93 replies to this topic

[Grugore]

How do they fit ten extra HS in an engine? Who ****ing cares? This whole argument is pointless. I think PGI is doing a bang-up job on this game. Sure. It has some issues, and I'm confident that they will be resolved. I've been playing this game for several months and I'm having a blast. So shut the **** up and enjoy the game, or go play something else.

[Lawler]

Grugore, on 03 November 2012 - 03:27 AM, said:

How do they fit ten extra HS in an engine? Who ****ing cares? This whole argument is pointless. I think PGI is doing a bang-up job on this game. Sure. It has some issues, and I'm confident that they will be resolved. I've been playing this game for several months and I'm having a blast. So shut the **** up and enjoy the game, or go play something else.

This was my first response to this thread, but since I wanted this game to succeed, I felt I had an obligation to try to educate the masses as to the how's and whys.

But since the masses seem content to stick their fingers in their ears and go "lalalalalalalala", I think I may just give up trying and just wait for the game to devolve.

[Sirous]

MustrumRidcully, on 03 November 2012 - 03:21 AM, said:

Considering that mechs can already produce two to four times the heat they could produce in TT, DHS are actually a necessity... The problem is that all those mechs build around DHS will work just as badly as the Single Heat Sink stock mechs we already have...

Glad I didn't play the TableTop version. Don't have any preconceived notions of what should be, all I can go by is what currently is. Heat is an Issue with the large energy weapns and AC's. Gauss and Streaks are slightly overpowered compared to the rest. If we can't change the weight or crits of the Gauss then the damage needs to be reduced and that will have people in an uproar. Because making Laser weapons viable doesn't change the GaussCats viability as a death machine, nor does it change the fact that the StreakCat rules the field of battle if it gets within range.
Buffing one thing to fix another never works. It just makes both overpowered, though PPC's do need more than a little help.

Still doesn't answer how one gets 10 free HS, with no compromise. By this one little addition with no explanation they altered the entire BattleTech universe and said oh well anything goes now. So should PGI not take the same liberty, and hopefully, figure out the proper values and get things at least into some semblance of order and balance.

You say that level 2 tech is reliant upon dhs. Was it because of the whole DHS or did they need DHS because they came up with Weapons that were running too hot already. Either way they broke with what seems to be an underlying feature of this game. Heat, Weight and Crits. In one fell swoop they disregarded all of them and made a game that is incompatible with itself.

That is the whole point that I am trying to get across, not heat, not weight, not crits, but that in one move the original designers came up with double heat sinks and you magically get what amounts to 10 free with no compromise what so ever.

You can not mount an XL without compromise, AC20 over Gauss, compromise. UAC/5 over AC/5 Compromise, LL over ERLL some sort of deviation. SSRM's over SRM's need lock(and hopefully damage reduction). Pulse Lasers over Regular Lasers. Everything in this game has some sort of change in either weight, heat or critspace except for the magic 10 that come extra when getting DHS installed.

[Vassago Rain]

Sirous, on 03 November 2012 - 03:43 AM, said:

Glad I didn't play the TableTop version. Don't have any preconceived notions of what should be, all I can go by is what currently is. Heat is an Issue with the large energy weapns and AC's. Gauss and Streaks are slightly overpowered compared to the rest. If we can't change the weight or crits of the Gauss then the damage needs to be reduced and that will have people in an uproar. Because making Laser weapons viable doesn't change the GaussCats viability as a death machine, nor does it change the fact that the StreakCat rules the field of battle if it gets within range.
Buffing one thing to fix another never works. It just makes both overpowered, though PPC's do need more than a little help.

Still doesn't answer how one gets 10 free HS, with no compromise. By this one little addition with no explanation they altered the entire BattleTech universe and said oh well anything goes now. So should PGI not take the same liberty, and hopefully, figure out the proper values and get things at least into some semblance of order and balance.

You say that level 2 tech is reliant upon dhs. Was it because of the whole DHS or did they need DHS because they came up with Weapons that were running too hot already. Either way they broke with what seems to be an underlying feature of this game. Heat, Weight and Crits. In one fell swoop they disregarded all of them and made a game that is incompatible with itself.

That is the whole point that I am trying to get across, not heat, not weight, not crits, but that in one move the original designers came up with double heat sinks and you magically get what amounts to 10 free with no compromise what so ever.

You can not mount an XL without compromise, AC20 over Gauss, compromise. UAC/5 over AC/5 Compromise, LL over ERLL some sort of deviation. SSRM's over SRM's need lock(and hopefully damage reduction). Pulse Lasers over Regular Lasers. Everything in this game has some sort of change in either weight, heat or critspace except for the magic 10 that come extra when getting DHS installed.

It's because the game was very diffent, and very slow, without. You were playing jousting robots, with maybe 3 guns each, and maybe 12 heatpoints per mech.

So someone decided that we should maybe make the game not so slow, but instead of altering the system, they made an entirely new era, where heatpoints were doubled, guns became bigger, there were more mechs, an entirely different faction focused on ranged combat... It's tech 2. Like, that's all it is.

It's not complicated. None of the cool guns or gear would exist without doubles, but you don't have to play with doubles. You can play real man's battletech, aka age of war. You can play an even later version, where dubs are so commonplace, they're on the cheapest of pirate mechs.

It's not possible to run a gun that uses twice the heat without being able to churn out the heat necessary. You overheat and do bad things to yourself. It's not about 'heat management,' or L2P. That's simply how the techlevels are made.

[Grugore]

Double heat sinks have been part of the game for over 20 years now. Accept that. If you can think of a way to explain how they work, fine. All I have to say on the subject is, isn't technology wonderful? Just roll with it and enjoy the game. It doesn't really matter.

[Sirous]

See when I first came into this game I was told flat out that Unlike most games the rules have never changed or been altered, and apparently not, but they altered the mechanics behind it and when someone like me comes along and asks, hey wait a second. I get called ignorant and all sorts of fun names. Thanks for that.

Great so the battletech designers came up with a game that is faster with more powerful mechs at least twice, There is a middle ground to be reached, There are four aspects to this game that can be changed at any one point some harder than others, weight, heat, damage, crit slots. They doubled the heat dissipation of engines without altering the other two. Good times. They ****** up their own game and everyone is now blaming PGI.

Edited by Sirous, 03 November 2012 - 03:58 AM.

[Sirous]

I must go now, I truly and sincerely appreciate the discussion.

One last time,
I will also state that the original designers of the game, made a fatal flaw that everyone seems to agree with, I do not and only hope that PGI has the will and at least some brains to fix the mess they put themselves in apparently.

[MustrumRidcully]

Sirous, on 03 November 2012 - 03:43 AM, said:

Glad I didn't play the TableTop version.

Let's not talk Table Top then. Just MW:O.

Let's say you have a mech that can fire his weapons every 10 seconds and not overheat.

Let's say he has equipped a single PPC and a single AC/10.
Now, what happens if he decides to utilize one o these two weapons at its full rate of fire.
To be heat neutral with 1 single PPC and 1 AC/10 firing every 10 seconds, you need 12 single heat sinks.
His DPS would be 2.

Let's say he wants to fire the PPC every 5 seconds, allowing him to reach a DPS of 3.

That means that he now produces 9 more heat over the course of 10 seconds. To negate that, he would need 9 more heat sinks, but he doesn't have them, he still has 12.
13 heat sinks give you a heat capacity of 42.
1 single AC/10 shot per 10 seconds produce 0.3 Heat per Second on average, and two PPC shots over 10 seconds produce 1.8 heat per second. 13 heat sinks dissipate 1.2 heat per second.
So he has a total heat production of 2.1 heat per second, dissipating 1.2 per second. So he accumulates net heat of 0.9 per second. So he will now shutdown after ~47 seconds.

Let's say he fires the AC/10 every 5 seconds, allowing him to reach a DPS of 3.
He now produces 1.5 heat per second, dissipates still 1.2, so a net of 0.3 heat per second, so he'll shutdown after about 140 seconds.

So the AC/10 is much more efficient in firing faster.

Now, you may ask - "but we haven't considered ammo yet!". True. He would, of course, run through ammo also twice as fast. But this doesn't change the total damage output he has with the AC/10 - it just allows him to inflict the damage more quickly.


Let's say you transfer the config to a mech with more tonnage, so we can buy more ammo.
We could either decide to acquire 9 heat sinks to let the PPC fire twice as often. For the same weight, we can get 3 heat sinks and 6 tons of ammo.

6 tons of ammo for an AC/10 represents 90 shots. 90 shots equals 900 points of potential damage. That is enough to kill about 4 Atlai with center torso kills. So even if you miss center torso with 75 % of the shots, it's a full extra Atlas that you could destroy.
Of course, t would take you about 450 seconds to fire all those shots if you limit yourself to a rate of fire of 1 shot in 5 seconds. That's 7.5 minutes. Or half the match.

So in short, it would be overkill to actually spend 6 tons on ammo.
The question may be -how much more do youactually need? And I guess here the couter-question is - how many mechs could you kill typically before you doubled your rate of fire with the AC/10? If that was already one or two mechs - you technically don'T add to add a single ton of ammo. You'll just be killing your enemies 50 % faster than before. So your choice is to either spend 9 tons of ammo to kill enemies 50 % faster (boosting the PPC), or 3 tons to kill your enemies 50 % faster.

Think these weapons are balanced?



Does that mean DHS are okay? No, not really. It just mean that the game currently isn't balanced. DHS would be the way to balance the weapons, but it's ultimately a flawed attempt - stock configs don't use DHS, that means if they are equipped with energy weapons, they are are per se underpowered.

I think there may be some tricks possible to balance DHS, like having DHS lead to a lower heat capacity than single heat sinks, for example. That won't change heat neutrality based figures, but it will change if you don't look for just being heat neutral, but for building a mech that lasts "long enough" while risking to shutdown after prolonged fire.

Edited by MustrumRidcully, 03 November 2012 - 04:40 AM.

[Alex Wolfe]

Properly double heat sinks may remedy the heat issues for advanced configs or hi-tech stock mechs, but it doesn't change the fact that single heat sink configs - most notably trial mechs - are left in the dirt.

People argue that "with DHS nerfed, some canon configs cease to function" - that much is correct. Keep in mind though, that current canon configs don't function properly either. High-heat Clan configs and high-heat advanced IS mechs should be able to handle their own heat, and with this change they may not be able to... thing is, current stock mechs can't handle their own low power configs either. DHS help the former, the latter remains miserable.

In short, heat in MWO is one giant mess, and people have been saying so for months now without the issue being addressed .

Would somebody please think of the newbies.

before the game sinks without the new blood

Edited by Alex Wolfe, 03 November 2012 - 05:49 AM.

[Grandexeno]

Grugore, on 03 November 2012 - 03:27 AM, said:

How do they fit ten extra HS in an engine? Who ****ing cares? This whole argument is pointless. I think PGI is doing a bang-up job on this game. Sure. It has some issues, and I'm confident that they will be resolved. I've been playing this game for several months and I'm having a blast. So shut the **** up and enjoy the game, or go play something else.

Well, +1 for this. I mean, I'm also a new player to the game and the genre in general, but for the life of me I can't, really can't see why people are so enraged with the whole "DHS has only pluses". I mean, it's a new technology, "L2" right? Can't it be considered as a "new whole engine with better cooling performance"? What's all the fuss about, really.
If it's about "Canon", people: this is an ADAPTATION of a TT ruleset, so some things must be different to work in an online game.
On the other hands, if I read well, the downgrading of the cooling power of DHS IS something to debate about. But only that: and again, we are in open BETA, so things can be changed (and are changed, in fact).

The only thing devs need (any dev team in any game) are MODULAR FEEDBACKS from community. So try to create a "feedback system page" about the changes, like a sql/php page where you address with a star rating each change in the gameplay/settings/stats. Also adding some checkbox (for each "point" of the change/update of course) with predetermined answers could be of use, like "it unbalances the game" "makes some class OP" and the like, so Devs can actually come up with a GOOD UNDERSTANDABLE FEEDBACK from the community (that also pays or could/will pay for the sustainment of the game).

Let's help dev in a way they can elaborate on, forum fuss (pardon me, there are still lots of extremely detailed opinions, I know) is just too time consuming for them to view and appraise: totally not feasable for them to stay hours to read and compare each comment and opinion.

Edited by Grandexeno, 03 November 2012 - 06:10 AM.

[MCXL]

Alex Wolfe, on 03 November 2012 - 05:24 AM, said:

Properly double heat sinks may remedy the heat issues for advanced configs or hi-tech stock mechs, but it doesn't change the fact that single heat sink configs - most notably trial mechs - are left in the dirt.

People argue that "with DHS nerfed, some canon configs cease to function" - that much is correct. Keep in mind though, that current canon configs don't function properly either. High-heat Clan configs and high-heat advanced IS mechs should be able to handle their own heat, and with this change they may not be able to... thing is, current stock mechs can't handle their own low power configs either. DHS help the former, the latter remains miserable.

In short, heat in MWO is one giant mess, and people have been saying so for months now without the issue being addressed .

Yup.

[Kaptain]

Read a bunch of this and just want to add one thing. Critical space is a TAX. It is in no way representative of space. Think about endo structure. You can run it entirely in your arms or anywhere you would like it. It doesn't take 2 crits from every section of the mech. DHS like FF and ES are a critical space tax. You get the benefit from double engine dissipation but you are taxed 300% critical space for every addition sink you add.

Stop thinking about it as physical space inside the mech and you will be much more at ease.

Also, 100 and 35 ton mechs have the same number of critical space slots. That's a tax scale also and one that favors light and medium mechs as they usually have more free space thanks to smaller weapons and payloads.

[JimSan]

Sirous, on 02 November 2012 - 09:23 PM, said:

GaussCat move ballistics into the arms(ears).

TT Mech has them in the Torso, so thats where they stay, want ballistics in Arms? get a Jagermech, thats what its build for.
Moving them into the Arms wastes the time and effort of putting the Jagermech into the game.

A Better Solution would be to make the side torsos bulkier when given larger weapons installed there (with the currently being added mech models changing depending on loadout) to both reflect the space needed and to balance having a large weapon there.

[Valore]

Sirous, on 03 November 2012 - 04:22 AM, said:

I must go now, I truly and sincerely appreciate the discussion.

One last time,
I will also state that the original designers of the game, made a fatal flaw that everyone seems to agree with, I do not and only hope that PGI has the will and at least some brains to fix the mess they put themselves in apparently.

That's the main problem right there. Its a bit rich implying that people are deluded by asserting they're blindly ignoring a fatal flaw, when you're putting faith into people who have proven completely incapable of fixing several basic problems without the help of the community.