425 replies to this topic

[Sifright]

Zwietracht, on 04 December 2012 - 03:10 AM, said:

Frankly speaking im just amused by this forum cause opinions change actually on a hourly Basis. Scats are great, no it sucks... Lrm are op, lrm are useless... Trial mechs suck.. and now i just imagine the response of a Community with 500 active posting gyus with 750 opinions. (Just a estimation to make ms Statement clear)..

hahahaha, you realize those 'opinions' are different this week from last week because those weapons where changed and behave radically differently? Right?

What do you mean No you didn't know that?

Surely you wouldn't be posting such drivel if you didn't know what you were talking about.

Malek Deneith, on 04 December 2012 - 03:21 AM, said:

Sadly my machine turned out to be too weak to run MWO, so I lack first hand experience with the game, but going by my experience with TT Battletech as well as older Mechwarrior games my guess would be the issue is less with Trial mechs and more with... customs.

Why?

Well, trial mechs are, as far as I understood, as faithful to TT loadouts as the game allows, yes? Here's the thing - stock mech loadouts are flawed, all of them. And intentionally so. They're made flawed so that players have to work around the flaws, learn to ride the heat curve, etc, rather than have perfectly min/maxed weapons of doom alpha strike at each other until one of them falls. It makes the game more interesting, and that was the goal. The result of this is that the moment one side makes a custom mech the other instantly is at disadvantage - even a total noob can customize a mech better than stock loadouts, as long as he has at least basic grasp of the game rules. This is true in tabletop, this was true in old MW games, Mechcommander games, and is most likely true in MWO as well.

I have no illusions so I'm not going to suggest locking away option to customize, since there's no way that is going to fly. About the only solution here I see either to allow customizing Trial mechs or alternatively make two separate game modes - one where only trials and un-touched stock mechs can fight, and other where customs fight customs only.

The mechs are true to table top.

The in game rules on heat and such aren't though.

Stock mechs are at least viable in table top.

Stock mechs in mwo are nice turkey that you shoot the legs out from under to take their delicious xl engine salvage.

[Slanski]

There are 3 weapon systems in this game which dominate all others for DPS/ton and HPS/ton:

1. Gauss Rifle
2. Medium Laser
3. UAC5

You can win with missiles and other weapons, but if you come around a corner and cannot retreat, I will destroy you with these systems in a stand up fight.

All the so called viability of PPCs/ER weapons relies on being in a fight you can retreat from and contribute low DPS, not being where it counts. Large and medium lasers are being used to tremendous effects, but literally require the maximum heat sinks installable on the chassis and they would be better if you could drop weapon tonnage and get more heat sinks.

Trial mechs universally carry 2 weapon systems too much and 10 heat sinks too few.

[Roadbuster]

Quote

So once we get the matchmaker going where we get brand new players are being matched up against other brand new players they’re gonna do fine.

Don't expect a stock mech to keep up with a customized variant using upgrades and efficiencies.
If they are matched against other stock mechs it will be fine.

[xxx WreckinBallRaj xxx]

They also overheat the instant their weapons are used. The first thing you're going to do to any bought Mech is add more cooling or buy Double Heat Sinks and Endo Steel to turn crit slots into more cooling. With such an issue, Trials can't compete. Piranha's first solution was to just make them reward you more than regular Mechs. Their next solution will be to separate matchmaking in some way. But these are just dance around's of the problem itself. They're still going to suck until you change the builds or edit heat values.

[Sifright]

Slanski, on 04 December 2012 - 03:24 AM, said:

There are 3 weapon systems in this game which dominate all others for DPS/ton and HPS/ton:

1. Gauss Rifle
2. Medium Laser
3. UAC5

You can win with missiles and other weapons, but if you come around a corner and cannot retreat, I will destroy you with these systems in a stand up fight.

All the so called viability of PPCs/ER weapons relies on being in a fight you can retreat from and contribute low DPS, not being where it counts. Large and medium lasers are being used to tremendous effects, but literally require the maximum heat sinks installable on the chassis and they would be better if you could drop weapon tonnage and get more heat sinks.

Trial mechs universally carry 2 weapon systems too much and 10 heat sinks too few.

Normal SRM6's and 4's are pretty nasty weapons in a brawl as well so add those two systems in.

everything else you said is spot on.

[MustrumRidcully]

Stone Profit, on 04 December 2012 - 02:49 AM, said:

Yes yes, my opinikn differs so I must be bad at the game. Yawn. Children. And adult s who act like them. No longer funny.

Well, you seemed to have made a similar assumptions.

Meh. Why do I even bother?

[MustrumRidcully]

Malek Deneith, on 04 December 2012 - 03:21 AM, said:

Sadly my machine turned out to be too weak to run MWO, so I lack first hand experience with the game, but going by my experience with TT Battletech as well as older Mechwarrior games my guess would be the issue is less with Trial mechs and more with... customs.

If you could play the game, you may n otice there are some differences between MWO and other computer games. It is true that not all stock mechs are really fine-tuned, perfect builds. But I think quite a few of them are pretty well and stand up well against custom mechs.

For example, look at the AWS-8Q. It has 28 heat shinks and fields 3 PPCs and a Small Laser. What would you optimize?
Would one of your optimization steps be: Rip out one PPC and install 7 additional heat sinks?

That's a reasonable optimization step in MW:O, but in the table top, it would be a "WTF are you doing?" moment.

[Ikarti Danaro]

They're terrible.

[Thorn Hallis]

Right now trial 'Mechs achive three things for new players in my eyes:

- new players get interested in the game / a certain chassis and contniues to grind to get a customizable version of it or another fully customizable 'Mech
- new players get interested in the game / a certain chassis but don't wont to grind and take the short road by buying MC for a fully customizable 'Mech
- new players get discouraged and leave MWO

Unless we get to see actual numbers one can only guess which of those three things happens the most. But maybe the "trial 'Mechs are good"-stance of PGi is not because they think that trial 'Mechs are nearly on the same level as customized 'Mechs, but because the trial 'Mechs achive their intended goal?

[BigJim]

Thorn Hallis, on 04 December 2012 - 03:53 AM, said:

But maybe the "trial 'Mechs are good"-stance of PGi is not because they think that trial 'Mechs are nearly on the same level as customized 'Mechs, but because the trial 'Mechs achive their intended goal?

That's what I'd think; As long as you're not getting WTFpwned by some ninja lolback or supa-speeeed Centy they're fun builds, that make you think, manoeuvre, shoot, etc..

But they're not on the same competitive level as fully-pimped custom builds, and imho, they shouldn't be.
What they should be, is matched-off against other stock builds.


*EDIT*
..And that leads me to an interesting thought; I would happily see the trial mechs increased to say, 8x instead of 4x, but there be a seperate MM-queue for stock builds.
Hell, call it the stock-league if you like; I'd happily play that game as well as the fuly-imped-custom matches we mainly run now.

If trial mechs had a separate queue right now with no changes, it would soon get pretty boring, as there's only 4x to choose from; You'd only ever see one type of Light, Medium, Heavy, etc..
But double that, and you could easily make an excellent "extra" gametype that would be ideal for beginners to get into.

Sure, you'd still lose to very experienced players in stock mechs, but that's natural.
What you wouldn't get, is pwned by some custom mech that appears to have super-powers as compared to your own machine.

Edited by BigJim, 04 December 2012 - 04:05 AM.

[John Norad]

BigJim, on 04 December 2012 - 03:10 AM, said:

Stock mechs are truer to Tabletop principals than anything you, or anyone else on this forum could possibly think of.

This is so not true.
First, you don't even know what I can think of. Rest assured, it's quite a lot.
Second, stock mechs in MWO are not true to TT principals.
In the TT a heavy mech with 10SHS doesn't have any problems whatsoever firing 2 measly medium lasers every round. In MWO? "Oh hi Dragon! Y u so hot?"
In the TT a Stalker has to choose between his short rage and his long range weaponry, both are not a problem. In MWO both sets will make it shut down very fast.

In MWO piloting some of the stock mechs catches a bit of the feel you get when reading the books. I'll give you that. But I think it's still far from perfect.

[Steinar Bergstol]

Balance for stock mechs really has been a problem in every MW game so far, and in my opinion customization is to blame. The games are balanced (or at least an attempt to balance is made) according to what's possible in customization to begin with, and I feel this is the wrong approach to take if you want to make stocks viable next to customs. Balance should be achieved (as much as balance is possible in the first place) by making the average stock mech a viable machine. At this point, and _not_ before, one could think about adding the ability to customize and, more importantly, balance customization in comparison to the existing canon stock designs so that custom mechs aren't easily far better (or far worse) than stocks. Trying to balance everything around customization has always resulted in stocks being for the most part sub-par compared to customs.

The other option, since rebalancing the entire game to such a drastic degree at this point is unrealistic, is to add a stock only gamemode so people could run stock mechs against stock mechs without having to consider "being a hindrance to their team" because they don't want to play boring munchmechs. Some stocks will still be better than others (the Gunslinger with gauss in both arms comes to mind, when/if it arrives), but by and large a stock is still closer in balance to any other stock than a hyperoptimized custom job.

[Steinar Bergstol]

John Norad, on 04 December 2012 - 04:02 AM, said:

This is so not true.
First, you don't even know what I can think of. Rest assured, it's quite a lot.
Second, stock mechs in MWO are not true to TT principals.
In the TT a heavy mech with 10SHS doesn't have any problems whatsoever firing 2 measly medium lasers every round. In MWO? "Oh hi Dragon! Y u so hot?"
In the TT a Stalker has to choose between his short rage and his long range weaponry, both are not a problem. In MWO both sets will make it shut down very fast.

In MWO piloting some of the stock mechs catches a bit of the feel you get when reading the books. I'll give you that. But I think it's still far from perfect.

Well, it is true... in a sense. Sort of. Kinda. If you don't fire as fast as your firerate allows but restrict yourself to, say, 10 seconds between shots the way it is in table top then the heatproblems aren't as bad as they seem. Of course, armor is still way higher and weapons like AC20s and PPCs aren't near as scary as on tabletop, but it is closer at least. The heatproblems do seem closer to the way mechcombat is described in the novels than TT, you're right about that. From the novels you get the feeling firing a single PPC in a Marauder turns your cockpit into an oven, allowing you to fry your bacon and eggs for breakfast on your control console.

I'm not saying this is a good thing or a perfect solution, but then again the game is pretty much balanced around customization, and not around stocks the way I would have preferred it.

Edited by Steinar Bergstol, 04 December 2012 - 04:15 AM.

[BigJim]

John Norad, on 04 December 2012 - 04:02 AM, said:

This is so not true.
First, you don't even know what I can think of. Rest assured, it's quite a lot.

Good to see that we haven't all lost our sense of imagination.

Quote

Second, stock mechs in MWO are not true to TT principals.

Quote

In MWO piloting some of the stock mechs catches a bit of the feel you get when reading the books. I'll give you that. But I think it's still far from perfect.

You seem to disagree, and then agree with me at the same time..?

I don't say this to be argumentative (well, within the bounds of my not agreeing), but check this out;



Bottom-right; Heat scale and effects. Look how little heat it takes to really screw up your mech.

Short version is that heat is harsh.
Right now with our custom mechs we mitigate heat so well that it's barely even a consideration.

Now I admit that having all kinds of screwy things happen when your heat gets to 5% or whatever would be annoying in a real-time game, people would get frustrated if their shots went wild of the crosshair just because they'd fired 2x Med Lasers a minute ago, or if they couldn't take cover from LRMs because their movement speed was gimped due to having a few nuggets of heat on the heat-bar.

So with those consideration in mind, how do we make heat a real, valid issue to deal with? How do we introduce real jeopardy?
That's why I say it adheres to TT principals, and not that it's a 100% literal translation

Like so many things from TT, a 100% translation wouldn't work well in a real-time first person game, but the current heat system, and how stock mechs respond is about as close as you can get I think without making the game a total frustration-fest.


I spent last night running trials, so I know they can be used without blowing up, or killing yourself (triple ERPPC rawrsome) and it's a fun mech-game, but when matched against ****-mechs, it's - well, it's no match.


So I come back to my basic premise, that the heat system per-se isn't the problem, the problem lies with the mix of stock and fully-pimped mechs.

Edited by BigJim, 04 December 2012 - 04:24 AM.

[Joseph Mallan]

Franchi, on 03 December 2012 - 06:04 PM, said:

Oh i did simply don't care. Putting a new pilot in the current trial jenner or the 9m should be considered abuse.

Yet we have numerous posters in this thread saying that both are fine.

Putting a new Pilot in a Jenner is a bad idea period. But the 9M is proof that the heat system is in fact quite broken. One or two Alphas with 3 ER PPCs should leave a 9M warm(34% of maximum shut down heat Max) not shut down! This is the perfect example the DEVs needed to prove if the heat system, as is, works or not. And as a 27 year vet of this Universe, this IS broken. Sinks need to vent every 3.5-4.0 seconds to be working as intended by Canon. Mechs did not Alpha once and shut down (with only a few exceptions) in the novels, not even the 8Q. The Awesome is supposed to be a deadly assault Mech as it is it's basically a dead assault Mech.

Quote

Short version is that heat is harsh.

Yes it is harsh, But the Timber Wolf you referenced is able to fire both it's ER large lasers and ONE LRM20 continuously without worry of shutdown as it is 4 points of heat UNDER the max dissipation rate of the build. Heat in the MMO is broken.

Edited by Joseph Mallan, 04 December 2012 - 04:47 AM.

[wanderer]

ShadowDarter, on 04 December 2012 - 02:08 AM, said:

Sorry, reading anything from the goons/lowtax makes me instantly think its fake or biased in multiple ways.

That's a damn shame, as frankly, the Goons know their s*** on EVE. Just because they're TROLOLOLOLO doesn't mean they don't have a grasp on how things work- quite the opposite, as that's what it takes to -break- the system at times.

And Trial Mechs are a lousy training method for new players. Period. We'd do a thousand times better putting 3025-era tech "trainers" in vs. the near-constant flow of severely handicapped (vs. custom) designs we see today in the Trial queue. Not that I don't like having Trials. They're a good idea. But they're not designed to give new players a solid grounding in how MWO works, and that's what we need- variants that aren't designed to be superperfectextreme but don't pummel the newbie into the ground while "teaching" them how to shut down and die as fast as possible. They shouldn't be customizeable, but they SHOULD be built around teaching people how things work without leaving them flailing around.

It also doesn't teach them diddly about one of THE most important skills in MWO, learning how to tweak your 'Mech- but that's a different thing entirely. There are times I'd like to take whoever's decided the current new player system into a woodshed and deliver some corrective criticism with an ax handle (to whatever computer they came up with this pile of fail on).

The good news is it'd be rather easy to produce trainer variants for use by new players using existing chassis. Ravens, Centurions, and Dragons don't make bad mixes of weapon choices and allow for an electronics trainer (in the case of the Raven), while an assault trainer is probably going to be tougher, as the only real "mixed" hardpoint assaults are Atlai. But it's certainly doable.

[Sifright]

Goon swarm for life bro.

XOXOXOXOXO

[MustrumRidcully]

Steinar Bergstol, on 04 December 2012 - 04:14 AM, said:

Well, it is true... in a sense. Sort of. Kinda. If you don't fire as fast as your firerate allows but restrict yourself to, say, 10 seconds between shots the way it is in table top then the heatproblems aren't as bad as they seem.

If you limit yourself to 10 seconds between shots, the situation would be pretty much like in the table top.

But the problem is - that isn't a good strategy. If you fire only every 10 seconds, you deliver less damage than an enemy that doesn't restrict himself like that. Maybe he overheats and you don't - but if you die before he overheats, and you can't kill him because you deal too little damage, you're not doing very well, are you?

The problem is that you have always compare yourself to the alternatives. There are several:
1) Someone could have made a mech that is build to fire his weapons as often as he can for an extended period of time.
2) Not all weapon and build s- even without customziation - are equally effected.

A TL;DR: example of extremes: 1 Gauss Rifle firing twice in 10 seconds costs you 1 heat and 1 extra bullet. 1 PPC firing twice in 10 second costs you 10 heat. See the problem? If not, there is a longer explanation with a less extreme example.


But if you like a less extreme example:
For example, take the AC/10 vs a PPC. Let's say you have one mech with 10 heat sinks and 2 AC/10s, and one mech with 2 PPCs with 20 heat sinks. Both get 10 "free" engine heat sinks.
The AC/10 user invests 24 tons in his weapon, and, say, 6 tons in ammo, for a total of 30 tons.
The PPC user invests 14 tons in his weapons, and 10 tons in additional heat sinks, for a total of 24 tons.
So in the table top, one can argue that the AC/10 user is disadvantaged.

But let's move to MW:O. Both weapons can fire more than once in 10 seconds. Let's say you fire both twice in 10 seconds (both can be fired more often, but limit ourselves to this for simplicity's sake.)

Now the AC/10 user produces 6 heat per 10 seconds (or 0.6 heat per second) that he can't compensate. The PPC user produces 20 heat per 10 seconds (or 2 heat per second) that he can't compensate.
The AC/10 user has a heat capacity of 40 in MW:O, and so he'll last about 65 seconds before overheating.
The PPC user has a heat capacity of 50 in MW:O, and so he'll ast about 25 seconds before overheating.

If both were trying to compensate the extra heat, the AC/10 would need 6 extra standard heat sinks. That brings the AC/10 user to a config of 36 tons. The PPC user needs 20 extra heat sinks, bringing him to 44 tons.

With real Double Heat Sinks, neither build would need a change at all. (Who would have thought? Doubling your heat sink strength and doubling your rate of fire compensates itself nicely!) With MW:O weirdo DHS, the PPC user would need about 5 tons in extra DHS.

Maybe the last thing is why they picked their current implementation? But this is the math for 2 PPCs vs 2 AC/10s - the Triple AC/10 / Triple PPC scenario will change this again. The Triple AC/10 still doesn't need extra DHS, but the PPC now needs 28 DHS...

[Kaijin]

Trial (stock) mechs must be optimized for MWO, or optimization must be limited. It's very simple.

[Joseph Mallan]

Kaijin, on 04 December 2012 - 04:47 AM, said:

Trial (stock) mechs must be optimized for MWO, or optimization must be limited. It's very simple.

No. Heat needs to be fixed. That is the fix that will make the trial Mechs usable v our customs. An Awesome 9M Should run the whole game without shut down by cycling it's ERPPCs in a 3 and 2 cycle. It will be warm, but it will stay at a constant level of heat.