Horizontal Weapon theory:

EvilKitten · Aug 22, 2016

Because MMO's are almost exclusively dedicated to the hunt for better player gear, and in order to provide sufficient time to consume new content the requirements to achieve said player gear become astronomical. By disassociating players from the grind of achieving new gear you can alleviate much of this problem. Tying player gear into the various buildings each base contains can allow for player progression and yet remove the "grind" feeling by allowing any and all actions the player takes to contribute to progression. As long as there is no set requirement to perform X activity to receive Y item then we can simply play how we want, when we want and for how long we want. Get bored with one activity, jump to another. That way things don't get as stale and individual content will last longer.

It also provides a good way to continue with "progression" because with 28 different worlds participating in Ember, it would be possible to provide the same horizontal progression multiple times but with altering looks/styles so that players can mix and match new looks, but not be tied to needing exponential vertical growth. The new faction bases (that all have to be built from scratch and thus provide a continuing resource drain) would be the focus of Mark's "expansion packs" which would combine new "cosmetics" with actual gameplay.

EDIT: just to clarify...my thought (when combined with my previous post about mods) is that the various buildings we build provide access to the schematics for mods and abilities within their respective fields. IE an armorsmith building might provide players with a mod that increases personal protection. Upgrading the armorsmith with a forge (armorsmith level 2) would provide the tier 2 version of that protection mod as well as say an ability that deflects damage for a few seconds...and so on. The buildings would be staffed by NPC's that would provide ongoing quests and research activities to keep the player engaged, but all the resources that they aquire would go to the building/upgrade of their choice).

From a game design standpoint, once all of the different mods were set in place and the game was up in running, Mark could introduce a second, third, fourth, fifth etc faction with all of the same mods wrapped up in new cosmetics and requiring a brand new base to be built on another part of Ember with perhaps new challenges to face and whatnot. The game design (crafting buildings to provide new schematics) will remain the same but allow for a completely new look and feel across the board.

Nunaden · Aug 22, 2016

EvilKitten said:

I don't think that certain stats should influence others... clip size and max ammo influencing accuracy is in my opinion total bullshit...
more ammo would just make the gun heavier, but not more inaccurate.
a gun would get inaccurate when you use other ammo types or when you shorten the barrel (also the reason why bullpup is more accurate, their barrel is longer since the mag is behind the trigger and often just some cm away from the buttplate) and not when you just swap your 30 rounds box mag with a 50 rounds casket or a 100 rounds drum mag.
The RoF also doesn't influence the accuracy nor does it influence the recoil. It just increases the strength of the recoil since the gun will spit more bullets out than before, just reminding since ppl love to forget such crap. example for something like that:
a mod of a G36C that increases the rof but keeps the original barrel length has still teh same accuracy and recoil, it is jsut a bit heavier, you would notice it while firing in teh semi automatic firemode.

taiiat said:

i also think that tactical attachments not directly be part of a gun, meaning that guns can switch scopes etc. 'cause they are just mounted on tactical rail.
so the argument "higher Zoom" isn't valid for me... except you're as gunsmith dumb enough to not include a tactical rail and mount the scope as non replaceable part of the gun... example for that:
The mosina-nagant got a build in over rail mounted scope that cannot be replaced. The RFB does normally not use scopes but it got a tactical rail allowing the mounting of scopes, meaning you can set on different scopes, assault scopes, collimators, holographic sights and hybrid sights on it that have different zooms. So you could mount a NXS 2.5 with a 10x24 zoom on it or a NXS 5.5 with a 22x50 zoom on it.

EvilKitten · Aug 22, 2016

Nunaden said:

Yeah it was merely intended to be an example and not something set in stone. In that one I meant to add in additional rate of fire and forgot...It wasn't intended that a particular stat influence another directly but rather the intention was supposed to be that every mod have both a positive and negative vertical progression component to keep the playing field as flat as possible, while still allowing mods to completely change the characteristics of a weapon. Obviously I, in a few minutes of furious typing, am not going to get it perfect.

EDIT: I would prefer focus be on the concept rather than nitpicking on the precise details that as I stated, were pulled out of my butt

EDIT2: The clip/max ammo size combined with the RoF have to have accuracy reduced not for realism but to keep the average damage per clip the same. Probably what would be more accurate was instead of an accuracy penalty, to have a mass penalty instead, IE 2x the bullets, half the bullet size. Since Mass is a critical component of weapon damage you would end up with a corresponding flat DPS curve...again I was in a hurry and didn't think everything through.

Nunaden · Aug 22, 2016

EvilKitten said:

well, yeah in short time nothing is perfect.
but i thought some time as well about it (actually some seconds bout this what im going to suggest), and i think the direct influence of the mag size would be the stability since the gun is heavier and that would also result in a heavier sway so it is more difficult to hit targets on long range.

EvilKitten · Aug 22, 2016

Nunaden said:

EvilKitten said:

I think the idea here is not weapon accuracy at all but rather spread...which is technically different. Having a lower mass projectile means it is far more a plaything of air current conditions. While obviously in RL there are windy and calm days, for the sake of game mechanics it can be set at a fixed spread to compensate for the vertical progression of having more bullets.

EDIT: The key point here is that each mod should include one or several mechanical alterations with a corresponding negative to maintain a mechanical horizontal progression. Vertical progression would come not as a result of numbers changing, but rather through increased specialization allowing a players skill to come into play.

In the SMG example, a player who is really good at maneuvering can position themselves to negate the -projectile spread and thus deliver increased damage, even though the numbers themselves are intended to keep the curve flat. Likewise someone with very good accuracy skills might prefer to use a sniper which, in spite of having fewer rounds, would end up with increased DPS because the damage per round would be much greater and they wouldn't miss very often. Specialization and free range of modification is the key to allowing skill based vertical progression in a horizontal system.

Omnires · Aug 22, 2016

One of the things I hate about shooter games is many of them act as if biology and training don't exist. For those of you who knew me from FF I always pointed this out in how they artificially capped player skill by making up odd rules for how different weapons worked. Prime example, giving sniper rifles a larger firing spread than of shotguns when out of scope for "reasons". When realistically sniper rifles should have no spread at all do to how the weapons are designed to be most accurate and precise types of gun. In FF even if you maxed out the perks and put the best mods as possible to lower your spread do to the artificial capping on the stats to always make the spread on snipers the largest in the game it didn't matter. They effectively toke away player skill and choice out of the game by forcing players to play in set fighting styles that they felt was best, even if they were unnatural ones.

My mean hope for Ember is that before they starting coding the aiming system of the game and how different guns work. That they do a bit of research on how real life guns works and look up how the Human body and mind works. Because people do have things like proprioception, spatial awareness, and triangulation to able to do things like aim without the use of sights and will as to hit targets they can't see (be it behind them or over 3 blocks away behind a wall).

MattHunX · Aug 23, 2016

Omnires said:

I think it was yesterday when I was leveling my Electron into the Elite Ranks and I was given Weapon Spread Rating reduction as one of the choices. I didn't got for it, of course, because the Shock Rail is precise at every range, but what I didn't know, as I have discovered, when looking at my stats, was that Spread wasn't even listed under my Primary Weapons' stats. LOL! I thought...well, that solves it.

If we wouldn't be piloting mechs, I would ask...should sniper rifles, in particular, have a bit of - just a tiny bit of - sway effect, both when scoping in and when firing from the hip that can be halted for firing, by a different key...as our character holds their breath, then exhales? If we want a bit of realism. Should all weapons, then, have a bit of sway from movement and just us our character heaving. Should stamina be also a thing? Have a bar, under HP or wherever. But, yeah...all that doesn't matter, if we're in a mech. Outside of it, maybe? Also, devs, I really liked how the HUD was setup in Firefall. They way both my HP and my Jet Energy could also be displayed, as those vertical bars, with opacity set by me, around my targeting reticle (it underlines the word, had to check dictionary. Almost wrote "reticule". Sliiiightly different.)

(Could be a different thread)

There's another factor, with weapons and their effectiveness that bugged me in Firefall, a thing that I brought up, at least, two times, here, as well. That is distance. And how badly it was displayed in FF. 200 meters felt and looked like it should've only been a hundred, in-game.

It was also annoying how an un-modded assault rifle almost had the same range as an un-modded sniper rifle. 125m and 150m, respectively. Or something like that. And since 25 meters, and even 50 meters, was literally a few skips, in-game, that small difference, was made even smaller.

The effective ranges of un-modded weapons should be more...pronounced. Note, not completely realistic, as a damn sniper rifle can amazingly kill over 2000 meter, for fuck's sake. That's just awesome, by the way. But, in-game, it would be a bit unbalanced, for obvious reasons.

Examples:

An un-modded sniper rifle should have a range of, say, 300m. Yes. At least, twice what it is in FF.
An un-modded assault rifle can have 100-150m.
SMGs: 50-100m

Shotguns: Up-close and personal. In your face. But, not strictly.

I saw people with that much-loved (completely unbalanced and OP) Omega Perseid effectively shooting at small Baneclaw kids from the other side of the arena, which, even in-game, was easily over 50-70, if not a 100 meters. Maybe it wasn't the...Omega...Perseid...initials: "O.P."...*stares silently* *facepalm*. Anyway. It was definitely a shotgun, judging by the spread of projectiles. And un-modded Shotguns shouldn't be effective past short-range. Period. Modded ones can approach an effectiveness close to medium range. One can modify their shotgun and reduce spread to all hell, increasing recoil to compensate (for balance), eventually having a much narrower cone of fire that would be effective past short-range. Or if there is a raid-type of boss, a huge monster, with a big, wide, soft belly, one can throw spread right out the window of their cockpit (bounces back from the shield, but whatever) and let their shotty have enormous spread, so they can gear it towards e.g.: damage per projectile and up the number of projectiles, so they can stand relatively close to said giant creatures and given its size, all projectiles could still hit it and give it more than a tummy ache. And then, one could store their setup (as per my new thread), with their weapon specifically built for that boss.

With all that rant said...I wonder how they will handle distance and effective range. Different scopes. Different zoom distance. And if distances will look realistic enough. 100m should look like a 100m.

TankHunter678 · Aug 23, 2016

Omnires said:

They did that for balancing.

Originally the sniper rifles had perfect pin point accuracy in and out of scope. It "looked" like you had massive spread, but you in fact did not. Which resulted (when people realized this after a few days) in people putting a dot in the center on their screen and then running around obliterating people with no scope headshots at any range.

Recons stopped being snipers and became "ninjas" since the only thing that could survive a headshot was a dreadnought, but pressing the trigger again solved that. Recons could 1-2 shot anything and no non recon class could do the same back to them. Some even used aim bots. After all, the weapon was hitscan.

Even in real life though firing a sniper rifle from the hip you wont be perfectly accurate, so the fact that they were perfect accuracy fired from the hip went against reality, and made sniper rifles completely overpowered all range super weapons that with the help of 3rd party software required no skill to use to rack up kills on the score board.

Omnires · Aug 23, 2016

TankHunter678 said:

But even with old pinpoint accuracy the weapon was balanced. This because of how sniper rifles work and how the recon class as whole worked. Sure they could kill everything in the game in one or two shots, but given their slow fire rate and low ammo count, most of the time they are vulnerable because they are always rechambering rounds after each shot or reloading every few shots so they couldn't fire back if they missed and/or something else came around the corner to attacks them. Add that to the fact that the Recon class as a whole has the lowest armour and health in the game, making it so it doesn't take much to kill them in one or few attacks. The game was already balanced before they unbalanced game the favor one style of playing over all others limiting player skill and choice. By unbalancing the weapon and class artificially in the name of balance for some misguided reasons is why the recon class as a whole, especially the Nighthawk, lost their roles and purpose in the game.

I'm going to be talking about all games in general now, not just FireFall.
Sniper rifles
In video games, the upsides to a sniper rifle are high accuracy, high damage per round, and long range that surpass all others. The downsides to a sniper rifle are slow rate of fire (even for the semi-auto sniper rifles), a low ammo count (both in terms of mag size and total ammo you can hold at once), for larger calibre guns a noticeable recoil with each shot (although this can be countered with shock absorbers built into the gun and stock, the muzzle design, and the weight of the gun itself), and the size and mass of the gun. In video games, sniper rifles are a kind of high-risk high-reward self-balanced weapon type. As in their basic design alone keeps them from being over-powered. Yes, they have the power kill in one accurate shot from ranges greater than normal weapons. But they have a slow rate of fire leaving them open between each shot, and their small mag size and ammo count means they'll reload more often and run out of ammo before others do in prolonged fighting. So when trying to balance something that is already balance, by doing things like artificially raising the differently of using sniper rifles while out of scope beyond what is normal (the cone of fire for sniper rifles out of scope should be the same as any other rifle hip firing) is just artificially capping player skill and creating an imbalance that enforces some play styles over others and limiting player choice.

High damage output with low defence characters. A.k.a glass cannon, paper tiger, fragile speedster, etc.
In short, they are characters with super damage out in contrast to their abnormally defensive capabilities. At the most extreme they are characters able to kill anything in a game with just one hit or combo while at same times they themselves can be killed in one hit or combo. They are high-risk high-reward characters that mostly specialized at being masters of long range attacks as well as close range attacks and melee fighters. They are particularly deadly and effective when doing preventive strikes, ambushes, and guerilla-style combat making both tacticians and tricksters on the battlefield. Because of their abnormally low defence when comes to matters of survivabilty they mostly rely on high mobility (speed and agility) and stealth to avoid taking damage. This also means when it comes to defensive abilities and skills they are more prone to using counter-attacks (redirecting incoming damage back at the attacker), interrupts, and debuffs over trying to block and absorbing damage. As a whole, they all live and die by the adages of "The best defence is a good offence." and "You can hurt what you can't hit."

Nunaden · Aug 23, 2016

well the "slow fire rate" isn't legit in my opinion. Semi auto sniper rifles can fire pretty fast... in CW they can go into 300 rounds/min and the bolt action go to 60 rounds/min. Our carbines go from 250 rounds/min to 350 rounds/min. the only sniper rifles that got more are our full autos... the VSS Vintorez with roughly 700 rounds/min and our SVU-AS with 480 rounds/min

Omnires · Aug 23, 2016

Nunaden said:

Yes, but basic video game balance logic is on a sliding scaling, with damage per hit moving counter to frequency. So the more damage you can do in one hit over the normal the slower your attack rate becomes to balance it. Likewise weaker your attack is from normal the faster your rate becomes. This scale works both in range combat and melee combat. It is the reason why in most games you can do things like death by a thousand cuts with daggers or use a great sword and do the same amount of damage in one hit, but the great sword has a much slower swing and recovery time than the daggers. And why in many games machine guns have a super high rate of fire but do lower damage with each shot while on the other hand a sniper rifle does super high damage in one shot but have a much slower rate of fire.

EvilKitten · Aug 23, 2016

I think that projectiles should be based on pure ballistics, gravity pulls the bullet downward at (rounded) 10 m/s2, which means after 1 second of travel it will have dropped 5 meters. On level ground that would mean a bullet can travel less than 1 second's worth of distance before impacting the ground. In reality how far a bullet travels is mainly factored by the angle it is fired at and the muzzle velocity on leaving the barrel. Rather than having bullets travel in a straight line and simply stop at a certain distance I would prefer a bit more realism. Now obviously I don't want a sniper headshoting me at a several kilometers, so actual velocities in Ember might need to be much lower than in reality BUT the premise still stands IMO.

Most pistols and SMG's are short range not simply because they are inaccurate, but also because they fire subsonic (aka slow) rounds which means they travel a much shorter distance before bullet drop becomes significant. Sniper rifles on the other hand can hit something from kilometers away because they have tremendous muzzle velocities compared to other weapons.

Pandagnome · Aug 23, 2016

Its set in the future the technology would be more advanced than of today's reality i guess & improved on.

bullets that foam up and cause opponent to move slower? I dont know i like that there is sci-fi fantasy but also actual sci-fi too
a nice mix but not overly crazy.

There is a gun the lawgiver was from the move/game judge dredd just loved the choices you had for it
and the gun saying the ammo type in that robotic voice was soo cool

Not forgetting robocops gun that was smexy too

Omnires · Aug 23, 2016

EvilKitten said:

Also remember even energy weapons are affected by gravity. As gravity is the curvature of spacetime, so even things that only move in a straight line can still be on a curved path as the space it is passing through is curved. And all objects with mass curve spacetime in some way, it just that object with greater mass makes larger curves (so small things like Humans have their own personal weak gravity). This is how things like gravitational lensing works.

In other words, yes even things like lasers can bend, twist, make turns do to shape of the space they are traveling in itself. So realisticity, not even energy weapons should be able to move in straights.

MattHunX · Aug 23, 2016

Omnires said:

But wouldn't it take an enormous gravitational anomaly, taking place right on the battle field, along the path the laser travels, to have it meaningfully affected? Normal gravity, or even if we'd be on a planet with 2x the gravity of Earth, wouldn't cause the shots of energy weapons to drop any significant or even noticeable amount, I'd wager.

Falloff damage should be a thing, but it wouldn't effect lasers or other energy type weapons much if at all. It shouldn't. Instead, energy weapons should have other draw-backs, that would balance them out. Say, over-heating quickly, from sustained fire. Small mag-size, if mag-size would even be a thing. Mayne, with energy weapons, we'd have heat-sinks, instead.

Omnires · Aug 23, 2016

MattHunX said:

Remember in sci-fi games like FireFall they do have gravity based weapons, example the gravity grenades. In other games they have weapons and even ship engines that can make small blackholes.

MattHunX · Aug 23, 2016

Omnires said:

Well, yeah.

Damn! I forgot...I wanted to add, since the Tsihu will be some dimension/time distorted or -ing enemies, maybe they can mess with space-time, also, so they WOULD be able to slow, divert, redirect, make fall ANY weapons-fire. How about that?

EvilKitten · Aug 23, 2016

@MattHunX is somewhat correct. Light is a massless particle/wave and as such is unaffected by gravity, what it is affected by is the warping of space-time which gravity causes (also known as lensing). The problem with battlefield application is that in order to sufficiently bend a beam of light using gravity lensing you would need a gravitational mass on order or larger than our sun. I hope I don't need to point out what effect a gravitational mass that size appearing on the earths surface would have on the planet...

What would mostly attenuate laser beam weapons would be laser blooming (damage falloff with distance), and target material (certain materials absorb different frequencies). Also the possibility of using reflective chaff grenades might have some usefulness though it would be a very short duration.

MattHunX · Aug 23, 2016

EvilKitten said:

So, maybe the technologically advanced alien race that phases in and out of time, could have developed, or even had the innate ability, to create such gravity wells, with enough mass to wreak havoc on the battle field. Perhaps it would only be used by their very highest ranks. The elite of the elite.

EvilKitten · Aug 23, 2016

MattHunX said:

That size of a gravity well would destroy the planet. From a sci-fi point of view I think the optimal means of deflecting laser weapons (but only lasers) would be prismatic diffraction combined with the ability to absorb energy and redirect it into a safer outlet (capacitor or battery for storage, waste heat generation for excess perhaps).

EDIT: It would be interesting as a game mechanism for dealing with energy based weapons for our omni-frames to have a heat statistic. While having a distance falloff for beam weapon damage, the damage would however increase in damage over time for sustained contact. As the omniframe absorbed laser energy it would convert as much as possible into heat, filling up the heat bar. The higher the heat bar the less effective that mechanic would be and so the more damage you would take, but once away from the weapon the heat would dissipate and the defense would become more effective again.

Horizontal Weapon theory:

Well-Known Member

Veteran

Well-Known Member

Veteran

Well-Known Member

D-Gater

Firstclaimer

Well-Known Member

D-Gater

Veteran

D-Gater

Well-Known Member

Kaiju Slayer

D-Gater

Firstclaimer

D-Gater

Firstclaimer

Well-Known Member

Firstclaimer

Well-Known Member