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It is obvious that Paul and/or Bryan is at least partially asleep at the wheel here, and I've come to help with your overall game design. The flow, or rather, extreme lack thereof, once UI 2.0 was introduced has become terrible, and seemingly small things have been somehow screwed up within a 2-week patch cycle. So, starting with the social features I posted elsewhere...
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1) the ability to click to add people to our friends list directly from a match instead of having to remember their name and type it exactly as its displayed in order to add them
2) a module to find friends with similar in-game interests (a friend finder that could have criteria such as chosen faction, game type preference, play style, etc)
3) a method of sorting players in one's friends list, ie a folder system where you could place merc corp members in one folder, faction members in one folder, casual or afk friends in one folder, etc
PS - it wouldn't hurt to get some in-game voice similar to Halo/Gears of War/Titanfall/insert other AAA title here where you can selectively mute people that you don't want to listen to. This would even up the perceived advantages of groups on Teamspeak since then all 12 people on each side could all hear each other.
2) a module to find friends with similar in-game interests (a friend finder that could have criteria such as chosen faction, game type preference, play style, etc)
3) a method of sorting players in one's friends list, ie a folder system where you could place merc corp members in one folder, faction members in one folder, casual or afk friends in one folder, etc
PS - it wouldn't hurt to get some in-game voice similar to Halo/Gears of War/Titanfall/insert other AAA title here where you can selectively mute people that you don't want to listen to. This would even up the perceived advantages of groups on Teamspeak since then all 12 people on each side could all hear each other.
#1 here shouldn't be hard to achieve since it already exists elsewhere in the UI - in a group if somebody isn't your friend you simply click the little blue icon. #3 is something that should be pretty simple, too. #2, not so much, but with community warfare maybe sometime in the future existing (at your current pace, we won't see it for another 20 months) it would be nice to find other non-friend people that are in the same house/clan that are currently online.
As for the in-game voice, if you want to call MWO a AAA title, or even an A title, this is something that should have been done in closed beta. Titanfall closed alpha had in-game voice ffs. It isn't frowned upon to have basic features, or to assimilate ideas from well-engineered games that already exist, so I don't know what the hold-up is with something deemed practically essential in a team-based shooter now. Devs probably play games outside of MWO, so they should have exposure to this kind of stuff. At least, I'd hope so if they're working on a freaking game themselves.
Now, let's talk about the lobby.
The lobby for private matches is kind of just hidden off to the side for, well, as its been said, private matches. Theres the obvious post-launch equivalent in the public side when the MM finds a match, but there's one glaring problem with this (going back to square one here): flow. Ideally, and this is again a cue from other AAA titles, you place players in a lobby FIRST, then you present them with any options they might have (and let them mute any annoying voices there might be once in-game voice is implemented), then you let them go at it. It's a little more social this way, and it allows for a few key things your playerbase has wanted since closed beta: map voting, allowing changing of paint schemes based on map, and selection of a mech relative to the rest of the team. So you've got this privately, and there's nothing terribly wrong with the public way of doing things I suppose, but this is what you should have been doing in both spots to begin with. The other thing this would accomplish? Only having to plug in new players when people leave, instead of repopulating all 24 players each time. Less system and network utilization.
Look at it from our point of view, and not just us as gamers, but us as IT professionals of varying landscapes (developers, network security guys, support guys, etc). UI 2.0 was supposed to be a greatly improved experience. What it actually turned out to be is a worse way of doing all of the same things we were doing before. The flow of getting in a match needed to be changed, a lot of people hoped it would be, and then eventually, finally, we got it... for private matches... and the better part of it ONLY if you have premium time activated. This is something that needs to be public, it needs its features enhanced a little bit, and it's something we've been waiting about 2 years for. You can keep extra special options and features private, and even for premium private, but the basic functionality needs to be put on the public side.
Oh, and that box where you currently choose public or private, and then a separate box to choose assault/conquest/skirmish after you click 'play now'? Why not just streamline that? Give us one game mode choosing mechanism off in the right corner. Just one box with the game mode choices greyed out until you select public. If you select private it takes you to the private lobby like it already does. And also... play now... has always been a little on the dumb side. Just 'Start' is fine. Less text, more accurate.
In case you haven't noticed, it's all of these little things that drive me crazy. These are basic engineering ideas, though. To have a lead designer -and- his developers not even think about the efficiency of their design is kind of irking. And again, since closed beta we've been saying things like this. It's nothing new. It's not a few recent mishaps. It's 2 full years of the community saying things.
So the last items on my list are pretty skimpy in comparison to ranting about how little flow things have been screwed up. I definitely saved the best for last, right?
Decals - where did they go? We would like to have those back.
Music - Living in southeastern Michigan comes with some advantages besides having a decent hockey team and tons of car shows - we know music. We have no Justin Bieber to apologize for, but we are the home of Motown and techno. We gave the world The White Stripes, Kid Rock, *******, etc. I'm sure I could drum up some production for stompy robot music here, and even produce some myself, but... what's with the lack of music anyway? Just no creative direction there probably?
Various UI scaling things - like the lobby... its kind of small and there's a lot of wasted screen space... and there's a decent amount of instances like this.
The mechlab - why do we always see the mechlab? Shouldn't that be for the mechlab tab? Surely you could find a better use for the other tabs to display other things instead of constantly being demanding on the GPU.
Purchasing mechs - from the store, you can't show the exact same stuff for a chassis that you can in the regular mechlab view when hovering over the chassis? I've seen other people complain about this, too.
Guys - please start actually reading the suggestions -and- the bitching. It will help you get your crap straight.
