33 replies to this topic

[1453 R]

[[Firmly slapping the hornets' nest in 3...2...1...*SMACK*]]

It has occurred to me, in recent days, that people are putting really very unrealistic expectations on the Community Warfare feature currently absent from MWO.

As it stands, the typical argument is that without CW, MWO is ****. It’s incomplete **** at that, with absolutely no reason to keep playing, and also Piranha is the worst video game developer ever, even worse than all those guys selling college-homework-project level ‘alpha builds’ for twenty bucks on Steam, because Community Warfare ISN’T HERE YET and how dare they keep ignoring their Founders who are CLEARLY the only people who actually matter since they wouldn’t even have a job if not for anyone with a Founder tag?! There’s nothing to do, no reason to play, balance is butts, bugs are rampant, and all Piranha ever does is sell bobbleheads and Champions to people who don’t subscribe to N.O.P.E..

The corresponding notion, of course, is that the introduction of Community Warfare will, in one fell swoop, completely revitalize the game and Make Everything Better. All balance issues will dissolve away, any remaining bugs will take a hike, poptarts and LRM-spammers will spontaneously explode within the first five seconds of every single drop, and every single player of MWO will get a free Marauder handed down to them by Morgan Kell himself, and every time they drop in that Marauder water and flowers will spring up in its footsteps. Every single MWO player’s individual, personal actions will have a massive, statistically trackable impact on the future of the Inner Sphere, any/all group numbering limits will vanish, and Jesus Christ himself will come down from the Heavens to drop in his favorite Orion, with Siddharta the Buddha in a Thunderbolt and Mohammad the Prophet in a Cataphract next to him, and they will bless us all with the sweet kiss of divine laser fire that gives everyone it hits 100% experience gain across all chasses for the rest of their natural lives.

Ahem: yeah, right.

Come on, guys…what, in the history of this game’s development, makes any of you think that the introduction of CW will go any better/smoother than the introduction of U.I. 2.0? There will be more bugs, not less, balance will be completely unaffected, and frankly people have spent two years now building up their own ideas of what Community Warfare will be. They’ve all constructed elaborate game modes and objective types in their brains that sound just freaking awesome (like, 9M-level, even!), and they’ve decided that being able to play that will Save Mechwarrior Online. Since CW is also supposed to Save Mechwarrior Online, and clearly their incredibly unrealistic expectations for hours-long, multi-stage sieges across half a dozen different maps in sequential order with strict drop limitations and a deep, multi-faceted resupply and R&R system which somehow only inconveniences meta-followers is the only thing that will Save Mechwarrior Online, why, that’s just exactly what CW is going to be!

Does no one else realize that CW is going to be little jiggling lines on a map on the launcher somewhere, nudged slightly this way or that by the aggregate points of every player in whatever faction the last week, and with occasional up/downs to base chassis costs for House players based on who managed to burgle which factory planet over the weekend event?

Community warfare is not going to ‘save’ Mechwarrior Online. If the game needs saving at all, then the things that will save it will be a massively streamlined new player front end with useful tutorials and instructions that let new folks hit the ground running – which Community Warfare does jack-all nada to address.

It’s going to be an improved communications system making use of commo rose/command wheel systems that allow PUGlies to coordinate their efforts simply, intuitively, and without the vile, horrid, ear-searing hate-spew that in-game VoIP would invite.

It’s going to be a ground-up reworking of the currently-totally-borked skill tree and module systems, both of which are currently nothing more than expensive and time-consuming taxes on your ‘Mechs.

It’s going to be the introduction of a private match system that allows the competitive players to form their own leagues and hold their own…oh, wait. We checked this one off already, didn’t we? And lo and behold, people complained long and loud about the system’s implementation and accused Piranha of being a bunch of money-grubbing jerkbags, rather than saying “Cool! We finally got this thing we’ve been wanting for ages! It may not have been exactly how we wish it had turned up, but it’s here! And it can always be improved later on!” Which, frankly, reminds me an awful lot of Skirmish mode, come to think of it…

Face it, folks. CW isn’t going to Save Mechwarrior Online because none of you are willing to let it be saved. None of you are willing to admit that Piranha is even capable of Saving Mechwarrior Online – you’re all already convinced that the game is dead and nothing the dev team can possibly do will resuscitate it. Even when CW finally hits, all that will happen is a rampaging firestorm of threads about how piranha “SCREWED UP CW FOREVER!”, and how it’s the final death knell of the game and the servers are going to be shut down by this time next year.

So why do you keep trying to convince yourselves otherwise, eh?

Edited by Egomane, 09 May 2014 - 03:22 PM.

[Davers]

If CW is as you paint it, then no. It will not 'save' MW:O. But it will most likely kill it.

Already they are running out of ways to make new mechs different. Look at light mechs. Wolfhound? Panther? You can make them (and possibly superior versions) of them with the mechs we have now. The heavier chassis might have some more life to them, but that is just because they have more weight, and thus more varied loadouts. But it won't last. Why is the T-Bolt considered 'meh'? It's because we have mechs in that exact tonnage that does it's job better.

Done right, CW will have an effect on all aspects of gameplay. If it is just a bunch of wavy lines and percentages then this game is already dead.

[Livewyr]

For me, it's the clan mechs that will tell the tale of Livewyr's continuation in MWO.

If they're freaking awesome (from a different, but objective standpoint) then I will stick around in hopes that the foundation will be made sound. If not, then I will not hang around in the tree to fall with the rotten trunk.

CW's will still be garbage if all the battles are fought with jumpsniping highlanders, cataphracts, and shadowhawks- with Spiders/Ravens and everyone dropping arty strikes as fast as they can cycle.

People don't like doing 12mans for that reason.. why would they want to do organized 12mans when those arrive?

---------------------------
The foundation must be made whole before this game has any hope.

[Sagamore]

Davers, on 09 May 2014 - 03:26 PM, said:

Already they are running out of ways to make new mechs different. Look at light mechs. Wolfhound? Panther? You can make them (and possibly superior versions) of them with the mechs we have now. The heavier chassis might have some more life to them, but that is just because they have more weight, and thus more varied loadouts. But it won't last. Why is the T-Bolt considered 'meh'? It's because we have mechs in that exact tonnage that does it's job better.

I've always thought that chassis quirks are another way to make chassis unique. For example, "weaker" chassis might have a faster turn rate or acceleration or whatever compared to their similarly sized cousins. This could be taken a step further with giving the Awesome a quirk to allow it to shoot up to 3 PPC without a heat penalty.

On topic, if anyone thinks that CW will be the magic pill that fixes everything they are joking themselves. The core gameplay of MWO is good. If it wasn't, we wouldn't still be playing the game. CW will just make those games more meaningful.

But TBH, other than a few bugs here and there, as a casual player I am very happy where MWO is right now and CW will be value added not the feature that saves or destroys the game.

[Rick Rawlings]

1453 R, on 09 May 2014 - 03:17 PM, said:

It’s going to be an improved communications system making use of commo rose/command wheel systems that allow PUGlies to coordinate their efforts simply, intuitively, and without the vile, horrid, ear-searing hate-spew that in-game VoIP would invite.

Oh, look at you... you managed to sneak a nonsensical anti-voip rant into your nonsensical "hey, the game is already pretty good and a new front end will make us forget the mind-numbingly repetitive deathmatch on the same old maps" rant! Well played, sir!

[1453 R]

Davers, on 09 May 2014 - 03:26 PM, said:

If CW is as you paint it, then no. It will not 'save' MW:O. But it will most likely kill it.

Already they are running out of ways to make new mechs different. Look at light mechs. Wolfhound? Panther? You can make them (and possibly superior versions) of them with the mechs we have now. The heavier chassis might have some more life to them, but that is just because they have more weight, and thus more varied loadouts. But it won't last. Why is the T-Bolt considered 'meh'? It's because we have mechs in that exact tonnage that does it's job better.

Done right, CW will have an effect on all aspects of gameplay. If it is just a bunch of wavy lines and percentages then this game is already dead.

Funny…I actually find myself relatively content with where the game is right now, feature-wise. It’s not dead at all. Ailing, sure, but still more than strong and healthy enough to save – if we do the right things instead of expecting the wrong thing to magically save the entire game in one patch.

Considering that Community Warfare, as proposed by The Community, is designed specifically to punish/squeeze out lone wolves “who all just need to get over themselves, pick a faction, join a unit, and get on TS3 already, jeeez you antisocial foo’s!”, I’m kind of anti- Community Warfare, honestly. I’d much rather see the quirks, modules, and skill tree systems all ripped out and rebuilt from scratch than watch Piranha pull the trigger on making half their regular, PUG-droppin’ playerbase want to uninstall. A proper quirks system, backed up by skill trees and modules that aren’t nothing more than time-sink taxes between ‘Mech Being Bad and ‘Mech Being Good, would go a lot further towards making this game awesome again than would some hyper-convoluted mess wherein an entire regiment of players has to organize for a six-hour assault on Endor. Or, for that matter, the same game modes we have now but with a pointless star map added on the launcher/homepage, and also an occasional badge or cockpit banner for surpassing 100k LP for your choice of faction.

Sagamore, on 09 May 2014 - 03:36 PM, said:

On topic, if anyone thinks that CW will be the magic pill that fixes everything they are joking themselves. The core gameplay of MWO is good. If it wasn't, we wouldn't still be playing the game. CW will just make those games more meaningful.

No it won’t. Frankly, Community Warfare hurts anyone who drops under a Lone Wolf tag, which is at least half of the PUG population. And enough has been said about that 84% thing to get the idea across. If you’re not part of an organized House unit, then Community Warfare takes away from your game, it doesn’t add to it. How people can even remotely think this is a good idea, I cannot fathom.

Edited by 1453 R, 09 May 2014 - 03:50 PM.

[Khobai]

Quote

has occurred to me, in recent days, that people are putting really very unrealistic expectations on the Community Warfare feature currently absent from MWO..

Not us. PGI. They said it would be done 2 years ago. Theyre the ones putting unrealistic expectations on CW. You cant blame players for believing them. Nor can you blame players for being upset when they dont deliver.

[Davers]

1453 R, on 09 May 2014 - 03:47 PM, said:

Funny…I actually find myself relatively content with where the game is right now, feature-wise. It’s not dead at all. Ailing, sure, but still more than strong and healthy enough to save – if we do the right things instead of expecting the wrong thing to magically save the entire game in one patch.

Considering that Community Warfare, as proposed by The Community, is designed specifically to punish/squeeze out lone wolves “who all just need to get over themselves, pick a faction, join a unit, and get on TS3 already, jeeez you antisocial foo’s!”, I’m kind of anti- Community Warfare, honestly. I’d much rather see the quirks, modules, and skill tree systems all ripped out and rebuilt from scratch than watch Piranha pull the trigger on making half their regular, PUG-droppin’ playerbase want to uninstall. A proper quirks system, backed up by skill trees and modules that aren’t nothing more than time-sink taxes between ‘Mech Being Bad and ‘Mech Being Good, would go a lot further towards making this game awesome again than would some hyper-convoluted mess wherein an entire regiment of players has to organize for a six-hour assault on Endor. Or, for that matter, the same game modes we have now but with a pointless star map added on the launcher/homepage, and also an occasional badge or cockpit banner for surpassing 100k LP for your choice of faction.



No it won’t. Frankly, Community Warfare hurts anyone who drops under a Lone Wolf tag, which is at least half of the PUG population. And enough has been said about that 84% thing to get the idea across. If you’re not part of an organized House unit, then Community Warfare takes away from your game, it doesn’t add to it. How people can even remotely think this is a good idea, I cannot fathom.

As I said, if CW is as you describe then no, it will not add anything to the game. Maybe I am just naive (I did buy Founders after all) but I am hoping CW is more than that. But since it looks like CW will just be a separate queue, and what we have now will remain unchanged as 'Public Queue' then I don't see how it will hurt you at all.

[Rhaythe]

Quote

CW WILL NOT SAVE MECHWARRIOR ONLINE

Nor will forum rage damn it.

[Green Mamba]

Well to "SAVE THE GAME" it Will actually have to be "PLACED IN THE GAME" instead of constantly pushing it back..Games have a Certain Shelf Life to be successful after they are Launched. MWO went Live date is September,its already been 8 months and counting since its been considered released.

[Khobai]

Quote

Well to "SAVE THE GAME" it Will actually have to be "PLACED IN THE GAME" instead of constantly pushing it back..Games have a Certain Shelf Life to be successful after they are Launched. MWO went Live date is September,its already been 8 months and counting since its been considered released.

Its true. And whats ironic is the only players still devoted to playing the game 8 months later are the players PGI derided as not being their target audience. DERP.

[1453 R]

Here’s the thing. Original Post, Condensed Version:

People want Community Warfare. They’ve been led to expect, by other forum users and in many cases by Piranha themselves, that Community Warfare will ‘Save MechWarrior Online’. It is the last remaining Big Freaking Feature in the game – once CW goes in, there isn’t anything else coming after it that players can use to try and tell everyone else that the game is *****.

if Community Warfare comes out, and it is anything less than the Jesus, Buddha and Mohammed thing I laid out above, people will jump ship in droves because they not only held unrealistically high expectations of the update, but there will then be nothing else in the pipeline they can point to and say “See?! That! If only Piranha would get off their lazy, worthless butts and do that already, this game would be awesome instead of *****!”

These players need to either admit to themselves that the game is all right – certainly possessed of its share of problems and in need of some pretty serious fixing, but still all right even in spite of that – or they need to admit to themselves that the game will never be what they wanted it to be, they will never get to play a six-hour continuous siege of Endor with dropship supply runs, multiple points and fronts of attack and defense, and a dozen ‘Mechs for them to cycle through as each one wears out, and they should just give up the ghost already and uninstall like they keep threatening to do if CW doesn’t deliver, and soon.

I’d honestly prefer the former. I like having people to play against, and I’ve missed my giant stompy robots since MW4 finally went knockers-up back in the day. So can we all just agree that CW is not going to magically fix the whole game and maybe – just maybe – set some slightly more realistic expectations of the feature here?

[Willard Phule]

I hear you, man, and I agree with you completely.

We've been hearing the whole "this will save MW:O" or "This is the first step to fixing issues that we weren't able to before" diatribe since....well....since I've been playing, at least.

And oddly enough, it's always...ALWAYS...followed up with a cashgrab. Almost makes you think they're desparate, doesn't it? But, that's neither here nor there.

There's not one thing...one simple "omg, this is what we were missing" part that can be plugged in and everything be EXACTLY like they promised it would be at any given point since this game was cobbled together.

There are SO many things wrong with the game.....and, if what you read in the forums is to be believed....there are SO many people in the community that are CAPABLE of fixing each and every one of these problems. I'm not talking mouth-breathing complainers like me or even the white knights....actual honest-to-god coders that actually work with Cryengine. And they're willing to DO IT FOR FREE...if only they had access to the core game code.

Huh. Reminds me of several other online, multiplayer, first person shooter type games. Half-Life is the fist that comes to mind. Both Counterstrike and TF2 were fan built Mods that eventually got sold to Valve and made them a lot of money. Maybe PGI will start to consider something like that at some point...but, probably not until they're no longer financially able to support the game and will just sell the rights to whoever, since they still own the license or whatever to the franchise.

Whatever. I'm still here. I'm still playing (at least until I figure out how to make the graphics on MW3 and MW4 look good on my modern gaming computer....after that....I think I'll do the campaigns one more time, just for old time's sake)...they've got a monopoly on getting my Battlemech fix for the moment.

[Sephlock]

[Dymlos2003]

Khobai, on 09 May 2014 - 03:57 PM, said:

Not us. PGI. They said it would be done 2 years ago. Theyre the ones putting unrealistic expectations on CW. You cant blame players for believing them. Nor can you blame players for being upset when they dont deliver.

What are you talking about? PGI has normal expectation, they know what they are making. It's the players that are thinking it will fix everything. Instead of, you know, actually fixing and polishing what we have now.

[Davers]

1453 R, on 09 May 2014 - 04:14 PM, said:

Here’s the thing. Original Post, Condensed Version:

People want Community Warfare. They’ve been led to expect, by other forum users and in many cases by Piranha themselves, that Community Warfare will ‘Save MechWarrior Online’. It is the last remaining Big Freaking Feature in the game – once CW goes in, there isn’t anything else coming after it that players can use to try and tell everyone else that the game is *****.

if Community Warfare comes out, and it is anything less than the Jesus, Buddha and Mohammed thing I laid out above, people will jump ship in droves because they not only held unrealistically high expectations of the update, but there will then be nothing else in the pipeline they can point to and say “See?! That! If only Piranha would get off their lazy, worthless butts and do that already, this game would be awesome instead of *****!”

These players need to either admit to themselves that the game is all right – certainly possessed of its share of problems and in need of some pretty serious fixing, but still all right even in spite of that – or they need to admit to themselves that the game will never be what they wanted it to be, they will never get to play a six-hour continuous siege of Endor with dropship supply runs, multiple points and fronts of attack and defense, and a dozen ‘Mechs for them to cycle through as each one wears out, and they should just give up the ghost already and uninstall like they keep threatening to do if CW doesn’t deliver, and soon.

I’d honestly prefer the former. I like having people to play against, and I’ve missed my giant stompy robots since MW4 finally went knockers-up back in the day. So can we all just agree that CW is not going to magically fix the whole game and maybe – just maybe – set some slightly more realistic expectations of the feature here?

So my choices are 'accept the game is alright' or 'accept that the game will never have good CW and uninstall'? Isn't calling for players en masse to uninstall against the CoC?

[Ph30nix]

Honestly MWO will limp on for a few years at least as long as they are bringing in enough to keep the servers running it will limp on. It will never get to be anything we can sing praises of or that will be seen as a amazing game down the road at best it will be something that killed some time and we wasted money on when we were drunk.

It's a shame too it had a lot of potential but greed and stupidity derailed any chance it had.

[Green Mamba]

Here is the deal IMO, others may disagree and that's OK. There is a Certain game being developed (I won't say the name of the Space Sim game and ask others not say it either because I don't want this thread to be jettisoned).This game is having a Dog Fight Module Coming out Soon ..."eventually" that is. it Will go Alpha Later this Year and probably be released 2015 or thereabouts ...Why is this important you ask? Because when I look at the Guild Registry I see Probably about 50%+ of the Same names(people) that were or currently are playing this game. PGI has to get this game going before that game gets too far along and people lose Interest in the game that PGI currently has implemented.MWO is on a Time schedule to deliver the game that was promised.

Edited by Green Mamba, 09 May 2014 - 04:33 PM.

[1453 R]

Davers, on 09 May 2014 - 04:28 PM, said:

So my choices are 'accept the game is alright' or 'accept that the game will never have good CW and uninstall'? Isn't calling for players en masse to uninstall against the CoC?

Heh, ye missed the part where I would, instead, much prefer for players to not uninstall since I like having other players in the game. I just would also prefer for the ‘CW Will Save Mechwarrior Online’ folks to realize that A.) it won’t actually do that, and B.) some of us are in fact rather dreading the final implementation of CW, since it sorta kinda means the end of us being able to play MWO if it goes down the way the CWWSMWO folks want it to.

As soon as six-hour sieges becomes the only game mode in this game, I’m out. Not because I want to be out, but because I have a job and a life and I can’t make time for the full-on Community Vision™ of Community Warfare. I just can’t. And frankly I don’t feel like you guys have any more right to take my game away from me than I have to take yours away from you.

And since Piranha agrees with that sentiment, CW will consist of maps with vaguely squiggling lines and the occasional economic boon/crash. Sooner people accept that, the sooner we can move past CWWSMWO and maybe throw our energy and effort into things that might help.

[Roland]

The equivalent of "Community Warfare", as created by folks like Dark Phoenix in the NBT league, are the single thing that kept Mechwarrior 4 alive for the better part of a decade.

But the thing is, it wasn't just wavy lines on a map.

If that's all CW ends up being, then PGI will have failed miserably, and the game will cease to be... because while it could technically be possible to use private matches to play games in some kind of league that we create on our own that gives us the depth of the league play we had in Mechwarrior 4... why would we do that, and pay a subscription fee for it? Why would we continue to feed PGI money, if we are forced to do all the persistence ourselves?

We had that in Mechwarrior 4, and we didn't have to pay fees for it. We paid 30 bucks and bought the game.

If MWO has no persistent universe, or has one that offers no real depth or interest, then there will be no reason for folks to pay PGI a monthly fee for premium time.