277 replies to this topic

[SweetJackal]

Merchant, on 10 May 2014 - 10:11 AM, said:

Here comes the PGI reneg list. Not on your case, but it is coming.
Consumables
3PV
.....

The entire problem with everything on that reneg list is how it was handled or the design.

3PV wouldn't have been nearly as much backlash if PGi didn't flop between so many stances on it. To try to avoid backlash they started with saying you'd never be forced to use 3PV or play against people that use it. They then went on to say that 3PV didn't have any advantages. Both of those statements were proven false by the community and PGi went into full spindoctor mode and made the infamous "You Are On An Island" claim.

The fact that consumables exist is something I don't like but from a design standpoint I can see why it was done, not just to try to put in an expendable item that can be bought with real money but also a means of a C-Bill sink after the disaster that was Repair and Rearm. The real problem I have with them is what was turned into consumables in the first place: UAV, Airstrikes and Artillery Strikes were originally pitched as part of Role Warfare, means of players filling a role on the field to punch above their weight in terms of effectiveness and impact on the match as well as a means of promoting teamplay. Removing those elements from anything designed toward Role Warfare stripped the advertised design and cemented the Placeholder EXP Trees as overstaying their welcome. Role Warfare would need to be past the design phases for proper XP trees to be put in as the two were supposed to be intertwined, the EXP Trees weren't supposed to be bigger numbers on mechs across the board, the design of them being as such was just supposed to be a test to ensure that they worked.

The ranting and raving about the Reneg List itself might not be reasonable but the reasons why that ranting and raving exist is due to reasons much more powerful than "they lied to us and changed the design of the game."

[Harmatia]

Bishop Steiner, on 09 May 2014 - 10:45 AM, said:

the very point we tried to get through PGIs thick skull about catering to the non dedicated Btech crowd..... through all of Closed Beta? That Battletech might not have the fanbase size of WoW, but it was one of the most loyal, and dedicated, and oh, yeah, made up of mostly middle aged professionals, who had plenty of discretionary income that we were happy to part with....for the game we were described?

(I won't say "promised" like some of our more entitled members say...because we ere not promised, as founders anything beyond exactly what we received, and anyone really listening knew that they were painting blue sky ideas in very large strokes, and thus subject to changes due to reality constraints. And had those been the causes for changes, I think mos tof us would still be OK with it. But I am also reasonably sure that a lot of the changes were handed down directly from PGI, whose marketing people have never understood the Btech IP, and thus are still under the delusion this will somehow attract the numbers of players that the twitchy titles do..... which will NEVER happen.)

Dude, the PGI marketing people don't understand much. Period.

[WarZ]

Wow !!!

I had forgotten how good this game played. We have been slowly laddled with visual performance downgrades, and game play downgrades that I hadnt fully realized how far the game has fallen.

Weather effects ! I remember that rain. I thought it was f'ing awesome at the time. Now all the maps are a bland almost generic effect and feel.

SRM's !!! Not needing artemis in order to have SRMS's that worked great UP CLOSE. Right now even when I'm in someones face my SRM spread is all over the place. Seeing then vs now, goodness no wonder they suck balls now. Even if they fully fix hit reg.

No ECM putting in artificial (unnecessary) barriers.

The old interface was simple but nicer as well.

Plus I honestly did like the pace of 8 man matches more than 12's. Plus the steam roller effect though still present did not get as out of hand as quickly as it does now.

The game really did feel and play differently.

[Accused]

I miss the days where mech would glow brighter than the sun.

I also like forest colony before there were any weather effects whatsoever. I mean you could see clearly to the other side of the map. It's was beautiful. Also miss the glowing red eyes on Atlas (boo so what if you can snipe them across the map).

[Bishop Steiner]

Accused, on 10 May 2014 - 05:15 PM, said:

I miss the days where mech would glow brighter than the sun.

I also like forest colony before there were any weather effects whatsoever. I mean you could see clearly to the other side of the map. It's was beautiful. Also miss the glowing red eyes on Atlas (boo so what if you can snipe them across the map).

or, like other effects, they simply could dial down the range the eyes could be seen at.

[Krievian]

Technoviking, on 09 May 2014 - 10:46 AM, said:

I want to believe, with every fiber of my being, that this is not true, and instead, they have lost the way due to some sort of planning/publisher factor.

This. The developer's priorities are determined for them. On one hand the fact that core gameplay has evolved into what it has is only a reaction to the behavior of the players (all of them, not just the ones that bother to post on forums); a lot of goals, plans and ideas turn out to be deeply dysfunction in practice (i.e. A lot of proposed "fixes" would be geometrically worse then current balance). The wrench in the development process is the IGP/Microsoft requirements of monetization that make addon features (community warfare) a secondary, if not tertiary goal.

Edited by Krievian, 04 June 2014 - 11:18 PM.

[bryantjudoman]

Ya that beta footage looks darn amazing...sign me up. I love the way the thermal works. And the srm grouping is great. All in all I want THIS!

[pbiggz]

Something changed, its like they stopped caring, and paul went to work... not working...

[5th Fedcom Rat]

Accused, on 10 May 2014 - 05:15 PM, said:

I miss the days where mech would glow brighter than the sun. I also like forest colony before there were any weather effects whatsoever. I mean you could see clearly to the other side of the map. It's was beautiful. Also miss the glowing red eyes on Atlas (boo so what if you can snipe them across the map).

Forest colony always used to be my favourite map but I've never liked it ever since they mucked it up with the darkness and haze. Always have to adjust my monitor's contrast ratio ever since. When my mechwarrior is reaching forward to punch buttons on startup, so am I....

.

Edited by 5th Fedcom Rat, 10 May 2014 - 09:19 PM.

[RedDragon]

Man, those were the times...

For those of you who hadn't the chance to play in CB or before:


Sunny Forest Colony!

And what makes me really sad now that I rewatch those videos: They even had working cockpit screens. Can you imagine? There were displays telling you about ammo, mission kills and Gyro/Life support etc. - and now we are stuck with empty screens for 2 years. Even if those screens weren't functional back then, it was a lot cooler to see SOMETHING at all on them.

Not to talk about ammo explosions etc...


Edit: Oh and for the sake of your mental health, don't listen to what Russ is saying. 90% of that stuff we never got in the game (Role Warfare, 5 Pillars etc.). You will weep about those missed chances if you listen to it.

Edited by RedDragon, 11 May 2014 - 01:45 AM.

[Primetimex]

Thank you for sharing those glorious CB Youtube video's to remind us of how MW:0 looked back then - it was glorious - and not the downgraded mess it is now.

PGI take note:
1. Making people feel like they're blind on maps like Forest Colony is NOT enhancing gameplay
2. Implementing convoluted systems like ghost heat, jump jet shake, gauss charging is NOT enhancing gameplay.
3. Why do you keep yo-yoing between balancing weapons? Why not let them all be OP? Snipers OP - no problem - if you hadn't mucked up SRMs, they would be also OP - viable counters to snipers - problem solved.

Whenever I have a bad day in MW:0 - I fire up these old videos and it makes me feel better again - though not necessarily to play the current, downgraded version of it!

[Creovex]

Dymlos2003, on 09 May 2014 - 04:19 PM, said:

People saying stuff like this. I'm starting to think people are making stuff up to make the beta sound WAY better than what we have more. Haha.

The explosions when a mech died were real, however it killed gameplay as if you were duking it out with someone close range and managed to pull off the kill, you got caught in the explosion (practically insta-death for the victory). At the same time, the "trip/collision" effect was still ingame and that cause tons of people to run after a kill, trip and be caught in the explosion and die.

[Captain Stiffy]

GetterRobo, on 11 May 2014 - 04:37 AM, said:

PGI take note:
1. Making people feel like they're blind on maps like Forest Colony is NOT enhancing gameplay

OMFG THIS. 10,000 internets. THIS. I thought I was the only one. I turned off window glass/film grain and it helps marginally.

I want a shirt that says

W T F P G I

[Bishop Steiner]

Creovex, on 11 May 2014 - 04:57 AM, said:

The explosions when a mech died were real, however it killed gameplay as if you were duking it out with someone close range and managed to pull off the kill, you got caught in the explosion (practically insta-death for the victory). At the same time, the "trip/collision" effect was still ingame and that cause tons of people to run after a kill, trip and be caught in the explosion and die.

My favorite was a match on Forest Colony. We had 3 guys left, killing their last guy. A wave of LRMs crash in, killing the guys, and you start hearing the popopopopop of his ams ammo cooking off as we fade into end of match screen. A full 3 seconds into the end of match screen his ammo explosion cores me and kills me.

Lolz. I wish I had had FRAPs back then, would have been one of the best CB videos, ever.

[aniviron]

It's like the part OP mentions about the glowing eyes- yeah they were cool, but they had to go because they meant you could see the Atlas from a mile off.

Everything happened for a reason. Missile flight paths were changed because the netcode couldn't handle the old pathing. Inverse kinematics (where the legs bend to match the terrain, instead of going through it or floating above it on slopes) went for netcode reasons too. Missiles had to lose the splash damage which made them bad. Double heatsinks were added, which meant reasonable loadouts were severely undergunned against new powerhouses. The maps were made uglier to run on lower-spec machines. Thermal vision was destroyed to make it so that there was a reason to not use it for once. The mechs actually handle like mechs because no pilot trees means you can't do a 360 in a quarter second. Damage glow was removed so that the HDR wouldn't break when you looked at someone taking a lot of fire.

The list goes on and on. Some things I don't really understand why they were removed (Watch the video in the OP; at 5:23 the pilot takes a crit to his SRM ammo and you can see it drop to 0 and then moments later the mech starts to shake violently and you can hear the ******* terrifying sound of it cooking off before it kills him), For the most part the reasons were good. The thing is, somewhere along the way a lot of little compromises have added up to a game that is worse than the beta. Yes, it's less buggy now, but I was willing to deal with bugs in exchange for a game that looked, sounded, and played like a million bucks. Every time I see screenshots of beta maps and mechs, I just wonder if it's too late to go back.

[StandingCow]

They tried to be the next world of tanks... tried to "appeal to the wider audience" and didn't listen to their core fanbase.... in fact they went out of their way to let those core fans know that they weren't important to them with comments like, "They are on an island" and "Not our core demographic".

Add to that lies/changing their stance (whichever term you prefer) on large issues and slow development. It takes a hell of a lot for me to refuse to play a game... in fact I think this was the first one I have ever gone from loving and being excited about... to refusing to play because of what IGP/PGI has done. Just look at my side bar... I have poured quite a bit into this game, so that wasn't an easy choice to make, they drove me to it.

Edited by StandingCow, 11 May 2014 - 06:33 AM.

[DeathlyEyes]

Nikolai Lubkiewicz, on 09 May 2014 - 04:20 PM, said:

We certainly remain passionate about our game, which is why we could not let it suffer from being too demanding on the average users system. As has been pointed out by a number of players, we have had to tone down some of the graphical elements of the game in order to allow these players in.

Does this mean the end of those qualities forever? Certainly not. We still have a great deal of optimization work ahead of us and improvements to the average users specifications will allow us to push even further.

Then can you explain to me how an FX 8320 @ 4.8 GHZ + R9 290 Tri-X + 12 GB of DDR3 only get 30 FPS With extreme FPS drops bellow 20.

Edited by SLDF DeathlyEyes, 11 May 2014 - 07:54 AM.

[Gorgo7]

Durant Carlyle, on 09 May 2014 - 02:36 PM, said:

Some fixes:
1. Engines should only affect speed.
2. Torso twisting speed and up/down movement speed should be locked per variant.
3. No more Speed Tweak.
4. Heat sinks should only affect heat dissipation.
5. Double Heat Sink dissipation should be double SHS dissipation.
6. Weapon cooldowns should be increased, making for slower rate of fire for all weapons.
7. Weapon extended ranges should be reduced to 0.5x or even to zero, making small maps larger and big maps huge. Oh yeah, and most 'Mech combat would happen within 300 meters, like it does in the lore.
8. Max engine rating should be reduced on all 'Mechs, to something like (stock rating + 15).
9. Max armor rating should be based on stock armor rating, something like (stock tonnage + 2 tons).
10. Base sensor range should be class-dependent, something like 1200 meters for lights, 1000 meters for mediums, 800 meters for heavies, and 600 meters for assaults.
11. More rewards for doing scouty things.
12. R&R.
13. Heat Capacity should be static for all 'Mechs, modified only by variant quirks.
14. There should be movement and weapon penalties for running hot, something like 50% increased cooldown, some reticle shake similar to when jump jets are active, and 50% reduced speed, starting at 75% of Heat Capacity.
15. Turn radius should be determined by speed and 'Mech tonnage.
16. Collisions.

Yes, I want 'Mechs to be slower and less maneuverable.
Yes, I want 'Mechs to have different armor maximums, to make them feel more like they were designed to be.
Yes, I want weapons to have a slower rate of fire, especially the FLD weapons.
Yes, I want combat to happen at closer ranges.
Yes, I want heat to matter more than "Am I shutdown or not?".
Yes, I want to have players learn some fire discipline and not alpha all damn day.
Yes, I want players to stop face- and back-hugging, and better control range.
Yes, I think these changes would greatly benefit the game.

Dude... you don't want fixes...you want a new game.

[Bishop Steiner]

Gorgo7, on 11 May 2014 - 09:30 AM, said:

Dude... you don't want fixes...you want a new game.

is that so wrong?

[cSand]

SLDF DeathlyEyes, on 11 May 2014 - 07:53 AM, said:

Then can you explain to me how an FX 8320 @ 4.8 GHZ + R9 290 Tri-X + 12 GB of DDR3 only get 30 FPS With extreme FPS drops bellow 20.

That's strange,

My friend just got a 8320, no OC, and a 750ti with 8GB RAM....

My brother got a 8350 and a 760 with 8GB RAM....

Both are having great performance at 1080p...