430 replies to this topic

[Bru1zer]

Since we are going back in time.

Hello Paul, whats happening.
I'm gonna need you you to go ahead and come in tomorrow and re visit ECM before it goes live, so if you could be here around nine, that would be great, mkay.

Oh oh and I almost forgot, umm I'm also going to need you to come in on Sunday too kay, we uhh lost a few features this year and if you could split ECM out to their respective modules (GECM, AECM, Null Sig) that would be greeat, we need to sort of play catch up.

Thaaaanks.

[Belorion]

I was behind the rollback a year ago.

[Ancient Demise]

So this invasion will be what happened if the inner sphere was warned about the invasion two years before it commenced and prayed to comstar to nerf the clans so that it was more "fair." If this was truly a rollback you would get rid of coolant pods and Angel ECM but we all know that will not happen.



Since the Inner sphere knows the clans are coming and are more or less prepared in this timeline, you should make it interesting.
Open up invasion corridors all around the inner sphere (say its 3052 and the homeworld clans traveled all the way around the periphery to make a coordinated invasion). THAT would catch everyone off guard, and each IS faction could fight all the clans!
Goliath Scorpion attacks House Marik! Hells Horses and Ice Hellion attack House Liao! You get the idea.

[Nick Makiaveli]

Wow...2 pages in and no one seems to care that we were supposed to have some IS combat time before the Clans showed up.....so is that gone?

[Jakob Knight]

This was an unexpected and welcome change, simply because it does help inject something I think has been sorely missed in MWO for a very, very long time now. Something that I believe has cost this game at least as many players as the many failures on deadlines and promised features.

Simply put, why we fight.

Right now, we only have a game that is a hollow shell of what it was supposed to be. All we have is the arena combat. The various Factions do not exist, the universe MWO was born in does not exist, and players are given no idea why they should keep on going into one fight after another. The Clans are -not- being introduced later this month....only their technology, their tools. The -Clans- are not a new set of battlemechs or weapons for players to use...what the Clans are is not present in MWO, and the same is true of all of the Factions (which are nothing more than a cute symbol next to a player's name in MWO). Players have the tech, and a few arenas to fight in, but there are no reasons to fight, no goals to accomplish, except as an ongoing sport event.

But MechWarrior is not about a sporting event competition made up of 15-minute matches. It is about the various cultures and what they seek -when- they fight, and -why- they fight. They are about putting the supreme effort forwards that may not result in personal victory or a high 'score', but something more. To this point, all we have had is the fighting, without any of the why of it. And, when all you have is a continuous series of arena-type fighting (even the limited strategic aspect of capturing the enemy base was all but removed in two of the three modes of fighting in order to remove the need for forces to think in any terms but 'rush in and fight'), players become tired of endlessly grinding and fighting over and over without point. You start to lose players from sheer disinterest. Adding new tools to do the same jobs while leaving the need for something worthwhile to come out of the fighting and for that fighting to be something more than a 15-minute sporting event only provides very short-term solutions, and you end up having to constantly churn out more or lose even more players. However, even that fails after a period of time as players become numb to 'here is another mech to run'.

Community Warfare has always been that needed other half of the game that would keep players interested, and attract the kind of players who want more than just endless brawls inside a 15-minute sporting match. Yet, for two years now, it has been left to gather dust in favor of adding in more toys for the sporting matches, even being pushed back in favor of development and release of a group of mechs and tech that were never supposed to be in the game in the first place, let alone put in before CW could give justification for their introduction. As a result, we -still- have only the shell of the game we were told would be MechWarrior Online when it launched out of Beta.

So, now we come to it. The reset is a good sign that -maybe-, we will finally get the rest of the MechWarrior experience that has been missing completely since the regular news bulletins were discontinued. The biggest, most important factor here is one I will stress with as much emphasis as I possibly can....

Community Warfare -MUST- be much more than simply a glorified Tournament scoreboard such as we have seen to date. If all it ends up being is another form of 'Faction X fought more battles than Faction Y in the period of the Event, and the warriors had Z score, so this means Planet A goes to Faction X', then it will only serve to be another form of sporting event. Community Warfare results -MUST- be the result of more than a score on a sheet, with battles that have goals instead of KDR/ELO and a score total. If not, then players will truly know there is no point to continuing to do the same thing over and over, and the game -will- stagnate regardless of how may new mechs are put in.

Until we have a reason for why we fight, we will not have a worthy MechWarrior title.

If further evidence is needed for this point, please spool up the opening cinematic of the immediate predecessor to MechWarrior Online, MechWarrior 4. No other point could so graphically illustrate how much is missing from MechWarrior Online today than to look at that, as well as the very background art of these Forums.

Please, make Community Warfare your first and most important priority, and make it worth having.

Sincerely,

A player from the beginning.

Edited by Jakob Knight, 03 June 2014 - 06:30 PM.

[Deathlike]

At this point, it doesn't seem to matter.

This pretty much feels appropriate at this point in time:


There's no value in complaining about it anyways.

[Nyden]

EpicWarlord, on 03 June 2014 - 04:34 PM, said:

So in essence this game is basically starting over... Since this is the case are you going to release the Founder and Phoenix packs again so those who missed them the first time around can have a second chance to get them?

That'd be even better if it went both ways! If I knew then what I know now I would have neither.

In all seriousness, this does not matter one iota until some version of community warfare makes it off the drawing board. This just goes to show how desperate PGI is getting for some kind of positive publicity because they really, really, really, really need to sell more clan packs before the delivery date to pacify their corporate overlords.

If only they could announce some positive developments in CW, I'll bet that would sell some clan packs.

[Asmudius Heng]

I worry that clan tech will come in totally OP or totally nerfed making a true contest in CW pointless.

If it is OP all the clanners will state it is fine and this is historic that they can rampage unopposed ... everyone else will be annoyed that they cannot fight a fair battle.

If it is nerfed the clanners will cry, but it will also be anticlimaticic for everyone who was expecting epic tough fights.

Without testing in the real world just how clan tech is going to go this is headed for disaster IMO.

A more sensible options would have been to roll it back to 3048 IMO and let community warfare run IS house VS IS house for a good 6 months with clan tech being used for instant action only to get balance feedback, then add in some periphery CW to gently introduce them into the already running and tweaked CW followed by the full on clan invasion.

To do so otherwise is going to be a damned balance trainwreck IMO with even MORE vitriol because there is more at stake than winning or losing a match for most people.

They did not roll back far enough - I am sure plenty of clanners also agree that they do not want stupid OP mechs and no contest and they do not want gimped mechs either - CW is the worst place for testing untested balance.

[Monsoon]

I'm all for the rollback as the Invasion is something worth playing out in CW.

But I do hope we'll also fast forward through the quiet bits as well. Like the one year hold on the invasion after Leo Showers dies.

Edited by Monsoon, 03 June 2014 - 06:37 PM.

[Baltazar]

I think must be return.

Very happy with the proposal.

we must look to the future.
And not to remember the bad past.

[Greyboots]

Hmmm...

"We're going to mess with some stuff to keep the universe in order. Unfortunately this will mess with some stuff that puts the universe out of order. On the good side the possibility of stalling the entire clan invasion is giving you the opportunity to REALLY mess up the universe making anything we do to keep it lined up rather inconsequential. But hey, at least we got the clock right!"

Well.... It looks like it doesn't really effect anything and you could have equally started the clan invasion 2 years late or even changed the date to 'the Himalayan year of the Rabid Welshman' and it would still make no substantial difference.
So yeah, I guess I'm ok with the change.

[Gremlich Johns]

Doood, it would have been much easier to push the game back to 3025.

[Prezimonto]

Quote

When Community Warfare is ready, the Clans will only occupy a small number of planets. This is where players will have the ability to follow a recreation of the Clan Invasion by forcing their way down into FRR territory and harassing House Steiner and House Kurita along the way. However, if the Inner Sphere players are organized, they can even change the course of BattleTech history and try to stop the Clans in their tracks.

And this may have just returned a bit of my faith in the this game. THIS is the reason I wanted in on the ground floor of this game. The fact there's signs it's returning/finally being offered in game play may actually turn my opinion on purchasing an ala carte mech.

Please give us more CW information, specifically how will this aspect of CW work? Will it be restricted to Clan vs. IS mechs and tech? Will the clans receive an actual tech advantage during these matches to help simulate the setting?

Any more information would be appreciated.

[Bhael Fire]

Sounds good to me; kinda thought this would be how it'd down if there was to be any semblance 1:1 to the actual BT timeline.

Though, I would have been fine with a completely vague and perpetual timeline that occurs sometime between 3050 and 3051.

Also, PAUL, thanks for the posted update...would like to see more of it!

[L Y N X]

The 'S' variants should be the least of your concerns. You made all IS mechs are essentially OMNI mechs with your PGI interpretation of BT mech configs. So the S-variants do not offer much in the way of "umph"...

before you roll back the timeline, lets actually get to CW, otherwise I think we will be on the "EDGE OF TOMORROW" for a long time. Pun intended.

[J0anna]

While I am very glad I can choose the true descendants of the Star League as my faction (finally), I am not at all pleased with only choosing (at most) seven of the clans, while my clan (Star Adder) will not be added. Before anyone says that Clan Star Adder was not fighting in the Inner Sphere in 3050, let me point out that neither House Marik nor House Liao had ANY battles with the clans during Operation Revival. Are those houses going to be unable to take part in Community Warfare (since we are being historically accurate)?

Since we are only allowing the Clans that fought in Operation Revival to be a part of Community Warfare, shouldn't we also only allow the houses that fought in Operation Revival too? Sounds fair to me PGI......

[Marvyn Dodgers]

Thorqemada, on 03 June 2014 - 06:02 PM, said:

Move on, move along, have good mood and sing a song:

Nice on the video Thorqe, need to go pick that one oup

[Aym]

I just wish some of these reversals from PGI and Paul would include a "You guys were right during Closed and Open Beta. The timeline was too aggressive given our rate of production. You guys saw this 2 years ago, thank you for your feedback and effort during the beta. Additionally since we did not feature CW for over a year after "Launch" possibly you were right about the game not being ready for launch, and it was still effectively a Beta." Again, I'm glad to see the "vocal minority" confirmed in such things, but an apology regarding being on an island, out of touch, and so on would be nice when they come around to our point of view.

[McQueen]

Moenrg, on 03 June 2014 - 08:08 PM, said:

While I am very glad I can choose the true descendants of the Star League as my faction (finally), I am not at all pleased with only choosing (at most) seven of the clans, while my clan (Star Adder) will not be added. Before anyone says that Clan Star Adder was not fighting in the Inner Sphere in 3050, let me point out that neither House Marik nor House Liao had ANY battles with the clans during Operation Revival. Are those houses going to be unable to take part in Community Warfare (since we are being historically accurate)?

Since we are only allowing the Clans that fought in Operation Revival to be a part of Community Warfare, shouldn't we also only allow the houses that fought in Operation Revival too? Sounds fair to me PGI......

Historically Liao and Marik agreed to back off from their territorial claims against FedCom. which would make CW very boring for those two factions. Several ideas have been suggested in this thread to offset this.

One was to have other home Clans make new invasion corridors in other parts of the Inner Sphere. This seems like it would split the community into way to many small baskets.

We could have Marik and Liao decided to take advantage of the situation and have a free for all with the IS vs IS and Clan vs IS. This would make for a very dynamic CW but, would still leave the Home Clans out in the cold.

Finally if PGI goes with a simple red vs blue CW with all IS factions working together against all the Clans then there is no reason not to have the home Clans as faction choices. After all if I'm still going to have to drop with snakes on my team then there is no reason to keep Star Adders or Ice Helions from dropping alongside the Falcons and Bears.

Personally I prefer the second option where we have multiple fronts and only factions that share borders can fight each other. Drop composition should be limited to your faction and lone wolves only. This would mean that clans couldn't afford to be split into 16 separate factions.

More information about what PGI is planning for community warfare would be nice.

edited for grammar.

Edited by McQueen, 03 June 2014 - 09:15 PM.

[dangerzone]

So much yes. I was honestly worried about the CW not lining up with the waves in lore of the Clan Invasion, but I see now you guys already realized that and took care of it. Well done. Please carry on with rewriting matchmaker and coding CW