255 replies to this topic

[StandingCow]

Hopefully these continue as we try to make MWO a better game. Thanks again for hosting this WoL.

[Stalkerr]

Happy to serve!

[Moku]

You apathetic solo players should go trial run with some teams and then come back here and talk.

[JeremyCrow]

N0MAD, on 14 August 2013 - 04:47 AM, said:

Posted this in wrong thread, re posting..

While i listened to todays Townhall, overwhelmingly i listend to people talking about game balance and while i think that it has its merits, its something i believe is a work in progress and nothing that can be fixed outright quickly. While some will say that this tweek or that change will fix things that will always be debatable.Obviously some small things will help the balance but a developing game will NEED to be tweeked on an ongoing basis. No amount of pressure will hasten the progress in any real or longlasting effect as the process needs to be ongoing. As others have mentioned even established games with a lot of years behind them still have calls for balancing.
The point of trying to open a communication line to PGI has merit, good luck with it.
One comment i think worth mentioning made by Stalker, made me think. He stated the game had lost alot of its fun. Here i need to ask, if the game was balanced to a point most would say "ok this is playable" would it really be fun again and if so for how long?
How long before playing random drops without any real end game result would it still stay fun?
OK so some will say and of course PGI will say we have CW coming, your point is mute. But i think alot of us will say that from the litle communication we have had about it, its not what alot of us want/need.
This leads me to ask, what kept the MW2-3-4 community alive and active for a decade? GAME LOBY.
Until MWO has one it will never be fun to a whole generation of MW fans. It will never be truly competitive, think about that.
As a Smoke Jaguar i want to drop vs a Team of IS scum say in a 200 mech vs 200 battle, weight limited, spanning multiple drops and players and beat the crap out of them. I want to go up against Goons, Kaos, SJR in controlled organised battles.
Until i have this, balanced or not the game will just be drop after drop, same old, boring.
Seems im in a small group of people thou as the main focus seems to be in whether 2xppc 1xgaus, or ghost something is killing the game ( balance) rather than Features.
Just my opinion thou.
GL

Agreed. I couldn't care less (at this point) if everyone brings PPCs or whatever. The game has absolutely no features. You pick a mech, fit it and press launch.
Until community warfare is implemented, I'll stick with Eve Online.

[N0MAD]

RG Notch, on 14 August 2013 - 04:47 AM, said:

Folks here keep insisting people have quit in droves, they are playing and paying less, and the numbers are impressive.

I have only quoted that one comment because i want to comment on that alone mate.
Im an old gamer both in age and time playing internet games, going onto 20 years of PC gaming, over this time i have made a lot of long lasting friends and alot more acquaintances whom i keep in contact with on a regular basis. A large number of those are MW fans, and i consider we cover a broad spectrum of the gaming community and have similar likes/expectation to said gaming world. We basically are the average player, so i daresay we are fairly representative.
An example, Lots of us played and enjoyed Guild Wars for a very long time, GW2 was announced and many of us played the Alpha. The GW team decided for their own reasons that they would make huge changes to the game ( no need to go into detail about those changes here). We thought that they were moving away from what we thought the main attractions of the game were (being an average demographic of the games population) plus alot of the testers and told them so, they went ahead anyways and the short of the story is look at the population of GW2 compared to what GW had been. (None of us play GW2, a pity as GW was great)
Point is that i see that group of people being the average gamer, when i see them walk out of MWO en mass i am of the belief that many other average players are doing the same, so yes i think we have lost a significant % of population.
These people were huge longtime MW fans, if you cant keep them what hope is there of keeping non MW fans.
Another point to make is that these guys will talk about the game to their group of acquaintances, what do you think their comments will be?.
Can you see the ripple affect and it consequence?.
Just my opinion.

Edited by N0MAD, 14 August 2013 - 05:34 AM.

[Windies]

MustrumRidcully, on 14 August 2013 - 03:58 AM, said:

I can't believe that PGI has no passion for M:WO or Battletech. Who wrote those dev blogs then? You can't tell me that some marketing guy could come up with such a document without caring for the IP?

Maybe it was written by someone that left the company?
Or was it written by someone that didn't realize how much work, effort and skill t it would actually require, and just can't do it?

I mean I could write such a document, but I couldn't do it alone.
A three man team could write such a document, but these three couldn't pull it off.
Maybe a PGI team could write such a document, but they still can't pull it off.
Maybe you need a AAA team of hundreds of developers, artists, designers, engineers and what not pull it off?


I might even say that there are hints they are actually too passionate about things - like not being able to let go of certain design decisions. ECM, Heat, Crit Seeking... (Surprised really in this context that R&R was removed..)

Marketing people can come up with some pretty amazing ****, They're like used car salesmen, They want to sell you something and will do anything to make that sale, that's the nature of their job. Like I said, maybe there was some passion at some point in the early development, but I can tell you I don't feel or see it in the work being done now, especially from key people.

The fact they want to hold on to bad implementations isn't a sign of passion, it's a sign of ignorant egotism. "Hey look I created this system and no one's gonna tell me it sucks even if it does!". That's not passion.

[Lazy Eye]

RG Notch, on 14 August 2013 - 04:47 AM, said:

Anyways, you can say you are representing lots of groups but it doesn't appear so from that audio.

Concerned that #saveMWO isn't representing you or players like you? Contact Stalkerr and air your views at the next meeting. That's what I did.

I'm a hard-core fan, but I play like a "casual". I listened to the first town hall and felt that it would be good to have non-aligned players represented, so I joined in.

If someone else wants to represent non-aligned players, that would be great - I'm not in this for my ego, I'm in it because I feel that PGI "could be doing better" and I want to be part of the conversation that defines what "better" is and hopefully persuade PGI that we're not "foaming at the mouth fanatics" and that actually, what we're talking about is just GoodGameDesign™ and GoodBusinessSense™ and will promote and preserve MWO into the future.

Most of what we talked about is the lack of clarity; where is the game going? What's going to be there to keep us interested (i.e. keep us investing in MWO)?

The conversations about balance comes around, because there is a consensus that this could be done differently, in ways that appear less convoluted, in ways that would seem to take better advantage of the "beta" status.

Anyone who thinks we're in this to "wreck" MWO, think on this: why would intelligent, educated individuals who could be doing something else even consider spending their time organising an international meeting that means some of us have to stay up 'til 3:30am (or later) on a work night?

If you don't agree with us, come and participate, put your point across. You never know, we may actually change our minds. But if you don't try, what are we supposed to do, use ESP?

[Dagger6T6]

I'm glad I was able to listen in and view the Jabber chat for TH2, especially since I wasn't able to attend the first one. Thanks for making this an open discussion for all of the MWO community.

[RG Notch]

N0MAD, on 14 August 2013 - 05:29 AM, said:

I have only quoted that one comment because i want to comment on that alone mate.
Im an old gamer both in age and time playing internet games, going onto 20 years of PC gaming, over this time i have made a lot of long lasting friends and alot more acquaintances whom i keep in contact with on a regular basis. A large number of those are MW fans, and i consider we cover a broad spectrum of the gaming community and have similar likes/expectation to said gaming world. We basically are the average player, so i daresay we are fairly representative.
An example, Lots of us played and enjoyed Guild Wars for a very long time, GW2 was announced and many of us played the Alpha. The GW team decided for their own reasons that they would make huge changes to the game ( no need to go into detail about those changes here). We thought that they were moving away from what we thought the main attractions of the game were (being an average demographic of the games population) plus alot of the testers and told them so, they went ahead anyways and the short of the story is look at the population of GW2 compared to what GW had been. (None of us play GW2, a pity as GW was great)
Point is that i see that group of people being the average gamer, when i see them walk out of MWO en mass i am of the belief that many other average players are doing the same, so yes i think we have lost a significant % of population.
These people were huge longtime MW fans, if you cant keep them what hope is there of keeping non MW fans.
Another point to make is that these guys will talk about the game to their group of acquaintances, what do you think their comments will be?.
Can you see the ripple affect and it consequence?.
Just my opinion.

So then PGI/IGP which clearly has the churn numbers is simply ignoring this exodus? Or they are not seeing this mass exodus people are claiming from anecdotal evidence? That's what I'm trying to bring out. If these numbers are true, why doesn't IGP/PGI engage this movement to prevent this loss? No one seems to address the possibility that isn't the case.
I am not saying that is the case. I'm merely positing why a company that wants to make money would let that much money walk away without doing anything. If they are so prideful that they would willingly do that, clearly nothing will convince them. It seems impossible they don't have the actual numbers. So to me the only conclusions are 1) they are morons and won't listen or 2) their numbers are telling them a different story.
Folks clearly latch on to number 1 but don't even seem to give a minute's thought to number 2. There is actually a third alternative, they are misinterpreting the numbers, but again the question then is why or how are they misinterpreting them. Because, they certainly have the true numbers and are clearly ignoring this movement. I'm open to other ideas on this but to me this seems the central issue. It's not about how to "fix" the game it's about why PGI doesn't seem to want to listen. You can give all the polite constructive feedback you want, but if no one is listening it's all for naught.

[Big Giant Head]

I think main problem is money.
They needed to push to Open Beta and lift NDA in order to have bigger income - but - it was to early if you look at the product

Back in Closed Beta, communication between average player and Devs were solid. You are a treated as tester and game is in testing, there was more room for mistakes.
When we went in Open Beta all changes where commented strongly from competitive players and if I can remember it was after "ECM patch" that they really changed their relations to community and made it more limited.
However, PGI realized this, they realized they lost that freedom they had back in Closed Beta.
It was around that time they started telling us that we will be getting Test Servers which was probably very smart move.
But, there was something that slowed them down around April.

So, IGP owns PGI (MWO) and Roadhouse (MWT)
And we all know that MWT was in early production for very long time due to instability of Unreal Engine web player and they still are.
Recent move by IGP switching Roadhouse for Blue Lizard Games form Ecuador that was making casual games probably because it would take so much resources and money to support Roadhouse's development.

I just dont want same thing happens to PGI and MWO.
All these moves by Paul (like ghost heat/ ghost delay) that look like plans that are made in about a week or less is more of a temporary change on the balance part.
You have to remember they have a lot of technical issues to solve first and that takes time/money/resources,... blahblah.

And there are a lot of assumptions made by competitive players, that paid with their money to see Mechwarrior game with full in-depth customization and with complexity that they fell in love with, that PGI will dumb down whole game mechanic of Mechwarrior which is very disturbing.

At the end, again, communication, we dont know what is their true problem. Are they afraid of something? Is it all just business? Little time left until releasing the game with gameplay so shallow that even some of the pubbies and reviewers have stoped playing MWO?

I mean what is the problem here? 12v12? PPCs? Missiles? Hardpoints? Poor gameplay mechanic?

Community is the most powerful tool they can have, so powerful if it gets out of hand it can hurt them.
They are not using us properly, obviously they need some kind of manual.
If you need new player, boom its done - competitive players with passion can create such powerful content to attract big number of newcomers that never heard of Mechwarrior/ Battletech franchise and mecha games in general.
And we've seen this with a lot of videos, podcasts, tutorials,..
Dont be afraid of that
If you need to disscus about some game mechanic we can organize some kind of townhall meeting with community manager, lead devs and approach each hot topic slowly.

Edited by Big Giant Head, 14 August 2013 - 10:57 AM.

[CSPshala]

Man some of you need to find out how to use an enter key.

[sokitumi]

And here we thought mechassault killed the franchise.....

edit/expansion:
A lot of good commentary in there. But come on, communication has been the problem since forever with this team. You srsly STILL have hope these guys can turn this train around 4 weeks before release? Before metacritic scores this thing into oblivion?

Edited by sokitumi, 14 August 2013 - 08:37 AM.

[jozkhan]

I think it is certainly pretty interesting that there have been changes to the ingame economy which are suggestive of an attempt to wring more cash out of existing players rather than genuine attempts made to open up the game through ditching one of the worst new player experiences in gaming today.

The changes to ingame economy have also had a knock on effect of making Premium less-than-it-was.

Then there is the new mech release model. Hero Mech first (MC Only), Variants released (MC Only) and finally released later for CBill only.

And dont forget Project Phoenix packages, pay months up front (cash only) to effectively pre-order.

Moving shortly to 2 mechs released a month... mmm double your money

Is there a 'general direction' this kind of grab is going in? And what does it say about the player base size?

Edited by jozkhan, 14 August 2013 - 07:16 AM.

[Time at the Position]

This whole thing reminds me of orks attempting democracy

[Stalkerr]

Time at the Position, on 14 August 2013 - 08:56 AM, said:

This whole thing reminds me of orks attempting democracy

Well, at least no one is painting the place red yet. Red onez go fasta, eh?

[Lazy Eye]

Stalkerr, on 14 August 2013 - 09:02 AM, said:

Well, at least no one is painting the place red yet. Red onez go fasta, eh?

Even if all we really want is

MOAR DAKKA!!!!!!

[Kraven Kor]

5,000 players all spending $25 a month on average would be 1.5 million dollars per year.

Is that a significant impact on their bottom line? I honestly don't know.

But, I am off to greener pastures for the moment. Have fun you crazy kids!

[N0MAD]

RG Notch, on 14 August 2013 - 06:41 AM, said:

So then PGI/IGP which clearly has the churn numbers is simply ignoring this exodus? Or they are not seeing this mass exodus people are claiming from anecdotal evidence? That's what I'm trying to bring out. If these numbers are true, why doesn't IGP/PGI engage this movement to prevent this loss? No one seems to address the possibility that isn't the case.

You bring up a good point. Personally i think at this stage there is litle they can do but plough on and see what happens and hope for the best.
There would be several factors at work here, this is opinion only but, the engine i beleive is one, this is giving them problems and has set them back substantially, both in time and of course that means money. The fact that collision and Zoom have been basically scraped i think give weight to this, also the delays in SLI support and DX 11 as do the problems with graphics.
Having started a timline, that has now fallen by the wayside i beleive is also an indication that they are way behind,where are the clans? will they make an apperance with CW, maybe, but still behind they are.
Falling behind in any project means a greater need of finance and we know they are not overflowing with this otherwise they would not of needed the crowd funding (Founders packages).The investors IGP will be wanting returns sooner rather than later.
The amount of product that is sold for $ i think also shows they indeed need instant revenue, their inability to expand the Dev team to a size suitable to catch them up may also be a sign that they are finding it financially difficult.
Engaging the movement could be seen by many as admitting that there are major problems, that would be a serious problem to any company,especially if you do have numbers showing the community is in decline.
If any of my assumptions are any where fact, then really their only option now is to close ranks and push towards that release date and hope that it turns out well.
Engaging the community now has no benefit to them now, they have a fast approaching deadline and not the manpower/time to address their concerns.
Well thats my take on it, purely opinion tho.

[Varrin Coursca]

Big Giant Head, on 14 August 2013 - 06:48 AM, said:

Community is the most powerful tool they can have, so powerful if it gets out of hand it can hurt them. They are not using us properly, obviously they need some kind of manual.

If you need new player, boom its done - competitive players with passion can create such powerful content to attract big number of newcomers that never heard of Mechwarrior/ Battletech franchise and mecha games in general. We've seen this with a lot of videos, podcasts, tutorials...don't be afraid of that.

If you need to discuss about some game mechanic, we can organize some kind of town hall meeting with a community manager and the lead devs and approach each hot topic slowly.

Cleaned up the above quote for clarity and bolded the important bits.

I think you really understand the one of the deeper sources of my and most likely others' frustration. We signed up to do closed and open beta to help them develop (and play) a good MechWarrior game. We really want them to succeed. However, we're not being used as proper beta testers. Our input is rarely asked for, our views of what's going right (yes, there are some things right about the game) and what's going wrong go largely unacknowledged, and the developers management continues to live on an island.

Use us. Engage with us. We're here to help. We're practically free labor. In fact, we're better than free labor: if your game is good, we'll gladly shell out cash. Engaging with your community is a low-risk, high-reward undertaking that doesn't require a whole helluva lot of effort. Simply not engaging is very risky and will hurt your core community in the long-run.

[Effectz]

Good points made in the Audio!