SilentWolff, on 05 March 2015 - 10:19 AM, said:
I have been playing since closed beta, as has most of my unit. This post is not meant as a bash PGI thread, but rather an insight on why most people I know no longer play this game. This is an condensed list of the complaints that were expressed when I asked people why they no longer played.
So without further ado......
#1 Piss poor map design
The maps are too small. Information warfare/ scouting is not needed and plays no real part in the game. CW maps are bigger, but all the room is wasted, as almost all fighting takes place in one corner of the map.
This causes other issues as well. It makes most range weapons obsolete (not including dual gauss). Your higher ELO's become nothing more than a Nascar deathball under ECM causing boring/stale game play.
Players in this game gravitate towards where there is cover or good terrain to make a stand. The small maps are from the CB 8v8 days and older. Since CW is a thing now, PGI, at least for the 1st half of 2015 is ignoring the Pub. Queue maps and game modes so they can focus solely on CW.
Quote
#2 Matchmaker punishes higher ELO players. There is no incentive to take creative, fun, silly builds because you will end up getting beat like a drum. This means 90% of the mechs in your mechbay go unused. Go meta or go home.
That's a player problem, not a game problem. Players in this game gravitate to the meta builds and then punish anybody who isn't meta. I honestly can't blame PGI for this. They implemented ghost heat as a "player control mechanic" (Paul on the latest Mechs, Devs and Beer podcast) and its not working right. Even if I bring a non-meta build (I like the challenge of being against the grain, yet still successful) I get guff in chat for having "sub optimal" builds, yet 2/3 of the time I'm in the top ten of the match screen and top 5 of my team.
Quote
#3 No real lobby system. Having to have premium to do private lobbies is insulting and a naked cash grab.
While I'd like to see lobbies that collect players and send them off to the MM to find a game, PGI doesn't agree with this notion. Still I there is a lobby system and its free. Anybody can make a group of 2-12 players and then drop in a match. They can even group up and battle another team, also for free, but have to deal with random maps. If a group wants to set specific things about the match between another private group, then at least one on each side has to be running Premium Time.
That's not much of a cash grab IMO.
Quote
#4 Poor geometry, getting stuck on a pebble, invisible walls blocking shots.
Geometry is because of the mech designs, and many of the mechs come from other sources. The AWS is just wide. Its wide in the TRO, its wide as a mini, and its wide in game. However there are some things PGI can do to fix that. A consistent scale depending on class would be nice (ever compare the height of a Wolverine to a Shadow Hawk?) and the arms on the Catapults are disgusting. I won't use them until PGI fixes that.
Maps need passes yeah, there's weird bugs that need to be fixed. Hopefully once PGI gets CW done to some passable level of satisfaction, we can get devs to make a few passes at the maps.
Quote
#5 Jump jets are horrible. Useless on assault mechs ( see Highlander) Knee jerk reaction to poptarting
Yes. Poptarting was a thing, and except for a few poptart addicts, everybody hates it. I think they nerfed the JJ's too much in reaction. I think more screen shake is needed while in the air. Not just when JJ's are engaged. They also wanted to fix people running with just one JJ and leaping about like rocketmen, so they changed it so you need near max JJs for them to have any thrust worth a damn. That, of course, comes at the cost of guns, but since this game has morphed into a direct-fire, pin-point alpha meta, nobody wants to make that sacrifice.
Quote
#6 Progress in the game moves at a snails pace. Lack of content (this has got better since IGP was booted, but its still too slow)
PGI has a small staff. They want the game to compete at the AAA level, but just don't have the resources for it. There aren't enough players (compared to say the numbers Destiny has), and the F2P model means they're dependent on whales (I'm sort of a whale) to keep the lights on, servers running and devs fed enough to come to work every day. There's a very vocal anti-whale community here that likes to kick us for supporting the game. They have it in their head somehow that by financially starving PGI they'll get a better game.
Quote
#7 Economy is too punishing. takes way too long to earn C-Bills
Yes, I have a fleet of 30% c-bill mechs and banked PT I dole out to overcome this. But again, devs gotta eat, so they have to incentivize players to buy MC an PT to beat the stingy c-bills. Having said that, the new player experience is brutal. Starting with trial mechs and being thrown into the deep end of the pool with veteran players is counter-productive. PGI should have a place for newbies and lowbies to hang out away from the high-elo players so they can build up a decent personal economy and have fun doing it.
Quote
#8 No destructible terrain, which both MW3 and MW4 had. Inexcusable that we have actually went backwards since MW4 and that was over 10 years ago.
PGI has talked at length about this. MW3 and MW4 had player side destructables, that bore no impact on the game. Knocking over trees and lamposts does not destructable terrain make. While it would be cool to be able to blow holes in a building and then shoot through them, the netcode to replicate that to 23 other players with random (and sometimes crappy pings) would choke the game. PGI consciously avoids destructable terrain for the time being because of that replication.
Quote
#9 Too many game breaking bugs. (Hit Reg, getting stuck in terrain, frame rate issues and game crashing to desktop)
Like I said, they have a small staff. Limited bandwidth and a huge CW list to work through means these bugs will linger.
I honestly wish PGI has more $ to higher more devs and knock this stuff out faster. But, again, the F2P market is fickle and not the glut of cash that a AAA design house has. PGI simply cannot raise the cash to hire the amount of staff that Bungie has, or any house under EA for that matter.
6
