103 replies to this topic

[Triordinant]

It'll only be "fixed" if the vast majority of MWO players think it's fun. The last figure we have from Russ Bullock is only 13.5% of all the activity on MWO servers takes place in CW. Clearly what makes CW fun for those currently playing it is not fun for everybody else.

[GI Journalist]

Waiting alone in near empty queues is not fun.

However, recruiting players to join House Liao to go stomp Davions can be lots of fun if you have the necessary tools.

Fixing faction chat to function for players waiting in the CW planetary queues will help. Creating a recruiting channel that factions can use to reach independent mercs would also help. We need to put more community in our community warfare.

[Escaflow]

The whole CW thing is complex, on the one side you got the „Its 12 against 12 stop killing this game mode you filthy PUGS!!!1111“ and on the other side are the „Just want to play for fun“ aka PUG.
What we got now is the winning of the diehard 12man guys, the majority of us filthy PUGs don’t play CW anymore so you got this whole mode for you… and 2 weeks later everyone screams that CW is dead.
I don’t think the problem are the rewards, I got 300-400k a non Premium drop in CW and the Free Mechbays/Cocpit Items etc and I am only a Joe Average Player who plays for fun (Hell I got a Nova in my Dropdeck because the Stormcrow is Ugly).
The main Problem is that we fall under the “I got a match in 5min or less” line, if I dont get a match in 3-5min I just quit the Que and call it a day. I had so much fun on the Tuk event because my wait time was 5min max and I didn’t cared if I got 12man stomped since 5min later I got the next match.

TL;DR: To long que, Pugs are filty

[Anjian]

To answer the thread title.

Three days to rise from the dead.
Divine intervention.
And a miracle.

[Clownwarlord]

Currently there are no benefits to CW, yes you get Loyalty Points but outside of that C-Bills and Experience you can gather more quickly by solo drops or group drops. Since there is no benefits (for even owning a planet) most units have stopped dropping, and even pugs have started to stop because they keep getting units more so to go against.

[Sjorpha]

The first and foremost thing that is missing in CW is the actual simulation of war.

Owning planets need to give significant advantages, both in terms of resources of some kind and for the purpose of strategic progress. And for the unit as well as the faction.

And there needs to be a macro scale end game, a way to actually win the war, in which the aquiring of planets is a means of progression not limited to colouring the blips.

PGI seems afraid of the prospect that a faction could actually beat another, but that is the whole point of war. If taking over more and more planets does not convey an increasing advantage but instead, as now, actually punishes you for success, then there is no point. Resets or the galactic map should ultimately be driven by the extermination or otherwise determined victory of one side in the conflict.

A good start would be to reverse the system of reward adjusments to reward success rather than failure, the more planets you take the more your faction should pay you, because the will have more money to do so with. This could be balanced by dividing payouts by population, so that players of overpopulated factions gets paid less, which makes sense does it not? This way the number of planets owned by a faction determines indirectly the limits of that factions population.

Rewarding success should also go for individual success in terms of rank and loyalty. Simply pay a player more per match the higher rank he has within a faction, this way you encourage faction loyalty continuously as well as through specific rewards.

Last but not least the tools for organisation and strategic impact of units must be vastly increased and improved. Loyalist players (permanent contracts) might for example be able to elect leaders for their factions, who can then issue merc contracts to be taken by units. This right to vote for leadership or otherwise faction related issues could be the defining difference between loyalists and mercenaries.

Also allow units to do something with their money, why not upgrade defences on planets they control, or even buy mechs owned by the unit to be borrowed in dropdecks of unit members, with appropriate downsides as compared to owning private mechs for balance sake. Perhaps attach a maintenace cost for dropping in them, cut them out of the skill tree and so forth, but still a way to gear up your unit members for a given mission. Why not allow units to upgrade their dropships to be more lethal etc. Perhaps access to airstrike consumables in CW could be determined by if and how many aircraft bombers the unit has bought. Perhaps UAV, or why not all modules, is usable only if the unit has invested in the appropriate technology, and perhaps there is a maintenance cost to include that technology in a given drop. Bottom line is that units and their resources must be given real impact.

Edited by Sjorpha, 13 May 2015 - 02:15 AM.

[DI3T3R]

- Conquering/losing a planet should have ramifications for the player and the whole faction.

- Instead of head-on collisions, give us missions that require some guile.

- Some depth, e.g. AI-tanks (e.g. turrets on rails).

- Put the public queues into CW, but with a priority to sort newbies into their own, separate queue if possible.

- Make it mandatory to join a faction. Any faction.

- More restrictions (weight-class, tonnage) on the Drop Decks of each planet. That way players can't use a one-size-fits-all deck.

[Revis Volek]

Triordinant, on 12 May 2015 - 04:45 PM, said:

It'll only be "fixed" if the vast majority of MWO players think it's fun. The last figure we have from Russ Bullock is only 13.5% of all the activity on MWO servers takes place in CW. Clearly what makes CW fun for those currently playing it is not fun for everybody else.

Doesn't have to be lore friendly, based on real life stuff/Physics or even make sense as long as its FUN!

Clan mechs are not fun to drive, hot, long burn times and junk A/C's makes for a vanilla mech even with the different variants.

Also CW itself IS NOT FUN due to these things....

IS LL changes has namely made CW very unfun (for clan pilots)
IS over quriks has made the game and CW unfun (for clan pilots)
Junk light mechs make CW unfun and takes a tactic away from Clan pilots
Again, Clan mechs are too hot and not that much fun to play for the most part

For the IS I feel it due to these reasons....

Clan mechs are OP because most IS solo's i see dont utilize quirks
Clan mechs have better XL engines there for rush better
Clan mechs have longer ranges (again due to a lack of understanding of quirks, not really the new pilots fault)
The TBR and SCR are the best mechs in the game

On a whole....

CW is boring
Long waits
Lack of MM causes grief for the SOLO and smal groups
Lack of reasons to play (planet benefits, real rewards, fluff) "No Immersion, So its just SOLO with RESPAWN and longer waits?"
Lack of Logistics, very vanilla map even know it has over 1000 planets there are no special snowflakes in this arm of the milky way.
DOTA maps which funnel players as if we are mice in a maze, Give players some tactical freedom please.


I could go on...but i need to get back to work.

Cheers!

[Saint Scarlett Johan]

There's some immense problems. Problems I'm seeing that are leading to low population are:

• Bland maps
  
• Bland objectives
  
• Bad gameplay

Bland Maps:

The maps are all DOTA-likes. Huge immense maps with lanes that restrict the fights to a few small tightly packed areas. It's literally tower defense. They need to be more open and fluid with gently rolling hills, some dense areas, some flat areas, etc. They absolutely HAVE to avoid chokepoints. This is a shooter, not a Tower Defense game. How many other successful shooters use DOTA-like maps? The answer is none.

Bland Objectives:
We have (1) Open the gates, blow the 3 gens to blow another gen, profit and (2) shoot enemy, blow up truck, profit. That's boring. They need to do staged games. Open games. Have strategic locations. Have SOMETHING.

Bad Gameplay:
It's bland. Where the fights take place, one side is shooting fish in a barrel and the other side are the fish in the barrel being shot. Not to mention to the level of low skill that are dropping in the matches. I just finished up two CW matches prior to the ceasefire. Eight people in the first drop failed to achieve more than 700 damage. The second drop 13 people failed to break 700 damage. That's indicative of some issues regarding people that don't belong in CW. There is no mechanic such as Elo to prevent a total newbie from fighting SJR, 228, KCom, or Lords. So they drop into a CW match with 4 trial mechs and are perma dead in the first 4 minutes of the game. That's not fun for them because they didn't even get to play. And that's not fun for me because I now have to pick up their slack.



How can it be fixed?

Bland Maps:
Look at how open and large the previous MW titles are. Look at the BF series maps. Look at WoT maps. Look at Warthunder maps. They are open, with no artificially induced chokepoints that can't be bypassed. The whole "central feature" thing is fine in the normal pub queue drops, but it is NOT okay in the CW drops.

Bland Objectives:
If I had my way, I'd have designed it like this:

• Each planet has 15 wedges.
  
• There are five drops.
  
• First drop of each five set is an attack on the giant gauss rifle (Attack/Defend).
  
• Second drop is an attack on a city/base/strategic location. Take and hold the bridges/mountain pass/enemy garrison (King of the Hill in short).
  
• Third drop is a series of OBJs that need to be held a la true Conquest, just like in the BF series. There is ticket system where each side is allotted X number of tickets and there are 3-6 strategic locations on the map such as bridges, LZs, mech hangars, docks, city crossroads, railyards, etc (stuff that's important in real world strategy). Owning the majority of strategic locations causes a steady drain on the enemies tickets. Death of an assault drops the ticket count by 4, a heavy by 3, a medium by 2, and a light by 1. You no longer are limited to just 4 lives. You can spawn from any LZ or hangar you own (attackers start with LZs and defenders with hangars) and you can pick from you 4, which means if your medium gets killed, you can drop in it again. (Yes, I shamelessly stole this from BF2)

Bad Gameplay:
I don't know how to fix bad gameplay short or forcing Elo or completely barring trial mechs from CW. But the skill gap is so severe I can take 2 Awesomes, a Vindi, and a Panther and regularly hit 2500 damage and 10 kills with that drop deck. If I take my meta deck, I'm scooping up between 2500 and 3500 damage and between 12-20 kills.

Edited by Lord Scarlett Johan, 13 May 2015 - 02:07 PM.

[Tywren]

Step 1: Start building CW around the Community instead of the competitive teams! People have been saying for months that building around this small minority will turn CW into nothing more than a remake of the old 12 man que, and they've been absolutely right. the old 12 man que died due to lack of interest (mostly because the majority of the ultra-comp teams are a 12 pack of used ****** that most people want nothing to do with), and the exact same thing is happening to CW.

Step 2: Rebalance all of the maps. On Sulpher Rift for instance, remove the invisable walls on the mountains, thus allowing jump equiped mechs the ability to hit the base without face grinding through a choak point. Other things in the catagory would be changing drop zone placement to make spawn camping harder, as well as possabbly bringing over some of the PQ maps such as HPG (the map is already well set for CW stile gameplay, it wouldn't take much in the way of tweaking).

Step 3: Reduce the number of drops in regard to over quirked cheese mechs. Personaly for this problem i like the idea of a repair timer on all mechs, with increasing time based on the amount of damage taken. This would force players to start to dig into their closet for mechs they don't normaly use, because their first choice is laied up, with 3 hrs of repair time.

Edited by Tywren, 13 May 2015 - 02:35 PM.

[stermy]

Enable the ability to see a warning if other team is a 9/10+ premade... (only that... not player/team information). With that maybe we will see some more action coming from the pugs or small groups that are looking forward a close and fun game, not to be farmed and spawnkilled by organized teams.

Edited by stermy, 13 May 2015 - 02:52 PM.

[N0MAD]

CW is trash (maps, game modes, objectives) was from outset will always be.. realize that and try move on.
IMO its to late for MWO. but..
Design an MS Zone type game lobby, install a general chat lobby to go with it, let the community start its NBT/Registry/Mechlord/BZ type Planetary/Ladder type leagues, this kept the MW IP alive for over a decade.
PGI was told this from day 1 and nada.. it has bled 90% ( probably 60,000 ) of its founders alone in under 2 years because of this.
Stop wasting development time and effort on CW and use those resources to fix outstanding problems.
Let the community make its own CW, let PGI fix the game.
People will buy mechs, colors, faction insignia, camos, decals, if they have a stable game and interesting leagues to keep them having fun.
Units can participate in multiple leagues at the same time to keep their members interested, they can train their new troops in the lobby, friends can play at will, teams can recruit in the chat lobby, man so many options, but no, why?
PGI is trying to control the community by not letting them play as they want, well that just isnt working is it.
Bahh just wasting my words here but.. i seriously wish we had those leagues again, so many good times there for over a decade, what a waste..

[Dolph Hoskins]

Someone mentioned in another thread, (and I curse them for it because it is such a delightful dream that will never happen) but if CW was like Planetside 2 but with battletech mechs. That would be pure community warfare nonstop around the clock...do you know how many people would be playing that ****....it would be glorious.

Edited by The Ripper13, 14 May 2015 - 07:53 AM.

[IlKhan Prepaid Kerensky]

I think CW needs the inclusion if AI teams so it is always human opponents vs 12 AI players. That way every game will be super easy and units won't have a reasons to run and hide in pub que land like they do now because they just lose and lose and lose to those evil organized 12 mans

This community doesn't understand how to take losing properly. Losing is research for winning if you haven't figured it out yet. The average skill level in this game is also really low. These are the main obstacles.

How do you fix a game when about 80% of the player base is playing so sub optimally? I have no idea.

Fortunately I don't give a **** this is your guys problem.

[sycocys]

I honestly didn't like the idea of mixing the queues before, but if you flat out dropped the standard queue and made everything CW with solo/group drops then set up a few different planet options:

IS only, Clan only, Is v Clan, Merc/mixed - it drops the total planets down to 8, of which 6 could have "meaning" on the map (just track the winners of fights in the back and give them the next open planet from the 4v4 or randomly from the current system) and the mixed matches could operate exactly like the standard queue does now - just add 3 drops and reduce the LP rewards, or keep it one drop and reduce all rewards.

Personally I think you could just put the 4x drops on the back burner until the game some some depth to make additional drops worthwhile and interesting, and keep the matches going fast and smooth lowering the LP rewards to compensate.

Do away with attack/defense selecting and just make it straight up random just like which side of the map you drop on in standard. Can even keep all standard maps/mode and probably figure out ways to fold them all into the CW maps with minimal environment adjustments.

Put everyone into a smaller bucket as they like to say, employ the entire player base in the mode and give them some options for the kind of matches they want to play, instead of which slightly different version of the same mode they want to play.

[Caustic Canid]

Prepaid Lenin, on 14 May 2015 - 02:12 PM, said:

I think CW needs the inclusion if AI teams so it is always human opponents vs 12 AI players. That way every game will be super easy and units won't have a reasons to run and hide in pub que land like they do now because they just lose and lose and lose to those evil organized 12 mans

This community doesn't understand how to take losing properly. Losing is research for winning if you haven't figured it out yet. The average skill level in this game is also really low. These are the main obstacles.

How do you fix a game when about 80% of the player base is playing so sub optimally? I have no idea.

Fortunately I don't give a **** this is your guys problem.

You fix a game like this by ignoring tryhard posts like yours and making the game fun for people who consider video games to be a hobby instead of a lifestyle.

[anonymous161]

Apnu, on 12 May 2015 - 10:37 AM, said:

They need to combine the queues.

Move the Assault, Skirmish and Conquest game modes into CW. Make players align with a faction (even if its for 24 hours), and when they look for a game they're on a team with others of the same faction in a game on some planet that's active. When the match is over, they win some LP (less than in Invasion/Counter Attack) c-bills and MXP/GXP as normal. Then they can attack again and rinse/repeat. They come back to a screen showing them the IS map and what's going on.

Doing it this way gets players looking at the IS map and thinking about it and their faction. From there its tiny steps to get them involved in deeper map and faction play.

Provided there are deeper game modes beyond Invasion/Counter Attack.

No this is second time you pushed this idea not enough population to separate anything.

leave regular matching alone its fine.


cw is too boring get very little out of it boring maps that are all lifeless

[Crazylegz]

Should be able to drop on a planet any time you want, F the 12 mans, waiting for others, queue blah blah.

1)Pick planet
2)Drop on planet
3)Run to the front lines
4)Blow up big stompy robots

I also agree with a previous post that the main thing that community 'WAR'fare lacks is any kind of sense of 'A WAR'. A war has winners and losers and supply lines and negative impacts from losing territory and so on.

As a long time lover of all things Battletech, i appreciate what PGI has done for the product. I just hope they can fix it before this game becomes another footnote on SARNA.NET

[Clownwarlord]

This is where I come in and say, IF CW WAS WORTH MORE TO PLAY FOR THE INDIVIDUAL MORE PEOPLE WOULD PLAY IT. Instead the only benifits are: Unit tag on planet (which gets you NOTHING!!!!), similar pay out if you add up the long wait the time length of match and everything else tied into it, and lastly the ONLY GOOD THING OF CW is some loyalty points which are a *bleep* to grind for in CW current state of affair.

[Benjamin Davion]

Planets need to be worth something. Frankly it doesn't really matter to me what color the dots are anymore. Yeah, I find it amusing that Smoke Jaguar has been effectively destroyed. Beyond that? Whatever. I play CW to have good fights, make loads of cbills, and have fun. CW matches are simply more fun than pug matches. Make taking a planet actually matter for something, even if it's a one-time deposit. Say 1CR takes a planet. We should get a bulk deposit into our unit coffer of some very significant amount of Cbills as well as a cut to each of our members. Additionally, every time cycle that we hold that planet, the unit should earn cbills and each member of the unit earns cbills.

As for 'I don't make money in CW', I'm sorry, what? I make ridiculous amounts of money in CW. If I make less than 500,000 cbills in a CW match, it's been a very bad match. I typically make 750,000, 800,000 or more in an average CW match. If you aren't, either you're a pug pugging with other terrible pugs (in which case, join a unit for Christ's sake, CW is meant for units) or your performance is simply bad. Either you're not a very good pilot or you're running trash mechs in CW. Stop bringing Urbanmechs and other trash. Learn the state of the game and drive what works. Meta is not a curse word, it's simply how the game is played if you want to achieve anything.

As for putting the pug queue in CW, absolutely unequivocally no. I've seen enough matches sandbagged by terrible pilots who crawled out of the pug queue and into CW and have no desire to see them have any more of an effect on CW than they already do.

I think AI tanks and such on turret drops would be good, taking a little of the monotony out of turret runs would be nice.

4v4 mode will help.

People are still burnt out after Tukayyid.

Oh, by the way, get rid of that idiotic ******** 'uncontested defense' which wastes everyone's time for no logical reason.

And taking and losing territory needs to mean something.

Oh, and maybe if PGI would stop running BACK TO BACK CHALLENGES THAT ONLY APPLY TO THE PUG QUEUE HOLY **** IS THIS BASIC OR WHAT. 'Hurr, we don't have enough players in teh CW, how do we get them out of the PUG queue? LIGHT BULB, let's give them a challenge that forces them to stay in the pug queue! Genius.'