Oh my gods, the things I've seen in this thread.
I teach game design, and I was a software developer in a previous life. The ins and outs of the industry are complex and deep and fraught with issues. People who work in the Video game industry are entertainers, and most of what is in this thread are people watching them trying to entertain you and going "DANCE HARDER MONKEY! I'M NOT ENTERTAINED RIGHT NOW"
I was going to go over the points of the first post, but after reading to about page four of the dreams that people hold, I decided to roll up a newspaper and go with what I call the "Thwap" method. It's more of reality check than anything else. (Anybody who wants to make a 'Fap' joke, know that you've been preempted).
So lets start:
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Matchmaking should work and it should be fixed already
Multiplayer game programming is one of the most complex things on the planet. Your natural assumption that you see it everywhere doesn't mean it's any less complex. If you consider every object in the game as an entity, from the mechs, to the missiles to the fallen arms and limbs, to the laser beams moving in the air, you're talking about tracking a huge amount of objects. Each of these objects have to be tracked in their position, velocity and orientation just for you to even play the game properly. Imagine if a mech shot at you, you registered damage but the laser beam went in another direction. That doesn't help you as a player and makes the game unplayable.
And it's not just positioning data. Just on your mech, the game has to transmit to all other players in the game. What type of mech you have, your mech's loadout (lest we forget that you can visually identify what a mech is carrying) your paint job, your proper animation based on throttle speed and or jumping, the current position of your torso and your arms, your mech's appearance based on the damage it's taken, what you're firing and where you're firing it from. It's a massive amount of data, and the average game has to transmit this to twelve players about the other eleven. It's a staggering amount of data that has to be transferred all around, not to mention making sure that some punk isn't using utility off a site to make his mech appear where ever he wants on the map.
This doesn't even handle connectivity issues. All of this data has to be thrown up to a single point, which they have to pay a huge amount to either get to their house or for a server farm to store, computed by those servers and then sent back to you. Your net hiccups more than you realize. But rather than give you a waiting screen, there's this little thing called predictive computing that predicts what's going on for a few seconds to try to fool you into nothing has happened at all. What you complain about is when the show doesn't work, which is the 5% when the model fails.
To put it simply, there is more data and calculations done in a minute of gameplay than you could digest in a day. It's a miracle that multiplayer games work at all.
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Well other game companies do it just fine
By other game companies, the standard you're putting PGI up to is Activision, Blizzard, EA. Companies with huge amounts of money and personnel that they can throw to fix any problem. PGI according to Wikipedia employs 65 people.
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That should be enough to....
65 people is barely enough to make a piece of accounting software, let alone make a multiplayer game that tens of thousands of people try to enjoy. As mentioned above, Multiplayer programming is one of the most complex fields there is, and I assure you that they're working every day to improve what they can with what they have. We're talking about stuff that five doctorates in Computer Science would take months to implement, and they're working probably with a handful of regular programmers and a smattering of masters. Just so you can bash heads with other mechs. When time allows it, they get to implement new features. Otherwise, they're fixing the stuff. Not because you complained about it, but because they already know it's there.
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But they use the Cry Engine to make the game. It's not like they actually do anything
Engines are versatile components in modern game development, but it's not like you put a bunch of resources into an engine, shake it and your game pops out. There is a ton of custom code that they had to put in here, most of it the multiplayer component to merge with their servers in order to make this work. This isn't a bunch of checkboxes to be checked off, we're talking serious high level programming which would make your brain split apart if you even tried it for a little bit.
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They're making tons of money though, they should hire more people then
65 may not seem like a lot to you, but paying for it is. If each were to earn a standard living wage of 40k a year, that means that their operating cost, without electricity, servers, computers, or websites for people to cry on would be 2.6 million alone. That means that they'd have to sell 100k copies of the full clan pack and still be 100k short. And your average developer generally has a
spouse, kids. They work eighty hour work weeks in the game industry regularly and they expect to be paid accordingly. The average starting salary for a staring programmer is 70k, a senior developer could be worth a 150k. Mechwarrior online is a fun game but as a free to play model is not entirely economically viable. This means two things:
1. They have to take up contract work. They worked recently on the multiplayer component for Duke Nukem forever, which shows how low they'll go to stay on as a company if you wanna get technical about it. They work on Mechwarrior when they can because mechwarrior doesn't pay all the bills
2. You yelling don't buy anything DOESN'T HELP YOUR/THEIR CAUSE. If anything, it makes it less economically viable and makes it less of a priority because you're unhappy and crying about things you don't know or understand how it functions
Set your sights lower. Don't consider them a triple A development company because they're not. Don't put them with Call of Duty or Battlefield because it takes 65 people just to make the freaking models for the guns in those games. You have 65 people working on a multiplayer game. You're lucky it works, and frankly, looks and works as well as it does. I've seen games produced by 200 people look and be horrible. Yet they're listening to you, listening to your complaints, and made an overall balanced game.
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But it's not balanced at all
Yeah, you remember the old mechwarrior. Me too. I played Ghost Bear's legacy in a Stone Rhino. It had five ppcs in the torso and nothing else but heat sinks. I was twelve at the time. I would sit there zoomed in, and any mech that came my way I'd alpha strike. Half died outright, the other half had their arms pop off and then the second shot would finish them off.
Granted, I never did any multiplayer in old mech games, but I think that they've done a fantastic job thus far. They've made it so that light mechs are a threat on the battlefield and everybody isn't running around in assaults. I own several clan mechs, and they are not the win button people say they are. It takes a lot of skill to play a clan mech properly, which I don't even do. It's like a Ferrari. IT's a high tech piece of machinery. You can drive in circles with it, but to get the max out of it, you have to know what you're doing.
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Yeah, well this game has been out for two years now
This game has been out for less than a year. It was launched September 2013. What you saw before that was Beta. Where they were trying to fix whatever they could. I registered when it started, but I didn't play till now. Why? Because there's a greater mech variety now, they have clan mechs now, and there is more stuff coming up. I love battletech. I read almost every book they came out with. I was issuing Batchalls the other week when they made it Clan vs. IS. I love this game. But products have to come to term. If you've been here playing it till now, it's only coming to fruition now. It took Blizzard, a company of 300 at the time, eight months to get WOW under control to start launching patches. That's what you've witnessed so far. And they've still added content to it. That is nothing short of miraculous.
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But I've been playing for two years though. I payed money then
A few years ago I read something that said the average MMO startup cost is 50 million dollars. That means as soon as you say the phrase "MMO", tack on enough to buy a bad major league sports team. Forget whatever the idea is about. Start with that. Now, it's gotten better over the years I'm sure, but it's still expensive. What you paid for up until now has been helping them with the creation of this game, because it costs a lot to run it while maintaining it, while developing content for it. Those 500 dollar golden mechs weren't them showing off, it was them BEGGING for money. Because they make so little on this game
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But they promised a bunch of stuff like Community Warfare and Voice over IP
Instead of looking at it from what they haven't given you, look at it from a stepping stone point of view. Rather than send out incredibly broken Community warfare stuff, they have, for the past two years, worked to make mech battles the best that they can. Matchmaking aside, they've taken out tons of stuck points in maps, they've made a ton of mechs look excellent and feel excellent. They've tweaked combat data, they've tweaked performance of the game to make sure that when you can finally make your team and fight one another that it feels great.
And as for Voice over IP? Making one from the ground up is difficult and costly. You don't just need software but hardware as well.
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*Thwap*
Your Xbox was designed to have it. It was designed to connect to their servers and allow you voice over calling which was done with thousands of technicians. And all of them on a dedicated machine. You're talking about the PC market, one of the most varied in terms of hardware, because all types of mics have to work. Once again, 65 people. And none of them specialize in voice over IP. I'm betting. So what that means is they'll have to look into an alternate source. They will have to buy a product from someone else.
A voice over IP system could cost between 5k and 500k depending on what they want. It still then has to be set up, done up right. And if it sucks, oh my god you'd never let them live it down. If it's free, they'll have to pay for support because they're a big company. Someone somewhere has to make the money and it isn't cheap. So that's jut another thing taken out of their wallets.
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Well what about my seemingly awesome idea about community made maps or making it more into an MMO or dropships landing and having to take it or jumping into system.
Now you're making your game. Not their game. They've suffered long and hard to make the empire state building. And now you want two empire state buildings sticking out of the top adjacent to it.
What is wrong with you!?
Lets take a simple example. I'm not picking on the OP but it's there. He asked why can't we have community made maps? It's worked for valve and garry's mod. Why not here?
Simple. Because other than having to suffer through mounds upon mounds of bad maps made by people that would range from not working to unbalanced to covered in missing textures, the maps would have to be uploaded to the server, to be downloaded to everyone else. Not a huge feat, but would cost servers. Then, we have a multiplayer game where your performance in it reflects how many C-bills you get. People complain about the current maps, imagine someone's creation where one team spawns in a pit while the other team spawns above them to fire down. It'd be havoc and chaos.
Beyond that, the teams work hard to create maps with intricate detail and scaling. I remember the old MW maps, that buildings were just boxes, now you can see the grand designs of the 31st century. And they are trying their best to deal with odd hit boxes and geometries that other games straight up dont' deal with. You don't have multisized players in COD? There is basically a new size category for every mech because of their hit boxes.
Almost every other idea I've heard in here that someone says "I'd pay for your game cause it'd be so much better" is basically like this. They're off the wall insane some of them. None of them consider the physical ramifications on gameplay nor technical feats required to impliment. They just sound cool, and everybody goes "They don't do cool ideas because they're lame and they're bad at game creation." Well they don't.
They have a plan with this game. They're developing as they go. And you've been along for the ride.
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Then they should tell us more!
For what? So you can complain and whine and moan about it? Keep shouting and repeating that they promised you it and it isn't here yet? A single concept like community warfare has probably been in development and planning for over two years. But with nobody actively developing on it. Why? Because the server 32 keeps crashing and starting up the environment isn't working with the last patch. They might have tons of things in the works and in development, but if they don't keep it close to their chest, either you'll keep complaining it isn't there, when it doesn't work out you'll claim they promised it to you, or a competitor could come up with something else to steal you, their consumer, away from this product.
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Well they should! PGI is holding MW hostage!
They're not holding it hostage. I am the saddest person to say this, but nobody wanted a mechwarrior game. When Microsoft took it over, it ruined the franchise, because they tried to turn it into something they weren't. We try to forget mech assault, but they did it. What PGI is doing is serving a Niche market. 90% of the people that play this game aren't new to the franchise. They loved the books, the tabletop game, the old games, or something along those lines. They can name a minimum of five battle mechs they like, which go ahead into town and ask someone you don't know to name five battlemechs. It's not that common.
And frankly, I like it this way. People are nice in game, except for the occasional grouch. They're helpful, and they all know the battle tech universe in one way or another. They're there to clash metal. And that's what we're doing, and PGI has been nice enough to give us this product essentially free of charge.
The OP showed a video saying what a good free to play game is. PGI has offered this. I bought the clan packs. I love looking at them. I love having them. I love owning them. I use them sometimes, but I love my inner sphere mechs too, which I pay for with C-bills. Hell, I was gonna stop at the direwolf, but bought the adder because of the ghost bear medallion. And I freaking love the Adder now.
What this tread is, is niggles. That's all people are coming up with in this. Niggles. They made my favorite weapon bad, it doesn't match cannon, why can't the make it a drop button, blah, blah, blah. I'm not trying to tell you to not complain. I'm not stamping your free speech, and hell, it's the internet. You're gonna complain anyway. Your complants do help shape what they want to do.
But what I'm saying is don't claim that they've ruined battletech or mechwarrior, because frankly it wouldn't exist if they weren't there. You'd still be fondly trying to remember it as technology got better and better until your kids asked what you even saw in that boxy old game. And you're doing it like you've never done it before.
I'm tired of this negativity about PGI. I may have not been around for most of their sins, but I can't seem to find them. The most people have is "There isn't enough content." Well fine. Don't play for a year. Then come back. If it's the same game, you win. But I'll bet you they'll have a ton done. In the mean time, be patient like everybody else.
Go blow something up. It's freaking awesome.
Edited for spelling, mistakes, and I replaced wife with spouse because I'm not sexist. Still working on it.
Edited by Frostfire, 26 August 2014 - 02:11 PM.
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Viktor Drake, on 26 August 2014 - 09:58 AM, said:
