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The first thing is making all the weapons/options viable, not just a "you can do this" but a "you can do this and it won't be a straight penalty to your team for not doing something else that's vastly superior"
LRMs currently are not a part of the game, being able to only suppress if you put 60-100 LRMs per alpha on your rompy stompy robot is not a viable strategy, it removes you from the game as a credit to your team, 100 LRMs is 70 damage if they all hit, average LRM volley takes 3-10 seconds to hit, in that time my trebuchet poptart can put at least 60 damage pinpoint on a single mech torso and almost drop it, that 70 damage from LRMs is going to be akwardly and uncontrollably distributed and ultimately walked off every time, that PPC damage my trebuchet would do will force that robot to turtle it up behind teammates if he wants to keep contributing. can't wait to see how missiles fit/function in the game after they fix the damage bug. just whatever you do, dont have them do under 1 damage a missle or over 1.5 damage, otherwise it'll just be doing artificially inflated damage via splash to no real effect.
SRMs need only a small buff to be more viable on medium/light mechs but on heavy/assault mechs they can work a little as it is, better the lower elo you are obviously as everything is more viable. Splatcats were pretty bad though, 75 ton robot shouldn't force people to focus it down asap better than an atlas could ever hope to, if they want to implement/improve role warfare, which dosn't seem that far off if you think about how small the adjustments to implement it would be. Commandos are especially useless since they're SRM dependant and don't have the tonnage to yield SRM24-36 necessary to make SRMs viable in higher elo. Thinking 2 damage instead of 2.5 oughta do, tabletop it up.
Energy weapons are solid currently, large lasers getting the buff they need to exist in the game, PPCs and ERPPCs being absolutely silly with predator vision, but the nerf to sniping with vision modes as they are make everything much, much better than they were before IR replaced heat vision, 4 PPC stalker is still kind of silly, and will be especially moreso once 12 man modes come out, 12x4=48 PPCs, 480 damage via voice chat coordination, torso focusing need not even be applied. Pulse lasers feel like they generate a little too much heat for the range-damage falloff penalties they include over regular lasers. Otherwise energy weapons seem fine, really small tweaks is all that's really possible to make energy weapons fit real nice into the game
Ballistics are running a little heavy and wonky atm, uac5 is jamming way too much, 15% at most but it's jamming 20% at least, and with murphy's law that equates to 100% of the time. AC2/ac5/ac10 are kind of underpowered, way too heavy for their worth, ac/20 and gauss are the only 2 effective options, nothing really demands any significant changes, just possible balance tweaking, the only real problems lie in bugs/digital mishaps like lag/hit detection.
edit: the ballistics overall generate a little too much heat which is the territory of energy weapons to compensate for not having ammo, ballistics in general are generating too much heat while still requiring tons invested to storing ammunition
The only real change/implementation to turn MWO to the max is assigning a capacity value to hardpoints, and it's really a your mileage may vary implementation, I approve of it though as it'd allow for more mechbay imagination. 2-4 AC/2 in the slot of a single ac/20 so you can long range ballistic, or an ac/20 for close range splattering, stack smalls instead of larges for heat efficient brawling etc. It opens up a lot and allows for more diverse builds and reduces pidgeon holing.
In terms of game experience improvements, the only two areas are the lack of weight-balanced matchups, where 8 atlas can be matched up against 8 hunchbacks etc. Forcing a weight-balance elo matchup thing give or take 10-35% or whatever weight difference per match would help bring out the role warfare the game devs have discussed as well as spice up the gameplay and prevent really imbalanced matchups in terms of gross armor/firepower on one team versus their opposing team. Utility currently dosn't clean cut balance against a lot of armor and firepower and trying to balance it out like that is a really abstract and difficult thing to focus on, probably not the best goal to aim for.
After all that the only real improvements to make are add maps (that don't pidgeon hole you into brawling or sniping) and definitely CTF for content and frivolous things like shinier prettier graphics or whatever really.
TLDR; missile fix/tweak, laser and ballistic tweaks to make everything more viable to reduce pidgeon holing. Possibly allow hardpoints to have capacity values. Implement soft-weight balance between teams in matchmaking. for god's sake avoid pidgeon holing your playerbase into poptart / sniper boating while using third person to god-view everything without being seen to know when to pop out and attack at the perfect time, then it turns into a hide until you get bored and then risk dying instantly robot game, alienating brawling and striking and light mechs and medium mechs and ballistics minus gauss, so basically almost all of mechwarrior is thus unviable. Then just add maps and CTF and stuff we can throw money at you for.
^ bam MWO is a perfect rompy stompy robot game with quality that speaks for itself and all of a sudden cash whales everywhere. Planetside 2 patched/fixed up hard and asap by the guys at sony and it's now got cash whales dumping paychecks into the game, IE: quality speaks/advertises/sells for itself.
That's my opinion as it stands currently, I could be wrong about things, but I think I'm on the dot for almost all of it. I'll edit if I go back over it and see something communicated poorly or something I screwed up on.
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PS: Map layout/design is much more important than the aesthetic, a poorly textured roman gladiator pit to pilot mechs in with a great obstacle/wall layout will beat an amazingly textured and beautiful rolling hill map any day of the week, it's just more fun to play on.
Edited by Spudbuddy, 07 April 2013 - 04:41 PM.
