MK_Regular

5 hours ago, Haswell said:

Challenger HESH Changes

The HESH and PISH rounds, available to the Challenger MBTs, were changed as such:

• Reduced the damage per shot value by 100 across the board
• HESH module damage bonus was standardized to 35% (previously it ranged from 25% to 50% on PISH)

Assuming that the total module damage done by a shell is proportional to the damage per shot of the shell, for each of the Challenger HESH/PISH shells that are available:

• Challenger 1 HESH - 410 damage instead of 510 (19.6% reduction), 135% module damage modifier remains unchanged for total module damage down 19.6%
• Challenger 2 HESH - 440 damage instead of 540 (18.5% reduction), 135% module damage modifier instead of 125% (increase of 8%) for total module damage down 12%
• ATDU HESH - 760 damage instead of 860 (11.5% reduction), 135% module damage modifier instead of 150% (reduction of 10%) for total module damage down 20.5%
• ATDU PISH - 800 damage instead of 900 (11.1% reduction), 135% module damage modifier instead of 150% (reduction of 10%) for total module damage down 20%

Yeah, those are some pretty serious nerfs. Part of me wonders if this might be because HESH shells got a massive penetration increase in 0.33 that removed most of the skill required to use them....

My only suggestion for the next round of nerfs for HESH/PISH (if there is one) would be to reduce penetration so they can't go through the frontal armour weakspots on MBTs. It might be worth seeing how well HESH/PISH performs when it can't lol-pen everything from the front and trash all the internal modules....

You can collect as many commanders as you want without needing to meet any global prerequisites. On top of the commanders start with, you can get more commanders from various vehicles:

• Tiran 6 (tier 3, Rachel)
• M108 (tier 3, Freja)
• LAV-300 (tier 4, Ioannis)
• BMD-1P and BMP-1P (tier 4, Rashid)
• Merkava 3 (tier 8, Giya)
• Sprut-SD (tier 8, Andrey)
• K2 (tier 10, Kwon)
• Leclerc T4 (tier 10, Vincent)
• M48 GAU-8 (tier 10, Douglas)

The "2 Colonel" mechanic only applies when you are trying to level up commanders. If you have less than 2 colonels, for any rank promotion higher than lieutenant you must have at least 1 other commander of the preceding rank (i.e. in order to promote a commander to first lieutenant, you must have at least 1 commander at the rank of lieutenant not including the commander you want to promote). Thus, in order to promote your first and second commanders to colonel, you must have at least 1 other commander promoted to each of the ranks of lt. colonel, major, captain, 1st lieutenant and lieutenant.

Yeah, that one is a bug. If you look at the Evo/Revo armour model and look at the rear section of the side armour, it is 80mm raw thickness and does not seem to gain any effectiveness from angling against any shot in the game.

If someone could test this in the proving grounds or custom match, it would be very helpful.


Edit: can confirm that this occurs on the Evo in proving grounds, I managed to pen the rear side armour at an angle of over 85 degrees (I had to hunt for pixels to find the spot I could pen, but I could pen it)

With the Type 99:

With the Ramka:

Notice the tracers from the AP shots ricocheting off the side armour after they penetrated and did full damage....

21 minutes ago, knutliott said:

The Stalker's missiles are base 850 damage, but can roll up to 1100-ish.  Best to use base damage for comparisons, though.

Wait what? I thought my.com was removing all of the HEAT damage bonuses at tier 7-10 in order to make things balanced?

I guess I stand corrected.

4 hours ago, Cpt_SmoothBore said:

If matchmaking could set an internal player score value and distribute players/platoons evenly based on that performance value, things will improve.

If matchmaking could set an internal vehicle score value and distribute class/vehicle score points evenly on both teams, things will improve. (everyone knows that meta vehicles as type10/ATDU/640/PL01/M48/ would outperform any LeoAX/X21/Centauro/T14/MGM or other weak tanks).

I like the 2nd suggestion as an option to balance Glops (and PvP in general) matchmaking. Yes, it might take a bit longer than the current system, but any matchmaking system will usually require a bit more time to make a fair match compared to an one-sided match. However, I'm not entirely sure what the current situation is respect to the internal workings of the matchmaker (especially with regards to the average time to get a match vs. the amount of time waiting in queue before the matchmaker loosens the matchmaking parameters and allows for a more one-sided match) so I cannot say whether or not implementing internal vehicle scores would have any effect.

Another possibility (if it hasn't already been implemented) for improving the matchmaker would be to make it so the timer for when the matchmaker can loosen its parameters does not start unless there are enough players to populate a match (this should help prevent the matchmaker from randomly cobbling together unbalanced teams the moment there are enough players to populate a match).

Looking at the model for the M1128 MGS, I am beginning to suspect that an overmatch mechanic has been added to the game.

Consider the following images, where 105mm M900 APFSDS (rated at over 600mm of penetration at 700m in-game) tries to penetrate the M1128 from different angles:

Side armour without side skirts or ERA at extreme angle from the front

The same spot from a different angle to show the raw thickness of the armour (~58mm)

The sloped frontal armour from the side at extreme angle

The same spot from a different angle to show the raw thickness of the armour (~20mm))

The roof armour from the rear at extreme angle

The same spot from a different angle to show the raw thickness of the armour (~71mm)

In each case the M900 APFSDS has more than enough penetration to pass clean through the armour regardless of angle. The APFSDS can still ricochet if it impacts at extreme angles, but this only seems to occur on armour that is above some threshold of armour thickness. As such, I suspect that some form of armour overmatch mechanic was added to the game unannounced and is the reason for the missing auto-bounces that OP is experiencing.

In some of the cases, the thickness of the armour plate that is being penetrated is less than half of the gun caliber of the vehicle shooting at it:

• Wilk (120mm gun): 50mm composite (ignored for overmatch) over 50mm steel plate
• K21 XC-8 (120mm gun): 59mm steel plate
• AMX RCR (105mm gun): Aluminum plate equal to 25mm steel plate
• SPHINX (40mm gun): 19mm steel plate

However, this is not the case for the other vehicles:

• Leo 2AV (105/120mm gun): 55mm steel plate
• Leo 2A5 (120mm gun): 80mm steel plate
• PL-01(120mm gun): 74mm steel plate

I'm honestly not sure what's going on here, however I suspect it's a bug with the armour viewer as I have noticed a few inconsistencies with the new armour models both in the armour viewer and between the armour viewer and gameplay environment.

On 9/23/2020 at 10:21 AM, Qbicle said:

Some vehicles still had HEAT and HEAT-MP shell damage bonuses even after their removal in Update 0.33, this has been fixed

Yeah no, they didn't fix this. There are still quite a few vehicles that have HEAT and HEAT-MP damage bonuses, plus a few that still have HESH/HEP damage bonuses (which are also no longer a thing, iirc).

I'm just going to point out that it isn't actually a binomial distribution since there are (at the very minimum) 3 outcomes when it comes to platoon advantages:

• Friendly team has the platoon advantage
• Enemy team has the platoon advantage
• There is no platoon advantage

Given that you are only doing a binomial distribution of the matches where there was a platoon advantage for one team or the other, there is potentially a quite sizeable source of error in the form of all of the other matches you discounted due to the lack of a platoon advantage. Additionally, since you do not differentiate between platoons of 2 or 3 players or platoon advantages of +1 or +2 platoons, these are also potential sources of error (e.g. does 3x 2-player platoons vs . 2x 3-player platoons count as a platoon advantage for the team with 3 platoons despite each team having 6 players in platoons?).

1 hour ago, TekNicTerror said:

WTF would you complain about extra damage on ammo that was supposed to be removed?

Not complaining per se, more pointing it out for other people to be aware of it.

On a side note, these vehicles will probably be quite deadly in PvP until the devs get their shit together and undo the half-assed changes...

Griffin 120 still has the HEAT damage bonus on its stock HEAT rounds, 650 base damage with a 35% damage bonus trashes anything it can pen in very short order.

Edit: just checked, the damage bonus is still on the Griffin's HEAT ATGMs, 700 damage with a 30% damage bonus.

Edit 2: also:

• ATGMs on the Degman with the 120mm
• ATGMs on the Seon'gun-915
• HEAT on the Type 74
• HEAT on the Leclerc Proto
• HEAT and ATGM on the ST1
• HEAT and ATGM on the PL-01
• HEP on the WWO Wilk (the tier 8 TD)
• HEAT and ATGM on the Sprut-SD

These are just the ones I noticed. It looks like the devs couldn't even remove a game mechanic properly, WTF?

Yay, Meltdown is back.....

Uhhhhhhh......

Maybe I should try relogging.

annnnnd, no.

Heyyyy, I got a kill!

Not that it was actually worth anything because I relogged....

Honestly, I think the issue with the K2's magazine loader should be added to the list of concerns about update 0.33. The magazine loader (which was already the strongest all-round gun option of the K2) received a ~20% DPM increase while the single shot and ready rack options only received a 5% increase rendering them largely irrelevant. Since I always feel like it is a waste to have things in a game that nobody uses because they are completely useless, I'm going to recommend a few possible changes that could be made to the K2's other gun options to make them relevant again.

The basic idea is each gun should have a defined use case:

• The single-shot gun has no burst capacity, and therefore has the use case of sustained DPM
• The ready rack should not be able to get close to the single shot gun in DPM, and should instead focus on some form of burst damage
• The magazine loader should also focus on some form of burst damage

If we assume that the current DPM for the magazine loader is the upper limit of what is deemed "acceptable" by the developers, the single shot gun should have its reload time dropped by at least 1 second to 6.50 seconds (which would give sustained RoF and DPM of 11.17 and 6925, respectively). 

If the magazine loader is to be left in it's current state as a hybrid burst/sustained option, that means that the ready rack should occupy a niche dishing out burst damage. To this effect, the overall DPM of the ready rack option is less of a concern than how fast it can fire the first few shells in an engagement. As such, I would recommend increasing the capacity of the ready rack by 1 (allowing it to fire between 4 and 6 shots depending on the setup) and reducing the cyclical reload time by at least 1 second to 3 seconds.

With these changes, the minmaxing table would look like this:

I think this would be a much better state for the K2 to be in, as it would give all of the gun options a purpose that a player could base their playstyle around.

That said, I think that the magazine loader should get a nerf in the form of a longer reload time (about 18 seconds seems about right if it is supposed to be a hybrid burst/sustained gun option).

0.33 Update:
Due to popular request (literally 1 person asked for it), I am updating my K2 minmaxing table for update 0.33, since a new update should mean new minmaxing setups. Changes in 0.33 to the K2 include:

• The 120mm AP round getting buffed to 620 damage
• The magazine loader getting an extra shot (3 instead of 2)

With this in mind, my K2 minmaxing table changes as follows:

The same rules apply to this version table as the original table from the K2's pre-release.

What does all this mean? Not much, really. About the only thing that changed is that the magazine loader went from being noticeably stronger than the other gun options to being the strongest gun option on the K2 bar none. The single shot option is still decent (or at least not terrible), but is overshadowed by the magazine loader while the ready rack now has no valid reason to exist on the K2 because the magazine loader does everything the ready rack does, but better.

Yet another person who lost out on XP and credit compensation for the M1A1, M1A1, and Proto Leclerc. I had researched all of the upgrades on all 3 tanks, but after I had re-researched and repurchased the upgrades in 0.33 I had somehow ended up with less credits and XP (~70k XP and ~2M credits) than I had before 0.33 released (and I did not buy or research anything that would account for this difference). Note that this also does not account for the fact that I had the M1A1 and Proto Leclerc at 100% and now need another ~95k and ~160k XP respectively to get both tanks back to 100%.

I haven't looked at the vehicles that much yet, I'll be back with updates in a few hours.

Edit 1: just noticed that the M1A2 is missing one of the unlockable free XP injections (worth ~67k XP), it should have 4 (like every other tier 7-10 MBT) instead of the 3 that are shown.

Go figure, the 5th Anniversary event requires you to play a match every day for over a month, and a controversial new patch drops on day 3....

Why did I get the feeling that this would happen?

Auto-generated crew names are fun....

I remember it being quite fun in PvE back when I first unlocked it a few months after it was added, but I haven't gone back to it since then.

The main thing that the Rookiat had going for it (imo) was actually armour. The turret armour was strong enough to tank any autocannon AP it would see as well as some of the less powerful full-size AP rounds, while the upper hull was sloped enough to auto-bounce any AP round that you would reasonably expect hit by. Essentially, you could take a hull-down position and be practically immune to just about everything you would come up against in a PvE match with the exception of some of the more powerful ATGMs (I seem to recall that the armour was unexpectedly strong against HEAT despite being plain old steel). Combine this with decent view range (not outstanding, but good enough to counter-spot any of the bots that tried and failed to kill you), a half-decent gun for finishing off low-health enemies, and good mobility and you ended up with a very odd (and mildly cursed) scout/TD/MBT hybrid with a fairly unique scout-by-counterfire role in PvE.

That said, I haven't played the Rookiat in forever an day so that assessment probably isn't accurate any more. There have been a whole bunch of new vehicles added or changed (re: got penetration buffs) since then that I would be very surprised if the Rookiat was still viable as a scout-by-counterfire vehicle in PvE. Odds are that it has been power creeped to hell and back, but it might be worth trying to see if it can still do the whole scout-by-counterfire thing.

It's been a few minutes since I read this.....

I'm still processing what was said here (especially in regards to P2W matchmaker edition and fuel fires), I'll come back once I sort it out.

I predict that the new wheeled bots will behave like police from some of the earlier GTA games:

• They'll charge you down at full speed and try to ram you (completely ignoring the fact that they are very light, have paper armour and terrible accuracy on the move)
• Understeer on every corner they try to make at high speed (and drive into buildings or off of cliffs)
• Only ever moving at max speed and poor obstacle avoidance meaning they will get stuck on small rocks and other obstacles (probably in a position where they don't have enough gun depression or elevation to shoot you)

It might not be the tier 3 version of the Malyutka. iirc, the ZBL-08 gets a Chinese derivative of the Malyutka and is fairly effective at tier 6.

looking at the wikipedia entry for the Malyutka, we could end up with a number of variants:

Quote

• AT-3A Sagger A 9M14 Malyutka wire-guided MCLOS Entered service in 1963.
• AT-3B Sagger B 9M14M Malyutka-M wire-guided MCLOS Entered service in 1973 improved motor, reducing flight time to maximum range. Mass 11 kg. Range 3 km.
• AT-3C Sagger C 9M14P Malyutka-P wire-guided SACLOS
  • 9M14P Improved warhead 460 mm versus RHA, Entered service in 1969
  • 9M14P1 Improved warhead 520 mm versus RHA with a stand off probe for improved capability against ERA.
  • 9M14MP1
  • 9M14MP2
• AT-3D Sagger D wire-guided SACLOS entered service in the 1990s. Mass 13 kg. Range 3 km. Speed improved to 130 m/s.
  • 9M14-2 Malyutka-2 3.5 kg HEAT warhead 800 mm penetration versus RHA. Entered service in 1992. Weight 12.5 kg.
  • 9M14-2M Malyutka-2M 4.2 kg tandem HEAT warhead for improved capability against ERA. Weight 13.5 kg. Speed 120 m/s.
  • 9M14-2P Malyutka-2P
  • 9M14-2F Malyutka-2F 3.0 kg thermobaric warhead. Intended for use against troops and soft vehicles.
  • 9M14P-2F
  • 9M14-2T Serbian VTI Malyutka-2T SACLOS 4.4 kg tandem HEAT warhead 1,000 mm penetration versus RHA, improved capability against ERA. Weight 13.7 kg. Speed 120 m/s.
  • 2T5 Serbian VTI Malyutka-2T5 range 5 kilometers, guided missile via radio control. Speed 200 m/s.

The Malyutka we currently have in-game at tier 3 appears to be either the AT-3A or AT-3B, meaning we could see any of the AT-3C variants (460 or 520 pen, possibly with a better modifier against ERA) or the devs could completely go off the deep end and give us AT-3D with 800mm (or more, and possibly with a tandem warhead) of HEAT pen at tier 5.

11 hours ago, knutliott said:

The only thing I can think of is that aggro is cumulative in some way throughout the match.

That could very well be the case, and would actually make sense irl. If a bunch of tanks had observed a an enemy take out half of their number, while remaining mostly unscathed, the remaining tanks would prioritize them as the single biggest threat. As such, it would probably make sense if a 'global' agro system was being used in the game.

That said, I have definitely observed bots acting on individual agro levels, so any global agro system would have to work in parallel with the 'individual' agro system. If there is a global agro system, I'd imagine that players would generate global agro much slower than individual agro (probably somewhere between 5%-10% of the values for individual agro) so that bots could still react to players that are a threat to them and not just tunnel vision on the top player (as you claim they tend to do).

Edit: just a quick disclaimer. The information here represents my current understanding of the agro system in AW. I'm not 100% certain that the information here is completely accurate, so there may be a few things that I either missed or got wrong. If you find something that isn't written here or indicates that some of the information here is wrong, please let me know so I can update it.

There was a dev article a while back (almost 2 years ago, right around the time that Heroic spec ops was released) that explained the rules for AI agro. According to the article, the vehicle that the AIs target is based on 2 things:

1. The player in the heaviest and closest vehicle
2. The player with the highest aggro (with aggro being generated by dealing damage to bots and deflecting the return fire according to the article)

When an AI has not fired a shot and not been shot at in return, it defaults to the first setting (this can be seen when spotting a fresh AI vehicle, note how they typically face the nearest MBT even when said MBT is behind multiple layers of cover). I believe the equation that determines each player's proto-agro value takes the form of:

ProtoAgro = VehicleWeight / Distance

This means that a decrease in your vehicle's weight will allow you to get closer to an AI before it targets you. For example, if a player in a 50-ton vehicle is 250m away from an AI, another player in a 30-ton vehicle would need to be less than 150m away in order for the AI to decide to focus on them instead of the player in the 50-ton vehicle, while a player in a 10-ton vehicle would need to be less than 50m away for the AI to focus on them. Of course, this assumes that distance has a proportional effect on which player is focused when in is entirely possible that the effect of weight or distance is squared (placing a larger emphasis on heavier or closer vehicles, respectively). Some tests would need to be done to determine exactly what the effects of vehicle weight and distance are.

Once an AI has either fired a shot (and had the shot bounce) or taken a damaging hit, the AI will change to the 2nd setting and focus on whatever player (that is currently in their line of fire) has the highest total of damage dealt to that AI and deflected return fire (I'm not sure if there are any modifiers for the total that change the weighting of the dealt/deflected damage stats). If there are no players in line of fire that have damaged the bot or deflected a shot from the bot, the bot will go back to the first setting. It is worth noting that each AI has a separate agro counter, meaning that agroing one bot will not agro any nearby bots (although they will still try to shoot you if you get spotted and have high agro on them).

As far as I can tell, agro will only ever go up, which means that deflecting a several thousand damage worth of autocannon AP from single AFV in an MBT will all but insure that the AI that fired those rounds will never attempt to attack a player that isn't you (as long as it can continue shooting at you). If you break contact with the AI, it will immediately begin attacking the player with the next highest agro total that it has line of sight on (like that TD that got a bit too close and got spotted while shooting up the AI), but will go back to attacking you if it regains contact with you.

What does all of this mean? If you want to minimize the damage you take from bots:

• Let someone with armour be the first one spotted, they can deflect damage and will draw more agro with every shot they deflect
• Try to shoot at the bot that the tanking player is shooting at, they are drawing more agro from that bot than the others
• Don't outpace the agro drawn by the player tanking the damage, otherwise the bots you shot up will try to shoot at you instead. It is easier to outpace the agro for a bot with low DPM (e.g. Challengers) than it is to outpace the agro for a high-DPM bot (e.g. Termi or T-15), so pick your targets carefully
• If you start taking fire, fall back and let the bots go back to shooting at the player who was tanking damage. You can take this time to relocate to a position where you will be less likely to be spotted or will be able to better support your team for the next stage of the mission

Conversely, if you're in an MBT and want to minimize the damage your team takes from bots:

• Make sure you're the first one spotted, any shots you deflect will make the bots that fired them less likely to shoot at your teammates
• Focus on the bots that need to die, this will make them less likely to shoot at your teammates when your teammates decide to shoot at it
• Do not break line of sight with the bots if any of your soft-skinned teammates are spotted, otherwise the bots will start shooting up your teammates
• If a bot starts shooting at someone else, shoot it to draw its agro back to you

On 6/23/2020 at 2:39 PM, Qbicle said:

Shortly after Maciek announced the initial results, someone reported that you platooned up for the PVE damage results. You may have been disqualified because of that.

It's best for you to contact SS and/or Maciek if you do have screenshots/replay that can otherwise disprove such accusation.

I almost never platoon up unless I'm trying to farm a BP mission or something, and I definitely remember that I was not in a platoon for that match. I will have to contact one of the mods when they're on and give them the replay.

Edit: I was told to put the screenshots and replay in a dropbox or google drive folder. I'm leaving the link here so I don't forget about it.

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1stxFaeylgt8uUlvLl_zJtes5SsTqJmKj?usp=sharing

So, after checking the contest Discord channel, I found that my 27,978 damage PvE game was the highest damage score for the Type 74 damage contest.

Naturally, I was expecting to either be contacted by one of the mods or have the reward show up in my garage one day. After waiting a few days without either of the expected outcomes happening, I decided to go look at the contest channel to see what was up. I found this:

I am really fucking salty right now.

Can someone please explain why this happened and how I can go about claiming my prize?