36 replies to this topic

[Rascal2pt0]

I purchased Ferro for my catapult, then re moved it. If I want it back I have, pay for it again, I think it even made me pay for standard armor again.

If I've already purchased it once It shouldn't just disappear.

[Spirit of the Wolf]

Yeah, I agree, kinda.
I think that you should have to pay for it in full if you don't have enough of that type of armor to fill the mech already.

I also hate that it's a standard cost for DHS across all mechs, but that Endo & Ferro scale with the weight. That's messed up.

[tegraT]

I fully agree with this.

I just came back to MWO after quite a while. I played some games (since I hadn't played much after the open beta wipe), got me a Mech, and when I tested stuff with the upgrades, I just lost quite a bit of money for no good reason. And I'm basically stuck with bad heat efficiency, since I have Double Heat Sinks and Ferro, but not enough money to change back to normal sinks. I found that somewhat amusing in a sad, sad way.

[Diego Gomez]

just get rid of dat ferro dude.... IS ferro sacks donkay bawlz

endo+dhs

but i gotta agree, if u bought that equipment, it´ll most likely not vanish into thin air... and if it does u probably should look out for a thieving As/Tech in ur crew...

Edited by Diego Gomez, 30 December 2012 - 10:04 AM.

[Volthorne]

Spirit of the Wolf, on 30 December 2012 - 07:33 AM, said:

I also hate that it's a standard cost for DHS across all mechs, but that Endo & Ferro scale with the weight. That's messed up.

All 'Mechs can equip 10+ heatsinks. Not all 'Mechs can equip 400+ armor.

[RWilliams]

I'd love to see this too. Would make experimenting with different builds easier.

[WC Angelo]

Yes, i agree with this

[Eraos]

Absolutely agreed. The "disappearing c-bills" problem has bitten me several times when I've been playing around with loadouts. Ideally the suggestion would go even further and it would be possible to complete a loadout (including changes to upgrades and/or modules and/or fittings and/or armor) before hitting the "OK, do it!" button that actually charges the money and makes things happen.

That is a farther-future suggestion, though; and in any case once you buy an upgrade for the mech, it should persist so that you can toggle back and forth between the states (DHS -> standard and back again) without massive further costs.

[Xandralkus]

Developers, this is how you game design:

One of the fundamental pillars of mechwarrior games is experimentation and creative freedom with mechs and configurations. Anything that encourages more of this is good. Anything that discourages or constrains it is bad.

EVERYTHING on the upgrade tab has to be purchased, then repurchased again if you want to revert. Everything on the upgrade tab financially restricts free & open experimentation.

Personally, I think that the upgrade tab should not exist at all. EVERYTHING in the upgrade tab should be moved to the loadout tab. Endo-steel needs to be an item that can be dragged & dropped into criticals - meaning that a 35% Endo-steel chassis should be completely possible to build. Dragging and dropping FF armor onto empty criticals should allocate points of FF armor to that body part. DHS and SHS should be usable in tandem on the same mech, just by dragging and dropping. Artemis and non-artemis ammunition and launchers should appear in the list of purchasable items, side-by-side.

Before anyone tries to justify these costs with "Upgrades involve stripping and rebuilding the entire mech"...so what? We already do that when we switch between standard and XL reactors. We already do it when we add and subtract armor. None of those operations cost C-bills if the equipment is already owned.

Remember, realism isn't in the driver's seat, or riding shotgun, or even asleep in the backseat. As soon as we started talking about stompy robots as primary combat vehicles, just about all semblance of realism got flushed down the toilet. We aren't even following the laws of thermodynamics, mass, or volume anymore. Arguing that upgrades should cost C-bills to cover labor expenses for the sake of realism is just as nonsensical as arguing that the sun ceases to exist at night.

[Savroix]

100% agree. Honestly, I'm surprised that there isn't even a warning to the player about this, or at least I didn't notice one when I did it. For those with limited funds, this is a -very- unpleasant surprise.

[Victoly]

Thank you, Xandralkus, for making me see reason. I almost supported the "Realism" argument. I totally agree. 90% of the fun of Mechwarrior has always been creativity and a vast amount of it in building and rebuilding and experimenting. Upgrades really squelch that.

FIX IT D:

[wickwire]

Agreed. Once we've bought Endo for a mech, let us switch between the two armor options (maybe for a small installation fee).

[Roughneck45]

Paying for the mechanics labor, not the parts themselves.

Thats how I look at it, anyway.

[Zypher]

Roughneck45, on 31 December 2012 - 06:51 AM, said:

Paying for the mechanics labor, not the parts themselves.

Thats how I look at it, anyway.

I get it, it's logical, but it doesn't make the game any more fun. It's especially bad for more casual gamers, the costs can prohibitive to fun, this game is about customization as much as it is a mech simulator, and the current model is frustrating and misleading. You can swap other parts all day long without incurring additional costs. How come installing the old AC/20 I had in my inventory doesn't cost anything?

[MasterBLB]

The best suggestion there is the Xandralkus's one.
It'd also solve problem of crappy allocation of these dynamic struct/armor slots,it happens practically always there is one slot left in left arm.right arm and a side torso.3 slots whose could be filled by dbl heatsink for exampe.

[Xandralkus]

That which is logical and that which makes the game fun do not always align.

I have edited a few screenshots in MS paint to reflect what new UI elements might look like as a result of this change:





A: Standard Armor/FF Armor ratio bar. Adding FF armor will make more of the bar turn yellow. Once it is full, no more can be added.
B: Standard Internals/Endosteel Internals ratio bar. Adding Endosteel will make more of the bar turn yellow. Again, once it is full, no more Endosteel can be added.
C: A single item of Endosteel. Each of these consume a single critical and subtract 0.5 tons of weight. If this is removed, it goes into inventory.
D: A single item of FF armor. Each of these consumes a single critical and converts 40 points of standard armor into FF armor, reducing the weight of that 40 points of armor from 1.25 tons to 1 ton.
E: The upgrades tab no longer needs to exist
F: This indicates the total amount of FF armor present on the mech, and how many criticals are occupied. Note that this is not a per-body-part total, but instead a mech-wide total. Three tons of FF armor present means that up to 108 points of the armor are ferro-fibrous, and all other points are standard armor.
G: Endosteel, Ferro-Fibrous Armor, Standard Armor, Artemis, Heat Sinks, and Double Heat Sinks appear in the components tab of every body part on the mech.

Note that Artemis must be dragged & dropped onto a compatible missile weapon. Dragging and dropping it to an empty critical or a non-compatible missile weapon would display an error message.

Because Endosteel refunds so much more weight than FF armor does, it may also be appropriate to make equipping a body part with Endosteel suffer an additional 10% internal structural damage when hit.

Edited by Xandralkus, 01 January 2013 - 11:00 PM.

[Szaesse]

There are a certain set of rules to consider in the whole multiple combinations. Some people would actually find certain aspects of that frustrating.

1 - The chassis is the complete frame of the mech. You can't really take a car and combine a steel to a fiberglass frame. This would compromise the frame itself, making the vehicle unstable and dangerous to ride in. No machine that I am aware of has ever utilized a combination of standard and endo steel internals.
2 - Ferro armor and standard armor I don't necessarily see a problem with this. I have never personally seen this before on any machine, though that doesn't mean it wouldn't be possible to attach ferro plates to a machine that is mostly sporting standard armor,
3 - It is specifically stated that standard and double heatsinks don't work together. They can't be mixed and matched. In cannon, there was a special "double strength heatsinks" that were a very short-lived experimental technology that revolved around highly corrosive metals. Those could be mixed in with either type of heatsink, and only took up 2 crit slots. They were short lived because they had next to no longevity. They had to be replaced every 5 years regardless of damage, and weren't reasonable financially. But yes, there is a specific rule that stated double and single heatsinks can't work side by side (though don't ask me why).

EDIT: However, I am not against the idea of adding "upgrades" to the "loadout" tab, similar to armor. This way you can make all the changes you are considering and see what happens. I know I personally would have preferred this. I was trying to make the CTF-3L for real. Doing so bit me in the butt.

In MWO, we have shorter critical slot lists than in the TT game. The 3L mounts 16 DHS, Endo Steel, FF Armor, 4 MPLasers, 1 LB-X10 with 3 tons of ammo and 1 ER PPC alongside a 285XL and MASC. I needed 12 extra critical slots to pull this off. Switching back to standard internals cost me a total of 1.5M C-bills, setting me back significantly on saving up for my next CTF chassis. Something I wasn't very happy with.

Edited by Szaesse, 01 January 2013 - 11:40 PM.

[Chief Justice]

I like to support this suggestion.

It was a very unpleasant surprise to see, that switching back to normal heat sinks or internal structure costs money, AGAIN.

Even if we take the "installation cost" argument for granted, why is the switching of large weapons free of charge?

The system at it is, is not even consistent in regard to this "argument".

Customization is a big part of the fun in BT, and at the moment it's overly expensive, cumbersome, illogical and very limited.
I mean come on..i have to pay 750k to install the Artemis system, and 500k to remove it..wait, WHAT?

The removal of this expensive system costs 66% of the system itself..yeah right.

A better question: Why can i switch the engine, one of the biggest and most expensive parts for free?

So i agree..please make these "upgrades" real items, so that we don't have pay for their removal.
If you like to introduce some kind of "installation" cost, do it. Just keep it reasonable.
I like the idea of combining armor types(not on the same location of course), but that would not be that high on my priority list.

Thanks.

EDIT: Regarding the Artemis system. There is a funny error. Streak missiles which are guided missiles don't benefit from Artemis, but the SRMs, while unguided dumb fire missiles, do.
That can't be right

Edited by Chief Justice, 02 January 2013 - 12:39 AM.

[Xandralkus]

Szaesse, on 01 January 2013 - 11:33 PM, said:

1 - The chassis is the complete frame of the mech. You can't really take a car and combine a steel to a fiberglass frame. This would compromise the frame itself, making the vehicle unstable and dangerous to ride in. No machine that I am aware of has ever utilized a combination of standard and endo steel internals.

Gameplay and game design > realism. Our stompy robots defy the laws of mass, volume, and thermodynamics on a regular basis. Absolutely nothing is lost in terms of having a bi-material frame. It is more important that we expand player choice to include this, rather than hang onto some lost semblance of reality.

Szaesse, on 01 January 2013 - 11:33 PM, said:

3 - It is specifically stated that standard and double heatsinks don't work together. They can't be mixed and matched. In cannon, there was a special "double strength heatsinks" that were a very short-lived experimental technology that revolved around highly corrosive metals. Those could be mixed in with either type of heatsink, and only took up 2 crit slots. They were short lived because they had next to no longevity. They had to be replaced every 5 years regardless of damage, and weren't reasonable financially. But yes, there is a specific rule that stated double and single heatsinks can't work side by side (though don't ask me why).

You don't bring a walrus to a dog show, and you don't bring tabletop mechanics to a shooter.

Let's delve into WHY the developers of tabletop actually set it up this way: They did not have a giant server on the other side of the internet, capable of vast, infathomable feats of number-crunching. Calculating heat buildup and dissipation was probably done with charts and handheld calculators, and in order to simplify and speed the act of playing the game, they wrote the rules such that all heat sinks present on the same chassis had to have uniform heat dissipation rate.

When your heat sinks start getting blown up at random, it REALLY simplifies the math when you don't have to recalculate a brand new total for heat dissipated per turn, because you run two different types of heat sinks.

We are not subject to the same mathematical constraints as tabletop. The need for such mechanics to exist at all has evaporated as our technology has improved. We can improve and extend player choice now, and that is infinitely more important than the maintaining of traditionalism. We have everything to gain, and nothing tangible to lose.

They might have come up with a handwave technobabble explanation behind why double heat sinks and single heat sinks are strangely incompatible with one another. Even if they came up with a good and realistic explanation (highly unlikely), realism was flushed headfirst down the toilet when we began talking about stompy robots as primary combat vehicles.

Edited by Xandralkus, 02 January 2013 - 05:38 AM.

[Victoly]

Looking at how a heatsink works in the first place, it makes no sense that you could not mix the two types. A heatsink conducts heat away from high-temperature item such as a CPU or reactor, dispersing it into the surrounding air or into a liquid medium.

I suppose I'd understand if you were going from gaseous dispersion to liquid dispersion, but the difference is "Double" versus "Single"... meaning the heatsink's surface area is doubled to better pull heat off; the medium to which the heat is transferred does not change.

And to top all that off...

Xandralkus, on 02 January 2013 - 05:31 AM, said:

They might have come up with a handwave technobabble explanation behind why double heat sinks and single heat sinks are strangely incompatible with one another. Even if they came up with a good and realistic explanation (highly unlikely), realism was flushed headfirst down the toilet when we began talking about stompy robots as primary combat vehicles.

Who cares what's realistic? Who cares what's unrealistic? We're pilots of great big robots that defy physics and aerodynamics and all sorts of crazy stuff. Heck, nowadays we can hardly make machines that walk in a bipedal manner without spending enormous amounts of money on complex balancing systems and lightweight materials. The configurations of these monstrous machines in the BattleTech universe would never be able to stand, let alone WALK and FIRE MASSIVE WEAPONRY and maintain their balance while doing it! Don't bring realism to a subject of pure fantasy.