151 replies to this topic

[Scout80913]

Bryan Ekman, on 31 May 2013 - 11:06 AM, said:

`Mech's and Mechbay
Dragonkindred: Due to the huge support for a worthy cause, will you be making a hero mech for Sarah?
A: A mech yes!

I can't say how happy I am to see this. By far, one of the best things I've ever seen a gaming company do. Thanks to all the folks at PGI and IGP for making this happen.

[BumRuckus]

Bryan Ekman, on 31 May 2013 - 11:06 AM, said:

Toltecher: When could we see a Developers versus the Inner Sphere weekend event (ideally including all of your dev teams and QA teams as well)? I think that would be a wonderful and exciting way to preview the Clan Invasion before handing over Clan tech to the playerbase (and don't forget to broadcast such an event live!).
A: It’s a great idea and one that’s been tossed around internally. Once we get to launch and beyond, we’ll have more time on our hands to run bigger community events. Right now the team is charging hard towards getting the last major game features in.

If I saw a PGI team of 8 Timber Wolfs charging my team of Highlanders, 'phracts, and Jenners, I might simultaneously crap myself and climax.

[p00k]

Bryan Ekman, on 31 May 2013 - 11:06 AM, said:

RazorWarrior: Will we ever be able to use jump jets to go directly forward or side to side like in previous MechWarrior games?
A: Vectored jumpjets have been discussed.

i couldn't care less about vectored jumpjets one way or the other, but why even respond to the question if that's all you're gonna say about it?

[White Bear 84]

Nice work guys

[FupDup]

Bryan Ekman, on 31 May 2013 - 11:06 AM, said:

FupDup: Will you ever increase the C-Bill and XP rewards for non-killing/damage-dealing roles to be closer to the rewards of those aforementioned damage roles?
A: We are working on refactoring in game rewards to be more granular and role/group/faction based.

Vague answer is vague.

[Hawk819]

I wonder if they're going to add in the rest fo the Inner Sphere weapons before the Clans. Or are they going to add those weapons after the Clans enter the fray?

[Brilig]

Bryan Ekman, on 31 May 2013 - 11:06 AM, said:

Brilig: Are you considering changes to convergence to address issues with boating/alpha striking? Or is heat scale the only option that you are exploring?
A: We’re looking at different ways to improve balance. Nothing specific to talk about just yet.

Thanks for the response. Good to know ya'll are looking at things, even if you don't have any more info about it.

[zraven7]

Thank you.

[BrkDncr]

re: Not seeing the odd LRM behavior: Yes, if all the devs did was test LRMs, they would have seen this, but if you were to put together a test checklist of every conceivable play function, you would be testing for months prior to a patch release. It's much easier to build, do an alpha test, and then send it to your Beta group (us) to find those bugs and report them. And boy do we report them...

[Reno Blade]

Enig, on 31 May 2013 - 02:35 PM, said:

"M0rpHeu5: Why don't you put MWO on steam?
A: We’re doing an analysis now."

An analysis of what? "Would we gain a shitton of userbase, or a fuckton?"

This was answered a few times in earlyer ATD already.
The problem with steam is the transaction model. They demand 20% of each sale of ingame currency and such that would suck for MC and probably wont work for CBills in its current implementation.

[Almeras]

Quote

A: You are reward for collecting resources, not capturing resource points. We are discussing internally whether we should add a cap reward.

The issue being if as a pilot your spend all game capping nodes and winning the game for your team but haven't spent any time fighting you score will be much lower than that of a guy who spent the game shooting stuff and ignoring nodes.

[Kageru Ikazuchi]

@Bryan and the rest of the PGI team, I appreciate the answers we received and understand why some answers were vague or "non answers" I know you have tons of ideas for coming features and tweaks.

However, I wish you would be more open with your feature timelines. I would love to be able to tell my friends who are waiting for one thing or another that they need to get in this game because you need to be ready for "X", they're working on making "Y" better, etc.

We are either your best or your worst PR.

There are hundreds of thousands of registered players, and we're all either actively playing or waiting for something. Help us get excited about the next steps you're taking. When deadlines slide, some are going to get upset, but most will understand.

Please, please, please, give us an update to the original Dev Blog posts ... let us know what your priorities are (if not the actual timelines). Most of us are adults and understand that things change due to random events beyond our control.

[Nicholas Carlyle]

BrkDncr, on 01 June 2013 - 12:03 AM, said:

re: Not seeing the odd LRM behavior: Yes, if all the devs did was test LRMs, they would have seen this, but if you were to put together a test checklist of every conceivable play function, you would be testing for months prior to a patch release. It's much easier to build, do an alpha test, and then send it to your Beta group (us) to find those bugs and report them. And boy do we report them...

That's bull.

It was one of the major parts of the patch. It actually took up half the patch notes.

They OBVIOUSLY tested them, because they knew about the Artemis Always On bug.

It means they ignored the fact that splash damage and the flight path was messed up, or some how their 16 person instances are different from our 16 person instances....which is...well if that's true we are super screwed.

[Tennex]

Win by cap in assaut is not exaclty a telemetry issue.
It is a griefing issue.

It gives very few players the chance to essentially waste 15 other peoples time. The 15 people have dropped to play a heated match of MWO. While that one player drops with the intention of ruining that.

Any measures to minimize this should be taken. Like increasing cap time in proportion to map size

Edited by Tennex, 01 June 2013 - 05:14 AM.

[Gremlich Johns]

Bazooka B, on 31 May 2013 - 01:30 PM, said:

Ever heard of "Christmas in July" sales? How about a back to school sale lovin' for broke college students? Maybe a "Halfway to Christmas, Half Off MC Sale" only on June 25th?

How about make the game full launch first. (that means fix the problems that being a beta launch is supposed to uncover)

Dr Killinger, on 31 May 2013 - 02:51 PM, said:

This is a great idea for a module imo.

Not, it should be a basic scout mech computer capability.

[PhoenixFire55]

Bryan Ekman, on 31 May 2013 - 11:06 AM, said:

Karl Streiger: Do you consider any changes on the armor distribution? Most players aim directly for the Center - some for the side torso - but in most cases it is cheaper (less time consuming to kill the target)
Shouldn't the gain of disarming a target first be increased over the kill shot? My Ideas were (CT 28%, Legs 13%, SideToros 15% and Arms 7% of total armor)
A: Armor values are based off the TT values.

Which makes little sense because in TT all weapons hit random parts of a mech.

Bryan Ekman, on 31 May 2013 - 11:06 AM, said:

General Taskeen: I recall in Closed Beta that Devs would examine making C.A.S.E. useful with XL Engines (since it is used on Record Sheets), is this still being worked on? If yes, when might we expect this?
A: No plans to do so at this time.

Should be useless for XL engine. XL = use at your own risk.

Bryan Ekman, on 31 May 2013 - 11:06 AM, said:

Prosperity Park: Are there any longer-term plans to add a Deep Water penalty to the movement speed of Mechs traveling through significantly-deep water?
A: We’re adding some new movement code that will make mechs behave more realistically when traversing rolling terrain. Once in, we can examine adding water friction if we feel it will add a benefit to gameplay.

Gotta do it if you are even slightly following TT rules.

Bryan Ekman, on 31 May 2013 - 11:06 AM, said:

Belorion: I seem to take a fair amount of friendly fire during some drops. Is it possible to get friendly fire added to the end of match score board and/or changing the reticule color flash is a team mate is hit? That way people can see if they are hitting mostly the enemy, or need to work on avoiding team mates.
A: The average amount of FF damage done per player per match is less than 5 dmg. The amount of damage being done is far less than even we thought, which is encouraging. I like the FF indicator, we can look at putting up an X or something indicating do not fire along with an audio queue when dmg is done.

FF damage should be substracted from your damage done score and it also should be shown. Those who care about teammates won't notice the difference, those who don't care will and most importantly we will all be able to see just who shouldn't we brawl in front of.

Bryan Ekman, on 31 May 2013 - 11:06 AM, said:

Brilig: Are you considering changes to convergence to address issues with boating/alpha striking? Or is heat scale the only option that you are exploring?
A: We’re looking at different ways to improve balance. Nothing specific to talk about just yet.

Manual convergence for fun game. Auto convergence for alpha-PPC game with pop-tarts. Its just that simple. MW4 ...

[Koniving]

Enig, on 31 May 2013 - 02:35 PM, said:

"M0rpHeu5: Why don't you put MWO on steam?
A: We’re doing an analysis now."

An analysis of what? "Would we gain a shitton of userbase, or a fuckton?"

It's actually along the lines of "How much of our players' hard earned money must we ship to Valve in order to get the additional publicity? 30%? 50%? What kind of budget cuts would we have to make? How many of our employees will we need to lay off to make this happen?"

[Victor Morson]

Oh. Boy.

Quote

Levi Porphyrogenitus: Has PGI considered removing splash damage from missiles altogether?
A: Yes we have, but have elected to balance them differently. Currently the splash damage on all missiles is set to 5cm (effectively removing it) and will investigate if it should change any further in either direction.

Do you seriously need to investigate this any more? Missiles are absolutely useless as LRMs and sub-par as SRMs, everyone is saying it and.. what? How do you not answer this with "Yes, and a buff is on it's way! Hang in there missile users!" or something? How can you seriously even REMOTELY glance at the community, metrics, or anything and then say this with a straight face?

Quote

Mokey Mot: When are brawling weapons going to see some love (pulse lasers in particular)?

Ranged warfare is in a good place at the moment; as shown by it's current popularity. But I feel it is narrowing the gameplay a little too much; there is no real advantage for brawlers to expend the effort of getting close at the moment. I don't think you can just go nurfing ranged weapons though, as balanced builds are actually quite nice to pilot now.

A: While nothing specific is coming at the moment, we’re going to be coming full circle on weapons soon, where beams will be looked at and tweaked if necessary.

First off, Monkey Mot - please tell me where you get your drugs. Balance builds are nice to pilot right now? The range game is "popular" because people like the ranged only game? Perhaps you were trying to really softball the question, in which case, good for you.

That said, to the answer.. it's good to know that beams will be looked at again soon, but seriously.. this man just told you the truth. Brawlers are horribly inferior right now. Why the lukewarm "We might look at lasers?" Do you guys ever play the game outside of internal matches? I know you do, we've played you before!

Where is the community re-assuring "Yes, we know brawlers are troubled right now, and that's why we plan to improve them." You don't even have to be specific. It'd be nice if you were, but seriously! You don't even sound like you realize there's an issue!

Quote

MustrumRidcully: Can you explain a bit about the patch release process?
I don't want to come off as overly critical or something here, but:
We've had at least two patches where missile flight paths were broken and one where missiles' splash damage interacted together with the hitbox change to make them overpowered, forcing hot fixes. Did the QA miss these issues, or did you find them too late to change anything for the build? You changed missile damage despite having flight paths and splash damage being off. I would expect the damage change would be tested, which would - unless it isn't done in game - necessitate testing the flight paths as well. How do these things fit togehter?

A: All of the above can happen and has. We have an extremely aggressive release schedule, one that sees a feature completed no more than 4 weeks ahead of going live. We’ve been working towards increasing this gap to allow for better testing and soak time. A new set of test servers will come online in the next 4 weeks. These will allow us to test major features and minor tuning adjustments at scale. Scale meaning player loads similar to our production servers. Between IGP and PGI we have finite resources and hardware. It’s almost impossible for us to replicate live conditions at scale. A lot of issues only rear their heads when we have 1,000s or 10,000s of players playing. With each month that goes by, we are able to improve our processes, and testing to improve quality and delivery of content

One look at the metrics and some interaction with your hardcore community and almost all of your serious balance problems wouldn't actually exist, or would be drastically reduced from how they are right now.

Also, releasing with issues that I refuse to believe you don't know about (the HUD crash issue, broken splash / turned off splash, etc.) is a really bad idea, flat out, period. That said, we don't need even longer times between patches, we need smaller more frequent patches.

And if anything gets seriously broken again (the HUD issue before) it needs to be rolled back immediately.

All in all, this Q&A has done nothing to re-assure me or much of the community I suspect, given it sounds like the developers are either unaware or unwilling to acknowledge the current massive issues with game balance.

[Nicholas Carlyle]

Don't worry man! When the weapon comes up on the cycle they will look at it. That means about 3 more months for LRM's.

So they won't be fixed until after release!

But it's ok.

[aniviron]

James Montana, on 31 May 2013 - 01:43 PM, said:

I have not had much luck at getting my question answered. Perhaps someone in the community can help me out: "Combined arms (infantry, armor, helicopters, drop ships, etc.), will we get to fight them in mwo?"

It was stated in an older ATD that they want to have npcs in helicopters and tanks at the very least. Can't find the quote right now, but far far down the pipeline that is somehting they said they want to do.

Reno Blade, on 01 June 2013 - 12:20 AM, said:

This was answered a few times in earlyer ATD already.
The problem with steam is the transaction model. They demand 20% of each sale of ingame currency and such that would suck for MC and probably wont work for CBills in its current implementation.

CBills would work fine as they are now on Steam. They are functionally no different than the free currency in most other f2p games, and there are certainly an abundance of those on Steam right now. But yes, Valve would want 20% of their MC money.

I'd like to see mwo on steam, I think it would do well and being able to reach so many users would probably increase overall revenue quite a bit. That said, I don't want to see it on Steam until after launch, cw, the clan invasion, and most bugs are squashed. Once it goes live on Steam you get once chance to capture the people who will flood the game; if it is a half-done buggy mess, they will leave. Better to wait a few months and release it when you have a chance of retaining some of those players.