33 replies to this topic

[Iqfish]

Well, as the title says, I'm back to a basement discussion.

While I was watching the Livestream of the launch event (I stayed up late, because I was a bit excited for it, and it was getting late in germany) I realized something.

But let's talk about the Launch Event a bit more.
We all knew, that launch would not be much of a launch, because the main features are missing, bla, bla, we had this several times. The only way I could think of, making this horrible start a bit better, would be a bombastic launch event (like Minecon, or every Star Citizen presentation).

When I saw what was going on, I felt like slapped in the face. With a chair.

It all started with the Livestream starting 45 minutes late. Well, PGI/IGP is a small Company, so thats O.K. I guess. The room was a bit too small for the people in there, but they seemed to have fun. It was very dark and not very inviting.

The first giant mistake was Daeron's (is that his name?) Headset. The Twitch Chat was exploding, about 15 minutes passed until Russ came to the NGNG guys and told them to speak loudly, because one Microphone was not working.
This whole event seemed to be sponsored by Razer and it was not possible to get this guy a working headset in almost an hour?

Then the tournament started. The teams had to syncdrop, this drop was initated by a super awesome launch countdown.

I never heard someone talk that much of unnecessary stuff in my whole life. But I guess the poor Phil was just nervous, so I could kind of understand that. After about 120 Minutes into the stream I could not take this anymore and went to bed.

2500 people watched the "event" at that point. According to PGI they have passed the 1.000.000 player mark.

Lets do some math.

2500 people out of 1.000.000 makes a percentage of 0,25% players of MWO watching the big Launch event.
I dont know much about marketing, but that value seems a bit too low for me.

This leads to my initial point:

I Love Battletech. If i look at Star Citizen, its great and seems like a giant game, but big stompy robots are still somewhat more awesome in my POV.
I also love MWO to a point. I play this game since January and I'm a member of an active house unit. I also do some art stuff related to BT and MWO. I even produce some Videos from time to time (check out my signature).

But

this game stopped hooking me. I spent about 300€ on this game, that makes almost 400 dollars.
We are missing some features that will make the game instantly more interesting and I know I will play more again if we get CW and UI2.0.

The game looks cool, you feel like a Mechpilot and it has achieved an acceptable point of balance.

They just f- up marketing on every chance they get. I dont even know who to blame for this, because Bryan and the other people seem very sympathico to me, but whoever is doing their marketing stuff should be thrown in a pool of icecold water.

- Where are the big Challenges that encourage people to play more?
- Where are free Cbills and free MC events?
- Where are the possibilities for player run leagues/events?
- Where is the ******* communication?!

Giving ingame stuff away does not cost them a dime and makes players happy, whch results in cash. Loads of cash. They have a whole warehouse full of possibilities to make us happy and all we see are the same boring sales every week...

I made a post in the feedback thread for the UI2.0 history thread, which got somewhat popular and made in the recent Ask the Decs too, which shows that im pretty famous (irony alert!) and that people liked my idea!

Basically what I said and what my point was the following:

Get rid of AtD. Its too much effort and wasted developing time for too less end-product.
Take one of your staff members at the end of a week or every second week and let him write what he is doing, what he as done and what he will be doing.

So, this had to get out of my soul, let the shitstorm begin!

-iq

Edited by IqfishLP, 27 September 2013 - 01:30 PM.

[Akulakhan]

IqfishLP, on 27 September 2013 - 01:27 PM, said:

Well, as the title says, I'm back to a basement discussion.

While I was watching the Livestream of the launch event (I stayed up late, because I was a bit excited for it, and it was getting late in germany) I realized something.

But let's talk about the Launch Event a bit more.
We all knew, that launch would not be much of a launch, because the main features are missing, bla, bla, we had this several times. The only way I could think of, making this horrible start a bit better, would be a bombastic launch event (like Minecon, or every Star Citizen presentation).

When I saw what was going on, I felt like slapped in the face. With a chair.

It all started with the Livestream starting 45 minutes late. Well, PGI/IGP is a small Company, so thats O.K. I guess. The room was a bit too small for the people in there, but they seemed to have fun. It was very dark and not very inviting.

The first giant mistake was Daeron's (is that his name?) Headset. The Twitch Chat was exploding, about 15 minutes passed until Russ came to the NGNG guys and told them to speak loudly, because one Microphone was not working.
This whole event seemed to be sponsored by Razer and it was not possible to get this guy a working headset in almost an hour?

Then the tournament started. The teams had to syncdrop, this drop was initated by a super awesome launch countdown.

I never heard someone talk that much of unnecessary stuff in my whole life. But I guess the poor Phil was just nervous, so I could kind of understand that. After about 120 Minutes into the stream I could not take this anymore and went to bed.

2500 people watched the "event" at that point. According to PGI they have passed the 1.000.000 player mark.

Lets do some math.

2500 people out of 1.000.000 makes a percentage of 0,25% players of MWO watching the big Launch event.
I dont know much about marketing, but that value seems a bit too low for me.

This leads to my initial point:

I Love Battletech. If i look at Star Citizen, its great and seems like a giant game, but big stompy robots are still somewhat more awesome in my POV.
I also love MWO to a point. I play this game since January and I'm a member of an active house unit. I also do some art stuff related to BT and MWO. I even produce some Videos from time to time (check out my signature).

But

this game stopped hooking me. I spent about 300€ on this game, that makes almost 400 dollars.
We are missing some features that will make the game instantly more interesting and I know I will play more again if we get CW and UI2.0.

The game looks cool, you feel like a Mechpilot and it has achieved an acceptable point of balance.

They just f- up marketing on every chance they get. I dont even know who to blame for this, because Bryan and the other people seem very sympathico to me, but whoever is doing their marketing stuff should be thrown in a pool of icecold water.

- Where are the big Challenges that encourage people to play more?
- Where are free Cbills and free MC events?
- Where are the possibilities for player run leagues/events?
- Where is the ******* communication?!

Giving ingame stuff away does not cost them a dime and makes players happy, whch results in cash. Loads of cash. They have a whole warehouse full of possibilities to make us happy and all we see are the same boring sales every week...

I made a post in the feedback thread for the UI2.0 history thread, which got somewhat popular and made in the recent Ask the Decs too, which shows that im pretty famous (irony alert!) and that people liked my idea!

Basically what I said and what my point was the following:

Get rid of AtD. Its too much effort and wasted developing time for too less end-product.
Take one of your staff members at the end of a week or every second week and let him write what he is doing, what he as done and what he will be doing.

So, this had to get out of my soul, let the shitstorm begin!

-iq

There's not gonna be a shitstorm here man, because everyone agrees with you. You have to be some special kind of delusional to enjoy the way the game is going.

I've also spent money climbing into the hundreds, but I've since uninstalled. Why? Because the primary focus of this game is vaporware.

Pure and simple. Community Warfare is just not going to happen. And if it does, boy are you guys going to be underwhelmed. It's already a year behind, and during the launch event, they said they haven't even started programming it yet.

Let that sink in.

[Khobai]

Something is obviously wrong. Ive seen 3-man development teams create more polished games.

[SuomiWarder]

I think we have the classic case of a group of people with the technical ability to make a game, but that lack all the skills required to make a game company.

[Sandpit]

I think it's a combination of incompetence and mismanagement of time as well as **** poor prioritization. Any one of those three things can easily be overcome but when you combine them even in small amounts all into the same package nothing gets done. You have people not super competent working on things that the player base considers low priority while pulling resources off of your key features. This is just a recipe for failure and missed deadlines. This is entirely speculation but I either go with that formula or have to believe that pgi could care less about things like cw and basically just gave the finger to their core player base

[Jestun]

SuomiWarder, on 27 September 2013 - 02:03 PM, said:

I think we have the classic case of a group of people with the technical ability to make a game, but that lack all the skills required to make a game company.

I've got to agree.

It's the decisions which I have issue with, which all falls on the managers rather than the technical roles.

[mekabuser]

incompetence is definitely part of the problem. I mean have you tried to play 3pv just to see what it looks like? its
horrendous. Thats the best word i could find to describe it. Its so bad you literally cant play it, thats what many people dont i firmly believe.

[Sandpit]

There are a few huge reasons there was such a backlash over 3pv. First they ask the players if they want it and thousands literally say no, they implement it anyway. Then they say separate queues and blatantly misrepresent a bias poll on that because they knew what the answer would be. Then they force those that don't want it to play with it. THEN they tell us they had time to design and implement this feature but can't get cw implemented in two years after several severely missed deadlines

[IceLom]

mekabuser, on 27 September 2013 - 02:57 PM, said:

incompetence is definitely part of the problem. I mean have you tried to play 3pv just to see what it looks like? its
horrendous. Thats the best word i could find to describe it. Its so bad you literally cant play it, thats what many people dont i firmly believe.

They had to make it bad... have you seen the reaction they got from introducing it? if it was really good i cant imagine the forum backlask so they had to make it highly limited in order to remove any precived advantage and even that was not good enough for most of this forumn,

To the OP I agree with you, they should really look at WOT and there weekend events... it really drives the player base with lots of cool sales and bonus credits and xp. The current sales are really weak... and the events are very lame... play 24 matchs for a dangly thingy... why not play 24 matches and receive a dangling thing and 2M cbills.... that would have gone along way to make people happy and that results in more sales.

They should toss things like c-bills and xp around more as they don't cost anything and in the end they drive sales... you have a lot of cbills you want a new mech so you buy a new slot and then you want to cammo it or whatever...

I do enjoy the game and am looking forward to the future... however that does not mean that there marketing could not improve... maybe we just have to wait for UI2.0 because there current UI cant handle anything other then there basic sales (since its the same sale everytime) so they don't want to mess with updating the old UI as it would be a waste of time? one can only hope.

[Biglead]

There is some pretty good brainstorming in here. Now that we have identified PGI's problems, how can "we" as the customers/gamers help? Thoughts/Ideas?

[keith]

i would love to see how igp/pgi can justfiy their manpower hours. if in 1 year all they have to show is a bug free game, mechs, maps and the infamos UI2.0. don't get me wrong i enjoyed my time. just seems very little has gotten done. like other ppl have said, indie stuidos have gotten more done in the same time. yet we are the ppl on "islands".

[Sandpit]

Biglead, on 27 September 2013 - 03:30 PM, said:

There is some pretty good brainstorming in here. Now that we have identified PGI's problems, how can "we" as the customers/gamers help? Thoughts/Ideas?

well I've closed my wallet in hopes they'll open their ears

[Sug]

Sandpit, on 27 September 2013 - 03:44 PM, said:

well I've closed my wallet in hopes they'll open their ears

Same. I still play a couple matches a day but I'm not spending any more money until I see something that resembles actual development.

[Sandpit]

Sug, on 27 September 2013 - 03:55 PM, said:

Same. I still play a couple matches a day but I'm not spending any more money until I see something that resembles actual development.

I think that's one thing that gets discounted when numbers start getting thrown around. YAY!!!!! We have 1 million players playing. Never mind that only 1000 are actually spending money or only login on patch days to check new stuff out. It still boggles my mind how you can have an ip that players just throw money at sight unseen and then seemingly do everything you can to alienate them in every way possible and finally discount and ridicule many of them

[LeShadow]

I... think I'll have to agree with the OP. While there definitely have been some really weird priority decisions, from a purely technical perspective the game's actually doing fine. Yes, they took their sweet time fixing even the critical bugs, but when they did, their work was solid. And things like the HUD bug roulette, while ugly, cannot always be avoided. Something is bound to go wrong when you work with a new engine/framework/core technology you're not really familiar with.
The marketing, though... Well, let me just say that coming back after about a month or two (was only logging in once in a blue moon before that), it really hit me. Hard. I'm sure they don't mean to, but oh boy do they sound condescending. Read the latest ATD? Let's just ignore the lack of actual info for a minute, just look at the wording of these "answers":
"the messaging around those recent podcasts was far too delicate and tricky to be expressed in a written form."
"We do continue to post regular, detailed information via these ATDs, and Command Chair posts, more than could be conveyed in a podcast"
"we plan to release all of the glorious details"
I'm was going to resist paraphrasing these statements, but, just to make my point clearer:
-This task (in this case: dispensing info in written form, mind you) was oh so epic, surely no one could have prevailed against these odds!
-But, look, we're already doing what you asked of us. We clearly say so. Over and over. Why don't you get it?
-Oh, hey, by the way, it's a secret, but great things are gonna happen. Just wait for it. We'll sweep you off your feet when it's time. Trust us!
That's actually a textbook example of patterns widely used in media to portray an impotent government/authority figure. Usually of the not so democratic sort. Back when I played regularly and spent hours on end in the forums, I'd gotten so used to it that all I took away from such a post were the little snippets of information that could be used to piece together a slightly bigger part of the puzzle - or, of course, the lack thereof. Now every "answer" just raises more questions. Aside from that new UI, I honestly do not know what the dev team is actually working on. Makes you think they've maybe got yet another coolant/3PV-esque "ace" up their sleeves.
Which leads to the question of management. Probably just as relevant to the current state as their marketing strategies, but it's already really hard to get any solid info on what the team as a whole is doing. Attempting to understand the underlying dynamics and philospohies would probably prove futile (but damnit to hell am I curious )
Now, that launch party apparrently went about as well as most of us probably expected. Don't really blame 'em for that one, without anything at all to actually, you know, launch, to unveil or make available to the general public, it all basically amounts to a glorified LAN party. Without a local server, it would seem.

Edited by LeShadow, 27 September 2013 - 06:06 PM.

[General Taskeen]

IceLom, on 27 September 2013 - 03:30 PM, said:

They had to make it bad... have you seen the reaction they got from introducing it? if it was really good i cant imagine the forum backlask so they had to make it highly limited in order to remove any precived advantage and even that was not good enough for most of this forumn,

Trust me, there would have been far less backlash if two things happened.

3PV was made really good - like what you would expect it to be, like in MW3 or 4.
Separating matches into selectable difficulty queues (arcade or realism) implemented at the same time

Its not rocket science.

The same reason there is hardly backlash in actual simulation games with arcade and realism settings. Because both options exist, and servers get to enforce the difficulty levels, thus giving players choices for what they like to play.

Edited by General Taskeen, 27 September 2013 - 06:55 PM.

[Sandpit]

General Taskeen, on 27 September 2013 - 06:50 PM, said:

Trust me, there would have been far less backlash if two things happened.

3PV was made really good - like what would expect it to be, like in MW3 or 4.
Separating matches into selectable difficulty queues (arcade or realism) implemented at the same time

Its not rocket science.

Pretty much. As it is this is what happened: DO you guys want 3pv? NO! (dam we thought they'd like the idea because the vocal minority is too minor to affect vote this down in favor of a new demographic) Well we are implementing it anyways, SURPRISE! Do you guys want a separate queue so you have the option not to play against it? YES! Haha, just kidding, you're on an island and you're not our target demographic anymore but we will give you a limited option of having it if you can line up 24 players that all team up and look for games at the same time but if you can't find a 12 man team then you're screwed. Thanks for your support and have fun.

[RG870]

I stopped playing MWO a few days after the cbill nerf. It just felt too much of a grind to me. Now with the implementation of 3PV and not having seperate queues I don't even think about starting this game again.
I put like 50$ into this game and was thinking of buying some more mechbays and maybe a hero mech. But I refuse so spend a single dime until I see some real progression which means:

- reduce the ammount of grind for cbills to pre-nerf level
- UI 2.0
- seperate queues for 3PV and 1PV for all players
- reducing prices for hero mechs (I can buy a full price game 2 weeks after release for the price of a Misery / Firebrand) colors and so on [the price for mechbays is ok to me, that's why I bought several of them]

I really like the MW franchise but there are too many better games out there to waste my time with a game which does not really satisfy me anymore after the last updates.
You want my money? Then motivate me to spend it instead of trying to force me.

[Nick REX Trebla]

That's not just about things missing but also about the fact that what we have now is crippled: what about scales? What about bugs? What about phantom trees and untouchables buildings? What about ghost-maps (not a moving car, not a bird, not some side-way light infantry engagement, no static defences like Calliope Turrets or attacking small vehicles, not a civilian running scared, not a drunkhard smirked puking in a corner (am I asking too much now? ) ... I mean everything added will be welcome (not more 'Mechs though, by all the Saints we have in Heaven! We have tons of 'Mechs already and nothing to do with them...) but don't forget to fix the junk we have now too.

[Iqfish]

I guess we would have a much better and content-rich game if they knew how to work efficient. Just imagine how much time was wasted on 3PV and now nobody uses it.