57 replies to this topic

[wonator]

Mechwarrior Buddah, on 09 March 2013 - 11:27 PM, said:

Hell in EVE a certain person tried to get their corp to get another player to commit suicide by harassing him into it. I havent seen that yet here

*Facepalm* Dude you should play the game and not only trust some moronic news...

[roguetrdr]

I think it really boils down to (and I hate that it's become so obvious) the community is really nothing other than money sacks to PGI/IGP now. It really seemed different back in the day, back in early beta. Then it really felt like they were fans and wanted to make a game that wasn't just to turn a profit, but to be a good game that was true to the franchise. Now it looks like they scraped together the bare minimum in order to be able to get some cash out of people and they are ticking over doing bare minimum content wise, and the maximum MC shop wise.

[valkyrie]

Moromillas, on 10 March 2013 - 12:45 AM, said:

Nah, the numbers are pretty good for testing, well they seem to be anyway.

I don't think they should be marketing quite honestly, but instead having demonstrations about what MWO can do, and what their scope is.

Here's the issue I'll have to raise with that. We already know what their scope is. Their scope has since been revised or outright reduced in some cases. What PGI needs to do is less "this is what the game will be like in two years!" and more "this game is actually pretty fun right now," which it can be as long as they get the balance tweaked better (and that is much easier than say, full community warfare integration). Once new players are in, that's when they can say "ok, eventually we want to do this," but if we can't convince people to play this game RIGHT NOW, we're looking at stagnation of the player base and a drying up of funds, which means we'll never get to CW at all.

tl;dr PGI needs to stop putting the carriage before the horse and market the game they have so they can build the one the WANT to have.

[Moromillas]

valkyrie, on 10 March 2013 - 12:50 AM, said:

Here's the issue I'll have to raise with that. We already know what their scope is. Their scope has since been revised or outright reduced in some cases. What PGI needs to do is less "this is what the game will be like in two years!" and more "this game is actually pretty fun right now," which it can be as long as they get the balance tweaked better (and that is much easier than say, full community warfare integration). Once new players are in, that's when they can say "ok, eventually we want to do this," but if we can't convince people to play this game RIGHT NOW, we're looking at stagnation of the player base and a drying up of funds, which means we'll never get to CW at all.

tl;dr PGI needs to stop putting the carriage before the horse and market the game they have so they can build the one the WANT to have.

No, it's not even a game yet, all we have is a bunch of game mechanics on the cry engine. This is just doomsaying and baseless assertions. Yes we do need to have as many players on board in order to be successful, this is a long term goal though. We can't say we need a tone of new players RIGHT NOW, because we don't have anything substantial to say we need a tone of new players RIGHT NOW. You make it sound like IGP is clueless and that there's no one assigned to the budget side of things at Piranha, I can't see anything that would suggest that it's going down the toilet.

We don't know what the scope is beyond "make stuff for MWO" we don't even have any solid details about CW or Op. Revival yet.

Balance is never-ending. You're never going to get a game that is 100% balanced.

[Vassago Rain]

Moromillas, on 10 March 2013 - 01:37 AM, said:

No, it's not even a game yet, all we have is a bunch of game mechanics on the cry engine. This is just doomsaying and baseless assertions. Yes we do need to have as many players on board in order to be successful, this is a long term goal though. We can't say we need a tone of new players RIGHT NOW, because we don't have anything substantial to say we need a tone of new players RIGHT NOW. You make it sound like IGP is clueless and that there's no one assigned to the budget side of things at Piranha, I can't see anything that would suggest that it's going down the toilet.

We don't know what the scope is beyond "make stuff for MWO" we don't even have any solid details about CW or Op. Revival yet.

Balance is never-ending. You're never going to get a game that is 100% balanced.

But 20% balance would be a vast improvement over what we have now. Things like making machineguns spit bullets three times faster, revising how CASE works, fixing hit registration on SRMs... They don't feel or look like big, complicated projects to me, but would vastly improve the experience of what we have right now,

[Glythe]

WoT didn't play commercials for their game until 6 months after release.

They should have played commercials in very select channels (such as history and G4). They could have bought an add for WoT during one of like 5 tank shows on the history channel ffs. About a year after release they finally did that.

[Moromillas]

Vassago Rain, on 10 March 2013 - 02:00 AM, said:

But 20% balance would be a vast improvement over what we have now. Things like making machineguns spit bullets three times faster, revising how CASE works, fixing hit registration on SRMs... They don't feel or look like big, complicated projects to me, but would vastly improve the experience of what we have right now,

Yikes, a zero (or 1) out of 10 for balance? I would have given it a 7.... Ok, maybe a 6.

I can't say I know for certain how complex game balancing is in a project like this. It may very well be more complex than one might think. I might ask this in the next Q&A.

[valkyrie]

And another thing!

Someone on /mwog/ just made a really great point - why is there no referral system to this game? Even crappy F2P games have referral systems; it's the best possible way to get friends interested since they'll have a support base (their friends) and ideally a bit of a bonus to reduce the grind necessary to compete on par with said friends. Hell, I know I got someone into World of Tanks this week just because I ended up with a spare referral code in my SXSW goodie bag and said "anyone want to play World of Tanks? Here's a promo code!" on my Facebook page. Code was gone in under a minute.

Instead we get...Trial by Fire Sales. For 'Mechs that are often not worth the HDD space their data is on, the Hunchback -4SP and Catapult -K2 being the only exceptions thus far. Woohoo.

Uh, someone want to explain to me the logic behind trying to entice new players by telling them they can spend less money on a new 'Mech...in a free-to-play game they're not even sure they're going to like?

Edited by valkyrie, 11 March 2013 - 10:40 PM.

[ZealotTheFallen]

This is Not Mechwarrior it is CallofDuty mechfighting and everyone of us from the original game MPBT multiplayerbattletech will tell you this is not even close to the true game. Yes we drop on a planet and fight big freaking deal this is stale all the names i see everyday are new, this game was based on planet conquest and holding it for the next team to take another forward planet within the opposing house area. Not here team play is gone there is no true community. It is still so far away from the original game that I feel bad for them because wow how many more drops can people trully do seeing the same thing doing the exact same thing. Community warfare was the only reason i started this game and i wish i had my money back to put it into another game. Till we have a lobby where we can stage our drops to a forward planet where the supply lines have to be held and dropships are flying to help support a team then i would call it Mechwarrior not now so why advertize to be laugh at because this is going so slow all the true mechwarriors of the past have moved on to be replaced by children who do not know of the real game from the late 90s or not even born.

[Thirdstar]

ZealotTheFallen, on 11 March 2013 - 10:57 PM, said:

This is Not Mechwarrior it is CallofDuty mechfighting and everyone of us from the original game MPBT multiplayerbattletech will tell you this is not even close to the true game.

You've never played Mechwarrior 2 or 3 or 4 have you?

I don't really blame you though, but you really shouldn't have bought into the CW hype.

There's this Myth that some of the older Founders have created around what MWO was 'supposed' to be. It completely ignores what the previous Mechwarrior games WERE.

Edited by Thirdstar, 11 March 2013 - 11:18 PM.

[MustrumRidcully]

I think they are simply trapped under countless of announced IS and Clan mechs that they were trying to hold back. Garth "vacation" was actually a cover up in his attempt to acquire a professional rescue digging team.

[valkyrie]

Hang on, there's a decent post in there somewhere. Don't worry post, my writing degree and I are coming to save you!

ZealotTheFallen, on 11 March 2013 - 10:57 PM, said:

This is not MechWarrior, it is Call of Duty. Mechfighting and every one of us from the original game, MPBT (Multiplayer BattleTech) will tell you this is not even close to the true game. Yes, we drop on a planet and fight. Big freaking deal. This is stale.

All the names I see everyday are new. This game was based on planet conquest and holding it for the next team to take another forward planet within the opposing House's area. Not here. Team play is gone. There is no true community. It is still so far away from the original game that I feel bad for them because wow - how many more drops can people truly do seeing the same thing, doing the exact same thing? Community Warfare was the only reason I started this game and I wish I had my money back to put it into another game.

When we have a lobby where we can stage our drops to a forward planet, where the supply lines have to be held and dropships are flying to help support a team, then I would call it MechWarrior. Not now. So, why advertise to be laughed at? This is going so slow. All the true MechWarriors of the past have moved on to be replaced by children who do not know of the real game from the late 90s or before they were even born.

Periods are nice. Commas are nice too, as are paragraphs. Throw some proper capitalization in there and you're golden!

Anyway, here's a shocker, and I'm sure this will throw some other people off too: this game's Founders are not all that special. No, we really aren't. How much money did we collectively give to PGI/IGP? I recall it being something over $5 million or so, and THAT got split off into three different games anyway. While I personally have huge personal issues with that, there's not a lot we can do about it. Now, here's the thing - $5,000,000 really doesn't buy you much in the game dev world anymore. When that gets sliced up and divvied out, it gets you even less. To put it in perspective, the average game budget in 2010 was about $10,000,000 for a single-platform title.Those games on Kickstarter? I assure you, the money they're getting from donors is not the only cash they're getting - I'd be willing to bet some serious cash that the most successful Kickstarters had investors waiting in the wings to say "ok, if you get X amount from the public to start with, we'll give you Y amount on top of that since we know consumers will buy this." From what I understand, IGP has basically done the exact OPPOSITE (though I'd love to be proven wrong if anyone has a source) by splitting the Founder's cash across MWO, MWT, and whatever the hell that other game they were working on was.

You want to know why PGI is pushing consumables so hard? They're probably hurting for money. Problem is, their audience isn't big enough to support Community Warfare, even if we did all start buying consumables. We probably don't have enough players to make it really viable from a gameplay standpoint, much less a financial one when the game is still being developed. To paraphrase Top Gun, PGI is writing checks their body can't cash.

You might hate the "new breed" of MechWarriors. You probably hate me too - while I started with a bit of MW2 when I was in elementary school, I didn't really pick up the franchise until MechAssault, which got me into MW4, which pushed me to Clickytech, then BattleTech, and now here we are. Have you ever wondered why EA, Ubisoft, Activision, etc. are all pushing for the casual audience? It's because all businesses need new blood to stay alive, much less grow. They "casualize" without any sort of respect for their original fanbases, and at some point they'll implode under their own weight, mark my words. You can broaden your audience without doing that to your games and your company though. The trick is finding that balance, and that's what I'm trying to jump start here.

MechWarrior's strength has always been it's depth, so I don't think PGI needs to dumb it down any. But, what they should do, what they NEED to do to survive, is get as many new players in as possible and keep that flow going. To do that, they're going to have to start selling people on the game they have, not the one they want to have. The concept of Community Warfare is awesome, but at the end of the day, money talks. If they want to build CW at all, or give us Clans, or anything like that, they need that new blood and the new income that's coming with it.

The old guard is not the most important thing to MechWarrior's survival as a franchise any more. You can say "well I'd rather take my ball and go home rather than play with these kiddies!," but a lot of us 20-somethings (or younger!) are every bit as smart, well-spoken, and passionate about this game as the people who still have their BattleDroids box set collecting dust in the closet. You take that ball and go home now, and you'll soon find yourself without anyone to enjoy playing ball with ever again. We're all in this together. Remember that.

tl;dr: Deal with the lack of CW, we need this game to succeed now if we want it to ever get where we want it to go. That means fixing the game we have now and marketing, marketing, marketing.

Edited by valkyrie, 11 March 2013 - 11:44 PM.

[Vassago Rain]

valkyrie, on 11 March 2013 - 11:41 PM, said:

Hang on, there's a decent post in there somewhere. Don't worry post, my writing degree and I are coming to save you!



Periods are nice. Commas are nice too, as are paragraphs. Throw some proper capitalization in there and you're golden!

Anyway, here's a shocker, and I'm sure this will throw some other people off too: this game's Founders are not all that special. No, we really aren't. How much money did we collectively give to PGI/IGP? I recall it being something over $5 million or so, and THAT got split off into three different games anyway. While I personally have huge personal issues with that, there's not a lot we can do about it. Now, here's the thing - $5,000,000 really doesn't buy you much in the game dev world anymore. When that gets sliced up and divvied out, it gets you even less. To put it in perspective, the average game budget in 2010 was about $10,000,000 for a single-platform title.Those games on Kickstarter? I assure you, the money they're getting from donors is not the only cash they're getting - I'd be willing to bet some serious cash that the most successful Kickstarters had investors waiting in the wings to say "ok, if you get X amount from the public to start with, we'll give you Y amount on top of that since we know consumers will buy this." From what I understand, IGP has basically done the exact OPPOSITE (though I'd love to be proven wrong if anyone has a source) by splitting the Founder's cash across MWO, MWT, and whatever the hell that other game they were working on was.

You want to know why PGI is pushing consumables so hard? They're probably hurting for money. Problem is, their audience isn't big enough to support Community Warfare, even if we did all start buying consumables. We probably don't have enough players to make it really viable from a gameplay standpoint, much less a financial one when the game is still being developed. To paraphrase Top Gun, PGI is writing checks their body can't cash.

You might hate the "new breed" of MechWarriors. You probably hate me too - while I started with a bit of MW2 when I was in elementary school, I didn't really pick up the franchise until MechAssault, which got me into MW4, which pushed me to Clickytech, then BattleTech, and now here we are. Have you ever wondered why EA, Ubisoft, Activision, etc. are all pushing for the casual audience? It's because all businesses need new blood to stay alive, much less grow. They "casualize" without any sort of respect for their original fanbases, and at some point they'll implode under their own weight, mark my words. You can broaden your audience without doing that to your games and your company though. The trick is finding that balance, and that's what I'm trying to jump start here.

MechWarrior's strength has always been it's depth, so I don't think PGI needs to dumb it down any. But, what they should do, what they NEED to do to survive, is get as many new players in as possible and keep that flow going. To do that, they're going to have to start selling people on the game they have, not the one they want to have. The concept of Community Warfare is awesome, but at the end of the day, money talks. If they want to build CW at all, or give us Clans, or anything like that, they need that new blood and the new income that's coming with it.

The old guard is not the most important thing to MechWarrior's survival as a franchise any more. You can say "well I'd rather take my ball and go home rather than play with these kiddies!," but a lot of us 20-somethings (or younger!) are every bit as smart, well-spoken, and passionate about this game as the people who still have their BattleDroids box set collecting dust in the closet. You take that ball and go home now, and you'll soon find yourself without anyone to enjoy playing ball with ever again. We're all in this together. Remember that.

tl;dr: Deal with the lack of CW, we need this game to succeed now if we want it to ever get where we want it to go. That means fixing the game we have now and marketing, marketing, marketing.

Listen to this man.

[Monky]

MWO isn't a product I would go around bragging about yet, it's got heart and a lot of blood/sweat/tears and it could end up being great, but I don't blame them not pumping advertisements to full blast, especially when they are making money to run right now and develop things in prep for prime time. Truth be told, aside from acquiring mechs, dicking around in mechlab, and fighting mechs, there isn't much to MWO. Community warfare is absolutely needed, as well as eventually, the clans. These things will draw people in and provide variety (well, at least the community warfare. We all know everyone is just going to pilot a timberwolf).

[Windies]

Honestly, CW is a myth until proven otherwise. I'm sure PGI had a great idea as to what they wanted CW to be, but planning and the ability to actually do and create what you plan are two different things.

That doesn't mean I don't think something called Community Warfare will ever surface, I just don't think it's ever going to be what was described as one of the main pillars of the game. I'm afraid PGI honestly put the cart before the horse a long time ago by selling the promise of a great Mechwarrior game, without the ability or the foundation for it to be built on.

As for the PR and marketing of MW:O, Honestly what can they market right now. The game is as bare bones as it could possibly be. Sure we get some shiny Mechs here and there that offer different configurations of the same weapons, we get a map every few months, The game modes are extremely bland and uninspired and get old very very quick. PGI is going about it completely wrong and prioritizing all wrong. The priorities should be on the game modes and the maps, not the Mechs themselves. I feel like they are focusing on Mechs because it's something that can be monetized, Not so much because it adds content. I would have been happier in all honesty if we had 8 Mechs, better game modes and 10-15 maps right now instead of like 12 mechs and 4-5 maps with really boring and repetitive game modes. Maps and game modes are the foundation and Mechs are the building blocks to build the walls with, so to speak.

Balance in this game is just completely fubar'd. Some things that would balance the game out are such easy implementations, yet for some reason PGI feels like they have to take the ultra complicated route or do nothing at all. DPS is good for looking at the general characteristics of a weapon, but there are many other factors to consider. Ever since Garth made the "3 second Jenner fear" post, I've honestly come to realize that I don't think PGI honestly has a good solid idea on how they want to implement things. It feels like they're just throwing it on the wall and seeing what sticks. It feels like that for a lot of different things besides balance issue's.

I think the largest reason though you are not seeing a large PR presence is because they are hurting for money. I honestly think they are churning through players faster than they can retain any of them. Consumables just screams desperation to me for some reason. The way they were going to implement them, the way they implemented the so called quirks system for Mechs without telling us until we data mined the information from the game files and how it was first introduced on a Hero Mech. Also the whole slippery slope argument about Hero Mechs to begin with.

All of it screamed money grab to me. I'm not against them making money, and if they want to implement these things they can. I'm against things like consumables and I'm against Hero Mechs from the point of view that they still give a unique variant for RMT only. To me, P2W isn't some magical I WIN button that you pay for, but rather the lengths a development or publishing company will go to in order to make a profit while affecting the mechanics and game play of their game.

Sales and more and more cosmetic and consumables are not gonna keep this game alive unless there is something worth paying for and something worth playing for. Until they start focusing on the foundation of MW:O instead of the monetization aspect of it, it's just going to keep sinking farther and farther into a hole. What's the use of spending money on a PR blitz if you know the ship is sinking anyways?

Edited by Windies, 12 March 2013 - 12:33 AM.

[SuomiWarder]

I suspect that it is simply a matter of not having the cash to spend on marketing programs, or feeling that what cash they have set aside for such programs would not gain sufficient return on investment if spent now.

Why they don't bother with low cost ploys like giving a few days of free premium time to a new player and the person that referred them to the game I can't even begin to guess. Well okay, I have one guess. Coming up with and coding new means of gathering money from the players they do have on the hook has priority over fishing for new players that might or might not spend real cash.

[Corvus Antaka]

having lobbies to match up for player run tourneys. 1v1, 2v2, 4v4, 8v8.

some ability to communicate/friend/block people effectively from ingame and after game in mechlab lobbies.

Letting the community help to build maps, all the other stuff already noted like 3D models perhaps, etc.

if these where in ASAP PGI could relax and work and improve the game and do CW right with a lot less pressure.

instead the MWO carrot dangles, and we all pray that someday the mighty mech gods will let us just play some mech in organized drops vs our friends.

Some respawn would help too imho. even if it doesnt pay. yes, its voluntary. dont you norespawn ppl go all bananas now...

just some fun CTF would be awesome, heck, slap a flag on each base, give us 30 minutes, no respawn, 5 caps, I'm in!

[ZealotTheFallen]

I played all the mechwarrior games and before that tested all the little games that turned into ultima online etc. my first computer was a 1977 ibm clone with duel 5 1/4 inch floppies but it seems what we invisioned for this game: thats the twenty or more guildmates from mpbt: will never come about I reactivated my old game of over 10 years so no biggy. I just hoped this game would become the modern version of MPBT just a dream and to all above. I am a writer, posting here well, I get a bit taken away by my passion and adhd. Thats why I have proof readers and an editor so I sound sane. Funny I find how critical people get about things that trully have no bearing on this game. You never know what may happen, I trully hope for the best.

Edited by ZealotTheFallen, 12 March 2013 - 02:02 AM.

[Windies]

Colonel Pada Vinson, on 12 March 2013 - 01:21 AM, said:

having lobbies to match up for player run tourneys. 1v1, 2v2, 4v4, 8v8.

some ability to communicate/friend/block people effectively from ingame and after game in mechlab lobbies.

Letting the community help to build maps, all the other stuff already noted like 3D models perhaps, etc.

if these where in ASAP PGI could relax and work and improve the game and do CW right with a lot less pressure.

instead the MWO carrot dangles, and we all pray that someday the mighty mech gods will let us just play some mech in organized drops vs our friends.

Some respawn would help too imho. even if it doesnt pay. yes, its voluntary. dont you norespawn ppl go all bananas now...

just some fun CTF would be awesome, heck, slap a flag on each base, give us 30 minutes, no respawn, 5 caps, I'm in!

I think letting the community design maps would be a wonderful idea. This sounds derogatory, but I don't think the community could do a worse job than PGI at this point.

[Lyrik]

Windies, on 12 March 2013 - 02:11 AM, said:

I think letting the community design maps would be a wonderful idea. This sounds derogatory, but I don't think the community could do a worse job than PGI at this point.

Sorry, that would be a stupid idea.

I don't know that what's your problem with the maps of MWO (except that there too few) but I found them well crafted. Different terrain, lots of buildings, dropships, ships, hills etc...

Ok Alpine is a a little bit empty but they couldn't fill such a huge map with a lot of buildings without making the game unplayable for the gamers with old PC's.