9 replies to this topic

[Type AE-86]

Hi guys, just trying to give my two cents here (or more of 150 bucks). It's gonna be a long post, so for all of you, TLDR, its at the bottom ;) Not sure if this is the right place to put this post as well. this post/essay is more for the developers, but I gladly welcome all responses.
I reckon most wont read it. I won't, its too long, but I had to write it down. -_-

Mods please shift this to the right forum if applicable, posting noob here :P

(3038 words)

TLDR (142 words)

DISCLAIMER: Its all personal opinion below. You can disagree with it, infact I encourage it, but I would like constructive criticism please (If you actually read it, heh :D)


Background: Battletech/Mechwarrior fan, got knows how much i've put into the mechwarrior franchise in terms of time and money.
I used to play a lot in closed beta, nevermind the wipes, playing with my clan mates. Great fun. Now with uni exams around the corner, I play less often (a series of games a month or less) so I tend to see several patch effects in one go.

Game feedback that I'll be giving will be split into several factors:

• Content addition / creation
  
• Playability / Stability
  
• Gameplay mechanics / balance issues
  
• Player feedback and improvement

1. Content addition / creation






I love new stuff! who doesn't? :) Oh but I don't like it when it is new but out of my reach though. who does? :angry: Having plonked down a good sum of money to back this amazing game (see legendary founder), my reaction to content addition over the last year or so has been lukewarm at best.

I understand that PG took a brave step buying the liscense of the franchise. Not sure if its a flat rate or poportional to profits, but no matter. Yes there is a pressure for them to be profitable, after all it is a company. However this is a open beta. Your community is not going to be huge. Thus your consumer base is not going to be huge either. Generally a normal game monetary wise works as follows I think. correct me if i'm wrong.

• Pre-Alpha
  
• Alpha
  
• Beta (Open, Closed, or both)
  
• Release Candidate
  
• Release

Currently MWO is at Open Beta. From what I understood of open beta, the point of it is to transition to a release candidate and then to a releasable product asap: releasable products are (traditionally) the way companies make money. So in beta, what happens?






AFAIK, "the focus of beta testing is reducing impacts to users, often incorporating usability testing." ~Wikipedia (relatively reliable)

Alright. so usability testing. However you can't have a Release or RC without content right? that would be a half baked game. Thus content creation is required, this I will not dispute.

What I will dispute or like to note is that the addition of content at this stage is not meant for profit short term (e.g micro transactions) but for long term (e.g release product) to put it in a little analogy:

You're trying to sell a chocolate cake. (the game MWO)

You would most definitely sell it as a chocolate cake and make money

Game-wise: product with all expected features, fully fleshed. In my opinion this involves a working/stable engine, core game modes, maps, a fairly decent stable of mechs, options and replayability. A release product.

You would most definitely would like to have add-ons that make more money and give customers options such as sprinkles, chocolate icing, customised writing, etc

Game-wise: Add-ons that are cosmetic or otherwise that add value to the game. This includes custom skins, custom decals, in cockpit items, and others such as hero mechs

You would most definitely not sell flour, eggs, butter, chocolate etc. and call it a cake. Then charge an additional fee to make the cake. Or add sprinkles over the mess of ingredients and market the product as DIY. (not a very good analogy this one i know)

Game-wise: The game isn't finished yet. its in Open Beta. I fully understand the point of microtransactions in Beta is to finance the project. Game development in this day and age is getting more and more expensive. I'm sure those microtransactions help. The kickstarter for this game was pretty much the founders programme, which bought in 5 mill for the company, not a insanely huge sum video game wise but not to be sniffed at, coupled with IGP support (I don't know how much)

Yet with the game still in development in beta, i'm seeing things like the Highlander being released first as a hero mech, then scheduled later for C-bills (I'll get back to that in a bit).
I'm seeing things like Priority air and artillery shots in the same implementation as the actual features. I love the idea of GXP grinding to even out the MC advantage, but by implementing a option to pay for a new feature that will likely be retweaked or debugged may backfire. People get angry if you change / balance it when they have already paid money for it. It does make money for the company, but I believe implementing it too early gives too many problems.

As with most betas, it would have issues/glitches/bugs. adding new features (I'm thinking of things like air strikes, command options, and the like) would naturally bring in new problems that are meant to be fixed. This will bring me to my next big wall of text.
2. Playability / Stability

Generally I applaud PG's work on converting the Cryengine. I'm no programmer, but I can imagine the difficulties that they must be facing, it being a uphill struggle. However I would like to point out two things that have been bugging me: content addition and hotfixes.

Adding content is great, but fixing gaming / stability issues is better! :D

I would like to go for a spin in my shiny new Atlas that I bought with the sale, but when my game crashes every 7 launches or so, and I get minimap problems in 1/4 of my games and end up being a 100 ton liability to the team, it really takes the joy out of the game.

Stability has many many effects. Let me go back to the cake analogy (I like cake .___.)

Nobody is gonna consistently buy your cake if the quality is inconsistent

Game-wise: Yes, this isn't a finished product. Us open beta testers are here to help the developers make the game better with suggestions, bug reports, hour crunching on the game. There will be a patch up in 3 days, I am aware.
However if the solution to such game breaking bugs can be solved, I would think a hotfix would be so worth it.

Everytime there is a bug on any 1 of 8 players, the balance is skewed.
A fair match is no longer fair. players cannot comment as well on whether that PPCs need a buff or thay Heavy Metal is imbalanced, blah blah blah, if its a effective 7 v 8 or worse. So much data is lost to the developers in terms of feedback, and all the support tickets that they will be getting until the next patch would be of the same outstanding technical problem. All that time is lost that could be used to quicken beta, or focus on another area.

Back to the Highlander, Heavy Metal. Why release it before the other Highlander variants? I've been trying to come up with excuses for it, but I can honestly say that its for profitability. If you have the Highlander model down pat, it doesn't take much more effort to make C-bill base variants.

Sure you do get more money short term, but in my opinion this just makes some people lose faith in the perceived "cash cow" that PGI is supposedly using MWO for as some people would say. Another benefit of increasing the avaliability of the mech is for better feedback on the new Mech for any bugs it may have. I foresee that when the base variants come out and some people feel it is better than HEAVY METAL, possible grief by players who forked out the cash for it. I feel that this sort of strategy is not useful in the long run.

I played this game 2 months prior to this week or so, and I can honestly say it felt like it went backwards stability wise. I in fact still remember some radar bugs being present back then as well. Might just be bad timing to come back i guess :P

Gameplay / Balance issues

This is one area that I feel has been great so far. The company has been great in balancing weapons or new features as they are added. I do remember some hotfixes for LRMs a while back, and the endless cycle of buff and nerf continues on and on and on and on....

Its impossible for everyone to be happy about the situation of weapon balance, but kudos to PG for dealing with it in a decent way.

Two things that I may suggest is the following:

• Heat vision fix: This thread is in my opinion a very very good suggestion. As someone with experience with heat vision equipment in the military for vehicle detection, this is something that I feel will put heat vision where it is meant to be, and be balanced at the same time. Only implementation issues I feel would be scaling with graphics for different systems.
  
• Features are great, but revising old features that were implemented and made redundant to be balanced and viable situationally would be nice as well (i'm looking at you 4x vision module) back to the cake analogy: if you offer a mini cake version at 3 inches that no one buys, either revamp it to make it marketable or of use, or junk it.

I don't have any more comments on this section, other than keep it up.

Player feedback and improvement

As everyone knows (supposedly) a happy / satisfied customer is more likely to return. Right now as it stands, MWO is not a small game, but it is no big hit either. One big hit game in the world right now is League of Legends. (i'm probably gonna get lots of flak for comparision or mentioning it, but welp.)

Some would ask what similarities are there? Totally different game, lol! Omg you play league, QQ casual or something like that. I'll try and make my point through comparision.

• Yes, they're not even remotely close gamewise, even if you try to stretch it.
  
• Its a proper game already, dude, why are you comparing to MWO which is in open beta?
  
• Demographics are different. Different audience as well.

Right, lets get started. League has been massively successful commercially, something you can't deny. I'll go through what I could think up.



So what made it so big?

• It had a great premise and older game (DotA anyone?) with a strong fanbase.
  
• It was marketed as a casual game. larger audience pool in this age of massive casual gaming uptake. The game can be played competitively or casually.
  
• It was seen as fair commercially-wise due to income being derived from either only cosmetic skins for characters, or convenience in access of characters, or convenience in loadouts (rune pages)
  
• The level system and IP (C-Bill) only purchases for performance runes were great in maintaning that advancement system
  
• The Elo system and teamed/ custom matchmaking were there for the more serious gamers. This was implemented pretty early in the game for serious gamers.
  
• Consistent release of new content, very strong fanbase, good player to developer communications

Thats all I could think of right now. So lets compare it to MWO.

• Also has a great franchise history, and a very dedicated fanbase. Granted it was nowhere as near as DotA (some might argue otherwise at some time ;) ) but it was, and still is great.
  
• MWO at the moment is still seen by many of my gaming friends as "niche", hardcore, or simulation. This is true to a certain extent.
  
  
  
  It is the reason why some of us love it compared to arcadish Hawken. However the basics aren't that hard to pick up. movement, twist, shots, heat, components, capture.
  In fact I feel MWO is more casual than League or DotA for the simple fact that matches are a maximum of 15mins, where a DotA game is so much more longer.
  
  Been in a Pub game with randoms who just charge anyone? :lol: Advanced gameplay, we start thinking of ECM, tatics, spotting, defense, optimum loadouts... This game has so much potential! I as a fan wouldn't want to see this amazing franchise go to waste. Who doesn't like piloting a 7-17m god of war? :lol:
  
• commercially-wise, I think MWO is roughly on the right track, the things that I feel should be changed is the timing and maybe pricing.
  
  
  
  
  League of Legends was breaking even and making slight profits during Beta and such, its now that it is seriously reaping in the profits via skin sales, large consumer base and dedicated fanbase. the skins werent so common in Beta, but now they are rolling them out, and making money from it. Same for Dota, announcher packs, weapon cosmetics and such were truly looked into after the main game was stable and released.
  
  In MWO, the system is in my opinion not consistently a fleshed out game yet that the profitability isn't there. The Beta is to make it a better game, not to make money from the small pool of interested beta testers. All good things come in good time. In my clan, not a few members left due to lack of content updates, and their feelings were that the game was overly marketed for in game purchases. Many of them were hardcore Mechwarrior/Battle tech fans with founder packs who left rather dellusioned. I felt sorry that they left. May of them gave great feedback and suggestions to the community and devs, somethings which I rarely do :blush:
  
  Pricing is a hot topic, but I believe that mech prices are a bit over. As someone who has a bit of common sense and economics, theres always that sweet spot (Max TR) where total revenue gained by the company is maximal.
  
• The current system for MWO seems good overall. the GXP and modules, possibly with a bit more diversity in the pilot lab for different mech weights could allow for more diversity, but thats a nice extra. Its relatively good so far, and for people who max out, the next step could be competitive play.
  
• We all love being the best. Who doesn't? I always dreamed of being a ace Mechwarrior in the future. With team based warfare looming on the horizon, I couldn't be anymore excited to have a go with my clan mates. While I respect the decision of PG to hide normal match making elo, with a ranked system, a visible Elo would make the game have a longer life for competitive players, which make up a significant poportion in MWO. Visible Elo will obviously lead to male-genetalia-size- matching contests, but thats competition.
  
• Strong fanbase, consistent release and user-developer communications. In these three boxes, PG and MWO ticks them all.
  
  
  
  However communications and action have to work hand in hand.
  
  If people feel that their advice is taken to heart and worked on, ++ points. If people feel they are being ignored, - points. If their advice is acknowledged, agreed upon, then not implemented or worked on, lots of -- points. People lose fait in the developers and the game. Not saying PG is doing any bad things, but its a point to note.
  
  As mentioned earlier, fan enthusiam can add so much to a game. Looking at CnlPepper's thread on Thermal imaging. I'm sure there are many fans out there with great knowledge on warfare or such similar topics that when asked will be willing to give advice to the development team to make it a much better game.
  
  League of Legends spread so fast because people were recommending the game to their friends, even in Beta.
  I love MWO and Mechwarrior, but I unfortunately would say I would not recommend this game to a casual gamer friend who is interested in the mechwarrior franchise.
  
  If any of you play LoL, you know that the joke is the average gamer there is 14 years old, talks as if on Xbox live, and is a horrible human being. I won't disagree that a significant portion of such LoL fans are such, but thats the result of a huge fan base and a variable demographic.
  
  I'm pretty sure that MWO has great potential for improving its young player fan base. Giant fightning robots with pew pew and dakka dakka? count me in! Hell even mass media can't get enough of giant fighting robots! For those that wouldn't want such people in the ranks, I do admit I find such obnoxious players annoying, but for the franchise to expand and to let more people know about the awesomeness of Mechwarrior in childhood (that we experienced), shouldn't these kids learn about it as well? :)

Conclusion




I have been, and will be, a die hard Mechwarrior/Battletech fan. Sticking with the Beta for so long, seeing the way things are, I won't be so invested in this game so much more however. I will probably be playing a bit more Living Legends here and there with friends. Yes I didn't really give much feedback, as a lurker and all that, I tend to chat more with clan mates who wrote the posts. I did give the occasional support ticket though.

I really respect the dev team for making such a awesome game with such passion and dedication. I wouldn't be able to do such a task.

Well after 10 games today for me, It finally got to the point where I felt obliged to write something in the forums, which I almost never ever do for any forum i'm in, but I really love the franchise so much. Hence this 2k+ word vomit. :o

I personally felt my Legendary founder pack was worth it if it makes this franchise suceed, but it didn't really feel worth it in terms of utility. I'll probably be back during the summer to give arranged team and house warfare a go, assuming I don't fail my university exams ;)other commitments in life have resulted in me letting this game go.

I wish all the best to PG’s endeavor in this great game. I hope to come back in a year or two to a awesome game, if not earlier to help things out

TLDR

• I love this game and franchise.
  
• The game is (I feel) advancing rather slowly content and stability wise.
  
• The current patch has some issues on stability and features that I feel aren't being addressed as well or aren't prioritised as a beta version should be.
  
• I disagree slightly with the direction this game is going in terms of commercial aspects. i.e pricing and marketing in game / releases.
  
• Some personal advice on how I feel the game should go commercially in terms of marketing and being sucessful.
  
• Players/Fans who are in beta are a great resource for devs. Also one of the nicest in game people that I know (rarely flaming, lots of jokes around) but high turnover due to lack of interest.
  
• I finally gave feedback! :P
  
• I won't be playing this game so much in the future. I will be around here and there though, espeically lurking the forums as usual :ph34r:

Edited by Neil Claymore, 14 April 2013 - 09:41 AM.

[warp103]

DEV did you read this.
1 from a founder.
2 does not post a lot
3 wow hit nail on the head.

To the Op i wish that I could have posted something like this. I have posted alot of videos showing the issues.
But maybe since I have about 200 post I no longer a person the dev listen too.
When a person has high hopes for a game and feel let down they leave. I am glad that even though you are not playing much. You have come back to play and check the state of the game. When core MW still feel there is a big issues with the game. How are causal gamer going to feel?
Great post

Edit I hope the DEV get the message

Edited by warp103, 14 April 2013 - 10:53 AM.

[Nacon]

Neil Claymore, on 14 April 2013 - 09:39 AM, said:

I will probably be playing a bit more Living Legends here and there with friends.

...That gotta be a joke.

Basically you're ranting about small little things that wrong with MWO and now you want to go play MWLL, a mod that has more bugs than MWO and NO LONGER BEING DEVELOPED.

You're not changing anything with this (long) post.

[Rebas Kradd]

Neil Claymore, on 14 April 2013 - 09:39 AM, said:

Adding content is great, but fixing gaming / stability issues is better!

This is a false dilemma. Just because playability wasn't hotfixed two days after appearance doesn't mean it's not being prioritized. They have a window for hotfixes following every patch and the bugs proved too elusive to hotfix within this last window, so they pushed the fixes back to this upcoming Tuesday patch.

Edited by Rebas Kradd, 14 April 2013 - 11:25 AM.

[warp103]

Rebas Kradd, on 14 April 2013 - 11:25 AM, said:

This is a false dilemma. Just because playability wasn't hotfixed two days after appearance doesn't mean it's not being prioritized. They have a window for hotfixes following every patch and the bugs proved too elusive to hotfix within this last window, so they pushed the fixes back to this upcoming Tuesday patch.

wow 2 weeks for a fix is too long. After a week at most you done a roll back. What the hell am I saying if it more the 3 days you roll it back. But this is not the area for this topic.

[Type AE-86]

Nacon, on 14 April 2013 - 11:18 AM, said:

...That gotta be a joke.

Basically you're ranting about small little things that wrong with MWO and now you want to go play MWLL, a mod that has more bugs than MWO and NO LONGER BEING DEVELOPED.

You're not changing anything with this (long) post.

1. Like I said in the post, I'm not ranting, just trying to give feedback on what made the game work for me, and what didn't. I know MWLL is no longer being developed, and has bugs, but not necessarily totally game breaking ones. I have always been playing BOTH MWLL and MWO. Its just that at the moment I personally find MWLL more fun / less griefish to play than MWO at the moment.

2. I will still be playing, giving feedback, and trying to help out MWO. I love the game. Its just that at the moment I feel that I need to take a break because the time that i'm putting in it is not worth it in terms of enjoyment. Not to mention that I have exams coming up, and medicine was never a easy course to scrape through

3. I'm not changing anything, but i'm giving suggestions, (hopefully ) constructive feedback. Isn't that the point of beta?

Rebas Kradd, on 14 April 2013 - 11:25 AM, said:

This is a false dilemma. Just because playability wasn't hotfixed two days after appearance doesn't mean it's not being prioritized. They have a window for hotfixes following every patch and the bugs proved too elusive to hotfix within this last window, so they pushed the fixes back to this upcoming Tuesday patch.

Yeap, I totally agree with you that hotfixing is being addressed, and prioritised to a certain extent. For instance, on page 16 of the current stability & crash feedback Matthew Craig replies with a hotfix.

Matthew Craig, on 05 April 2013 - 09:32 AM, said:

The hotfix about to be released is to address crashing mid game, please continue to post here once it is up and let us know if you still have this issue.

Thanks

However to my knowledge, this is the only post in 20 pages. Going through all 20 pages, you see users who dilligently fill up the report format, and it honestly pains me how dedicated the fans are and the the measures they resort to such as reinstalling the game several times. (I too used to do that with bugs) However you do get a few posts here and there with people's frustration with this current patch as well as the state of things.

Just a quick glance on the current patch feedback forum I can see at least 2 other threads speaking of stability issues, some which are long standing. The players in this community are really great and understanding, so I believe that if as you said that the bug was too elusive, a quick announcement, stickied, would be great to relieve everyone's frustration. I for one would love it if they said that was the case, apologise for the inconvenience, and let us know a rough ETA. Thats the point of the forum I think

Thanks for the thoughts guys, cheers!

Edit: Forgot to add: Big THANK YOU to everyone who bothered to read my essay and reply. It means a lot to me that fellow players add to the discussion and share your views on the matter as well.

Edited by Neil Claymore, 14 April 2013 - 06:21 PM.

[Corvus Antaka]

The most important factor to the success of ANY game is word of mouth.

paint, decals & holograms will never generate word of mouth for a video game.

Hero mechs won't either.

Gameplay and FUN and BALANCE will.

You make some very good points in this posts, and I hope PGI management reads this and does some serious thinking in what they need to do in the next 6 months to make this work.

[Quinton99]

Well said, Neil Claymore, and for the most part I agree, but naturally I have some things of my own to add:

The comparison to LoL is indeed a bit thin. Honestly, this game competes directly with another game called War Thunder for the same demographic (Which Bryan Ekman says is the male action gamer). Gaijin Entertainment is a similarly sized development studio, and they and PGI have both been working on their respective games for similar amounts of time. I won't go into too much detail, but MWO in its current incarnation stacks up *very* unfavourably against War Thunder and more than a few people in my Merc Corp have left MWO as a result. As you yourself said, MWO is advancing too slowly content and stability wise.

Secondly, MWO is indeed a strong Intellectual Property. It's not exactly Star Wars (and look how BioWare, a developer I thought could do no wrong, mishandled that one), but it does have previous titles to build upon, and decades of tabletop gaming to draw in a crowd. Even the premise should sell itself: Big Stompy Robots! Who doesn't like that?

And yet I'm in exactly the same boat as you are in that I will not recommend this game to anyone because I know that they will hate it and quit before giving it a chance. My own brother, who is also a Legendary Founder, who loves MechWarrior, and who has dedicated his life to armoured warfare since he first got to ride on a tank when we were kids has all but given up on this game because it has failed to compete for his interest. Let me be clear: He didn't leave to play another, better game. He just doesn't want to play this one enough to dedicate his time to it anymore.

So all that being said I definitely agree with you that the Founder's package feels like it hasn't been worth it, but here's where our opinions diverge: I do not give kudos to PGI for their great work. They have not yet earned it. I don't even feel confident that they will.

Don't get me wrong, the game is all things considered fun to play. I've even had a minimum of bugs that plague so many other players. That being said I had to use Colonel Pada Vinson's user.cfg modifications(Thanks Colonel!) to get the game to not look like I was piloting a mech while drunk wearing slimy scuba goggles, and at a good frame rate. I get a solid 60 FPS on an i7-2600k running at 4.5 GHz and a GeForce 460 GTX. The reason PGI gets no kudos for their technical achievement is that the game is still on DX9, and they're licensing an already complete and field tested 3d engine. The bar of expectation here was set much higher, so as we've said before: They've taken too much time to deliver too little product.

Secondly, and here's where my real sticking point is: PGI has consistently mishandled public communication.

The rumours that our Founders money went to finance another IGP-backed MechWarrior title (untrue from what I've been able to dig up). Bryan Ekman's "we don't listen to forum users with 1000 posts" comment. Garth Erlam's "we're never introducing coolant because it will unbalance the game" statement. Paul Inouye's "back to the drawing board with consumables(particularly coolant which we said would never happen) because it spawned 156 pages of rage about P2W on the forum within the first hour" incident. The Garth Erlam telling a player in game that he could have a Team Deathmatch mode "when you stop touching yourself" incident. The Russ Bullock "you're going to have to pay to start a Merc Corp in CW" interview incident. PGI is always in damage control mode because none of their employees seem to be able to consider the consequences of their words before they think out loud in a public forum.

Those are all just off the top of my head. I'm sure if I dug around here I could find more. The one thing I will give kudos for is Bryan Ekman's handling of 3PV. He took charge and made clear that it's the direction they're going no matter how much crying it causes and he kept the forum discussion about it on topic and civil, and most of all constructive. I don't agree with the choice, but I do respect the display of leadership and professionalism. Unfortunately it remains the outlier in a disturbing trend of amateurism.

So am I leaving the game in a huff? No. I paid in to the game (more than once), and I'm going to casually keep playing when I have the time, but I've seen better games than this fail.

I once wrote a letter on a beta forum cautioning the developers that their game was veering off into dangerous territory. You can call it "Open Beta" if you like, but once you turn the lights on and let people see your product the clock starts ticking. They have an expectation based on what you've been telling them the final product is going to be like, and if you don't get there, and get there soon, people just get bored and leave. The project lead replied to my thread, tried to get into an epeen measuring contest with me over who had been playing games the longest and thus knew what they were talking about, and then told me that if I wasn't happy I could leave. At the time half the player base was unhappy with the game balance, and the other half was unhappy that there was no content to speak of, just 5 or 6 arenas and 3 or 4 game modes.

So I did leave. And so did my guild mates. And then so did everyone else. That game was Global Agenda and it went from being the game that dozens of my friends quit WoW to play to the game that took up an annoying amount of space on our hard drives. It didn't "fail" exactly, in that people expect that when a game fails that the developer goes out of business and the game shuts down. The lights are still on over at HiRez, and they have other titles. But 6 months after launch day for GA, it was difficult to get a game together because so few people were in the battle ques. Their forum has got like 5 active threads since 2011, and this was the game that was supposed to revolutionize the FPS and the MMO.

This post has gone on a little longer than the OPs, sadly, and I'm sure very few of you have actually read it so, as an old fighter pilot used to tell me, here is what it all boils down to:

PGI is taking too long to deliver too little product while doing too little to manage expectation. Worse, they have been on occasion actively hostile to the people who are passionate about their game. That passion is a good thing. When you read forum posts about "zOMG fix ECM/MG/PPC/BAP" what you're really reading is "I care enough about this game for it to affect me emotionally". Well that passion is fading. People are going to stop making suggestions for improvement because they'll grow tired of the perception of being ignored, or worse the perception of being exploited for their wallets.

There aren't going to be dozens of posts of people throwing tantrums and leaving, it's just going to get quieter around here.

[ShadowSpirit]

This is not a beta as shown by the simple fact that they released a "pay to play" mech prior to releasing the other chassis. If the priority was testing they'd get as many people possible in the mech. That is not the case. This has turned into a money grab.

Anyone who is content with saying "this is a beta" and using that as a reason for bugs to persist (I said *persist* - not exist) then they are blind to the reality that is MWO.

I will not spend another dime on this game until 1) there is an obvious effort to resolve longstanding bugs 2) a vastly improved user interface exists that allows for more social interaction. I grow weary of the "randomness" that is MWO.

-SS

Edited by ShadowSpirit, 15 April 2013 - 10:26 AM.

[Mophise]

Neil Claymore, Quinton99, I'd just like to say thankyou for spelling it out so clearly.

I myself have a small story of my passion for the Mech Warrior franchise and MWO.
First let me get this out of the way: I'm poor. I pay my rent, my bills, I buy groceries, and then I'm broke. Any money I put into anything beyond that comes out of my grocery budget.

I was introduced to the MW universe by MW2:Mercenaries, and I've loved the whole thing since. When I heard MWO was being developed, I seriously considered borrowing money to buy a founder's package. Unfortunatly, my computer was so old I wouldn't have been able to run the mech lab, nevermind an actual match. And with this in mind, I instead focused on putting together something that could atleast sort-of run the game.
Now, i have bought 8 Mech bay slots. that's it. that's about $15 total spent on MWO. Not a big contribution in the grand scheme of things, but that's a total of 3 days without food for me.

I'm running a computer that's old enough I get a warning of "unsupported video card" every time I run the game.
I have been playing this game at 8-18 fps since about a week after the Open Beta release. My solution: I play bigger, slower mechs to compensate.

I'm not expecting any miracles in playability for my setup.
I'm not saying PGI should cater to people with older systems.
I'm doing what I can to enjoy what has been a source of joy for me since my early childhood.

With that said, I'm curious as to how we managed to see such a huge drop in frame rate after the last patch.
I've read posts saying that people normally getting 60 fps are now getting 40 fps. Lucky them.
I can't play MWO at all right now, because I get a solid 4 FPS the moment a match starts.

I'm not saying this is the only issue, but I'm sure I'm not the only person who can't afford a nice, new computer that can pull off 40 fps with the current state of the game. Well, PGI, there goes a bunch of potential customers for you...

And here I am, one of the most loyal fans you could have, who has already tried to pitch in what he shouldn't.
I love Mech Warrior, and you're breaking my heart with your abuse of this thing I love.