End Of Year Designer Update
#201
Posted 11 December 2013 - 01:58 PM
#202
Posted 11 December 2013 - 02:17 PM
Heffay, on 11 December 2013 - 01:40 PM, said:
You aren't PGI's boss. You are merely a customer. My boss cares about things like "Are we meeting our metrics?"
Ok this is not about You, your generous boss or how well or badly you do your job. This is and always will be about how poor a job that is being done here in certain areas. If your boss lets you sleep on the job yippe ki flipping yay. PGI's performance this year leaves a lot to be desired. I get it, you think it's all roses and dancing Smurfs. A lot of people disagree.
No customers translates to no sales which means no cash flow resulting in no job. And trust me if your boss starts losing too many server orders because people have found someone that will deliver the same as you but sooner and cheaper, you will find them to be less generous.
#203
Posted 11 December 2013 - 02:20 PM
Ransack, on 11 December 2013 - 02:17 PM, said:
No customers translates to no sales which means no cash flow resulting in no job. And trust me if your boss starts losing too many server orders because people have found someone that will deliver the same as you but sooner and cheaper, you will find them to be less generous.
/looks at Ransack's Overlord badge...
Lack of paying customers doesn't seem to be one of PGI's problems right now.
Edited by Heffay, 11 December 2013 - 02:20 PM.
#206
Posted 11 December 2013 - 03:36 PM
Heffay, on 11 December 2013 - 02:20 PM, said:
/looks at Ransack's Overlord badge...
Lack of paying customers doesn't seem to be one of PGI's problems right now.
I'm an ID ten T that still had hope. How many have lost it? How many founders were smarter than I and did not purchase it? Wanna know why I have it? because right before I asked for a refund they posted something that gave me hope. It turned into a pipe dream. Confidence lost. I fully came into this game expecting to spend money, just as I have on every other MMO that I play. My spending in this game has dwindled significantly as a result of what I perceive to be developer apathy. How many others have stopped spending?
Edited by Ransack, 11 December 2013 - 03:50 PM.
#207
Posted 11 December 2013 - 03:42 PM
Geek Verve, on 11 December 2013 - 02:27 PM, said:
Quote
That started it.
I responded with
Quote
Quote
(with past tense) introducing a hypothetical situation.
"if you had stayed, this would never have happened"
Hypothetical situations.
Got anything else?
Edited by Ransack, 11 December 2013 - 03:44 PM.
#208
Posted 11 December 2013 - 04:16 PM
should have just said "nothing new till after the new year"
oh well, nothing new here. Trudge on.
#209
Posted 11 December 2013 - 04:40 PM
Geek Verve, on 11 December 2013 - 12:40 PM, said:
I think you're missing the mitigating circumstances. It's a return on investment thing, the amount of 'return' is disproportionate to the amount 'invested'. Choice really doesn't have much to do with it.
Geek Verve, on 11 December 2013 - 12:40 PM, said:
Priceless.
What point of yours was I proving, exactly? That I was brandishing a e-peen? I simply pointed out the age of the account under which you are posting and presumably playing MWO with, which also plays into the mitigating circumstances at hand. However, whatever helps you sleep at night.
#210
Posted 11 December 2013 - 06:08 PM
Ransack, on 11 December 2013 - 03:42 PM, said:
Got anything else?
I don't *need* anything else. You asked if I performed in the same manner you're assuming the PGI dev's to have, would I still have a job. I told you why they very well may.
giganova, on 11 December 2013 - 04:40 PM, said:
I think you're missing the mitigating circumstances. It's a return on investment thing, the amount of 'return' is disproportionate to the amount 'invested'. Choice really doesn't have much to do with it.
You paid for what you hoped was in the pipeline. Well, it still is. That's not what I'm talking about, though. I'm referring to the way people on this forum behave like petulant children where all of this is concerned. I don't get why *anyone* would continue to play a game that makes them behave in such a manner. It really is reflective of their character, as is any manner in which one chooses to conduct themself.
giganova, on 11 December 2013 - 04:40 PM, said:
The point was the way people are resorting to all kinds of snide and "web cool" tactics to play the part of the squeaky wheel, and how they react in the same manner to those who are quite content with the game and tired of hearing it.
So, you jumped in on an early beta period for a game. I get that. I've done it before. However - and this may just be my own take on it - claiming all that time as some sort of badge of honor or makes you more qualified to offer an opinion on the subject is just silly.
Also, whatever they may have said they were working toward, time in beta doesn't really even count. It was BETA, for crying out loud - a concept I'm not quite sure you fully understand. It doesn't much count for anything where timelines and new features are concerned. They were, by definition, still fleshing out the game. There is no reason to believe they lied to anyone or are incompetent, which are the prevailing conspiracy theories here. They gave you the opportunity during beta to buy the perks early, and you jumped at the chance (as I likely would have done). Are you seriously going to try and tell me that if you knew UI2.0 and CW weren't going to be here by December, you wouldn't have paid for the things you wanted in the game? Knowing how willing I've been to open up my wallet based purely on what's in the game now, I seriously doubt it.
Heck, I don't really even blame anyone for being a bit bent about it or worse. What I just can't stomach is all of the whining and moaning and accusatory {Scrap} that spews forth around here on a daily basis. If you were like that around people in the real world, everyone would write you off as a malcontent and have little to do with you. Like I said, why do people continue to hang around in a game when they are so put off by it and the people making it?
Sure, you could ask me the same question where these forums are concerned. The fact of the matter, though, is the malcontents are just a very tiny minority. You hear the same {Scrap} from the same people long enough, and you just feel obligated to speak up now and again to say, "Hey, we don't all have our knickers in a bind over the game. Some of us love it and continue to look forward to what's coming next, whenever that may be!"
So go ahead and wallow in the fact that you've been playing so long and seen so little change. That doesn't invalidate the opinions of all those who have played less. Nobody twisted your arm and made you get in on the ground floor. By your own reasoning, you would have been a lot happier with the game, had you waited until "launch" to start playing. I know this "Johnny Come Lately" is.
#211
Posted 11 December 2013 - 06:59 PM
Its equally amusing seeing the white knights who say "oh go play something else"
What they dont realize is that many of us who have been here since day one have just about had it.
WHat they dont realize is that for many of the above individuals, there is no OTHER game than Mechwarrior.
TO see a beloved IP bungled to such a degree its both tragic and comic is the reason, one , practically no one posts on these forums anymore<forum traffic is down Id say 80%> and two there is outright contempt for pgi , igp whatever.
Many of us were happy playing mwll , for years.. But pgi took that away from us with their hype and ultimately with their dirty tricks. Of course its understandable how they were intimidated by a mod team that literally blew them out of the water in their free time.
Im rapidly approaching my first ever ignore on any forums..
Just seeing the sheer volume of white knight posts from a few individuals here is just nauseating.
#212
Posted 11 December 2013 - 11:14 PM
#213
Posted 12 December 2013 - 05:33 AM
mekabuser, on 11 December 2013 - 06:59 PM, said:
WHat they dont realize is that for many of the above individuals, there is no OTHER game than Mechwarrior.
Seems to me their have been quite a few forum goers that "have just about had it" since the moment they started playing MWO over a year ago.
#215
Posted 12 December 2013 - 06:58 AM
1) PGI has been very slow with their development cycle. They announced tentative dates and missed them, in some cases by months or years. (e.g, CW was supposed to be in 90 days after going to open beta. The person making that statement was either clueless, incompetent or both ... as well as massively over-optimistic).
2) PGI has a very small engineering team and a comparatively larger art department. You can look them up on LinkedIn if you like and of the 50 or so employees listed there were about 17 artists and 6 software engineers listed the last time I checked a few weeks ago. It is not surprising to me then that engineering development moves at a glacial pace especially if they have more than one large task to try and implement or debug at the same time ... CW, UI2.0, DX11, hit registration, host state rewind, netcode, mechlab, database ... the list goes on.
3) PGI has not "bungled" the franchise. They may not have delivered on all that the game can be or might be ... they have work to do on balance, on making the game more fun and interesting, on adding features that retain players. They should WANT to do these things since player retention will ultimately mean more income. Most of the folks I know who have been around a long time aren't spending any more ... the core fan base, founders and others who really like the IP ... just don't see the point unless PGI actually starts to deliver more of the game they have promised.
4) I do think PGI has failed to execute on a number of fronts. They could have taken advantage of closed and open beta to collect metrics on a wide range of game balance conditions ... adjusting weapon heat, damage, heat sink behaviour and other factors to really get an idea of how the game could be best balanced. Instead they have implemented a bunch of band-**** (I can't believe that A-I-D-S is blocked by their word filter) and made design decisions that have worked in the short term ..
- ECM
- double heat sinks
- ghost heat
Heat sinks is a prime example of design issues ...
- heat sinks increase both mech heat capacity AND dissipation - why was that decision made? If they just increased dissipation there would be less issue with high heat alphas. The board game only increased dissipation and used a fixed capacity the same for every mech.
- when they first introduced double heat sinks it was clear that either the designer or the developer was clueless about what a double heat sink actually did. In addition, it required in-game tests by the players to identify that the implementation was bugged ... PGI did not find and identify the issue on their own. If I recall there were three iterations ... something like engine 1 and external 2, engine 2 and external 1 and finally engine 2 and external 1.4 which we are stuck with today.
- the reasoning behind the 1.4 was apparently "A jenner could kill an Atlas from behind in 4 seconds if we used proper double heat sinks" ... needless to say this statement has been proven false many times ... yet PGI has never revisited heat sinks ... WHY? Because they don't have enough people.
- if heat sinks worked as they should and simply increased dissipation without affecting capacity then the number of alphas in a specific time frame would be limited. That limit could be set by properly defining the constant maximum total heat (the 30 used in BT makes no real sense in the context of MWO ... unless weapon heat and damage was also scaled appropriately for a 10s turn) and adjusting heat dissipation rates.
- improper design of the heat sinks initially has contributed to the problems with weapon balance and boating and required other band-aid solutions like ghost heat.
5) PGI had the opportunity to properly address these issues and explore them with 6 months of closed beta and a year of open beta ... they chose not to ... and this, in my opinion, is one of the areas where PGI has failed both their customers and their investors. If PGI wants to make money for their investors then they need to create a game that their customers want to play and keep coming back to ... which requires proper game design and not just the pretty pictures that get folks in the door.
Edited by Mawai, 12 December 2013 - 07:00 AM.
#216
Posted 12 December 2013 - 07:15 AM
Marack Drock, on 12 December 2013 - 07:09 AM, said:
Customers can be troublesome, for sure. But...
...the current situation is mostly of their own making. Their inexperience and lack of PR savvy has hurt them more than any delays ever could have. If they had been humble enough to admit that they may be in over their heads, and solicit input from the community in an honest manner, most of the anger could have been avoided.
Instead we get absurd new systems to "fix" problems that they created in the first place, through bad decisions, and their form of asking for input from the community takes the form of extremely biased and stilted "polls", with limited and stacked options. Through it all, they project an air of "we know what's best", and "you don't have the enough information to judge our decisions". This arrogance has probably done the most damage, over-all.
#217
Posted 12 December 2013 - 07:25 AM
#218
Posted 12 December 2013 - 07:37 AM
Marack Drock, on 12 December 2013 - 07:32 AM, said:
If you cannot realistically devote sufficient resources to a new project in such a way as to do that project successfully and professionally, within reasonable expectations and unforeseen circumstances... then you shouldn't take on another project.
"They run two other games" is not an excuse that will mollify those upset at the glacial rate of development of certain features; in fact, it would only make me angrier if I still had any real emotional investment in this or whatever.
#219
Posted 12 December 2013 - 07:49 AM
cSand, on 10 December 2013 - 11:25 AM, said:
No you don't, and I'd like to see a post that says anything along the lines of "big things next patch" except when describing things that are in the next patch\
In fact none of what you said has any bearing on reality at all and you do indeed live in a mythological fairy planet of your own creation
Ha! HAHAHAHAHAHA!
OK then... "If you say so."
cSand, on 10 December 2013 - 01:36 PM, said:
An iPhone costs you 500$, so yes, I would expect instant action for a physical piece of hardware that I paid half a G for. If, that is, I joined you guys in your rock habits
In a free to play game that is being constantly developed, there is no finished product per se,
So basically I just enjoy playing the game
As do I. And I'm not even mad anymore or anything. Just lamenting "what could have been" and hoping against hope that we will see some of what we thought was promised; some of what we thought this game would be.
Ransack, on 11 December 2013 - 05:44 AM, said:
Got news for you. Some of us have sunk more than $500 into this game based on those promises that you choose to ignore. This is why people are angry and upset. For them to rehash a post about what they plan to do, which is the same as what they plan to do every three months or so, and try to disguise it as a new creative update kinda put people off. Granted there is an explanation, but that was a wee bit late.
Pretty much this.
Some of us keep giving them the benefit of the doubt (I just bought $25 worth of MC with the last MC sale) and, again, hoping there is some huge secret work going on behind closed doors and at some point in some mythological future they will release some really fun new game modes, maps, Community Wafare, Solaris...
Again, what we have is "fun" but rough, and lacking that real "reason to play" vis a vis some form of the promised Community Warfare.
#220
Posted 12 December 2013 - 07:51 AM
Investing money in their own expectations? That's on them. I don't understand, apparently, but then again I have some patience. I thoroughly enjoy the game as-is and am more than happy to give a small company such as this ample time to put out a quality product. I'm a firm believer in "do it right" instead of "do it now"
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