232 replies to this topic

[TLBFestus]

I think it's funny as heck to hear that PGI and RB think that they paid too much attention to a "small vocal minority" in past instances, yet here they are throwing $100,000 + at a "small minority" of the game.

Not important enough to listen too...but important enough to give $100,000 + to........

Someone needs to get their story straight.

Edited by TLBFestus, 01 May 2016 - 11:14 AM.

[MoonUnitBeta]

carl kerensky, on 30 April 2016 - 08:41 PM, said:

Mwo suffers from a lack of vision. We have tepid developers running this show that are afraid to take a risk or too. So we are left with the same old stuff. Same problems same issues.

Underlined the type of thing that I feel pretty strongly about... because I don't think PGI has a vision... I feel like they have dreams...

And nothing describes this better than how they spent a solid 20 minutes with their cockpit item contest in Vlog #14... What I noticed was that rather than discussing among themselves about how that might possibly turn a questionable idea into a great one, they instead mocked and shot-down ideas with a seemingly glee-full attitude.

In an environment like that, one that tears down instead of builds up, how do you expect employees to come forth with an insightful idea without receiving the same kind of attitude? Let alone just wanting to brain-storm an idea without continually being shot-down, because people can't stop for a second to think about a bigger picture.

I feel like working at PGI could potentially be a stifling factory type of job if you think that your grand ideas and passion for Mechwarrior could make a difference. My impression is that imagination in PGI seems limited to map/level design, and Alex's concept mechs, and texture artistry.

I think they all dream about great things, but when they actually start to talk about getting there, it seems like things are constantly broken down into finicky tasks and then passed off as being 'impossible' or 'needless'.

Edited by MoonUnitBeta, 30 April 2016 - 11:09 PM.

[Bluttrunken]

Everything get's whined about here and the constructive input in this forum is minimal. I would have a hard time giving a single f**k about what is written here as well.

"You know nothing hence your opinions are invalid" is a bit too much, though.

Edited by Bluttrunken, 30 April 2016 - 11:19 PM.

[MauttyKoray]

Alaric Hasek, on 29 April 2016 - 10:20 PM, said:

Russ finally said it: the player base needs to stop thinking that it knows better than PGI how to develop this game. They don't. If you _can_, let me know when you finish your perfect game and I'll come play it. Until then, put up or shut up.

Some of us can at least make suggested or put forth ideas that can provoke though. Not all of my ideas personally have been good but they've at least been thought out enough to put an option on the table or create a platform to discuss others.

Sadly a fair number of the community want a twitch shooter (please go play Hawken...or something) while others want a tactical 'mech combat simulator, and some just don't care.

[Afuldan McKronik]

I want what was originally promised to the Founders. I often wonder what happened.

[Sorbic]

Ok, I might have missed it but did Russ actually say what the OP posted or is that a very ruff paraphrase. I thought everyone was reacting to this statement.

""I know how much I love mechwarrior and like if only PGI would do this this and this it would be bigger than Halo. I know there's not many people who think that way and feel that way..."

Any idea where it is on the video?

Edited by Sorbic, 01 May 2016 - 08:04 AM.

[MechWarrior319348]

adamts01, on 30 April 2016 - 09:34 PM, said:

They only did the PTS thing that one time. I didn't have access to internet at the time to use it so I don't know how they communicated with players. The only way they get feedback now is through twitter, it's stupid really. There are a handful of prominent players that have personal contact as well, almost all the feedback actually considered is through those few I'm sure.

I got stomped that last match with you.... managing 196 damage with a classic streak2 Raven in that kind of loss isn't too embarrassing though. Meta or go home, so sad.

Bah, at this level we know that damage doesn't mean anything. Some of the best brawlers who end up tanking might do 90 damage, but have a massive impact on the match.

[Pjwned]

Alaric Hasek, on 29 April 2016 - 10:20 PM, said:

Russ finally said it: the player base needs to stop thinking that it knows better than PGI how to develop this game. They don't. If you _can_, let me know when you finish your perfect game and I'll come play it. Until then, put up or shut up.

There's a difference between saying it and proving it.

Have they proven it over the last few years? No.

Let's just look at ONE example (out of MANY examples by the way) of PGI incompetence: the major mech rescale coming in June.

Why does that demonstrate their incompetence? Well, you see, as early as the Phoenix pack (probably earlier than that even) there were many posts and topics made about players' concerns for proper mech scaling, mostly about current and upcoming (at the time) medium mechs being way too big for their tonnage (*COUGH* VINDICATOR *VIOLENT HACKING ASTHMA FIT* INCOMPETENCE) but also about other atrociously scaled mechs like the Dragon, Catapult, Awesome, etc.

What does PGI do? They shrug it off and say "it would be too much work at this point" and they continue to **** out mechs with clearly busted proportions, and they couldn't release new mechs with actually good scaling because it would be unfair to the old & busted mechs; note that players (chumps) are also at fault for buying all these mechs for huge amounts of money but that's another topic.

Obviously this solution of ignoring the whole thing causes severe issues for a very long time, and it finally comes to the point where it literally cannot be ignored any further because it interferes with properly adjusting quirks in their "great mech re-balance" efforts (which was halfassed & unfinished in typical lazy, incompetent PGI fashion) and then PGI finally announces that they are going to actually work on proper mech scaling...AFTER having released a few dozen more chassis with busted scaling, making their job that much harder and wasting assloads of time & resources that could've gone into other cool stuff if PGI had simply tackled the issue early on instead of saying "no we need to **** out more $120+ mech packs instead of fixing our shoddy product."

So PGI pisses away tons of time & resources doing something poorly, players point it out VERY early on, PGI ignores them and continues pissing away time & resources doing something improperly, and then they end up going back and fixing their screw ups anyways except it ends up being a MASSIVE endeavor that takes a huge amount of time & resources by the time they get around to it, instead of it being a much smaller effort by working on it over 2 years earlier.

Who knows how to better develop the game? Not PGI, that's for sure, and there are many other examples of PGI screwing something up only to stubbornly implement player suggestions verbatim many months/years later such as turrets in assault mode being left in for well over a year and then finally removed, pop-tart jump sniping meta ruining matches for over a year, clan XL engine penalties being way too small for almost a year, dozens of examples of overquirked mechs being way too good (TDR-9S being the worst example) that are left alone for months on end because PGI is too busy ******** out more mechs to edit some god damn XML files, etc...I could go on for a while.

Edited by Pjwned, 01 May 2016 - 12:33 PM.

[ScarecrowES]

Sorbic, on 01 May 2016 - 08:03 AM, said:

Ok, I might have missed it but did Russ actually say what the OP posted or is that a very ruff paraphrase. I thought everyone was reacting to this statement.

""I know how much I love mechwarrior and like if only PGI would do this this and this it would be bigger than Halo. I know there's not many people who think that way and feel that way..."

Any idea where it is on the video?

It's a rough paraphrase... more a general tone. He didn't come out and say the community needs to quit whining and let them do their jobs, but a lot of what was said when a lot of the questions NGNG were asking came up took on the tone of, "hey, we do the things you ask, and they turn out to be the exact WRONG thing for the game. Meanwhile, because we did what YOU asked, we couldn't put other features in the game it needs. And then you complain about that too."

I've attended every townhall over the last 2 years, and it's obvious that most of the community has its head up its ***. Nothing demonstrated that more than a series of questions that got asked in this last townhall...

The first was about how PGI can make the game appeal more to casual players and retain more month-over-month. This question mentioned a drop in Steam players since the initial Steam release. Russ had to go out of his way to first explain that 99% of games released on Steam see a drop in players after the initial release, so that it wasn't unusual that MWO did too... AND that MWO has a larger active player base than it ever has. But he also explained that MWO was a niche title with a very steep learning curve, and that it wouldn't be possible to appeal to most casual gamers without greatly simplifying the game to a degree where it's no longer Battletech.

THEN... after answering a question on how to make MWO more simple to appeal to casual gamers, he was asked a question on whether they would increase the complexity and realism of the game by having critical hits on locked components like actuators have a real tangible effect on the mech - like making a critical hit on a leg actuator make the mech limp, or on an arm actuator making it impossible to swivel your arm, etc.

Russ basically took the tone of... "You guys JUST got done asking me to make the game simpler and more casual... NOW you're asking me to add complexity for the sake of complexity?! Well which do you want? It's either casual, or hardcore. You can't have both."

And really, the whole townhall went that way. Players suggested that Faction Warfare eliminated factions, so that it was just Clan vs Inner Sphere. Russ questioned what the point of taking factions out of faction warfare was. Players asked why we didn't get pre-saved dropdecks for FW... Russ said because we ran out of time after working on other features players asked for that we now have to remove from the game because they didn't use it.

And so on.

Really, sitting through these townhalls, and seeing just the awful things being said by the community, and just how unbelievably insipid so many people are, I'd honestly never hold another townhall ever again if I were Russ.

This community, quite frankly, is terrible.

Edited by ScarecrowES, 01 May 2016 - 11:04 AM.

[MechWarrior319348]

Heh.....

I'm curious, what would the player base response be if the devs came out tomorrow and said, "here you go, this is our finished product for MWO, no more patches, enjoy!)?

Not trying to make a point, i'm just curious.

[Afuldan McKronik]

Gigliowanananacom, on 01 May 2016 - 11:02 AM, said:

Heh.....

I'm curious, what would the player base response be if the devs came out tomorrow and said, "here you go, this is our finished product for MWO, no more patches, enjoy!)?

Not trying to make a point, i'm just curious.

We would probably crowdfund buying the server code, or we would crowdfund MWLL as the next MW game.

[ScarecrowES]

Afuldan McKronik, on 01 May 2016 - 11:08 AM, said:

We would probably crowdfund buying the server code, or we would crowdfund MWLL as the next MW game.

Erm, you could probably do the former... but you'd likely need a couple hundred million dollars to buy PGI out of their license rights. And doing the latter would be illegal.

[Jun Watarase]

As someone who has spent quite a bit of time modding other games, especially Fallout 3: New Vegas, I'm always amazed whenever companies fail to balance things decently. Note that i'm not saying perfect balance...but to a decent level. Some companies also fail to do basic QA and fix extremely simple bugs...things like simple typo errors that can be spotted by looking at an error log file in 30 seconds. Many companies won't fix bugs like these. I honestly don't understand why. Disciples 3 for example, shipped with incorrect filenames for many sound files, so certain units, etc, never played their sounds ingame. All you had to do was look at the error log file which tells you exactly which files are incorrectly named, cross-reference it with the actual filename and change the filenames. An intern could have done that in an hour or two, but to the very end they refused to put out a patch to fix it.

As most people know by now, MWO's weapons can be easily modified via editing a XML file. The fact that PGI very rarely does this is problematic. When balancing stats, you need to constantly make changes to get feedback. You don't wait 3 months, slightly reduce PPC heat, then wait another 3 months. You are NEVER getting anything done at that rate. I have no idea if this is considered the "industry standard" for balancing...but anyone here with modding experience can confirm that this basically does nothing.

To give an example, when I was modding Disciples 3, I would take an underpowered unit, change it's stats/abilities, then play test a few battles to see how the new unit performed. Most of the time, I would find that the new unit would either be overpowered, or still be underpowered, and have to make additional changes. Sometimes I had to repeat this process more than half a dozen times before I would feel sastified with the end result. That's precisely what PGI should have been doing in the closed and open beta...making changes every week and tweaking them based on feedback. Instead, it takes 3 months or more for small changes to occur, so obviously, nothing gets done.

Any experienced player can easily mod the game's files to achieve much better game balance in a week. This isnt unique to PGI though...most companies these days end up with the same problem. Bethsoft is probably most famous for these since all of their modern games are basically unplayable without community patches and mods that fix hundreds of bugs and game breaking issues that the parent company simply will not touch. I would love to hear from an industry insider as to the explanation for this phenomenon...but nobody wants to talk about it because they know it will probably make their company look bad, which means killing their career.

I also noticed that nobody in the industry seems to be hiring marketers to talk to their customers. This is very, very odd, because every business school these days is stressing how important it is to build a relationship with your customers. The games industry seems to operate in a very old school way, in which all they do is look at product sales. Other than that, nobody is using any marketing tools or strategies to gather data from customers. One example of what PGI should have done was hire a marketer to act as community rep in the closed beta phase, who would be running surveys/focus groups to get data on what the customers want. Instead, PGI gathers data mostly via "feel", such as seeing how many complaints Russ gets on twitter.

Example 1 : There were countless forum posts on the forum on ways to fix the clan-IS XL engine imbalance. For months, NOTHING happened. Then one guy tweeted to Russ that clan XLs should get a movement penalty after losing a side torso. Russ agreed with him, and in a few weeks that change went live. That was not a unique idea, it had been posted on the forums countless times before the tweet, but PGI obviously didnt read those...the only thing that got read was the tweet that went to Russ.

Example 2 : Nobody was complaining that the BJ was underpowered. Then PGI released massive structure quirks for the BJ, along with other buffs. Every competitive player basically facepalmed. Customers did not ask for this change...nor did PGI gather any marketing data that suggested customers wanted this change. Why then, would a company make a change that customers obviously did not want? Sometimes, companies make changes because the people in charge want that charge, not because it would lead to more profits. PGI almost entirely balances through the desires of one person (Paul) without taking into accounting marketing data. It would be like Coca Cola releasing a new drink because an executive wanted it, without doing any marketing research to see the potential market size, the target demographic, etc. That's basically what PGI does with game balance.

Also, I doubt that Russ is willing to backup his words. I would be more than happy to demonstrate that I could dramatically improve the current game balance, but I am well aware that there's no way that PGI would risk doing anything that would make themselves look worse than one of their players. So basically what will happen is that we will never hear of Russ's comment ever again and we will continue on the current cycle of game balance hell.

Edited by Jun Watarase, 01 May 2016 - 12:05 PM.

[TyphonCh]

ScarecrowES, on 01 May 2016 - 11:01 AM, said:

This community, quite frankly, is terrible.

And you're the shining paragon of virtue. Right.
Have you ever been in another game forum? They're literally all the same. This community is quite decent overall.

PGI has done this to themselves. I don't hate the game, I just hate the way it's handled.

Edited by Team Chevy86, 01 May 2016 - 12:34 PM.

[ScarecrowES]

Team Chevy86, on 01 May 2016 - 12:32 PM, said:

And you're the shining paragon of virtue. Right.
Have you ever been in another game forum? They're literally all the same. This community is quite decent overall.

PGI has done this to themselves. I don't hate the game, I just hate the way it's handled.

There are a lot of toxic communities out there, to be sure. I've been around quite a few. The interesting thing is, given the sheer complexity of a game like MWO, it simply amplifies the problems present in other games. We're not simply discussing whether a burst-fire M16 is OP and needs to be dialed back, like back in the old CoD days. We've got massive and sweeping gameplay systems that some players simply can't get their head around, but decide to be vocal about anyway.

Watching the chat window during townhalls show just how awful and unhelpful most of the feedback from this community is.

Part of this is PGI's fault, for not having a proper line of communication between itself and its community. PGI's never been able to get a handle on which voices it should be listening to, and which it should flat out ignore.

It does you no good, for instance, to take Community Warfare queue advice from players that have no interest in CW. And yet, whose voice is the loudest? Not the folks out there enjoying CW.

It's a massive problem that's frustrating both PGI AND the player base.

[Pjwned]

ScarecrowES, on 01 May 2016 - 12:47 PM, said:

Watching the chat window during townhalls show just how awful and unhelpful most of the feedback from this community is.

Part of this is PGI's fault, for not having a proper line of communication between itself and its community. PGI's never been able to get a handle on which voices it should be listening to, and which it should flat out ignore.

I'm pretty sure what you meant is that it's entirely PGI's fault for not having a proper line of communication.

Quote

It does you no good, for instance, to take Community Warfare queue advice from players that have no interest in CW. And yet, whose voice is the loudest? Not the folks out there enjoying CW.

I'm not interested in FW because PGI has done an overall terrible job and it needs to be changed so that it's actually decent and worth playing. If I didn't care about FW no matter what changed then I wouldn't bother posting about it at all.

It also speaks volumes that PGI can't make proper changes to FW because there's not nearly enough people interested in playing it.

[ScarecrowES]

Pjwned, on 01 May 2016 - 01:07 PM, said:

I'm pretty sure what you meant is that it's entirely PGI's fault for not having a proper line of communication.



I'm not interested in FW because PGI has done an overall terrible job and it needs to be changed so that it's actually decent and worth playing. If I didn't care about FW no matter what changed then I wouldn't bother posting about it at all.

It also speaks volumes that PGI can't make proper changes to FW because there's not nearly enough people interested in playing it.

Fallicy... Russ actually said in the townhall that roughly 40-50% of the simultaneous player base at peak hours are playing FW. More than I ever thought, honestly, but then again MWO only ever reaches a peak of around 2,000 players. Plenty of reason to make proper changes.

But what changes should they make? And based on who's feedback?

In what way does FW not interest you? Are there specific actions that can be taken to improve specific aspects of the mode?

The problem is, most people can't reason their way out of a paper bag. They have no concept of what is or is not working, and so they can't offer an informed voice on the matter.

An example of this, from the townhall, was the notion that maybe there weren't enough people in dedicated FW matches at a given time to allow for proper influence of the map. So a suggestion from the community was to remove factions and just have the fight between IS and Clan. Of course that's dumb.

The counter suggestion was... we have an entirely other half of the player base playing Quick Play whose actions don't affect FW at all, and yet most of those players will be carrying faction tags. Why not arrange the modes in such a way that no matter how you play, your actions affect the FW map? Fold Quick Play into FW. This could be easily done in a way that doesn't fundementally change the way players who are only interested in QP play... but both influences the map AND rewards them for that influence. It's easy, and it's smart.

But which voice was the one PGI got to hear? The one that said to remove factions from faction warfare. How helpful is that?

[Afuldan McKronik]

It's time to let a company that isn't guided by Mediocre™, Minimally Viable Product™ and Players Know Nothing™ take the reigns.

Edited by Afuldan McKronik, 01 May 2016 - 01:21 PM.

[ScarecrowES]

Afuldan McKronik, on 01 May 2016 - 01:20 PM, said:

It's time to let a company that isn't guided by Mediocre™, Minimally Viable Product™ and Players Know Nothing™.

And which company would that BE exactly, considering noone else wants the license to produce a Mechwarrior product?

[Afuldan McKronik]

ScarecrowES, on 01 May 2016 - 01:22 PM, said:

And which company would that BE exactly, considering noone else wants the license to produce a Mechwarrior product?

Give it to the guys who created MWLL, a MOD of crysis that has more features in a shut down beta version game than we have after how many years of being out of beta? I don't doubt that some people, especially founders, are starting to liken PGI=Ubisoft. Yeah, it looks nice, but get past the "Ooooooooo MechPorn" and a lot of people have the same problems with Ubisoft's 3" deep gameplay from many of their games for the last 5 years as a lot of people do with PGI's handling of a IP that has been around for 3 decades.