The good:
· You finally delivered after a year of promises
· It does look nice and cleaner (do prefer more grit as MW has always been gritty, not pretty)
· It has a lot of pretty charts and information regarding mechs, once a mech is selected
· You finally fixed the launcher grabbing and locking the mouse cursor when game not actively selected
· You can turn your mech around in the bay and see how it looks
· You can finally setup weapon groups outside of the active game and in the mech bay (however, its broken and broke previous weapon groups)
The bad:
· You’ve overcomplicated the UI
o What used to take 1-2 clicks now takes 4-5 (literally)
o The chat interface is considerably worse and much harder to access
o The chat interface is almost a pain in the rear to leave
§ Should not require a tiny “x” on the far right of screen to exit
§ Should allow “esc” to take to previous screen
§ Chat interface should be integrated into the primary screen, not as a subscreen
o The ready up functionality of the game is now considerably worse
o Forcing user selection of game type at each launch is a pain
o Sorting mechs is a pain
§ Attempting to sort by type of mech does not list them together, spreads them out based on non-user selected qualifiers (hero mechs first, then champion, then regular in random order)
· Need to allow users to select specific mech types/chassis, sort by weight, sort by variants, and so on.
§ When sorting against mechs the user owns, you display the trial mechs. These mechs are not owned, why are they showing? You give the user the option to buy the trial mech which clearly shows a value that the user does not own the mech and does not meet the constraint of “if user owned then display”
o No longer able to run the UI in a windows mode and run game in full screen as previous UI
o You don’t effectively use the space of the UI. You cluster in small areas and use tiny fonts/graphics, leaving lots of dead space that should be better used
· Frame rates have decreased by 20-30 FPS in UI 2.0 and in game
o Multiple monitor setup maybe responsible; however, this was working great and not an issue before latest patch.
o In combat, FPS now drops to 10-20FPS making it impossible for me to drive any mech successfully or target a specific area.
· Increased graphics glitches
o Twice out of five games, I started moving and the screen stopped refreshing. I could hear the game, but the video decided to freeze frame. Game continued and mech kept moving. Standard methods of “esc”, “alt-tab”, “alt+enter” and “alt+F10” did nothing. “alt+clt+del” for task manager finally brought the screen for active MWO play to the front
o New glitches in game, starting up and seeing numbers and weird symbols instead of seeing environment outside of the cockpit of mech. Mech graphics internal rendered fine; however, everything external went wonky.
o In combat too close to mechs now warping user into a view of flying above the battlefield, then dumping in areas, while watching mechs warp around the screen. (while running 30-60ping)
· Sound volume
o I now have to crank the sound volume of the game to almost nothing in order to hear anyone on TeamSpeak. This is for music, sound effects, and master. Literally below 1/20th of total volume in order to hear what was normally in game adjusted to ½ of total volume to hear the same.
· Mech Access / Loadouts
o Completely over done… way too much information now, in that all of the garbage we don’t want to see is now consuming the full screen of the interface
o Unable to disable seeing equipment not already owned (engine screen and so on)
o Unable to reduce the scaling of displayed equipment to a list instead of bulky and overdone graphics
o Inability to see where hardpoints are on mechs
o Inability to move modules on and off the mechs by double clicking on module, now requires “equip” or drag to move on, and drag to move off (you added 2 functions to add and only one to remove, not even keeping consistent in your own design plans)
o Requires the user to “Check Out” of mech lab at every small section to actively accept user changes instead of a simplified, centralized, and reasonably sized button to “accept” or “cancel”
o “Check out” mech does not back out of mech configuration
o Backing out of Mech lab to cancel for a prompt requiring additional user interaction to cancel configuration changes. Needs a cancel button.
o Locking user in mechlab when attempting to get into a game with group. Forcing the user to go through the tedious chat system exit, go through “check out”, and then having to back out of the mech lab to return back to the chat system to ready up.
o While the new “Weapon Groups” configuration does allow for user to customize the weapon groups outside of active game/combat, it does not allow for chainfire setup, nor does it allow the users to set a weapon group to activate/deactivate AMS which is clearly listed in the weapon groups
§ Either fix AMS not to show in Weapon Groups or create the hotkey for toggling AMS as previously requested by this community numerous times in the past.
· Settings Screen
o Certain areas like keyboard and controller settings have a scroll bar for a limited box area that does not use the full height of the game engine window, even in full screen mode. It’s like this game is intentionally attempting to make certain things harder than it should be. Instead of being an adaptive coded window to the height of the user’s client, the code is locked into a specific size to force the use of a scroll wheel and wasting user desktop space by not actively taking up all of the available space in a screen where nothing else is active except modification of system settings
· Premium Time activation
o Broken
o Does not list stored amount of premium time
Ultimately: PGI, you have released this product as a full release; please stop treating it like a beta
· Test your product and changes in staging servers to catch these issues and feedback well before you dump it on the core and paying community
System specifications
Asus G75vx Core i7-3630qm CPU@2.40Ghz w/24G ram
NVidia 670MX w/ 3G ram using GeForce 334.67 beta drivers (rel 01/27/2014)
Samsung EVO 840 240G C:\ where MWO is installed.
RealTek HD audio 6.0.1.6818
Windows 8.0 64bit (8.2, build 9200) w/dx 11