1 reply to this topic

[Dagerin]

I've been thinking of somewhere that we could use as a bit of a community hub in game, and I think Outreach would be perfect for it. Canon wise it was THE meeting place in the Inner Sphere for Mercenaries and houses alike, and combined unit training and mech production, amongst other things also all happened here. A perfect setting for this idea.

One of the biggest problems for me with MWO right now is that it feels like i'm playing Team Fortress instead of MechWarrior. There's absolutely no community outside of the battles, or possibly over VOIP with unit mates. That's it. I'm not connected to the people playing this game whatsoever. I'd love to have access to SOME type of a General Chat function where everyone logged in to the client can talk, exchange ideas, etc. It doesn't fit in well with our current home screen however, that's why I think giving us Outreach instead would be perfect. It could be used for a million things, even if it's just a pretty GUI for what's going on, it would make sense in the game world.

1. Community Chat. A global chat would be great for getting questions answered, interacting with your faction mates and enemies, and just a way to wind down or spend time between games.

2. Unit Recruiting. Just like the hiring hall at Wolf's Hall, we could have a recruitment center here where units could post posters and information about their units and new people or unemployed mechwarriors could see just what's available and talk to some people to see what or whom they may want to join.

3. House Merc Contracts. This is a no-brainer. I know we're going to have community warfare at some point, this is a perfect place (just like in the lore) to have merc contracts available for drops.

4. Mech Purchasing. This is a tenuous lore tie at best, as Wolf's Dragoons had limited mech production capability and didn't make that available to outsiders, but no reason not to have a mech lab and mech sales available here as well, with all of the current functionality of our Home screen but perhaps with the added functionality of a test range.

5. A Test Range. This game SORELY needs the ability to drop out of matches to get a feel for the controls of your mech, setting up fire groups, testing heat buildups, and just getting used to mechs before incurring massive repair bills. You could even program some rudimentary AI battles like the unit training that occurs on Outreach for some live combat type exercises.

6. A Marketplace or Bulletin Board. Give us a place to sell used mechs. It's bad enough that I have to own three varients of the same chassis, but I sell it back for absolute crap. I understand part of this is to force us to spend MC on mech bays, but I like this idea. Give us a place to either hawk our old mechs that we aren't using, or a simple storefront like Forza offers us where we can put up our used Catapault K2 at 75% of new market price. The owner wins because they get more money than they would by just selling it off, and the buyer wins because they bought used at less than new price.

It's a bit of a lengthy post, and perhaps something that doesn't have any chance of being implemented, but this game tries to be somewhat of an MMOFPS, but we don't have the MMO portion of it at all really. Replacing our current home screen with Outreach wouldn't change a ton other than adding some more functionality, but it would also help it feel like an actual community rather than me just hitting the launch button over and over again and playing with 15 other people I might never see again, or know.

[Dagerin]

Bump for the morning crew.