Karl Berg, on 09 April 2014 - 10:41 AM, said:
Seriously? I just checked and he has 10,583 of those forum awesomeness popularity point things, so I'm guessing he used to be a highly active player; although it looks like he hasn't even played July of last year.
Chronojam, if you would humor me, was there something in particular that set you off? If there are specific issues, it's possible I might be able to rectify some at best, or at the very least provide an explanation or further insight. For now, the best I can do is apologize on behalf of the company.
Not sure how to approach this. I could go really concise upfront and link you an image that was actually banned by the moderation team because it got too popular, but may as well write some words and maybe they'll amount to something.
Yes, as you might imagine, "CJ is a staunch hater" was quite an oversimplification. At the beginning, I played the hell out of MWO as you guessed, until things finally reached a breaking point for not just me but essentially my entire unit.
In June 2012, the Hunchback was added to the game -- by July 2012, we already had over 300 players. I am not exaggerating when I claim we had over
1,500 players active at one point, but our last active guy was Mint_Frog who finally gave up. It's crazy to watch firsthand as that many people get fed up and leave, and watching your buddies all cringe at patchnotes. Despite being from a big group, it's also a bit of an oversimplification to say the issues we had were all big-group issues.
When UI 2.0 came out I did try to install it again -- on an alt -- and did experience some difficulty with that process and the in-game settings (which has since been fixed, I heard) and found that didn't really pull me back as you also might imagine.
One of the reasons I used an alt at work, and believe others used alts to check patches, is because of a sense that upper management was out of touch, unable to properly take meaning from data, and would see founders logging in and say "Aha! Retention! These patches are working brilliantly!" At one point there was some statement made that implied that 50% of founders were retained because they had logged in within the 30 day window or something. That was frustrating to hear; maybe that's not a correct reading of the original statement, but that was the impression and was never corrected.
The growing sense that PGI's top guys were out of touch is a trend that's painfully evident if you glance through old Ask The Devs, etc., where the tone changes from hopeful optimism ("When will feature _____ be implemented?") to questions that started to take the format of "Do you even know _____ is an issue?"
You can see that same sense continuing still. For example, the recent dev feedback thread on group drop data. The community has a lot of concern that the group drop data is being misread and will be misused. A lot of players starting to argue about "group launches" vs "player launches" and what percentage of the population uses what group method.
Nothing has been done to reassure players, allowing the atmosphere to get even worse. That's a tale that's been told time and time again in the past.
Not only has nothing been done to reassure players when they have concerns, but many times, more fuel has been added to the fire after a long wait for clarification. For example, players had concerns about cockpit glass for a very long time. Predictably, with developer silence (and apparent ignorance of the issue itself), came player resentment. Finally, on Twitter of all places (another gripe that's now being addressed, maybe?) a statement was made: Removing glass would be a premium option.
Well, fuel on the fire, this sounds an awful lot like something you have to pay for, as opposed to a normal option like Anti-Aliasing. Developer silence on what a "premium option" was, is predictably met with players roaring over its implications.
On that particular note, I'd like to thank you for clarifying about player count indications. And reading this far. I'll touch upon that. A long while back, we had player counts displayed (much like several titles, such as War Thunder, display). Players are dissatisfied with its removal, and questions about player counts were met with the usual silence. Finally, prodded enough, Russ tossed out: "People might misinterpret the numbers."
And,
my, that is a wholly unsatisfying explanation. The explanation we just now, in this thread, got from you is far more palatable and not condescending in the least, and is the first time it's felt properly addressed. So, thank you. A while ago, Kyle/Fox told us in very intentionally specific phrasing about "logins" for the day while specifically not mentioning player counts.
That was also much-welcomed information... unfortunately, this sort of information was never presented in any of the "State of things" wrap-ups and you'd only know it if you saw it cited by a player or were reading reddit that day. That's the kind of thing we'd expect to see Russ or Bryan mention in a summary somewhere.
Anyhow, what's got me irritated in particular, some of it still-to-this-day?
Ghost Heat -
A lazy balancing mechanic that was poorly explained at its inception, poorly implemented and full of questionable choices that broke several weapons and reinforced the playstyle it ostensibly targeted. You'd think firing 40-50-60 LRMs would have a predictable heat curve, but 50 is cooler than 40 or 60.
Balance and Build Variety - Sort of hand in hand with Ghost Heat. Paul promised us "Aggressive balance changes" with regards to SRMs a year ago -- those changes never came if you read the patch notes up until now, and even players who say SRMs are balanced readily admit they are unreliable due to hit detection and splash (or lack thereof). Recently there was a comment that the game was balanced except
autocannons were being looked at; this comes as a surprise to anybody who was wondering what good flamers or small lasers were for.
The 2PPC1Gauss metagame was allowed to rule alongside jumpsniping (with that same loadout) while players watched as balance fixes did nothing but encourage that playstyle by gutting its competition. It took forever for jumpjet changes to get in there that disrupted jumpsniping, but those were quickly reverted (to the detriment of gameplay). Only very recently was another attempt to overhaul jumpjets made, finally making "Should I take jumpjets?" even a question because up until now the answer was "Yes, take one jump jet if your mech can take them."
SHS vs DHS is not even a choice. DHS are a clear upgrade. Perhaps that's the PGI vision for the game, but it's bad for build variety and takes it from a thoughtful consideration directly into being a "newbie tax."
Teamplay support - No integrated VOIP, beyond the tragicomic C3 effort that was hyped as the best thing since walking tanks in an over the top press release in Reuters. Not even token clan tag support. Nothing to facilitate group matchups beyond players sync-dropping. No ability to have a mission record to even find players you dropped with post-match. Very sketchy text chat, with no in-game quick-command options (attack my target, fall back, cover me, overheating, disengage, etc.). This more than anything probably helps create the gulf between the "haves" and "have-nots" in groups, and makes it hard for players to even find a team. "Go on the third party NGNG teamspeak server and hope you find some guys to play with" isn't really a good alternative.
Communication - This should be very, painfully obvious. And I feel it has been a two-way problem. The former community manager and administrator Niko Snow did not do a good job. From the surprise and shock that PGI seems to feel when players provide direct feedback on issues, it makes me wonder if a lot of negativity was whitewashed before reaching the decision-makers or dismissed upfront as trolling/nonsense. Once, I had a conversation with Garth about the balance between long range and close range weaponry. He was honestly convinced that was impossible to achieve; this makes me wonder if player feedback towards those ends was simply discarded.
There have been one or two volunteer moderators who were causing issues, and apparently nobody responsible knew. Again, there was some degree of surprise/shock when everyday PGI staffers heard about what was going on and they were quick to correct it, but the "proper channels" had failed.
I stopped playing because after sticking with it for so long, I did not see the game getting better. I saw the game getting worse. There was no more patience left, I could not in good faith invite friends to play due to a worsening new player experience and dismal future outlook. Providing feedback seemed pointless as it never seemed to actually get anywhere, and game-damaging decisions were being made in direct opposition to known community sentiment.
Here's an image for you, after all. It helps sum up a lot of the community's concerns, certainly my own, and I very nearly posted this alone as reply to you. This image was banned from the forum as initially linked, the URLs being added to the profanity filter to prevent players from re-posting it easily. Here it is, not as originally linked but instead as captured by one of several low-postcount founder/phoenix purchasers who had grown frustrated with the path MWO had taken.
beefridge has indeed not posted since then, in case you're wondering.
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I reckon Cryengine has a secret deal with MS so people have to buy Microsoft licences to run dedeicated servers 
