Jack Dawes, on 27 October 2015 - 06:16 AM, said:
While I agree with you, I am still here (sort of), I have 4 friends I attempted to get to play with me. Grouping with newbies is absolutely brutal. Loss after loss after loss - and one of them quit after a day's play in total frustration. I got smarter and the other 3 dropped solo. None of them made it a month. One was so enthused that he actually built himself a cockpit in anticipation - and he lasted about a week before quitting (bitterly, I might add).
The play is complex, which is OK. But everything from first drops (the tutorial is nice but insufficient preparation for a game as it merely shows you how to move and group weapons with no tactics or strategy involved) to C-Bill / XP rewards to skill trees to modules to...pretty much everything is too steep for most people to stick with it for any length of time. And, for the record, the people I introduced are geeks with an accumulated 4 decades+ of gaming. And all of them, to a person, quit in frustration.
That is not the way to grow your franchise.
Yeah, I cannot really argue against your experience. I've only been able to attract one real-life friend into MWO, but then he's an old-timer who's played all the previous MW titles.
The issue of NPE has come up in the last one or two townhall sessions, and I get the feeling that PGI (or Russ specifically) is kinda throwing up their arms with the issue, saying that it's an inherently complicated game, and only so much can be done. While that's true, and I'm happy that they'll rather keep MWO a complicated game than dilute it into a generic FPS, I still feel like more could be done for NPE.
Stuff like single-player battles against even rudimentary AI would immensely ease the NPE, without cheapening the core gameplay. But I'll acknowledge that even a simple AI is a big programming task. And stuff like the complete lack of official guides (such as mech building basics, basic in-game tactics), after years of development, kinda puzzles me. I know it's a small developer, but even a single person working part-time could've achieved so much over that time.
I just get the feeling that it hasn't been that high on the agenda, and it's strange because that's
really shooting yourself in the foot.
Edited by jss78, 27 October 2015 - 09:35 AM.