1392 replies to this topic

[IntruderAlert]

Ich muss zustimmen. Es ist noch nicht bereit für die "Prime Time".
Davon abgesehen, die Tatsache, dass es jetzt in "Open Beta" und jeder kann springen und spielen, bedeutet im Wesentlichen, dass es effektiv bereits freigegeben ist, die Art der schaltet den Verzicht Abschluss....

:|

Just remember that this is a first attempt by someone to use a "new" game engine version (Cry3), in a way that was not completely envisioned by the engine creators. The engine in a lot of respects is like a Rubic's cube..where one change here can cause a change to other characteristics, sometimes unforseen and drastic.

Personally, I am happy that someone...anyone..has taken up the reigns to re-create the game I thought had died over a decade ago. I would have been completely satisfied with a re-make of Mechwarrior 2 with new updated graphics, but they chose the more difficult and challenging route to ensure the game would last further into the future. As I see what the Game engine can make possible eventually for the game I am satisfied with thier progress..(they have only been working on it for a year...most games take 3 times that amount and are much less technically challenging).

Again, the "official release date" doesn't really matter any more as the "open beta" is essentially when the judging public makes thier decision.

It's still a fun game.

-IA

[Aegis Kleais]

Well, best case scenario, I don't want the lights to lose their speed; it's one of the reasons why people choose that weight class. I'd rather the netcode just be fixed so that shot registration quality you get on 50+ tonners would work on those lower than that.

Couple it with the introduction of good collision detection, and I think I'll be more than happy.

A good light pilot can do some amazing thing with that Mech, but right now pilots are getting a false sense of security and ability with the chassis since it is not getting knocked down (a usual death sentence to a light) nor are shots registering, so they are doing things like running in front of heavies/assaults with immunity, a tactic which most skilled pilots would avoid if there weren't these protective aspects of the game in play.

[Kenyon Burguess]

havent seen this much forum anger over lights since the trollmando days. it will get better in time. meanwhile fire up some memes and laugh about it.

[Jock Blaine]

Aegis Kleais, on 14 November 2012 - 11:00 AM, said:

I have buried you 100-fold in more helpful content on this forum, yet you squeak with the power and ferocity of a mouse at wanting the same level of recognition. On top of it, after calling someone a whiner, you then tell them not to call you a name.

Hypocritical dumbass.

Oh, I am so sorry. I didn't know the number of postings determined the quality of an observation, nor that my goal in posting here should be to gain recognition. I clearly have taken the totally wrong approach to this forum. My apologies. I will not speak with you again until the number of my postings approaches yours, until that time I am obviously not worthy to doubt what you say, nor the way you word it.

[watsonclarke]

[color=#666666]We´ve been getting a lot of feedback, questions and suggestions on the latest patch and we are very thankful for your time and effort to play through and evaluate our work.[/color]

[ArkS]

Smurf account?

[Rebus]

At the moment,as an Australian player, the lag is making this game all but unplayable. Trying to duel with lasers is beyond a joke, and i know you need to aim where the opponent will be as appose to where you see them as well as take into account their possible lag and to look at the targeting information to see if your hitting or not and while your doing this your opponent with no lag is ripping your core out because they are hitting what they see! Even using missiles is frustrating as it takes you much longer to get the lock and it seems much easier to lose the lock and if your using SRM's again you have to aim where the opponent will be as etc etc etc
If there will be no Asia Pacific server i will simply not play the game as much as i like it there would be no point.

[Daekar]

OK, so I've been dropping with premades and pugging, and these are my observations from the last few days:

1) LRMs seem to be pretty good. They might need a tiny tracking improvement, but they're freaking deadly in the right hands. I got ripped to shreds more than once today by LRMs. If you're hearing complaints about them, I think one of two things are happening: the person voicing the issue is one of the many today I saw shooting the ground with them, or there is a bug causing issues with either missile tracking or hit detection.

2) Light mechs seem OP. I get killed more often by Jenners than any other mech, and there really seems to be no counter to them, especially with the need to lag-shoot. When knockdowns come back this will be improved, but I think it's also related to...

3) ... DHS. They have done as I predicted and reduced the TTK because weapons are now performing as they were originally intended to. I believe DHS should stay as they are, but armor needs to be increased to compensate. It is now feasible to run a K2 Catapult with 4 large lasers... I played that way for a few rounds and then stopped, it was easymode. People went down with ridiculous ease. Please investigate ways to keep people alive longer. I would consider reducing engine DHS to 1.7 as an appropriate heatsink nerf. The rest should come from increased armor.

4) Ammo cost for missiles. It's been whined over, but I didn't join in the discussion because I didn't have any experience. Now I do, I've been running non-Artemis SRMs in my C4 Catapult, and with 600 missiles (that's 25 salvos) I was paying 40k per match to rearm. Given that the 4 large laser build was more effective by far than the 4x SRM + 2 med las build (it was actually MORE heat efficient), there seems little point to running missiles if I am going to take a performance hit AND a cash hit. My original plan was to use Artemis to shrink the SRM spread, but at 80k per match (that's 6 tons of ammo) I would never get anywhere, so that's out. I have resorted to using the 75% free reload for now just for my non-Artemis SRMs, but it makes me feel dirty. Please examine the cost of missile ammunition relative to its battlefield utility and potential C-bill rewards.

5) Ammo cost for ballistics seems fine. I only run the YLW with an AC20, and I don't recall cost being an issue. And I love the paint-scheme on the Wang even more now that I know the canon pilot was of both Japanese and Chinese descent.

6) I mentioned this earlier, but the necessity to lag-shoot is a problem I'm sure you're aware of. I appreciate your efforts to improve this aspect of gameplay.

7) Overall rewards without premium (net gains) seem a tad low. In fact, if I were not on Premium time and was not going to be spending money on the game anyway, I would not be playing because of the slow rate of progression. With my premium bonus, my rate of advancement seems emotionally acceptable, but it is near the borderline. This is subjective, of course, but the important point here is that without Premium I wouldn't bother playing.

8) I'm sure it was just the matchmaker lottery, but I seemed to have good games today, overall. There were a few instances of pugstomping, but pug matches seemed more even than previously. I think the playerbase is learning, and the 4-man groups aren't as invincible as 8-mans. Once the MM is up to scratch, it's going to be magical.

9) The heat efficiency reading in the mechlab seems to have nothing to do with battlefield performance.

10) Please continue work on stability. I experienced multiple soft-freezes that were remedied by Alt+Tabing out, one crash to frontend client, and one CTD.

11) The new snowy forest map is quite nice. I enjoy the variety, and look forward to new maps. I have not encountered any map related bugs or performance issues that I have been able to discern.

12) Convergence issues for PPCs and ballistics. This dead horse has been cruelly beaten in the past, but is still available for flogging. Please understand that just because this isn't at the top of the forum whine list that doesn't mean the current implementation is acceptable in the long term. I would like to be able to run a K2 with PPCs in the arms and not feel as if I'm gimping my team... the model looks so awesome like that!

EDIT: 13) I forgot to mention that the heat for SRMs seems a bit high. Please investigate their heat relative to laser options.

Edited by Daekar, 15 November 2012 - 10:36 AM.

[vettie]

Good Post
Well thought out.

[Rixsaw]

From my experience, here are my observations of current metagame. Some small adjustments may be needed.

1. LRM's - LRM's are rather useless. If being hit by LRM, I generally ignore it unless there are 4 Catapults raining missiles on me. At that point I know that half the team has no short range weapons and I can proceed to closer range combat where they will quickly die. The flight path adjustment was needed, but the reduction in DMG was not needed. They should be buffed back to 2.0 per missile imho. I'm not really sure how TAG and Narc have any benefit, before the LRM's were changed,we used to have a tagger and 2-3 LRM boats mixed with brawlers. This gave players with different talents roles in the combat. As it is now, those players are liabilities.

2. Streak SRM2's - The current state of streak missiles is weak. They provide some benefit in making it harder for the target to aim, but generally produce less dammage than other weapons with a lower cost in ton's / heat. Part of the cost of the streak missiles is that they use a hardpoint. Maybe they were a bit over powered before when they homed in on center torso, but we never really found it to be much of a challenge to simply focus down the streak boat. People who run streak boats have to get close, and they can't put out the DPS to compete with a well balanced brawler. They had some mobility advantages with the jump jets or smaller mechs, but they required skill to pilot them successfully, and had heat issues as well as being a 1 trick poney so to speak. My suggestion is to find a middle ground from where they were to where they are now.

3. Lasers - I suppose lasers are fine as they are now, if you want to use them as a point of reference for other weapons They are simpler to fire, easier to aim, give away your position and are unable to sustain fire due to heat. There is a problem with the mech bay "Firepower" indicator as it does not take into account the rate of fire for the weapons you place on your mech, so many players may think large lasers to be superior to small lasers, when in reality they have vastly different rates of fire. I.E. Large does 9 dmg every 3.25 Small does 3 dmg every 2.25. Some adjustment to firepower might be helpful. AC2's suffer more from this disparity, as they only show 2 Dmg but in reality have the same Effective DPS as all the other weapons etc.

4. Auto Cannons - Most are arm mounted and thus have convergence issues. Until this can be fixed, we should probably just have the game fire them as if they were from the torso. There is no way to lead a target without putting your reticle in front of them, which will then change the convergence to a point in space 1000 meters away instead of the 200-300 that they are from you. Have it converge on your selected target distance may solve this problem. And people can learn to press r before firing it isn't that hard really (stop being newbs!!).

5. Gameplay. Gameplay has shifted from 8 man strategy play which involved larger more fun groups of friends to snarpy 4 man's trying to survive with the wrong mech for this map or the wrong weapon loadout for the team they are facing. Rather drull and not helpful. House cohesion and unity is turning into house chaos with 12 4 man teams doing 12 different things and noone getting together / bonding anymore. Fix this sooner rather than later or say goodby to the game. Lose the houses and there is no game. The Pugs can join a house, we are all here on the internet easily found, or they can get pug stomped. Its their own choice IMHO and those of us that put forth effort and time to organize shouldn't be punished for the whining that the lone wolfs have produced which resulted in this change.

6. Gamplay In-Game. Any testing currently being done and balance changes being made aren't really being tested against valid 8 / 12 man organized teams. So much of this may be wrong once 8 man returns. However it seems that LRM boats are out, Tag / Narc is gone, the game is all about rush the base and plow over anything in your way with an AC20. Mechs not able to fit an AC20 and plant it into your chest to fire, are using lasers due to their better heat effeciency now that we have double heat sinks. Dispite the current video on you tube which indicates PPC's are a great, they are in fact useless. They cannot sustain the rate of fire that a large laser can, barely out range it, and have projectile based firing issues..

7. Long Range / Headshots. Head shots are too hard. They should be much easier. We are going the wrong direction on this one. If someone wants to expose their head to a double gauss rifle, then they should get it blown off. Visual range needs to be extended beyond the 950 meters we have now. Players who use heat vision can easily see targets that other players cannot. Not really sure how to fix the headshot issue, but it should be viable for a well aimed shot to hit the head. AFK players being impossible almost to headshot is kinda silly.

[HaDeZs]

I agree with pretty much everything except the armor. I think the problem is more with weapon damage values and how the hitboxes, lag, ect affect damage output Plus heat issues between weapons. I've been opting for less of the larger weapons vs more of the smaller versions. Its the certain groupings of larger alpha damage weapons that break the survivability time, not armor amount. Try to take out something with 9x small lasers and you will say that things have too much armor. Anyways, I won't run any small lazers on any mech (jenner excluded) unless im able to boat more than 5, otherwise its a waste of heat and weight.

I dunno, something with the coding feels off, maybe im missing something.

Also, wanted to add that ISK gains are pretty low for non founders, and low but better for founders. IMO this is pretty balanced and the way I would like the game to stay as far as income. The progression in the game is fine, it forces people to spend time in game building their characters and skills before going to the next mech tier which sadly won't be OK with a lot of new players that want that instant gratification. These are also the same players that play World of Tanks which is an even worse grind.

The problem I do see with the income in game is the price tag on the larger mechs. Larger doesn't mean better, just different in their role that they play on the battlefield. Game balance is doing just that, I don't understand why the economy is going the opposite direction. You can buy 3-4 maxed out lights for the price of one maxed out assault while lights are considered assault killers. The price between 2x large lazers and 4x med lazers is a large $$, while both setups do comparable damage, meds being the better of the two. the price tells me that large is better, but my field experience with the weapons says that I should go with meds unless I have conditions where I might want to use large. Im being vague to try to get a point across, these calculations might be off a bit but you get my drift.

Edited by HaDeZs, 15 November 2012 - 11:15 AM.

[Daekar]

HaDeZs, on 15 November 2012 - 10:55 AM, said:

I agree with pretty much everything except the armor. I think the problem is more with weapon damage values and how the hitboxes, lag, ect affect damage output Plus heat issues between weapons. I've been opting for less of the larger weapons vs more of the smaller versions. Its the certain groupings of larger alpha damage weapons that break the survivability time, not armor amount. Try to take out something with 9x small lasers and you will say that things have too much armor. I won't run any small lazers on any mech unless im able to boat more than 5, otherwise its a waste of heat and weight. Maybe im missing something.

Actually, I agree with you. Leaving armor the same and decreasing weapon damage would be my first preference. However, they have shown some inexplicable resistance to changing the damage values, preferring to tinker with almost every other parameter of the weapon first. I think the weapons FEEL right - the refire rate, range, etc, are all good. If they are willing to drop weapon damage a bit, that would definitely be the best solution, but in the absence of that option, I felt the armor was an adequate substitute.

For the record, my opinion is swayed by the fact that I am currently playing only Catapults in my efforts to max out the PilotLab unlocks for all of the variants. I haven't been in a light mech since the reset at Open Beta.

EDIT: 9 small lasers is a 27 dmg alpha... that's pretty hefty, and delivered in 0.75 seconds to boot. That's 3 damage short of a dual-gauss hit, and just as pinpoint. I may have to try a small laser hunchback after all...

Edited by Daekar, 15 November 2012 - 11:06 AM.

[HaDeZs]

Its not a problem of low armor or too high damage, there are still balance issues with a ton of other things. Dropping damage will lower small weapon damage making them useless. Plus, the conversion from tabletop means that you should be seeing the same gamplay from MWO than you would the tabletop version and that is perfectly fine. damage to armor amount works and was adjusted for game length. Lowering dps would mean lights still go down quick while the added armament of assaults would rip everyone to shreds.

And the 9x small laser hunch isn't as deadly as it used to be, and still takes quite a bit to take things out. Lets say another hunch is my target, with 35 armor i need to take out 70 true armor in game. Thats 3 1/2 hits to blow center armor, 4 maybe 5 because of lag and me hitting the shoulder or arm due to movement. It takes 2-3 more real hits in game to take that armor piece out on non FF for some reason. I think the issue isn't game balance, heat, dps, or anything else coded into the games its a problem with the way the servers and clients distribute damage. The problems aren't the same for all weapons, certain ones are affected more.

Edited by HaDeZs, 15 November 2012 - 11:28 AM.

[Daekar]

Ah, I see your concern. Well, in my opinion there is no reason why all weapons would have to be changed equally, or even at all. However, since my preference runs towards slower matches and longer kill times, we may have to agree to disagree on this one point. I like my walking tanks to last a while.

I think you're right about the "unquanlifiable" issue with the servers/clients distributing damage. The lag, or whatever it is, impacts certain weapon systems more than others, and that should be accounted for during tweaking unless this mysterious variable is close to being eliminated.

[Stingz]

Streaks will eventually be available in the larger 4 and 6 variants (but not before you get shot up by them).
Streak 2 is a utility, Streak 4/6 is for damage.

The thing with head-shots is the head on most mechs are really misleading, and small.

Edited by Stingz, 15 November 2012 - 04:42 PM.

[Mazgazine1]

1. - I have seen single LRM boats do quite a bit of damage. Even now they do a ton - its just spread out. so its hard to see the total damage.

2. - Streak SRMs are awesome, they are PERFECT for hitting light mechs. I have never incountered an SRM boat with just streaks yet - , I mean they don't do a ton of damage, but against light mechs they are the tool for the job.

3. Lasers work fine. I would say that the larger lasers generate way more heat then their worth, but the medium laser is awesome. I have a 6 laser HBK-SP and I can burn through a torso on a centurion pretty fast. Its my goto to just brawl. I barely over heat (usually my fault). I can Alpha strike 4 times before getting a heat warning.

I agree the current measurement of "firepower" . The mech lab needs an overhaul and I hope they take a damage over time instead of "alpha strike" as the new measure. this will make it easier for newer players to figure out their mech.

Head shots really? You want lights to be the only thing anyone ever plays? Make headshots easier and that's what will happen.

Haven't touched PPCs yet, but an atlas with 4 of them is scary.

[Gogopher]

basically i disagree with everything u said...seems as if you are writing from an 8man premade POV and a sniper/lrmer to boot

the game has many issues that are broken...but most of what you wrote isnt it...and headshot are definitley not it...in TT you have a 3% chance to get a HS (roughly)...what you are advocating is a FPS mentality and it simply isnt needed

your comments on ballistic weapons is completely off base and almost silly...yes there are some issues but making all arm weapons act as torso mounted...na ill take broken arms over that any day...ssrm2's are simply put fine as they are...they are friggin ssrm2's and what they were before was godguns of doom and made the streaky cat the most dominant mech in the game...lrms arent great as is now but they are vastly preferable to beta lrms, where all teams had were lrm boats who ruled and dictated the match...

gameplay is fine...well actually with all the 4manx2 premades it hasnt improved much at all...matchmaking is pathetic but vastly preferable to what we had when all u saw was 8mans farming farming farming...they have all ready stated they are coming out with 8manv8man rooms so im not sure what your beef is...if anything the current system allows to many people to do the 1,2,3 countdown and still run 8man...

so in conclusion: as i all ready stated i basically and fundamentally disagree with almost every point you made...i dont see a thing that you wrote that i do agree with enough to support it

[Asmosis]

If anything headshots should be harder, like the atlas. Not easier, like the catapult.

A skilled pilot can already take the head off most mechs aside from fast moving scouts (and atlas) with reasonable efficiency/patience.

Or you can take the shotgun approach, run right up in front of them and blast them in the face with 6srm6's. Still wont headshot an atlas as the cockpit is TINY compared to every single other mech, but it'll kill anything else in one salvo from an awesome down.

Streaks are an anti-light mech weapon, and they fill that role fine. LRM's are fine, most people think they were nerfed too hard (they're not) the "issue" is that your targets are smarter now and are using cover/breaking LOS so most of your missles arent hitting in the first place.

Matchmaking is in a much better place for the playerbase as a whole. Some people will have to wait for 8 man premades again, but honestly I think most of those players will stick to 4 man teams because they like winning and wont win so much vs experienced, co-ordinated 8 man groups. Its a case of "the grass is greener" atm.

Edited by Asmosis, 15 November 2012 - 05:17 PM.

[Asmosis]

The weapons as a whole are fairly well balanced, tried and tested in a number of different scenarios over the years. It makes sense to leave them alone other than a few things needed for FPS balancing like lrms and rate of fire (so the game isnt boring).

[CrazyPenguin]

I'm in the opposite boat on one of your points, armor. I feel as if mechs are too armored right now. It already feels as if we're shooting peas at each other instead of massive munitions. Even if you presume that half the weight of a ton of ammunition is dedicated to mechanisms relating to storage and loading the shells, a single AC/20 shot weighs almost 71.5 kilograms. A typical 150mm artillery shell weighs 50kg, and produces a crater over four meters wide and a meter and a half deep in the ground. And yet it takes something at least half again more powerful than that FOUR SHOTS to open up the leg armor of an Atlas? Armor in the 31st century has definitely won the weapon-versus-armor race.

Yeah, I know, it's a sin to bring realism into a mech sim game. But remember that armor has already been doubled from the tabletop values.