Alexander Steel, on 11 January 2015 - 01:44 AM, said:
I'm not sure the best plan for a company that is trying to get their game to succeed is to go... "Hey you know that game that failed and is no longer around? Let's just make the same game, I'm sure it will work THIS time."
The path that they're on isn't any better... I'm being very honest here, too. The game play is getting old. CW had to be huge open world with an array of objectives spread across kilometers of terrain. Basically, a huge 64+ player private match, but anyone is allowed to drop in a play. Screw ELO and match making, toss that junk out the window.
PGI has the audience that MWLL never had. MWLL was pretty exclusive in that it was a mod, most casual gamers wouldn't be bothered. I know I wasn't, even though I would have loved to played. I just wasn't bothered enough to even look into how to set up the mod and get into the action. I looked fun though.
MWO has brought in (at least, I'd like to believe so) many new faces to the Mechwarrior franchise.
Basically, MWO is more accessible than a full conversion mod than MWLL was. PGI really needs to dump the "drop into a match" mentality, and push the "drop onto a planet".
PGI could easily spin up or take down available planets based on the fluctuating population, so that the population is centralized to only a few planets, or at peek times across dozens of planets.
Each planet would be on a 6 hour timer until it's given it's own ceasefire (PER PLANET. NOT ACROSS THE WHOLE MAP!) When a ceasefire ends on a planet, it would then go back into the pool and the system would determine if it should spin it back up, or save it for later. And every planet that is allowed to be contested over must be taken out of the pool every 48 hours so that you're not stuck with one planet that never gets a chance to exchange hands.
Each planet would essentially be a "mini" server.
If PGI would do it this way, they wouldn't have to worry about ghost wins, they wouldn't have to fiddle around with their silly ceasefire times for EU, East Coast, West Coast, AUS, etc players.
Build the underlaying foundation that DOES THE WORK FOR YOU. PGI is
wasting time on what they're doing right now. They're spending copious amounts of time on trying to figure out how to make Attack/defend work, building new maps, trying to solve base rushes, fiddling with lobby's, queues, wait times... They've created this huge amount of work for themselves which could have been entirely avoided.
But no. Here we are, with this INCREDIBLY complicated system of planet points, attack, defend, counter attack, ceasefire times, poor game modes, maps, etc. And within a month, it's no different than what we have already. It's just a fancy map with long wait times and frustrating tactics.
Edited by MoonUnitBeta, 11 January 2015 - 02:27 AM.