99 replies to this topic

[CLANBOY FFI]

I have to say i was gutted when the matchmaker was put back. I know conquest is not the best mode, but for the chance to play a match that i can enjoy is worth it. I had so much fun (much Needed) for that short time.

I like to drop with my friend but this is madness, we spawn on planet with our two man group and mixture of other players V a 10 man drop. This happens time after time after time. yes i get some kills but the result is doooom for our team.

I have stopped dropping in groups and kept solo, its so much more fun. I dont have (for example) the (LORDS} rushing over the hills in a mad death killing charge . I respect the LORDS dont get me wrong they are legends, but it would be just great if the matchmaker would stop dropping a full team against a team of pugs with a 2 man group. I an seeing people drop out of game and not wanting to play leaving the rest of us to try and last at least 2 mins. THIS IS NOT FUN, ITS NOT GG. NO!!!!!

Well thats all i got to say about that.

[KraftySOT]

PappySmurf, on 13 October 2014 - 08:00 AM, said:

The video the OP has played has some good points and is so wrong in other comments.First I don't play Conquest that much because I cant pick my mech after I know the map and game mode plain and simple auto selecting my game modes was not a good idea unless you could pick your mech after knowing the game mode and map then it would have worked just fine.

But PGI is not that bright in there game mode designs so here i am JOE PLAYER in a assault mech and get dumped in Conquest which unless it turns in to a big fur ball fight at theta im in a totally useless mech.As for the cockpit glass I think PGI should have left it in the game but made it a checkable option in the game options or the graphic options.

So many things in MWO could be fixed with just simple ideas and testing but it always ends up a mess because PGI does not think it through and look at all the good ideas from topics and posts players make and test them with viable options until there palatable by the community.

Yet I drop in my Wubshee with all the gamemodes clicked and never have a problem because of the map.

Get a bigger engine?

[Roland]

clanboy, on 13 October 2014 - 08:03 AM, said:

I like to drop with my friend but this is madness, we spawn on planet with our two man group and mixture of other players V a 10 man drop. This happens time after time after time.

No it doesn't. It happens with extreme rarity.

[Morang]

Enlil09, on 13 October 2014 - 07:09 AM, said:

PGI are the professional game designers.

Don't start, you won't like what will follow.

Just google "Jarhead Games", also find other projects by PGI before MWO.

[El Bandito]

Not listening to the forums and fapping around Reddit had brought PGI so low in the first place. Why compound the folly? To take almost 3 years to balance so little content is maddening.

Edited by El Bandito, 13 October 2014 - 08:16 AM.

[RG Notch]

Enlil09, on 13 October 2014 - 07:09 AM, said:

Good vid here by Sidestrafe that lays it out really well.



While I've received excellent advice and help on this forum, I've also been appalled by the amount of noise and discord. Now someone is suggesting a, "Player Council", to guide the design of the game? That would certainly be the death of MWO.

PGI are the professional game designers. They need to keep their own counsel, do their jobs as best they can and let the chips fall where they may. If they keep taking direction from the loudest complainers on the forum this game is doomed.

LOl, oh yeah these guys are professionals with years of experience making Grade ZZZ shovelware hunting and fishing games. They clearly know how to run a F2P MMO shooter. I mean hell this game has been going great with them not listening. I mean it's not like they need to make major changes because there aren't enough players to fill 3 separate queues. I mean the NPE is wonderful and player retention is awesome. LOL seriously, these guys are doing a great job with out help, if that job is to run the game into the ground.

[LordKnightFandragon]

Logan Hawke, on 13 October 2014 - 07:24 AM, said:

Listening to the community, interacting with them, and taking the gems that pop up here and there is very good. At the very least it makes people more willing and understanding when there's a connection to the people behind the game.

Now, that being said, putting the players in charge of anything more important than a bag of coal is a terrible idea, and let's be honest - this community would find a way to ruin that coal
however, I don't recall the player council ever being about making decisions. I thought it was supposed to be a group that filtered through the loads of crap on the forum and simply brought the gems to the devs attention

No, they would ask for nerfs to it's color of black because its to hard to see. Then it would get brightened up to grey and there would be QQ cuz now its not realistic looking, charcoal is supposed to be black not grey....so yeah...

[KraftySOT]

And in two months of listening this game has improved.

Boom.

[Koniving]

On a random side note... There are good players to listen to and bad ones. There's no denying that. Russ's player council idea was to have a number of players -- chosen by the community (and if it was a popularity contest I certainly believe I would have scored much lower to far more popular people out there, it's my hope and belief that people were chosen for how their design ideas, suggestions, requests, etc. could produce better gameplay) -- to talk about a better arrangement for how to produce a fair and balanced ECM that is still effective but not the deciding factor in "which mechs are great and which mechs are garbage."

For example an ECM should be useful. But should a team with two ECM and a team with no ECM be the deciding factor in a match? No. It should help influence the match but by no means should it be the deciding factor that says "Oh they have ECM, they win."

ECM should not be the choice that dictates which mech to get. "Well I can get a Jagermech at 65 tons for fire support or hard-hitting brawling, or this 60 ton Dragon with ECM." "Get the ECM!" "But it's a Dragon, isn't that easily killed trash?" "Who cares, it has ECM! Get the ECM!"

Clearly something is wrong if that's the mentality that goes into choosing a mech, and it says a lot about ECM and its current state.

The council, if it even will come to a conclusion, has to pitch exactly one idea... where PGI will look it over, give feedback on both pros and flaws that they foresee with it for editing, and if it's acceptable, the idea gets presented to the forums. Then the community must have an 80% majority vote for it to actually happen (which if it does, PGI will likely freely change anything they see with it for balancing or technical difficulty reasons).
----------
That said, I have another issue that I have been asking, requesting, etc. for a change to with both support and resistance from players. Threshold. Ghost heat was given to us because our thresholds can climb so high, allowing the mass boating of large scale weapons and situations like this one.

Skip to 7:48 for the story behind it, or skip to 9:30 for the important part. 30+ PPCs fired in under 18 seconds. This was before ghost heat. That's 300 heat generated before I exploded, with only 10 to 13 DHS (I can't remember now). That's a threshold of 50 + (20% Heat Containment Skill + 25% Frozen City =) 45% = 72.5 threshold.
So 72.5 points of heat is "100%" heat and a shutdown temperature. 300 heat is 413.79% heat before I died. Obviously not all at once, the cooling was decent but not nearly as good as most mechs have.

Since then we have received ghost heat which has helped.
And then we learned we can just ignore ghost heat. 3 PPC Awesome before the quirks? Easy to alpha strike. It's just the heat of firing 4 PPCs when you fire 3 at once. Then there's simply chain firing. It helped, but ultimately the core problem was ignored.

Now, we have this.

And while fantastically entertaining to watch, we have a problem.
The build shown has 24 DHS.
That's...
Cooling Rate : 4.55 heat/sec
Heat Threshold : 83.52
on Forest Colony.
Check for yourself!

(Tabletop this would be 4.8 heat/sec cooling and 30 threshold, making it impossible to fire more than 2 at the same time and that's assuming there's a charge delay in the ER PPCs to spread the heat, though it could easily fire them, one at a time, and manage 4 in 10 seconds without shutting down. The need for this boat's creation wouldn't even exist as using it would be impossible.)

The heat of 9 ER PPCs without ghost heat is 135. This alone should basically kill the pilot. It'd be 450% of threshold in 30 threshold.
But MWO has a rising threshold.

The ghost heat of 9 ER PPCs is 332.78 additional heat for a total of (according to Smurfy) 467.78 heat!
Now lets find out what that percentage is of MWO's threshold for a 24 DHS Dire Wolf.


Without ghost heat that would be 559.99% heat for a single shot. And at some points in the video he does a second shot, then a third before dying, while still overheated and overriding...

This...this is absolutely insane.
This, unfortunately, is the professional side of PGI at work, somewhat detached from what is really wrong with their game. Denying it for so long, doing bandaids that ignore the core problem... and here we are.

This is perhaps the very embodiment of the reason Russ suggested the idea of a player council, to find out how the community wants it fixed.

[LordKnightFandragon]

RG Notch, on 13 October 2014 - 08:14 AM, said:

LOl, oh yeah these guys are professionals with years of experience making Grade ZZZ shovelware hunting and fishing games. They clearly know how to run a F2P MMO shooter. I mean hell this game has been going great with them not listening. I mean it's not like they need to make major changes because there aren't enough players to fill 3 separate queues. I mean the NPE is wonderful and player retention is awesome. LOL seriously, these guys are doing a great job with out help, if that job is to run the game into the ground.

Hunting and Fishing games? Now the company name makes so much more sense.

[KraftySOT]

Koniving, on 13 October 2014 - 08:16 AM, said:

it's my hope and belief that people were chosen for how their design ideas,

I voted for you and Homeless Bill based solely on your ideas. I liked StJobes as well. Its cool that if you click on your names and go to your forum profile, you can see old topics youve authored. Id like to hope that more people than just me, clicked on some of you guys and read your articles before voting.

[990Dreams]

The smartest most of this community has gotten is "Stacking Penalties are stupid and violate thermodynamics" and "Flat maps are good for brawlers."

Honestly, I trust less than 97% of this community to actually come up with good ideas. A player council is a stupid idea and will be then end of MW:O.

[Angel of Annihilation]

Ironically, another game has a Player's Council and it has had almost constant growth over the years with absolutely zero decline in subscribed accounts...something I don't think ANY other MMO has managed and that is EVE Online.

Now I am not saying a players council is necessarily a good thing for MWO but not listening to your player base almost killed MWO and now that we have dialog and communication with them, things have generally improved.

[Vassago Rain]

DavidHurricane, on 13 October 2014 - 08:21 AM, said:

The smartest most of this community has gotten is "Stacking Penalties are stupid and violate thermodynamics" and "Flat maps are good for brawlers."

Honestly, I trust less than 97% of this community to actually come up with good ideas. A player council is a stupid idea and will be then end of MW:O.

The dumb people didn't get voted on for the council.

[Koniving]

KraftySOT, on 13 October 2014 - 08:20 AM, said:

I voted for you and Homeless Bill based solely on your ideas. I liked StJobes as well. Its cool that if you click on your names and go to your forum profile, you can see old topics youve authored. Id like to hope that more people than just me, clicked on some of you guys and read your articles before voting.

Thank you. That means a lot.

[990Dreams]

Okay, so since I am so far out of the loop:

• Is the player council a thing yet?
  
• Where do I find the voting thing if it is?

[stjobe]

Koniving, on 13 October 2014 - 08:16 AM, said:

And while fantastically entertaining to watch, we have a problem.
The build shown has 24 DHS.
That's...
Cooling Rate : 4.55 heat/sec
Heat Threshold : 83.52
on Forest Colony.
Check for yourself!

(Tabletop this would be 4.8 heat/sec cooling and 30 threshold

You know I agree with you on lowering the threshold, but in TT that 24 DHS Direwolf actually has a per-turn heat threshold of 78, not 30. It can subtract 48 heat (from the 24 DHS) and only apply what's above 48 to the heat scale.

Now since we're not operating on 10-second turns here in MWO (apart from dissipation, of course), the rest of your argument is in essence correct. I just thought I'd point out that the comparison to TT was - in my opinion - a bit biased towards exaggerating the differences between the two systems.

I'd also like to take this opportunity to point out that we need TT-style heat penalties rather badly.

Edit: Oh, and I'd also like to point out that "professional" only means "getting paid to do something" - not "expert"

Edited by stjobe, 13 October 2014 - 08:31 AM.

[KraftySOT]

Koniving, on 13 October 2014 - 08:24 AM, said:

Thank you. That means a lot.

Absolutely man. You guys have a clear love for the TT and understanding of the franchise, and understand from experience as gamers, what it takes to "make it".


And something that sticks out to me...Quirks. Theres no way PGI had some guy play 900 hours of MWO, and come up with their tier system for how to apply Quirks and then have some guy audit all those Quirks and apply them all on their own. That took community support. They had to go ask people who played what they thought. I think Quirks are a big step forward and was always one of my favorite house rules before they started getting added to the actual ruleset. And it comes completely out of listening to the community and an appreciation for the TT and lore.

The more of this type of interaction the better. If this happened back during #saveMWO, we wouldnt have had a dead year of nothing going on.

[Lord de Seis]

EVE Online has a elected player council that gets flown to Iceland to discuss development of the game with the developers. In the end the developer is the one who makes any calls on what goes into the game but what is wrong with communication with the reasonable people in the community?

[KraftySOT]

DavidHurricane, on 13 October 2014 - 08:28 AM, said:

Okay, so since I am so far out of the loop:

• Is the player council a thing yet?
  
• Where do I find the voting thing if it is?

Voting happened, there was a wrap up, and I think now PGI is probably talking to those people one on one, about their ideas and the communities ideas. Though clearly theres some stuff on PGIs plate before they get to the ECM discussion.

Also, while I have no evidence to support this, I think everyones general concensus was "Make ECM better, instead of just nerfing it, change how it operates" and that is probably something thats ongoing for the next few months.

The player council was just convened to handle that one issue. My understanding is that the next issue, will start the process all over again.

Which will probably be ghost heat.