5
1) Giant "Medium" Mechs. Why oh why must they be so big? Nevermind they lack agility that most Heavies do not already have! The result is Heavy sized mechs that are undergunned, only marginally faster, and have very little advantage over their 30% heavier counterparts. Scale isn't just restricted to medium mechs. For instance the Awesome, Quickdraw, Locust and others are also suffering from poor scaling, and reflect that greatly in how frequently you seem them in game. Oversized mechs immensely hurt how well they perform. Then there are other elements in-game such as object scale, which I believe to be a lesser issue. Still something that hurts the immersion for a few players, however.
2) Bad Game Modes. I think this is the biggest reason most players HATE Terra Therma, Tourmaline and Alpine. The game modes require players to either split up, coordinate, or take faster mechs. Even in those cases, PUGs lack voice communication for solid team work and coordination -- making these maps especially prone to "cap warrior". The result, is a very mundane game of mindlessly walking around to "arbitrary red square 1" to arbitrary red square 2".
3) Poor map design. I'm looking at you River City, Forest Colony, and Frozen City! Sure these are the three smallest and 3/4 of the oldest maps we have, but that is no excuse. These maps desperately need to be reworked. In the case of River City and Forest Colony, they simply need to be bigger. Add a second beach on the opposite side of Forest Colony, make River City an actual city! There is a reason the only way to engage on Frozen City is over the dropship, because its a glorified frozen arena map that lacks for any other method of engagement. They are just simply put, bad maps with bad design.
Then there are other maps like Terra Therma that are filled to brim with terrain bugs and places to randomly get stuck in. Sure their Map Making team is improving with
4) Heat Scale
Bacl: The heat system, not talking about ghost heat but the "regular" one. Having such a high heat cap and low disspation allows you to alpha the big weapons over and over again until you have to cooldown for a certain period of time. A lower heat cap preventing some weapons to be "alphaed" with double heat dissipation would allow you to chain these weapons all day long like ballistics ( ballistics are being "alphaed" so talking about the sustained fire here) do however going alpha would be dangerous. They made this worse by implementing the ghost heat system and trying to get rid of those "boaters" and in fact we barely see any 4 PPC or 6PPc mechs but it also penalised all the chassis that could run multiple energy weapons like the Awesome, some Hunchback and Stalker.
Thanks Bacl, I had this poll option, but no description. The other BIG A** PROBLEM is that mechs with this scale *cough* Awesome *cough* cannot even use their STOCK loadout of 3-4 PPC's. The poor Awesome has already been through enough by making it wider than the Sun, but then PGI goes and ruins its renowned base loadout. Furthermore, there is zero, ZERO punishment for running the red line in this game! Where are my movement penalties! Where are my Shlttier aim? Where are my catastrophic ammo 'splosions that would make Mr. Stackpole proud?! Again, tons of great threads on this one too. Search for it, you'd be amazed at what depth this game is missing.
I'm not even going to bring up Single HS vs 1.4 "Double" HS. Not even going there..
5) HRS Issues / Lag. Man, do I feel for Aussies who play this game. It must be miserable playing with 200 ping and thinking "Wow! Look how low my ping is today!" With the only server being hosted in Toronto, I'm fortunate enough to get a decent latency. But not unfortunate enough to escape the occasional bad hit registration. Between mechs with bad / broken hit boxes, HSR issues (which seem to be ok after a server maintenance) and general lag, its not exactly easy to hit a light mech zooming around. More than not, its more dependent on luck, really. Hell, I've had times when a shutdown Atlas / Stalker refused to register damage. Nevermind SRM hit registration which leads me to...
6) Missiles In General. So, what is the worst part of Missiles in this game? Oh boy where do I begin! Well starting off with the obvious, SRM hit registration. Not being a big fan of SRMs to begin with, I feel as if I am being conditioned to stay far, far away from these weapons. Between slow missile speed, lack of registration, hugely spread damage, why would I even bother unless I'm going to facehug someone? Oh but Artemis helps the accuracy which brings up another elephant in the room.
First off, due to PGI's lazy / bad weapon mechanics, I can use Artemis on my SRMs but not without them on my LRMs. Its either all or nothing! But thats not where the bugs with Artemis end, Streaks STILL benefit from having a mech upgraded with Artemis, all the while costing zero tons or criticals! Yes, streaks still use the same lock-on mechanic as LRMs hence the bonus to accuracy and lock-on time. LRMs, my biggest complaint is that they work NOTHING like they did in MW2, MW3, MW4, or even in MW:LL. They are not fire and forget and they have a minimum range which only existed in Battletech Table Top. Why oh why, out of the so few things they retained from TT did they keep this? The result is LRMs that are so black and white in consistency, you rarely ever see them in league matches. On the opposite side of the skill spectrum, lower ELO pug matches where people are still learning the game and haven't figured out what cover is, they are considered end-all near OP. Its so ridiculous how something can go from such an extreme worthless, to an extreme good? The flight pattern is ok, but due to it being improved, it incidentally improved LRMs accuracy and has been removed. Even the guys from MW:LL who struggled with LRMs didn't have this much trouble. Its known that Missiles in general are hard to work with in CryEngine, but seriously?
Then streaks. You have caused more problems in this game than I can count. Besides being buggy, they work very little like they are described to work / work nothing like in past mechwarrior games (which should be a big red flag). Its only been just recently they fixed a bug where you could retain lock with streaks and fire at target behind you. So besides being near auto-hit unlike in early CB where you needed to actually aim a bit, PGI is artificially trying to balance out that whole lot of {Scrap} with random lock-on locations. Sure, why not -- but then they make the damage per missile to 2.5? What? Its still an SRM, so why does it do more damage than its counterpart? So besides that, its the reason ECM is broken to begin with! PGI decided since they cannot balance Streaks, they'll make a hard counter to it! So ECM doesn't function how its supposed to, which lead to BAP being a hard counter to ECM. If anyone knows the rules behind BAP/ ECM, this is supposed to be the opposite! So now ECM doesn't do what its supposed to and then some, BAP's only real function is to counter ECM -- which isn't even told to a new user when reading the description!
And then finally there's Narc. I don't think I need to say anything more about Narcs.
7) Lack of a functional in-game chat / lobby system. Yes, PGI's has said this will come with UI2.0 . This is a desperatly needed feature in the game. If this game's community wasn't so resiliant and loyal to the IP, this game would have shriveled up a long, long time ago. (For instance, anyone remember Reign of Thunder? The non-IP Mech Assault spiritual successor? There's a reason I typed remember in past tense... )
8) Convergence / PinPoint damage. Now I'm no fan of RnG in my FPS's but the reason such high precision alphas have been king in MechWarrior since 1998 is this reason. Search this topic for the number of in-depth threads about this topic and its solutions. One I am a huge proponent is Heat Scale affecting a mechs accuracy and mobility upon reaching its heat cap, like it has in MW3 and 4 and (Yes, one of the few things PGI should have taken from) TT.
So! Lets see what the forum community thinks is the games biggest gripe entering November of 2013! Feel free to add your own suggestion to the poll. Actually even better, if you read the great wall of text, explain to me how anything I typed is either incorrect or wrong, or whatever.
<S>
Edited by mwhighlander, 30 October 2013 - 02:11 PM.
