1063 replies to this topic

[HRR Insanity]

Even Dark, on 07 January 2013 - 11:12 PM, said:

ssrms why must they allways hit the torso and do not split up the damage to all parts of the mech.

This will likely be corrected.

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finally torsos are too weak in the game? i never lose a arm or a leg on a heavy mech allways the torso is destroyed and that really fast. if your "assault" atlas a 100 tonnage mech, stand in front and lead the attack and will meet a srm6+ medlasers builded stalker the fight ends in 30 seconds . stalker just runs in front of you and shoot 2 times thats it.

That's because you're concentrating damage. You've exactly pointed out the problem. If you can combine 3-4 weapons into a super-weapon, it breaks the armor/damage model. Torsos evaporate. 'Mechs die really really fast.

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all know these mech builds wich are op in the game, you can see the result on the dps after the much and try it self.

Agree. That's what I'm trying to point out is a fixable problem.

[LethalRose]

I want to try to understand your POV...

Can you in 1 sentence explain what the problem is? I read your entire post and I'm not getting it.

Edited by LethalRose, 07 January 2013 - 11:18 PM.

[HRR Insanity]

Yokaiko, on 07 January 2013 - 11:17 PM, said:

K2s never were a problem. The nerf just makes them a lot easier to kill.
The people crying about K2s were almost universally full time assault pilots. Personally I like the three UAC Ily a lot better.

I disagree. If we ran our K2s, everyone, Assaults down to Lights, gnashed their teeth because the game was over within about 30 seconds of engagement. A 'Mech dies every 3-4 seconds when you concentrate damage to that extent.

The Ilya is another great example of a strong boatable 'Mech because you can combine 3xUAC5 into a Guass round (or close to it) every second. That's a TON of damage on the same part of the 'Mech nearly instantly. Without pinpoint accuracy grouped fire, the UAC5 boats would be much less abusive.

[Wintersdark]

When I saw the thread title, I thought this would be a worthless qq thread - my apologies to the OP.

It's actually very well thought out and - dooooooooom aside - absolutely correct.

Convergence is a major issue, and is where most breaks most significantly from TT. The OP's suggestions to correct the problem would do so.

It won't happen, however. It could have been done in closed beta, but not now. That's just too fundamental change to force in on a live game, open beta or no.

With that being said, a middle ground of MINOR firing spread being applied based on movement rate and heat could certainly work, and be a much gentler pill to swallow by the player base at large.

Minor spread, by the way, working as with many shooters wherein its unlikely to make you miss, but rather to force shots in the situations to be aimed center mass so deviation will just hit other body parts and not cause misses.

It's particularly necessary with our current heat system. It's absurd that you can fire a 6 ERPPC volley at 99% heat to no ill effects. In TT, you'd detonate instantly.

This, of course, isn't table top and (differing from many here) I don't think it necessarily should strive to be. But the heat mechanic exists for a reason, and is a primary balancing factor - one that prevents such builds as 6 ppc stalkers, amongst other things.

[HRR Insanity]

LethalRose, on 07 January 2013 - 11:18 PM, said:

I want to try to understand your POV...

Can you in 1 sentence explain what the problem is? I read your entire post and I'm not getting it.

*thinks*

Combining damage from multiple weapons into a single damage packet makes 'Mechs explode very rapidly and fundamentally breaks the armor/damage/heat model of this game (and the game it was based on, BattleTech).

[Yokaiko]

HRR Insanity, on 07 January 2013 - 11:21 PM, said:

I disagree. If we ran our K2s, everyone, Assaults down to Lights, gnashed their teeth because the game was over within about 30 seconds of engagement. A 'Mech dies every 3-4 seconds when you concentrate damage to that extent.

The Ilya is another great example of a strong boatable 'Mech because you can combine 3xUAC5 into a Guass round (or close to it) every second. That's a TON of damage on the same part of the 'Mech nearly instantly. Without pinpoint accuracy grouped fire, the UAC5 boats would be much less abusive.

Only on a stationary target, it doesn't take a lot of movement and between jams and fireing lag Ily is very much a spray and pray affair, I knock stuff off with the lasers most of the time.

I remember running 5 K2 teams back before class matching, if it was all Atlas we would roll them, if it was fast mediums and dragons it was hit or miss.

[HRR Insanity]

Wintersdark, on 07 January 2013 - 11:23 PM, said:

When I saw the thread title, I thought this would be a worthless qq thread - my apologies to the OP.

It's actually very well thought out and - dooooooooom aside - absolutely correct.

Apologies for the inflammatory title, but I think this point is a critical one that needs discussion and to be addressed by the Devs.

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Convergence is a major issue, and is where most breaks most significantly from TT. The OP's suggestions to correct the problem would do so.
It won't happen, however. It could have been done in closed beta, but not now. That's just too fundamental change to force in on a live game, open beta or no.

I hope you're wrong. I proposed this in closed Beta and the Devs said they were 'on it' and to 'be patient'. I've been patient.

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With that being said, a middle ground of MINOR firing spread being applied based on movement rate and heat could certainly work, and be a much gentler pill to swallow by the player base at large.

Minor spread, by the way, working as with many shooters wherein its unlikely to make you miss, but rather to force shots in the situations to be aimed center mass so deviation will just hit other body parts and not cause misses.

I'd be fine with a small cone of fire to start with. Get something in the game...

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It's particularly necessary with our current heat system. It's absurd that you can fire a 6 ERPPC volley at 99% heat to no ill effects. In TT, you'd detonate instantly.

This, of course, isn't table top and (differing from many here) I don't think it necessarily should strive to be. But the heat mechanic exists for a reason, and is a primary balancing factor - one that prevents such builds as 6 ppc stalkers, amongst other things.

It would be nice to have and if heat based cone of fire limited the effectiveness of energy boats by some factor, they could then start making the heat model a bit more like the game it was based on... with heat neutral stock 'Mechs.

Yokaiko, on 07 January 2013 - 11:24 PM, said:

Only on a stationary target, it doesn't take a lot of movement and between jams and fireing lag Ily is very much a spray and pray affair, I knock stuff off with the lasers most of the time.

/nods/ It is slightly less powerful, but I usually run a 4xAC5 CTX. 20 damage every second to a single panel is a bit too good usually.

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I remember running 5 K2 teams back before class matching, if it was all Atlas we would roll them, if it was fast mediums and dragons it was hit or miss.

Lag shooting... it's key (points to sig).

Edited by HRR Insanity, 07 January 2013 - 11:30 PM.

[Yokaiko]

I've always favored ballistics, I know all about lag shooting 8)

[LethalRose]

HRR Insanity, on 07 January 2013 - 11:23 PM, said:

*thinks*

Combining damage from multiple weapons into a single damage packet makes 'Mechs explode very rapidly and fundamentally breaks the armor/damage/heat model of this game (and the game it was based on, BattleTech).

ok I get that.

If a mech dies quickly I think its the fault of the pilot and their ability to prevent the destruction of their mech. If you're in an atlas and you run straight at me you deserve to die from 3 alpha's to your CT.

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Fundamentally breaks the armor/damage/heat model of this game

I don't understand. We are all using the same weapons/mechs with the same heat mechanics so what "model" is broken?

[Heeden]

HRR Insanity, on 07 January 2013 - 11:23 PM, said:

*thinks*

Combining damage from multiple weapons into a single damage packet makes 'Mechs explode very rapidly and fundamentally breaks the armor/damage/heat model of this game (and the game it was based on, BattleTech).

So aiming is bad, and the game would be better if it randomised your aim?

[Wintersdark]

LethalRose, on 07 January 2013 - 11:36 PM, said:

ok I get that.

If a mech dies quickly I think its the fault of the pilot and their ability to prevent the destruction of their mech. If you're in an atlas and you run straight at me you deserve to die from 3 alpha's to your CT.



I don't understand. We are all using the same weapons/mechs with the same heat mechanics so what "model" is broken?

You're not quite at the problem. It's not about successive alphas.

The problem is that the weapon damage/armor/heat game mechanics draw their stats from tabletop.

In tabletop, your single alpha will hit multiple locations - weapons do not converge.

Thus, smaller weapons such as the medium and small lasers are somewhat less powerful overall and never taken in large numbers because they would function as a shotgun, rather than a SuperLaser.

This made weapons like the ac/20 particularly awesome, because they'd *hammer* a single location extremely hard - something rare otherwise.

This spread of damage ensured that mechs lived longer.

In order to get the similar longevity, PGI doubled armor values. The result is that heavy weapons are less interesting and boating is optimal - the more smaller weapons you can combine with automatic pinpoint accuracy the better. It's why.

[8RoundsRapid]

Heeden, on 07 January 2013 - 11:39 PM, said:

So aiming is bad, and the game would be better if it randomised your aim?

That was never said. You can still aim your weapons, you just don't get pinpoint accuracy if you choose to fire them all together at the same time.

Every other fps game I've played in the last... well forever - has had randomness in the gunfire. Every. Single. One. Battlemechs are not meant to concentrate their fire with pinpoint accuracy. It totally breaks weapon/heat/armor balance in every important way and leads to other, even more ridiculous changes (ecm, I'm looking at you.)

HRRInsanity, keep fighting the good fight, brother. I think your idea is great, and I support it 100%. I also like the non-converging torso weapon idea, too. Either of those would work for me.

[HRR Insanity]

LethalRose, on 07 January 2013 - 11:36 PM, said:

If a mech dies quickly I think its the fault of the pilot and their ability to prevent the destruction of their mech. If you're in an atlas and you run straight at me you deserve to die from 3 alpha's to your CT.

True. Rapid death can be due to bad piloting.

However, if someone comes up on you with a 'Mech with 15 Small Lasers, do you think they should be able to combine all of those Small Lasers into a 'superSmallLaser' that does 45 points to a single point in 0.75 seconds and produces the same heat as a single ERPPC doing 10 damage? Do you think that anyone would run an AC20 when you could do more than twice the damage with half the tonnage and no ammo constraints? Of course not... so the developers are slowly 'balancing' the BattleTech weapons to have different values of damage/heat while keeping the weight/critical...

Thus, they're fundamentally breaking the way that light 'MEchs and other 'Mechs were able to remain powerful yet weak. Strong small/medium energy weapons/MGs/SRMs are what make light 'Mechs strong. They get behind you and wreck you with high damage weapons with short range. But when those SAME weapons are put on Assault 'Mechs... they're too strong in large groups.

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I don't understand. We are all using the same weapons/mechs with the same heat mechanics so what "model" is broken?

I'm not arguing that the game is unbalanced between players. I'm arguing that the game is unbalanced relative to the original premises of the game we're all simulating. BattleTech. The game was originally carefully designed to let small 'Mechs carry small but POTENT weapons. Big 'Mechs couldn't abuse those weapons too badly (they did some) because the damage, heat, weight, critical, and other parameters are all based on a simple premise: random hit locations for each weapon if the pilot hits the target (again, a random determination).

In MechWarrior, we have chosen to take the dice out of the game. We want to be the pilots driving the big stompy robots. We want to shoot and be responsible for our shots. We want skill. However, if we use the armor and damage model of BattleTech, we need to figure out a way to balance the Gauss Rifle doing 15 damage vs. our ability to hit the same spot with ALL of our weapons. If I take 10 Medium lasers and they all hit the same spot, those 10 MLs do WAY more damage than a Gauss Rifle for less tonnage and have no ammunition constraints. This makes 'Mechs die nearly instantly... so you have to weaken small weapons and increase armor... and suddenly the big weapons aren't doing anything either... because there is too much armor and then things start to fall apart. As they have so far during the Closed/Open Beta 'balancing' attempts. Paul's tweaks aren't cutting the mustard here. Weapons are getting ... broken. Heat is ... broken. Lots of stuff is ... broken.

Adjusting the damage of the weapons doesn't fix the problem (see original post) because it changes the very nature of the strength of weapons and makes the heat/damage/armor/critical model break down terribly. The only way to fix it is to simulate the randomness WITHOUT making it dice-based. We all want to shoot things and be in control.

By allowing pilots to choose to be pin-point accurate with big weapons we maintain gunnery. By allowing pilots to have a strong effect on the cone of fire with careful management of heat and movement, we put skill into the use of grouped weapons subject to the cone of fire.

That's the proposal. Prevent people from grouping weapons together to break the armor/damage/heat/critical model and keep the game recognizably BattleTech and make it MechWarrior by keeping it skill based.

[Critical Fumble]

LethalRose, on 08 January 2013 - 04:18 PM, said:

I want to try to understand your POV...

Can you in 1 sentence explain what the problem is? I read your entire post and I'm not getting it.


Realizing that saying it in that way would be even less clear? Perhaps you could follow some short bullets instead? (formatting feature, not 0.22 bits of lead)

• MW:O uses many elements from a complex tabletop strategy/RPG game from the 1980s. The dev team is, at least in general, trying to keep things similar to that game.
  
• I that tabletop game, when you fired your weapons, each one had to make a dice roll to strike the target, and another roll to determine which portion of the target it struck.
  
• That aspect of the game played a large factor in how weapons were balanced - the weapons that could potentially destroy a mech section in a single shot were costly in terms of weight and crit slots to mount; weapons that do less damage per hit were more efficient overall, but they had a significant chance of not striking the same location, and therefore less likely to kill or maim a mech.
  
• When translating the game, they used the tabletop game's weapon stats, but gave everyone convergence on a single point with all weapons. This largely removed the inherent balancing metric between most weapons, and now its simply based on how efficient the weapon itself is.

[Nothing Whatsoever]

This is an interesting topic, I've often wondered about how convergence is supposed to be handled when weapons are grouped in the same sections.

So, I can see arm mounted weapons converge at the reticule with some torso mounted weapon systems, but having all weapons consistently re-converging so effectively at different ranges seems a stretch to me for their available tech, especially for older Inner Sphere Mech designs.

So, possibly range limits to convergence could be factored so that boating weapons only converge at a fixed range dependent on the chassis variant, not changing with acquiring a new target or repeated firing. This could differentiate the variants a bit more as we have with torso twist and other variables for Mechs already, for example. And we possibly could use the existing ranges for different weapons as a basis for testing out good ranges for this possible change to how the weapon systems could work for the Inner Sphere at least.

And possibly having a minimum range for weapons to converge on the reticule could be another element in making the Mechs feel more like tough old War Machines, and not like a Finesse Weapons Platform that are hyper responsive when we pull the trigger.



Otherwise, what about having any weapons in the same Mech sections simply never converging on reticule?

Where the hardpoints are fixed to fire parallel to each other and the reticule is calibrated to focus on one of the hardpoints.

For me, the HBK-4P was the easiest to visualize, but there are many other doubled energy hardpoint sections found on the various mechs (AS7-RS, Dragons, Stalkers, Awesomes, etc.,) as I tried to illustrate below: (Left side is convergence on reticule, right is firing parallel to max effective range).



From what I've seen, we currently get a convergence at the reticule like the three left side examples, so again, what if the reticule could be fixed to one of the hardpoints and other hardpoints would simply be off-set on a parallel trajectory?

Could that be tested out?



As for missile systems, mostly Streaks and LRMs, I like the suggestions to have them have to re-acquire lock for each volley, not only having to re-acquire if one losses LOS, and also increasing the lock-on time for boating those systems. If out right reducing missile damage in not an option.

I've seen that missiles are very potent as they currently are even with AMS and the doubled armor values. My guess would be to have each missile do 1 point of damage each, to me that's still a lot of damage potential with the volume of missile volleys I've seen in too many matches, currently each missile does 2.5 damage and are very deadly still, I'd be fine if missiles would have a small velocity buff in exchange for the reduced damage, if their trajectories remained as we have them now.

Ballistics seem fine if the projectile speeds stay more or less the same, but maybe the AC5 could use a slight tweak.

And adjusting down the amount of ammo per ton for certain weapons, along with tweaking ECM being more like Guardian ECM and not Angel ECM would be other welcome variables to test out during beta.

[Sug]

KinLuu, on 07 January 2013 - 11:11 PM, said:

Will not happen.

People hate restrictions like that. And PGI can not afford to lose even more customers.

Seriously?

http://www.ign.com/w...tside-2/Weapons

"Weapons in Planetside tend to simulate the effects of recoil to reduce accuracy. Consequently, firing short bursts and then re-aiming is recommended over sustained rapid fire in most instances.

Most, if not all, modern games have a system in place to simulate the inaccuracy of rapid fire or firing while running. Doom and Quake were fun but games have evolved.

Edited by Sug, 08 January 2013 - 12:05 AM.

[Yokaiko]

Yeah, if you are running and jumping you basically spray the entire screen.

[Critical Fumble]

Sug, on 08 January 2013 - 12:04 AM, said:

Seriously?

http://www.ign.com/w...tside-2/Weapons

"Weapons in Planetside tend to simulate the effects of recoil to reduce accuracy. Consequently, firing short bursts and then re-aiming is recommended over sustained rapid fire in most instances.

Most, if not all, modern games have a system in place to simulate the inaccuracy of rapid fire or firing while running. Doom and Quake were fun but games have evolved.

This gets me in so many posts here. I remember the pinpoint or static spread pattern in the first Half-Life; but in all the modern games I can think of, pinpoint shots are limited to a small set of weapons, the first shot, or simply not existent.

[Dzikun]

I wouldn't mind testing the OPs ideas. This is beta and i can see how this could help fixing so many of the glaring issues this game has. It just seems logical too me.

[sunprice]

why should they change ? you should go play other games . This is the way of MechWarrior , from the oldest version .