20 replies to this topic

[venomman2]

I got a little ambitious today and decided to go back through all the patch notes on the website (open beta onward) and write down all the major updates. In the interest of full disclosure, I did omit things *I* felt were of little importance. There are also some major changes that I didn't see in the patch notes. Finally, it goes without saying that every entry below should have a note for "various bug fixes and tweaks."

So here's everything from 11-6-12 to the most recent patch on 12-17-13;

Patch 11-6-12
-Artemis FCS added
-Crashed ship in forest colony added
-Forest colony snow
-CN9-D added
-1-4 player groups allowed
-missile bay door toggle and indicators

-improvements to hit-box detection
-fixes for black screen glitch
-fix for pulse laser heat

Patch 11-20-12
-Cataphract added
-BAP, 360* retention and sensor range modules added
-removed manual unjam for UAC5

-SSRM damage and accuracy fix

Patch 11-27-12
-activate button for founder's premium time added
-frozen city night added
-Betty added
-Camo spec and cockpit items added

Patch 12-4-12
-ECM added
-Ilya Muromets added
-8 player groups allowed

-Gauss dropped to 3 health, 90% chance to explode

Patch 12-18-12
-Conquest mode added
-Repair and rearm removed
-Cadet bonus added
-Flame and Fang added
-Stalker added
-River City night added

-Jump Jet fix, trajectory now based on # of JJ
-PPC and AC projectile speed increase
-Tag range increase
-CTD fixes

Patch 1-8-13
-weapon bay door indicator fixed
-conquest resource changes
-FPS improvements

Patch 1-15-13
-Spider added
-Target decay 1/2 and sensor range 2 modules added
-Tag and Narc C-bill/XP bonus added

Patch 1-23-13
-The Death's Knell added
-start-up sequence added (Betty and animation)

-changes to shutdown/override/start-up

Patch 2-5-13
-Pretty Baby added
-Camo spec phase 2 added (refund + permanent unlocks)
-New match screens added (informative death screen)

-ECM health reduce to 3
-Awesome quirks added

Patch 2-19-13
-Alpine peaks added
-Trebuchet added

-PPC hits will disable ECM
-Matchmaker Phase 3 (ELO matching)
-buff to crit-seeking weapons
-AC/20 health increase from 10 to 18
-Centurion quirks added

Patch 3-5-13
-The X-5 added
-Testing ground added
-HSR added for hit-scan weapons

-Cicada quirks added
-Artemis-specific missile formation added

Patch 3-19-13
-Jagermech added
-Tourmaline desert added
-Throttle decay, arm lock, center torso to legs added
-Cool shot consumable added

-Catapult quirks and weapon meshes added
-Raven hit-box fixes

Patch 4-16-13
-Highlander added
-Dragon champion added
-lances, lance commander, and lance chat added

-HSR phase 2 (projectiles and fix for shot delay)
-HUD bug fixes

Patch 5-7-13
-Misery added
-Jenner champion added

Hotfix 5-14-13
-fix for all major HUD bugs

Patch 5-21-13
-Blackjack added
-Canyon Network added
-Seismic added
-UAV consumable added

-ECM slaved to specific location on a mech
-Legged movement changes
-Separate ELO for players <25 games
-BAP given ECM counter
-balance pass on some specific weapons

Patch 6-4-13
-Firebrand added

-HSR phase 3 (missiles and fix for shot delay)
-Screen/Reticle shake added when using JJ

Patch 6-18-13
-Quickdraw added
-Hunchback champion added

-Pulse lasers normalized against lasers

Patch 7-2-13
-Dragon Slayer added
-Atlas champion added
-Project Phoenix reveal

-Movement archetypes added (speed changes on slopes)
-Critical heat damage added (damage to CT over 120%)

Patch 7-16-13
-Victor added

-Map selection added to testing ground
-SRM damage buff
-Heat scale added (Ghost heat)
-New target weighting for SSRM

Patch 7-30-13
-Terra Therma added

-Heat scale linked across specific weapon groups
-balance pass on seismic and arty/air strike

Patch 8-6-13
-12v12 added
-First victory of the day added
-Golden Boy added
-Catapult champion added

-Critical damage now damages internal structure
-Pulse laser duration reduced
-ER/PPC heat increased
-C-bills, conquest, and assault adjusted for 12v12

Patch 8-20-13
-Sarah Parries charity closes with over $120,000
raised to battle cancer

-Kintaro added
-3PV added

-Mobility pass on medium mechs

Patch 9-3-13
-Protector added
-Saber package announced
-Movement tutorial added
-Centurion champion added

-Adv. zoom fixed
-Gauss charge added and velocity increased
-PPC damage reduce to 0 under 90m
-ER/PPC heat increased to 15/10
-Part 1 of Bryan's 3-part creative update

Patch 9-17-13
-Orion added

-3PV disabled for 12-man drops
-MWO credits added
-Fixed "Backspace" repeat for in-game chat

Patch 10-1-13
-Crimson Strait added
-Boar's head added
-Spider champion added
-Ready screen added
-Atlas weapon mesh updates

-JJ given slight forward thrust

Patch 10-15-13
-Project Phoenix content drop
-Locust added

-Mobility pass for light mechs

Patch 10-29-13
-Ready timer drops to 20 if everyone is loaded

Patch 11-5-13
-Jester added
-Blackjack champion added

-Arty/Air strike visuals improved
-C-bill/XP bonus for UAV
-Seismic sensor adjusted

Patch 11-19-13
-Shadow Hawk added
-Improved gyro and hill climb modules added

-First pass of hit-box tuning
-C-bill and XP bonus for using counter ECM

Patch 12-3-13
-Oxide added
-Highlander champion added

-New spawn layouts (significantly more spread out)
-Second pass of hit-box tuning
-Jenner weapon mesh updates

Patch 12-17-13
-Saber Reinforcement content drop
-HPG Manifold added
-Skirmish added
-Thunderbolt added
-Music added to front end and in-game


The notable event's that I couldn't place without extra research were as follows;
-LRMpocalypse
-SRMpocalypse
-Heavy Metal added
-vison modes fixes/updated
-artillery/airstrike added


Having looked back at all the patch notes, there were some *very* significant programming hurdles put to bed. Some of these fixes were likely "all hands on deck" which leaves me to wonder what time was left for U.I 2.0, much less CW. In all of that, I think last year was pretty good, maybe better than I really though it was.

Edited by venomman2, 06 January 2014 - 09:09 PM.

[Varent]

I understand the information is nice... but what does this have to do with balance?

[venomman2]

I think it outlines just how much balance work has been done alongside the "shiny" new content. Nearly every patch has either a significant balance change or a new piece of equipment that caused a significant balance change. While I may not have agreed at the time, I think Paul and team have done a bang-up job balancing the game at each iteration while breaking a little as possible. Kind of like solving a Rubik's cube one cubette at a time instead of by layers.

This is probably the most relevant sub-forum, off-topic being the next most relevant.

[Craig Steele]

Well I'm not sure if I agree with the sentiment here. Happy to be convinced though.

Yeah with hindsight we can acknowledge the excellent work that has been done. No one is going to say the game is "worse" over the last 12 months

But they promised so much more and have not delivered. Whether with their actual words or by letting insinuations foster without official announcements, expectations have been created within their players / customers that they have not met.

It now appears to be at the stage where for many players (if Forums are any guide), it's all "meh". If MM populations are any guide, many more have silently left.

To give you an example, I posted a few day ago on adverse MM issues I was experiencing and within 3 hours it had over 150 views. Then I posted another thread on new game modes we might like to see to improve the game. After 12 hours it had 11 views. Draw your own view from that very small example but it speaks volumes to me.

Pats on the back for work done sure, but I suspect a lot in the community rightly or wrongly would have preferred to see more.

[Roland]

Quote

I think it outlines just how much balance work has been done alongside the "shiny" new content.

Not much?

I mean, let's be realistic here... That list constitutes over a YEAR of development time.

It lists things which constitute changes which could be perceived as balance changes, but the actual impact on the balance of the game hasn't been that huge.

Ultimately, the gameplay itself is very similar to what it was back in closed beta. There were various times when balance was turbo broken.. like when LRM's became totally OP various times.. or back when SRM's were doing like 15 damage per missile.... or when UAC's could just totally shred targets.

Fixing those issues was great... but in many cases, the fixes were worse than the cure. The ghost heat system was a ridiculously over-engineered solution that really failed to address the fundamental issues of weapons convergence, and just pushed the problem to different weapons... And then they tried nerfing those weapons, and it just pushed it to other weapons.

Likewise, weapons like the LBX have consistently been terrible, and the balance fixes have effectively failed to understand the problem... the spread has been narrowed, but it's so obviously not the correct fix for the weapon. Why? Because you can extrapolate what would happen if you took that approach to the ultimate extreme... zero spread for the LBX. Have you created a weapon that co-exists with the AC 10 then? No. At some point it just becomes a slightly lighter AC10. Further the fix of the LBX was already developed in prior mechwarrior titles. Just buff the damage slightly, and then you have a weapon which is better than the AC10 at close range, and worse at long range.. suddenly, both weapons co-exist. And this change could be trivially implemented for testing.. change a number in a config file. But it was never tried, and we never got to test it.

Ultimately, that's the greatest failure in terms of balance.

PGI apparently has test servers... we've used them a few times. But therin lies the problem with the test servers.

Instead of having a test server where the developers are free to constantly tweak balance settings, without having to worry about making mistakes that would impact paying customers, the test servers are run for a trivially short period of time, every once in a blue moon. The last time I played on the test server, I played for the two hours it was up, and then I had to go do something.. came back like an HOUR later, and couldn't even post feedback into the test event forum, because it had already been locked. Seriously, it's like they've never seen public test servers in other games before.

Certainly, things have been done.. but I'm not really seeing some coherent progress towards a better game. Things change around periodically, but have things gotten BETTER since closed beta?

The one clear improvement has been hit detection, which I applauded when it was improved. But other than that, I honestly can't see things as being markedly better than they were earlier in development. There's perhaps more stuff, and some stuff functions differently, but I don't see clear progress towards the game we were promised.

[Sandpit]

I don't see many (with the exceptions of trolls, naysayers, doomsayers, etc. which should be discounted for GP really) that don't acknowledge PGI has made strides and progress. What many of us are out of patience with is the kind of progress made.

There's a good chunk of the player base that entered this game on two principles. CW and Btech IP

CW was touted from day one as being a premiere feature. That's the sticking point for many. That doesn't mean we are impatient but it does mean that some are out of patience at this point because after 2 years we're still sitting here with 1 game mode stretched out amongst 3. All 3 game modes we have are the exact same with the addition of cap points. It's stomp out, shoot, repeat.
That doesn't mean CW will change the actual game play but a lot are ready to stomp and take planets over. February 4th PGI, I've got my fingers crossed for ya

[Sephlock]

Craig Steele, on 06 January 2014 - 10:33 PM, said:

Well I'm not sure if I agree with the sentiment here. Happy to be convinced though.

Yeah with hindsight we can acknowledge the excellent work that has been done. No one is going to say the game is &quot;worse&quot; over the last 12 months

But they promised so much more and have not delivered. Whether with their actual words or by letting insinuations foster without official announcements, expectations have been created within their players / customers that they have not met.

It now appears to be at the stage where for many players (if Forums are any guide), it's all &quot;meh&quot;. If MM populations are any guide, many more have silently left.

To give you an example, I posted a few day ago on adverse MM issues I was experiencing and within 3 hours it had over 150 views. Then I posted another thread on new game modes we might like to see to improve the game. After 12 hours it had 11 views. Draw your own view from that very small example but it speaks volumes to me.

Pats on the back for work done sure, but I suspect a lot in the community rightly or wrongly would have preferred to see more.

In short, they Molyneuxed themselves?

[Tor6]

Reading through this only brings to mind just how much hope we had for the game back during closed beta, and how little we have now.

Sure, a lot has changed, but there's so many things that haven't. And even then, a very large part of the things that were added were just mechs (be they base, hero, or champion variants). I don't really consider these things 'big changes' to the game, because -how- the player plays the game isn't really improved significantly. At this point there are tons of mechs which you rarely even see because they're grossly obsolete and uncompetitive. So what do more mechs add to the game?

One of the changes that I remember fondly was the first iteration of damage decals. Mechs glowing red hot as they were shot. Was it buggy as hell? Yep! But it was neat looking and damnit it showed that the devs were trying something new! They were experimenting to bring us a better and more engaging game! Now the patchnotes are largely devoid of such things. There's little hope and little wonder at what the future brings.

Additionally, a large number of the changes listed there were things that I feel did -not- add positively to the game. Ghost heat, ecm, weird balance changes like pulse laser 'normalization'; the list goes on. Oh yea, and absolutely destroying the textures on the founder's mechs in what I still believe is some kind of passive-aggressive gesture to the people who supported them in the beginning. >

So yes, while we've come a long way by some metrics when you really look back at the list many of the changes were bad and a ton of really easy and necessary ones are STILL MISSING.

[Chemie]

a lot of what you list are not features...adding a drop ship to a map? making the "night mode" to maps...removing cap points and calling it a game mode? These are not features. I personally do not even see mechs as game play features. Also, many other things in your list are fixes for issues they created. The HUD bug did not exist in much of closed beta so they did something to create the problem. No credit for that either.

[MustrumRidcully]

Varent, on 06 January 2014 - 09:06 PM, said:

I understand the information is nice... but what does this have to do with balance?

Good question, let's move this to General Discussion.

[Kaldor]

Since open beta:

WRU CW?

Alot of the rest is just fluff. They did fix a few things, kudos to them. But adding mechs and modules is little more than fluff.

[Rhaythe]

I had forgotten about the Vanishing HUD Bug of 2013. We should have a badge for that.

[Corvus Antaka]

venomman2, on 06 January 2014 - 09:04 PM, said:

Having looked back at all the patch notes, there were some *very* significant programming hurdles put to bed. Some of these fixes were likely "all hands on deck" which leaves me to wonder what time was left for U.I 2.0, much less CW. In all of that, I think last year was pretty good, maybe better than I really though it was.

well, according to Russ the engineers are split 50/50 on ui 2.0 and the current ui. all those changes you note many need to be implemented or recoded by engineers, thus explaining the delay.

[Myomes]

Roland, on 06 January 2014 - 10:49 PM, said:

Not much?

I mean, let's be realistic here... That list constitutes over a YEAR of development time.

It lists things which constitute changes which could be perceived as balance changes, but the actual impact on the balance of the game hasn't been that huge.

Ultimately, the gameplay itself is very similar to what it was back in closed beta. There were various times when balance was turbo broken.. like when LRM's became totally OP various times.. or back when SRM's were doing like 15 damage per missile.... or when UAC's could just totally shred targets.

Fixing those issues was great... but in many cases, the fixes were worse than the cure. The ghost heat system was a ridiculously over-engineered solution that really failed to address the fundamental issues of weapons convergence, and just pushed the problem to different weapons... And then they tried nerfing those weapons, and it just pushed it to other weapons.

Likewise, weapons like the LBX have consistently been terrible, and the balance fixes have effectively failed to understand the problem... the spread has been narrowed, but it's so obviously not the correct fix for the weapon. Why? Because you can extrapolate what would happen if you took that approach to the ultimate extreme... zero spread for the LBX. Have you created a weapon that co-exists with the AC 10 then? No. At some point it just becomes a slightly lighter AC10. Further the fix of the LBX was already developed in prior mechwarrior titles. Just buff the damage slightly, and then you have a weapon which is better than the AC10 at close range, and worse at long range.. suddenly, both weapons co-exist. And this change could be trivially implemented for testing.. change a number in a config file. But it was never tried, and we never got to test it.

Ultimately, that's the greatest failure in terms of balance.

PGI apparently has test servers... we've used them a few times. But therin lies the problem with the test servers.

Instead of having a test server where the developers are free to constantly tweak balance settings, without having to worry about making mistakes that would impact paying customers, the test servers are run for a trivially short period of time, every once in a blue moon. The last time I played on the test server, I played for the two hours it was up, and then I had to go do something.. came back like an HOUR later, and couldn't even post feedback into the test event forum, because it had already been locked. Seriously, it's like they've never seen public test servers in other games before.

Certainly, things have been done.. but I'm not really seeing some coherent progress towards a better game. Things change around periodically, but have things gotten BETTER since closed beta?

The one clear improvement has been hit detection, which I applauded when it was improved. But other than that, I honestly can't see things as being markedly better than they were earlier in development. There's perhaps more stuff, and some stuff functions differently, but I don't see clear progress towards the game we were promised.

As a general rule I'd say stupidity is the most costly business model of all.

[Mister Blastman]

venomman2, on 06 January 2014 - 09:04 PM, said:

Having looked back at all the patch notes, there were some *very* significant programming hurdles put to bed. Some of these fixes were likely "all hands on deck" which leaves me to wonder what time was left for U.I 2.0, much less CW. In all of that, I think last year was pretty good, maybe better than I really though it was.

Umm, no. They have ONE (1) guy in charge of gameplay balance and after last year, balance is close to the worst it has ever been. I don't say absolute worst because we don't have hexastalkers and 3PPC+1Gauss Highlanders at the moment... but...

It is still incredibly limited and forces you to play a certain way or lose. Especially at the top ELO.

Until gameplay balance is restored to the fun that it was just after Open Beta Launch (October/November/January 2012/early 2013), all other patches, updates, features or changes are a waste of time.

The game needs to be FUN, first and foremost before anything else.

[venomman2]

I certainly appreciate the maturity of the responses so far. I was concerned that this would dissolve into a PGI-bash thread overnight. I'm happy to be proven wrong.

One think I'd like to point out is that I tried to separate each patch into categories; bug fixes/coding/balance changes and then "stuff" like mechs, modules, and maps. The reason for this divide was to separate different camps of development somewhat. Maps and mechs require modelers, texture artists, animators, etc. where bug fixes and balance changes require programmers and Paul.

When we analyze the work done by various departments and apply what we know about the limited staff, it's clear that the programming is bottlenecking forward progress. But PGI certainly isn't going to layoff the art team while everyone else plays catch-up. So while the programmers are banging their heads against kaleidoscope mini-maps, black screen start-ups, and HSR, the art team does what it does best: deliver on shiny new stompy robots.

I'm not entirely sure I'm driving toward a point, or if it there is a unifying concept to the whole thread. I think all I wanted to make clear is "this is where we started about a year ago, this is what happened and this is where we are now."

[Craig Steele]

@ Venomman2

Isn't that an issue in itself though?

If they have limited resources (and every company does) why is the Art Department so well resourced compared to others?

This is not a $2- company dipping their toe into a new market. This is a professional organisation with experieince. They "should" know what its going to take to make it all work and resource accordingly. I'm willing to bet that they are confident they do know what it takes which is why they splashed out for such a costly IP.

To be frank, over 12 months ago they must have had an inkling that things were not as they thought it would be (there was official announcements acknowledging missed milestones etc) which should have been a trigger to re align corporate resources to meet the business goals.

That they are still not achieving their goals (albeit they have cottoned on to the "don't make promises and you can't break any promises" concept) says volumes to me.

I don't want to bash them, yes there has been progress, the game appears to be "better" in some ways. But progress imo has not been towards the expectations they have set.

[venomman2]

I don't think it's a matter of the art department being better sourced, I think it's a matter of working with a difficult game engine.

Relatively speaking, art assets are easy; they function predictably, the tools are well known and well supported and it takes fewer people to make a complete product. I'm backing this statement with a couple years of professional-level 3D design experience.

Per the 2013 State of the IS, there are 20 people working on art assets and 18 engineers split between live ops and everything else. On a difficult game engine with little to no support from Crytek. We can all agree that MWO could use more than 18 engineers. PGI agrees too, they've had a "Now Hiring!" banner up all year. The problem, like most professions, is finding someone who fits the bill.

I agree that the missed deadlines and fallout should have triggered a corporate response but my opinion is that we are in the middle of the response right now. The past couple months have seen consistent effort to re-engage with the community and offer some transparency to the situations at hand. And despite much effort to not make promises, the year end brought some hard dates to key features.

Yes, we've seen these promises before. Yes, we've been given dates and watched them slide and slide and slide. The difference now is that MWO has officially launched, in fairly lackluster fashion, and things looked to be getting worse. But then something changed, communication started to improve, confessions of failure were made, some details for highly anticipated features were released and a road map was (again) defined.

So I wait anxiously for late February, early March. If UI 2.0 gets out in that time, PGI might finally be back on course. Then 2014 might be an awesome year for MWO.

[Lightfoot]

Well, we still have AC2's and Medium Lasers.

[Spheroid]

If I read this correctly no weapon has had its lethality improved since July 2013? Every balance change since has involved nerfing? Don't say the gauss rifle, that was clearly a nerf.

Edited by Spheroid, 07 January 2014 - 08:37 PM.