Mechwarrior Online

[Evildrider]

I like how they are trying to increase their player base by adding third person.. but then turn around and basically say "you are baddies and should just learn to play the right way."

[Falconeer]

aniviron: You've stated in the past that you don't want to give players using third person view a competitive advantage by being able to see around corners, behind them, or in their far periphery. Do you have any concrete plans for how to do this? It seems like this will be an unavoidable side effect of having the camera located behind the mech, and it is the main reason that almost the entire forum is against having it in the game. You could assuage a lot of upset on the forums if you detailed how you are going to do this.

A: Once players get their hands on 3PV, I think most people will be pleasantly surprised how little the camera impacts gameplay. Early tests are showing that there is not much of an advantage. That being said, until we get this viewmode in the hands of 1000s of players, we’re not going to see how it fully gets used.

 

[HaemishM]

 

This team seems like they are a compass pointing to magnetic wrong.

[satael]

I'd like 3PV... for the few times I'd like to look at how my mech actually looks look from the outside (when not in a mech bay). after that it will probably be just a curio for me unless it significantly lenghens the wait time (and balance) for 1PV.

[Falconeer]

At least Community Warfare between merc corps will be forced on "hardcore" mode (First person), but we all know they have all the time to change that too, right?

[Shannow]

At least Community Warfare between merc corps will be forced on "hardcore" mode (First person), but we all know they have all the time to change that too, right?

Assuming that Community Warfare isn't some giant clusterfuck in the first place.

Right?

.

..


Guys?

[Merusk]

I'd like 3PV... for the few times I'd like to look at how my mech actually looks look from the outside (when not in a mech bay). after that it will probably be just a curio for me unless it significantly lenghens the wait time (and balance) for 1PV.

3pv works well in WoT, even though you DO get the "peeking around corners" part.  If you let it work as FPV = sniper/ accuracy and 3pv = driving it's a great setup.  Of course, with the pinpoint accuracy, lack of COF that we have in the current game I can't see it working well in the game space.

What it *will* do is sell a lot more custom paint, for the above reason. People want to look at their mechs. If they never see them outside of the Mechlab, why bother painting them as it gives no advantages.

[Arthur_Parker]

I keep expecting them to figure out that they hit a nice balance of fun combat by making people place their shots where an enemy was going to be, not under the cross hairs at the time you fired (unless moving direct away or towards you).  Absolutely no sign of it as yet.

[Llyse]

Meh, I don't the naming and 3rd pv but if it means they ticking in money it's acceptable.

Meanwhile I tried to find Slayerik's Cataphract post but had no luck looking for his Jump around Cataphract build.

Besides the Marmoset and CTF-3D, what should my 3rd Cataphract be?

[Lantyssa]

I like both the 2D and the 4X.  Think my builds for 'em are listed in the 'mech customization sticky.

[Falconeer]

Quickdraw video.

These videos are so bland I could fall asleep. They also give a new meaning to the concept of brown, pushing it beyond what the eye can see.

[Samprimary]

The poor quickdraw; a mech introduced into a game in which the meta has not room nor patience for it. Boldly it strode onto lengthy fields where assault mechs going just ten kph slower than it and carrying about three times as much armor were able to hit it for 50 damage spot alphas halfway across the map

[Falconeer]

Yeah.

The one thing I've been waiting for more than anything is this:

StalaggtIKE: Light and Medium mechs were the most prevalent within Battletech lore, with Heavy and Assault being a rarity. This is not the case within our current meta game, which consists of opposing teams of mostly Heavy and Assault class. Basically the plan is to bring your largest, heaviest hitting mech. Is this intended,and if not, are there any plans to curb this trend?

A: We have some plans in the works to limit the amount of tonnage on the battlefield and encourage balance through rewarding well structured teams.

We can't get it soon enough. And of course, it's tied to UI 2.0 so September at best, but probably not.

[Samprimary]

I trust them to be able to balance weight classes about as much as I trust them to be able to balance the weapons

which is to say, at this particular point in time, not at fucking all, as a result of witnessing the ridiculousness of their proposed boating solution as well as how they are getting prepared to adjust the LPL from its current tenuously okay position to being mostly worthless, because they want it to match its appropriate position on some graph they made charting where pulse lasers are 'supposed' to be relative to each other in output

[Arthur_Parker]

Game has been broken for months, maybe they find it fun, I dunno. 

They shouldn't have put the training grounds in, I think whoever is play testing it uses them, why else would you find strapping as many long range weapons as possible on and finding a spot to camp fun.

[Samprimary]

Oh trust me we're having a wikkit fun time just simply following the meta.

We're in a 4man group that all run 5ppc stalkers. We go to a predetermined map point. We are patient. Something comes over a hill. We call its target letter. We all fire at it. It is crippled and dies shortly thereafter under a hail of 200 damage quad alphas.

they will eventually effectively nerf this and we'll just drop ppc's like they're hot and go straight to whatever new badly balanced meta rules all with an iron fist.

[Arthur_Parker]

I'm not sure they can or should nerf that, but snipers shouldn't be as good as brawlers close up and lights should get some damage reduction or aim penalty for being nippy wee buggers, otherwise it makes more sense to bring a medium with more armour or it would but snipers.

-30% damage for being in a light (I'd maybe exclude spiders as they seems to have this already) plus fix srm's and they'd at least be heading in the right direction.

[Falconeer]

I find SRMs viable with Artemis, but wet towels without it. I know people still hate a salvo of Short Range Missiles in the face, especially if you stagger and shoot them every second or so. What I don't know is if you can remove the shake or the smoke by hacking something client side or lowering the graphic details.

[Goreschach]

Oh trust me we're having a wikkit fun time just simply following the meta.

We're in a 4man group that all run 5ppc stalkers. We go to a predetermined map point. We are patient. Something comes over a hill. We call its target letter. We all fire at it. It is crippled and dies shortly thereafter under a hail of 200 damage quad alphas.

they will eventually effectively nerf this and we'll just drop ppc's like they're hot and go straight to whatever new badly balanced meta rules all with an iron fist.

The easiest way to fix this would be adding in long range ballistic artillery with a large aoe. This would allow players to flush out campers. This would actually imrpove the general meta of 'lump all your team into a great big ball of death and roflstop the spread out pubbies'.

Too bad nothing like that exists in battletech.

[Arthur_Parker]

The old way was just to use terrain get close and then kill them with brawlers.  Tricky against 4 in a team but 4 in a team on comms is an advantage you can't really nerf without taking a lot of fun out of the game, so it won't surprise me if they did attempt to nerf it at some point.

[Shannow]

Or pick them off with strikes and lights while getting some LRM mechs in range from behind hills. Hard to evolve tactics for this sort of thing in the instanced battles that we face though, since no guarentee you'll face them in your next 5 battles or something.

I can remember back in the days of Btech MUX , combat had devolved into basically two large blobs of Heavies/Assaults too afraid to actually engage each other (12 hours of real time downtime would do that to you, (kids today have it way to easy). So we started to get fairly tricky with our tactics....going strike/light heavy and sniping them until they broke ranks. Sticking a group of brawlers in lakes or behind hills and drawing their blob into an ambush....Drawing them off just far enough with our strikes and putting our heavies right outside their base etc. Ahh the good old days....(now where is my walking stick).  
BTW nothing will make you shit yourself like suddenly having 12 mechs appear in your contact report under 9 hex range even if it was in text.

[Ironwood]

A wee video that fools you into thinking it's not just a big pile of bullshit.

[Falconeer]

You know, I can see the flaws and what prevents it from being so awesome. I keep getting angry every day for what doesn't get fixed or worse, gets broken even more.

And still, I put a couple of hours into it every day. No other game has kept me this long in the 21st century. It could be fantastic, it should be fantastic. It's infuriating the way they are dealing with things. I've been confident they were going to fix stuff if nothing else for the sake of money, but in the last few months they have really chomped my faith. And all that said, I still have a hard time not enjoying this. Maybe it's not just a game to me, it's a kink.

Basically, to me the fact that it's so unpolished, unfinished and broken does not change the fact that it's lovely to play it.

[Ironwood]

I would feel the same if my machine wasn't being an utter cunt right now and pretty much every game is currently unplayable.

But I do like looking at big robots fucking each other up.

[Samprimary]

Yeah it's like what they said in Violent Combat Robot Show 13. Something like "We hate you because we love you, PGI. We hate you because we like what this game can be and sometimes is. We want to give you a lot of money. We see the potential you keep deflecting with shitty design decisions, always so tantalizingly close."

I'm in the same boat. Shitty games are a dime a dozen, easy to toss. But this one keeps just jilting me but staying so close. WE HATE YOU BECAUSE WE LOVE YOU, STOMPY ROBOTS

[Slayerik]

Meh, I don't the naming and 3rd pv but if it means they ticking in money it's acceptable.

Meanwhile I tried to find Slayerik's Cataphract post but had no luck looking for his Jump around Cataphract build.

Besides the Marmoset and CTF-3D, what should my 3rd Cataphract be?

http://mwo.smurfy-net.de/mechlab#i=40&l=ea3527b990c615411a1597186b8caf943299a42a

It's on our main Builds page.

[5150]

Oh trust me we're having a wikkit fun time just simply following the meta.

We're in a 4man group that all run 5ppc stalkers. We go to a predetermined map point. We are patient. Something comes over a hill. We call its target letter. We all fire at it. It is crippled and dies shortly thereafter under a hail of 200 damage quad alphas.

they will eventually effectively nerf this and we'll just drop ppc's like they're hot and go straight to whatever new badly balanced meta rules all with an iron fist.

The easiest way to fix this would be adding in long range ballistic artillery with a large aoe. This would allow players to flush out campers. This would actually imrpove the general meta of 'lump all your team into a great big ball of death and roflstop the spread out pubbies'.

Too bad nothing like that exists in battletech.

Arrow 4 would be a better bet

[Kageru]

This game has an impressively bad new player experience... I wonder how many hours new players have been spent in the mech-lab trying to remove the flamer from the light trial mech.

So basically the sequence is to get blown up a lot while your recruit bonus gives you positive earning and then buy a mech you can customize. The forums seem to suggest a centurion or hunchback as a good first step? Are the random matches weight limited to the point I'm a team deficit if i'm not fielding the heaviest mech I can?

[satael]

This game has an impressively bad new player experience... I wonder how many hours new players have been spent in the mech-lab trying to remove the flamer from the light trial mech.

So basically the sequence is to get blown up a lot while your recruit bonus gives you positive earning and then buy a mech you can customize. The forums seem to suggest a centurion or hunchback as a good first step? Are the random matches weight limited to the point I'm a team deficit if i'm not fielding the heaviest mech I can?

I'd say you are a deficit to yourself if you are not fielding the mech with most firepower you can (and like to play). Killing an enemy mech with a light mech or an assault mech both give the same rewards afaik.

[Kageru]

So the sides in a PUG game are not weight / tier balanced?

[Falconeer]

They kind of are. The matchmaker tries as best as it can to pit mirror weight classes against each other, meaning if you have 4 assault, 2 heavy and 1 medium and 1 light the matchmaker tries to put together a PUG on the other side with the same configuration AND in the same ELO range. But it keeps trying only for a certain amount of seconds, and starts widening the range as time passes, until it picks up anything that starts a game. In general there's a certain balance these days, but premades of four tend to screw the thing since the system seems to have a hard time balancing against that.

The lack of any form of tutorial is stupid and terrible, but they know and it's one more thing that is gonna be implemented in the next few months. it is so bad that all the friends of mine who tried the game without my supervision didn't last 2 matches, while all those who had me explaining the basics to them kind of liked it. There are just too many things that aren't common to any other game, without a tutorial you are alienating so many players right off the bat. Which I think speaks volumes about the game itself, considering how many play it anyway.

For a starting 'mech, in the actual meta EVERYTHING that is not an Assault or a finely tuned Heavy is gonna frustrate you a lot, but either a lasering Hunchback or some other cool Centurion (check here for lots of specs)could ease the initial pain for you a little bit. A Raven if you want an ECM light without being THAT light.

Kageru, are you Neaon Reaper? I saw that name pop up in my friends list last night but I couldn't place it in the f13 roster.

[Kageru]

No, I started playing last night so not on your friends list... Kagdoom. I'm playing the trial hunchback at the moment, because at least it has consistent weapons... even if it has way too many of them.

[satael]

So they now have a new "founders" program up (with forum titles and mechs etc) Project Phoenix 

[Falconeer]

I made another thread just for it. It's the fucking money grab you can't say no to. The UNSEEN? HOLY FUCKING 'MECH THIS IS A LOW BLOW!  

[Pennilenko]

Those sons of bitches. I hate them so much.