The new forums will be named Coin Return (based on the most recent
vote)! You can check on the status and timeline of the transition to the new forums
here.
The Guiding Principles and New Rules
document is now in effect.
Mechwarrior Online: PGI is on a roll and May is gonna rock. CTD hotfix is out!
Posts
someone kick me. I just realized I wasted 6 mil cbills buying an engine for the sprinturion last month when I had a perfectly good XL in my reaper this whole time I could have used.
@TheExAm, why oh why did you have to bring this up and made me look. <tear>.
For once it's good to see a bug pop up again. Looks like more confirmation of how they'll handle the mad cat shoulders. Unless of course it's old assets that are just sitting around.
http://mwomercs.com/forums/topic/111353-community-warfare-clarity-p2pf2p/
For those at work,
Yes, we are considering monetizing aspects of Community Warfare.
A small one-time MC and/or CB fee to create a Merc Corp*.
Some aspects of CW will reward players with MC, we are considering a Premium Account requirement to participate in these rewards. This will not prevent non-paying customers to participate in all aspects of CW with their friends and teammates.
If we decided to launch Private Matches, they will likely require a Premium Account to cover costs of hosting a match on our hardware.
* We are looking at ways to prevent/mitigate name reserving and parking. We may simply require players to have a minimum of 1 company or 12 active players to maintain a valid status.
At this time no final decisions have been made.
Due to the article coming out on a Friday and myself being on vacation, I was not in a position to write this response on the forums. Instead I used my Twitter account to try and alleviate some of the concerns. Please consider any communication via my Twitter account as an official response.
The Polygon article was correctly reported with one omission by the interviewer and one omission from myself:
I made mention near the end of the conversation that no final decisions have been made. I also used soft language, like may, possibly, could, probably - these are far from definite. At no time did I make any statements of finality.
I did not clarify that the requirement of premium time would be for the MC reward system and private matches. Both are part of the CW.
The response from the community and the timing of events were both unfortunate.
We cannot control when third-parties release their interviews with us and how they present the information we have provided them.
While we accept that the community is passionate and expects communication from us, and we always strive to provide the best answer we can:
Sometimes we are simply not available to answer right at that moment; Holidays do exist for developers.
It’s one thing to disagree politely and intelligently, even passionately, with the content as it had been initially presented.It’s a whole other issue when the community sends violent threats to PGI/IGP staff for any reason: whether it’s a misunderstanding or for not being available to respond in as timely a manner as expected.
However, we will hold firm that aggressive and threatening behaviour towards staff of fellow MechWarriors will never be acceptable and will result in banishment for those who do so.
I take solace in the fact that this behavior represents the minority, not the majority of our amazing players.
There are probably hundreds of other questions to be answered, however this was by far the most pressing. We are going to be rolling out a series of Command Chair posts over the next few weeks and months detailing all the aspects of CW. Since it's such a large feature, it will take time to reveal all the details.
The article in question that caused alot of commotion.
http://www.polygon.com/2013/3/29/4160534/mechwarrior-online-leaves-beta-late-summer-adding-guild-and-faction
For work people, again,
"Of course between here and late summer, we'll have countless updates to the game but there are three in particular that I want to talk about," he said.
The first is the match sizes. "Right now the game is 8 versus 8, so you have eight mechs per side," he said. "But in the next 60 days, roughly, we'll be going to 12 versus 12. So you'll have a full company of BattleMechs, which is BattleTech nerd talk for 12 mechs."
The second is what Piranha is calling "UI 2.0" — a "completely revamped" user interface designed to help new players get more from the game. "We'll be breadcrumbing you a little more into learning the nuances of MechWarrior, making sure you make it to your cadet bonus and earn your first achievements that let you get your first mech," he said. "Once someone plays MechWarrior for a few hours, most of the time they're hooked." The goal of UI 2.0 is to help make sure new players spend enough time to get hooked.
And lastly, what Bullock calls the "big daddy feature" is community warfare. "This is what [MechWarrior Online players] have been craving," he said. "The overarching metagame, the faction gameplay is community warfare."
"We've identified three kinds of players," Piranha Games creative director Bryan Ekman adds. There's the lone wolf, "the guy who doesn't care about role playing, being a part of any organzational structure whatsoever.
"Then we have factions, and factions are NPC factions. They belong to the universe, they're a part of the lore. These are the great houses of BattleTech.
"These guys participate in territory control in a more passive way. Their matches affect the universe, but indirectly.
"And then you have the Merc Corps. These are the guilds, these are the clans, these are the guys who come together, band together, fight together and play together and actually want to control as much territory as they can through their actions.
The lone wolf play style is what players currently have in the game today; the NPC factions will be free-to-play; the Merc Corps, on the other hand, will be monetized. "We're looking at possibly charging a one-time setup fee," Ekman said. "This is just to make sure there's not a flood of one-player corps.
"We really want people who participate in this to be as engaged as possible. And we'll probably require them to have a premium time account, as a kind of dedication level." That premium time account can be purchased in quantities ranging from daily to monthly to bi-annually, with the 30-day pack costing $10.
When asked to define what the cutoff for "late summer" was, both Ekman and Bullock said "September 21" in unison. So it sounds like they're leaving themselves as much room as possible to hit 1.0.
More likely the 'extra' components will have a set amount of IS and armor that can not be modified and won't count against tonnage of the mech. I think MW4 did this for a few components, can't remember if the t-wolf ears got this treatment or not. Otherwise the whole system starts to fall apart pretty quickly.
You could just divide up the armor and crit slots between the two sections. The Timber Wolf / Mad Cat is always depicted with skinny arms so make their crit slot allowance smaller. Make the arm have just enough crit slots to fit the standard config (shoulder + upper/lower arm actuator + ERLLAS + MLAS = 6 crits, 6 crits for the missile pod means you can fit an LRM20 and 1 ton of ammo. Now you have the same total number of crits as any other mech, just two different hit boxes.
Then for the armor, you could set a ratio to be 2/3 arm, 1/3 pod (in comparison to the arm armor for a mech of the same weight). Yeah, someone aiming for your arm or pod will have an easier time destroying it, but they only got rid of a small part of your firepower instead of a large percentage. Seems like a fair tradeoff to me.
but now your 'pod' is ALWAYS leeching armor from your arm (or worse torso), what if you don't put anything in the pod? or what if you have a bunch of weapons in the pod but 'just' a few backup weapons in the arm? Not seeing it working, but who knows what the Canadian clowns will come up with.... whatever gives folks an aneurism probably. :-P
Yeah, the Timberwolf could share crit spaces and armor between the arms and the shoulder racks but still have them explode off seperately when they run out of structure&armor. Much like how we currently do for front/back torso sections.
MWO: Adamski
I wish ClanTech wasn't going to be implemented.
You're kidding, right?
You know you can just put armour value at zero for a section right?
Orick - the Canadian mime
No, no, no. Gah. This way lies madness. :P
Once you start dividing up a 'mech's critical spaces based on the perceived physical size of that body location on the particular 'mech, there's no reason not to do it with every 'mech, which is just a gigantic clusterfuck.
It's better to just accept that the critical space rules are an abstraction which will not hold up to close logical scrutiny, much like how missile magazines store hundreds and hundreds of warheads, ludicrously short weapon ranges, etc. It has been ever thus.
yeah but clan XL only has 2 engine crits in the side, meaning you STILL have to crit the engine in the CT or other torso once.... Clan mechs are BRUTAL and without some sort of BV type system its impossible to balance against an IS mech. Hell even with BV its damn shaky to balance in table top and the system in tabletop is a lot simpler in a lot of ways. The current balance of Elo then weight (or whatever bullshit is the current situation) is pretty damn weak putting an average pilot in a clan heavy, he should be top tier elo in just a few matches if hes fighting IS heavies of any elo.
Thinking on it a minute, I don't think PGI has even implemented engine crit model yet anyway, so thats going to be a problem as well, either clan mechs with XL will be destroyed with a torso loss OR you will have to take both side torso or CT to kill them... ugh. I mean the 'bright' side here is there is no way they are very close to getting where they need to be with the current build to implement clan units so there is a lot of time and no use worrying or they have a much better test build with these features they aren't releasing because they don't want to spoil all the clan assets. Not sure that the over/under is on that...
How much does the Phantom 'Mech Ability module cost again?
100000XP and 10000MC and its per-drop like coolant :-P
The key is just to nerf the Clan 'Mechs and equipment from the tabletop; for example, just don't implement the ridiculously overpowered Clan DHSs or XLs and fuck the purists.
edit: The game is already a marked departure from Tabletop in many ways anyway, no reason you can't also just ignore the stuff that's completely stupid bullshit or retune it so that it's not completely stupid bullshit.
Well if you 'nerf' clan DHS you really limit their ability to use their lighter weapons to carry extra stuff, you get crit locked way too fast. The way their heat loading model works right now, clan is going to be in trouble anyway. I'm cool with the XL engine torso loss=dead maybe... but do they still only lose 2 crit slots to the engine then? For what its worth I hate clans, they make the game a big old headache and you have to remember a whole new set of range bands. :-P And some of the mechs are total bullshit without an RNG to equalize things: Jaegerbombs got nothing on hunchback IIc . :-)
Now that, my friends, is a real boombox.
it would add a LOT of diversity to mech types and make thouse with battlefists useful.
ohhhh mr. jager, you have no fists... good luck punching anything.
make any close encounter with an atlas truely frightening.
i would pay 100s of $ for this.
Hydro, a Jaegermech would be uniquely unsuited for melee combat. I've included a quick illustration:
Edit: fixed borked img link
Well, on Saturday playing with some folks. I made a joke asking about when the Thrash Metal, Death Metal, and Black Metal hero mechs were coming out. And then we realized there is no Mech Metal sub-genre of metal and I may have committed to working on at least one Mech Metal song. I have no idea when I'm going to have time for this, but if I do and you want to snatch 30 seconds or so from it, feel free.
Or I could do two separate projects. I guess let me know what you're looking for and I can see if I can come up with something.
PSN : Bolthorn
I think Drool ended up with 4 kills and some assists with his 2 Med/1 Med Pulse lasers "PowerHunch" build. It was the most laughs I've had in a while during a game.
Screenshot failed. I guess F12 doesn't work if I used the desktop shortcut and forgot to start from Steam? Duhh.
To have it animate properly from the cockpit is going to be a bitch, considering none of these 'Mechs have heads that turn. To get a punch to really look threatening and not so much rock-em-sock-em robots where the arm just shoots straight out, you're going to have to get some torso twist into it, which means that the user's view is going to swing all over the place during a punch, or if you'd have to fake it and have different punching animations for inside and outside the cockpit, which would admittedly probably not bug a lot of people but would personally bug the shit out of me.
I guess you could lock the user's view on the targeted punch area and just swing the cockpit model around it during the punch(like the pilot keeping their eyes on the target while the punch happens), but I don't know if that'd be any less disorienting.
Heh this reminds me of my only self-destruct. I purposefully turned off my auto-shutdown to do a full alpha in my stalker to kill an enemy mech. I survived and didn't crit any internals. I breathed a sigh of relief and took a step back, which spiked my heat and crit my engine.
I learned that day that moving actually registered heat.
Official PA Forums FFXIV:ARR Free Company <GHOST> gitl.enjin.com Join us on Sargatanas!
Best match win ever.
I would fucking love to see this. If you're going to make my Cataphracts used crit spaces for hands, at least let me punch someone with the hand!
I would really hate if melee attacks were kept out because some people find them disorienting. Can't keep track of what's going on with them? Easy solution: don't use them. I would personally think it be fantastically awesome to hit the punch button and blindside and enemy mech while your whole machine grinds and shifts, with your viewpoint on the target and the rest of your mech shifting around you.
I've been thinking about melee attacks myself and I think it would be as simple as a canned punch/kick animation (either or both) depending on the mech, then make the effect of the impact depend on how well the hit connected. Whiff on a kick while moving top speed? Stumble for extra recovery time. Land a solid hit? Deal damage and possibly knock the enemy down. Glancing blow? Extra recovery time with possibility of yourself getting knocked down.
Plus, make it so that it pulls all your weapons out of alignment as the mech shifts for the animation. Not to mention that there might finally be a use for hand/lower arm servos, which currently do nothing but limit mechs arbitrarily. Being able to clock a Jagermech while running by in a Centurion would be fantastic.
The coding would basically be a couple meter range ballistic attack with a low shot speed.