63 replies to this topic

[BrockSamsonFW]

I don't really care how many people they have devoted to each aspect of the game. What I care about is this...

There are some very simple balance changes that could all be done by one single person in less than a day. There are also some very simple mechanics changes that could likely be done by one programmer in a day but to be conservative I'd give the entire team a week to do it. These changes have not been made. Even worse is that they spend more time on band-aid solutions like ghost heat that make things even worse and were totally pointless to begin with because it would have taken less time and effort to fix the actual problems directly.

If they would focus one or two weeks of full time development on the core balance issues we could all have a better game while we wait for them to work on the big stuff.

[Josef Nader]

Surprise! The games industry is a business, and game developers are less concerned with making super fun amazing games and more with paying their mortgage and feeding their kids. PGI is a small company working with a largely dead IP, as much as us fans refuse to admit that, and the sale of the new mechs is one of the only things keeping development of this game grinding forward. Without their ruthless money grubbing, they couldn't afford to deliver on promised content. They aren't being backed by a major publisher or working with a well-known IP. Month to month mech sales are keeping PGI afloat.

[Nick Makiaveli]

Ordellus, on 22 February 2014 - 06:24 PM, said:

"-There is around 20 total staff working on content from maps, to `Mechs including hero, champion as well as skins and cockpit items.

Remember all these staff do not contribute to features like CW and UI 2.0 they also do not drain away from those efforts

7 staff under production, developer support (internal QA), marketing and community management.

This leaves 18 staff, all engineers to work on both live ops and feature development. And right there lies the key, if these 18 engineers could focus solely on feature development things would move much faster but these people have to also manage the live ops so there is always a constant stream of work involved to keep the game running smoothly, rollout patches, update the Patcher/Launcher, database management and other MWO tools.

So the end result is you are only getting a fluctuating amount of full time effort from some portion of those 18 engineers to make the forward progress."

->So basically there are more people dedicated to pumping out cash mechs, than are even employed to run and create meaningful content for the entire actual game. Guess we know what this company is about.

Long story short, get used to MechHalo: Cashshop..... that's all you're ever going to get.


P.S. Also a statement about the company recently finding out that their license doesn't expire in 2015? So what, you were just going to keep pumping out items for the cash shop until it expired next year?

Your math, it sucks. 18 working on feature development etc, and 20 split up between MAPS etc which includes content.

[redacted]

**edit** OH yea almost forgot....Damn son, learn to ******* read. The announcement was that they renegotiated their license agreement with Microsoft for another couple of years....[redacted]

Edited by miSs, 23 February 2014 - 02:52 PM.

[Khobai]

Quote

Surprise! The games industry is a business, and game developers are less concerned with making super fun amazing games and more with paying their mortgage and feeding their kids. PGI is a small company working with a largely dead IP, as much as us fans refuse to admit that, and the sale of the new mechs is one of the only things keeping development of this game grinding forward. Without their ruthless money grubbing, they couldn't afford to deliver on promised content. They aren't being backed by a major publisher or working with a well-known IP. Month to month mech sales are keeping PGI afloat.

I agree. The problem is PGI's current business model is unsustainable. You can only release so many mechs that are similar or identical to existing mechs before players stop buying them. PGI is already starting to hit this brick wall.

There's nothing wrong with releasing new mechs for real $. But it needs to be done in a way that adds new experiences to the game: like Dota2 does with new heroes, both in figuring how to play the new hero and figuring out how to counter the new hero with old heroes. Clan mechs were a perfect opportunity to do this, but the whole implementation and marketing of the clan mechs was completely botched.

And the new IS mechs are just stale. Its either more of the same old or pay to win power creep (ember). And players have wisened up to it. PGI is at the point where they have to do the bare minimum to differentiate mechs and make each mech a unique and balanced play experience (by adding role warfare + interesting mech quirks that arnt just increased arm movement or torso twist).

Additionally premium needs to be marketed better. For $10 a month you should be getting a heck of a lot more than a 50% booster for credits and xp. Premium players should be able to use any trial mechs, not just the ones on rotation. Premium players should also be able to use any patterns/camos as long as theyre premium. Premium players should also get discounted consumables. Lastly there should be incentive rewards for players that buy consecutive months of premium (like buy X months of premium, get an exclusive reward). Now were approaching something worth $10 a month.

Edited by Khobai, 23 February 2014 - 12:58 PM.

[Josef Nader]

Except technogy grinds onwards I'm the Battletech universe. We get a whole new mess of weapons to play with once Clans drop, as well as the introduction of Omnimechs. Once that happens, PGI can start releasing IS adaptations of clan tech and Clanbuster mechs, a whole new slew of stuff. Once that runs its course, we have the FedCom Civil War and all the goodies that popped out of that to play with. If we make it past that? The Jihad and the Dark Ages. All of these eras have new tech, new mechs, and new toys to play with.

tl;dr there is plenty for them to pull from to keep selling mechs. New weapons are not hard to program. Balance can be a bit tricky, but once you have the baseline figured out it's pretty easy to work new additions in.

Edited by Josef Nader, 23 February 2014 - 12:52 PM.

[stjobe]

At a company I used to work, there were about 40 staff total; of those 40, nine were actual programmers that made (and supported) the software systems we sold.

Were the other 31 useless weight? Not really; some were sales (pre- and post-sales included), some were project managers, some were middle management, some were HR, some were first-line support, some were application consultants (glorified trainers), and so on and so forth.

Making (and supporting) software isn't just programming. If the other guys and gals hadn't been around, the nine of us wouldn't have had much time for actual programming.

Edited by stjobe, 23 February 2014 - 01:06 PM.

[keith]

my only grip with them having so many artist and they using them many for money making items. y not instead use them to produce things to improve the game. give pulse laser a different effect(dear god it needs one) er ppc/ ppc could have different effects. if they really want to go the extra mile slowly go back to each map, add different weather effects to the maps for random cycles. u could have a light rain-heavy rain while in heavy rain have a cyclone that passes through. while this would not add money per say it would likely add more players in turn adding more money.

[OneEyed Jack]

Gee. Another brainless thread of nitwits who think that just because someone has the skills to do new skins or model cockpit items, they should be let loose with game code.

Thank goodness. We were running low.....

[Abivard]

Strange, I have never met a salesperson from PGI, nor heard of one really, nor did they list any salesperson in their employee lineup.

So my question is, why is there all these posts comparing the size of other business sales force to the size of PGI's art PRODUCTION team?

Then they seem to draw the conclusion that all is normal with PGI and they are really top notch, cutting edge developers who's only problem in delivering content is because someone on a board somewhere might not be a white knight about it?

[stjobe]

Abivard, on 23 February 2014 - 02:12 PM, said:

Strange, I have never met a salesperson from PGI, nor heard of one really, nor did they list any salesperson in their employee lineup.

So my question is, why is there all these posts comparing the size of other business sales force to the size of PGI's art PRODUCTION team?

Because most non-game software companies don't have much use for a (large) art department? And PGI doesn't seem to have much use for a sales department, as you so correctly observe.

Is it really that much of a stretch to substitute one for the other in a casual comparison like this?

[Abivard]

stjobe, on 23 February 2014 - 02:27 PM, said:

Because most non-game software companies don't have much use for a (large) art department? And PGI doesn't seem to have much use for a sales department, as you so correctly observe.

Is it really that much of a stretch to substitute one for the other in a casual comparison like this?

Yes it is, it is comparing apples and oranges. Saying that workforce ratios are the same because the ratio of sales to production in other companies is the same ratio as PGI's frills PRODUCTION department to its core component PRODUCTION department is nonsense.

[Trauglodyte]

I'm confused. Is the OP upset that they have more people dedicated to keeping the lights on than they are making him happy? Cause that is what is sounds like.

[OldCowboy]

Yeah this is silly griping OP.

It would be pretty silly for he company to say "you twenty guys work on the cool free stuff. And you lazy dudes in the corner there...see if u can find some watered down stuff for us to sell."

These guys aren't making this game just for fun.

[Prezimonto]

SirLANsalot, on 22 February 2014 - 08:19 PM, said:

U.I 2.0 came out ON TIME, yet you crucify them on the fact its not perfect.

If the new UI had some flaws, and some redeeming features of the core of the game that players actually need: ie the mechlab and managing your account, I'd be less irritated.

The only feature in the game UI that's currently reasonably streamlined is the shop and it's integration in all other parts of the mechlab. It has flaws, but is at least 90% finished. The entirety of the mechlab outside of that feature is unintuitive to downright difficult to use to do the two things a player needs to do: customize a mech and join a game. Shopping is secondary to gameplay from a user perspective.

[Duymon]

It's like they're running a tabletop wargame business. A very heavy focus goes onto the sculptures, painters and marketing for the miniatures and just a few people actually working on the core mechanics of the game.

Except that here we have digital miniatures that can cost up to 55 dollars a pop and the core mechanics of the game are lacking, unbalanced and/or under developed, and the only way to enjoy our extremely expensive intangible digital miniatures is to suffer through the game.

At least in Tabletop games you can not even care about the game and enjoy collecting miniatures

On a side note, if PGI wants to make money please put your mechs on shapeways, then I can enjoy my mechs and never play the game

Edited by Duymon, 23 February 2014 - 06:20 PM.

[TB Freelancer]

Meh...I see guys suggesting balance changes by pulling numbers out of their behinds all day long around here. They support their changes with reasoning that makes it quite clear they don't have the first clue how the game actually functions.

Case in point, guys wishing the LPL had much faster cooldown times to increase DPS. They want this without the faintest idea that it would actually make the weapon hotter and even more prone to stalling out and that they would effectively gain nothing.

....this thread, and the guys complaining about the makeup of the company is no different.

[Xipe Totec]

Abivard, I would put forward that a lot of PGI's problems come from not having a dedicated salesperson on their team (a common mistake for new F2P devs).

Salespeople, good salespeople anyway, know their customer base in a way few programmers or devs do. This is largely due to the fact that they have spent a lot of their time working on "soft" skills, a luxury not afforded most engineers and artists.

A solid salesperson would also trim down their messaging gaffes and probably not made some of the early mistakes with pricing or package roll-outs.

[Shlkt]

• It's not unusual for game projects to employ many more artists than programmers. That's par for the course.
  
• Programmers, on average, are paid more than artists. You can't swap an artist for a programmer without increasing your budget.
  
• QA/QC concerns exacerbate the compensation issue above. A larger programming team needs a larger testing team to keep up. When features are developed faster then they must also be tested faster.
  
• Frankly MWO's artwork is the least controversial aspect of the whole game. The artists do a great job and they've maintained a steady content release schedule. Cut 'em some slack!

Edited by Shlkt, 24 February 2014 - 06:15 AM.

[Ordellus]

Craig Steele, on 23 February 2014 - 12:10 AM, said:

(1) And still, your comparison is not making any conclusion. Reading is fine my end, comprehesion of someone elses abstract uncommunicated thoughts is not my strongest point.

If I use the restuarant analogy, there would often be 2 / 3 chefs (engineers), 5+ bar / wait staff (artist) and 2 managers (mangement), All are required to get my meal and drinks and I want both. So I still don't see your problem? Are you saying you don't want new mechs?

(2) Of course it is Durk tard (I have not heard this before so I assume this is a expression of friendship from your culture?) People pay for the shiny bits the same as the wait staff who arrange the meal on my plate and fill the glass with wine, its all part of the end product I am paying for. That fact that it is delivered digitally in this medium doesn't change it's focus. I can cook a steak, I order steak at a restuarant for a dining experience including presentaion.

Anyway, when you get around to communicating your point better happy to review what you've got to say.

Thanks

Holy shit you're dumb.

1) "They state it blunty" - THEY JUST CARE ABOUT MONEY..... again just read the article before pretending you follow the topic

2) I love how morons go to analogys (god I can't spell) when they don't understand something. Try an follow along.

The mechs they are making ARE THE PRODUCT BEING SOLD.

If half the workforce is making mechs.... HALF THE WORKFORCE IS DIRECTLY MAKING THE PRODUCT.

"Market penetration" means attracting customers you wouldn't normally attract.... again IT HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH PRODUCT MANUFACTURING

"Sales force" means the people trying to sell you said product... aka the the mechs that are thrown in your face all over the mechbay, or the adverts that pop up all over the website.... again NOTHING TO DO WITH PRODUCT MANUFACTURING

So back to you "analogy" except instead of 2 people making food it's 20 and they expect 1 other guy to run the entire rest of the operation.

Funny thing is this ****** still won't get it.....

Nick Makiaveli, on 23 February 2014 - 12:36 PM, said:

Your math, it sucks. 18 working on feature development etc, and 20 split up between MAPS etc which includes content.

[redacted]

**edit** OH yea almost forgot....Damn son, learn to ******* read. The announcement was that they renegotiated their license agreement with Microsoft for another couple of years....[redacted]

Oh that's right, I must have thought that it took a large portion of those 20 to make the what.... 2 new maps?

I guess they only had a couple of them making the 15ish new mechs?

Yeah MY math sucks

p.s. - yep, they got the license longer.... meaning IT WAS GOING TO EXPIRE. Look around.... do you see a finished game?

The current game was "the finished product" until the license was renewed. What a joke.

Edited by Ordellus, 01 March 2014 - 03:57 PM.

[Deathlike]

TB Freelancer, on 23 February 2014 - 08:59 PM, said:

Meh...I see guys suggesting balance changes by pulling numbers out of their behinds all day long around here. They support their changes with reasoning that makes it quite clear they don't have the first clue how the game actually functions.

Case in point, guys wishing the LPL had much faster cooldown times to increase DPS. They want this without the faintest idea that it would actually make the weapon hotter and even more prone to stalling out and that they would effectively gain nothing.

We're actually not blind to the changes as the question ultimately is whether the overall concept is better. Numbers would have to be adjusted for a particular change, but right now, Pulse Lasers are simply a poor version of regular lasers with only slight benefits.