Mechwarrior Online (Previously MW5/MW3015)

[zokudu]

Glad I got my Founders refund.

 

[GoodRevrnd]

Discussed how asinine this is w/ my friend to day, he put our thoughts to post on the PGI forums where it will inevitably be ignored and/or white-knighted to death.

http://mwomercs.com/forums/topic/12...n-2013/page__st__240__p__2443031#entry2443031

 

[greenhawk]

I have to go and read about this "anti alpha strike" idea as it soulds really really stupid.


"Bonus heat" really makes the setup they offer for working out the heat efficiency of a mech really crap. LOL.

given the game is pretty much people playing "poptarts" or similar (ie: hide behind something until cool, stick your head out, shoot, retreat), of course it is going to be alpha shooting for most of the time, which means you need similar weapons otherwise mixing different weapons in this approach means you are creating excess heat (out of weapon range) or have to lead and aim at a target at the same time.

what a joke.

guessing my mech design from 6 months ago is to be the perfered design then. atlas-rs with 4 er large lasers, set to repeating fire. End resule of a constant ongoing fire that does not stop for a long time. Makes targeting at range very very easy.

if that is the new and only way of playing, what a joke if everyone is doing the same thing. defeats part of the fun of playing with everyone driving the same mech configurations.

 

[lupi]

Sounds like its time to go with an all MG build, cause a 50% increase on 0 heat is still 0.

 

[OSULugan]

Glad I got my Founders refund.

QFT

 

[ElFenix]

guessing my mech design from 6 months ago is to be the perfered design then. atlas-rs with 4 er large lasers, set to repeating fire. End resule of a constant ongoing fire that does not stop for a long time. Makes targeting at range very very easy.

if that is the new and only way of playing, what a joke if everyone is doing the same thing. defeats part of the fun of playing with everyone driving the same mech configurations.

i basically played mechwarrior 2 with a similar setup, depending on mission parameters. alpha strike for maximum damage.

 

[Agent11]

I run a Centurion with 1 machine gun, 2 medium lasers, and 3 srm6's. 1v1 I can take out most anything, if I can get close enough.

 

[DrunkenSano]

Wow, can't believe MWO has gotten this bad and that the devs are running it into the ground. Is there any word on CW? It was suppose to come out last year...

 

[Gonad the Barbarian]

Now it's supposed to come out this year. Maybe. The game really is a mess.

 

[Fallen Kell]

if that is the new and only way of playing, what a joke if everyone is doing the same thing. defeats part of the fun of playing with everyone driving the same mech configurations.

This is what happens when things are not balanced. There is a clear configuration that is better than the rest, which results in everyone using that same configuration. Goes back to my points I have made time and time again about the constant weapon damage/heat/cycle time issues that this game has had from the beginning....

 

[Harabec]

The old MPBT:3025 system was brilliant (BTW - FU EA for canceling it).

You had planets and systems with class limits (up to light, medium, heavy or assault) depending on their distance from capital planets.
Other than that, what created the best battles, IMO?

Stock Mechs. You only had stock mechs. You had all the variants, but you had to make do with what you bought.

The dev team also solved the alpha-strike problem in about 2 months with a simple yet logical solution. Piranha has no idea what they are doing.

 

[GoodRevrnd]

Customizing mechs is too much fun though. I think you could maybe mitigate some of the cheese by adding something like hardpoint size restrictions. Right now you can put twin Guass rifles in the side torso MG mounts, but logically that doesn't make sense and probably could never work.

 

[Midwayman]

Now they're talking about implementing heat penalties for firing "too many" of a single weapon type simultaneously. They want to curb alpha strikes.

LMFAO

They're proposing that if you fire 4 PPCs at once, they not only create 28 heat (4 x 7 heat per PPC) but an ADDITIONAL 10 heat on top of that.

To make matters worse, if your Mech exceeds an arbitrary "heat threshold" your internal structure takes damage.

I think what they want at launch is everyone walking around firing once about every 5 seconds.

Right idea. Wrong implementation. Alphas of large groups of weapons had to be curbed somehow. 4xML is better than a ac20 without any damage spread. The heat system is just dumb though. No incremental penalties. (Like you slow down as you heat up, convergence takes longer, etc) The heat cap is waaaaaaaaaay too high. Alpha 4xPPC should be pretty much a shut down. They need to encourage chain fire. Trouble is trying to control alphas via heat just fucks with the balance of ballistic vs energy weapons even more. They should have cut the thresholds- Adding more HS should only increase how faster you get rid of heat- not how much heat you can absorb before shutdown. Then they should have scaled damage based on the number of weapons firing at the same time. 1=100% 2= 96 3= 91, 4=86, 5=75 6=54%
Or something along those lines. Make it a steep drop off for alpha striking a ton a weapons.

Trouble is the keep going in and screwing with stuff in ways that doesn't make any sense and further breaking things.

 

[child of wonder]

Right idea. Wrong implementation. Alphas of large groups of weapons had to be curbed somehow. 4xML is better than a ac20 without any damage spread.

No, it's not. 4xML is 20 points of damage spread over several locations unless you and your target are motionless. If not, it's going to hit more than one hit location due to beam duration. Plus it's 16 heat.

AC/20 is 20 points of damage right where it hits at only 6 heat.

Unless they've fucked with AC's to make the damage splash.

The heat system is just dumb though. No incremental penalties. (Like you slow down as you heat up, convergence takes longer, etc) The heat cap is waaaaaaaaaay too high. Alpha 4xPPC should be pretty much a shut down.

Not necessarily. It should create 4 times the heat of one PPC. If a Mech doesn't have enough heat sinks to cover all 4 weapons firing simultaneously, then the heat scale ala table top rules should come into play which makes the Mech slow down and targeting sensors whack out.

They need to encourage chain fire. Trouble is trying to control alphas via heat just fucks with the balance of ballistic vs energy weapons even more. They should have cut the thresholds- Adding more HS should only increase how faster you get rid of heat- not how much heat you can absorb before shutdown. Then they should have scaled damage based on the number of weapons firing at the same time. 1=100% 2= 96 3= 91, 4=86, 5=75 6=54%
Or something along those lines. Make it a steep drop off for alpha striking a ton a weapons.

Trouble is the keep going in and screwing with stuff in ways that doesn't make any sense and further breaking things.

No, that's a bad idea. Firing several weapons at the same time is fine. What they need to bring back is the arms and torso aiming differently. Right now everything is locked together and it's no problem at all to fire weapons in both arms and torsos with pinpoint accuracy. Going back to how it used to be with separate targeting reticles for the arms and torsos would curb excessive single weapon boating.

 

[Agent11]

In reality its not that big a deal. How many shots with 4 or 5 ppc's do you think you can get off before overheating?

If the team works together, uses cover and pressures these builds they overheat and are killed very quickly.

If anything they need to make sure the map designs limit unobstructed views and choke points.

Also use elevation to your advantage, they can adjust aim vertically for their arm mounted weapons quite a bit, but not so much for torso mounted ones.

 

[GoodRevrnd]

Not necessarily. It should create 4 times the heat of one PPC. If a Mech doesn't have enough heat sinks to cover all 4 weapons firing simultaneously, then the heat scale ala table top rules should come into play which makes the Mech slow down and targeting sensors whack out.

This is the one thing that's trickier to carry over from TT. In TT, I believe:
[Heat at Round Start] + [Heat from Weapons Fired] - [Heat Dissipated] = Heat.

So as an example 20(S) + 15(F) - 10(D) = 25 at round end. You don't end over your cap of 30 so no problem. In game, you instantly cross your cap of 30 after you fire those weapons worth 15 heat. How do we address this? Do we adjust the heat cap by the amount you can dissipate in "one round?" Or do you increase the heat over the entire duration of "one round" while simultaneously dissipating it? Something else?

Mech speed and aiming penalties are something they an and should implement regardless though.

 

[Midwayman]

No, it's not. 4xML is 20 points of damage spread over several locations unless you and your target are motionless. If not, it's going to hit more than one hit location due to beam duration. Plus it's 16 heat.

AC/20 is 20 points of damage right where it hits at only 6 heat.

Unless they've fucked with AC's to make the damage splash.

Yes, they have screwed with the numbers. The point being that groups of weapons way way way way way more powerful than they should be due to their decision to have pinpoint aim. Pinpoint aim + alpha means it fires like a larger weapon. Compare what 7 tons of small lasers does compared to a ER large for example. (Yes I know they have shorter range)

Not necessarily. It should create 4 times the heat of one PPC. If a Mech doesn't have enough heat sinks to cover all 4 weapons firing simultaneously, then the heat scale ala table top rules should come into play which makes the Mech slow down and targeting sensors whack out.

Yes, it should do 4x the heat of 1 ppc. The trouble is the heat scale goes to 40 IIRC and that is auto shut down. The threshold in MWO is closer to maybe 80? It varies with the number of heatsinks you have which is just wrong. The thing is instant heat vs heat over time is different. Say you had 40 heat sinks to fire those 40ppcs. If you alpha them your heat immediately goes to 40 (or maybe a delay to represent heat transfer, etc) In any case you immediately are in ammo explosion/shut down territory. If you chain fire the weapons like you are supposed to according to canon you can fire a weapon every 2.5s. Of course this would be sped up somewhat for video game scale. Maybe you fire every 1.25s instead. The point being that having all your heat coming in big packets is different than it coming in small packets. Having heat sinks=heat generated doesn't mean you can deal with all that heat generated at once, but you can deal with that much heat over 10s by canon. Time scales to be shortened for a video game.

No, that's a bad idea. Firing several weapons at the same time is fine. What they need to bring back is the arms and torso aiming differently. Right now everything is locked together and it's no problem at all to fire weapons in both arms and torsos with pinpoint accuracy. Going back to how it used to be with separate targeting reticles for the arms and torsos would curb excessive single weapon boating.

If they did some system where weapons mounted in a location would always fire parallel, that'd be great. The two recticle system still exists btw, its just an option now. I think its fine to alpha, but there should be a price to do so. Trouble is heat alone won't fix the problem and they've shown zero inclination towards figuring out a way to spread the damage around a bit.

Quite simply battletech's armor and weapons systems where designed around having hits land fairly randomly. Tossing that out requires a ton of band-aids to attempt to fix. I'm not really sure its even possible while still looking like battletech. What is more is they threw away a really good balancing tool by not using a 'cone of fire' like almost every single modern shooter uses. Things like large lasers are supposed to be easier to hit with, even at close range than a small laser. They don't have that advantage now, and without the CoF they won't.

 

[Midwayman]

This is the one thing that's trickier to carry over from TT. In TT, I believe:
[Heat at Round Start] + [Heat from Weapons Fired] - [Heat Dissipated] = Heat.

So as an example 20(S) + 15(F) - 10(D) = 25 at round end. You don't end over your cap of 30 so no problem. In game, you instantly cross your cap of 30 after you fire those weapons worth 15 heat. How do we address this? Do we adjust the heat cap by the amount you can dissipate in "one round?" Or do you increase the heat over the entire duration of "one round" while simultaneously dissipating it? Something else?

Mech speed and aiming penalties are something they an and should implement regardless though.

Something like you have a heat scale of 40. You fire 40 heat of weapons and over the course of 1-2s your heat gets added (maybe tunable per chassis) At the same time your heat sinks are taking heat out at 4 per second. Fire- T0, Heat 0. T1s Heat 16(+20,-4), T2s Heat 32 (+20, -4) By 2s in you could probably avoid a shutdown, but you'd have an ammo explosion risk, be slow, etc. You probably wouldn't want to do more than 2 at a time unless you had a killing shot.

 

[greenhawk]

This is the one thing that's trickier to carry over from TT.

not that hard I think, just need to use a running average over the last 5 -10 seconds then use that as the heat for working out the rest of things.

In reality its not that big a deal. How many shots with 4 or 5 ppc's do you think you can get off before overheating?

depends on the build. with my atlas-rs and 4 er ppc's, two alphas and then you are single shooting until you get the cool down chance. no over heating. on smaller ones, got to be getting close to only one.

 

[obidamnkenobi]

So nobody here playing this anymore? Isn't it not even out of beta yet?

I just tried it for the first time this week, and had a great time. Seemed like a pretty awesome mech game (also the only current one..), not to mention free.

But then I go look for guides and info online and all I see is whining, how the game sucks now, totally broken, #saveMWO etc. I'm not seeing that yet, and servers seem pretty darn full all the times I've played. Will I eventually have some epiphany and realize the game is garbage..? I even thought of putting real money into it at some point but hesitant to do that now. I dunno, I'll give it a while longer and see. But for now it's pretty damn fun

 

[BrightCandle]

I stopped playing the same day I built a complete battle simulator and then used it to find the best builds. The imbalance in the weapons was so glaringly obvious that it was disturbing. I did a similar test where I made the weapons act more like cannon and the balance was considerably better. The developers have a huge bias toward particular weapon types that its ruining what should be good builds.

They have moved the game on a bit but it still runs poorly considering it's graphics and the game is still just one massive grind. It's F2P and don't we know it.

 

[Gonad the Barbarian]

So nobody here playing this anymore? Isn't it not even out of beta yet?

I just tried it for the first time this week, and had a great time. Seemed like a pretty awesome mech game (also the only current one..), not to mention free.

But then I go look for guides and info online and all I see is whining, how the game sucks now, totally broken, #saveMWO etc. I'm not seeing that yet, and servers seem pretty darn full all the times I've played. Will I eventually have some epiphany and realize the game is garbage..? I even thought of putting real money into it at some point but hesitant to do that now. I dunno, I'll give it a while longer and see. But for now it's pretty damn fun

You're probably going to get burned out and frustrated about the time your cadet bonus runs out. There's fun to be had beyond that if you drop with a regular group but the game is pretty shallow and becomes tedious otherwise. The game "releases" Tuesday but is very, very far from the targets PGI has talked about since its inception and in some ways is behind where it was in the closed beta and that's where a lot of the griping is coming from.


And for anyone starting out, you're probably best off making your first set of mechs Jagermechs or Cataphracts.
Useful sites are here:
http://www.mechspecs.com/forum/
And here:
http://mwo.smurfy-net.de/

 

[greenhawk]

The game "releases" Tuesday but is very, very far from the targets PGI has talked about since its inception

they actually comming out of "beta", about 11 or so months late and without all that was promised?

gee, ....

Guessing some accountant in the back room finally put his foot down. The question is, are they going to keep improveing it to fix issues or are they going the "it's complete, no more updates" path.


Personally, while the lag was good for people outside the US a few patchs ago, I had to give up with the odd ball graphic glithes which did not ever seem to get fixed. Having a map where firing lasers blinded you was just wrong.

Of course, the issue of "bonus instant heat" from shooting too fast to stop boating was just a sick joke. I have not played since (so no idea if it was dumbed down or not).

Going away from cannon and it's years of balancing efforts was just silly.

 

[greenhawk]

So nobody here playing this anymore? Isn't it not even out of beta yet?

...

But then I go look for guides and info online and all I see is whining, how the game sucks now, totally broken, #saveMWO etc. I'm not seeing that yet,

and servers seem pretty darn full all the times I've played.

It is hard to play when taking out any mech without VIP or xp bonus generation items/upgrades means you do rarly have the money to repair your mech takes the fun out of it. but it is a f2p, so just another method to get you to fork over money if not sticking to the trail mechs and the locked loadout (which is why mechwarrior was ever fun).

That is probably as you are new to the game and have not experenced the game develope / change with each patch. Death by a thousand cuts rings rather true with this game.

That is because a game does not start without a full team on both sides. It is how the matching system works. For me that can be a very long match time as the game tries to balance skill level and team mech weights at a time when not many people are online (I am not in the US).

 

[HydroSqueegee]

So nobody here playing this anymore? Isn't it not even out of beta yet?

I just tried it for the first time this week, and had a great time. Seemed like a pretty awesome mech game (also the only current one..), not to mention free.

But then I go look for guides and info online and all I see is whining, how the game sucks now, totally broken, #saveMWO etc. I'm not seeing that yet, and servers seem pretty darn full all the times I've played. Will I eventually have some epiphany and realize the game is garbage..? I even thought of putting real money into it at some point but hesitant to do that now. I dunno, I'll give it a while longer and see. But for now it's pretty damn fun

i still play the shit out of this game, but all the hate in this thread killed it here. I play with the guys over at the Penny Arcade forums. Great group of guys and we've all been playing since mid closed beta or earlier. Playing with dudes in teh Vent channel make the game 1000% more fun.

There are a lot of valid complaints about the game, but there are still lots of people who whine about "cannon" and balance not being like table top and all that. you just have to ignore those kind of people. the game is in a pretty decent spot with the core mechanics. Balance is still being worked on, new features are still being added. "release" is later this month, but its just a media event at this time. nothing new for release. a lot of the features that need to be implemented are waiting on UI 2.0, which is due out in November. Community warfare comes "soon" after.

But really, if you like the game, come see us at penny-arcade. the thread here will just bring you down.

http://forums.penny-arcade.com/disc...b-has-been-updated-with-the-orion-variants/p1