From Mechwarrior Living Legends Wiki

I would like to hear some input on if we are going to create an individual page for grouped weapons. Ex. "AutoCannons" is all the autocannons and info. "Gauss Rifle" will be all about gauss rifles. OR are we creating a separate page for every weapon no matter what. "Clan Gauss Rifle" or very specifcly "Extended Long-Range Missiles" Next are the page names going to be acronyms Ex. the main page for Long Range Missile 20 will be http://wiki.mechlivinglegends.net/index.php?title=LRM20

• We could do that, but with each weapon getting their own page (AC20 work different than AC10 or AC5, think bullet count) we might just make a grouped page with basic information "AC are ballistic type weapons. We distinguish between ..." and proper individual pages for the actual weapon system. I think acronyms are fine? This is what people would search for when reading the text in the game or forums anyway. It doesn't hurt to give the full name inside the template or the page though to be clear on what we are talking about. Same goes for all the equipment (Group ECM, Individual GECM/AECM) Seraph 19:20, 23 February 2010 (UTC)
  • Yep, I though about exactly the same what Seraph told. Ba! We even have it like that now. Check UAC20 and AutoCannons as an example. Skywalker 19:26, 23 February 2010 (UTC)
    • I'm thinking we should add the full name and then categories for the weapons Right now there are tons of little stub pages with "AC2" "AC10" see here http://wiki.mechlivinglegends.net/index.php?title=Special:AllPages I'm probably just going to move then under the page Autocannons and then create categories. So if you have a mechpage where they list "AC2" and it has a link it will point at Autocannons#AC2 LycanElite 19:29, 23 February 2010 (UTC)
      • I wouldn't try that :/ This could bring us huge infobox-mess on one page. Also some guns tend to differ quite a lot between variants (EG. LBX20 is shotgun, LBX5 is nearly UAC only with limited range)... Also the Sarna.net have taken this schema and it works very well there. Any ideas why it would be wrong? Other than one-big vs several small pages issue? Skywalker 19:34, 23 February 2010 (UTC)
        • I'm just playing with ideas before we implement them and start working on something that's harder to manage in the long run. Maybe we can have the best of both worlds by having an index like page (like the current page "Weapons") seperated by Energy/Ballistic/Missile/Equipment in addition to individual weapon pages in their respective categories. Which is kind of what we already have. Just there is a lot of duplicate information on the main pages and subpages and It would be nice to have a set system for creating new pages so we have easy to edit categorized lists of everything before it gets out of hand. EDIT: I just took a look at sarna.net and they do have a very good system and it's pretty much like what I'm trying to say. Sorry about that. LycanElite 19:53, 23 February 2010 (UTC)
          • I feel like I got confused a bit :/ Can you explain on example of sarna what you have in mind? How I see it: 1. Ballistic Weapons - for us it'll be Projectile weapons - 2. Autocannon 3. AC10 - so first most general term, than weapons-group, than specific weapon, without Autocannons#AC2 section you pointed. Content more-or-less like on Sarna, only more details on Projectile weapons (minimum, maximum, compare to other weapons, and so on). Skywalker 20:07, 23 February 2010 (UTC)
            • Hey all, so the reason I made the AutoCannon page the way I did is because there are TONS of AC variants in MWLL, like 14? I think?. Listing all the info on every single on of them on the same page would result in a rather cluttered, extremely long page. If you take a look at the Gauss Rifle page, I put the stats directly there because there's only 3 different Gauss Rifles in the game. Same thing goes for missiles, as there's 20(?) different missile variants, not including NARCs, Firebombs, T-Bolts, and ArrowIV's. The latter three will probably have their own page, as they don't really fit in that category, while the Narc'll be stuck on at the end of the missile page, as it's essentially a modified LRM.
            • Lets go as suggested. It makes a less cluttered overall page and finding the info that we need to edit is not hard using a wiki search. Agreed on?
              • Aye Skywalker 21:38, 23 February 2010 (UTC)
              • Described everything on Article naming - if you have notes write them on article talk page. Thanks! Skywalker 22:38, 23 February 2010 (UTC)

Proposed change

Sitting on my talk page for the moment. Already moved over.

Significant reorganization. [I would convert] missile and energy weapon refire rates from seconds per shot to shots per minute, as used for ballistic weapons (at least, I assume this was the situation). Gave variants their own entry (C/ER/CER).

C/UAC5 had listed stats with an x5 -- I've assumed it was meant to be x2. LBXn -- there was a note about the IS version, which I've taken to mean "not CLBXn / vanilla LBXn". UAC2 gets "x2" indication for heat, damage.

Some variants are listed that I haven't seen ingame (UAC2,5;C/LBX2) while some that I have seen are mising (CUAC2). I'll leave that alone for now.

I would expect more weapons suffer from dmg falloff, so that could be added. Threesan 21:45, 25 February 2010 (UTC)

I'm looking for a way to obtain this information directly. I went browsing through the scripts folder, found a function "ProcessActorDamage" that looks promising, like it's somewhere in the call chain. But apparently Vista's search feature is completely broken and refuses to return results (CATHARSIS!!)... so, I guess I'll have to install cygwin or mingw or something at some point. But more directly: can any of these numbers be extracted from the .pak files? --Threesan 02:55, 28 February 2010 (UTC)

Hyea, great work with collecting all the data! :D I added the {{Formatting}} as this could use changes with design to match the older version, but that's just a sidenote. Most important thing is that in my humble opinion most of the informations we have now should go directly on weapons page, with notes being priority (as the one which should be in weapons descriptions). Also some of the data should be removed - especially all the calculations of damage/heat/whatever per second/minute because of two reasons: First of all this doesn't give any informations about actual damage, only heat seems to work, but still I'd avoid provoking people to create exel spreadsheets calculating which mech load out is the best as it's totally ridiculous cause these numbers don't say anything about real in-game damage nor about in-game heat (when difference between standing and moving already brings a big difference in combat heat management). Secondly these calculations confuse new players (and these are for who we make the wiki) cause thy don't actually say anything about real damage weapon can inflict. That's one of the reasons why you don't see refire rate on Weapons template - to avoid people making fools of themselves trying to calculate dps.

So to sum up, what I think should be removed from this page is: Refire, Notes, dmg/s, heat/s , s/t ammo

Next thing is what I'd like to propose - Replace the weapon damage in points with weapon damage indicators. These would be: Very low, Low, Below average, Average, Above average, High, Very high, Most damage. 9 points scale to sort weapons.

• Why? Because current values can be very very very confusing for a new players (told a little about that already). Take a look at Tbolt and Fbomb - as an example of primary weapons confusing people. Both have 1500 damage, while the fact is that Tbolt is 3rd/4th most deadly weapon in game and Fbolb is 2nd. Damage value for this weapon does not tell anything and may make newbie who read this list avoid them cause 4 x LRM20 Shiva seems to make waaaaaaaaay more damage while it doesn't do even half of what Tbolt can. And as we are on LRM20 - it does not inflict 3000 damage - it does 150 per missile. There's a difference as 100% hit rate for LRM20 doesn't happen most of the time (even for targets standing still), and now when we have AMS it doesn't happen at all. ;). Finally - there are problems with calculating damage of Laser weapons making this method more-or-less useless.
• So here I propose adding scale for damage - we should pick something for "Average" and than set up all the weapons on the scale with Long Tom owning the title of Most Damaging weapon and MGun with the title of Very Low damage. The procedure of giving score to the weapons is to be discussed (eg. take Sandbox, set Mech X, aim at torso, shoot, see the colors, give the score, perhaps we could also add hidden screenshots of mech damage after hit?), but this should give players more idea on how deadly the weapon is.

So, what you thing? Looking for suggestions/open discussion :) Skywalker 10:58, 28 February 2010 (UTC)

I think that, yes, how important the damage numbers are depends on the situation, on how much of that damage lands, or how many HS a vehicle has or what the external temperature is. However, I think actual numbers give a clear indication of the potential of a weapon, at least compared against other weapons. How much more powerful is an "average" amount of damage than a "below average" amount of damage? And providing the damage without rate of fire isn't very useful (unless you mean the scale to be based on damage*rate_of_fire, though I think rate of fire is important on its own).

The reason I added columns for "second-level" data (dmg/s, heat/s, s/t ammo) was in large part in anticipation of player-designed mech weapons loadouts (though they might be of interest when considering balance -- not on their own, but when considered together with all the properties of a weapon). "My mech overheats too quickly? I can switch some weapons with high heat/dmg or heat/s to lower ones." "My CUAC10 will run out of ammo fast so I should keep a couple free tons." "My heat is very low so maybe I can add a high heat, high dmg/s weapon." I think there is also interesting information beyond this (for example, a coefficient somehow describing how "focused" damage is, like comparing a Gauss to a few MPL), but there is only so much space on a table row, and I think those things are more intuitive (and complex to explain) based on Damage and Rate of Fire; Meanwhile, the dmg/s, heat/s, s/t ammo columns are provided more so the reader doesn't have to do the simple but repetitive math. Granted, I don't know how much room will be left on the table if weapon weight and price (and space requirements?) are added. I do very much want to change how the notes are done on the tables. I think they are important for a quick-reference but take up too much space right now.

Perhaps the Weapons page table should be made simpler, with a different "Mech builder's reference" set of tables elsewhere??

I suppose there is good reason to change LRM20 damage from 3000 back to 20x 150, though. --Threesan 19:43, 28 February 2010 (UTC)

I think actual numbers give a clear indication of the potential of a weapon - that's the issue I told about. They don't give indication of weapon potential - and that's the primary problem. For comparing LtGauss with HGauss it works, but for all the other it's very misleading.

As of info such as weight, price, and so on - everything goes to weapons pages. Here we should only have most basic informations to quickly compare the weapons, and most importantly - just to see the list of them and get on weapon-specific pages without digging through categories. What I wouldn't want to see for sure is the exel spreadsheet on wiki. :( Skywalker 19:56, 28 February 2010 (UTC)

I don't understand why damage numbers don't work. There is a "splash" note made in the notes section with relative weight, and things like not hitting with all missiles or the full laser beam should be understood by the player...

Anyways, I would propose moving the detailed tables to a Weapons Quick Reference article (or something) -- The "excel table" is already (to be) present on wiki (apart from this article), just scattered into dozens of pieces on individual weapon pages. It seems horribly inconvenient to force the user to navigate between dozens of pages to compare weapons. Granted, there is more upkeep in having them separate (I'm sure there's a technological solution to that, I just wouldn't know how to do it). --Threesan 21:19, 28 February 2010 (UTC)

The thing is that we need to keep the data on weapons pages in this or other way, so if we talk about unkeep cost - adding more informations to this page would be a trouble, not articles. Weapon articles are suppose to be the primary and most complete sources of informations. Any kinds of lists (like this one) are just additions.

Adding new article - the Weapons Quick Reference - would bring even more work to this, as not only the weapons articles (again: priority) should be kept up to date after each release, but also 2 lists being duplicates, only the second one with more informations.... will be confusing for visitors too. As for the spread I wouldn't worry so much - modern browsers support tabs so visiting multiple articles at once isn't a problem, while having ore visits is only a good thing. Also there's long way to go till mechlab, and we don't even know how it will look exactly nor what factors will be accounted in, so adding huge tables with data extracted from game files is more-or-less weird for me.

I don't understand why damage numbers don't work - see the Fbomb and Tbolt as one primary example. Than Arrow4 vs. LRM20. Than LPL vs UAC. Unless we are going to list all the 20 most important factors involved in weapons efficiency adding such lists can be very misleading for people who believe in 3-4 numbers extracted from files. Skywalker 21:43, 28 February 2010 (UTC)

Missile Links (like SRM6) from mech variants are still red. Can we get redirects to the Missile page? done (and thanks Sovereign) -MaverickOriginal 22 April 2010

I'll do that now. Sovereign 16:20, 22 April 2010 (UTC)

They cannot. Sorry, but I have to remove them all. See the Article naming policy. Sky_walker 06:40, 23 April 2010 (UTC)

Formatting

Minor thing, but is there a way to do a .mytables td { vertical-align:top }, without doing it for every tr or td? --Threesan 17:08, 20 March 2010 (UTC)

About that Data Accuracy section

I had hoped to trim it down (together with the "reader beware" note on dps) and rename it --Caveats--.

P1) "proven multiple times it's wrong etc" -- this is an old note, from my perspective. No longer applicable, unless you want to raise a new objection.

P2) "laser ticks" -- old note again.

P3) "uac20 splashing from torso to head" -- unless I misunderstood, this is also an old note.

P4) "hgauss spread to center torso" -- my interpretation of this is that when you destroy a shoulder or back section, the extra damage carries through to the center torso. If it works like other damage to a destroyed back or shoulder, it should be something like triple damage to center torso. But I would expect all weapons to work like that, so if a comment like this is to be made it would be more at home in something like a "damage mechanics" article.

P5) "splash density" -- old note. Table now includes splash radii with their damages and types.

P6) "damage affected by angle" -- I thought I had posted an inquiry about the "angle" issue (but now I remember not posting it..) -- are you sure about that? I tried to duplicate it, but as far as I can tell the game doesn't care what elevation you are at relative to your target, or at what angle your shot impacts the armor surface. The only thing that comes to mind is the destroyed shoulder/back parts.

P7) "form opinion based on in-game testing" -- present in --Caveats--

--Threesan 17:30, 20 March 2010 (UTC)

ok, so if I may, a replay:

1. ok, let's start:
2. Atlas shooting and pixel counting isn't a way for providing accurate data. I'm sad to say it but it's a "no-go". As for providing approximate info - it's entirely fine (that's what I wanted to do myself all in all), but for precise numbers as you want to show them in table - it won't work. Use what Seraph told you.
3. Elaborate please. Also providing info how to calculate the UAC 20 case in the article would be very helpful for newbies :)
4. "interpretation" is also a no-go. Especially when nothing was destroyed, so it's not the case.
5. Splash radious doesn't give much info as long as you don't know how often the damage is inflicted and it's amount. So this only alters one problem with another (more serious this time)
6. I figured it out later on myself - it's the splash damage reaching various parts of mech - whet I wrote there as assumption is a true in fact.
7. yup

Sky_walker 18:04, 20 March 2010 (UTC)

BTW: If all the data is from v.0.2.0 than please, take down the {{Out of date}} template (not sure if it is so I won't do it myself) Sky_walker 18:06, 20 March 2010 (UTC)

2) This isn't the method of procuring data. This was the method of figuring out how to interpret the data files/spot-checking that the method continued to make sense. The data is coming directly from the data files.

3) I think I understand the specific point you were getting at now, and that is covered in --Caveats#2--. Though probably it can be made it a little clearer that the damage is not spread out, but inflicted independently for each component/mech.

4) Then I'm not sure if I've ever seen that. I suppose I won't remove it, but it doesn't seem very useful right now.

5) Both the damage amount and "how often" are present in the table... damage, type, rate of fire, and projectile counts.

6) OK, that makes more sense (though it should be fixed up a little, then). But you're talking about total damage when the table can only present single-component damage (being unreasonable to try more) and provide information on how effectively it can increase total damage across multiple components/Mechs (splash). That doesn't make the table wrong.

--Threesan 21:08, 20 March 2010 (UTC)

I think it's all fine after your last edit. The discussion section should explain everything for the new guys. I'll try to make a test later on, cause I think there's still something wrong with some of weapons, but for now it should be ok.

To answer your questions:

ad. 2) Yep, it is method of calculating strict data from assumptions as the number of ticks directly reflects the damage, therefore if you'll miss even a single tick - your all data isn't right. It might be good for checking if you haven't made a significant error, but not to provide damage points. (To remind: You told that you are 'getting the number of ticks that happened' "based on experimentation" - and that's what is wrong).

ad. 4) Ofq that it is useful - it's all about damage calculation, so each thing matters, especially when it might change the value of damage inflicted to a single component (although this needs to be checked).

ad. 5) I have no idea what you mean by that. I was talking about single splash - nothing related to the ROF. but ok, if the table is about damage for single component than this doesn't matter.

Sky_walker 07:42, 22 March 2010 (UTC)