1063 replies to this topic

[MagicHamsta]

HRR Insanity, on 07 January 2013 - 05:12 PM, said:

During this thread the Devs indicated that a solution (weapon convergence, even if this is a non-optimal solution) would be implemented that would address this issue. They asked me to wait.

I promised I would wait.

I have waited more than six months.

Only 6 months?
('-')

Also as long as there be even a hint of variety & a singular goal, there will always be people who min/max.
Always.

The only way to prevent such min/maxing be to have no variety at all.

[ODonovan]

Soy, on 08 January 2013 - 07:08 PM, said:

Hey look, thread still continuing, full of BT fans that aren't actually into video games and more into rolling dice.

Aim TROLL.

Fixed that for ya, Zippy.




-Irish

[SASZ]

Hi.

I think this suggestion needs more fleshing out. Meaning that OP poster should make the hard work for the devs.

Make test and change plan.

Example of plan...
-Reduce armor to normal levels.
-Test 1 mech for each class in different configurations.
-Fight between moving, standing still and so on...
-Hard values, what to change for better balance.
-Make short battle scenes.

Doing this way would make it relative easy to devs see what you mean and possibly test it out.

In side note, would it be interesting to have test server, where we could test these radical suggestions out, like in Eve online.

[Tombstoner]

People who see no issue with the current state of game play are not taking into account that weapon stats are take directly from TT rules. Rules that are balanced in the context of randomized hit location. This is why in TT 4x ML are not as powerfull as 1x ac-20: concentrated damage. When skill based targetting is overlayed with TT weapon stats and boatting game balance is destroyed. Mechs died way to fast with cored center torso and the devs have been playing wack a mole with game balance ever since. add in full power Double HS with clan mechs and the game breaks. i expect the devs to have clan mech avalable for internal testing. then add in ECM and game balance is once again broken. yes i know its beta, but the OP is dead on correct in haveing concerns about the games long term viability.

A cone of fire for each weapon is one way to return to TT balance. another is to completly depart from TT weapons stats. but i think PGI is loathed to depart to far from TT. sadly they did that with skill based targetting with out redoing all weapons.
as it stands i think the ac-20 for it weight, heat, crit slots, ammo dependancy is basicly worthless relative to the gause or 4x ML. It should be doing at least 45 points of damage.


The OP is correct. The game is fundimentaly broken and now is the time to fix it befor the game is out of beta.

[Audd]

Jetfire, on 07 January 2013 - 05:35 PM, said:

Try sighting in a real rifle. The faster you move the more vibration and uncertainty.

Ever hear of the Abrams M1 tank? We're not in WWII anymore.

[Xyco]

+1 to OP, i do agree your discussion points need to at least be looked into and tested. like you've mentioned, we're in beta testing and this would be a good opportunity to try another approach.

shooting should be affected by speed, movement. not sure about the CoF for energy weapons but i agree convergence should be looked at.

[TheForce]

Soy, on 08 January 2013 - 07:08 PM, said:

Hey look, thread still continuing, full of BT fans that aren't actually into video games and more into rolling dice.

Aim.

do u wanna join Clan Boating Whure? U can be the Rear Admiral...

Edited by TheForce, 08 January 2013 - 10:28 PM.

[Abrahms]

OP is a moron. We dont need spread to further noobify this game.

We simply need heat that doesnt break TT weapons.

Aiming and accuracy is fine. PPCs being molten earth cores is NOT fine. (theyre hot ebcause with 3x rate of fire, every weapon is 2 tons heavier per heat point in heatsinks, vastly harming weapons more as they get hotter. A gauss now generates 2 mroe heat per 10 sec, a PPC now 27... 2 vs 27 tons is a big difference...)

The tonnage needs to balance out for what you take.

Also, maybe some perks to diversifying your loadout (think of - laser dmg then increasing ballistic dmg for example, not per se this but something to encourage it).

Boating should be viable, just not the best, route. An NO, do NOT add spread. Its the fastest way to remove skill when you reduce almost everything to chance. The noob will win because his spread dice roll did better than yours, regardless of skill = fail.

Edited by Abrahms, 08 January 2013 - 11:18 PM.

[Rear Admiral]

TheForce, on 08 January 2013 - 10:28 PM, said:

U can be the Rear Admiral...

No, no he can't.

[Quinton]

for what seems to be highly intelligent (sometimes) people, you guys sure do come up with some idiotic ideas for 'fixing' the game. Weapon spread? seriously? are we going to jump from 3050 back to 1945? Anyone who says lasers should be inaccurate needs to slap themselves a few times and think about that statement again. the only thing that really should be changed in terms of weapon groups is that every hardpoint on a mech should have a corresponding weapon port on that body part, so your commando has 2 lasers in its arms? they fire from 2 different locations on the arm. When that is done THEN you can worry about shots spreading out but only when in extremely close combat where the individual weapon systems cannot aim at the extreme angles they are being asked to do.

You can't fix or stop people from boating. Boating is a naturall reaction to a number of things,

1. how many weapon groups can i easily activate at different times? if i'm dancing with an enemy i dont have time to try to punch the right key out of 6 different keys while simultaneously steering my mech. So I use the mouse for groups 1 and 2, that means i have a limited number of weapon types i can put there, most people would'nt stick an SL and an LL in the same weapon groups.

2. managing and changing builds quickly and effectively. I'm going to boat multiples of similar weapons so after i finish fighting and can think hmmm i ran too hot there, so i'lll drop one of my 6 MLs and pick up a heat sink. or downgrade from a LRM20 to a LRM15. That's quicker and vastly easier than having to rebuild your mech from the ground up because you have 7 hardpoints, 6 different weapons in them and your overheating.

3. Skill limits aka multitasking. When I'm charging to the fight I don't want to be thinking gee should I use the SL, ML, LL, PPC, AC/2, or the AC/5? anyone in the middle of a brawl is too busy driving, aiming, dodging, monitoring heat, and ammo, not to mention the enemies damage spots and obstacles in the way to be concerned about which weapon will be the most useful in a given situation. They're gonna boat like weapons to take some of that stress off. THIS IS A BIG THING. In TT you have time between your friends actions and the GM's actions to sit and think about what your mech will do on his next turn, not so here in Live Action Land. I've done a lot of gaming, sometimes the time between my actions can take as long as 30 minutes! (longer if someone gets into a rules argument). And in theory those actions are back to back and can take between 6 seconds to a minute depending on your system.

So you see, trying to break boating and make group weapons inaccurate is a horrible idea. What we really need are a few simple, and some not so simple fixes:
make missiles not fire in a single burst cluster regardless of how many are fired at the same time
of course the damn lagshield that protects lights needs to be fixed
the reduction in cooling due to moving fast should be increased
the drift of ballistics weapons when fired while moving needs to be reduced
Collisions need to be reimplemented
bigger maps need to come into play
more weapon options need to be introduced, something to close the ballistics gap between machine gun and AC/2 primarily
ECM needs to be seperated into multiple modules, as well as worked on so you can reliably target those mechs outside of the AOE.

Why will that help? well, the missiles seem pretty straightforward, if they fire out in a stream instead of a clump it gives the target a bit more evasion time which is desperately needed when facing a cat with SRM6x6 and it will look and feel a lot more realistic. Possibly the worst thing i've seen so far is 5 LRM missiles coming to me, so I decided to suck them up to get a shot at the firing mech, only to realize he had 6xLRM5 and had fired them in a clump, so instead of 5 missiles I had 5 missiles with the power of 30.

Lagshield goes without saying

If the penalty for moving fast was a heavier reduction in cooling efficiency it will encouraging more 'tacical' movement, instead of a constant all out sprint all over the place for everyone.

Ballsitics drift is pretty crazy at the moment. This is exceptionally noticeable if you have a PPC and a ballistic weapon on a mech, fire them together at the same spot, the PPC will always hit dead on, and the ballistic wep will drift significantly depending on your speed. This makes ballistic weapons vastly less useful to any mech that relies on movement to survive.

Collisions speak for themselves mostly.

I believe larger maps will change the dynamics of everything we argue about in these forums. Especially if those maps allow for serious long range fights and for actual strategic movement. Right now all the maps have 3 general 'paths' everyone falls into and its exceptionally easy for 1 mech to watch all 3 and fiure out where the enemy is heading. With a huge map, say 5 or 10 km to a side, your team will have to rely on its scout mechs to figure out where the opponent is, and you'll have to decide to engage or fallback and protect your base or whatever.

I would like to see new balistics weapons fitting into the huge gap between AC/2 and machine guns. Also energy needs something between 2 tons and 5 tons.

ECM is a sticker for a lot of people. right now it does way too much and really has no counter that is as simple and efficient as itself, TAG is nowhere near as easy as having your ECM on and hosing all around you. I propose it gets split into mulitple parts:

Stealth, prevents you from being R targeted and locked on by enemy mechs,

Disrupt, 100-300m range increases lock on time, information gathering, and info relaying (the targets mark showing up on teammates HUD) by 50% but only for enemy mechs inside the AOE,

Counter, 100-300m range prevenst other ECM from working within its operational range.

Jam, 50-200m range causes information being relayed to/from missiles inside the AOE to become unreliable therefor making them less accurate.

first, note the variance in range, i propose each module will weigh between .5 -2 tons .5 for the least effective, and increases .5 tons for each additional 50m of coverage. This will mean that a light mech wanting everything will have to significantly sacrifice its offensive capability for that. Second the Raven chassis should really be the only type that will be capable of mounting ECM, its just too powerful on heavier mechs, especially since they can accept the increased tonnage and still operate at full offensive capacity.

OK, so theres my massive wall of text of thought for the current situation, lets see if anyone reads it.

[Heiggwinie Halberstadt]

The problem with boating many weapons comes because you can easily replace a half ton machine gun with a 14 ton ac/20. This is what makes ridiculous load outs.

I agree with the OP in that even if your reticle is on a mech should not guarantee a hit.

[Hrungnir]

Quinton, on 09 January 2013 - 12:40 AM, said:

You can't fix or stop people from boating. Boating is a naturall reaction to a number of things,

1. how many weapon groups can i easily activate at different times? if i'm dancing with an enemy i dont have time to try to punch the right key out of 6 different keys while simultaneously steering my mech. So I use the mouse for groups 1 and 2, that means i have a limited number of weapon types i can put there, most people would'nt stick an SL and an LL in the same weapon groups.

I just want to point out that you can still group weapons as normal with the implementation of some kind of spread. Just use chainfire within the groups to minimize or avoid it. Or just use group fire and risk the chance of not having ALL the weapons hit your desired panel, but still making more immediate damage.

Edit: I do understand where you're coming from, though. I myself am loathe to use more than three different groups (and thus more than three types of weapons) but that's just a personal preference/limitation.

Edited by Hrungnir, 09 January 2013 - 01:07 AM.

[Lyrik]

Boating weapons is used because we aren't some elite mechwarriors with years of pratice in using 5 different weapons at the same time. We don't have tanks (LRM5), infantery(MG+Flamer) and aircraft (AC2) in the game. This means that some weapons are useless when using TT values.

Spread is a stupid idea. This is not a boardgame but a FPS (more sim than CS, but still a FPS). If they implement that, you can stop playing MWO and start playing MW:T.

The heat system is fine. It's a little bit like the Crysis powerarmor energie management. It restricts you. You can't use all your fancy weapons/special powers the entire time.

And **** Tabletop values. A Mlaser doesn't need to do 5damage to have a Battletech feeling. It needs to do more damage, heat, range than a small laser. And have less damage, heat, range than a Largelaser.
When the AC20 doesn't enough damage, than buffed it . If an AC20 does 20 or 25 damage is irrelevant. PGI and MWO shouldn't be punished just because the devs of the tt had no imagination regarding weapon names :-P

Battletech is about the universe, the feeling, the characters and the timeline. And not about some numbers in a tabletop with Animemechs (Unseen mechs).

[Scout80913]

Harabecw, on 07 January 2013 - 10:41 PM, said:

I don't know if this was mentioned earlier, but during the good old days of MPBT:3025 we had exactly the same problem of pinpoint accuracy alpha destroying mechs (they had normal armor values, Btech style). The devs implemented early on a built in spread for alpha firing, while maintaining accuracy for chain firing. The spread would be like 50% aimed section, 25% for both sections near it.

This solved the problems and we shot each other happily. I still chain-fired cockpits off of mechs with my hunchback P.

This.

I agree it's still not really an ideal solution. It is, however, relatively simple, feasible, should be relatively easy to implement, has been tested before and proven fairly successful.

[Apoc1138]

ODonovan, on 08 January 2013 - 06:54 PM, said:

wall of trolling accusations

so anyone who disagrees with you = trolling?
right, got your number, can't actually think of anything sensible to counter argue a valid point so just refer to said poster as troll in an attempt to disparage the comment instead

[ParasiteX]

Abrahms, on 08 January 2013 - 11:17 PM, said:

OP is a moron. We dont need spread to further noobify this game.

We simply need heat that doesnt break TT weapons.

Aiming and accuracy is fine. PPCs being molten earth cores is NOT fine. (theyre hot ebcause with 3x rate of fire, every weapon is 2 tons heavier per heat point in heatsinks, vastly harming weapons more as they get hotter. A gauss now generates 2 mroe heat per 10 sec, a PPC now 27... 2 vs 27 tons is a big difference...)

The tonnage needs to balance out for what you take.

Also, maybe some perks to diversifying your loadout (think of - laser dmg then increasing ballistic dmg for example, not per se this but something to encourage it).

Boating should be viable, just not the best, route. An NO, do NOT add spread. Its the fastest way to remove skill when you reduce almost everything to chance. The noob will win because his spread dice roll did better than yours, regardless of skill = fail.

But it's not a dice roll... take for instance the Hunchback 4P, that packs 6 lasers in the torso.
Do you think you can make all those 6 lasers hit exactly the same point on a target? No you cant.
The way they are positioned would make that impossible. Hence, it would create a bit of a spread if you fire all of them at the same time on a target.

This is a problem with all torso weapons, as they are all fixed in place. As such, can not adjust the convergence on differently ranged targets.

So if way take for instance 2 PPCs mounted in the side torsos. And their convergence has been adjusted to hit dead center at a target 500m away. If you where to then shoot something 800m away. Then the shots would split off from 500m. And completely spread out once they reach 800m.
And if you shoot something at 250m. then the shots would also hit more spread out, instead of dead center.
A skilled shooter. Would have to naturally take into account the convergence spread, when shooting all weapons at once.

Also.. this game is not a FPS.. it's a simulator. There's a bit of a difference there.

Edited by ParasiteX, 09 January 2013 - 03:46 AM.

[ParasiteX]

What i would like to see instead of a Cone of fire. Or a big ring showing how much it will all spread. Instead i would like to see, small targeting reticules for all the fixed weapons, that automatically spread and adjust themselves to show where they will hit, depending on where i aim. This would end up making the reticule HUD a bit more cluttered, if you have loads of different guns mounted in torso. But would help improve aiming, and make it less dependent on chance, and guess work, if the spread will be too much or not.

A way to reduce clutter for instance, would be to only add one reticule if there's several weapons tightly grouped within the same spot. like the Hunchback 4Ps side torso.

[Brilig]

There are a lot of good ideas in this thread.

A reticle for each torso weapon seems a little bit extreme. It would leave the hud frustratingly covered. I do like ParasiteX's idea though.

A reticle for each torso section wouldn't be to bad. If that still leaves too much convergence you could make the reticle a little bigger and work in some space between where each round will always hit. Take the Centurion's center torso laser slots for example. They are stacked one on top of the other a couple of feet apart. They should strike the enemy mech a couple of feet apart from each other too. That way you don't have to worry about convergence, your shots will still go where the reticle is pointed no matter the distance. However there will still be some space between your shots because the weapons on your mech are firing from 2 different spots. A hunchback 4-P would be a little more extreme. Each shot would land in the same grid pattern they fire from.

Having a random number generator for cone of fire seems pretty silly. Using the Hunchback 4-P as an example. You fire all 6 lasers in the side torso and they fire at six different angles? Or the all fire at the same random angle in your cone of fire?

[Taiji]

ParasiteX, on 09 January 2013 - 03:52 AM, said:

What i would like to see instead of a Cone of fire. Or a big ring showing how much it will all spread. Instead i would like to see, small targeting reticules for all the fixed weapons, that automatically spread and adjust themselves to show where they will hit, depending on where i aim. This would end up making the reticule HUD a bit more cluttered, if you have loads of different guns mounted in torso. But would help improve aiming, and make it less dependent on chance, and guess work, if the spread will be too much or not.

A way to reduce clutter for instance, would be to only add one reticule if there's several weapons tightly grouped within the same spot. like the Hunchback 4Ps side torso.

Yep, I agree. It would be great for helping give us all a clear picture of the apparent netcode and firing delay problems. Since we could no longer confuse the convergence we're meant to be managing with the netcode and firing delay we aren't.

Edited by Taiji, 09 January 2013 - 05:02 AM.

[SpaceODC]

I really don't understand why lasers shouldn't be accurate ... WTF ?

As for balistic weapons, they have travel speed, so you can't really snipe a mech from a kilometer away (maybe if you're really lucky)

what could be done is to slow done even more the bullets of the big weapons like ac20

and the PCC ... it's a bit like a sniper, good damage, fast bullet travel, but a lot of heat which slows the reloading

if you look at the DPS values, ballistic is stronger than energy because of the reloading time, and that's ok, because they are less precise