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[Picone]

Constructive criticism from a long-term, happy, paying player

Maps
The maps you guys make are amazing. They look great, the variety is good (deathbowl, canyon, open field, etc). And I love the non-parallel nature of them and the visual aspects (crashed planes, buildings with streets and cars etc). But there aren't enough maps and they're being pushed out too slowly, making the game a bit stale. An easy way to add more variety to the game without having to have hundreds of maps is use the ones you already have and add weather conditions. Day / night / raining / light or heavy snowstorm.

MC / New purchases
Don't **** on your paying players! I didn't actually want to buy anything in particular (mechs etc) when I paid for this game, I still have ~8700MC sitting in my account (the things I did spend my MC on were drunk purchases. No regrets). The reason I payed was because the game is amazing, I spend a lot of time playing it and wanted to give back. I payed $130. I figured okay there isn't that much to buy that excites me at the moment but most of my mechwarrior memories from when I was a kid playing the game were of the clan mechs. So I figured, they'll come out eventually and then I can buy a couple of my old favourites. The clan release came out, but I couldn't buy it without spending more money. Why didn't the clan releases come with MC prices for those that had already paid? I would have looked and thought oh, I want x clan package, it costs $30 or 10,000MC. I have 8700MC already, I'll buy a couple thousand more and get the package. but that wasn't an option so now I just miss out on the clans, which are the only mechs I wanted in the first place, even though I spent $130 on the game.

Trash
You really need to get rid of the trash mechs. Fix them up. There’s no excuse for them. The good thing about the mech variants is that none of them are perfect, some are better at this but slightly worse at that, or they may even have the same hardpoints but different placements which may be more or less preferential so you have to make that decision of which you go for or buy both. But there is no excuse to have mechs that are STRICTLY WORSE. Example, the Spider 5V. There is absolutely no reason to purchase that mech. I had to get it to XP grind for my not-**** spider and it was no fun at all. The mech is just terrible and has no redeeming features.

Medium mechs
These need fixing. There’s a reason your queues are always showing the numbers you want to see for heavy and assault mechs and light mechs will always have their place. But mediums just don’t have a home at the moment. They can’t pack the punch and don’t have the armour of the assaults and heavies but they are far too slow to utilise damage avoidance the way you can with the lights. There is nothing you can do with a medium mech that you can’t do better with a light/heavy/assault. When there are 90kph victors out there, there is just no reason to buy a medium mech. And your queues show it.

User Friendliness (Interface)
Whoever is in charge of working on the user friendly aspect of your interfaces needs to find work somewhere else. The UI 2.0 looks pretty but it is pretty horrible to use. I’m not going into detail here because I know there are already pages and pages and pages listing my complaints all over the forums. The website needs fixing up too. To check challenges, I have to go to the website, log in, go to my profile, click on stats and then click on challenges. Judging from the chatter in-games, there are plenty of people that can’t even find that link. Really it should be something you can check ingame but either way you should never have to jump through that many hoops just to find the link

Premium Time
Don’t offer this as an award if you aren’t going to bank it. Like I would guess the majority of your players, I normally only play on weekends (or my version of them), and then – except for the odd match here and there I won’t be back on until the next ‘weekend’. Which means that every time I’ve won premium time, it’s kicked in just as I’ve finished playing for the weekend and then by the time I come back to the game again it’s gone. Which essentially means I never actually got any award.

Servers
These really need attention. MWO is laggy at the best of times. Its worse for me anyway since I’m in Australia but I know from chatting with others that they’re still having problems and the lag spikes are far more common than they ought to be. And I know it isn’t purely a server issue but sweet mother of jesus the queues to join games are long. You may look at it and think it’s not so bad, only a few minutes, but what’s a typical game, ~5 minutes? A lot of the time I will be waiting in queue for four minutes, and then sitting in the ready room for another minute, so for every 10 minutes I’m playing mechwarrior I’m only getting 5 minutes of actual game time.

Matchmaker
Holy **** this thing is an abortion. I realise on paper it looks good because the win/loss ratios are close to 1 but it’s not how it’s working. Basically you’ll get in and win a few games, just starting to get into about the right challenge level and then BAM matchmaker goes “oh his win rate is above 1 now, lets put him in the bottom queue with some *******”. There aren’t too many close games anymore. My team’s either roflstomping the other team, or being roflstomped by the other team. I’m guessing the control loop is set wrong, so it isn’t making adjustments in a useful timeframe.

Ready Room
You make me sit in a queue for 5 minutes to play a game and then throw me in a ready room with another timer that sometimes only takes ten seconds, other times takes two minutes, regularly resetting itself at random and then suddenly skipping fifty seconds and starting the game. Seriously, WTF? And there’s nothing we can do while we’re waiting except shoot the ****. It’d be far more useful to set a straight 30 second timer that only counts down once and then starts the game, and give us a view of the map with the chat screen so we can actually use that thirty seconds to check out our drop points (you don’t have to be specific, you could circle expected ‘drop zones’), see which side of the map we’re on and come up with some kind of strategy. We aren’t just wasting time. As an aside, the drop zone idea would be cool to see, where there’s an inbuilt % that a lance won’t always drop in the expected drop zone and that forces you to change your plans on the fly.

Challenges
Not going to go into too much details here. The challenges used to be really bad. You’re obviously making changes lately and they’re for the better, I’m looking forward to seeing where you end up going. Two things though, 50 victories in 4 days is too many. 25 or at max 30 in three days would be a more realistic goal. I went in for it this time because it was a novelty and I happened to have free time but most of the time I wouldn’t even bother with since I have work, uni and family. It’s just too much. Also, far too many mech bays. I’m glad you guys worked out that mech bays are a good prize – they’re cheap, a comparatively small item, but still valuable. That sort of prize is perfect. However, maybe get a bit more variety? A mech bay as the prize for every competition gets old quickly and we can only use so many mechbays. The number you’re giving out also prevents people from needing/wanting to spend money/MC on them. I regret the ones I bought but I needed them at the time and you weren’t giving them away willy-nilly then.

Prices
They’re not too bad, but I think a permanent -10% on everything would be better. It’d still be challenging, we’d still need to grind, but it’d just make it that little bit easier considering we need to buy three mechs just to xp grind for the one we actually want. The reality is, a 7 million CBill stalker actually costs ~15 million (after selling the other two we never wanted in the first place). 7 Million for a mech wouldn’t be bad but 15 million for a mech is terrible.

Bugs
Sweet lord, the bugs. Apart from the relatively harmless ones and the vague nuisances you expect, there are still serious crash issues, like every time my account tries to redeem something.

3:3:3:3
A good idea but flawed from the start. Firstly, it’s probably causing havoc with the matchmaker since no one wants to play with your ****** medium mechs. Second, now that clan’s involved, you’ve determined there will be a 12:10 ratio. So the 3:3:3:3 theoretically works for IC mechs (once mediums are fixed), but can’t work for clan.