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There's no meaning in making dozens of threads on the forum; not because exactly the same thing had been mentioned before, but because the forum is for discussion, for educating yourself of the issue, not demonstration of your determination.
If you want PGI to listen to you and to think again about the DHS thing, dont start another thread on the forum. Instead, send a mail to their mailbox. That way, they can easily count the number of people that actually think the move is bad. Plus you dont need to deal with fanboys either. Better still, send a mail to IGP, the publisher as well.
The following is what I sent to both PGI and IGP. Feel free to reuse and edit it as you like. Let your voice be heard properly.
Quote
Title: Re: MWO, please reconsider DHS 1.4 efficiency
To whom it may concern,
I am a player of Mechwarrior Online (MWO), and I am writing to you to request Piranha Games Inc. (PGI) to rethink the proposed implementation of double heat sink (DHS) being 1.4 times more effective in heat dispersion than single heat sink (SHS), thus not actually being "double".
There has been abundant mathematical and empirical evidences on the MWO forum that point out the current heat system already made high heat weapons underpowered and consequently unpopular, which in my opinion hurts the game's diversity and players' ability to customerise which is a cruical selling point of MWO with its mechlab. DHS are viewed by a sizeable portion of the community, including me, as a feasible temporary fix to the broken heat system and will lessen the imbalance until a proper in-depth analysis of all weapons' parameter and subsequent rebalancing could be done. Such a view is established under the assumption that DHS will indeed enjoy double efficiency over SHS, not only due to it being so in the source material, but also because the maths indicate that such an arrangement is best for game balance as well.
Therefore it comes as a shocking surprise that PGI do not act as I imagine a reasonable developing team would and set DHS efficiency at 2.0, but instead arbitrarily set it at 1.4 which makes DHS 30% less effective than it should, under the pretense of "balance issues". First, the community had provide mathematical evidence that proves with DHS set at such level, DHS will become inferior to SHS in many if not most cases, and incapable of giving any help to high heat weapons. If the new parameter is used, players are, in most cases, better off with SHS heat wise, thus make DHS' introduction moot.
In addition, the decision to drop DHS efficiency down to 1.4 came after PGI run a build with 2.0 and discovered "balancing issues". As PGI have confessed previously, they dont have an internal QA/test team, which means one of the following two things. One, the developers run the build by themselves with what little time they hadafter they done fixing bugs, or far more likely, two, the "balancing issues" were discovered by a contracted external teams. I would have to point out that the community do not have much confidence in the external testers after the recent patch where the entire external testing team failed to find out a bug community's member caught within ten minutes. I would like to ask PGI to not rely solely on the external testing teams on balancing issues. Not only that their competence is in question, but also for the fact that they are not the players who actually play the game.
Finally, I would like to point out that not giving DHS their supposed parameters will mean a lot of trouble down the road. PGI have decided to keep stock mechs that come straight out of the source materials around and act as training ground for new players. Even as of now, these SHS-using mechs overheat too easily, as in MWO heat builds up much quicker than in source materials. Once DHS-using stock mechs are introduced, which is inevitable as they exist in great numbers, these stock mechs will fare much worse than the SHS counterparts as in addition to having not enough heatsinks to cope with increased heat production in MWO, their DHS also suffer from reduced effectiveness, making DHS-equipped stock mechs doubly handicapped. Forcing new players to use hideously inferior mechs and as a result suffer extremely poor player experience is a sure recipe for diseaster for a F2P game.
Reducing DHS's efficiency from 2 to 1.4 is a exceedingly poor move. It's
1, mathematically unsound;
2, empirically unproven
3, diverge hugely from customers' expectation
4, leads to multiple foreseenable troubles in the future
It's bad for the community and also bad for business. I cannot overstress the importance of DHS to me, to the community, and to both short term and long term success of the game. I urge PGI to reconsider the action, for the direction MWO is going makes me difficult to introduce and suggest my friends to try the game out.
Yours faithfully,
MWO account: Academus
To whom it may concern,
I am a player of Mechwarrior Online (MWO), and I am writing to you to request Piranha Games Inc. (PGI) to rethink the proposed implementation of double heat sink (DHS) being 1.4 times more effective in heat dispersion than single heat sink (SHS), thus not actually being "double".
There has been abundant mathematical and empirical evidences on the MWO forum that point out the current heat system already made high heat weapons underpowered and consequently unpopular, which in my opinion hurts the game's diversity and players' ability to customerise which is a cruical selling point of MWO with its mechlab. DHS are viewed by a sizeable portion of the community, including me, as a feasible temporary fix to the broken heat system and will lessen the imbalance until a proper in-depth analysis of all weapons' parameter and subsequent rebalancing could be done. Such a view is established under the assumption that DHS will indeed enjoy double efficiency over SHS, not only due to it being so in the source material, but also because the maths indicate that such an arrangement is best for game balance as well.
Therefore it comes as a shocking surprise that PGI do not act as I imagine a reasonable developing team would and set DHS efficiency at 2.0, but instead arbitrarily set it at 1.4 which makes DHS 30% less effective than it should, under the pretense of "balance issues". First, the community had provide mathematical evidence that proves with DHS set at such level, DHS will become inferior to SHS in many if not most cases, and incapable of giving any help to high heat weapons. If the new parameter is used, players are, in most cases, better off with SHS heat wise, thus make DHS' introduction moot.
In addition, the decision to drop DHS efficiency down to 1.4 came after PGI run a build with 2.0 and discovered "balancing issues". As PGI have confessed previously, they dont have an internal QA/test team, which means one of the following two things. One, the developers run the build by themselves with what little time they hadafter they done fixing bugs, or far more likely, two, the "balancing issues" were discovered by a contracted external teams. I would have to point out that the community do not have much confidence in the external testers after the recent patch where the entire external testing team failed to find out a bug community's member caught within ten minutes. I would like to ask PGI to not rely solely on the external testing teams on balancing issues. Not only that their competence is in question, but also for the fact that they are not the players who actually play the game.
Finally, I would like to point out that not giving DHS their supposed parameters will mean a lot of trouble down the road. PGI have decided to keep stock mechs that come straight out of the source materials around and act as training ground for new players. Even as of now, these SHS-using mechs overheat too easily, as in MWO heat builds up much quicker than in source materials. Once DHS-using stock mechs are introduced, which is inevitable as they exist in great numbers, these stock mechs will fare much worse than the SHS counterparts as in addition to having not enough heatsinks to cope with increased heat production in MWO, their DHS also suffer from reduced effectiveness, making DHS-equipped stock mechs doubly handicapped. Forcing new players to use hideously inferior mechs and as a result suffer extremely poor player experience is a sure recipe for diseaster for a F2P game.
Reducing DHS's efficiency from 2 to 1.4 is a exceedingly poor move. It's
1, mathematically unsound;
2, empirically unproven
3, diverge hugely from customers' expectation
4, leads to multiple foreseenable troubles in the future
It's bad for the community and also bad for business. I cannot overstress the importance of DHS to me, to the community, and to both short term and long term success of the game. I urge PGI to reconsider the action, for the direction MWO is going makes me difficult to introduce and suggest my friends to try the game out.
Yours faithfully,
MWO account: Academus
Edited by Academus, 02 November 2012 - 01:17 PM.
