88 replies to this topic

[Frostiken]

So let's say I'm a fresh-faced new player. After waiting 30 minutes for the email to show up, I load up the game and jump in.

I start the game with a whole slew of Trial mechs to chose from. Now, the Trial mechs are... actually pretty good! Just about all of them are thoroughly upgraded with all sorts of doodads that new players won't understand whatsoever.

I play a few matches, but I'm frustrated and want to actually play with my own mech. Since I'm new, I'm basically not getting **** for bonuses and earning maybe 80k per match on average, both because of my constant losing and lack of boosts and bonuses. Whatever, right? After playing about a dozen rounds, I have almost a million C-Bills. Great! Let's go see what I can buy!

...

Oh.

Oh my.

I can't buy ****. The cheapest mech in the game STARTS at about 1.4 mil. At this point I've had maybe 3 or 4 hours in this game (including time spent dicking around with the UI that's completely impenetrable for new players, and time spent learning just how to play), and I have been so far unable to do ANYTHING. I can't play with the mechlab. I can't spend skill points. I have been given absolutely nothing to 'grab' me.

So I go look at MC. Plug a few bucks into the game, get myself a mech, and I'm good right? Well I'm not going to BUY the shittiest mech available, so I'm going to look at something mid-ranged. Well what I see is that for $30 of MC, you guys are charging me like $8 for a lousy Hunchback.

This isn't even the best part - I'm getting to that. You see, what's going to happen is that a new player is going to buy what they can afford. They aren't plonking down 15 mil for some slick Clantech, and they SURE aren't going to drop $30 on a single mech, which is what a Timberwolf costs in MC.

No, what they're going to buy is going to be the cheaper mechs - $5, 6, 7 maybe, or maybe something that costs under 3M C-Bills. And you know what they're going to get? An absolute **** of a mech. It will have single heat sinks. It will have a standard structure and standard armor. It will have absolutely nothing worthwhile mounted to it whatsoever. It will have an extremely crappy, heavy, standard engine.

You see, you just FORCED the newbies to get acclimated to the game on the Trial Mechs which are all heavily upgraded. Now they buy their first mech, and because they aren't going to understand who the hell 'Lando Steele' is, much less what it does, their first mech is a woefully underpowered, underarmored, slow, overheating deathtrap.

Now the real adventure begins. You want to stick a decent engine in your new mech? That's about 3.5 million C-Bills - at 85k Cbills average per match, and figure 12 minutes per match (that's time spent doing other things in between as well as loading, waiting, etc.), that's about 42 rounds of getting their ass kicked in their garbage mech, for 8 ******* hours, on top of the several hours they already put in just to buy the damn thing. You want double heatsinks and Lando Steele? Pop another 2m in. Oh and by the way, you're going to have to BUY the new heatsinks too, on top of that 1.5M you just dropped on the privilege to get them. Want to experiment with different weapons? Well considering we're in insano-land where an LRM-20 costs 500,000 ******* C-Bills and everything else isn't much better (a large laser at 200k means another 3 rounds, for a weapon that might not even *work for what you need*), good luck with that.

At the end of the day, I've managed to make my horrible, lousy mech into something vaguely capable of not being steamrolled by everyone else in what is, from my newbie point of view, a Pay-2-Win game. All is good now, right?

Uh huh. Right.

So I'm clicking around and check out the 'skills' menu. Hey neat, I can upgrade my mech even more!

Then I see that little text. "Unlock all basic tier efficiencies for 3 variants of this chassis to unlock Elite tier efficiencies!"

3 variants.

I just went through hell for the last 20 hours and have funneled every single dime of my income into making my first incredibly ****** mech even *playable*, and now you're telling me I need to do it TWICE MORE just to get some more skills. On ONE CHASSIS. Out of, like, 50 mechs possible.

Then I mash Alt-F4 and uninstall the game.

This game is blatantly pay-2-win. Yeah, sure, TECHNICALLY I can get a good mech playing for free, but that would require me to make playing this game a full-time CAREER, as this sad pathetic trickle of C-bills slowly adds up over time, and then completely empties when I buy a single engine, for one mech. A fully-upgraded mech is simply better, full stop. The C-Bill grind is so absurdly steep that the only way to get ahead is going to be to spend MC, which makes it Pay 2 Win.

I don't see how playing this game without boosts and without a serious obsession for Mechwarrior that makes you want to devote literally hundreds of hours just to build a roster of three mechs is viable whatsoever. The average gamer is not going to tolerate this nonsense whatsoever.

Look, I played the freaking alpha. It was NOT ANYWHERE CLOSE to this bad. I basically haven't touched this game since then, and even WITH my boost AND my Founders mechs (which are all pieces of ****, thanks PGI for not putting Endo Steel or anything in any of them, so I have to do the newbie thing now too and spend the next thirty hours of gameplay making my Catapult not a ******* joke), my income rate is insultingly low. Over several hours in the Alpha I was able to buy a couple new mechs (by the end I had expanded my mech roster by at least seven or eight more mechs, including a few Catapult and Atlas variants) and upgrade them. Now in the post-IGP 'release', I've watched as I scrape together a few bucks, and then decide I want to try an AC-10 on this weird Centurion I was given, and POOF, all my money disappears for a gun I don't even know if I want. It's okay, I can sell it later, right? Oh yeah, for a completely outrageous 50% ripoff penalty.

I'M frustrated with the sad trickle of C-bills, what do you think a new player who will be performing even worse, in lousier mechs, without a boost is thinking?

Edited by Frostiken, 14 April 2015 - 08:35 PM.

[Cementi]

Look at your earnings again.....for the first 20 or 25 matches I forget there is an additional achievement that also gives a large cbill reward that is not displayed in your after game score. I'm not positive of the total but by the end of it you should be over 10 mil which will buy you almost any IS mech in the game.

[Yokaiko]

You said hunchbacks are lousy....


....missed that they are awesome mechs.

[White Panther]

Yeah, I started an alt account couple weeks ago to see what it was like. Finished the cadet bonus, couldnt afford ****... its absolutely appalling.

[DjPush]

I completely dissagree. I pay a lot of money to play this game and I lose most of the time. This game is agrivating some times. Tonight for instance, MM thought it necissary to remind me of how terrible I am at this game by putting me on a team with people who are worse than I, then throwing us into matches against people in a completely higher class than myself. Not once or twice but every single match. Played for an hour and lost 12 to 1 or 0 every match.

The sad thing is I keep holding on to the dream that one day a patch will come and this will be more than the COD version of giant stompy robots. Instead it just gravitates more to that style of game. Spawn, run around, die. Spawn, run around, die. Spend money to buy things that ultimately get equipped with the same fracking weapons.

Oh well... I had a team of 50 people that once played together all the time. Loved the game and had fun. They have all left and I can't really blame them.

Time for me to follow suit. I am taking a break for a month or so.

[Frostiken]

Cementi, on 14 April 2015 - 08:33 PM, said:

Look at your earnings again.....for the first 20 or 25 matches I forget there is an additional achievement that also gives a large cbill reward that is not displayed in your after game score. I'm not positive of the total but by the end of it you should be over 10 mil which will buy you almost any IS mech in the game.

It's more like 8 million. I admit I didn't consider the achievements. Even still, 8 million is pissing in the wind as far as your expenses are going to run you. To buy a medium mech, put an XL engine in it, and upgrade it to DHS and ES, that's 8 million right there.

[Tidy]

Well you have the starter of the game right, annoying. I'll give a short version of "late" game.
It's pay when bored.

After you get say 9 mechs (3 groups of the same) maxed out and play for fun you kinda dont even look at your funds as the game sucks you into matches all the time. When you get burnout your coffers are overflowing with cbills just by neglect along!

I can buy 3-6 clan mechs with cbills at this point and only payed for MC because I was lazy with the mech skills. Problem with this is when burnout is burnt out, you take a break.

it's getting more often for me anyway with dull weapons and nothing brand new being developed but hey, it's free so I'm ok with that.

[Frostiken]

DjPush, on 14 April 2015 - 08:40 PM, said:

I completely dissagree. I pay a lot of money to play this game and I lose most of the time. This game is agrivating some times. Tonight for instance, MM thought it necissary to remind me of how terrible I am at this game by putting me on a team with people who are worse than I, then throwing us into matches against people in a completely higher class than myself. Not once or twice but every single match. Played for an hour and lost 12 to 1 or 0 every match.

Play-2-Win doesn't mean the game plays for you. It's not literally 'swipe card to instantly win match'. A player in a mech with 20 million Cbills sunk into it maxing out its performance and tweaking its weapons perfectly is going to win against a player in a 'factory stock' version of that same mech, if that player is exactly the same skill. This isn't even up for dispute. Endo Steel, FF, an XL engine, and DHS makes your mech far more capable than a standard mech.

Add on top of that the untold millions of C-bills you have to spend getting three more variants of the mech and sinking XP into it, as well as the mech 'upgrades' which inherently make your weapons better through the power of 'magic' (by the way, making weapons better is blatant pay-2-win nonsense. These '+x% faster reloading!' should be removed).

20 million C-bills is an utterly absurd amount for a new player, never mind the three other mechs they have to buy just to get elite skills.

[TLBFestus]

I feel your pain.

PGI just stubbornly will not revamp the new player experience despite many of the points you have made.

C-bill earnings are low, or at the very least out of whack with getting new players invested in the game. In WoT they have tiers, the earlier of which are relatively easy to earn the cash to buy them. The difficult ramps up as you progress.

Due to their structure, MWO can't do this, but surely they could do something to improve the early game for new players, the best of which I believe is to give them a DAMN mech at the end of their Cadet training so the get INVESTED in the game.

With the 3 mech mastery setup it's not like they are going to stick with that single mech...they are going to want to improve what they've got.

It's not all that pay-to-win though. At least not as much as you think.

[Frostiken]

Eboli, on 14 April 2015 - 08:45 PM, said:

You are a Legendary Founder therefore you already have 4 mechs earning 30% CBill bonus plus having premium time and 20,000 MC. Use it and grow.

Cheers Eboli.

Yeah that's not the point.

Also even with the 30% CBill bonus and my boost, the income is pathetic. Not to mention the Founder mechs are giant piles of **** and require several million CBill investments, because PGI designed them for before the Clan invasion timeline.

[bad arcade kitty]

to claim that mwo is p2w is the easiest way to get responces... even when the rant is so stupid and unrelated to the real new player experience (the cadet bonus isn't even mentioned etc), people still answer

[Yokaiko]

Frostiken, on 14 April 2015 - 08:41 PM, said:

It's more like 8 million. I admit I didn't consider the achievements. Even still, 8 million is pissing in the wind as far as your expenses are going to run you. To buy a medium mech, put an XL engine in it, and upgrade it to DHS and ES, that's 8 million right there.

I have 14 mil, enough to pimp a hunchie 4G

[Stoned Prophet]

Frostiken, on 14 April 2015 - 08:22 PM, said:

So let's say I'm a fresh-faced new player. After waiting 30 minutes for the email to show up, I load up the game and jump in.

I start the game with a whole slew of Trial mechs to chose from. Now, the Trial mechs are... actually pretty good! Just about all of them are thoroughly upgraded with all sorts of doodads that new players won't understand whatsoever.

I play a few matches, but I'm frustrated and want to actually play with my own mech. Since I'm new, I'm basically not getting **** for bonuses and earning maybe 80k per match on average, both because of my constant losing and lack of boosts and bonuses. Whatever, right? After playing about a dozen rounds, I have almost a million C-Bills. Great! Let's go see what I can buy!

...

Oh.

Oh my.

I can't buy ****. The cheapest mech in the game STARTS at about 1.4 mil. At this point I've had maybe 3 or 4 hours in this game (including time spent dicking around with the UI that's completely impenetrable for new players, and time spent learning just how to play), and I have been so far unable to do ANYTHING. I can't play with the mechlab. I can't spend skill points. I have been given absolutely nothing to 'grab' me.

So I go look at MC. Plug a few bucks into the game, get myself a mech, and I'm good right? Well I'm not going to BUY the shittiest mech available, so I'm going to look at something mid-ranged. Well what I see is that for $30 of MC, you guys are charging me like $8 for a lousy Hunchback.

This isn't even the best part - I'm getting to that. You see, what's going to happen is that a new player is going to buy what they can afford. They aren't plonking down 15 mil for some slick Clantech, and they SURE aren't going to drop $30 on a single mech, which is what a Timberwolf costs in MC.

No, what they're going to buy is going to be the cheaper mechs - $5, 6, 7 maybe, or maybe something that costs under 3M C-Bills. And you know what they're going to get? An absolute **** of a mech. It will have single heat sinks. It will have a standard structure and standard armor. It will have absolutely nothing worthwhile mounted to it whatsoever. It will have an extremely crappy, heavy, standard engine.

You see, you just FORCED the newbies to get acclimated to the game on the Trial Mechs which are all heavily upgraded. Now they buy their first mech, and because they aren't going to understand who the hell 'Lando Steele' is, much less what it does, their first mech is a woefully underpowered, underarmored, slow, overheating deathtrap.

Now the real adventure begins. You want to stick a decent engine in your new mech? That's about 3.5 million C-Bills - at 85k Cbills average per match, and figure 12 minutes per match (that's time spent doing other things in between as well as loading, waiting, etc.), that's about 42 rounds of getting their ass kicked in their garbage mech, for 8 ******* hours, on top of the several hours they already put in just to buy the damn thing. You want double heatsinks and Lando Steele? Pop another 2m in. Oh and by the way, you're going to have to BUY the new heatsinks too, on top of that 1.5M you just dropped on the privilege to get them. Want to experiment with different weapons? Well considering we're in insano-land where an LRM-20 costs 500,000 ******* C-Bills and everything else isn't much better (a large laser at 200k means another 3 rounds, for a weapon that might not even *work for what you need*), good luck with that.

At the end of the day, I've managed to make my horrible, lousy mech into something vaguely capable of not being steamrolled by everyone else in what is, from my newbie point of view, a Pay-2-Win game. All is good now, right?

Uh huh. Right.

So I'm clicking around and check out the 'skills' menu. Hey neat, I can upgrade my mech even more!

Then I see that little text. "Unlock all basic tier efficiencies for 3 variants of this chassis to unlock Elite tier efficiencies!"

3 variants.

I just went through hell for the last 20 hours and have funneled every single dime of my income into making my first incredibly ****** mech even *playable*, and now you're telling me I need to do it TWICE MORE just to get some more skills. On ONE CHASSIS. Out of, like, 50 mechs possible.

Then I mash Alt-F4 and uninstall the game.

This game is blatantly pay-2-win. Yeah, sure, TECHNICALLY I can get a good mech playing for free, but that would require me to make playing this game a full-time CAREER, as this sad pathetic trickle of C-bills slowly adds up over time, and then completely empties when I buy a single engine, for one mech. A fully-upgraded mech is simply better, full stop. The C-Bill grind is so absurdly steep that the only way to get ahead is going to be to spend MC, which makes it Pay 2 Win.

I don't see how playing this game without boosts and without a serious obsession for Mechwarrior that makes you want to devote literally hundreds of hours just to build a roster of three mechs is viable whatsoever. The average gamer is not going to tolerate this nonsense whatsoever.

Look, I played the freaking alpha. It was NOT ANYWHERE CLOSE to this bad. I basically haven't touched this game since then, and even WITH my boost AND my Founders mechs (which are all pieces of ****, thanks PGI for not putting Endo Steel or anything in any of them, so I have to do the newbie thing now too and spend the next thirty hours of gameplay making my Catapult not a ******* joke), my income rate is insultingly low. Over several hours in the Alpha I was able to buy a couple new mechs (by the end I had expanded my mech roster by at least seven or eight more mechs, including a few Catapult and Atlas variants) and upgrade them. Now in the post-IGP 'release', I've watched as I scrape together a few bucks, and then decide I want to try an AC-10 on this weird Centurion I was given, and POOF, all my money disappears for a gun I don't even know if I want. It's okay, I can sell it later, right? Oh yeah, for a completely outrageous 50% ripoff penalty.

I'M frustrated with the sad trickle of C-bills, what do you think a new player who will be performing even worse, in lousier mechs, without a boost is thinking?

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA....
Oh wait, youre serious? Let me laugh even harder.
Please go back to free stuffs cod kiddy land. Good riddance

[Tesunie]

White Panther, on 14 April 2015 - 08:35 PM, said:

Yeah, I started an alt account couple weeks ago to see what it was like. Finished the cadet bonus, couldnt afford ****... its absolutely appalling.

I did the same, with a challenge of using only stock mechs for the account for it's entire life span. I've seemed to have done much better and earned enough for several stock mechs during that time. After only 4 matches, I was able to by my first stock mech.

I logged my "new user experience" from the viewpoint of an experienced player in a new account here. You can read my take on things.

[mailin]

So the Op said that he was around in Alpha. Do you remember Repair and Rearm? This economy is WAY better. Under R&R if you won, no problem, you'd easily be able to afford to reload and fix your mech. But if you lost, whoa. I remember having to drop 5 or 6 times in a trial mech to be able to afford to refit the mech that I lost in. No thanks.

Also, rather than a player spending real money for a single mech, the mech packs are a pretty good deal.

Another point. This game is definitely NOT pay to win. Pay to win means that you cannot win unless you spend real money because only then can you get the best weapons, or something. Guess what, that doesn't exist in this game. Rather it is simply pay to make the grind go faster.

[Stoned Prophet]

White Panther, on 14 April 2015 - 08:35 PM, said:

Yeah, I started an alt account couple weeks ago to see what it was like. Finished the cadet bonus, couldnt afford ****... its absolutely appalling.

Ive been playing on my clanner alt. Let me break it down for you:
I have bout only paint, mechbays and paintjobs with mc.
I have only gotten Premium time by winning it in challenges.
I have had 8 clan mechs
Three stormcrows, two of which I sold
Three Hellbringers, two of which I sold
Two Adders, while working on the money for the third and leveling the first two.
Is it difficult and frustrating at times? Sure. But if you put in some effort, and learn how to make money, you can get whatever you want. But if youre one of these GIMME STUFFS NOW CAUSE I WANTS STUFFS NOW! I have ZERO sympathy for you.
Please, have a nice day.

[Eboli]

One aspect what I would like to put a positive spin on is that a new player will have to spend a fair amount of time playing in such mech variant to Elite and eventually Master it. This time spent actually makes the player learn the strengths and weaknesses of such variant while earning he necessary CBills to buy the second and then third variant.

By the time all three variants are purchased and Mastered (maybe not all of them depending) they should have by then learnt what they like and dislike regarding mechs to then move on to the next chassis, hopefully being able to use equipment from the chassis to supplement their next choice.

If the make a bad choice in mech selection then...

This is a free to play game with grind, just like a lot of other games out there. The grind gives enough incentive for players to think about spending some money on the game. This money helps the player as well as keeps the doors open for the game itself.

If players don't want to spend any money then they just have to put up with the grind.

Cheers Eboli.

[Palor]

I played for free for years, mastered atlas, jenner, jaeger, t-bolts and my premium time was all earned in events. I did the grind for all my c-bills, and sometimes it was frustrating...those atlas were expensive. Yes the c-bills from premium time really help buy new mechs, but if you want instant gratification you need to buy it.

[Frostiken]

mailin, on 14 April 2015 - 08:57 PM, said:

Another point. This game is definitely NOT pay to win. Pay to win means that you cannot win unless you spend real money because only then can you get the best weapons, or something. Guess what, that doesn't exist in this game. Rather it is simply pay to make the grind go faster.

That's not what that means. If that's what you think that means, that means the term is effectively meaningless, because almost no games are 'pay to win' like that. Pay to win means you are given an advantage if you shell out cash. In order for a game to not be 'pay to win', it must allow 'more powerful' content to be acquired by free to play players IN A REASONABLE FASHION.

There is nothing reasonable about the tiny trickle of C-Bills a free to play player is going to get.

[Kilo 40]

Frostiken, on 14 April 2015 - 08:22 PM, said:

This game is blatantly pay-2-win. Yeah, sure, TECHNICALLY I can get a good mech playing for free, but that would require me to make playing this game a full-time CAREER, as this sad pathetic trickle of C-bills slowly adds up over time, and then completely empties when I buy a single engine, for one mech. A fully-upgraded mech is simply better, full stop. The C-Bill grind is so absurdly steep that the only way to get ahead is going to be to spend MC, which makes it Pay 2 Win.

worst.argument.evar.