269 replies to this topic

[MCXL]

I'll say I'm actually an advocate for higher armor values, only because it allows more fine tuning to how we perceive changes. (I don't like doing damage in decimals)

Not saying anything about the Damage/HP ratio though I just mean that big numbers feel cleaner to me than small ones. (AC/2000 GOGOGOGOGOGO)

[Asatruer]

MCXL, on 07 November 2012 - 07:40 PM, said:

I'll say I'm actually an advocate for higher armor values...

I agree with not removing the armor buff, at least at first.
It seems to me that the doubling of armor was done as much to counter mouse-aiming and pinpoint convergence of weapon clusters as it was done to counter the increase in RoF (which is partly curtailed by the lack of heat dissipation to take advantage of the full RoF long term.)

Edited by Asatruer, 07 November 2012 - 08:04 PM.

[Indoorsman]

Good post. Just one thing to point out.

MCXL, on 04 November 2012 - 12:24 PM, said:

• Random hit location (even to the point of making impossible shots)

• Hit location is player determined (Both attacking and defending players)

By effectively reducing damage by 50% the design team at PGI effectively made the amount of heat you needed to generate to kill a mech double what it was.

Saying that doubling armor/reducing damage 50% is doubling heat generated is "true", but is ignoring that you need less heat in the first place to "snipe" a CT than randomly hit a mech till it dies.

I don't really think this game should be compared to TT for balance issues though, aside from hierarchy.

I didn't visit any of those links, but otherwise I read through the above. I disagree with doubling dissipation/halving damage though. That results in less meaningful actions. I like having the burst and the high heat penalty we've got now. I'd like all weapons to be useable though so weapon tweaks and incremental dissipation changes would be my preference.

Overall though, good work - good post.

[Indoorsman]

One more thing.

Is TT balanced? An individual in TT is controlling many mechs vs in MWO only one mech. So maybe 6 vs 48 weapons. Let's say a mech has 4 SL 2 SSRM2, that's a common build. Let's say that there is one of those in a TT players line-up and no other mech has SL. So what if SL were imbalanced.

Any imbalance TT has will be magnified in MWO.
TT 4/48 = 8.3% of your total weapons are imbalanced
MWO 4/6 = 66.6% of your total weapons are imbalanced

In TT you would have the same weapons balance relative to your opponent, not due to actual weapons balance but due to BV. Even if 66.6% of the TT players weapons were SL, his opponent would still be balanced against that. BV is what makes TT balanced, not that weapons are in fact balanced. So the 8.3% goes away completely, neither person even knows/cares that SL are imbalanced. They are equally matched by BV.

In MWO, it would be very obvious if 66.6% of your weapons are imbalanced, there would be no BV to balance the enemy against your weapon choices. This game matches class, not weapons loadouts. That means everyone is free to pick whatever weapons they want, and so is their enemy. That means every weapon needs to be equally viable, equal attention given to each weapon in balancing them. Aka not system wide balance adjustments(1/2 damage, double dissipation).

[MustrumRidcully]

Targetloc, on 07 November 2012 - 03:45 PM, said:

QFT x100

I love the game. It's tons of fun. The feel is right. The pace of battle; the flow; the roles and tactics...

for a certain set of equipment/builds anyway.

Exactly. We're sitting on a wonderful looking and feeling game... The caveat seem just a few edits to
the itemstats.xml file away!

Edited by MustrumRidcully, 08 November 2012 - 05:18 AM.

[Scarlett Avignon]

Personally, I get the feeling that PGI wanted to remove the possibility of "Heat Neutral" builds from the game (or at least make them effectively impossibly to accomplish.) I think their reasoning was that, they wanted heat to always be a factor on player's minds. When you play a multiplayer combat game like MWO, you are tasked to exercise many skills, one of which is multitasking itself. Highly competitive players will tell you that efficiency is one of the keys to being successful in combat. Expend less to do more. Multitasking itself is not a very efficient activity, though. So, the best way to alleviate the inefficiency of multitasking is to remove as many tasks as possible, allowing you to focus on more important activities. Removing the need to monitor your heat is an easy way to help with this. Put bluntly, the most efficient mechs to pilot are the ones where you can alpha strike all the time. However, this would make for a more boring game as it would lead to homogenization of builds. While I believe the system needs to be tweaked, I do believe that PGI made a good decision to try to make heat always be a factor in combat, therefore making the game more complex in it's simulation, and raising the difficulty of play.

[MustrumRidcully]

The way they did it was just wrong. They should look into heat capacity and limit that, not heat dissipation.

A low heat capacity means you cannot just alpha strike without risk. But coupled with a high dissipation,you can still fire your weapons at a high ROF - you just need to learn how to time your shots so you don't overheat firing too many weapons at once, and you still manage to land shots that are precise enough to be deadly.

But they unfortuantely don't evne have a heat scale that support this. They just have "No Heat Penalty" to "Shutdown, Ammo Explosion, OMG WHAT ARE YOU DOING TO YOUR MECH!". With more steps in between there would be meaningful trade-offs and risks along the way, and the smart mechwarrior would know how to "ride the heat scale", while the inexperienced one will just stack so many heat sinks that he doesn't get any damage but also no heat problem.

[Targetloc]

Franklen Avignon, on 08 November 2012 - 09:08 AM, said:

Personally, I get the feeling that PGI wanted to remove the possibility of "Heat Neutral" builds from the game (or at least make them effectively impossibly to accomplish.) I think their reasoning was that, they wanted heat to always be a factor on player's minds.

Franklen Avignon, on 08 November 2012 - 09:08 AM, said:

While I believe the system needs to be tweaked, I do believe that PGI made a good decision to try to make heat always be a factor in combat, therefore making the game more complex in it's simulation, and raising the difficulty of play.

Preventing heat-neutral builds is literally impossible unless they implement a non-linear heat function. And that in itself would make any prospect of balance between low heat and high heat weapons... unlikely.


The problem is they've taken the short-cut to 'encouraging' heat management by just making sure everything (except Gauss) runs hot.

The heat/weapon balance is systematically broken because the potential DPS of some weapons, like a medium laser, runs anywhere between 0.125 and 1.25, depending on the number of heatsinks you have. The value of heatsinks is incredibly low (in terms of DPS per ton gained), but the range of potential DPS you can gain by adding additional sinks is ridiculously high.


They have to allow the possibility of heat neutral builds, or they will HAVE to throw all TT values out the window because it will become mathematically impossible to balance.


Heat neutral builds aren't even optimal anyways, so I don't know why they're so afraid of them. Probably because they've picked poor ROF numbers on medium and small lasers which allows their damage per ton to be dictated entirely by the number of associated heatsinks (and the DPS/ton is out of whack)

[Antony Weiner]

MCXL, on 04 November 2012 - 12:24 PM, said:

This analyses will have several sections, and it won't have have a TLDR. If you can't be bothered reading the thing and understanding what I'm on about, then don't bother me by responding please.

I wonder why in Federal Intelligence Agencies or any serious scientific/academic setting one is required to have a tl;dr section (Called Abstract)... Maybe because they are "grown-ups" and don't like wasting time.

Edited by Antony Weiner, 10 November 2012 - 11:11 PM.

[SteelPaladin]

MustrumRidcully, on 08 November 2012 - 09:53 AM, said:

The way they did it was just wrong. They should look into heat capacity and limit that, not heat dissipation.

A low heat capacity means you cannot just alpha strike without risk. But coupled with a high dissipation,you can still fire your weapons at a high ROF - you just need to learn how to time your shots so you don't overheat firing too many weapons at once, and you still manage to land shots that are precise enough to be deadly.

But they unfortuantely don't evne have a heat scale that support this. They just have "No Heat Penalty" to "Shutdown, Ammo Explosion, OMG WHAT ARE YOU DOING TO YOUR MECH!". With more steps in between there would be meaningful trade-offs and risks along the way, and the smart mechwarrior would know how to "ride the heat scale", while the inexperienced one will just stack so many heat sinks that he doesn't get any damage but also no heat problem.

The problem also seems to be that they didn't design the system w/the capability to divorce dissipation from capacity. Garth's post about their DHS testing would seem to indicate that (at least under their current code) they MUST up the threshold by an amount equal to a heat sink's per 10 seconds rate. They are not 2 values they can tweak such that a HS cools at 0.3 per second but only boosts threshold by 1. If it cools at 0.3/sec, it will boost threshold by 3.

This is why waiting so long to address balance concerns is SUCH a bad idea. By the time you notice all the problems, you have to tear up entire swaths of code to fix them because all the dials you need to twist don't even exist as dials.

Edited by SteelPaladin, 08 November 2012 - 10:19 AM.

[Imagine Dragons]

Antony Weiner, on 08 November 2012 - 10:07 AM, said:

I wonder why in the Federal Intelligence Agencies or any serious scientific/academic setting one is required to have a tl;dr section (Called Abstract)... Maybe because they are "grown-ups" and don't like wasting time.

It must be embarssing when those same people read the abstract, call something out based solely on it.... and then get humbled when the author says "You didn't read the whole report did you?..."

But thats beside the point of this thread...

[Oinkage]

Excellent thread. Thanks MCXL.

Has anyone done an analysis of the 2750-3050 mechs that are unusable based upon the current heat design? Obviously, mechs like the Flashman are not usable.

[MustrumRidcully]

SteelPaladin, on 08 November 2012 - 10:19 AM, said:

The problem also seems to be that they didn't design the system w/the capability to divorce dissipation from capacity. Garth's post about their DHS testing would seem to indicate that (at least under their current code) they MUST up the threshold by an amount equal to a heat sink's per 10 seconds rate. They are not 2 values they can tweak such that a HS cools at 0.3 per second but only boosts threshold by 1. If it cools at 0.3/sec, it will boost threshold by 3.

This is why waiting so long to address balance concerns is SUCH a bad idea. By the time you notice all the problems, you have to tear up entire swaths of code to fix them because all the dials you need to twist don't even exist as dials.

The itemstats.xml may suggest something slightly different at least the out-of-engine heat sinks have two seperate stats for dissipation and capacity.

[SteelPaladin]

MustrumRidcully, on 08 November 2012 - 11:11 AM, said:

The itemstats.xml may suggest something slightly different at least the out-of-engine heat sinks have two seperate stats for dissipation and capacity.

It's possible. I was just extrapolating from the way Garth described the issue. The other alternative is that they were deliberately refusing to consider using 2.0 DHS w/a lower than 2 threshold boost, and I wanted to pick the assumption that made them look better.

[Tice Daurus]

Actually Mustrum brings up a good point here. If DHS were to have an increased heat dissapation rating which was better than SHS, it might make DHS viable. But I don't know if that might be the answer here or not.

As of right now, the heat system as MCXL says does indeed punish people and that is indeed a problem. But the other problem is not being able to do more choice in the mechs. If I want to custom build an AWS-8Q to have a XL 400 engine on my particular mech, I should be able to do it. I should however have to pay through the NOSE to get it, but it should be doable because to have an Awesome with and XL 400 engine isn't particularly 'canon'. What I'm saying though is, I do agree with the thread here is that choice in customization is going to be the thing that saves this game. And not just in mechs, but in the player experience too. If I can choose special skills that makes my player's ability to fight better, and give a lot of choices to choose from, it will make me a better pilot and gunner in my mech.

For example. If I'm a brawler, and if there was a piloting skill called 'Charging', it would increase my ability to charge and knockdown a mech if I charged into him. At the same vain, if I was a Light pilot and there was a skill called 'Resist Knockdown' it would help me against someone who has charging.

There could be a host of skills that could be possibly pulled from the Mechwarrior RPG game and the Mechwarrior Expansion books with different skills that could come into play that could help increase piloting, decrease costs you pay for repairs, tinkering with a particular weapons system to get a bit more damage based from a certain cost, engineering, stuff like that that could help in your build of your mechs to give a certain edge against other players over time.

This could be one way to help the game further. But ultimately the base structure of the game still needs to be tweeked I feel to help balance the game. I don't know if the most recent tweeks have been helpful with DHS being at 1.4 right now, the heat system definitely needs an overhaul, and yes, I do know the game is still in OPEN BETA, but we're not that far away from the game being in a finished state. Yes a lot more stuff needs to be added. New maps, new mechs, new game modes of play, community warfare, the Clan mechs and weapons in a few months from now in March, increases in matchmaking, play sizes, and a ton of other stuff down the road. But each week, more stuff is added. My problem is with the more stuff that's continually added, what I am afraid of is certain things like the heat system which needs to be overhauled will become overlooked later on down the road.

I don't discount all that the DEV's have done for this game so far. What I have a problem with is warning signs are flashing now that they need to go on a hiring spree to get more quality coders and more people into the QA group to make sure they can catch the bugs quickly now into the game to help them get the code in and checked properly. And they need to get them ASAP so the work can get done.

[Asatruer]

Oinkage, on 08 November 2012 - 10:53 AM, said:

Excellent thread. Thanks MCXL.

Has anyone done an analysis of the 2750-3050 mechs that are unusable based upon the current heat design? Obviously, mechs like the Flashman are not usable.

I would be a rather long task requiring a quite a bit of patient busy work, but we could just look at the mechs already in the game and the ones that have been announced.

How about the Blackjack?
While they have not announced which variants will be included, there was the infamous BJ-2 that loads two ERLLs and four SSRM2s. It ran so hot with its SHS, that FASA released an errata to upgrade it to DHS. Wonder how that variant is supposed to manage heat here, other than not firing every time its weapons' cooldowns are done.

Edited by Asatruer, 08 November 2012 - 12:40 PM.

[MCXL]

Chapter Four obviously got delayed. Skyfall was good, but then I fell asleep on my couch.

Tonight, I promise

[Indoorsman]

@MCXL

You should address how TT wouldn't be balanced w/o BV, and how accuracy/aiming reduces heat required to kill a mech compared to TT.

[MCXL]

That's gonna be part of Chapter Four, I think.

Disparity of power between mechs in TT and in MWO.

Edited by MCXL, 08 November 2012 - 01:29 PM.

[MCXL]

Antony Weiner, on 08 November 2012 - 10:07 AM, said:

I wonder why in the Federal Intelligence Agencies or any serious scientific/academic setting one is required to have a tl;dr section (Called Abstract)... Maybe because they are "grown-ups" and don't like wasting time.

I don't appreciate the pointless negative contribution.

I could add a TL;DR that said, "this game needs more heat dissipation if people want TT balanced stats." But, without actually understanding the math behind it, what would be the point? I don't think you get this thread, or why I need people to read, and understand something instead of just taking my word for it.

Maybe you are the one that needs to "grow up".

EDIT: Oops on double post, thought I was in editor.

Edited by MCXL, 08 November 2012 - 01:38 PM.