536 replies to this topic

[Phashe]

Unfortunately, this became another GRIPE thread and lost focus (well, OP was pretty wild anyways)... I am trying to help and old paper-n-pen player who also loves computer games start MWO right now. Major issues for him as a new player I see thus far are pretty simple:

(1) INFO. We take for granted how & where to find crap in the game. Like he asked me "where is the social button?!?!" yeah... Tutorials are out there, but not by PGI, and you have to dig thru forums and bad videos on youtube before you find anything worth while. If he did not have me to help, he would have left after his first few plays.

(2) GRIND. I personally think a new player should get about 2-million C-bills PER MATCH for first 12 matches (spitball number). Yes, 25 million C-bill rookie bonus, and faster. Enough to buy 3 properly-loaded mechs immediately after that. It costs about 8-million for a decent Medium remember! Dont agree - YOU got back and play 25 matches with STOCK (non-champion) mechs, and tell me how much fun YOU had!!!! yeah.... And how long are we going to keep same champion hero mechs!?!?!?

(3) FORUMS. Wow. If I read a forum like this, I sure as hell would not try out a new game. All the gripes and haters would turn away anyone. Yes game has issues. I still have a blast. love it. But look at the top 30 threads on any day, and 27 are people bitching about the same crap someone else already bitched about. NOT saying they are wrong, but damn, talk about pissing in the waterhole...

I have about 35 mechs now. Sold some along the way early before I knew that was a bad idea (info). And I am still buying mechs with C-Bills, still buying stuff with MC (real money), still learning about what I like to play best. Giving a new player a fighting chance with 3 good mechs is not giving away the farm.

Off to work...

Phashe

Edited by Phashe, 24 April 2014 - 01:49 AM.

[Triordinant]

MischiefSC, on 23 April 2014 - 07:30 PM, said:

It's not about 'groups of veterans'. It's about a specific group of people who are drawn to groups because of the advantage it gives and not for the fun of socialization in gaming. They don't want a challenge, they want an easy win. One huge opportunity for improving the game is in things like a split queue and approaching the game from the perspective of splitting that group out from the rest of the player base and keeping them out. Let them play; let anyone and everyone who wants to play in groups play in groups of whatever size they want. Just realize that some players, a significant slice, are absolutely toxic to the rest of the games population and need isolated in every way possible. They want to play against newbies, they make alt accounts to keep cycling through lower Elo ('It's so I can get the cadet bonus to get more mechs... well, yes, I have 200 million cbills stockpiled but I'm saving those. Why yes, yes I sync drop with my friends with us all in alt accounts. It's... uh, training. So we don't mess up our regular Elo, or some such bullshit') and otherwise look for means to exploit opportunities to get around matchmaking efforts to keep them among relatively comparably skilled players.

They're toxic and need to be treated like toxic material. It's not just in gaming but most businesses have this sliver of the business in some form or fashion. The stupid thing to do is to say 'we still want their money'. No you don't. They are incapable of paying enough to make up for what they cost in lost opportunity gains. Isolate them, let them whither and fade. People who enjoy playing in teams for the sake of teams, enjoy a challenge and are just out to have fun and don't care if they're getting matched against equal Elo players will stay. They're worth the effort and the investment. Don't throw them out with the bathwater so to speak....

This guy gets it -a lot of us do.

[Stonefalcon]

Jun's famous on these forums for raging against the premade, in one drop we merely just said we were in a group and he quit the match.

He's been gone for a long time and it fails me as to why he would return for another sledging session only for people to largely ignore him.

Nothing to see here, move along.

[Levon K]

Relax guys. There's no need for another cat fight.

Just wait for the launch module, and further content down the road.

Groups on comms will always have a significant advantage over randoms. They will have options for more organized group play, and I hope they take advantage of it.

Ideally, as a pure PUG, I would like the option of rolling in random land, but also as being a solo "plug" in the group queue. I honestly believe the group queue would be more enjoyable, but it's important to have the option.

The comic in the OP is enjoyable, but it is a little dated. Matchmaking has improved drastically since the game was in Beta. There are no 8-man goon squads rolling a team of 8 randoms like in the old days.

[Triordinant]

Revorn, on 23 April 2014 - 03:11 PM, said:

Pugs only vs Pugs only Mode.

This the solution. It's not perfect because PUG-stomping premade trolls will still try to sync-drop into it (premades who play for fun and camaraderie won't bother sync-dropping since they'll have their own unrestricted queue), but it will be a lot harder to sync-drop than it is now because they won't have a 4-man to rally around.

Edited by Triordinant, 24 April 2014 - 02:34 AM.

[Jun Watarase]

Quote

The comic in the OP is enjoyable, but it is a little dated. Matchmaking has improved drastically since the game was in Beta. There are no 8-man goon squads rolling a team of 8 randoms like in the old days.

I dont think that's very accurate judging from the dozens of games i played recently. Anyone here can easily play a few games and post their screenshots to show that most of them are ending up with newbie curb stomps one way or the other (i posted one here too). A single 4 man team, with ECM, focus fire and the most OP loadouts in the current meta can easily carry a team with no effort. Especially if the matchmaker decides to put them up against newbies in trial mechs.

The fact remains that MWO is a game that has a very low skill threshold. There are very few things in the game that is actually hard to do and depends on player skill. Most mechs are relatively slow and large targets...hitting them with any weapon is as simple as mousing over and pulling the trigger. With ACs and SRMs, you do need to lead a bit but that just takes practice to figure out the projectile speeds. And you dont have to lead at all if you get close, which is where the majority of combat occurs. Majority of any misses are due to lag and hit registration issues rather than any actual difficulty with lining up crosshairs. I think it's quite sad that my shadowhawk tends to survive more firepower than my atlas simply because hit registration is in my favor.

Poptarting? Line up crosshair, release jump button, click to alpha. So simple that i managed to do it on my first try and land all shots on the CT.

Load out and efficiencies contribute far more to player effectiveness than skill does. Put a vet in that trial HBK-4P and watch him do basically nothing when faced with the typical meta builds. It doesnt help that you need to grind 100+ matches to afford a mech, so the newbies are stuck with crap for far longer they are willing to.

The simple advantage of being able to decide your lance setup pre-match, an advantage that randoms do not have, decides matches before they have even started. It has very little to do with player skill or ingame teamwork. You could just play follow the leader and you would still faceroll a team. Which i have done before. And we didn't even run meta builds.

Im really not seeing why 2 or 3 man groups would "need" to queue with randoms though? I mean they would be placed with other 2-4 man groups in the group queue. There should be plenty of people for both queues if matchmaker ever gets fixed so it stops pitting teams of vets in meta builds against teams of randoms in trial mechs. MWO certaintly had more than enough people at launch, but the people dropping in groups and curb stomping newbies drove most of them away.

Edited by Jun Watarase, 24 April 2014 - 02:45 AM.

[Tahribator]

I completely agree. The "win at all costs" mentality coupled with 4-mans, degrade the quality of the matches for the other 20 players. This has been true ever since the weapon balance was really off the scale(essentially since ballistics HSR).

Only now the weapon balance is somewhat acceptable and we're getting 3-3-3-3 which will curb the number of meta mechs on the battlefield, or at least force them to bring something "sub-optimal". Though, the biggest game-changer in my opinion will be the limitation of one premade per team or none at all. It will undoubtedly improve the average gameplay but to what extend, we're yet to see.

[Nik Van Rhijn]

I've only played solo since CB. I place right in the middle with a 1 W/L overall. This is above my skill level but even solo a vet can easily kill new players. This will not change with a solo only queue, pre mades may well "swing" results even more but the way of the game is that initial losses can snowball rapidly.
Unless new players can have a "fun" experience what is to keep them playing?
Demonising groups is an oversimplification for the clusterf*ck that is MM.

[Jun Watarase]

Nik Van Rhijn, on 24 April 2014 - 05:15 AM, said:

I've only played solo since CB. I place right in the middle with a 1 W/L overall. This is above my skill level but even solo a vet can easily kill new players. This will not change with a solo only queue, pre mades may well "swing" results even more but the way of the game is that initial losses can snowball rapidly.
Unless new players can have a "fun" experience what is to keep them playing?
Demonising groups is an oversimplification for the clusterf*ck that is MM.

I already explained why this is not true. Multiple times. In this thread.

[MechWarrior5152251]

In this game they keep fine tuning weapons for balance, so nothing should be OP. On the down side this forces anyone who wants damage output to mount 2 PPCs/3 Large Lasers and/or 2/3/4 AC5s. I doubt they will be able to make clan tech balanced unless they give it a charge up time like the Gauss.

[Jun Watarase]

Quote

In this game they keep fine tuning weapons for balance,

I think you will be surprised how little has changed, weapon balance wise, since closed beta 2 years ago.

[Roland]

I just read the whole OP, and I'm still struggling to see what the point is.

What exactly is the suggestion? Is there one?

I see complaints that effectively are just saying that it's unfair that people run good mechs, and are good at the game, and how they are being mean.

Honestly, what exactly does the OP want them to do? Be bad? Drop with bad mechs?

If the game's weapons were properly balanced, then there wouldn't be such a small set of weapons which are so much more powerful than the majority of weapons. It's ridiculous to blame players for playing the game competently, and using what the game gives them. If you want me to use LBX, then make LBX not suck so bad.

On some level, a lot of the post complains about premade groups... but does so in the context of "Why people who I try to play with in a pre-made group don't stick around", so that's weird.

Finally, with the example of CLPL and targeting computers... the OP may not realize that the battletech creators actually removed the ability to use targeting computers with pulse lasers, specifically due to the fact that it was so imbalanced. The solution wasn't for players to simply not use them.

[Kaldor]

mogs01gt, on 23 April 2014 - 12:38 PM, said:

So you would rather have a game fail than have it become popular? That makes total sense.....

Its actually better for the game as a whole if purists leave.

Hey man, dont worry about it. PGI shat all over the purists and they have already left so the CoD kiddies cant be distracted by stuff like tactics and stuff.

Roland, on 23 April 2014 - 06:14 PM, said:

What is really sad is that in a misguided attempt to save the pugs, they limited teams to only 4 players.

So they decimated the organized teams, and lost those players, while simultaneously failing to stop the pugs from feeling like they were getting beat up by organized groups.


They could have done what other games do, and instead had a solo queue and an unrestricted queue, and kept many more happy players.

Above is what happened. 4 mans were supposed to stop the "GGclose" games for PUGs. It did nothing except pi_s off every unit and house that played.

Slepnir, on 23 April 2014 - 11:57 PM, said:

Don't feed the troll people Jun Watarase is the queen of the whiners about the premade boogyman. in fact Jun has been at it since closed beta I believe. Look at all the threads and comments he has had deleted by the mods on this very subject. Jun perhaps if you actually played the game instead of disconnecting the moment you think your at a disadvantage mabey things would go better for you. When I drop solo and I end up in Bravo or Charlie lance I am like "cool perhaps we have a group on our team who knows what they are doing". sometimes they do and sometimes they do jack all and get the lowest scores on our side. The matches are 15 minutes, ready up another mech and drop again. its not the end of the world. Winning the pug lottery isn't a sure thing and blaming a group of 2-4 players on the other team for your teams failings is pretty stupid....I'm still enjoying MWO, warts and all, even if I solo or group play(however group play is a lot more enjoyable because I like to play with my friends).......PS I also don't run meta builds

Heh, I remember seeing Jun in CB, and seeing him drop matches because he would get called out. If he would stay in the match it was a race to see who "could kill Jun first" everytime, no matter if you lost. And yep, I would say that Jun is truly a pioneer in whining about the "evil premade boogeymans" in this game...

Edited by Kaldor, 24 April 2014 - 06:04 AM.

[PhoenixTrolls]

Stopped playing in 2012... Looked into maybe picking it back up.. after reading a bit and seeing how much stuff costs with really NO new changes... and then to top it all off, the matchmaking is STILL rigged to make me have a bad time... I stopped installing halfway through.

I mean damn, it's been over a year and this game is still such a huge letdown. Do the devs NOT listen to the player base? Myself and many of my friends wanted to enjoy this game but...

Now I think I'll go play something else. Perhaps I'll see you all in another year!

Cheers.

Edited by Rarict, 24 April 2014 - 06:19 AM.

[Rubidiy]

there's a lot of critique flooding MWo forums. Most of which comes from ignorance, some of it comes out of momentary frustration, but there's one thing that no one argues about. Matchmaker is working the worst way possible. In my opinion, it's been broken since so called "release". We cann't blame only one person for that. There still are senior managers to approve this outrage. I wonder, when one of these gentlemen will finally realise how many players they lost to the fact that their matchmaker sucks at it's hardest.

[RetroActive]

Pygar, on 23 April 2014 - 11:46 AM, said:

Teamwork is OP bro- you can take any combinations of mechs you want in this game, give the other side the exact same mechs...if one side is using voice comms and teamwork, the other side w/out teamwork is pretty much always going to lose, and worse, probably going to get facerolled. If you want to make excuses for why you only play PUGs, fine... but don't expect me to buy them- because it totally is not hard to download and use Teamspeak, and it is equally not hard to join a house/guild/clan either...not even for a newbie- shoot, my house has weekly classes they run for newbies to help them learn different aspects of the game.

Remind me again, what are the benefits to being a "Lone Wolf"? I get to listen to music instead of communicating effectively on voice comms, and get to rant with righteous indignation about losing to "pre-mades" on the forums?

I stopped reading at the word "bro". I've learned that intelligent thoughts generally don't follow that word.

[Roland]

Kaldor, on 24 April 2014 - 06:03 AM, said:

Heh, I remember seeing Jun in CB, and seeing him drop matches because he would get called out. If he would stay in the match it was a race to see who "could kill Jun first" everytime, no matter if you lost. And yep, I would say that Jun is truly a pioneer in whining about the "evil premade boogeymans" in this game...

I think Jun actually applauded the imposition of 4 man limits at the time. It's good to know that, as we predicted, it would not do anything to stop his complaining about premades ruining everything for him.

[AlmightyAeng]

Tahribator, on 24 April 2014 - 03:40 AM, said:

and we're getting 3-3-3-3 which will curb the number of meta mechs on the battlefield, or at least force them to bring something "sub-optimal".

Lol, no it won't. If they want to meta, they can and will. Assaults? 3 Victors, 2PPC/2AC5. Heavies? 3 Cataphract 3D's, 2PPC/AC10. 3 Mediums? 3 Shadowhawks, 2 PPC/AC5. 3 Lights? ECM spiders.

The ONLY thing 3/3/3/3 will effect is tonnage balancing, and that won't be enough for non-premades to stop complaining about premades. It doesn't effect anything except the variety of tonnage match-ups you'll see...and it's making them more boring at that.

[RetroActive]

Primez, on 23 April 2014 - 05:33 PM, said:

Personally I never had a problem going vs premades and neither did my friends. What killed the game for my friends was the amount of cbills they acquire. They were never around before the 8v8 nerf and they also weren't around before that when the cbill earnings were at an all time high.

Out of the people I introduced the 1st one just found the gameplay lacking with no real depth and found the UI 1.0 confusing and cbills earning made for too much of a grind to become competitive.

The 2nd one thought the earnings were fine until he lost his cadet bonus and was shocked. He calculated that he would need to play 4-5 hours a night just to remain competitive to purchase a few mechs and that the time between earning cbills and acquiring a new mech and kitting it out would take too long.

The 3rd while enjoying the game didn't want to grind out DHS, engines, endo etc etc etc.

All of my friends I've introduced complained about the earnings and the amount of time it takes to become competitive viable per each mech.

So basically you're saying they're part of the "I want everything now for free" crowd. Please point me in the direction of a MMO type online game that makes it easy to get everything you want in a week and I won't play it because there won't be anything to accomplish.

[Davers]

Craig Steele, on 23 April 2014 - 08:40 PM, said:

Whats really funny (imo) is that the OP made a humourous reference to group / veteran players saying "L2P, get on comms, join a team" and what reads as the slice of responses in the thread from group players is

"L2P, join a team, get on comms"

Guess the OP was right on the mark in some ways?

Craig Steele, on 23 April 2014 - 10:46 PM, said:

My preference is still 2 / 3 man groups having the option to play in the Solo queue, I'd be prepared to listen to arguments supporting 4 mans in the Solo queue but I think its a stretch.

So the OP complains about facing premades and meta builds. You say 'Too bad, premades should fight pugs'. How is this any different than "L2P, join a team, get on Coms?"

Jun Watarase, on 24 April 2014 - 02:44 AM, said:

Im really not seeing why 2 or 3 man groups would "need" to queue with randoms though? I mean they would be placed with other 2-4 man groups in the group queue. There should be plenty of people for both queues if matchmaker ever gets fixed so it stops pitting teams of vets in meta builds against teams of randoms in trial mechs. MWO certaintly had more than enough people at launch, but the people dropping in groups and curb stomping newbies drove most of them away.

Unfortunately Craig is right that PGI is very unlikely to create a solo only que, probably for the reasons he stated. So PGI's stance is 'L2P or join a group' too.