Stonefalcon, on 09 May 2013 - 09:47 PM, said:
It’s been 11 months since I’ve joined this “what you might call a community” and began to contribute to the development of the game in my own way. Firstly there have been a number of drastic changes made to the game some more so than others and it has been a great experience to live with the game and see it grow but at the same time there have been instances where the game has literally gone backwards.
I’ll start with what I felt was a step backwards, why PGI made it so and what’s been done to fix it.
- Engine limitations on mechs. The reason this came about was to stop the 200kph mechs from lagging the crap out of the server but it also killed off some of the most fun builds to date, the XL 400 dragons and hunchbacks, the STD 400 Atlases pretending to be Banshees this restriction was put in place not to kill these great mechs but to stop a minority of people lagging the servers. Has it been fixed, unfortunately not, this quick fix is still in place and it seems just silly to have not fixed this issue after 11 months.
- Weightmatching. Some of the most fun players had in the early days was getting a group of 8 jenners together and swarming the opposing team one after another. Somehow back in the day weights of mechs did not matter, whether you had 8 Atlases vs 8 Jenners, well balanced groups or one awesome match I got to play 8 hunchbacks verse 8 centurions (Admittedly the last one was weight balanced but you get my point). Weightmatching was brought in by the vocal minority to stem development of fun tactics in favour of people wanting to bring in big guns to blow away your team.
- 16 Man groups. One of the killers of the game right here, people love to play the game with their friends, not 8 or 12 random people they may or may not know. With 16 mans there was a great level of uncertainty with entertainment and it would be great if this function returned so friends can once again play with friends and enjoy the game in their own way.
- Dev Drops with Testers. GONEEEEE is the day when Paul, Brian or Garth would join a 16 man and do random drops. I remember one day 16 of us with Paul just spend 10 matches testing just one weapon, one match with nothing but machine guns, another with AC/2s. I actually laughed when we were playing with the AC/2s and the common consensus was that AC/2s were crap, OMFG how that changed with the Cataphract 4X making a scene. But will we ever see devs playing in a group of testers, never again.
- Weapon Balancing. I have never seen a game where this has been done so wrongly. One week one weapon is OP then it’s heavily nerfed, then it’s buffed heavily then it’s nerfed and kept there. Some weapons have their values changed to encourage more shooting such as lasers and PPCs. In my honest opinion I’ve been using 6 PPC’s on an Awesome since the day it came out, back then it was hilarious, people thought me mad to field it. I love being outside the box but then around came PGI who reduced the heat from PPCs to nine and a few more people started to field it, now we have 8 heat for 10 damage? With a max range of 1080m? Just silly if you ask me the bigger weapons are supposed to be high heat due to their increased ranges whereas up close a medium or medium pulse laser would be more efficient in terms of damage and heat to tonnage.
- Jump Jets. In battletech jump jets are supposed to be a purely manoeuvring tool, they allow you to reach those places to get the perfect vantage point, take a shot then retreat, even in the battletech table top rules if you use jump jets it’s harder for you to hit anything during that turn, most likely due to the increased cockpit shake the jets are producing. OMFG poptarters are killing the game like you won’t believe, jump up shoot back down again, rinse and repeat with no repercussions. Will PGI do anything to fix it, most likely not without a massive reduction of players to make those dollar signs start shrivelling. Do they need to fix them, yes quite simply. How, surely they can introduce a system where the cockpit would shake based on the number of jump jets being used on the mech or better yet the class of jets being used. The heavier the jet the more shake it makes to move that heavy mass to the intended destination, were talking 90 and 70 tonne un-aerodynamic behemoths not paperweight minors taking a glide with their sleek shapes.
- The other factor involving jump jets is the reduced damage bug which still hasn’t been fixed since closed beta testers mentioned it over 10 months ago. More than once I’ve seen a jumping mech take a heaps of guns to the face and register no damage or only a fraction of it, even with state rewind this is a serious issue and it was absolutely stupid to hold a poptarting competition with the highlander while this bug is still present.
8. ELO, don’t get me started on how terrible this has made the game.
OK Rant over, now the good things UMMM
- State rewind. HUGE improvement, this has actually brought life back into the game, it has made each variant useful again especially for high ping players outside the US and Canada. I was a very happy chappy when this came in.
When I thought of writing this post I was sure there would be more good than bad, apparently not, sure you could say the addition of new mechs and maps has helped but at the core of the game these have changed nothing, it all comes down to those hard decisions PGI has had to make with the game’s development but honestly they are making it go backwards.
I really hope the development of this game picks up, PGI stops to think about releasing a flashy new hero mech instead of fixing that bug and actually gets around to finishing what they started.
Man, that is quite a bit of rubbish you write along with some darn fine points as well.
- The engine limitation is good, HUGE balance factor and much better than this crap where every mech was only different because of hardpoints. I say they should test a bit and maybe take it further and implement armour caps based on the default as well, so the chassis are more to their original role. Jagermech is a glass cannon, not a frontline brawler.
Maybe wait with this until they have quite a few more chassis done to avoid cutting the variety down too much.
- Weightmatching, I boggle that anyone could want completely random drops of mechs that do not match each other. A close even battle is the most fun, and that does not involve 8 Atlas or 8 Jenners pr side.
- 16 man groups, agreed, they need to get a proper system for group drops back into the game, its killing the community the way it is.
- Dev Drops with players... Im sure that was fun for the people involved. But.. what does this have to do with what is more fun in the game as a whole, for the average gamer when there are thousands of gamers involved at any given time?
- Weapon balance. Complex stuff, you may be right. These public test servers they have coming might be the answer to our prayers on this, fingers crossed. Because something need to change with the way they implement balance changes, it is not good enough at the moment. Just releasing ECM into the game as they did, oh my..
- Jump jets. Works ok, but combined with the bad weapon balance at the moment it is pretty bad. I do not see anything bad with having some shake on the aim, or at LEAST make it so that weapon convergence gets much worse while jumping, so that not all weapons hit one spot.
- Elo seems to be working pretty well for me and the ones I drop with, but I see a lot of other people complaining as well, so I might just be lucky. Some days I win, some days I lose, thats how it should be.
- State Rewind rocks, you are quite correct.
Other good points:
- Map design
- Mech design
- Conquest (not great, but it helps with some variety!)
- The improvements to the UI. It was a lot worse before, even if its not great yet.
- Quite a few balance issues resolved.
8
