117 replies to this topic

[Lucy Cameron]

I want this game to succeed. I also like Shadow Hawks. Those two reasons alone are why I'll buy the Project Phoenix pack.

[Alex Warden]

95% of customers who voice their concerns - weither or not they do that "the loud way" - stick with the product...
about 80% of those who don´t communicate are the ones for a company to worry about
just saying

Edited by Alex Warden, 02 July 2013 - 08:41 PM.

[Rebas Kradd]

Take out the 3PV, speed things up, and nobody is making anything that sounds remotely like the OP.

Granted, these are problems, but it's a far cry from equating PGI with Enron.

[3Xtr3m3]

Because i want to...
'NuffSaid,

[Lt Limpy]

I plunked down for overlord simply to spite the OP and to support the business practices that he hates.

[RockWolf]

Lt Limpy, on 03 July 2013 - 05:14 AM, said:

I plunked down for overlord simply to spite the OP and to support the business practices that he hates.

This is the reason why I hate the community past closed beta. It used to be" this wasn't done in TT' but with time people realized that TT rules didn't always transfer well to a FPS. Now people just spend their time trolling and acting childish(or maybe just being who they really are: children). OP shared his opinion with in a calm and logical way and people still considere striking and calling him a heretic. This is very disconcerting because I am very passionate of the mechwarrior franchise and would love to have it succeed. But I feel that allowing them to do a second founders run(maybe another for clans) would allow them to be overly confident on their marketing strategy rather than their game. And if we don't all act all together, than we won't make a change.

BTW why don't we start a petition? That way they can see who voted against.

[Ghogiel]

Who gives a flying **** what other people spend their money on. If people want shiny shadowhawk pokemon and catch them all... so what.

[Ricktor Black]

Hmmm...

"Delays.
Slow and broken content.
The utter absence of content promised a year ago, such as CW.
Lies. Lies such as no 3PV. But hey, it was there position at the time. So they may have meant well.
A hastily and completely doomed to tank attempt to "launch the game" in an Alpha stage."

Are we playing the same game here? Because I've been playing this game for about a year now and I've seen it get steadily and increasingly better as time has passed. I still play at least a couple matches a day and have a blast doing it. Friends of mine have taken a break to try out other F2P games... only to come back because they missed this one (and they are usually pleasantly surprised with how much better it's gotten since they left). The things you mention like delays and missing content, those are just realities of game development (or any large scale project). Things slip, schedules change, bumps in the road force the team to adjust... that's just life and reality. Would you rather the team stick to every single word they've said in the past... or would you rather have a fun game which is balanced and works?

And why would anybody invest in Phoenix? Maybe because you are getting about $228 worth of content for $80! It's pretty damn good value actually. (heroes, premium time, bay slots, badges plus the variants...)

[Zakua]

Interesting thread!

I've been watching this game for a long time but never saw any content (Mechs) that made me say "Ok there it is, I'm in". I have not even played the game yet but I have watched a lot of videos and lurked these forums for god knows how long now....Yesterday I stumbled upon this phoenix deal, saw the Locust, TB and BM and the light went off "Buy now, buy now".

So I guess while I can see the OPs point of view and understand a lot of good points made in this thread, keep in mind that this new stuff not only gives existing players more content it also can be the catalyst that brings in bitter old MW2,3, 4 Vets like me. The price of 80$ does not seem bad at all if it gets my foot in the door and seats me into gear I want to pilot.

More maps!

Cya in the field!

[Josef Nader]

I'd like to second Ricktor. I've been playing this game for just over a year now, and despite being a pretty rocky road it is definitely been improving at a very steady pace. Things are slow, there are lots of setbacks, things prove to be more difficult than initially planned. There's a saying with programmers that you take any timeframe a programmer gives you to deliver a working product and multiply it by 1.5x. This is simply due to the complex nature of computers and the number of interplaying variables that must be debugged for any large, complex program. Modern technology is complex, and nowhere else is that more obvious than with game development.

The game state a year ago:

• Constant crashes for everyone playing. You had to completely close the game every 3-4 matches to try and prevent the crashes, and even then this only worked sometimes.
  
• The HUD would just decide that it wasn't going to work some days. Really interesting and facinating bugs showed up all the time. Everything from "Your minimap is now rainbows" to "you just nudged the cartridge on your SNES" graphical foibles plagued the game on a regular basis.
  
• What's that? You want to hit a target moving over 100 kph? Good bloody luck. You had to aim no less than 30-50m in front of your target to hit them with lasers, much less ballistics or missiles. Heaven forbid you try to actually aim at specific components.
  
• Everything is Gauss Rifles. No exceptions. Every other weapon is varying degrees of absolutely useless. The Gauss Rifle generates no heat, is perfectly accurate with no max range (there were no maps out at the time that even challenged the Gauss' range capabilities). Unless you were in a light or medium going faster than 100kph, you were screwed (this is back in the days before engine caps reigned in the SLunchbacks.
  
• Weapon balance was non-existant. You think balance is screwed now? You ain't seen nothin'. Gauss rifles were the only ballistics worth anything. LRMs were less effective than bunny farts. Small lasers were the reigning champs of energy weapons, because everything else was a pile of heat and death. SRMs packed decent damage, but the incredibly crappy netcode and bizzaro flight paths meant that you only made a solid hit if your enemy ran into the cloud, your ping was below 70, their ping was below 70, it was a clear day outside, Jupiter's alignment with Ceres was correct, and you were wearing green underpants that day.
  
• Zero attempts at matchmaking meant that solo and small group players pretty much just had to stop playing at certain times of day, as they would always be matched up against coordinated 8-man teams using VoIP. You think it's bad now, you should have seen it then.
  
• You have 8 mechs and 4 maps to choose from. Have fun.

Seriously. The improvements this game has made since I joined are astronomical. People just need to understand that game development is incredibly complex, and there's a damn good reason that most developers don't let the consumer know jack crap about a game before it's finished and ready for launch. Stuff changes. Deadlines are not met. Simple features prove to be insanely complicated. Schrodinger's bugs appear and play havoc with QA and testing. It's just par for the course.

[PanzerMagier]

Even if MWO sinks after launch. I will be supporting it until the last of the hull sinks under the waves.

so that no one
NO ONE
can say I didn't support it up until the very end.
I gave it all the chances I could from the very start.

Edited by PanzerMagier, 07 July 2013 - 06:45 AM.

[Steve Varayis]

I shall keep the faith

Because I find your lack of it disturbing

Also, objectives change. Things change. You gotta take the good with the bad

so Lrn2objectives, eejit.

Edited by Steve Varayis, 06 July 2013 - 09:23 PM.

[PanzerMagier]

I just tried the new PP mechs in smurfy. OMG OMG OMG OMG OMG OMG FUN SHIZNIZZ

[Steve Varayis]

PanzerMagier, on 06 July 2013 - 10:56 PM, said:

I just tried the new PP mechs in smurfy. OMG OMG OMG OMG OMG OMG FUN SHIZNIZZ

Thunder-Thor here I come!

[PanzerMagier]

More excited about my 100kph shadowhawk with 3 MG, srms and lasers...

[superbob]

This was going to be another rant, but I figured keeping it short is a better idea.

• Buying MWO stuff tells IGP (and other sponsors) that the game is going to sell, meaning they give PGI more money
  
• MWO hasn't really started making money yet, phoenix and founders' is likely more about market research than profit
  
• tl;dr regardless of game state, this is where we throw money at MWO, to show IGP that mechwarrior is going to sell
  
• MWO has the prettiest mech models and cockpits to date
  
• Battletech fans should be throwing money at MWO just to have Alex paid to redesign more 'mechs
  
• Locust (and Flea) will be a lot faster, engine size limitations are mostly due to CryEngine bugs, which will be fixed
  
• Assault and Conquest are not final, though we'll likely have to put up with them for a while longer
  
• It is silly to assume we will never get game modes that give the battles some context
  
• Lots of other stuff (optimization, movement, netcode) is also going to be fixed, in months or years
  
• Anything bought while in beta should be considered a preview/preorder rather than final product
  
• So if you hate MWO now, but like Mechwarrior, buy Phoenix and come back in a year, disregard beta/early launch

tl;dr if you vote with your wallet pre-launch you will likely kill MWO and all hope for other mechwarrior titles in near future.


IGP will cancel the project, analysts will deem it unprofitable and too complex and aside from kickstarter, no serious company will attempt it. OTOH even if MWO dies past launch for being terribly balanced and geared toward casual mouth breathers instead of hardcore fans, there may be further attempts at tapping the more serious fanbase later on.


Finally, if you just take a few deep breaths and step back, take another look at MWO, you'll see they've done a lot of things right. Or at least are trying to. In fact, most of the blunders have been caused by PGI trying too hard. Which IMO is fine, because I'd rather wait a few more months than have the devs take the easy way out in every aspect just to push the game out the door ASAP.

Edited by superbob, 07 July 2013 - 06:30 AM.

[PanzerMagier]

superbob, on 07 July 2013 - 06:29 AM, said:

This was going to be another rant, but I figured keeping it short is a better idea.

• Buying MWO stuff tells IGP (and other sponsors) that the game is going to sell, meaning they give PGI more money
  
• MWO hasn't really started making money yet, phoenix and founders' is likely more about market research than profit
  
• tl;dr regardless of game state, this is where we throw money at MWO, to show IGP that mechwarrior is going to sell
  
• MWO has the prettiest mech models and cockpits to date
  
• Battletech fans should be throwing money at MWO just to have Alex paid to redesign more 'mechs
  
• Locust (and Flea) will be a lot faster, engine size limitations are mostly due to CryEngine bugs, which will be fixed
  
• Assault and Conquest are not final, though we'll likely have to put up with them for a while longer
  
• It is silly to assume we will never get game modes that give the battles some context
  
• Lots of other stuff (optimization, movement, netcode) is also going to be fixed, in months or years
  
• Anything bought while in beta should be considered a preview/preorder rather than final product
  
• So if you hate MWO now, but like Mechwarrior, buy Phoenix and come back in a year, disregard beta/early launch

tl;dr if you vote with your wallet pre-launch you will likely kill MWO and all hope for other mechwarrior titles in near future.



IGP will cancel the project, analysts will deem it unprofitable and too complex and aside from kickstarter, no serious company will attempt it. OTOH even if MWO dies past launch for being terribly balanced and geared toward casual mouth breathers instead of hardcore fans, there may be further attempts at tapping the more serious fanbase later on.


Finally, if you just take a few deep breaths and step back, take another look at MWO, you'll see they've done a lot of things right. Or at least are trying to. In fact, most of the blunders have been caused by PGI trying too hard. Which IMO is fine, because I'd rather wait a few more months than have the devs take the easy way out in every aspect just to push the game out the door ASAP.

At first I was like, omg another wall of text noober.

But then I was like, Wow, what a well put argument with valid points! Well done good sir.

[Felicitatem Parco]

Russ Bullock stated in the most recent No Guts No Galalxy podcast that all Founders/Phoenix sales are used for MechWarrior: Online, and not other games that happen to be published by the same publisher. The sales are used to pay for game development and game marketing; it's not diverted to Tactics.

This thread is now closing, and I am glad we got that cleared up