Or a small player base in the group queue, Soy. At your elo, even assuming your only in the "above average" category, AND playing in the group queue things are going to be like that.
They were less predictable Back In The Day because we didn't have a group queue.
Even with decent player numbers (and that's a question there - what does that even mean?) the group queue is going to be a fraction of the solo queue. Higher elo group queue an even smaller, subset of that, of course.
The fracturing of game modes definitely has a lot to do with the starkness of population/activity.
I will say I get the impression when I do a random solo CW drop that a lot of the people around me, I've never seen before, they appear to be running full stock dropdecks(!!!!!).
What does decent numbers mean. **** is so deep. I must toke more and meditate upon these things.
Let's also not forget it is summer. And Witcher 3 out, etc. No excuse just saying it's not always "game is old" or "PGI lied" things are very pragmatic, there's always things that make a playerbase fluctuate. Maybe some of the super nerdy players are into Kerbal lately and they don't have time for MWO, or maybe some of the twitch kids are playin this or that and not MWO atm, etc.
PS - upon toking it occurs to me that decent numbers is really not about a tangible number it's really about two things... first and foremost, this is a casual TDM so queue has to be expeditious and nobody likes to wait longer than the actual 'action' of the round itself, big waste of time... second, no matter where you're at in this game underhive or comp you are playing an online game and so socializing is key, there has to be enough people for the comp teams to survive turnover/burnout/drama etc without it being, say... predictable... like the league that just ended with only 2 teams carrying enough serious legit players to mount a title run meeting in the final
MWO's biggest obstacle is new player retention. If you poptart, MWO has already succeeded. You're in. The players who undermine the game's growth numbers arrive and leave again long before they ever learn what any of that stuff is or how to do it.
Back in mektek days, certain patchs were pure garbage and obviously designed to serve just a certain group of the community.
The nbt guys still bitching about poptarting, they would even go on servers where poptarting was the mode for that group of players and complain about it.
Is mechwarrior really served by making sure that you can hardly jump snipe at all so that the nbt guys can have thier brawl, longer laser burn , jj shake, damaged legs on fall damage, ghost heat, all those things to make sure jump sniping is a pain in the rear.
Hey, so what kind of weapons are you supposed to put on clan mechs if not the light lasers, but that means that even without jj the brawl guys are being sniped at range, and guess what happens. Nerf Stormcrow and Meathead.
Pretty obvious whats going on here, like its a secret or something.
This coming from a player that enjoys this game anyway and spends money on it, but the attention jump sniping or sniping in general gets is pretty stupid, all the reasoning used against sniping could be used just as fairly agaist LRMS. Going to nerf those into the ground to so that the self serving prior nbt crowd can have thier perpetual brawl?
Soy, you see the same players due to being in the group que, and as Winterdark pointed out, you aren't an average player, you are well above average, top of the field once, remember, and even tanking your Elo, it'll get right back up where it was. Only a small segment of the population plays group que, so being a small segment of an already small segment...
I drop solo mostly and I've seen you occasionally, along with others on the forums, but I tend to see a lot of names I don't recognize, even when I'm dropping for a few hours in a row in the same Mech.
When I drop CW, I'm sometimes solo, sometimes in a group, and I'll see the same names repeatedly on both sides, but that's due to the nature of CW. I tend to stick to a single planet because it's active, short que times, so do other people, so it's fully expected I'll see the same people over and over. If I planet hop because action is slow, I'll see different names depending on where I end up and who I'm facing off against, again, fully expected, totally within the norms.
Population seems to be growing to me, totally unsupported by any real data I freely admit, but I definitely get that feeling from the pure lack of repeat names in my drops in solo que. A negative population growth would mean I see the same people more and more often, and that's not been my experience, and I try to keep track of names, XO's recruiting duty habit ya know.
Combine that with the number of new players posting in the forums, and I mean real newbs, not alts, I see growth, not decline.
People left over poptarting, NOT because they couldn't do it anymore, but because they hated it being done to them. As you pointed out Soy, the top comps, they don't care, tactics change, it's the nature of online games, their attraction is adapting to the new tactics and mastering them. It's the people who can't adapt who get all salty and leave, and that's usually not a very big segment of the population, and probably not one you want to cater to anyway. The death of poptarting wasn't exactly a quiet thing, but that didn't bring some of those who left back, they won't come back and would have left over something else if poptarting had never come to be a thing.
Why did YOU come back Soy? Why are you still here, still playing, since you aren't all about the comp anymore? I know the burnout, been there, done that, but I, like you, went back to the game. I know why I did it, but I wonder if your reasons are different, I doubt it since you've been pretty open about this subject, but I'd like to know, after you toke a bit and mediate upon the question, why are you back?
Quite a few of us on the forums have a passion for the game, not specifically MWO, but MechWarrior itself. It's something about the game itself, how it works, what it requires of us, what it gives us. We white knight when we think it's appropiate, and we call bs when we smell it, but we keep playing even when we're pissed as hell at PGI for some stupid thing they've done yet again. Why is that you think? What's the magic in this game that keeps us coming back for more even when we swear we've had more than we can take from PGI?
I don't think pop-tarting has much to do with player retention. Or, more accurately, I don't think it is a controlling factor.
When pop-tarting was the meta, I was one of the haters. I was also a brand new player, and was still figuring everything out. I don't recall being particularly vocal about it; all I can remember is proposing reticle shake on the way down.
Anyway, now I am one of the pop-tarters. I pop-tart with my Mist Lynx and pulse lasers. I pop-tart with my Victor and an AC/20 with SRMs. I pop-tart hard in the BJ-3 with PPCs. I was pop-tarting hard in the Arrow with literally any load-out I had on it during the event: LB-10X, PPC, pulse lasers, machine guns, etc.
If it has workable jump-jets, I am a mufockin' toaster strudel, straight-up. Most peeps still can't handle the vertical.
Obviously, I'm still here and I still play the game. Neither the presence nor the subsequent nerf of jump-sniping have driven me away. Would it be awesome if I could bounce more efficiently? Hell yes, taking 2 tons in jump-jets on a light-weight chassis sucks! Still, I think the major contributor to people leaving is a general unwillingness to learn how to play the game efficiently and, therefore, successfully.
This is actually a problem widespread throughout gaming.
I asked Ken Rolston (main dude behind Kingdoms of Amalur, Elder Scrolls III, and Elder Scrolls IV) at a panel why games always seem to use player incentive systems that reward players based on time spent playing (i.e. earning XP for every action that unlocks more powerful abilities) instead of using incentive systems that reward players for being skilled (i.e. refining your motor skills to take advantage of the game mechanics). He replied, flatly, that it was because the game wouldn't sell if they did straight skill-based. Most people don't want to have to put that kind of effort into their games, they want to always feel like a bad-ass. MWO does not make a bad or inexperienced player feel like a bad-ass, it does exactly the opposite. And, when those same players get thrown into matches with the best players and those good players throw out the "ggclose, git gud scrubz" type of attitude, most of the n00bs and bads just quit playing instead of gitting gud.
On that thought and if I am recalling it correctly, the pop-tart era is when House of Lords (and SJR) players earned their supremacy and gained their unit its negative reputation. It is possible that there might be a stronger correlation between that and loss of players than in the state of pop-tarting, but even then it's likely to be far from the sole factor.
Most likely, players who left were already lost, and any perceived in-game slights just accelerated the process.
Kristov Kerensky, on 23 June 2015 - 09:58 PM, said:
Why did YOU come back Soy? Why are you still here, still playing, since you aren't all about the comp anymore? I know the burnout, been there, done that, but I, like you, went back to the game. I know why I did it, but I wonder if your reasons are different, I doubt it since you've been pretty open about this subject, but I'd like to know, after you toke a bit and mediate upon the question, why are you back?
What makes this game unique as a FPS is the give and take to the combat, with MechWarrior IP. If you took away either of those things, the game has nothing.
I left for lots of reasons actually some nothing to do at all with the game whatsoever, life happens, I came back because lifes like that, there's an ebb and flow to things and sometimes you have a lot of time to spend playing silly games or talking about them with other nerds on the internet.
I came back because the game has that special thing in the first paragraph. The opportunity presented itself and so here I am, it doesn't take much.
To expand upon that it'd go something like this... I'm back to have fun, I play the game from a more critical standpoint now than I used to, and that's not about meta... and I play on my own terms now.
I dunno, whatever dude this is vapid... just a guy playin a video game and having fun with it while I can.
It's easy: when something gets dominant in game (wheter it's bad balance, poptarting or meta) people quit.
Because just like running the meta and or laser vomit / gauss spam is the strongest and most effective of other options.
Then where's the fun if you have for example the poptarting being dominant? Just shortly like the Victors and Dragonslayers got introduced: everyone went for thst specific build and were going to poptart.
Really frustating when you see each match the same build over again on different people and poptarting the mad out of it.
It's like banging the same prostitute (h00ker) while you stand in the same line with other 20 guys.
I say it's well deserved it got nerfed. However the way how PGI nerfs and buffs things are questionable.
I asked Ken Rolston (main dude behind Kingdoms of Amalur, Elder Scrolls III, and Elder Scrolls IV) at a panel why games always seem to use player incentive systems that reward players based on time spent playing (i.e. earning XP for every action that unlocks more powerful abilities) instead of using incentive systems that reward players for being skilled (i.e. refining your motor skills to take advantage of the game mechanics). He replied, flatly, that it was because the game wouldn't sell if they did straight skill-based. Most people don't want to have to put that kind of effort into their games, they want to always feel like a bad-ass. MWO does not make a bad or inexperienced player feel like a bad-ass, it does exactly the opposite. And, when those same players get thrown into matches with the best players and those good players throw out the "ggclose, git gud scrubz" type of attitude, most of the n00bs and bads just quit playing instead of gitting gud.
On that thought and if I am recalling it correctly, the pop-tart era is when House of Lords (and SJR) players earned their supremacy and gained their unit its negative reputation. It is possible that there might be a stronger correlation between that and loss of players than in the state of pop-tarting, but even then it's likely to be far from the sole factor.
In 2002 I was playing the most popular 'private server' of any online game to date, IPY UO. I remember doing nothing but basically griefing for a solid year. Yes, some field fight pvp, dueling, ofc. But mostly just ganking, pking, house looting newbs, etc. Just being a true menace. We had a serious extortion type of thing going on with this server cuz it was a lot of top players in the crew who did this **** when field fights weren't poppin off. I mean, we had a guild that newbs could tag into called [10k] where if they paid 10k gold, we wouldn't drop them for a week. That's mafia ****. You've seen this type of **** in other games like maybe Eve or something. Ok anyways,
I remember at one point the head admin and I talking one time on Vent and he just says point blank, "do you know how many people quit because of the **** you do" and it really bothered me. I didn't really know what to say. I think looking back I've spent a lot of time trying not to be a big ****, but sometimes it gets the best of you. This game is no exception. I'm still an *******, but I try not to be. At least a lot of the time.
There are a lot of people who play games that go full throttle on griefing, trolling, insulting, everything. I can't take it for too long before it starts to bother me. That's just me though. I dunno about this crowd. I think a lot of people, and don't take this the wrong way, but I think a lot of the haters of this game or whatever, the antagonists, they want to see it go down because they want the next MechWarrior to come along. They want PGI gone and want something else. That's not how it works, if this game disappeared tomorrow, there's no guarantee the next one pops up the day after, or ever. I dunno, I guess what I'm saying is that at this point with this game, why are we having to defend it or worry about pop, it sucks (not the game, the 'must defend MWO against butthurts or trolls').
Earlier tonight I was playing a round and I turned on VOIP for the first time last night. I hadn't said anything all round, I'm dead, spectating some guy and he's got his back to enemy, they're on radar, he's not afk, shooting rock and I go on VOIP "WTF are you doing you f'ing artard omg how autist are you this is beautiful i love you" and after he dies 5 secs later, he types in chat "I'm new Soy you *******" and disconnects. I sent him a friend request and was gonna help show him the game but he never accepted my request. For all I know he uninstalled and is now crying in fetal position. I felt really bad. "He coulda been somebody, he coulda been a contender..!" Struck me as odd tho that he had a Seismic, how the hell does a newbie have Seismic...
^ RIP Clawtender on Canyon Network 6/23/2015 - 6/23/2015
I know some Peaople that leave MWO because Poptarting is nerfed. They say the high Skillcap is gone and the game become boring.
On the other hand, I liked to poptart but I didn't leave the game for HJ.
I must to be honest here: I was a sniper, I had to adapt...and yes, I became a brawler, and I have much more fun now.
Another set of skills required.
It's not true that skillcap is gone.
First ECM and then poptarting made it awfully obvious to anyone with eyes how incompetent PGI is and how they are unable to make decisive action to solve burning issues in their own gameno suprise that people left and never came back even if issues was fixed months later.
Btw I never snipe in other FPS, more of a runner n gunner, nothing better than being a crazy medic back in old Battlefield games. Reviving like 90 people within 5 minutes, firing a few rockets, throwin some nades, knifin a guy.
Sniping so boring.
Sniping boring in this game but at least poptarting is 'action'. There's a run n gun element to it.
Bad Balance
Pop-Tarting
Nerfing Pop Tarting
Slow development pace
Minimal Maps
Content is Boring
Everything is about Mech Pack sales - Not content to do
PGI/IGP - And related scandels. - Your on an Island
Forum Moderation - During Niko {Godwin's Law} times
Game modes - Repetitive
Group Que/Solo Que - People couldn't play how they wanted to play.
Exceptional failure at the New Player Experience - That was described as not a priority
And honestly the list could go on and on and on as to why people have walked away from MWO and PGI and will never return.
The game isn't dead, but it's done. I mean we are what, 4 years? in (i forget it's been so abusive) and we really are only just getting to the point content wise we could say this is more than a beta, the mech packs keep coming every few months to keep the lights on at PGI
Soy, on 24 June 2015 - 12:52 AM, said:
Btw I never snipe in other FPS, more of a runner n gunner, nothing better than being a crazy medic back in old Battlefield games. Reviving like 90 people within 5 minutes, firing a few rockets, throwin some nades, knifin a guy.
Sniping so boring.
Sniping boring in this game but at least poptarting is 'action'. There's a run n gun element to it.
People could never grasp the difference between Jump Sniping, and Poptarting.
In 2002 I was playing the most popular 'private server' of any online game to date, IPY UO. I remember doing nothing but basically griefing for a solid year. Yes, some field fight pvp, dueling, ofc. But mostly just ganking, pking, house looting newbs, etc. Just being a true menace. We had a serious extortion type of thing going on with this server cuz it was a lot of top players in the crew who did this **** when field fights weren't poppin off. I mean, we had a guild that newbs could tag into called [10k] where if they paid 10k gold, we wouldn't drop them for a week. That's mafia ****. You've seen this type of **** in other games like maybe Eve or something. Ok anyways,
I remember at one point the head admin and I talking one time on Vent and he just says point blank, "do you know how many people quit because of the **** you do" and it really bothered me. I didn't really know what to say. I think looking back I've spent a lot of time trying not to be a big ****, but sometimes it gets the best of you. This game is no exception. I'm still an *******, but I try not to be. At least a lot of the time.
There are a lot of people who play games that go full throttle on griefing, trolling, insulting, everything. I can't take it for too long before it starts to bother me. That's just me though. I dunno about this crowd. I think a lot of people, and don't take this the wrong way, but I think a lot of the haters of this game or whatever, the antagonists, they want to see it go down because they want the next MechWarrior to come along. They want PGI gone and want something else. That's not how it works, if this game disappeared tomorrow, there's no guarantee the next one pops up the day after, or ever. I dunno, I guess what I'm saying is that at this point with this game, why are we having to defend it or worry about pop, it sucks (not the game, the 'must defend MWO against butthurts or trolls').
It does really suck that we're having to talk about player population in a dedicated online game that's barely three years old and features a classic franchise. It's also unfortunate that we have some secretly salty, Nimitz-class d*uche-canoes that linger in the game and on the forums tarnishing the experience.
However, toxic community members and changing balance do not kill games alone. There has to be an underlying flaw with the game. In your UO server, that problem seems to be an unwillingness by the admins to ban griefers. Understandable, if he's getting money from the players and most of those players are griefers. But it's still a fatal flaw. In MWO the problem is...drumroll:
PGI.
I want it to be known that I think MWO has some great fundamental core game-play mechanics and some amazing artwork both in concept and in in-game execution. If those things weren't true, none of us would be here at all and this game would have died a long time ago. I also want it to be known that some of the reason's it's PGI's fault are actually out of PGI's ability to control. Those flaws still remain, however, and I'm gonna list them in spoilers so I don't take up the whole page.
Spoiler
The people behind the nitty gritty are clearly not experienced enough. You can tell by the types of flaws you see making it to the delivered game; they are conceptual, not logical problems. That they couldn't get a quirk to exactly apply 5% of whatever is an example, they had to go for "close enough." How can it not apply a straight scalar value, and what kind of voodoo did you use to build the original system where that's not a simple change? That's conceptual. They also can't understand their own code with regard to ammo-switching. That means whoever was programming before was an idiot who doesn't know how to write self-commenting code and whoever is programming now either isn't experienced enough to figure it out or has been told to spend his time elsewhere. Again, it's conceptual.
The UI is not user-friendly even slightly. As somebody who has taken courses in systems engineering, human factors engineering, game design, and graphics design, I can tell you that they aren't following the rules. There is no flow to the menus, nothing that captures the user's attention and focuses it in a desired progression along the monitor. They have the 'Mech as the centerpiece looking pretty, but the buttons are tiny, in the corners, and, translucent. Worse, they've hidden crucial information in pop-up boxes and sub-menus that have to be loaded every time they are accessed, slowing down navigation and causing the user's ability to perform the desired task (which is to enjoy themselves) to lessen. Actions that should be combined into a single area are split. You should be able to sell gear in the MechLab. You should be able to select your 'Mech from the 'MechLab. Applying paint should be doable from a tab in the items menu on the right.
There shouldn't even be a blank home-screen, honestly, it should just launch straight into and do everything from the 'MechLab.
It also doesn't scale well. At all. I question if they are familiar with DPI scaling.
Finally are the optimization problems which are non-existent in other CryEngine games.
All these things point to fundamental deficiencies in the development teams' abilities.
Spoiler
MWO has only the most rudimentary of support infrastructures, so complaints about poor conduct or bugs inside the game are both difficult to send and slow to receive responses. If there was an in-client method for support and manpower behind it on the other end, that would certainly help.
Spoiler
The communication between players and developers is poor. It's awful. There will always be players that bad-mouth you as a developer, but you can't stick your head in the sand over it and neglect your home forums. Rampant bad-mouthing, as you see here, is usually indicative of serious problems with your game, too. Where there's smoke, there's fire. If a large number of your forum population is angry with your performance, you've done something wrong, somewhere. People around here are upset because PGI presented a grand design and the result has not lived up to expectations. Fine, neat. But, to salt it up, they are upset because the fixes are not coming in quickly or with the expected quality. Players are not kept sufficiently informed as to what is being worked on and they are not actively consulted on often enough about what they would like to see in the game. And the community is willing to help. There are a lot of very valid criticisms and solutions on the game itself that PGI would to well to listen to and implement under some more informed interpretation. Some of the people in here have probably spent more man-hours trying to build the game as a conceptual entity than PGI did before they went and turned it into working software. They could even implement dev questions and community solutions into a hyper-linked ticker in the launcher or the client itself.
This is pure speculation, but I think they don't like to interact because they know they can't do it, as per the reason in first spoiler, and because they don't feel like putting up with the vitriol when they either say they can't or when they try and fail. I know how that feels, since it was a problem for me as the primary software developer in my college capstone project, but I didn't just stop talking to people about it.
Spoiler
No proper tutorials covering basic tactics and strategies to help new players not get steamrolled. Not even an offline training survival mode that would force you to learn how to at least roll damage and choose effective builds to stay alive longer and longer. Unranked, non-tracking playlist would also be great to try builds and theories in without impacting anybody's stats.
That they didn't think of this in initial planning for a game all about competitive (as in, people vs. people) play is mind-boggling.
Now, a lot of these problems would not be problems if PGI and MWO were attached to a properly large publishing company like, say, Activision. If they were backed up by those kinds of resources, the networking would be much more reliable, the support staff would be there, and the experience needed to craft the vision for the game would be available. You might have to pay for expansions like Community Warfare map packs, but so what? If the game is amazing, I'm ready and willing. If IGP had been willing to make the investment to get that level of quality in the first place, the game would have been stronger from the start and we wouldn't be having this conversation.
So, PGI's hands are basically tied without a massive cash injection to hire on more staff. That cash injection will not come simply from 'Mech packs...unless maybe that pack is a Marauder or something. I dunno. If the Timberwolf didn't do it, I doubt the Marauder would, either.
Quote
Earlier tonight I was playing a round and I turned on VOIP for the first time last night. I hadn't said anything all round, I'm dead, spectating some guy and he's got his back to enemy, they're on radar, he's not afk, shooting rock and I go on VOIP "WTF are you doing you f'ing artard omg how autist are you this is beautiful i love you" and after he dies 5 secs later, he types in chat "I'm new Soy you *******" and disconnects. I sent him a friend request and was gonna help show him the game but he never accepted my request. For all I know he uninstalled and is now crying in fetal position. I felt really bad. "He coulda been somebody, he coulda been a contender..!" Struck me as odd tho that he had a Seismic, how the hell does a newbie have Seismic...
^ RIP Clawtender on Canyon Network 6/23/2015 - 6/23/2015
I actually try to provide legitimate helpful information to players playing badly, but you know how it is. Everybody assumes everybody is as bad as or worse than they are! I do get frustrated and sometimes type it out snarky at the end of a match, but, eh.
Bads gonna bad. Even me, I bad sometimes. Always bad in assaults.
Stefka Kerensky, on 24 June 2015 - 12:02 AM, said:
On the other hand, I liked to poptart but I didn't leave the game for HJ.
I must to be honest here: I was a sniper, I had to adapt...and yes, I became a brawler, and I have much more fun now.
Another set of skills required.
It's not true that skillcap is gone.
Never say Skillcap is gone but the highest does.
Soy, on 24 June 2015 - 12:52 AM, said:
Btw I never snipe in other FPS, more of a runner n gunner, nothing better than being a crazy medic back in old Battlefield games. Reviving like 90 people within 5 minutes, firing a few rockets, throwin some nades, knifin a guy.
Sniping so boring.
Sniping boring in this game but at least poptarting is 'action'. There's a run n gun element to it.
This! It was action and you can turn a game with a few skillshots. I do it now with NVA and SMN.
Agree with pretty much everything here. I like to think I've been pretty positive towards PGI through this game's run, but there are some things that just baffled me. There have been multiple patches where they fixed one bug, only for another bug that was fixed a couple patches ago to resurface. That shouldn't be happening more that once or twice, I feel.
The reason why the Poptarting meta was so damaging compared to the other metas before and after, was that Poptarting evolved from being a dominant tactic to a form of griefing. Organized groups weren't just winning with Poptarting, but trolling the losing players in chat as well. This went on for far too long until the quiet ones left, and the vocal ones came here to the forums.
During the Poptarting meta, I used to run in a group that countered the tactic. We were a light pack, and if there was only one or two poptarts on the enemy team, we would focus them shortly after the main engagement started. But if there were more poptarts than we could handle, we'd cap the enemy base instead when the main engagement was too far advanced for the enemy to return in time. Zerging poptart groups worked as well, though that required a larger team that was on the same page as every other allied pilot. Having to counter poptarts was not enjoyable, since it detracted from a real fight or mechs I would otherwise want to pilot (fun mechs).
For the random pugs though... going against poptarts was either a matter of staying behind cover indefinitely, or attacking without much synchronization. From the Pugs' point of view, games never really started. At least with the other metas there was still some semblance of a game, with brawling and a good fight at the end of it.
Game changes and balance issues caused the poptarting meta. Prior to those changes, poptarting was just a flashy maneuver, and typically overshadowed by stronger builds that were not yet nerfed.
The reason the population went down and stayed down is because this is a shell ofa game an 95% of the "content" added to this minimum viable product are overpriced cashgrab mechpacks
Read this. THIS is the main reason this game is not doing well. I can't believe how a great portion of the current player base fails to admit this.
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Wintersdark, on 23 June 2015 - 08:13 PM, said:
