Just to add to the OP ...
All of the points you make regarding long term involvement and external reasons to keep playing beyond the visceral experience of a single match ... were made clearly on these forums during closed beta.
PGI has spent years not listening to this feedback ... hopefully the current push on development is not "too little, too late". Fans of the MW franchise appear to be extremely dedicated and many have stuck around waiting for reasons to play to pull them back into the game. The opportunity is there for PGI to either succeed or fail in this task. At the moment, with the extremely small development team they have available ... the work moves slowly and I am not sure if they will be quick enough.
The release of clans is probably one of the last significant lore based events to drive revenue creation and pull people into the game.
Unfortunately, aside from some technical changes, the game experience now is entirely comparable to closed beta. More mechs, more maps, somewhat different weapon balance ... but fundamentally the same game experience.
PGI is only now - 2 years later - trying to patch on some elements that will provide external reasons to play each match.
Here is my list of features that would be useful:
- a better mech XP system allowing the player to select mech efficiencies for each mech variant from a pool ... much like skill trees or perks in other games. The current system is simply boring ... once you have mastered a few mechs .. it is simply a boring grind to earn enough xp to fill out the efficiencies. There should be common efficiency trees with multiple levels in each efficiency that can be bought, along with role efficiencies and weight class efficiencies. Enough so that each variant of the same mech could be tailored for different purposes. In addition, the number of efficiencies or xp spent on a mech should be capped so that players will have to choose which efficiencies are best for their playstyle with that particular chassis. This kind of xp system makes grinding more interesting and gives folks a reason to keep different variants - thus selling more mech bays - AND more important contributes to player retention.
- competitive play - leaderboards - organized tournaments - they are starting this a bit now but they need a much better UI interface with lobbies to truly support this type of play. I think PGI is hoping that the community will step up and do the work for this.
- fix the work flow issues in UI2.0 ... the UI should encourage efficient and fun customization so that folks want to jump in and play ... at the moment the UI is so arduous that I sometimes decide not to play because there is too much work required to get the mech I want to play ready.
- community warfare - lots of folks seem to think this could be a big driver and there is some truth to it - but it needs to be well done - individual matches need to feel like they matter to the players in order to retain them - to make this happen I think they will need to add new match types like attack/defend to play into the entire CW concept. Attack/defend multiple stationary targets ... attack/defend a mobile target. I am not sure that PGI has actually thought out what is required to make community warfare interesting and a driver for player retention. At the very least the end match summary screen will need some indication of the contribution of that specific match to the overall balance of power. PGI will also have to be careful to make sure that large organized player groups are not given the ability to completely decide the outcome ... otherwise they may find that the community warfare fizzles one way or another. CW is a very complex feature to design and implement ... I hope they have the manpower available to make it happen.
- on the individual play experience - matchmaking is probably the largest single driver they need to improve. Balanced matches are generally more fun. Fun keeps people playing. In addition, challenge keeps people playing. Unbalanced matches are not fun for the losing side and not enough challenge for the winning side ... and so demotivate both sides.
- hit registration needs to be fixed for all weapons. The current perception in the player base is that SRMs are still not correctly registering and lasers may also need work. Lasers are resolved in pulses and the impression is that some of these pulses miss when they should not. This is much harder to find and identify since SOME of the laser does damage. It becomes difficult to prove that it is not doing the correct amount.
Anyway, I wish PGI the best of luck with the game ... I hope that they turn it into the kind of game that we all want to continue playing ... but they could have avoided these concerns if they had listened to feedback years ago ... so I am not as hopeful as I should be ...
Edit:
P.S. If you want to fix poptarts ... add a random cone of fire effect to any weapon fired while jumping ... make it small enough that the weapons will generally hit the target but calculate it independently for each weapon so they don't necessarily hit the same mech section. Makes both physical and game sense ... there was a to hit penalty involved in firing in a turn you jumped in TT.
A while back they added a lot of "screen shake" which made firing while jumping more challenging but made many people feel ill ... adding a random firing cone for jumping fire fixes both issues.
Edited by Mawai, 05 June 2014 - 05:11 AM.
0
