Joseph Mallan, on 11 April 2014 - 10:30 AM, said:
4) Maybe that is why we don't deserve nice things. If we cannot play nice with the toys we have, maybe we don't deserve better toys.
At least that was the lesson I was taught as a child.
Uhm, I meant my grandma was Greek living in Greece all her life. Just like me. Even though she died after the Interwebs, I doubt she had ever heard of them :-)
A gaming company would have the audacity to treat me as a child and not a customer aka "handing me toys" instead of providing and selling a service ? Oh man.... Of course, addressing your customers as children is much easier, you can break all the promises you want and let them sort it out with their therapists afterwards.
Maybe to further illustrate my point... forget you are a founder and have been with the game since the day of its inception. Make a new account. You get 4 trial mechs with a very bad loadout. For some wierd reason you like the game and after a long, hard grind in bad mechs, you get enough C-Bills to buy a true mech. You die in seconds, and it takes a lot games to even understand who is shooting you from where. Even if you shell out $30 to buy a mech straight away, you have to grind with single heatsinks, no endo and crap engine for a lot longer to get the C-Bills to upgrade.
Meanwhile you get no indication as to why the other mechs seem so much better than yours and why you get stomped to the wall, you have no way of knowing that there are 3rd party tools to design your loadout and 3rd party sites to copy loadouts from. Even if you are in the small percentage of players that will go out of their way to research the game they are playing, you will have to grind through several hundred sessions with a subpar mech to get the C-Bills to upgrade it.
But you persist. Finally, you have a pimped out mech, with a competitive loadout. You now know about ghost heat, pinpoint damage, frontloaded damage, dps and heat management. Information you had to wean off of various websites and forums because they are neither intuitive mechanics nor is there any way to find it in game. In fact, you had to design and copy your loadout from a 3rd party website because the crappy ingame mechlab won't give you any useful information as to your mech's performance. You are still getting stomped and don't know why.
Finally it dawns on you. Maybe the people you are playing against are using something more than the apparently useless ingame chat. But that can't be possible, there's no indication of an ingame community other than an incospicuous button with 3 people at the bottom. When you press it you can create a group that noone will join and a button to invite friends that you have no way of knowing their handles. Other than randomly picking ones in the heat of battle that is. And this is happening in a TEAM BASED GAME (well, according to your view).
What I have described is what I believe would be a process that may last from 2 weeks to 2 months for a regular gamer - who by the way is in no way lazy, stupid or selfish. They downloaded a game and started playing as per the instructions given to them.
Do you understand what I mean by bad design ? Maybe all that should be fixed before accusing players for being lazy or stupid ?
Edited by dimstog, 11 April 2014 - 11:49 AM.