a certain period of time while the modifications are in place would help limit the extent that modifications could be made. Serious heat consequences for players boating lasers would also help balance them out and prevent super-boats (lasers seem to be the biggest problem with boats, in my experience, since the ballistic and missile weapons are large enough and bulky enough, especially with extra ammo, that they're more difficult to super-boat).

[ELHImp]

LakeDaemon, on 14 January 2012 - 09:52 AM, said:

Not This

I mean topic started by obvious troll. And if be serious, I didn't like any customisation. It ruin canon.

Edited by ELH_Imp, 15 January 2012 - 02:24 AM.

[Tannhauser Gate]

I totally dig your russian text accent. To hell with articles!