Synra, on 19 March 2013 - 08:21 AM, said:
I for one am at my wits end here. I have been playing since last June, and I simply cannot believe where we are at with the game today. I expected it to be much further along and polished. Every day I find myself battling against frustration over really stupid problems with the game, that shouldn't be happening.
I don't even know where to begin describing them, they are so numerous.
-For one, I swear that the matchmaker is out to get me. I am so sick and tired of getting into games where my team loses after I go on a rampage. I deal out 500 or 600 damage, score some kills, then turn around and discover that my whole team has been wiped out, all of them having done 100 damage or less.
-ECM... is a whole long rant in it's own right, but needs to be listed here.
-Raven 3Ls. The perfectly lethal blend of ECM, Speed and firepower. I have seen so many games where just a pair of these working together absolutely wrecked the enemy team.
-7v8 Games. Why are we still seeing this? Why has the launching system and matchmaker still not yet solved this problem?
-Dead Weight: Disconnects and 0 damage players. Just like above, how has this problem not been solved yet? I am so sick of losing a game, then seeing on the score window that I had two people who did absolutely zero damage.
-Mech Weight class matching: One of the most productive things PGI ever did to the game was implement Class matching. And now they have removed it. I am also sick of losing games because the matchmaker gave me a team full of slow moving mechs, against a team with 4 high speed mechs, that either eat us alive, or cap our bases with no difficulty.
-Repair and Rearm are gone. R&R served a very vital purpose. It encouraged players to utilize smaller, cheaper mechs. Before R&R came along, our games were absolutely filled with souped up assaults and heavies. Since R&R was removed not long ago, matches have gone right back to the way they were. The only reason we still see quite a few lights is due to ECM. When that goes away, so will most of the lights. Every week I see more and more Assaults in my matches and it's going to get worse without R&R.
And on top of all these points, is the fact that this game is progressively moving away from Battletech. MWO is supposed to be a grand revival of the Mechwarrior franchise, yet PGI keeps taking the game further and further from the basic rules and stats that should be maintained. PGI seems to have some kind of very skewed and twisted concept of what Battletech is. This doesn't even feel like mechwarrior to me anymore. LRMs are doing 1.8 damage per missile, and deal splash damage. Also, with Artemis, 100% of the missiles hit their target! They should be doing 1.0 damage per missile, and only to the location they hit. And, even with Artemis, they should be landing in a spray. Some missiles hit, some miss. LRMs shouldn't be this far off base. MWO has diverged that much, and PGI isn't doing anything about this very obvious problem. And that's only one of the many weapon systems in the game.
*sigh* I had high hopes for MWO, and it had so much promise last summer. But I should not be writing these things today. None of these problems should exist right now.
Sigh .. first, I have as many concerns about PGI as anyone ... though, it is very difficult to assess and very easy to be critical when you are on the outside looking in ..
BUT ... the list cited above is an entirely unfair criticism of PGI ... comment on things they can change and control ... not on stuff they can't.
1) Team work has nothing to do with PGI. Unless you do something to try to organize the folks you are playing with then a good performance by one player will not win the game for you. If you are turning around to discover everyone dead then I have to suspect you were off by yourself somewhere ... maybe fighting one or two opponents while the rest of the team are munched one by one.
2) ECM is a game mechanic. I think it needs work. However, LRM/SRM/SSRM were/are broken and toning down ECM would have made this much more obvious ... I agree with you that PGI should have faced up to both these issues much earlier ... forum posters have mentioned these frequently. I can only assume that the team that pulls feedback from the forums just decided it was all complaints with no basis in unbalanced reality ... maybe they will pay more attention to feedback now ... who knows.
3) 7 vs.8 games. Have you noticed how long the game waits for that last player? The match maker did not set up a 7 vs 8 ... the invitation that went out the 8th client just did not get connected. Whether this is a PGI code issue or a network issue needs to be determined ... but it is unlikely to be a match-making issue directly.
4) Disconnects and 0-damage players. How can you blame PGI for these? Real life happens ... some one's kid bangs their head ... the phone rings ... the doorbell rings ... someone's mom starts yelling at them for playing too much MW:O ... AFKs are a fact of life ... afk farmers don't get anything anymore so at least the problem is a lot less than it used to be. Disconnects are similar ... they are most likely due to network and networking issues on the client ... there could be server side networking issues as well and network debug code should be running to see if there are unexpected drop outs or if the server is just too sensitive to lag ... but most of the time I would expect these issues to be due to packet loss or lag and outside the control of PGI.
5) I agree that match-making needs some work but to be honest tonnage has not be the deciding factor in most of the matches I have played. In addition, it starts off aiming to match things on a class by class basis not exact tonnage. You could get one side with 4 atlas and other with 4 awesomes ... 80 ton difference but 4 assaults vs. 4 assaults. The matchmaking could be better but I have to admit that my win/loss is currently 1:1 since the detailed stats were released ... so based on that metric the ELO match making would appear to be mostly working for me.
6) R&R was broken. I liked it in general but it was broken. Bonuses were applied to match earnings before costs so that the 50% bonus for premium was actually more like 100% on net earnings. Ammo costs were exorbitant and made it painful to play any mech that needed ammo ... never mind an lrm+artemis or srm+artemis mech. All these costs CAN be brought into line ... a decent economic model could be developed. However, in the end, the average earnings would need to be something like what they are now ... given the small team size at PGI ... it is a much better use of their resources to make a better game before spending a lot of resources creating a balanced R&R system that is effectively mostly just fluff. The overall game can't really be made balanced on an economic basis.
7) None of the MW games have ever been Battletech. I've played all the MW games and started with TT many moons ago. MW is a real time "simulation" and TT is a turn based board game. Any similarity between the two is mostly fortuitous though MW:O did start with TT values and started tweaking to get something with a reasonable feel. In general I think they have succeeded.
All of that said ... I think that PGI could do better on the commincations front and on testing. If I had to guess, I would say that PGI is understaffed for a project of this size and can't afford individuals to do numeric and regression testing to make sure that everything is actually working as intended. They have a mandate to make money ... so content that can be converted to revenue is clearly a very high prioroty ... this includes content that will keep people playing, that will attract them to the game and which can be directly sold through the in-game stores. However, in my opinion they really need to ensure that the underlying game is solid and reasonably balanced or the introduction of content may fail to achieve the goals they are aiming for ...
... anyway ... like many other folks I love the franchise and hope that PGI will continue to make a great game.
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