Yup I thought of that and was trying to hink of how to prevent it.  The only thing I can think of would be to make it so that if a bot's weapon misfires, it will target the nearest bot that does not share a communications channel with the misfiring bot.  If that bot is not an enemy, it will do enhanced damage due to defenses not being prepared for an attack from that angle.

This would cause a pretty significant number of friendly fire incidents in a zerg or blob situation where there are several small teams operating, especially with low skill pilots.  With high skill pilots, there would be fewer misfires, but the ones that do happen would probably hurt a lot more.

It looks as if Perpetuum is headed the same way as EVE went.  Blobs and zergs rule.

  With the weapons and technology that we are using, I can think of a couple ways to severely discourage blobbing and zerging.

  1) Cluster Munitions - basically area effect weapons.

  2) Viral electronic warfare which feeds off linked commo channels.  If you have 10 people on team A and 40 people on team B, and any of those players are hit by the viral attack would spread the attack to their teammates.  Every mech is affected if any of them are successfully affected.  The more mechs on a team that are affected, the worse the effects would be.  At 10 players, targeting times would be extended maybe, at 20, you might lose lock on existing targets, at 30 you might have your targeting range significantly reduced, at 40, you might simply be unable to target anything.  At 50 all of your equipment stops functioning.  At 60 your mech might move at half speed.

  The same might hold true for corps or alliance, not just teams.  If you get too many people together in one place, and they are linked by team, corp, or alliance, one hit could bring a zerg to it's knees.

  This would be a mighty potent discouragement.

  It might be appropriate to allow some mitigation of this effect with modules, but the modules would need to be difficult to fit, and NOT fit in an aske at all.

Distances between your mech and everyone else's mechs.

Sure there isn't collision in the game, but it has to have at least some effect on the server when a 50x50 battle means the server must keep 100 people updated on the positions of 99 other people at near realtime rates.  At the very least that's going to be 9900 updates per update cycle - just for sending the data to the clients, not to mention calculating them.

With "fog of war", you could reduce the range calculation rates to any non targeted or targeting to once per second or two and only send basic range data, not specific data.

You would still see mechs moving around, but they might not be exactly where you thought they were, until you target them, at which point they would firm up in your sensors and give you good info.

Been a member for a couple days.  Good people.

Bump

I've experienced the same problem but I run an armor repper continuously in my Castel when fighting, so I didn't die.  Seems as if you hit a bit of lag.  Some drones have armor repairers and will repair themselves.  If your lag lasts long enough, the bot will stack healing actions and firing actions that your client can't see, and your client will display and register them when the lag is over.  The server, however, doesn't trust your built-up actions and ignores them.

Unfortunately the server needs to ignore stacked client actions or there would be mass exploitation.  The server also needs to stack effects that you can't see if there is lag - also to avoid exploitation.

Best bet is to make sure your connection is clean, and if you are on a shared connection, ask people to stop downloading Pronz when you are playing.

It is working properly.

It's not 5% of all possible incoming damage.  It's a 5% reduction of the % that currently is unblocked.

Basically:

L1 = 100% * .95 = .95
L2 = 95% * .95 = .9025
L3 = 90.25% * .95 = .857375
L4 = 85.7375% * .95 = .81450625

...

This yields diminishing returns, and keeps you from ever reaching 100% damage reduction.

As you get into the larger robots, I would hope this would be less and less of a problem?  The small hills and whatnot will interfere less because you can fire over them easier in a taller bot?  Any laser pilots in mechs out there able to comment?

Only for the Tutorial 3b Mission:

Pop open the personal storage and make the concentric red circles like what is used to draw attention to the tabs at the top of the screens during other tutorials.

Sated

I'm not against optimization at all, but even when optimized, fog of war could be added.  This would allow even larger battles than optimizing alone, and allow lower end machines to participate in some battles that otherwise would be a problem for them even with optimization.

    I think it would be fun to allow more uncertainty on the battlefield, without implementing something silly like EVE's cloak and coast.

If this is indeed the case, then it might be best to implement some sort of fog of war that limits data input.

Here's what I mean:

If more than X robots are within your detection and ranging radius, switch modes to a fog or war mode.

Fog of war mode would only tell you the precise distance between you and anyone targeting you, or anyone you have targeted.  Everyone else would be an approximation.  Zero range, short range, medium range, long range, extreme range.

Ranges could then be refreshed occasionally rather than continuously, and ranges would be based on each individual ship's targeting range.

This would add a lot more realism to larger group PVP, and reduce the server / client range calculation issues as well.

Faster mechs might be able to move far enough that you might not see where they went - provided they were not in an engagement with you.

Perhaps allow mechs two size classes larger than other mechs to mask signatures, letting an aske hide under an assault class robot.  This would immediately be revealed by targeting the assault mech and isolating it's signature.

I could really see the fog of war adding a LOT to PVP combat.