Just a simple idea.

The AGT is a gatling gun, right?

So how about giving it a spinning barrel!

Make it take a second to start the barrel going before anything fires out of it. Bingo, you no longer have your uber-anti-fighter weapon because there is no way you can react to a swift dash towards you. BUT, its still great for support fire and covering yourself with. Only difference is you wouldnt be able to rely on it 100%.

Thoughts?

no

ooh, this is a neat idea, it has to warm up first. I like it.

(it'd also be kinda neat if this weapon was ammo based, you could up the speed/dmg for it and give it 800 ammo)

(I know people have pointed out that this causes lag, but I don't see why it should)

Yes@UncleDave
No@Shape

Could you expand on that answer rogue? Why not have an ammo based rapidfire wep. You keep the graphic the same, track it the same, but when it reaches 800 shots the thing shuts off.

Client sends +shoot1 & begins firing, client sends -shoot1 to stop firing, but client has a latency spike just then, and ends up shooting 100 more rounds than the player intended. That's just one reason why rapid-fire weapons might not be best to limit by ammo. I like Shape don't entirely understand why rapid-fire ammo based weapons would cause lag, but I can see how existing lag would have a detrimental impact on their use.

The fact of the matter is that they do cause lag and we really don't need to go over why again. No need to beat a dead horse. If a1k0n wakes up one mornign with a way to fix that, then we can talk again. Until then, don't mess with it.

kicking the horse just a little bit, shape, I think you've been told this before, but ammo for any weapon increases the amount of information that the server and the client need to communicate to each other, and for most weapons, the fire rate is slow enough that this isn't a problem, but the AGT is a rapid fire weapon, so the extra information increases significantly, causing lag.

UncleDave: I like the idea, but 1 second is probably too much. It'd be nearly impossible to anticipate firing opportunities one second in advance (especially against the superfast lights), but 1/2 a second would probably be more realistic while not making things overly impossible.

Think about it, a quick fighter can nip in, shoot a bunch of times, and nip out in a second. Unless the other guy is overly obvious about it, anticipating that one second in advance is practically impossible. But 1/4 to 1/2 a second would let you get a bit of a snapshot, but you'd still have to have really fast reactions to get the shots off in time.

Couldn't the ammo be tracked client-side?

Edit: I mean, the only thing that needs to be sent is a signal from the client that you're out of ammo. Which is only one more signal right?

I like this idea, though maybe a "light version" for the poor hog users first?

Tracking ammo client side is bad...

It makes it far too easy to sniff packets, route things through a proxy, look for your ammo tracker, and then override it.

Unlimited ammo.

To the best of my knowledge, the client already communicates each individual AGT particle to the server, so there would be no overhead in turning it into an ammo-based gun. The server would have to keep track of the ammo count to prevent exploits, but the code for that already exists (rockets are being tracked that way). The overhead is minimal server-side as well. Technically there is no reason against. I am not saying it makes sense though.

Technically, there is quite a reason against it. It had ammo for awhile. Any time you used it, it caused massive lag. We really don't need to go into this again. Feel free to look up the old posts if you need more information.

just make it so one unit of ammo is worth 10 or 15 shots, now you have 1/10th the lag you had before.

Yeah, and then you do 1 or 2 shots and it costs you 10, or you only do bursts of 1 or 2 and it doesn't costs you any ammo...
So you still have to count 'em all.

Seeing as plenty of other MMO games are capable of creating rapid fire ammo based weapons, there's no inherent flaw with it. It sounds like there was a bug or something back in antiquity.

tram: that only makes it simpler for the player, so he doesn't have to buy 1500 ammo, but just 100. The server and the client still need to track exactly how many shots the player has fired.

I'd still like to see the tracking ability of the AGT reduced just a little bit. Not so much that it makes it useless, just enough so that you have to do a little bit more than point your ship in the general direction of the target to hit it.

There are certain ships that are useless against AGTs, which is not good. I think creating a lag would do wonders for balance and make duels more interesting. For botting purposes, you're not losing much because you can see where they're coming from for the most part (and you're luring them in).

Okay, I've been thinking about it, and I like the idea of a 0.5-1 second "warm up" to firing the AGT.

Another possibility no delay before firing, but it has a 1-2 second "spin up" time so it starts with a low firing rate and then increases to its max rate. This has the added advantage of giving you the "snapshot" but not the added advantage of extremely quick followup shots.

And a slight decrease in the auto-aim is fine with me, but there need to be other improvements to the AGT if these other suggestions are implemented.

My main beef with these balance changes is that while it takes the "laziness factor" out of the AGT, it also weakens the power of already weak L-port weapons. Let's face it, the L-port guns are sadly behind the curve, especially when pitted against neutrons and gauss. At 375-400 damage, they're lower than neutrons, and at 180m/s they're as slow as gauss mkIs. Their only saving grace are the auto-aim and the firing rate. If these get reduced, then I think a damage and speed increase would be helpful. Probably also getting the firing spread reduced on the GC, but that's debatable.

What I figure is this: the spread of the gatlings means that after 150-175m, the rate of hits on a non-moving target is reduced to below 25% (whereas with neutrons, you'll almost never miss). This means that the gatlings are relegated to close-range weapons. But as the gatling cannon is an L-port gun. As L-ports are on medium-ships and larger, generally they don't have the agility to keep the crosshairs on the pipper for the gatling cannon to hit. And even with a lot of practice, I can for the most part shoot when my crosshair lands on the pipper, I usually don't hit due to the spread, or due to the fact that my target is moving so quickly that the shots just miss.

So thus, I think that if the gatlings are to be modified to make them harder to hit with, they need to get a damage boost and a speed boost to probably 190-200 to counteract the change. At least in this way, they'll be able to sufficiently punish smaller ships for making mistakes, without making it too easy to use. If not a speed boost, then 0.5-1m proximity would probably give a similar effect of allowing more hits without giving too many.