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May 19, 2024, 12:54:38 PM

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A dev posted about plans for weapon balance.

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Due to the sheer volume of conversations about the Medium Lasers, Flamer, Ammunition/Ton and Large Lasers etc. I am creating this post to expose our weapon balancing plan so you can see what we have planned and what we have under investigation.

This thread will be updated by David Bradley or myself and will remain locked as a type of release notes to all of you.

What we have planned:
- Heavy investigation into AC20 damage/RoF.
- SRM spread normalized at a certain distance from the firing Mech to keep the cluster together at long range.
- S-SRM to lock onto random components. There is still a chance of all SSRMs hitting center torso, just not 100% like it currently is.
- Some long range weapons will start to disrupt targeting abilities of LRM boats and Gauss builds.

What we have under investigation:
- Upcoming pilot modules that may affect weapons. i.e. Just say no to pay to win.
- Look into heat values of all weapons.

All items in this thread will be removed as we address them and added to the Patch Notes of any upcoming release.

Mmmm new patch definitely did something weird to graphics.

They won't have all this fixed for next week, unfortunate timing with xcom out. The new graphics, planned (not sure live yet) pilot lab skill bonus increases & new collision system are all very nice though. I'm pretty sure they are balancing weapons by what people are using most/least of on custom mechs, which seems to be a reasonable way to make a start on it.

Played about 4 games last night, everything was fine until we got one on Caustic valley when the game ground to a halt (3 of us on TeamSpeak, none of us were where the others could see us, game ended for 1 of us while the other 2 were still in game after the timer hit zero)

I suspect something is broken on Caustic

Quote from: 5150 on October 10, 2012, 02:59:50 AM

No, ever since the patch any match that goes past around 8 minutes seems to start to build up some kind of server lag. I think it may be some kind of garbage collection problem that's causing way too many checks on something. It seems rather random as to when it'll start and how bad it'll get.

Well they certainly didn't get a magic bullet with dual cores on this patch. At least they can start optimizing again.

Wake me up when we get a content patch.

I think I just killed Nebu in a random match. With triple AC-2 which are now a quite viable support weapon awesome, for real

EDIT: Try the new night vision. With no night maps it's utterly useless, but sure is pretty.

MechWarrior Online Open Beta Will Begin Next Week

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MechWarrior Online has been in closed beta for a while, but now it’s time to get down to business, as Piranha Games finally announced the beginning of the open beta.

The next phase of the test, that will be open to everyone, will begin on Tuesday, October the 16th, while the Founders Program (that provided quite a few perks and access to the closed beta) will be officially discontinued on the 14th.

Given the current pace of changes, this seems pretty risky to me as they always seem to need a couple of weeks to fix major changes.

Has anyone got the question on the PC Gamer digital copy redemption page right? I've tried all the answers I can get from page 88 and all get rejected :-(

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CHECK YOUR PAGE NUMBER AT THE BOTTOM OF THE PRINTED PAGE, NOT THE DIGITAL FILE PAGE

I think mine was off by 1 page, well answer was off by 1 too lol

That help at all?

Full thread here

Quote from: Arthur_Parker on October 10, 2012, 11:04:02 AM

MechWarrior Online Open Beta Will Begin Next Week

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Given the current pace of changes, this seems pretty risky to me as they always seem to need a couple of weeks to fix major changes.

Open Beta is supposed to be a few months long I thought. Not just a couple weeks then final product.

Wow, the game isn't nearly ready for open beta, especially given that that's essentially the game's release and that the clock starts ticking on the boosted experience/money that the founders paid for. Last I heard, they hadn't even finished balancing repair costs/round rewards for the game's economy.

My concern is just initial word of mouth. I have no doubt they'll get it all working correctly again, later on community warfare might turn out to be stupid and they might do other daft things but servers are a bit flakey at the minute.

Hopefully the game will be stable enough for them to be able to continue to work on the rest of it while people happily death match away. If they have to devote a lot of time fixing fundamental issues with the servers, net code or weapon balance they will end up facing a two edged sword of pissed off founders and negative word of mouth about an unfinished buggy game from people who just dropped in to play fighting robots. I doubt that calling it open beta will help them if things go south.

For a game that could definitely use so much more testing and all, it's pretty fucking amazingly fun. So yeah, it would be awesome if they could spend some more time in beta, but don't forget the reason they sold so many founders package after the initial rush is word of mouth, which has been very good.

So sure, now that the novelty wore off the glitches are more annoying and people are being very vocal about it, but the bottom line is that the game is fun as hell and it plays very good.

Decent video tutorial. PGI should just slap this somewhere in the menus before Open Beta next week.

[rant]

Fun times... swamp poop

Logged in after a long time of not playing in order to see the new graphics engine and get a feel before the open beta starting next week...

Jumped on my founder atlas as I saw that all had reseted since my last time playing (and I had no cash to customize it)
Load into the game, notice that I have no ammo, well, 4 medium lasers should do something so off to find a proper target!
Find a lone dragon which should be beatable with the lasers if nothing goes wrong...only to see my atlas get shredded in a matter of moments...
Turns out that my atlas (and judging by the forums not just my mechs) is broken and comes with 0 armor and no ammo...
And as a bonus you can't add any rear armor to it in the mech lab, hooray for my atlas with 0 armor in the back!

Yes, this game is ready for launch (meaning there will be no more wipes and premium time will start running for founders) next week...

[/rant]

Who is the publisher on this?

That is the thing. Nobody is. Or actually, Infinite Game Publishing, from Montreal.

Hotfix today addressed a few issues. If broken shit annoys you I'd give this a miss till a couple of days after the 16th. While trying not to sound like a fanboi, they upgraded the crysis engine this week and next week they are adding a shedload of new game features, so I expect more of the same.

Quote from: Arthur_Parker on October 11, 2012, 04:42:18 PM

Still can't add armor to the rear side of my atlas so the hotfix didn't fix anything for me Ohhhhh, I see.

I would have no problem with patches breaking stuff (and not being fixed "really quickly") if the game wasn't being released (open beta=release since there won't be any wipes once it starts) next week...

edit: the reason open beta starts next week is because closed beta players have done all they can http://mwomercs.com/news/2012/10/470-bryan-ekman-russ-bullock-on-open-beta

They keep repeating they don't consider the upcoming stage as the official release. "It's open beta, not release". This should be reflected by the fact that real money transactions are still not possible, but this is not clear yet. They are supposedly going to clarify on that soon.

Quote from: Falconeer on October 12, 2012, 05:10:38 AM

Any beta that doesn't end in wiping the servers is a release in my view.

edit: end in wiping ~~in the end~~

It worries me that they are dumping 3 balance changing/breaking systems (Ferro, Endo and DHS) on the game at the same time they go open beta.

Well, it is beta.... kinda.

Quote from: satael on October 12, 2012, 04:19:34 AM

Quote from: Arthur_Parker on October 11, 2012, 04:42:18 PM

Still can't add armor to the rear side of my atlas so the hotfix didn't fix anything for me Ohhhhh, I see.

I can see your point, it's not a good situation. I had an atlas dc the same, armour seemed bugged, I sold it (it failed to sell a few times too), bought it again and the new one was ok.

Official Response to Community Concerns - OCT 12/2012

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A response to the major concerns of the community.

We would like to let you all know that we DO listen and DO carefully follow the forums, Facebook, Tweets, PMs and support tickets. We have a team of committed staff whose entire job is to tell us these things.

Game development is similar to trying to steer a very large ship. To make changes in direction takes time and accurate judgement calls. Even after the decision to change direction has been made, it takes a lot of time to make sure the change is working and the direction is valid. A lot of the feedback on the forums specifically are in the **** for implementation, but again it comes down to time to get them ready and tested before sending it out to you folks on the live servers.

That being said, we’d like to address the concerns and worries that many of you have regarding Open Beta, Match Making, Founder’s Premiums, Game Balance, New User Flow and the future of Community Warfare.

Open Beta:

We have decided to push Open Beta back. We agree that the game's current state of stability is not allowing us to get the latest experience across to new and veteran players alike. This is a short push back on the date and will depend on the stability and playability of the build.

Current Gameplay Issue:

The instability (lag to completely dead FPS) has been identified and we will put out a fix tonight. We also want to make sure this fix works on the Live game servers so you will get a new patch very soon.

Match Making:

The developers at PGI are all veteran game players. Many of us were or still are competitive gamers and truly know the feeling of a great match played between two equally matched teams.

The next 3 stages of planned releases for Match Making involve the following:

Phase 1:

Reduce the maximum # of players in a group to 4. This means when players form a group, they will only be able to add 3 people. When that group launches, they will be put in a bucket. The match maker will then fill the rest of the 8 player team with 4 PUGs or any partial groups that are looking for a match at that moment. The same will happen for the other team. Matches will still be 8v8 but instead of playing against 8 people in an organized premade, you will see a max of 4.

Now before you light your pitchforks, we know that this does not address all the issues and that 8-player groups are the mainstay of community and organized team-play. This is why we move to Phase 2 VERY soon after Phase 1.

Phase 2:

Players will be able to convert their 4-player group to an 8-player group similarly to how World of Warcraft’s group to raid conversion works. With a click of a button, a group leader can convert a 4-player group to 8-players and invite 4 more players to the group. There is a limitation to this however. If the group leader decides to convert to an 8-player group, they MUST have 8 players in order to launch. (i.e. you cannot launch a game with 5,6 or 7 players). In addition to that, your 8-player group will be matched to another 8-player group ONLY. This does reduce the change of finding a match quickly but at the same time 8-players teams will finally be matched to other 8-player teams exclusively.

At some future date we will also want to include the ability to challenge a specific 8-player team to a match in a competitive/eSport manner. But as stated, this will be coming at a later date.

Phase 3:

We have been examining the various ranking systems in other games/structured tournament play etc. This includes ELO, TrueSkill and others. Our current plan is to use a hybrid system that uses the mentality of ELO with a weighting system that we’ve determined that drives down to player effectiveness/skill in a match. In order for this to work properly, we will need to do heavy pre-release testing before it goes live to the community and hence the amount of time to get it implemented.

We currently cannot go into detail as to how this system will work because we are not going to over-promise something that may change during implementation. We will try to keep you as up to date on this as possible.

Founder’s Premium Account Status:

We have heard your cries and we are responding to them…

On the date of Open Beta, your Premium Account timer WILL start ticking. Around Open Beta, a button will appear that will allow YOU the Founder’s account holder to decide when the timer starts to tick down. At the same time as this button appearing, your used Premium Account time will be reset to its full value. At that point, you can click the button to start your timer but you cannot stop it. It will be up to you to decide when the Premium Account starts to tick.

Please note that this only applies to Founder’s Premium Account Bonus. Founder’s Mechs behave as planned from Open Beta onward.

Players who purchase a Premium Account AFTER Open Beta will have their timers start immediately upon purchase.

Game Balance:

The game is fairly close to where we want it but the last few items are finally coming into play in terms of Mech on-board systems and items such as Double Heat Sinks, Ferro Fibrous Armor which directly relate to weapon balance and combat experience. Now that those systems are in place, we will be looking into balancing factors such as heat and damage/damage over time etc.

For more information about where weapons are going, check out this link.

New User Experience:

We are adding a lot of tutorials for new players, and we believe this will help greatly. We’re also tightening the UI to make the flow easier to understand. In general, we’re adding a lot in the coming days, and we do understand this is needed to help new players the various complexities of MechWarrior Online.

Videos of every aspect of Mech Warfare will be coming soon, including moving your Mech, arming your Mech and tactics with your Mech.

Community Warfare:
Let’s start off by re-quoting the original Community Warfare Pillar from our game description:

Community Warfare:
MechWarrior® in all of its incarnations has always had a loyal following of players in one of the strongest on-line communities in gaming history. Piranha-Games hopes to bring this community together in a friendly conflict of universal control. This may sound a little odd, but it is the fun competitiveness that will keep the game alive and kicking for years to come. Utilizing the BattleTech® Inner Sphere, we plan to have skirmishes amongst the Great Houses in BattleTech® lore. Allowing the player to have an active part in this conflict is one of our key directives in designing this game. Players will be able to create, manage and customize their Merc Corp's player base and appearance, while banding together to really delve into the Inner Sphere conflict where House alignment reigns supreme. Merc Corp leaders will bid and fight for occupation rights to some of the most valuable planets across the Inner Sphere and challenge other Merc Corps for control of planets reaping large rewards.

Nothing has changed from this original vision of where we want to take Community Warfare. The thing about Community Warfare the decision to push it out further post Open Beta, is the sheer size of the feature and the amount of time to implement. Right now we want the dev team to focus on getting the current game feature set into the live build and then stabilize the build as people join us through the first few weeks of Open Beta. Soon after, a large segment of the entire team will shift over to getting Community Warfare coded and implemented so we can get this into the hands of internal/early beta tester’s hands so we can launch the feature in the future. Because of the sheer workload of this feature we cannot give you an accurate timeline for delivery for this but we will start rolling out information as we begin development of Community Warfare.

After this big gameplay injection, we will look at the plan for the Clan Invasion.

- The MechWarrior™ Online® Team

Xcom is bloody good, I'm taking a break for a while till they sort their shit out.

Nice to see them push the open beta back (and acknowledge that there are some real problems in the game right now). Also being able to decide when to start the premium time is a nice (planned) change.

No patch today, its been pushed back to next week :-(

I'm so sad. Also, I'm one of those who's been loving the game from its earliest iterations, I just have a lot of fun with it no matter what. But one can't ever get enough new Mechwarrior related content. Should be lots of stuff next Tuesday though, Cicada, Artemis, Beagle, ECM and more.

Fucking finally. Except we'll see this 'mech on the battlefield in approximately a year or two.

In fairness to them, their art department has to poop out the base 'mech and multiple variants with differing weapon layouts, so the work required to get a model of mech stomping around on the battlefield isn't insignificant. But yeah, it'd be really swell if they accelerated the mech deployment speed.