187 replies to this topic

[Tsusie]

Laokin, part of the issue here is that it doesn't seem like you are seeing that the damage to components is considered separately from the damage to the internal structure, and serves only to disable or destroy components. This can cause lucky damage from gauss or ammo explosions, but not lucky damage like a critical hit in DnD. Personally I think its fun to be able to disable components without blowing off an entire section, and it makes some weapons (specifically autocannons, gauss, and ppc) have a strong role.

I'm with you on wanting to reduce RNG; however the only way to do so without completely scrapping the crit system would be to model the components (or at least place hitboxes) inside the mech. This still would be luck based as there is no way of knowing which critical slots a player put their components in, and would create a ton more work for the programming team, so its not a realistic solution. Maybe if we all ran stock builds or ammo/weapon hitboxes were standardized, but I think its too much work for the payoff, considering all the other cool improvements PGI could do with that time.

[Valore]

Laokin, while I can see where you're coming from, I'd still disagree.

A sniper firing at someone with a rifle does not get 100% accuracy every time, even if he's a perfect sniper. Simply because he is not almighty, and there exist factors outside his control.

A perfectly weighted and taken headshot means nothing if a passing mosquito makes your target twitch, a perfect body shot may mean nothing if it flukes a deflect off his lucky cigarette case in his breast pocket.

Crits are the same way. I may make a bad shot, but whoops, guess what, that ablative armour blasted off awkwardly and the shot sends shrapnel into your engine. What are you going to do? Pop your cockpit, shake your fist at me and demand a do over?

Sure thing. Let me rake you in the face with machine gun bullets. Better hope I roll an arseload of '1's

It boils down to whether more people want a game which resembles real life, or whether they want a game that takes place in a perfect controlled vacuum. There's no right or wrong answer here.

Personally I like the former. I remember a roguelike once that had this hilarious feature which would explicitly detail how a lucky crit or miss happened in graphic detail.

'Your parry, executed in classical form, misses as the red hobgoblin slips on a pile of dung and mistimes his already mistimed slash. It guts you for 28 damage. You die.'

The rage this would cause would be epic.

EDIT: Just to clarify, this only applies on hits that are already hits, and determining whether they crit or not. I do not expect hits to start miraculously doing no damage. We have that ingame already. Its called BAD NETCODE (Sorry devs, couldn't resist)

Edited by Valore, 22 November 2012 - 08:39 PM.

[Heeden]

Laokin, on 22 November 2012 - 08:01 PM, said:

If I shoot a .22 bullet through the palm of your hand, it's going to be the same everytime, I'm not gonna get lucky and roll a crit that takes out your ribs too.

Okay, you shoot me and hit me in the arm. It might graze my bicep, weakening the arm but leaving it usable. It could shatter my elbow, disabling the arm until it can be repaired, or it could hit the grenade I am holding in my hand, the resulting detonation destroying my arm and taking a neat chunk out of my torso.

[Laokin]

PierceTheHeavens, on 22 November 2012 - 08:16 PM, said:

Laokin, part of the issue here is that it doesn't seem like you are seeing that the damage to components is considered separately from the damage to the internal structure, and serves only to disable or destroy components. This can cause lucky damage from gauss or ammo explosions, but not lucky damage like a critical hit in DnD. Personally I think its fun to be able to disable components without blowing off an entire section, and it makes some weapons (specifically autocannons, gauss, and ppc) have a strong role.

I'm with you on wanting to reduce RNG; however the only way to do so without completely scrapping the crit system would be to model the components (or at least place hitboxes) inside the mech. This still would be luck based as there is no way of knowing which critical slots a player put their components in, and would create a ton more work for the programming team, so its not a realistic solution. Maybe if we all ran stock builds or ammo/weapon hitboxes were standardized, but I think its too much work for the payoff, considering all the other cool improvements PGI could do with that time.

Yeah there is, it's actually very easy.

As the armor disappears the internals take more damage based on percentage.

I.E.

Lets say you have 45 armor on your arm. I hit you with a gauss canon -- you now have 30 armor on your arm. Since there is less armor, less damage is mitigated by percentage.

Another way to say it is, when your armor is max, 1% of the damage bleeds through to internals. When your armor is stripped 80% of the damage bleed through to internals.

Internals have less total HP than the Arm itself, allowing you to accrue damage to the internals to knock out the internals completely without severing that section of the mech.

No hit boxes necessary. No random numbers game required.

Straight up damage mitigation, that's all armor should do.

Just like Quake 3 Arena, for a direct analogy.

A rail gun does 100 damage. When you have no Armor your life is 100. 1 shot kills you. If you have 150 armor, the rail gun strips 100 armor and 20 life, leaving you at 80HP with 50 Armor.

In MWO, we have Armor, and Internal HP.

The armor should mitigate damage by % against internal HP.

It's also important to know that each limp in MWO also has HP.

So there is 3 variables in MWO.

Internal HP, External HP, and Armor.

Armor protects External HP 100% until there isn't enough armor to cover the damage of the shot fired.

Internal HP should get damage by a scaling percentage of how much armor is left.

This allows internals to go before externals, but internals will only go when externals are really low. Some internals faster than others, depending on what the individual internals HP is.

Problem solved, no random numbers game necessary. No luck involved, same result, but one that is more consistent.

Ammo and weapons could still explode this way, and that would be your "Critical Hit." Without rolling any phantom dice.

The case should then protect the ammo from exploding, rather than shielding adjacent internals from random crits. This also means you only ever need one case in each torso, vs, using 1 case for each crit slot using ammo.

That makes the case more important on a per build level too.

[Thragen]

David Bradley, on 22 November 2012 - 06:05 PM, said:

Thanks you for your responses guys. I assumed it was something along those lines, but just wanted to be sure. In any case, the numbers for double heat sinks are something that we will very likely be looking over once again.

Also, I just realized that I forgot to include something in my answer regarding how crit hits work. Weapons that deal damage over time, like lasers, work by quickly dealing tiny amounts of damage repeatedly over the lifetime of the laser beam. I think the medium laser does something like 0.20 - 0.25 damage repeatedly until it does the full 5 damage. Each of those micro damage hits have their own chance to crit. This means that lasers will have many chances to crit, but the crits will be spread out amongst the equipment in the location, and do little damage each time. Meanwhile an autocannon will have only one chance to crit per shot, but do all its damage to one piece of equipment (or applied multiple times if you get a double or triple crit).

I'd like to add my thanks as well for taking the time out of your busy day to answer these questions. I would like to stress one other aspect that seems to get less attention when the discussion of DHS comes up. Most people just focus on the bigger weapons aspect or the boating of lasers but let's not forget that the weight savings also allow the bigger mechs ( heavy and above ) to use larger engines for increased speed and manouverability which in turn translates into more survivability.

[Laokin]

Heeden, on 22 November 2012 - 08:32 PM, said:

Okay, you shoot me and hit me in the arm. It might graze my bicep, weakening the arm but leaving it usable. It could shatter my elbow, disabling the arm until it can be repaired, or it could hit the grenade I am holding in my hand, the resulting detonation destroying my arm and taking a neat chunk out of my torso.

These examples aren't random, they are finite based on trajectory or other objects.

In the case of the sniper and the bug, the bug isn't random, it's there. It's not a "Why did i Just die" kind of thing. To do what you're talking about, to properly simulate this experience without a random number generator, which btw -- is never truly random, it's based on a concept called "Seeding" can only be done by actually modeling the internals.

Not necessary, as I have an alternative way to allow someone to damage internals without being confused like "okay now, why did that just happen" and then being told "homie rolled a 12."

It's the most bunk way of trying to capture that experience.

What if, in military flight simulators, they put in a % chance that your landing gear would break as you were landing and cause you to crash unavoidably.

That can happen in real life, it's not likely -- and can be avoided with maintenance.

What if The black hawk simulator had it explode an engine 25% of the time you were shot in a rotor. Would that be realistic?

No... not at all. Those are the same as all these silly analogies people are using to defend the "RNG" in MWO.

It's silly, it's stupid, it exists in the table top, because the game is based on strategically calculating probability. It's like poker. A good poker player, even though the cards are random, can win if he knows his probability.

That is NOT MW:O.

Imagine being in the MWO MLG world championship, and it's down to just you and another guy, and he's wrecked, you just legged him, you're nowhere near as hurt as he is, and he crits you and you explode and your team loses, even though your team completely out played the other team.

How would you feel losing $8,000 because some poor shmuck on his last leg [awesome pun right?] got lucky?


It's not right -- at all. And PGI has already expressed their interest in MWO competition, which will NEVER take off with RNG crits, because of the above scenario I just explained.


It's stupid, and has no place in this game.

It also doesn't add anything to the game at all, other than allowing a bad player to beat a good player with "luck."

And that's not a fun game.

P.S.

Now I also know why my repair bills fluctuate so randomly... that's another negative side effect to the RNG crit game.

I can take less structure damage and more internal damage one game inflating my repair bill 20k even though I barely took any damage.

I can get an arm blown off and have a repair bill cheaper than the last round, because I got lucky and wasn't crit.

Repair bills didn't exist in the TT game either for obvious reason -- another reason why it just doesn't translate to MWO.

Dumb mechanic is dumb.

Edited by Laokin, 22 November 2012 - 08:54 PM.

[Khavi Vetali]

Laokin, on 22 November 2012 - 08:35 PM, said:

The case should then protect the ammo from exploding, rather than shielding adjacent internals from random crits. This also means you only ever need one case in each torso, vs, using 1 case for each crit slot using ammo.

Good analysis, and it does make for a game less based on random chance, but the above is incorrect. Currently CASE does not shield adjacent internals from random crits. CASE prevents the damage from exploding ammo (and gauss rifles) from transferring to an adjacent section of your mech. It basically funnels the explosion out the back of your mech instead of being contained within. Also, you only ever need one CASE per section, not multiple CASE.

I have to take issue with your hypotheticals, however.

Quote

Imagine being in the MWO MLG world championship, and it's down to just you and another guy, and he's wrecked, you just legged him, you're nowhere near as hurt as he is, and he crits you and you explode and your team loses, even though your team completely out played the other team.

If you are nowhere near as hurt as him, you probably don't have any sections stripped to the internals, he is not just going to crit you and cause you to explode. If you aren't using ammo based weapons, or have no ammo left, he is not going to crit you and cause you to explode. If you have a section that is stripped to the internals, you should be favoring that side and keeping it out of his field of fire. There are ways in MWO of mitigating probability through skill as well. If the final match comes down to two individuals, your team did not completely outplay the opposing team. It's really not as black and white as you make it out to be, and the critical system that MWO takes from the table top is not nearly as debilitating as you are making it out to be.

Edit: Question, in your above system, what controls which internal items are taking damage, or as armor is reduced and damage is bleeding through to those internals they are all taking the same amount of damage at the same rate?

Edited by Khavi Vetali, 22 November 2012 - 09:02 PM.

[Valore]

The bug may not be random, but its something you as the sniper have no control over. So it might as well be, right?



Someone puts a round into your knee actuator, there is no chance you'll know exactly what kind of deflection it'll take. It could bounce off and do next to no damage, or it could jam right at a joint which makes the entire leg seize up.

Like I said, I agree that penalising people for some things is too much. But as far as crits go, I think that's acceptable. You hit someone, there's no chance you took into consideration every factor like how it will deflect, how he's turning or juking at the moment, etc.

As for the tournament, if one side is completely outplayed, then you should be 4 on 1 and flatten him. So I don't agree with your analogy there either. If it falls to a lucky crit to win, then it was a close fought match in the first place, so tough luck for the runners up, but that's life.

Edited by Valore, 22 November 2012 - 08:56 PM.

[Vermaxx]

Laokin, on 22 November 2012 - 08:44 PM, said:

Imagine being in the MWO MLG world championship, and it's down to just you and another guy, and he's wrecked, you just legged him, you're nowhere near as hurt as he is, and he crits you and you explode and your team loses, even though your team completely out played the other team.

How would you feel losing $8,000 because some poor shmuck got lucky?

If you were not nearly as damaged as the target, and assuming medium or larger mechs, your example probably doesn't happen. The hit has to eliminate armor and do additional damage, thereby forcing a critsplosion check. A successful crit check kills whatever the game decided with a second roll - a gun, an actuator (eventually that might be in), an engine or gyro slot (you get 3 and 2 respectively), or an ammo stack.

Out of that list I just gave you, only two things can "kill" you and one is a maybe. The "maybe" is if the hit crit a gauss, and the 20 damage kills you somehow. The ammo stack probably kills you. That is Battletech, and that is Mechwarrior. I have played games of tabletop where a friend took a critical-through-armor (does not exist in MWO except in bugs) and died in the first five minutes of what went on to be a several hour game. He put his shoes back on and went home. I've also seen 'enemy' mechs die to a lucky critical and suddenly rebalance the odds in our favor. Most Battletech crits happen after mechs are hammered shart. If you fall into that category, you take your chances. Armor is your single lifeline in Battletech and Mechwarrior. If you don't have any on a location, you play like a prize fighter and keep hiding that body location from as many blows as you can.

Anyone who gets into a MECHWARRIOR tournament without accepting the ruleset and fluff is in the wrong tournament, they should have signed up for Armored Core or Hawken. The current crit system and competitive gaming are entirely compatible. The contestants will just be people who like/love the ruleset and fluff.

If this does not sound like your cup of tea you are better off looking at another game, because the critical system is as integral to the Battletech setting and "feel" as the names of guns, the shapes of mechs, and the political powers in the galaxy.

[Valore]

Oh and incidentally, concerning how luck has no place in a skill based game or tournament.

Before we were more concerned about animal cruelty, one of the shooting events considered to take the most skill was one where they would release live birds instead of using clay pigeons.

The live birds would fly in random directions. Which means a shooter could get an easy shot or one that was nigh impossible. In fact, it was common practice to pull random wing feathers off the birds just so they would fly more erratically.

While I can understand your dislike of having random factors, it takes just as much skill to compensate and build in margins of error into your calculations when planning for victory. This is why I most strongly disagree with your assertion that people would get annoyed and its a stupid system.

Don't blame the system if people don't want to adapt. Its a double standard. You can't argue no skill, when all having a RNG in a crit implemented system means that you just have to add a different skill into your considerations.

[Orzorn]

Valore, on 22 November 2012 - 09:05 PM, said:

While I can understand your dislike of having random factors, it takes just as much skill to compensate and build in margins of error into your calculations when planning for victory. This is why I most strongly disagree with your assertion that people would get annoyed and its a stupid system.

Working with probability is actually a huge part of many games in the MLG scene. Look at Dota, with its random critical hit values and semi-random neutral creep spawns. There are many tactics and strategies that have formed based around such things (especially neutral creep spawns, as some heroes can manage some creep spawns, but not others, at low levels. This changes their jungling strategy for the game).

A good player will always understand and take advantage of the odds.

[Laokin]

Khavi Vetali, on 22 November 2012 - 08:47 PM, said:

Good analysis, and it does make for a game less based on random chance, but the above is incorrect. Currently CASE does not shield adjacent internals from random crits. CASE prevents the damage from exploding ammo (and gauss rifles) from transferring to an adjacent section of your mech. It basically funnels the explosion out the back of your mech instead of being contained within. Also, you only ever need one CASE per section, not multiple CASE.

Edit: Question, in your above system, what controls which internal items are taking damage, or as armor is reduced and damage is bleeding through to those internals they are all taking the same amount of damage at the same rate?

I am aware you only ever need one case per section -- I don't like that. The tooltip from the case makes it sound like it's per munition slotted, and there would be more depth in builds if that were the case IMO.


As for your question, there's actually a bunch of ways you can handle this.

Obviously the items that take up more crit slots are bigger, and since they are bigger probably have more life on a per HP base, so you could damage all internals with the bleed damage, but make the sliding percentage bigger by the amount of crit slots it takes up, simulating the smaller chance to damage tiny things inside the specified section.

A quick example is, Gauss Rifle, Heat Sink, in torso.

Gauss Rifle 7 slots, heat sink takes 1 slot.


Armor is at 100%, lets say it mitigates 95% damage as a base. You can deduct the amount of mitigation by crit slots the internal occupies.

So 95% is the base, but the Rifle takes 7 slots, so we can deduct 7% off 95% to the gauss rifle, so the rifle would have 88% mitigation, while anything that takes 1 crit slot uses the mitigation base of 95%.

As you drop armor, the base mitigation changes, but the deductions stay the same.

Obviously the proportions need to make sense to the amount of damage coming in vs the amount of HP the internals have specifically, i.e. It may not actually be balanced to deduct per crit clot occupied, in practice it might have to be more or less, so it could be half a % for each crit slot, so 7 slots would then be 3.5%.

Obviously this needs to be mathematically balanced based upon weapon damage in, how much your armor is going to mitigate at base, and how much HP the actual internal has.

Internal HP values might have to be adjusted.... and like I said all balanced in proportion, but this was just an example of how you could do the same thing without RNG.

You can then calculate factors like, shot in the arm? Weapon doors open, armor mitigation is halved.

Then you score a critical hit based on skill instead of RNG.

Scenario, Cat opens weapon doors, shoots, gets into a sticky situations needs to bail, but forgot to close his weapon doors [I literally do this all the time too, I probably shouldn't admit that] you take note and are able to perfectly line up a shot to the open weapon door scoring 50% bonus damage to the internals of that arm.

[Brilig]

Really appreciate the feedback. Thanks Dev team!

[Laokin]

Valore, on 22 November 2012 - 08:54 PM, said:

The bug may not be random, but its something you as the sniper have no control over. So it might as well be, right?



Someone puts a round into your knee actuator, there is no chance you'll know exactly what kind of deflection it'll take. It could bounce off and do next to no damage, or it could jam right at a joint which makes the entire leg seize up.

Like I said, I agree that penalising people for some things is too much. But as far as crits go, I think that's acceptable. You hit someone, there's no chance you took into consideration every factor like how it will deflect, how he's turning or juking at the moment, etc.

As for the tournament, if one side is completely outplayed, then you should be 4 on 1 and flatten him. So I don't agree with your analogy there either. If it falls to a lucky crit to win, then it was a close fought match in the first place, so tough luck for the runners up, but that's life.

No, not at all. You have no control over any mech on the enemy team, that's akin to saying his buddy stepped in the way.

When they add knock downs back in, the same thing could happen. I could line up my shot, dude could get knocked down and I missed.

Neither of those are random dice rolls. When I miss, I know WHY I missed. Someone who witnessed the sniper shot because the dude bent over to pick up his keys can say "Wow, dropping my keys saved my life" the sniper could say "Damn why'd he have to drop his keys"

In MWO it's like "Did I just crit?" or "How the hell did I die?"

Neither one of them are clear, because nothing actually happened -- some algorithm based on seeding decided your fate to no announcement any of the players.

Quote

so tough luck for the runners up, but that's life.

No, that's not life. I don't lose a basketball game because a random number generator decided I'm going to miss the winning shot. I missed it -- ON MY OWN MERIT.

Period.

Outplayed doesn't mean you beat someone down. In a fair game, the team that wins, out played the other team, ya know -- cuz they won. Simple.

If it comes down to the wire, even without criticals, the same scenario could happen -- don't you see that? It just would be based on the merits of the players instead of some random act of the computer god guiding your to victory. It's not your skill when you win by crit in an underdog situation -- it's luck.

Again, Wayne Gretsky didn't become a legend because he had good favor, he became a legend because of his own skill. If you weren't better the Wayne, you couldn't beat him under ANY circumstance. That's a fair game.

Crits add nothing to the game. An underdog can still win by being clutch. Go watch some counter strike matches -- tell me how many times it's 5 against 1, and the one guy has 22 life left and no armor and wins despite being outnumbered, out gunned, all odds against him, because he made smart decisions.

It happens more than you think, all without "Critical Hits" being rolled by a RNG.

Critical hits don't add anything to the game but they do make the game unpredictable for the wrong reasons.

If a player DID something unpredictable, he's legged, uses his jump jets to hover in the blind spot of the gausscat, lands and puts fatal damage on it's head and wins, that's awesome , if the player gets lucky unpredictably because the devs put in a random number generator, that's not awesome -- that's lame.

I shouldn't even have to explain how silly that is, it would take you losing $8,000 in a tournament due to a foul critical hit before you realized the totality of how stupid it is.

Edited by Laokin, 22 November 2012 - 09:29 PM.

[Orzorn]

Proper use of mechlab allows you to reduce or even remove such issues. In some of my Hunchback builds, I will move my ammunition to my (well armored) legs. People are so focused on destroying my torso that my ammunition has essentially zero chance to ever be crit and explode. I minimize the chance through intelligent designs. That IS skill at play, just in a different way.

[Valore]

Laokin, on 22 November 2012 - 09:23 PM, said:

No, not at all. You have no control over any mech on the enemy team, that's akin to saying his buddy stepped in the way.

When they add knock downs back in, the same thing could happen. I could line up my shot, dude could get knocked down and I missed.

Neither of those are random dice rolls. When I miss, I know WHY I missed. Someone who witnessed the sniper shot because the dude bent over to pick up his keys can say "Wow, dropping my keys saved my life" the sniper could say "Damn why'd he have to drop his keys"

In MWO it's like "Did I just crit?" or "How the hell did I die?"

Neither one of them are clear, because nothing actually happened -- some algorithm based on seeding decided your fate to no announcement any of the players.



No, that's not life. I don't lose a basketball game because a random number generator decided I'm going to miss the winning shot. I missed it -- ON MY OWN MERIT.

Period.

Outplayed doesn't mean you beat someone down. In a fair game, the team that wins, out played the other team, ya know -- cuz they won. Simple.

If it comes down to the wire, even without criticals, the same scenario could happen -- don't you see that? It just would be based on the merits of the players instead of some random act of the computer god guiding your to victory. It's not your skill when you win by crit in an underdog situation -- it's luck.

Again, Wayne Gretsky didn't become a legend because he had good favor, he became a legend because of his own skill. If you weren't better the Wayne, you couldn't beat him under ANY circumstance. That's a fair game.

So in other words, if they put in a flashing explanation saying 'ENEMY SHOT BOUNCED AWKWARDLY OFF INTERNAL STRUCTURE AND HAS PENETRATED YOUR GAUSS RIFLE CAUSING CRITICAL EXPLOSION' when you you get hit on internals with a crit, you'd be more okay with that?

[Khavi Vetali]

Laokin, on 22 November 2012 - 09:15 PM, said:

As for your question, there's actually a bunch of ways you can handle this.

Obviously the items that take up more crit slots...(truncated)

I like the proposition, and it makes sense. Thanks for devoting the time to it

Unfortunately, it changes so much of the current systems that it would likely never be implemented, and having played with the current system since it was introduced in closed beta I do not believe that it causes the competitiveness issues that have been raised.

That said, PM your posts to a Dev, have 'em read. Since they have been active in this thread they perhaps have already taken note or will.

[Fooooo]

Valore, on 22 November 2012 - 09:27 PM, said:

So in other words, if they put in a flashing explanation saying 'ENEMY SHOT BOUNCED AWKWARDLY OFF INTERNAL STRUCTURE AND HAS PENETRATED YOUR GAUSS RIFLE CAUSING CRITICAL EXPLOSION' when you you get hit on internals with a crit, you'd be more okay with that?

It would be better, as people would know wtf happened.

However it doesn't fix the problem, which is the whole RNG part. To me its not very drastic atm as you do have to get rid of the armor first, but it can and does lead to situations where the better player or team ends up losing because of lucky crits from the other team.

Case in point. 1 mech left on either side. No external armor left on either mech, only internal armor is left.

Both using a gauss rifle. 1 guy is a much better shot and player and gets 3 hits in to the other guys 1, its looking like the better shot is going to win...........until he gets his 3rd hit in (all shots did not crit so he did 45dmg all up)

On the 3rd hit the other guy hits with his 1 shot out of 3 and gets lucky with a crit and does x3 dmg to the other guys gauss (it could be x2 or x1 it wouldn't really matter as the hp is so low) blowing it up and the guys torso.......the better shot now has no gauss and ends up losing...or the gauss explosion killed him outright.......

It doesn't have to be a gauss in this situation it could be a ML, just the gauss is the extreme somewhat so shows it much easier.......

[Jman5]

Very informative. Thanks for the responses guys. It is nice to know that the DHS stuff was not an error on your end but an intentional design decision.

Edited by Jman5, 22 November 2012 - 09:53 PM.

[Orzorn]

Its important to remember that when *******' Betty is added (apparently some time soon), she will likely tell you of critical hits against your mech.