48 replies to this topic

[renegade mitchell]

Mister Blastman, on 24 May 2012 - 04:33 PM, said:

I never saw this, ever... and I had hundreds of hours into MW 4 and not to brag, was at the very top of the MW 4 stats page, i.e. #1 for some time (the stats for the whole community). There was no lag shooting.

If you had lag shooting, your internet connection was terrible or you lived on Pluto.

QFT!

[Mister Blastman]

I don't recall that happening much at all and if it did, it was very rare.

LAG shooting is completely different than LEAD shooting. If you've been playing Mechwarrior as long as I have (all the way back to Mechwarrior 2 on Kali or MW 2 Mercs on Mercnet PPP), you'll know this difference. For those that don't, I'll explain:

LAG shooting is compensation for network code/ping etc. Lag shooting involves shooting into the air where you think your target will be (or should be) at or nearly into the future from now. When you fire a shot while lag shooting, you NEVER see it hit. It passes by the target in thin air and you see it continue on down the battlefield. That is, on your end of the connection. On the other players end of the connection, the shot hits them as you are being predictive not only of where their mech will move, but where it is/was in spacetime that you can't realize due to Peer to Peer netcode being bogged down by pings and data throughput. Lag shooting was especially pronounced against people across the globe--i.e. in Australia. There were times in MW 2 online back in 1996 where I swear they had nearly a 1000 ms ping. It'd take a LOOOOONG time to blow them up. Remember, prior to Mechwarrior 4, all netcode was Peer 2 Peer. Mechwarrior 3 had notorious lag shooting that could be exploited moreso than Mechwarrior 2. It in ways was a step backwards but from what I can tell, was not because of the netcode but because of small mechs being able to move sooooo fast and accelerate/speed up with the reverse key (I can go into depth if needed on how it was done to make your "hole" in spacetime bigger than it would have been otherwise). This was bad despite lasers being instant hit. You had to find that "sliver" in front of you the mech was really in but you couldn't see it.

Lag shooting I guess, could be said required using the "force" to figure out where people were. Some of us became extremely good at it.

LEAD shooting is different and isn't an alien concept, unlike lag shooting. Lead shooting is simple. You take a projectile/object/bolt under accelerative force that has to traverse x distance in y time and compensate for "o" object that is moving parallel/perpendicular to your shot and adjust that lead visually so your shot makes contact visually with the target you are aiming at. Think... World War 2 aircraft firing Browning 50's at some nasty BF 109 Nazi fighterplane and you aim ahead of their path of travel. It is intuitive. It is in mechwarrior terms, leading the gauss gun or PPCs in MW 4 to hit that pesky raven moving around you.

Two completely different things. Mechwarrior 4 had LEAD shooting but as far as I remember, no lag shooting. I used all weapons except missiles. Lasers, PPCs, Gauss, ACs, LBXs etc etc etc. I used them all.

[Gremlich Johns]

Gabriyel, on 24 May 2012 - 04:54 PM, said:

Recoil goes both ways, you have ammo issues and if the devs make the mechs according to spec - ammo will be an issue in a fight.

Also, let's take an Archer for example or Catapult since that's in the game. If it's running at max speed and fires off several flights of LRMs, that has 'recoil' of it's own slowing the mech down 10 kph or so. Same with larger ballistic weapons and depends on the Myomer muscle/strength/weight of the mech...

Not so much, I have fired the maingun on tanks many times with no noticable slowing down. The recoil system takes care of that. So, if the weapons are in the arms, the majority of the recoil will be "felt" there, with some translating to the torso. Torso weapons with recoil will push the torso around the center some but will have little effect on the legs. Missiles have only a portion of the recoil chemically propelled projectiles possess. Gauss projectiles have some recoil as well, but again, not as much as a chemically propelled munition (close, but not the same). Newton's Law is in effect. There was a thread in MWLL on this topic.

[Roland]

Blastman,
We are using the same definitions then regarding lag shooting... Talking about needing to compensate for network lag. Some previous posters appeared to be defining lag shooting to mean what you are calling "lead shooting". That is, needing to compensate for a weapon's travel time, target velocity, etc.

MW4 definitely had travel time weapons, that were not instant hit. As pointed out, folks like MekTek modified the travel time of the weapons later in MW4's life cycle to speed up some of the travel time weapons in an attempt to make them more competitive. To folks who thought all the weapons were instant hit (not you), I'm not sure what to tell them.

Regarding lag shooting, unless you always played on a LAN, network latency had a non-trivial impact on the game. The major reason for this, I believe, was that prior to PR1, hit detection was all done clientside. If you saw a hit on your screen, then it was a hit on the server, and the damage got propagated to the target (regardless of whether or not THEY saw the hit).

However, PR1 moved the hit detection off of the client and onto the server, in an attempt to combat certain hacks that had emerged. However, when they did this, what you ended up having was a game whose netcode wasn't really designed for the task at hand.

This isn't really an opinion. This is simply a statement of fact. If you would like proof, please go to MW4's original site (which I am, frankly, amazed is still served up my Microsoft). Now, bear in mind that at the end of Vengeance's lifecyle, you can't get to the original PR1 patch. However, what you can see from that link is the readme file for the 3rd patch release for vengeance. In those notes you see:

Quote

The patches fix several instances of a bug that caused certain ’Mechs using Jump Jets to be significantly more difficult to hit than other ’Mechs.
The patches fix a bug that sometimes resulted in damage not being recorded correctly in multiplayer games. This behavior still appears occasionally as the result of games with high server lag, but the patches should reduce the instances of the problem significantly.

The reality is, they were never able to fully fix the bug, due to inherent deficiencies in the netcode that was designed for clientside hit detection.

Oh, also, our unit actually worked with the devs directly to help identify the bugs with damage being dropped.

At this point though, if we're still in disagreement, we'll just have to agree to disagree. It's no big deal anyhow, whether or not there was lag in a game over a decade old at this point.

[Wildkarrde]

It's just another dynamic/ tactic to the game. It is not some uber undefeatable strategy or force. To take out knocking/ recoil would do more harm than good, IMO. Learning how to deal with knock/ recoil is what separates your hypothetical "equal" mech pilots. The one that learns how to deal with/ counter it and win IS the better pilot.
Many of my mech configs had weapons chained just so I could continually knock an enemy around and to deny them an opportunity to strike back.
Also, travel time weapons were used and nearly perfected for practical use by many teams. My long stint with Lyran Alliance taught me how to effectively lead a target with light gauss and subsequently other travel time weapons. Ending my tour of MW4 with GDL/ HRR honed my skills further and taught me how to operate as ONE team. And since we were LA's house mercs it was like I never really left LA. GDL/ HRR won back some planets and fought some battles that LA had left us with less than an appealing mech selection. Those battles were the most fun and it really raked in the C-bills.

Edited by Wildkarrde, 07 June 2012 - 09:56 PM.

[Wildkarrde]

HRR Insanity, on 24 May 2012 - 09:37 AM, said:

/snickers/ We're all here. It's only a matter of time now.

{HRR} Insanity

/waves/ The storm is coming.

Edited by Wildkarrde, 07 June 2012 - 10:02 PM.

[Revage]

Recoil is an interesting dynamic in the more modern Mechwarrior games, in spite of the fact that some energy weapons are now somewhat less dominant. A dodo bird was also an interesting example of diversity, but time proved it inferior as well. Like lasers, maybe they'll just not be seen anymore. Not a flaw in nature, just a flaw in one aspect of it that needed weeded out.

[Strisk]

Another reason people have gravitated towards larger weapons, in my opinion, is the reduction of lag in the gaming environment.

During league play in MW2:Mercs you could declare someone too laggy if they were more than 1000ms ping. 600-800ms was common, and below 500ms was really good. In this game, as in MW3 you had to "lag shoot" by leading your target based on the amount of lag that existed between you and them. If you guessed with a large weapon and missed that was a costly thing, so smaller weapons were much more common. MW3 had a lot of the same issues, but the internet was getting faster, and many people were getting faster connections and modems, and lag leading dropped somewhat. MW4 eliminated lag shooting completely.

While "rocking" has certainly made the game different, and caused missed shots (as well as many complaints), I think that it isn't the only reason for the migration of weaponry that we've seen over the years.

PGI seems to be doing a good job at making this game diverse, and I think they'll be able to address this issue. One of the good things about F2P (and one of the bad things?) is that the devs are constantly tweaking the game.

[Rodney28021]

i would like to see some recoil effects in the firing of Balistics, missiles, PPC, the bigger the weapon the more the recoil, the effect should be shown by making your targeting difficult. For instance, firing a AC/20 and lasers at same time causes your lasers to go wide or out of focus.

I would like to see Impact effects of being hit by high damage weapon could cause you to fall down or miss your shots at that instant. For instance, being hit with a gauss rifle round would shake you up, maybe trip you.

I would like to see some flight time effect and ballistic curve effects in all gun and missile weapons. Gauss rifle would be the exception because of the ultra high speed of the round.

Lasers would have no recoil on firing but be affected by Impact and Recoil of other weapons at time of firing. Lasers would have straight path and zero time of flight but should have LOS effects like those trees, smoke that you are firing lasers through would reduce damage by a fraction.

PPC beams should have a problem with high magnetic and gravity environments over long distances. But not like Ghostbusters.

I would like to see your movement have major effect on your targeting, especially Jumping movements and falling. So if you ran then jumped and turned your torso then your targeting should be off greatly.

This would make for some better balancing of designs and tactics that had caused many problems in earlier Mechwarrior video games.

Edited by Rodney28021, 08 June 2012 - 11:04 AM.