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[Mechwarrior:Online] Weapon Rebalancing on the 21st. Oosik Sigs on P19
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They've said multiple times that tracking down the persistent crash bugs has been almost impossible because they're either bizarre and hard to reproduce because they have no obvious trigger, or they're weirdness inherent in Cry3 that they have to figure out how to fix without breaking the whole game.
They're working on it, but stuff that's caused by bottom level engine issues is a biiiitch to fix.
Keeps the game...refreshed, i guess you could say.
Steam and Origin - BillGates91
LoL - BillBotNik
MWO - BillGates
STEAM: Gasman1220 | My Backloggery
And I'm not saying that they're necessarily incompetent or unwilling to deal with the bugs; it's not even the bugs that bother me on a consistent basis. But the game has been in open beta for something like 9 months now and the game still has a number of the same major crashes and bugs it had when it went to open beta, which has an impact on the player base, especially for new players or players not invested in the BT universe. If you get a player new to BT/MW who drops in for the first few games, doesn't know how to work everything yet, gets obliterated by horrible game imbalances he doesn't even understand, and crashes out of or is otherwise crippled in the games where he isn't destroyed quickly, he's most likely not going to come back, and those are the new players an expanding game will desperately need.
All of which I was pointing out merely as something that could actually contribute to the game getting shut down, rather than the endless doomsaying shenanigans you get on the official forums where the game is doomed because they don't have the right shade of blue yet. MWO has problems, certainly, but they're more complicated than the vast majority of the mouthy official forumers have any clue about.
This is of course you don't mind not being able to use every single hardpoint. It's good variety of long range and close range damage and if you just use the lasers at there respective ranges then you wont overheat.
Steam and Origin - BillGates91
LoL - BillBotNik
MWO - BillGates
Seriously, though, this is something I would care about if I were looking to hire these guys, not buy one of their games. As a player I give exactly zero shits about how many people worked on something and a great many shits about the quality of the final product. PGI has created a game with very fun core gameplay and numerous, crippling bugs. I'm not going to write them a pass because their team is small.
StarCraft II User Name: DeadMenRise
"Look at that subtle off-white coloring, the tasteful thickness of it... Oh my God, it even has a watermark."
That doesn't fit according to the Oosik Mecklab. 2LL, 4ML, and a STD260 can only fit a single extra DHS. You'd have to drop down to a STD245 (only a difference of ~5kph less than the 260) in order to fit 4DHS. I've never ran a Hunch (decided to elite Cents first), but when I do I'll probably do just that. I hate being locked into only engaging at a single range.
STEAM: Gasman1220 | My Backloggery
The bugs and code shortcomings I can be really, really patient about; there is only so much work that can be done by 40 people, and coding is complicated as hell.
Where my patience wears thin is the complete, utter, and total inability to prioritize balance changes, and that's the area where PGI definitely fails by the widest, most culpable margin. When a major game change like HSR massively upsets the balance of the game and causes it to stagnate horribly for weeks on end, you get that shit locked down. Not necessarily because we hate it, but because new players are going to come in, pick a mech, and spend a dozen games in a row getting fucking roasted by shitty balance without getting to play shit. Then they will uninstall the game and badmouth it forever, regardless of how much the game improves. Coding may be pretty complicated, but changing item values, especially things like heat, damage, and firing rate, is probably something I could figure out how to do regularly without much trouble. They have got to get a handle on making balance changes within short periods of time if they really want MWO to go the distance; otherwise, they're just hemorrhaging new players in the weeks- or months-long imbalance periods, and they'll only ever get a fraction of those players back.
Maybe i said something wrong?
Edit- I didn't mention Endo..but i usually just assume thats standard now, if thats it, sorry.
Steam and Origin - BillGates91
LoL - BillBotNik
MWO - BillGates
It's true. As annoying as their inability to iron out all of the bugs they introduced a month ago (or even the ones that have existed since closed beta) is, it's baffling that they are clearly aware of the skewed, PPC's n' poptarts uber alles state of the meta, acknowledge it's a problem, and have still not bothered to do anything to address it after several weeks of time and multiple updates.
Or for that matter, that it's taken them months to even plan to do something about the "If you can take it and you don't you are DOING IT WRONG" overpoweredness of ECM.
Like...they aren't having pizza parties all day. Work is happening. And in all fairness to PGI, PPC is just another meta, and maybe it would have gone away on it's own, like splat cats. It hasn't, so sure, get that sucker worked on.
FYI: Image above links to my webcomic, and is (mostly) SFW. Steam ID: Obos Vent: Obos
Ah, nope, it was the -18 armor. With full armor you can only fit 1 DHS. With a STD245 you can fit all 4 DHS with -1 armor.
STEAM: Gasman1220 | My Backloggery
I can't really fathom a valid excuse why they couldn't tweak them just a TINY bit in this recent patch. It's so goddamn obvious PPC's are broken, there is literally no excuse I can think of why they couldn't tune them just a LITTLE bit, not a rehaul, not a major nerf, just a slight nerf so they are not GOD LIKE and are just well, they are still broken, but its not as bad as before broken.
I don't know how there balance system works, or hows it stored on the server or any of that, so maybe it really is a big task to change balance. If that is the case, they need to work on a more robust system then.
Or at least give us a reason why they decided not to slightly tweak a weapon that is clearly, broken in the most recent patch.. AC 20's are questionable, but PPC's are plainly obvious. When everyone and there mother uses them, you know somethings not right.
Steam and Origin - BillGates91
LoL - BillBotNik
MWO - BillGates
Oh...yeah forgot about that, sorry. I always nuke the legs because rarely do HBK's get legged when that hunch up top is like a fat target.
Steam and Origin - BillGates91
LoL - BillBotNik
MWO - BillGates
And I could understand that for a month or two for something like ECM, where the balance is much more complicated than just making it run hotter or shoot slower. But ECM was broke as fuck for months.
Then you have something like PPCs, which only got buffed because they were shitty without HSR. A really fast and easy fix would be to return to the pre-buff values. What's the worst that happens, PPCs end up a bit underpowered? How could that possibly be worse than right now?
Back in the closed beta, they had a brief issue with people using a text editor to alter weapon values stored in a beta file on a player's computer to get ludicrous death-weapons. It's just not possible that it takes weeks to figure out how to open one of those files, change a couple numbers, and then have the file updated in the next patch, so the issue has to be some sort of insane regimented, inflexible protocol that PGI has for weapon balance, and that protocol has to go if PGI wants to retain new players for any length of time. They need to be able to prioritize major imbalance issues, analyze the source, and come up with fixes within days, not weeks or months, if it's something that can be fixed by just tweaking item values in a text file.
This thing where they approach weapon balance in a "cycle" is flat stupid, because it means they're delaying implementing vital, unavoidable fixes while they churn through a multitude of other weapons that aren't doing anything horrible to the game balance, and then they take months to do it. If your car has three flat tires, you don't wait until after you get the oil changed to replace them just because that's what your schedule says to do.
Annoying, sure. But it was not an auto-win.
In the light world, ECM is most certainly a auto-win, even today.
Steam and Origin - BillGates91
LoL - BillBotNik
MWO - BillGates
It is broke as fuck in this sense: again, if you have a 'mech which CAN carry it, and you choose not to carry it, you have objectively made a mistake and you are actively handicapping yourself and the teams you play with. There is no reason not to carry it. It is more valuable than anything else you can do with 2 crits and 1.5 tons on any build.
Any single weapon or piece of equipment which that can be said of, where using it is objectively better than not using it in any given situation, is unbalanced. The only exception I can think of is double heat sinks...there's really no good reason to ever not have double heat sinks. But the tabletop game was guilty of that too.
As for PPCs, as I've said before, I think all that's really necessary is to increase their heat a little bit to the point where carrying huge batteries of them is unfeasible. Two of them on a build should be fine, there are lots of canon 'mechs with an arsenal built around a pair of PPC's. Three or more is and ought to be incredibly rare.
MechWarrior Online: Khyber Pryde
If the other team had it and yours didn't, the disruption counted extremely heavily in their favor; that was also an event which happened constantly. The fact that it blocked friendly location signals was alone enough to make it indeed "broke as fuck". Then there were all the other advantages and it could only be countered by more ECM, so yeah, it was definitely pretty horribly unbalanced. They shouldn't even have released it in that state, much less left it be for months on end.
And yeah, playing in premades countered how horribly it was broken, but the majority of players drop solo, which means it was a broken item for the majority of players and was in desperate need of fixing from the day it was released. Instead, we got months of ECM lights that could not be targeted by streaks or LRMs and could no be reliably hit with anything but lasers, when fixing that should've been the number-one balance priority (along with streaks, which were also horribly broken in that time period).
Yeah, it's better now because of other balance items (namely HSR), but they only JUST fixed one of the core issues, which was the friendly signal thing. That was honestly as bad as not being able to hit with streaks or getting jumped by ECM mobs, because it was ludicrously easy to lose where your teammates were and what shape they were in.
Now I don't care either way if my team has ECM or not. In the current sniper heavy, pop'tarting meta-game, ECM doesn't really confer that much of an advantage when people are engaging enemies at such an extreme range that they can't even target them in the first place.
"Democracy is based on the assumption that a million men are smarter than one man. How's that again? I missed something" Lazarus Long
wtf? The only thing that comes to mind is the contrast/glitched textures on the day version make it harder for me to play, but I must be better than most people in thermal and night vision...
Hmm. Looks like I was wrong! Well, off to the mechlab tonight.
Isn't it the other way around, though? Frozen City Night has FAR better visibility and Frozen City (Day) has crap for visibility. So it would make sense that you have better situational awareness on FCN.
Wang on sale. Is it good? Or if I wanted to start in on Centurions, should I just grind C-bills for one of the normal variants?
I want to zombie mode like a mofo.
capnnips in MWO
It makes sense, the disparity just surprises me. That's a pretty big shift between the two.
my frozen city/ frozen city night is similar. 0.94 to 1.57. sadly thats my best map.
ugh... ever since stats have been tracking im doing quite poor in the win dept.
assault/conquest are 1.00/1.19 respectively.
and i finally passed 1000 kills the last night i played apparently.
625/450 overall W/L
Do you want:
* The ability to fit an AC/20 or two UAC/5s in the arm?
* a permanent 30% Cbill bonus per match using this 'Mech?
* A unique camo pattern?
If yes, get the Wang. If none of that is overly important to you, you're probably better off with the Cbill variants.
The Wang's a fun 'mech. It's ridiculously survivable (like all Cents) and you've got a gigantic screw-you AC20. It's a little easy to lose it, and doing so drops a whole lot of your firepower, but you can zombie almost as well as the other Centurion builds once it's gone. (The other Cents will have a missile back-up in their left torso, usually, and that can be quite a bit of punch depending on what they've mounted.)
A de-armed Wang has the benefit (?) that everyone knows you've been neutered, and so most people will drop you way down the target priority list, which means you can sometimes zombie for a lot longer than other Cents, and because you've usually got nothing important in your left torso (and you should not be running an XL), you've got two whole heavily armored sections that people can throw weapons fire at with absolutely no effect on you.
Steam: Elvenshae // PSN: Elvenshae // WotC: Elvenshae
Yes, hesitantly.
Nice, but not necessary.
Meh.
So that works out to.... a lukewarm yes?
[Edit] Then I did the real-dollar math....eh. Guess I'll pass, and give them money for other things instead.
capnnips in MWO
NEVER do the real dollar math. it will make you weep.
It's why I doubt I will ever own a Hero mech. Unless it's like 50% off.
Steam: stabbitystyle | XBL: S For Stabbity | MWO: stabbitystyle
I actually don't mind the real dollars much; it just tips the scales a bit in this case. Though Elvenshae makes some compelling arguments.
Gah! Gripped with indecision.
capnnips in MWO