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[tuffy963]

I am excited by the potential of CW, but the last two weeks as a beta tester has been frustrating. So, as beta testers do, I am leaving my feedback here.

Many of the personal observations I make below are based on my 70+ CW drops to date. I am aware that many of my observations may already be addressed by PGI leadership in townhalls, the CW roadmap underway, or this forum. Further, I will NOT be suggesting fixes, features, or strategies no matter how obvious. Again, I am not ignoring what is coming, just want to be focused detailing my personal insights. Here we go...

CW Game Play Experience - The Good
Overall, there are some truly exciting moments in CW. When defending a planet with my unit and using voice comms, it can be an inspiring experience. These games can have some epic conflicts & allow you to strategize with the your team on several levels:

• Drop deck strategy - Coordinating complementary mechs and waves is very fun and a team with a robust drop deck strategy can create some clear synergies on the battlefield
  
• Battlefield placement - There are clear trade offs and strategies emerging around position the defending mechs. This feels pretty good to me so I will not go into much detail
  
• Lance coordination - This is still a little rough around the edges. This may be more about the maturity of our unit than actual CW functionality, but something still is not working right here. Sorry, I can't be more detailed. I can only say that the 12-man tends to work as a single group over coordinating through the lance structure. This is not a bad thing, but the lance concept feels under utilized in CW at the moment.

CW Game Play Experience - The Bad

Today the attacking/counter-attacking team's incentives are terribly misaligned. The only reliable way to win appears to be by blindly charging (mostly ignoring enemy mechs) to destroy the tiered objectives (Gate Gens -> Gun Door Gens -> Omega Gen). This strategy is boring, not profitable for players, and makes little sense from a canon perspective. A few anecdotal observations about each point:

• Boring - I run in past a dozen mech shooting at me and I am either: legged & left for later, killed out right, or make it to one or more objectives and shoot it blindly until killed by defending mechs. Rinse and repeat until we win or run out of mechs.
  
• Not profitable - This strategy in it's purest form yields about 150,000 C-bills, 200 loyalty points, and 800 xp. In short, for 40+ minute investment, I earn less in a "winning" CW match than I do in a 10 minute PUG match. Oh, did mention, this strategy doesn't always produce a win? Cut these numbers in half for a failed rush attempt
  
• Mechwarrior canon leads us to believe that mechs are ultra-expensive and spare parts for them are hard to find. This is the reason we have the concept of salvage in this game and all previous mech warrior games. These war machines are so hard to come by that at the end of the battle, the winner scrounges all the usable gear/parts off the destroyed opponents mechs and hands it out to their team members as rewards. This unfortunate rushing strategy that has emerged undermines that canon "feel" and hurts the overall MWO universe PGI is trying to build, IMO.

Conversely, because the rewards are so misaligned another strategy has emerged in CW attack/counter-attack drops. Some players have de-prioritized trying to achieve the stated objective and instead focus on killing the defending team. While this strategy is unlikely to produce a win (by killing all defending mechs), it is far more fun way to spend 30 minutes in a CW drop. Further, it is reasonably profitable (though not as profitable as the PUG queue). This emerging strategy would be fine, but except undermines the whole point of CW... to take planets! This means we now have people dropping on worlds to activily choosing a strategy that will not contribute to the larger objective (win the planet). This is not too big of an issue in Beta as there are not unit or loyalty benefits for owning planets at the moment. Where it is creating a very bad experience for me is when these two different mindsets are put on the same team and asked to work together in PUG CW match.





This situation on the ground is a very frustrating as it means there is very little chance that a 12-man PUG group will come together as a team, as some players are focused on the "fun" and other focused on winning the "objective". Drop after drop, I watch PUG leaders attempt to coordinate the attack, and each drop, players are unable (newer players don't even understand the tension yet) or unwilling adopt the other camp's strategy. The "fun" group does not see the point of focusing on the objective at the expense of brawling/sniping fun and C-Bills earned. The "objective" camp cannot tolerate the idea of not winning the objective (and planet). Both strategies require all 12 members to even have a chance at being successful. This creates hard feelings and is generally frustrating.

Dead Drops are too painful
Finally, "Dead Drops" are time consuming, boring, and miserly. When our unit commander directs us to take a world versus I/we are just looking for a world with a high enemy population to get matched quickly into a game, we end up doing these "dead drops". These can take up to 10 minutes to form a team unless you have a full 12. Another 10 minutes to count down waiting for a defending team to form. Another 5-10 minutes achieving the objective. For that 25+ minute investment of my time, I get 75 loyalty points & 75,000 Cbills. This is not a good use of my time. This is all around a bad experience for me as a unit player. Without additional incentives, it is hard to justify this kind of time investment just to put a unit tag on a world. My fellow teammates have already started to ignore unit leader requests when they believe it will involve dead dropping on planets.

Thanks for reading. All feedback is welcome!

Edited by tuffy963, 25 December 2014 - 09:47 PM.