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[Spiff]

I’ve been playing the game for a month or so now and have been reading the numerous posts from folks bitching about balance issues and bugs during the beta.

These posts generally leave me with two thoughts:

a- Balance doesn’t mean you always win, in fact it means you get your *** handed to you occasionally
b- It’s an f’ing beta and coding is this kind of stuff is nontrivial – so give these guys a break

Frankly I’m surprised as how well the game plays right now and at the quality of the release. I hesitated to invest as a founder and am kicking myself for not doing so now. I’ve had more fun with this thing that any other game I’ve played recently- which is saying a lot as I normally avoid online games like the plague. But the current offering is already better than supposedly “finished” games like Dragon Age 2 or SimCity (both of which I found to be big disappointments). At least the folks at Piranha continue to improve the builds (yes I know, one step forward two steps back- welcome to development- regression testing is also nontrivial).

As to the question of balance, frankly the MW universe is pretty balanced out of the box. Individual games can and will make small changes here and there, but weapon weights, ranges, and heat values have been roughly consistent across any number of different MW games through the years not to mention the table top system. The weapon load outs I’m using here aren’t all that different from the ones I was using back in my MW4 days. PPC’s will always been good sniping weapons, SRM’s are always going to be the answer for small fast movers, etc… Most of the decisions Piranha has to make are around things like how quickly a PPC fires after you pull the trigger or the mechanics of how missiles travel.

There are certainly some balance questions around things like ECM and LRM hit rates and the like that still need to be worked out. But things like weapons damage and heat are already well sessed out in the MW universe and, for me at least, changing them too much detracts from the experience.

In terms of the latest comments on LRM’s being nerf’d, I don’t know that I buy it. I had been avoiding them for a while after reading all the posts, but I had to go back to them as I was leveling up a few of my builds. My Awesome 8T with dual LRM’s and Artemis generally does pretty well these days. But I have to play it differently than I did before- keep line of site, don’t shoot at **** behind a rock, and make sure I have plenty of ammo (1400 rounds in this case). It’s not unusually for me to rack up 300-400 pts of damage and a few kills, though the following round I might get my *** handed to me by a guy sniping with a PPC, or a bunch of brawlers that mug me.

I actually like the fact that you have to expose yourself, get LOS, and maneuver a bit to use LRMs now. Do I wish that TAG worked better or that damage was a touch higher? Sure. But LRM’s are absolutely workable right now. You just have to change your tactics a bit – which is half the fun of the game. Do I always win with LRM’s? Hell no, but it adds to the game that an LRM build and PPC build can duke it out at long range now and you don’t know who is going to win ahead of time. That’s actually a balanced game- not the one where you spam the LRM button from behind a hill for a bunch of kills.

Anyway, the game is fun, even though it’s a work in progress and I hope that my opinion/attitude represents the silent majority out there as I’d certainly like to see it succeed.

Thx…

Spiff