27 replies to this topic

[Stalkerr]

EDIT: Oh man, I typed this in one sitting and it's really long. I apologize if I massacred any grammar along the way.

Hi everyone,

It has been a little over a year since #saveMWO, and I wanted to take a look back at the MWO Community's first effort at attempting to collectively raise our concerns about MWO to PGI. I thought now might be a good time to remember, especially as the next "Community Town Hall" for MWO will be facilitated by Russ Bullock himself. A lot can change in a year.

Feel free to ask me any questions about #saveMWO in this thread. I will provide full disclosure.

How it Started: Not a Goon Plot
Set your time machine back to July, 2013. Goons were dissatisfied with the level of communication (or lack thereof) we saw from PGI at the time, as well as the game design decisions we thought were impacting the ability to have fun playing MWO. Victor Morson, reached out to us at the time, asking us to review a letter he was trying to shop around to various units, outlining concerns about the direction of MWO. This really solidified for us that we might not be the only ones feeling that MWO was becoming less fun over time.

Originally, we thought "oh, well there's nothing we can really do", however some discussion one night I and a few other Word of Lowtax directors got fired up and decided that we shouldn't just site back... we should become engaged and try to organize the community to "save" the game. Thus, #saveMWO was born.

The idea of #saveMWO was to create a rallying point for those with concerns about MWO to collectively raise those concerns to PGI. We hoped that if enough people got involved and were committed to this, we could get a response from PGI and maybe, just maybe, we could start to see positive changes that would lead to a more fun game for the entire community.

I cleared this with Garth Erlam first and he was all for it. He told me that he was hoping to see change as much as we were. OK, then, we had a level of official approval to move forward!

Kicking it off
First, we had to organize everyone. So, we began identifying unit leaders and other opinionators in the community and contacting them individually via MWO Forum PMs. As we did so, we found that we truly weren't alone, that many others felt the same way as we did and wanted to see a change. It also quickly became clear that not everyone agreed on how change should be brought about, or what change should even look like.

So, Town Hall #1 was born. The purpose? Rally the community around a single event and start getting some consensus. A thread was made, infrastructure organized and people rallied. Over 500 people attended the first Town Hall. All the unit and community reps spoke about what they wanted to see changed, and even of their concerns that #saveMWO might not have the impact we hoped it would. We had no idea what we were doing, so it wasn't super organized, but this was still awesome, because the community was committed to change.

But how to record that consensus for change? We needed a real deliverable, and so The Letter came about. We worked with all the representatives to craft a list of points we wanted PGI to open up discussion with the community on with the idea of addressing them. This letter was the result of a ton of discussion and compromising made by people who really care about playing stompy robot games:

Quote

To Russ Bullock, Paul Inouye, Bryan Ekman, and studio staff,

Mechwarrior Online (MWO) is a game with a rich concept, fun core gameplay, and exciting IP. We, your active players, have invested heavily in this vision alongside you. All of us are passionate about your game and its continued success. It is our commitment to seeing it succeed that drives us to write to you today. We are concerned. The game’s focus has shifted and we, the players, are not having fun for reasons we consider wholly avoidable. We feel strongly that several design or production choices have negatively impacted our enjoyment of your game:

• Very slow iteration of simple gameplay balance
  
• Decisions made contrary to constructive community feedback
  
• Segregation of 8 man and 4 man player queues in a social online game, a system made obsolete by implementation of Elo ranking
  
• Design decisions often failing to account for high level gameplay
  
• Using canon Battletech systems despite their unsuitability for PC games

It has been over a year, but many of the simple problems are still unaddressed. As a collective we have seen serious declines in the numbers of players participating, buying MC, and enjoying the game. Your community believes the following points are the most urgent. They represent what we feel is the best course to bring about positive and meaningful change to MWO.

• Appoint community representatives from player groups to provide objective game feedback for your design team
  
• Aggressively iterate on simple and inexpensive game balance (weapons, mech quirks) with help from the public test server
  
• Abandon tabletop values and fittings where logical
  
• Use external focus testing to help with prioritization and vetting of balance changes
  
• Improve the new user experience
  
• Provide a roadmap for private lobby/queue support

We make these suggestions to you, the developers of MWO, because we want to have fun playing this game again. Above all else, we stress that the simple things that make MWO great should be polished before new systems are put on top of them (CW, Heat Scale, etc.) We want reasons to continue inviting our friends, playing together with them, and supporting this game throughout its lifetime. Right now, MWO is not that game, and we know it can be. We sincerely hope you take steps to address our concerns.


Thank you for hearing us out.

Canvassing, Town Halls, and Wrapping it Up
A call went out for signatories to The Letter, and boy did the community respond. Over the course of a month, over 1000 individual players signed the letter and unit leaders representing over 5000 MWO players signed on behalf of their units. To drum up more awareness, and also to figure out next steps, we held several more Town Halls. Each of these community meetings, while less well-attended than the first town hall, resulted in a ton of thought-provoking discussion and ideas about where to go next.

During this time, I sent The Letter and signatures off to Garth and asked him to bring it up with Russ, Paul and Bryan. I also contacted Russ and Bryan separately in the hopes that I could engage them directly and get some sort of actionable response from them.

Unfortunately, the only response we got was a post from Bryan saying, essentially, "we hear you and are actually already working on many of these things". However, there was no real follow up from this and no attempt at community engagement by PGI. For me, at least, I saw all this effort put forward by over 1000 active community members as for naught.

Legacy
Most folks see #saveMWO as a failure, as it didn't achieve its stated goals. While there's some element of truth to this, since to be honest once we had 1000s of people behind us we actually had no idea how to direct them effectively, I believe that the legacy of #saveMWO is to truly wake up large portions of the community to the fact that they weren't alone in their concerns and in their desire to see change. While I know many people who stopped playing after saveMWO concluded, some continued on in community leadership roles, doing their best to advocate for the community even though they continued to disagree with the direction PGI was taking the game.

For those who lived it, #saveMWO was a pivotal moment in the history of the MWO community, and stood as a clear marker for everyone as to when the community really stood up and made their voice be heard.

As for myself and many of the goons, we started pledging to Star Citizen and contracted space madness. #saveMWO was nothing if not an emotional rollercoaster, and for many of us, we were simply spent from advocating for change and seeing no movement at PGI. The best road for us was to engage with a new community and distance ourselves from MWO. TIme heals.

The Road Forward
I was excited to see Russ engage himself with the community on a new level recently. The discussions that are happening, the posts he is making, they are everything we asked for and wanted out of #saveMWO. It's funny that Russ refers to the upcoming community meetings as "Town Halls", as for me it speaks to the legacy of #saveMWO and the importance of multiplayer game developers truly engaging and even partnering with their community of players to create an enjoyable experience for all.

In a way, Russ is leading #saveMWO 2.0.

I hope for the best out of the new level of PGI engagement with the community, and regardless of my personal involvement or not in the proceedings, I look forward to playing a more engaging and fun robot game in the future with my friends throughout the MWO Community.

(TLDR: SQUAWWWWK!)

Reference
The thread that started it all: http://mwomercs.com/...128120-savemwo/
Town Hall #1 Thread: http://mwomercs.com/...l-1-discussion/
Town Hall #2 Thread: http://mwomercs.com/...hall-two-bravo/
Town Hall #3 Thread: http://mwomercs.com/...ty-town-hall-3/

The Letter to PGI: https://docs.google....DfMZDUeBG8/edit
List of Signatures: https://docs.google....94cFBDOVE#gid=0

Edited by Stalkerr, 18 September 2014 - 10:57 AM.

[Stalkerr]

I've edited the post for clarity in a few spots, notably where I talk about exactly what started #saveMWO.

[Artgathan]

#saveMWO was exactly as pivotal as Occupy Wall Street.

[ApolloKaras]

The goons are seriously attempting to take cred for the community amassing ideas for council?

[DrAwkward]

Saxie, on 18 September 2014 - 11:02 AM, said:

The goons are seriously attempting to take cred for the community amassing ideas for council?

Don't worry, they'll call up some sockpuppets to claim that it represents 5 to 50 or even 500 shadow-players that totally support this revisionist story, just like last time.

[Training Instructor]

Artgathan, on 18 September 2014 - 11:00 AM, said:

#saveMWO was exactly as pivotal as Occupy Wall Street.

Yeah, our unit had 40-50 players last summer, not all at once, but we never heard a whisper of this. I remember the posts, but I had little hope of any headway with PGI.

You know what brought about the recent changes to Russ's attitude? Catastrophic failure of quarterly sales expectations. Simply put, when given the opportunity to spend $240 on the masakari package, too many players just bought one or two mechs ala carte, and were okay with that. Or they just didn't buy any clan packages at all, having played long enough to know that waiting a month or three to use their hoard of cbills on individual clan mechs was a wiser route than picking up a package that might be half-filled with garbage like the Phoenix pack was.

Also, for every person really excited about PGIs new push for customer interaction, there's another person or two that is extremely skeptical and pictures the abusive husband begging his battered wife to let him come home, because he's really changed this time and he won't ever hit her again.

Put me in the skeptic's camp. Dollar signs are all that influences Russ or Bryan. Thinking you can motivate either of them to move in your favor if it doesn't yield immediate profits is to be continually disappointed.

Case in point, clan wave 2 goes on sale right after they make this big community outreach. They'll probably keep on pretending to care about the community all the way up through Christmas, and then they'll go radio silent again until February, when Americans start getting tax return checks in.

[Stalkerr]

Saxie, on 18 September 2014 - 11:02 AM, said:

The goons are seriously attempting to take cred for the community amassing ideas for council?

That is not what this post is about. All we did was make an attempt. What's happening now... I don't know if saveMWO influenced it in some small way or if it's completely organic.

All that matters is that PGI, especially Russ, is stepping up and actively engaging the community. That should be something we all can celebrate.

[Hoax415]

Remember to vote Saxie for council he's clearly the type of voice we need. /s

[ApolloKaras]

Hoax415, on 18 September 2014 - 11:18 AM, said:

Remember to vote Saxie for council he's clearly the type of voice we need. /s

I don't have the time to do something like that lol

[1453 R]

Say what you will about the effectiveness of the movement (and people do, frequently). I always saw #saveMWO as the most crucial and dire of indicators for Piranha that They Were Screwing The Pooch. Whether or not #saveMWO accomplished anything, at the time it had gathered a tremendous amount of steam and support and was a Pretty Big Deal. I was there for the first Town Hall meeting, though my sharp disagreement with how the folks there wanted to handle the issues brought up kept me out of the subsequent ones, and I can attest that when you can get upwards of five hundred people to sit through what amounts to a city hall annotated meeting, in their free time, for no compensation...well, it makes an impact.

You can all sass the Goons over it, and they'll certainly know to plan a better follow-through next time as I believe their biggest issue was simply not having any real clue how to handle the turnout they got...but it's a low blow to give them guff over the measure's ineffectiveness. It was a big deal, and we shouldn't remember it as just another Goon prank.

[Roadbeer]

Having taken part in the first #saveMWO townhall meeting with a few other reps from House Marik (think we numbered about 1,200 at the time) I liked the spirit behind it, but unfortunately the overall message was disjointed and could be summed up in a 4 panel "All the things" meme.

Part of the problem was the perception that it was a "Goon Movement", this perception wasn't helped by most of those trying to rally people to the cause, were in fact, Goons. Aside from them being the tip of the spear of the rallying, and providing the resources to bring it together, this wasn't a "Goon Thing"

The majority of the problem with #saveMWO was that there were SOOOOO many problems with MWO at the time (not that there aren't now, but the real problems are more obvious than they were then), nobody could really come to a consensus of what was necessary to save it, and many of the things proposed were diametrically opposed to each other.

It was a great idea, lessons were learned, but at that point in time, I don't think the PTB were interested in listening. Now, it appears they are.

[Bishop Steiner]

Stalkerr, on 18 September 2014 - 11:15 AM, said:

That is not what this post is about. All we did was make an attempt. What's happening now... I don't know if saveMWO influenced it in some small way or if it's completely organic.

All that matters is that PGI, especially Russ, is stepping up and actively engaging the community. That should be something we all can celebrate.

Possibly. "Firing" IGP might also have a little to do with this, though only time will tell that for a certainty.

[Stalkerr]

Man, some of the vitriol on reddit to what we tried to do with #saveMWO is almost palpable.

I just want to be clear on this: Nothing we did during #saveMWO was a power grab, an attempt to mislead, or anything other than honest. Do not cast aspersions here... I personally worked a ton of hours to make this a success because I love Battletech and I love having fun shooting robots with friends. That's all this effort was ever about.

There are many reasons why it didn't work out, but in some way it was because I just came up with the idea on a whim and wanted to see if we could really make a difference. I never had a plan or concrete goals, other than giving the community a real voice with PGI in how the game was balanced. I had no idea how many people would get involved, and I was shocked by how many did.

I wish we could have leveraged all that participation to make a difference, I really do. I'm sorry if anyone feels bitter about either being left out or any other reason. Everyone working on #saveMWO did their best to make this work, but none of us really knew what we were doing. We wanted to include everyone, but ultimately we couldn't figure out a way to do that... how would we even run a Town Hall where every single person attending could speak?

If we had someone with grassroots community organizing experience, maybe things would have been different. I guess we'll never know.

Edited by Stalkerr, 18 September 2014 - 12:01 PM.

[Rebas Kradd]

Stalkerr, on 18 September 2014 - 10:28 AM, said:

• Appoint community representatives from player groups to provide objective game feedback for your design team
  
• Aggressively iterate on simple and inexpensive game balance (weapons, mech quirks) with help from the public test server
  
• Abandon tabletop values and fittings where logical
  
• Use external focus testing to help with prioritization and vetting of balance changes
  
• Improve the new user experience
  
• Provide a roadmap for private lobby/queue support

Okay...some good stuff in here. BUT, also some stuff that sounds close to telling the devs how to do their jobs (and even, from some people's mouths, holding them over a barrel until they do(. That's the reason I'd hesitate to support this initiative the way it's written.

I agree with the communication aspect. PGI should talk about why they're doing what they are. That's a huge source of irritation with PGI for me. In some cases, they have. In a lot of other cases, they haven't. So I fully agree with asking for transparency.

As far as the design decisions - believe it or not, PGI deserves a say on that. I'm a little tired of everyone assuming otherwise, and I really don't care that there are allegedly 5,000 people who do so. I also don't care that they aren't goons. PGI are the ones who know what the engine is capable of, what the engineering team is capable of, and what design decisions are feasible, practical, and beneficial to all corners of the community. Neither the Founders nor the BT veterans are infallible experts on this stuff. Is that an inconvenient truth for those who believe PGI is an apathetic shell company? Yes. Is it still true? Yes. Even constructive feedback is not necessarily the best thing to implement for the game. The biggest problem is that we're not told why.

Additionally, a number of very reasonable things that you guys are asking for were planned, but not implemented immediately. Some of them have since been given to us. Balance testing, for example, on which the community has utterly failed to come through, for reasons that PGI probably saw coming years ago.

Also, I resent the subtle undertones, intentional or not, that pull numbers out of ***** to try and intimidate PGI. Your birds-of-a-feather groups may have lost tons of people and given you the impression that everyone's leaving, but I still see a healthy community. Old players constantly return and ask for updates. New players are always needing help. The IS and Clans forums are a-chirp with cheerful players oblivious to your concerns. My unit never got smaller. 100+ members for two years now. Meanwhile, PGI has gotten its license renewed, been handed another popular PC game IP (Wing Commander), and bought out its publisher. These aren't things that floundering companies do. So while I accept some people were frustrated with the direction of the game, it doesn't confirm that your desired direction is the only one that will keep it alive. There are just so many problems with that line of reasoning, starting with the fact that it doesn't really look true from where I'm standing.

Provide feedback all you want, but keep the understanding (especially those of you excited about this new "player council") that PGI may or may not follow it, and sometimes, the best you'll get is a carefully detailed explanation of why not.

Edited by Rebas Kradd, 18 September 2014 - 12:25 PM.

[Vasces Diablo]

I was fairly indifferent to the whole thing at the time. Some of the points were good, but it never felt like an attempt to represent the community as a whole. It failed in the same way PGI did at the time. It came off as "we're right and everyone else just needs to accept that and deal". That's why a lot of people reacted to it badly.

I to am encouraged by the (so far) apparent turn around, though I'm sure it has more to do with the Transverse fall out than anything else.

Also, "town halls" has nothing to do with what #savemwo was, that's just what it's called when a person in a position of power or authority has an open forum with the masses.

[Apnu]

This change was a community effort. It was lead by nobody, and only the community as a whole can take any credit for it.

Goons left in disgust ages ago. They hung out on reddit and other places being snarky. I've been playing consistently from an early CB invite until now. I hadn't heard a squawk on coms for months and months until the lance challenge weekend. Then, I saw a lance of Goons once.

The lack of goons in MWO changed nothing.

Always enjoyed playing matches with you guys because you were fun, goofy, and wild in that order.

But don't take credit for the changes with PGI. Don't even take credit for getting the ball rolling, plenty of other people were involved outside of the Goons along the way.

Rebas Kradd, on 18 September 2014 - 12:21 PM, said:

As far as the design decisions - believe it or not, PGI deserves a say on that.

They have the only say on that.

All we can do is choose to play or not play, and choose to pay or not pay.

The only positive outcome of all of this, and yes the goons have a part to play in it, is the communication is open and flowing nicely with PGI.

[KraftySOT]

I agreed with all of it other than the TT adaptation thing.

The gloss over the fact that pin point accuracy of weapons converging on a single pixel no matter how fast you or your target is moving is a design decision that can be changed, and fixes half the plethora of problems #savemwo started out to fix in the first place.

Theres almost no situation where the TT is wrong, its just the implementation of the transition. There was a time long ago when arms didnt even detach from your cross hair. Further expansion here is needed. Then you dont have to come up with silly arbitrary values based entirely on the meta, and not on battletech/mechwarrior.

Its annoying when people say "oh this doesnt translate well from the TT, big surprise!" based on a really bad translation. Its like saying babelfish is a bad translator because you asked it to translate english into german when you wanted english into french.

The pinpoint module is a bust, as is the system which is so minute no one notices it, which puts some accuracy into the weapons.

[NocturnalBeast]

Artgathan, on 18 September 2014 - 11:00 AM, said:

#saveMWO was exactly as pivotal as Occupy Wall Street.

So pointless and the brunt of rich people's jokes?

[orcrist86]

I was around and found the whole savemwo thing to be obnoxious. It felt very self entitled.

[Roadbeer]

Ed Steele, on 18 September 2014 - 01:41 PM, said:

So pointless and the brunt of rich people's jokes?

Hardly rich, but yeah, I got some good laughs from it.

"I spent $40k on tuition and have a double major in Sanskrit and Ornamental Horticulture and I can't find a job! It's the banks fault!"
Lulz

Edited by Roadbeer, 18 September 2014 - 01:53 PM.