12 replies to this topic

[fenji]

Tl;dr
1. MC value is highway robbery
2. Gameplay is inconsistent in quality and poorly balanced
3. cbills are worth less than bubblegum wrappers and harder to earn than a firearms license in New York City

There is are massive problems with MWO. It is too expensive, gameplay is broken, and the economy is worse than socialistic nations of times past. Before I start this though I want to first mention that, though I am really angry about how the clan mech inject will be taking place and the ridiculous gouging of a loyal battletech fan base, this is not about pre-ordering or future additions.

Now on to the show:

Too expensive,
There is now a strong market of free-to-play games and the biggest success stories can be summed up simply for arguments sake in one title. I know my sweeping assumption will get picked at, but try to ignore the fine details and see the big picture here. The title I am leading to is League of Legends. LoL thrives off of fun gameplay, but it stays alive by respecting the wallets of its patrons. Everything essential to being competitive is accessible by currency earned in game. Only frivolous things like skins or ward mods are restricted to purchased currency. There is almost endless fun because every new character you can earn is accessible through moderate patience and skill. Once earned, you also never even think about losing your benefits. Basically if you get bored of a champ you can easily expand your fun without having to sack an old champ. The concept of purchasing mech bays is ridiculous. If I get bored of my elited jagermechs why do I need to take such a massive blow to my personal economy by selling them to open a spot for a new source of entertainment? Because my only other option is to buy a mech bay with MC. Second major point I will bring up is that MC is almost like the US Dollar during the great depression. While not exactly inflation, the effect is the same. One has to blow and exorbitant amount of money to get a currency that can barely purchase you anything. If I want to purchase a new variant I am having to blow $30+ USD. That amount of money is worth months of entertainment is steam sales alone. In League of Legends $30+ USD will get you champion packs with massive variety, runes, skins and a truly massive amount of play value. So I will ask you PGI, please remove the concept of mech bays costing money. I would even be ok with having to purchase mech bays with cbills. Also please raise the value of MC we get per USD, or lower the cost of items purchased with MC.

Gameplay is broken,
For the inordinate amount of money I have spent, which is my own fault
because I didn't want to sell mechs I have earned/purchased, I have received poor experiences in game repeatedly. First example is constant fluctuation of fraps. Whether it be because I play one too many rounds in a row before having to reset my client to get my fraps back up or just random clipping rubber-banding and fps drop, I am continually reaching the point of just leaving the game because of frustration. Second example is poor design quality. Who here has never gotten stuck on a pebble on the ground or found yourself able to walk straight threw a solid boulder? Who here has not been shooting at an enemy mech only to find out after precious ammo has been wasted, that they were really shooting at a building that suddenly decided to not be an untextured window. Thirdly, while I find it admirable that PGI has tried to stick to values from the tabletop somewhat, they do not work in a real-time environment. Armor seems like paper mache, and massive multi-story armored gods of destruction that shaped the history of a universe feel like water balloons in a room full of needles. 12 mechs vs. 12 mechs should be strategic battles, not "which pug will poke his head out first and get popped." Or having 12 mechs melted in one 1-3 minute Mexican standoff.

Horrendous economy,
To bring up a point from earlier, in LoL one can earn a new champion with moderate skill and some patience. In MechWarrior one can get a decent mech after focusing ones entire soul into sitting in front of a computer for hours slaving away game after game to finally get a stock mech that will have no chance of standing up in combat (with the exception of a few variants like the 6 ballistic jager). After this, one has to slave away endlessly just to build their mech to the point of competency. Engines are ridiculously overpriced, purchasing ferro and endo as well. If I want to eventually join community warfare with my battle group, I will have to basically stop having fun for months just to grind out my portion of cbills purchasing a dropship without customizing my mechs. With the return of repair and salvage the problem will only be compounded, even though I think of it as a key part of MechWarrior gameplay. A new player will hit the plateau of mediocrity and be forced to stay there or keep creating accounts till they get there win/loss ratio good enough to break into the world of builds and strategy. So much like MC either make items cheaper, or raise the amounts of cbills earned.

Final thoughts,
I understand that the gameplay issue may take time to fix, but at least get the rest of the game fixed to make access to larger variety, more fun and easy for the masses. If I have to continue spending enough money to purchase multiple A-list games just to have a poor gaming experience in the world of Battletech, in fairly short order I will drop MWO and remember it as yet another gaming company ruining such an amazing game with such potential. I think many people will agree with me (if I am wrong in this I can accept that) and this game will fade into nothingness that will only be remembered or played by hardcore fans 5-10 years from now on private servers and lan parties.

[luxebo]

We'll have to wait for CW for a better economy. For now it'll just look like how Bush was ruling.

[xhrit]

The economy could use an overhaul. They need to let players sell stuff to each other on an auctionhouse type thing. Mechs, Weapons, Cosmetics.

They need to add salvage, as actual items, not just a cbill bump.

Also they need to add back repair and rearm, with several contract options. For contract options, there should be a dropdown box with 3 options - Basic Contract, Partial Reimbursement, or Full Rights. The default should be Basic Contract

Basic Contract - Payout for pilot performance, No R&R, no Salvage
Reimbursement - Payout for pilot performance, ammo reloads and 25% armor / structure repair is covered, salvage as a percentage cash payout.
Full Rights - Payout for pilot performance, Full R&R; full salvage as weapons & armor from your kills.

This will let players chose low risk low reward contract where they always make at least some c-bills no matter what happens, win or lose, or a high risk contract, where they could make a huge profit if they are skilled (or lucky)... or lose big if they are not.

Finally, they should make mechs auto-repair in realtime. A fully destroyed mech should take ~24 hours to repair, but pilots should have the option to speed the repairs up by paying a rush fee. R&R should only cost c-bills to rush repairs, and finish instantly. So if you have a enough mechs you can cycle throught them without paying c-bills to repair and rearm.

Edited by xhrit, 05 January 2014 - 09:25 AM.

[luxebo]

Yeah, that's a good idea. But once again everything is screwed until CW, then economy will change completely.

[fenji]

luxebo, on 05 January 2014 - 12:19 AM, said:

Yeah, that's a good idea. But once again everything is screwed until CW, then economy will change completely.

How will it change though? CW is cool and all but it won't fix the fact that MC and cbills have barely any purchasing power and are overly expensive and time consuming to obtain.

[fenji]

shameless bump*

[Soulscour]

fenji, on 05 January 2014 - 10:06 AM, said:

How will it change though? CW is cool and all but it won't fix the fact that MC and cbills have barely any purchasing power and are overly expensive and time consuming to obtain.

So basically you want more for less in a game that essentially free to begin with. I also think the cbill earning decrease in october was not necessary. The reason they did it was that too many people were getting every mech in the game to quickly.

[Fut]

xhrit, on 05 January 2014 - 12:10 AM, said:

Also they need to add back repair and rearm, with several contract options. For contract options, there should be a dropdown box with 3 options - Basic Contract, Partial Reimbursement, or Full Rights. The default should be Basic Contract

Basic Contract - Payout for pilot performance, No R&R, no Salvage
Reimbursement - Payout for pilot performance, ammo reloads and 25% armor / structure repair is covered, salvage as a percentage cash payout.
Full Rights - Payout for pilot performance, Full R&R; full salvage as weapons & armor from your kills.

This will let players chose low risk low reward contract where they always make at least some c-bills no matter what happens, win or lose, or a high risk contract, where they could make a huge profit if they are skilled (or lucky)... or lose big if they are not.

Finally, they should make mechs auto-repair in realtime. A fully destroyed mech should take ~24 hours to repair, but pilots should have the option to speed the repairs up by paying a rush fee. R&R should only cost c-bills to rush repairs, and finish instantly. So if you have a enough mechs you can cycle throught them without paying c-bills to repair and rearm.

This would be amazing!
R&R needs to come back into the game, if only to remove the "death doesn't matter" attitude that players currently have.
Really love the idea of Repair taking time as well, sort of adds a level or realism to things.

[Dan Nashe]

"Cbills are too hard to earn"
"I know, we need to put repair and rearm back in so we earn less cbills"
Silly forums.
Yes, you could up cbill earnings by 50 percent and add a repair rearm average, but whats the point?
"Players should care about dying".
Yeah, I want someone on my team in a raven 2x with a large laser and a standard 200 engine sniping kills and powering donw the instant our team is two kills behind, while some guy on the other team is taking his raven 3l out for a spin today because he afk farmed enough cbiills on his lowcost last week. I already hate artillery strikes in pugs for this reason. That's what repair rearm IS - artillery strikes give you a significant competitve advantage but cost you cbills of 40 percent of my lifetime avg per game earnings (90k per game, you can check yours under profile).
Here's a hint, I and other veterans willfontinue running top of the line builds and just quit when cbill earnings mean I can't buy new mechs anymore. Also, here's a fact, there are meta builds that use standard engines. R&R will NOT just force people to run non-met builds. It will narrow the pug meta.
Gargle. Urgh. Burst.

At OP.
I agree MC prices are too high. But ... they are lower than world of tanks (a much more comparable game) and much lower than Star Citizen ships appear to be, a beta coming that is popular on mwo forums. So keep that in mind.
But $30 hero mechs are just waiting for a ctf 3d equvalent hero to accidentally be introduced.

I disagree about mechbays. They are $1.50 each. That isn't free, but $30 for 24 mechs is not bad. That's the only thing you need ever buy to play top notch competiton leagues. $40 gets hou a mech of every weight class.

Premium time makes no sense to me. $15 a month every month and you don't get any progress towards heros or paint or mechbays? Premium needs to award like 15 mc per win. (Because of real money value, you can't make it obtainable by afk bot farmers too easily).

($40 is good value for a game. MWO seems to want you to spend $30 a month though just for new mechs:premium plus at least half a hero).

Agree cbills feel too slow. If I master a mech, I should be closr to being able to buy a new one. A new ctf 3d costs 15 million ater engines and upgrades. But I don't know, if premium doubled cbills and awarded mc so the $15 a month left you fat on cbills it would be fine.

[MissingBolt]

While it's true MC costs don't seem to be fair or logical, comparing MWO with LoL doesn't really work:

Through younger family members, I know IRL ~10 teenagers who play video games once a week on a console, only use the PC for Facebook, yet they all tried LoL and played it a bunch of hours. They never heard of BattleTech, most of them don't know what is a "mech", so there's literally no chance they'll hear about MWO and be interested in it. They will never play MWO.

That's the main reason why MWO has a much smaller and different potential playerbase (market), why it just can't live off by selling a few cosmetics/champions for cheap like LoL is doing. It's just niche. Sure, it can recruit more people, get *some* people into that niche, but unless a miracle happens it's never going to achieve 500k concurrent players.

In 2012, LoL already had 70M registered users, 32M active users - for 2013 we don't have any official data (well, after googling a bit) but they had 32M viewers for their esport final - sounds like (at the very least) 50M active users and over 100M registered users. MWO reaching 1M registered users some 6 months ago (if I'm not mistaken) means they're at best getting closer to 2M registered users now. That's at best 50 times smaller than LoL.

A similar flawed comparison could be made with F2P FPS games: since TF2 can very easily make huge profits by selling cosmetics/balanced weapons (that you can drop randomly/trade), all F2P FPS can make profits with that model. Problem: not every F2P FPS can have such a massive playerbase.

Edited by MissingBolt, 07 January 2014 - 09:27 AM.

[Mawai]

Well I have to disagree ...

MWO has problems but the ones you list aren't them.

1) MC prices only matter if you want to buy something. The game plays fine as free to play or you can buy packages when they are offered. MC prices in MWO are in line with offerings in World of Tanks and other online free to play games. You may want to see the prices reduced but there is no reason to do so unless it would increase game revenue and no data is publicly available to support either side of that argument. The only evidence I can cite ... if MC price reduction could be expected to increase revenues then PGI would likely have done so already.

2) Gameplay has issues. No question. However, the gameplay is probably the best it has been ever. Gameplay improvements ... at least with PGI ... are painfully slow to be tested and implemented. Match balance is, on average, reasonable. About 10 to 20% of the time the matches appear unbalanced (I dropped in match this morning with 8 assaults+1 light vs 0 assaults+3 lights) ... the match maker needs work when dealing with pre-made all assault mech groups. However, in my experience ... although those matches are memorable because of the imbalance they are also in a minority and I have been in "unbalanced" by tonnage matches where the lighter side wins. Tonnage is easy to point at but ELO and pre-made groups are significant factors in balancing a match. It would be nice if some of this information was available in the pre-match screen.

3) Cbill earnings are SUPPOSED to be slow. Again the data to support any conclusion is known only to PGI. However, they nerfed Cbill earnings and have not subsequently increased it. Only they can tell whether the increase to cbill grind has driven MC or premium time sales ... since the point of a challenging in game currency grind is to drive real currency sales to reduce the time required to grind ... in this case hero mechs and premium time. With premium time the grind is fairly manageable. Someone has even acquired over a billion cbills in their account ... how I have no idea.

Cbill earnings correlate to time required to play. People who play for limited amounts of time are "encouraged" to purchase MC items that will make the play time more efficient in terms of earning cbills. This expenditure in turn supports the development team and server operations (as well as investor profits if any).

So ... in my opinion ... none of the items you cite are really the "Current Issues with MWO".

What are?
1) PGI has consistently missed development targets to provide essential game features
2) PGI has a vapourware roadmap for the coming year encompassing a wide range of essential features including UI2.0, Lobbies and private matches, player associations and ultimately community warfare ... the question is whether they will deliver on it.
3) Game design - ghost heat, speed limits, host state rewind/proper hit registration, matchmaker improvements, ecm, weapon balance especially considering the clan weapons and mechs that will be introduced in about 6 months.

In my opinion, PGI are masters of the art work ... maps and mechs are where they have made the greatest progress in the last 2 years ... but they won't sustain the game in the long run and long term sustainability of the player base on on-going revenue is probably the single biggest issue with MWO.

[Svidro]

From the wiki "An economy or economic system consists of the production, distribution or trade, and consumption of limited goods and services by different agents in a given geographical location."

It amuses me when people talk about MWO having an economy when (outside the drops) it's a solo game and every item is unlimited.

Edit: and don't get me wrong, I would LOVE it if there were actually an economy. It would mean that there was actually a game linking all those independent drops!

Edited by Svidro, 07 January 2014 - 10:31 PM.

[fenji]

Svidro, on 07 January 2014 - 10:30 PM, said:

From the wiki "An economy or economic system consists of the production, distribution or trade, and consumption of limited goods and services by different agents in a given geographical location."

It amuses me when people talk about MWO having an economy when (outside the drops) it's a solo game and every item is unlimited.

Edit: and don't get me wrong, I would LOVE it if there were actually an economy. It would mean that there was actually a game linking all those independent drops!

And the point of this post was? Thank you for the unecisary definition. Because I'm pretty sure that everyone reading this didn't know that the game isn't a true economy.

Anyway, I see some valid points being brought up, but I'm still not satisfied. I've already stopped playing because earning enough to have fun with new mechs and builds took too much time. The gameplay still is inconsistant.

Soulscour, on 06 January 2014 - 04:16 AM, said:

So basically you want more for less in a game that essentially free to begin with. I also think the cbill earning decrease in october was not necessary. The reason they did it was that too many people were getting every mech in the game to quickly.

Yes it is a free to play game, but that doesn't mean that we shouldn't be getting more for less. I was having to do too much boring repetition to enjoy precious little fun. At that point it became work and no longer a game. So yes for this game to become fun again, and more accessible to the masses out there who aren't L33T enough in your opinion to earn fast and enjoy the game, Yes we should get more for less.