89 replies to this topic

[Jake9123]

wonder how a player would play as an "indirect fire support" mech... i have a thing for big guns and artillery...

[Quentin Yatoki]

Load up a Mech with LRMs and hope that A) people scout for you, and hope you don't get caught out in the open. The Catapult and certain variants of the Awesome mount many LRMs.

Edited by Quentin Yatoki, 03 June 2012 - 06:56 AM.

[69th Canopian Pleasure Circus]

As for indirect fire support there may also eventually be arrow IV the catapult has a couple of variants that carry it.

As for gender I sort of think those numbers posted are likely correct to maybe one or two of the non-reporting people being female. I base this on my experience playing tabletop battletech, and some experience with massively multi-player online games. My tabletop group currently has around 25 people who play 11 of them regularly and 5 semi-regularly, one of those is female, and she is the daughter of one of the founders of the group. One of the people who occasionally show-up and play is also female the ex-girlfriend of a couple of members and only sort of seems interested in playing but loves painting minis.

With other MMOs usually less than 20% of the player base is female, and some of those are based on activities/games with a more heavily female demographic than battletech. As it is a female player base of around 5% is slightly above expectations.

[Soviet Alex]

Had to tick "Other" in the roles section, because I don't plan on pidgeon-holing myself into any particular role. With a few modules & a well designed mech, I might change roles mid-battle, & I'll certainly change between battles, depending on what the team needs.

[Kreisel]

For indirect fire. LRMs on a mech with a scout buddy Taging or Narcing for you is about as close as we have yet. Arrow IV and Long Tom are both the official artillery mech weapons and neither is confirmed yet, so not in initial launch, may come later (perhaps coinciding with a mech that has one, though I don't know any which it's default for.) Also the commander role had several modules along the theme of calling in air strikes or artillery strikes.

I realize I left "Brawler" out from roles, and that seems to be a common play-style description but there was no room for it, just like I feel I kinda should have had Clansman as an option in question 3, but I left it out cause I think question 1 can give us a sense of how many Clansmen vote.

I'll try and do an update on trends at 200 or so responses, and every 50 or 100 more after that (depending how fast we get them).

Soviet Alex, that's a good mentality that I hope is common among players, which is part of why I left the poll open to multiple responses, since I assume most people are flexible, but have a few jobs they prefer to avoid.

Edited by Kreisel, 02 June 2012 - 07:14 AM.

[Steve Fire]

I hope to be flexible on what roles I will play, I am starting as a lone wolf but I am sure I will look for a good group to hang out with.

As for scales of mech, well that really depends on how they line up in game I hope to use my founders credit to start up a few choices of mech from scout to medium and assault even an indirect missile chassis if I can stretch my credit that far.

[Chunkymonkey]

Seems like role warfare might actually work.

[Arikiel]

Looks like if you were be able to plot what everyone will be playing, by weight, you'd get a pretty nice bell curve.
As it should be.

[Hawkeye 72]

You have intrigued the overlords at Operation:Steel Dominion. Well done on that data gathered so far.

A few comments

Kreisel, on 01 June 2012 - 08:16 PM, said:

Great to see the responses coming in, we're at 130 responses at the time I make this post, which is enough that some trends start to appear. I'll be editing my initial posts to include trends I notice that are not so immediately obvious to the eye that pointing them out wouldn't be helpful.

I would be hesitant to base your trends off of 130 responses. Considering the active forum community sits at around 10,000 pilots, you need a larger sample size for trending. If you can gather 1000+ responses, then trending will be more relevant. However even then, out of the entire community this is a small response. But it will give you a good idea at the demographics of the people who reply to this thread.

Kreisel, on 01 June 2012 - 09:37 PM, said:

137 of 151 responses are reporting their gender. 2 female, 135 Male, 14 Non-responsive. This may say something more about women being unwilling to self identify in a forum like this than it does actual population...

After all those 2 female votes could have been males checking them, and females could have checked male, or some people might have checked both. Certainly some have checked neither... so *shrugs* it's not really conclusive other than what people were willing to throw out there.

Solis Obscuri, on 01 June 2012 - 05:18 PM, said:

Damn this game is a sausagefest...

Paige V, on 01 June 2012 - 09:01 PM, said:

*looking over results, checks gender ratio*

Male: 125
Female: 2

sadness. You're just hiding, other ladypilots? Right? ....Right?

69th Canopian Pleasure Circus, on 02 June 2012 - 03:24 AM, said:

As for gender I sort of think those numbers posted are likely correct to maybe one or two of the non-reporting people being female. I base this on my experience playing tabletop battletech, and some experience with massively multi-player online games. My tabletop group currently has around 25 people who play 11 of them regularly and 5 semi-regularly, one of those is female, and she is the daughter of one of the founders of the group. One of the people who occasionally show-up and play is also female the ex-girlfriend of a couple of members and only sort of seems interested in playing but loves painting minis.

With other MMOs usually less than 20% of the player base is female, and some of those are based on activities/games with a more heavily female demographic than battletech. As it is a female player base of around 5% is slightly above expectations.

Upon our last analysis, Steel Dominion found that of the 24,754 members who identified their gender, 19,039 were male, 5,304 were not telling, and 411 were female. While this only makes up approximately 18.9% of the community, do not expect to find a high concentration of females on these forums.

We will continue to monitor your progress

Edited by Hawkeye 72, 02 June 2012 - 07:37 AM.

[Kreisel]

Hawkeye 72, on 02 June 2012 - 07:36 AM, said:

You have intrigued the overlords at Operation:Steel Dominion. Well done on that data gathered so far.

I would be hesitant to base your trends off of 130 responses. Considering the active forum community sits at around 10,000 pilots, you need a larger sample size for trending. If you can gather 1000+ responses, then trending will be more relevant. However even then, out of the entire community this is a small response. But it will give you a good idea at the demographics of the people who reply to this thread.

We will continue to monitor your progress

*Arches an eyebrow* Thanks for the Input, good to see there is someone out there who could actually put this Data to good use, I started collecting it because I was interested to see what would turn up, but honestly statistics are not one of my strong suits.

I should be clear, I suppose I should have avoided the use of the word trending, because I know this thread is a long way off from being a decent sample size given how large our community is. However, at their are enough respondents that certain tendencies in the data we have so far start to show up and that's all I'm really pointing to. I would encourage people to take any results here with a grain of salt. After all polls like this do have to problem of being skewed in that certain kinds of people may be more apt to answer them in the first place, or people could lie, ect. Still, thanks for the info, it's good to know the numbers where things could be considered a serious sample. And of course feel free to make use of the data that comes in, I get the sense you have a better idea how to display it in useful ways than I do.

Not really sure why I included the gender question to be honest, it doesn't really line up with the rest of the questions asked, it fit better when I still thought I had room to ask the age category question too.

Edited by Kreisel, 02 June 2012 - 08:33 AM.

[Hawkeye 72]

Kreisel, on 02 June 2012 - 08:32 AM, said:

I would encourage people to take any results here with a grain of salt.

I wouldn't. This is rather interesting. While it might not speak for the whole community, it does help support theories that user distribution over weight classes will be rather even than lopsided towards assault mechs only. While this could change if certain classes are found to have advantages/disadvantages, it is definitely a positive start. Hopefully more people will vote and help build the results because right now this is the only way users like us can gather such data. But in no way would I dismiss the results of this poll.

[Kreisel]

Stats updated for the new numbers as of the 227 mark.

Corrected a spelling error in the pole pointed out to me about the wrong kind of Cannon/Canon.

Some interesting details Lone Wolf/House and mercs are rather consistent percentages, about 20% Light, 29% Medium, 34% Heavy, 15% Assault. Heavy is actually turning out to be the most common tonnage category, with medium lagging just a touch behind it. Those who have reported they intend to use Clan mechs have, so far, indicated a much stronger preference for larger mechs than any other group (10% more Assault, 4% more Heavy than any other group.)

High Tonnage Mechs look to be the ride of choice for those interested in the Defense or Commander role, while, of course, Scouts heavily favor light. There is a good number of folk who are going to try to be offense at every weight class.

81% of the respondents have played Mech warrior 4. 72% Have played Mechwarrior 3 and 49% have done the Table Top game.

Roughly 1/3 of the respondents Plan to be highly flexible and adaptive to their group when making a choice of Mechs.

3/4 of those who responded are planing to spend money on the game.

and finally 9% of us want to have an Urbanmech in our garage.

Edited by Kreisel, 03 June 2012 - 09:07 AM.

[Artifice]

Brilliant thread. I really appreciate the statistical breakdown, good stuff.

I like what I see from the community. Heavies have a bit of a following, but plenty of people want to show up in solid support roles. I really want to see the further results of this, but the field looks good so far.

I'm certain that this information will be important to the Devs, someone should pin this - for science, you monster.

[BeforeLife]

Im going to pilot everything and do every role with it
Weres my Charger!(with a 400XL of corse, standered 400s are way to fking heavy >_>)

[Sassori]

Well this particular genre is more male oriented than female honestly. It doesn't help how the writers have typically portrayed females in the novels too.

Fantasy tends to draw more an even mix of genders than mecha.

[Starbadger]

Christopher Dayson, on 03 June 2012 - 08:31 AM, said:

Well this particular genre is more male oriented than female honestly. It doesn't help how the writers have typically portrayed females in the novels too.

Fantasy tends to draw more an even mix of genders than mecha.

I'm surprised at just *how small* the percentage is. With female gamers being a pretty common thing now, I would've thought maybe... 10-30% ?

I'd guess that Btech/Mechwarrior just isn't as well known in recent times as other properties. It enjoyed popularity in the 80's/90's, when it was less common to see female gamers (or so I hear ) so there aren't a lot of female old fans. Old fans being a significant portion of these forums.

[Kreisel]

Bumping in the hope more people will see the thread and respond.

I'm seeing several other threads along a similar vein pop up recently. One asking what role people will play but lacking a poll and a second galactic census. I was hoping people would more readily actually discuss what role/class they were looking to play in this thread with posts because that would keep it bumped, but it appears people are more likely to just respond to the poll without a post (which in some ways is good, because 261 responses would be a lot to read through!)

[Kudzu]

Paige V, on 03 June 2012 - 06:50 PM, said:

Old fans being a significant portion of these forums.

Get off my lawn!

[Starbadger]

Kudzu, on 04 June 2012 - 09:04 AM, said:

Get off my lawn!

*Ignites an urbanmech with a flamer on Kudzu's porch, runs*

(I meant old as in "been a fan for a long time". =) I'm only a teenager, but I played my first Btech video game around Kindergarten. Yes, I am a massive nerd. >_> )

[Shisai]

hmm... the results so far seem to indicate a quite well-balanced weight class distribution