Insidious Johnson, on 10 May 2012 - 04:48 PM, said:
If by tactical play you mean two teams parked 900m from each other jump sniping from cover in 3rd person view, then yes, crippled it will be. Other than that, it opens up a whole realm of tactics which you have not seen, nor which have yet occurred to you. That does not mean they are not readily apparent to others nor that they lack tactical value to all others besides yourself. The pace of combat itself is not a determining factor as to the tactical content contained therein.
Insidious, I don't recognise your handle, but by your unit history I would have pegged you as an ex-NR league guy. I'm surprised to hear someone with that background make an argument based on 3pv.
Yoseful Mallad, on 10 May 2012 - 04:58 PM, said:
ok... not arguing or disrespecting but can you then explain to me what you believe this game should be like so it becomes a tactical game? Genuinely asking...
I'll lay this out clearly, because I think there's a huge misunderstanding on one side. This will be long, but you did ask.
The price of reduced range is that it becomes easier to close into brawling range. That much is obvious. The important metric is dps versus the time taken to close. The worst-case situation for brawler versus range is when the brawler is charging blindly towards the ranged 'mech across open ground. In that situation, the long range 'mech needs to be able to inflict enough damage that the brawler will be crippled by the time it gets close. If it cannot, long range is not viable and everyone will brawl, because your test has demonstrated that range does not come out ahead even in ideal situations for that tactic. With me so far?
By reducing the maximum range, you narrow the window the ranged 'mech has available to inflict that crippling damage. It takes 30 seconds to cross from 900 to 450m, but only 20 seconds to cross from 600 to 300. To maintain the balance, you must increase the dps of the ranged 'mech so that it can continue to deliver crippling damage in a shorter window; MWO has done this, as LRMs now fire very quickly. There are hidden costs to this. The first and most obvious is that everything dies much more quickly. The game moves away from sim and towards a classical shooter, where enemies are killed in a matter of seconds rather than minutes.
Second and less obvious is the cost to cover and manouvre-based play. In simplest terms, you need a certain window of grace in which to expose, fire, retreat, reposition and fire again. Here is where everyone who played MW4 casually and/or briefly will write me off as a poptart and ignore everything else I have to say. I challenge you to keep reading and entertain the suggestion that what you saw in 3pv respawn pub matches was not what the game was meant to be.
People who never played MW in organised FFP/NR tend to deride cover based play as a dumbing-down of the game. The fact was that for players who knew what they were doing, the herp-derp forward-reverse or stand-still-and-jump-up-and-down move that permeated pub servers was actually a death sentence, because you became an incredibly easy target for a competent team able to predict you while flanking your static position. In essence, the tactic that 99% of people rage about was a complete joke among good players (except in 3pv, which is irrelevant for MWO).
Real cover based play involved whole teams or subsets of teams constantly attempting to flank each other, using terrain to create and shield firing angles and searching for advantage or weakness. Longer range and slower weapon recycles meant teams were able to engage lightly, trading shots and shifting positions. If you found yourselves engaged in a poor position, retreating to a better one was sometimes viable because the enemy were far away. Harassers could work with relative confidence knowing they were difficult to catch. That space actually created a thinking man's game of the highest order.
By reducing range and increasing cycle time, you drive players towards exposure and open-plain slugfests. If a team that moves out of sight for thirty seconds to find a better angle risks cresting to find a horde of hunchbacks up in their grill, that tactical option has been removed. It is better to simply stand in the open and fire until they reach you. This is exacerbated by mechanics such as convergence, which further punish a team for moving from cover into combat.
Ironically, stupid poptart tactics are hurt less by shorter weapon ranges and higher recycle times, because they rely on a simple move that occurs as fast as their weapons recycle. They'll just come up and down a bit faster.
The real losers are players who try to use cover intelligently to create space and angles, who stay down longer than their weapon recycle because they're moving from place to place. They suffer because their guns have less idle time, so instead of giving up two shots' worth of damage to reposition, they lose four to move the same distance. There is also a much higher risk that in the time they are down and blind, their enemy will move into range and crush them. Again, it's better just to stay in the open.
I get incredibly frustrated by all these mechanics that are being introduced to combat the demon known as poptarting, when that demon was actually never a problem in the first place, and by targeting it you destroy everything that made MW the thinking man's game everyone seems to desire.
Edited by Belisarius†, 10 May 2012 - 06:35 PM.
12
) and when someone say mechwarrior we all mean on video game its little odd to think its something else.
