A goodly portion of the playerbase is unwilling to ever forgive Piranha for 2013, and has willfully discarded everything the company has done since. With the exception of any slips or mistakes, which they are quick to tear at.
‘Disillusioned’ is a good term for it, methinks. ‘Delusional’ works too, if less broadly. As has been mentioned, the Founders were sold a game which they will often claim they did not get. As well, many old BattleTech tabletop players stand behind those Founders (as they’re usually the same people, really) in claiming that this game has Betrayed The Spirit of BattleTech™ and is a travesty and abomination upon the face of their beloved franchise.
Some of these players are so disconnected from reality that they believe the franchise would honestly be better off – that it would be Better For BattleTech – if MWO were to collapse and die, and deprive Piranha of the license in the process. They actively desire to burn the game down in the hopes that someone else will start over and “give us the BattleTech game we actually want/deserve”. How these people manage to delude themselves into thinking that any developer would be willing to touch a property whose playerbase actively and deliberately attacks any attempt to adapt the franchise to the modern day, I do not know. But I suspect it involves the sort of narcotics they do not grow in fields in Kansas.
Just a couple of comments ...
1) As a founder I resent that remark! I received pretty much the game I expected but I must admit that I have constantly hoped for more. Over time it has become apparent that PGI moves very slowly since they have invested a minimal amount in development and that their vision for what the game will be and my ideas on the greatness it could be do not match up.
The failed promises of PGI have more to do with "dreams and game design" ... role warfare and community warfare as examples ... where they didn't have any solid design or effort completed ... just wishful thinking. Russ' "90 days after open beta" for the release of community warfare comes to mind. To be honest, Russ was either lying to himself or to everyone else depending on whether he believed that claim or not.
However, none of this changes the decent game that MWO has become today and the progress that PGI is still making towards a better game.
2) As for the Battletech community (which I have also played ), although they might wish for a game more like Battletech (HBS is making their product now ), I don't think most of them realistically expected anything substantially different from the previous MechWarrior computer game titles which are about as similar to Battletech as MWO is with the exception that MWO must modify things further so that they are more or less balanced. Balance is an additional constraint of a multiplayer online game in which mechs of all kinds can be mixed in matches ... which is one of the prerequisites for efficient match-making.
it might not matter to anyone but i like the game a great deal play it every day just spent 55$ getting all the packs for the archer and dont regret it in the least. i like this game as much as i did 6 months ago when it entered my life. untill it dies i will play simple as that
.i hope pgi continues this upward trend of faster content and new mechs ,wouldn't mind new maps to, more space oriented like hpg or a real city scape because river city isent cutting it.
maybe tanks and infy even static ones just so i can gear up my mechs with a machine gun or two and go to town.
also would love to drive a demolisher tank hmm duel ac20.
and as one final note
mech morters.
cant be taken down by ams but require Manuel aim come in 4 differant sizes/strengths and shoot a corresponding amount of shells. its a skill weapon it would be nice to have especially since so much of the warhammer art i see has it toting at least one if not two of the bigger ones.
I never say MWO is bad. I tell anyone new they will enjoy it and it's not a bad grind and it's not pay to win.
However, the game was much better in May 2013 before the Gauss charge-up, slow-mo PPCs, LRMs that do nothing. Basically that leaves MWO in stagnant laser-vomit, game after game. The problem is, only certain mechs have the hardpoints to laser-vomit because Battle Tech did not design all mechs to laser-vomit. So many of these new players are likely to find out the hard way they bought the wrong mech, get frustrated, and leave. This is why all weapons in MWO should give players an equal chance to win. That's just love of the game.
Founders were sold on mechwarrior online being a specific kind of game. And for a while, it was while in closed beta. Today, it's a very different game. And for many people, it's quite disappointing.
MWO is what it is. A mech-based twitch shooter that has far more in common with games like Hawken than most of us founders are comfortable with. In my opinion, it's still a good game. But I can understand why some vets are disappointed in how it's turned out.
"Thinking man's shooter". Yeah. Right.
I don't understand how anybody could consider this a twitch shooter. Titanfall is a twitch shooter. CS:GO is a twitch shooter. But on the other side of the fense, there are people that try to argue that CoD is not a twitch shooter.
How would you change MWO to make it not a twitch shooter in your eyes?
I don't understand how anybody could consider this a twitch shooter. Titanfall is a twitch shooter. CS:GO is a twitch shooter. But on the other side of the fense, there are people that try to argue that CoD is not a twitch shooter.
How would you change MWO to make it not a twitch shooter in your eyes?
Remove all pinpoint accuracy. Make weapons have different accuracies at different ranges. Introduce a proper crit system rather than the placeholder one we have had since closed beta. Make weapons like LRMs have a purpose other than to trick newbies in trial mechs into using them. Introduce more build strategies other than "boat the highest alpha possible". Make it viable to mount weapons for different ranges, just like in the tabletop.
Right now builds like 1x LL, 3x ML, 1x SRM-6 are completley non-viable in MWO because why do that when you can boat 3x LL with the most OP quirk mech you can find?
Jun Watarase, on 16 December 2015 - 09:20 PM, said:
Remove all pinpoint accuracy. Make weapons have different accuracies at different ranges. Introduce a proper crit system rather than the placeholder one we have had since closed beta. Make weapons like LRMs have a purpose other than to trick newbies in trial mechs into using them. Introduce more build strategies other than "boat the highest alpha possible". Make it viable to mount weapons for different ranges, just like in the tabletop.
Right now builds like 1x LL, 3x ML, 1x SRM-6 are completley non-viable in MWO because why do that when you can boat 3x LL with the most OP quirk mech you can find?
I don't see adding cone of fire will change how people build their mechs. Builds like 1x LL + 3x ML + 1x SRM6 will still be terrible. There's no way you can make mounting weapons for different range viable without introducing some type of "ghost" mechanic, such as "mount more than 3 medium lasers and suffer a ghost convergence penalty"
And what do you mean a proper crit system? We have a crit system and it works fine. The problem is that you can't crit until armour is removed, which is the way it should be, but components don't last very long after the armour stripped so crits hardly every matter. Unless you want to triple internal structure, which is far far from lore.
Don't get me wrong, I'm all for delayed convergence and a slight CoF mechanic, but I don't see how it's going to make people play TT bracket builds. In fact it would probably just make boating more common.
What's the point of the FOV slider when it increases your FOV inside the mech instead of the entire view?
Are you able to drop consumables on spawn/drop points?
Why would anyone not get an XL engine?
Why is it easier to play TDM than the objectives?
Is there some organized post collection of suggestions, bugs, and statistics?
Why haven't they added PVE elements if the flamers are for soft targets?
Why are the maps so... tiny?
Hearing more about convergence makes me think that it may be a good balancing factor, but you disagree, why is the community so fractured about it, it seems like it would be a good idea?
Does Piranha have a test server or polls?
Why does a single new mech with all the variants cost $55?
Are MG's for soft targets as well?
Destructible buildings?
Why no melee or throwing trees/poles/cars and all this other cool crap I keep reading about?
What's the point of the Urbanmech?
How come camouflage hasn't become a thing?
What's the point of dumb firing LRMs?
You would think that in a game like this there would be IR smoke screens or something, or powerful Anti-tank mines?
What's the point of shutting on and off?
Why ever use NARC when TAG is lighter, has longer range, and uses no ammo?
Why do assault mechs have Jump jets?
Edited by ComradeHavoc, 17 December 2015 - 05:22 AM.
ComradeHavoc, on 17 December 2015 - 05:21 AM, said:
Now I have even more questions:
Why would anyone use a worse mech?
What's the point of the FOV slider when it increases your FOV inside the mech instead of the entire view?
Are you able to drop consumables on spawn/drop points?
Why would anyone not get an XL engine?
Why is it easier to play TDM than the objectives?
Is there some organized post collection of suggestions, bugs, and statistics?
Why haven't they added PVE elements if the flamers are for soft targets?
Why are the maps so... tiny?
Hearing more about convergence makes me think that it may be a good balancing factor, but you disagree, why is the community so fractured about it, it seems like it would be a good idea?
Does Piranha have a test server or polls?
Why does a single new mech with all the variants cost $55?
Are MG's for soft targets as well?
Destructible buildings?
Why no melee or throwing trees/poles/cars and all this other cool crap I keep reading about?
What's the point of the Urbanmech?
How come camouflage hasn't become a thing?
What's the point of dumb firing LRMs?
You would think that in a game like this there would be IR smoke screens or something, or powerful Anti-tank mines?
What's the point of shutting on and off?
Why ever use NARC when TAG is lighter, has longer range, and uses no ammo?
Why do assault mechs have Jump jets?
I´ll leave some out...
2. Immersion...many of us hated to sit with the nose to the window, so we edited the FOV in the user.cfg to be more in the cockpit...PGI promised a year or so ago to put it in, and finally did... thanks for that
4. Vulnerability, especially with gauss or ammo in the side torsos... some mechs work good with standards, in fact i prefere those...
5. Because it will ALWAYS be easier to just kill the enemy. although, base rush works, but will not pay well
7. they already announced that PVE stuff will (probably) arrive next year
8. dunno... that question has been asked since closed beta... best answer: because....
9. conversion was in the game, yea...it was good and would be good to come back. but 2 things spoke against it: it was bugged (converted on background objects rather than on mechs) plus many people couldnt deal with properly aiming before shooting... so PGI appearently decided to not further fix it...
10. yes, but used very irregularily
11. seems to work, people buy, so they keep the prices up...
12. basically yes, although they made them crit seekers... debatable
13. doubtful
14.lots of work...we can be happy that PGI got a little faster lately...
15. its a classic, some people love it for nostalgia reasons... if "city tech" rules would actually apply to MWO (slipping on pavement), it would maybe even have some purpose ^^
16. workforce i´d say...
17. sometimes you can drive even ecm´ed mechs out of cover or into it if you are good
18. maybe. PGI mentioned to be "thinking about it" ...
19. none really...no one is stupid enough to not recognize a shut down mech...or are they? ^^
20. narc is fire and forget...peak over a hill, narc, get back to cover... cant do that with tag, you have to stay exposed...
21. why not?
Skoll, on 17 December 2015 - 05:30 AM, said:
Has anyone brought up the lack of Active / Passive radar yet? You know, that itty bitty thing that's been in every MW game up til now.
several times...another "we´ll look into it"
Edited by Alex Warden, 17 December 2015 - 05:50 AM.
Has anyone brought up the lack of Active / Passive radar yet? You know, that itty bitty thing that's been in every MW game up til now.
I did in my review, which I tried to be fair with. However, Active/Passive requires too much thinking + has too much depth/tactics/skill to it (especially with proper ECM - see MW:LL). So they decided neither should be required for their quick-kill-match, DeathMatch Arcade game.
ComradeHavoc, on 17 December 2015 - 05:21 AM, said:
Now I have even more questions:
Why would anyone use a worse mech?
What's the point of the FOV slider when it increases your FOV inside the mech instead of the entire view?
Are you able to drop consumables on spawn/drop points?
Why would anyone not get an XL engine?
Why is it easier to play TDM than the objectives?
Is there some organized post collection of suggestions, bugs, and statistics?
Why haven't they added PVE elements if the flamers are for soft targets?
Why are the maps so... tiny?
Hearing more about convergence makes me think that it may be a good balancing factor, but you disagree, why is the community so fractured about it, it seems like it would be a good idea?
Does Piranha have a test server or polls?
Why does a single new mech with all the variants cost $55?
Are MG's for soft targets as well?
Destructible buildings?
Why no melee or throwing trees/poles/cars and all this other cool crap I keep reading about?
What's the point of the Urbanmech?
How come camouflage hasn't become a thing?
What's the point of dumb firing LRMs?
You would think that in a game like this there would be IR smoke screens or something, or powerful Anti-tank mines?
What's the point of shutting on and off?
Why ever use NARC when TAG is lighter, has longer range, and uses no ammo?
Why do assault mechs have Jump jets?
Now, see, I know you're trolling me because you're pissed off at the community, trying to prove that Piranha hasn’t included enough tutorial information and also that the community is nothing but a bunch of p!ss-and-vinegar salty bittervets, but I have a solution to this. And that solution is to keep answering your belligerent question-barrages until you have to admit that the vast majority of this stuff couldn’t possibly have been covered in an in-game tutorial – nobody puts information about long-standing forum debates in their in-game tutorials, man, and we all know it – and also that the forum is not, in fact, filled with nothing but p!ss-and-vinegar salty bittervets. The game is simply complicated and with a remarkably turbulent history given its relatively short lifetime, but fortunately for you I have a fairly decent grasp on most of it. Huzzah!
So let's get cracking.
1.) Because it's an old tabletop favorite of theirs. Because they like underdogs. Because they disagree that it's a worse 'Mech. Because they're streaming and their viewers are challenging them to get a kill with a stock Cicada. Because they’re drunk. Pick one. Why shouldn't they be allowed to use whatever they like?
2.) As Alex said - FOV in this game is more a cockpit functionality than it is the horrible unnatural fisheye-lens thing people use it for in regular FPS games. This is a MechWarrior game - it has a long-standing tradition of putting you in the cockpit rather than gluing your face to the windshield.
3.) You can drop consumables anywhere you can point your cursor, for the most part. If the enemy's still on their spawns by the time you can point your cursor at their spawns, drop away. Wake their asses up.
4.) Because Inner Sphere XL engines kill the 'Mech they're mounted in when you lose a side torso. Standards are more durable and let you survive both side torsos lost. A Clan XL engine survives one side torso destruction with reduced performance, but dies if both shoulders blow out. Before you ask: CXL behavior is another old tabletop holdover.
5.) Depends on your team. An organized group in the group queues can play the objective fine, but regular disorganized pugs in the solo queue go hunting enemy 'Mechs because mostly that's what they want to do. And also because a team with no 'Mechs left on it is unable to deny you the objective of the match. It's what you get in a one-life game like MWO.
6.) No. Because bittervets would sabotage such a thing within hours of its existence. No spreadsheet of suggestions; Piranha simply monitors the forums, Reddit, and other sources of public opinion and takes action as necessary.
7.) Because Piranha is incredibly overstretched with this game as it is. They don't have the manpower to work on A.I. and also things like Community Warfare updates and all the other junk this playerbase demands all the damn time. PvE elements would be difficult to implement and also something prone to igniting volcanic eruptions of nerdrage if implemented in a way the forum community disliked. A hint for you: all possible ways of implementing A.I. in regular matches would be ways the forum community disliked.
8.) Because unlike Mechwarrior 4/Living Legends, which had maps that were literally bigger than the Moon and in which a single match could take over a week of real-time warfare, most of which was spent combing the oversized map simply trying to FIND the enemy...Piranha decided to make maps which were big enough to maneuver in (mostly) but small enough that players could quickly come to grips with their enemies. It's a stylistic choice, and as a longtime hater of all things Battlefield and the odd, unpleasant obsession of some players with maps far, far, far, far too large to handle, it's a choice I approve of.
9.) because this isn't Call of Flippin' Duty. Cone-of-fire or other such mechanics work as a damage control mechanism in a game where you can ADS to mitigate cone of fire, and are also possessed of weapons which have fire rates of hundreds of rounds a minute. In Call of Duty or other such games you’re generally armed with an automatic weapon possessed of hundreds of rounds in reserve, and it only takes two to five-ish of those rounds to kill a target. In MWO any munitions-firing weapons you have will maybe have enough ammo to go through three enemies, if you’re good, and they also have fire rates of one shot every two to five seconds.
Imagine a Call of Duty match where everyone is armed with bolt-action sniper rifles and is also possessed of twenty times their normal health. Now, imagine the same Call of Duty match, but with the ADS/scope-in option disabled. The former match is what MWO could be considered to be right now. The latter match is what we’d get if the convergence jackalopes had their say.
10.) Piranha has a test server, but it’s only open during specific time periods for specific, prescheduled tests. They do conduct polls occasionally, but not in regards to balancing issues (with the semi-exception of the forum-driven ‘Mech Rescale Polls a while back). Neither is a common balancing tool because, again, salty bittervets have tried to sabotage such efforts in the past, and also simply because Piranha is not very good at dealing with their community. That’s not a dig at Piranha, by the way – it’s simply not a strength of their company, as until they started working on MWO it’s not something they needed to develop.
11.) I take it you’re referring to the new ‘Return of an Icon’ packages? If so, first of all, everything you need to master the chassis is available for twenty bucks – the Standard package is actually a fairly decent dollar value. The Collector’s package offers a fourth ‘Mech but no new variant – you’re getting a Special Promo Bonus version of one of the chassis you will already be getting in the Standard package. Hero ‘Mechs are usually anywhere from twenty to fifty-dollar investments – the fifteen-dollar add-on to one of the existing RoaI packs is a steal by ordinary Hero pricing standards. Technically, you only need to spend thirty-five dollars to get the full package content, which is less than ten dollars a ‘Mech and also all the various bitsies and Freemium Time the packages net you. The Icon packages are generally one of the better-priced things they’re selling, actually.
If your argument is that Piranha’s overall monetization/pricing scheme is bonkers and that A’la Carte purchases are basically Piranha robbing you blind, you’ll get little argument from the forums. Everyone thinks they’re charging insane prices for singular MC variants. That said, they keep paying their bills, so clearly it’s working. At least for now.
12.) Lore-wise, yes. In tabletop machine guns were actually pretty violent against anything in sufficient numbers, but they were intended as a soft-target option. Also, in tabletop ammunition explosions are a much more prevalent concern than in MWO, and due to how the cookoff rules worked, a machine gun ammo boom was only slightly less disastrous than an engine meltdown. If your MG ammo cooked off, they’d find bits of you over a hundred-mile radius for the next three months. Ergo, people were pretty damn careful with their MG ammo, and did not usually gang up machine guns to rip stuff up in close with because having five tons of MG ammo cook off meant the death of your ‘Mech, its pilot, and all the pilot’s family for the last seven generations.
In MWO…well, same deal as flamers. Piranha doesn’t quite know what to do with machine guns, so they remain mostly junk.
13.) Difficult and resource-intensive to do in the game’s current structure/engine. MWO is almost strictly server-authoritative as an anti-cheating measure, and server-authoritative destructible buildings are a big fat no-go. Also not really conducive to proper balance and short-circuits too much map design. In an alternative Earth where Piranha has unlimited budget and manpower they’d like to implement destructible buildings, but the closest we’re ever likely to see is the current destructible fluff-terrain.
14.) Current ‘Mech animation/rigging prevents melee combat; it’s one of those sticky problems there’s no good solution for. They’d have to rebuild some of the fundamental building blocks of the game to get melee in, and throwing stuff is right on out. As I recall, even the tabletop game didn’t really have rules for hurling debris – that’s strictly a lore/novels thing because making it work in a fair and balanced and yet also useful manner would be twitchy and weird for not much effort.
15.) Lore-wise? The UrbanMech is supposed to be a super-budget city defense machine. In the cities it’s meant to garrison, the UrbanMech’s laughable stock top speed is less of an issue, and it has surprisingly heavy armor and monstrous firepower for a thirty-ton light ‘Mech that costs barely a million C-bills. Garrison commanders strapped for C-bills can use UrbanMechs to hold low-value targets or to augment more expensive units in higher-value areas.
For the BattleTech fan base/MWO player base? The UrbanMech looks like a walking trash can, which is hilarious. It’s the slowest ‘Mech in the game while being in the weight class known for being fast and hard to pin down, which is also hilarious. It’s a thirty-ton ‘Mech carrying a heavy autocannon, which is furthermore additionally hilarious. The combination of it being cute and adorbs and also one of the most unique machines in the entire franchise has turned it into something of a meme fountain, as well as an unofficial mascot of the franchise.
Also:
16.) It is a thing. Sort of. It’s not something you can adjust immediately pre-drop, but I’ve seen people rig up paint schemes designed to blend in to certain terrain types. Beyond that…’Mechs are walking fusion reactors with multiple different sensor systems. A coat of funky paint is not usually considered a serious stealth tool in the franchise, though it can help someone with the appropriate training and additional equipment make a go of it. Overall…’stealth’ in MWO works differently than in other games, and consists more of positioning and avoidance than hiding-in-plain-sight.
17.) Remember that ECM hard-counter answer from last time? Mostly, dumbfiring LRMs is a waste of ammunition, but if you see someone standing still under heavy ECM cover, you can lob a salvo of dumbfired missiles at him to score some damage and also surprise the guy. It’s also a ‘skill shot’, for people who’re more concerned with looking cool on YouTube and lording it over their ‘lessers’ than with winning matches.
18.) The original BattleTech tabletop game didn’t have a lot of that sort of thing. Remember – the fundamental game was developed in the eighties, a lot of modern SF gimmes weren’t around then. I do believe mines were a thing, but not the “blow your leg up with one bad step” type. Thunder munitions were LRM-deployed cluster minelets that would ‘trap’ hexes and cause some damage to anything moving through them, usually used as an improvised defense by garrison troops or as a weird sort of IED by guerilla units. Beyond that, laying mines wasn’t a job for BattleMechs – you usually had dedicated minelaying vehicles for that. Also: losing a leg to an AT mine would suck, so they don’t throw ‘em in here.
19.) Shutting down breaks missile lock-ons and removes the enemy’s ability to detect you without a Beagle probe, and even then they can only detect you in what amounts to point-blank range. It’s an ambush mechanic when used deliberately; elsewise shutting down from overheat is a punishment one suffers for pushing their ‘Mech too hard. At that point you have Dun Messed Up, and the shutdown is a balancing game mechanic to prevent you from continuing to fire Moar Lazors at that guy’s exhaust port.
20.) Because NARC is fire-and-forget. Land a NARC pod on someone and you can trollface your way into cover while the NARC beacon lights up that enemy for the next twentyish seconds. TAG requires you to hold the beam continuously on target, meaning you need to expose yourself while a big red laser pointer indicates your precise position to the enemy. NARC is a much more potent overall effect, and in fact if I am running a missile machine (or a missile-assist machine) I prefer using NARC to using TAG.
21.) Why not? There is not piece of equipment in this game that is exclusive to a given weight class. It’s one of the hallmarks of the BattleTech franchise – a medium laser is a medium laser is a medium laser, regardless of what it’s mounted in. Jump jets are handled a little differently, but it’s the same principle – there’s no exclusive-to-lights stuff that can’t be engineered into bigger ‘Mechs, just like there’s no exclusive-to-fatbros heavy guns that can’t be bolted into Hollanders. That doesn’t necessarily make some decisions one can make a good idea – see the aforementioned Hollander – but it does mean you get the chance to make those decisions.
Jun Watarase, on 16 December 2015 - 02:23 PM, said:
Huh? You lost me.
Summoner has been underpowered/sub-optimal since release and a very vocal minority of us Summoner fans had some big threads on how to fix it. Was totally ignored. Funny thing is the fixes were simple: removable JJ(like the Kitfox), 'poor endo', ST pods with E hardpoints, better quirks to boost DPS.
But some felt the Clan OP tech was enough to keep it going. Well, that has since been nerfed.
Mist Lynx is all kinds of messed up. Seriously, look at the trial loadout.
So the normal 'ignore a mech and it gets serious Buff' is correct...most of the time but not for B-team Clammers.
Hoo boy. This is why they don’t explain things in mid-match, this one’s gonna take me a while. All righty then…
1.) The Flamer is a BattleTech tabletop weapon which is meant to be used against armor (tanks, Jeeps, stuff like that), infantry, and also shrubbery (the tabletop game has rules for setting hexes on fire). In MWO, it exists because it’s a basic weapon type they can’t not put in a MechWarrior game, but Piranha doesn’t really know what to do with it. They’ve considered it a nonissue next to all the other, more glaring issues in the game, and so it continues to be pants. C’est la vie.
2.) None, really. I doubt they’re really following it, the timeline has become more of a loose guide than a hard fact. Remember, the 1-to-1 timeline was something Piranha laid out to Founders, a plan they discovered later they were not equipped to live up to. The studio has bitten off a significant chunk more than it’s comfortably able to chew with MWO, they’ve had to scramble ever since open beta. I would argue that only in the last year-ish have they really started to get a proper handle on the game.
3.) Because there’s hundreds of ‘Mechs, and because a number of weapons are either awkward to implement or are so niche that they just don’t turn up. This game uses the same general equipment list as every other MechWarrior game set in/near the same time period; they’ve never had Blazers or ‘Mech rifles or such in a MW game before, and Piranha has gone on record was wanting to balance the gear that’s already in the game before introducing (more) completely new elements. As for ‘Mechs…they’re releasing them faster than most people are comfortable with buying them as it is. We’ve got a great stable so far, and they’re making good progress on the Unseens now that Catalyst has slain Harmony Gold’s legal Jabberwocky.
4.) I’m not actually sure what you’re asking here? The quirks system is, unfortunately, something players asked Piranha to implement for forever, except not at all the way most players wanted it. In the original tabletop game, ‘quirks’ were special rules modifiers that were given to certain ‘Mechs to represent certain design perks/flaws of that particular machine. Things like Hard To Pilot (a quirk that negatively impacted piloting rolls) or Improved Targeting [range] (which added a boost to a ‘Mech’s to-hit rolls against targets in a certain range bracket). They’re supposed to help add character and personality to ‘Mechs, and would have theoretically been used to offset the bad weapons/hardpoints/geometry of underperforming ‘Mechs as well.
What we got? Well, nobody really wanted it, but we’re kinda stuck with it now. Same as Ghost Heat. If that’s not what you needed, I’m afraid you’ll have to be a bit more specific.
5.) In the tabletop game, hand actuators allowed a ‘Mech to do things you’d need hands to do, such as pick stuff up, throw it, or punch the enemy in their blast panel. They add a lot of utility and versatility to a ‘Mech in TT. In MWO, I believe hand actuators are supposed to give you slightly more radius to your arm reticle movement, but in reality they’re largely useless. One of the game’s many holdovers from the original tabletop rules, which will hopefully gain a useful function someday.
6.) Company commanders can set company-wide objective markers via the battlegrid interface, and can also rearrange ‘Mechs into different lances (this doesn’t move the ‘Mech, just re-orders who shows up as ‘Alpha Lance’ or what-have-you). Lance commanders can set lance-specific objective markers via same. I’m not entirely certain how this works, I’ve never bothered claiming command. Most of the time (in the solo queue anyways, which is my bailiwick), the command system is most useful for indicating precisely which player on your team you should ignore. If someone Takes Command™, sets a bunch of markers, and starts barking orders over VoIP…well, follow them if they make sense, but unfortunately that individual is likely an idiot.
7.) ‘Hard counters’ refer to systems which 100% defeat other systems. An example is that ECM, currently, prevents one from obtaining a missile weapon lock against the carrying unit and any other unit within 90m of the ECM carrier. You can not lock and fire lock-on missiles against ECM; ECM is thus considered a hard counter to lock-on missiles. The Beagle Active Probe, on the other hand, automatically overrides and shuts out any single enemy ECM system within its effective range. Again, a hard counter – the Beagle does not degrade, mitigate, or reduce the effect of ECM, it completely and utterly eliminates it. You can not operate ECM when within the range of a Beagle user.
Players don’t like hard counters because they reduce play options in the game. LRM machines are junk in large part because heavy ECM presence on the enemy team renders them pretty much dead weight. Conversely, multiple Beagle units eliminate most any benefit one can derive from ECM. Players would prefer soft counters, akin to the AMS system. AMS provides partial defense against missiles and weakens enemy missile players, but it’s not a 100% screw-you-buddy to missile users. The missile guy can try and work around/bull through the AMS system, and the AMS guy has to be aware of his missile defense’s weaknesses and can’t Faceroll McDerperp his way to victory against any/all missile machines.
8.) Because “NO SIGNAL” is boring as hell and immersion-breaking for many. I much prefer the new screens; they add some life and color to my cockpits, and even if they’re a bunch of pointless **** they at least look like they’re trying to tell me something useful. “NO SIGNAL” was idiotic.
9.) I have no idea. I don’t play Commodity Warfare, as I am a dirty filthy solo player and as every CW vet out there will tell you, “No unit? GTFO of CW, f’kin’ scrub.”
10.) Nature of the beast. Remember, this game is heavily based on a thirty+ year old property, and most of that property’s assets were never designed with online gaming in mind. In MWO? ‘Mechs with fully-articulated humanoid arms (upper and lower arm actuators) get wider play with their arm-mounted weapons, but ‘Mechs with cannon arms usually have much higher gun mounts in those arms and can thus fire over cover and other obstructions easier. It’s something of a classic debate around here, honestly – high-mounted hillhumping bazooka arms locked to center vs knuckle-dragging gorilla arms with wide horizontal firing arcs. The former are preferred by snipers, while the latter are typically preferred by short-range brawlers.
11.) Okay. This is a hot-button issue in the forums right now, but in short, and to cut most of the snarling rabble-rousing hullaballoo out of it: lasers are very weight-efficient. When the Clans were released, the game was suddenly faced with a slew of very fast ‘Mechs that did not die as quickly as fast ‘Mechs tended to before the Clan release. Players found themselves needing bigger engines to try and keep up with the maneuver game Clan ‘Mechs could play, which cut into available weight for weaponry. Combined with a series of pretty savage nerfs to PPCs and less-savage-but-still-painful nerf to ballistics (both of which used to drastically outperform lasers, to the point where most considered pre-Clan release Sphere lasers to be essentially worthless), and the fact that Clan lasers were amazeballs and could produce then-unprecedented alpha strike numbers, the metagame shifted over to laser-dominant machines with scads of compact Clan double heat sinks.
There it has stayed despite everything Piranha could do; we are, at this point, just about full-circle. Most everything has had its time as the incredibly dominant, super-overpowered weapon, and Piranha is trying to avoid bringing back old plagues like the Evil Poptart Meta (which was infinitely more infurating and unfun to play than Big Engine Laser ‘Mech meta). Supposedly quirks were going to fix this, but we all know how that ended up.
12.) Tabletop holdover. The paperdoll has always been a singular common image for all ‘Mechs, regardless of size, weight, or shape, in all BattleTech board games and also all MechWarrior titles. It also helps players better familiarize themselves with new ‘Mechs, since they can easily recognize what they’re taking fire on, and also the entire BattleTech-inspired locational damage system breaks like an egg in a meteor shower if all ‘Mechs don’t have a basic framework in common to use as a fundamental anchor point for the game’s design.
13.) UUUUUUUGH.
Okay. In the tabletop game, damage was allocated via random/semi-random dice roll; it was almost impossible to focus all of one’s weapons onto the same specific, targeted component of an enemy machine. As such, multiple-weapon attacks tended to ‘scattergun’ all over an enemy – fire four medium lasers mounted in your arms at an enemy, and those lasers would hit the center torso, right torso, left leg, and miss altogether, with no rhyme or reason. This was one of the lynchpins that underscored tabletop balance and a primary factor in the very slow pace of tabletop battles.
People around here want Piranha to remove weapon convergence (i.e. the ability of the weapons on your ‘Mech to fire at wherever the crosshair is pointing, regardless of their location on your ‘Mech) and replace it with one of OVER NINE THOUSAAAAAAAND(!!!!!) player-developed ideas. It is the (erroneous) assumption of a great many players that Fixing Convergence™ will cure all of MWO’s balance problems forever, eliminate the need for Ghost Heat, bring the BattleTech back into this BattleTech Game, and also cure cancer, feed all the hungry orphans in the world, and usher in world peace.
It’s an old, old, old, VERY OLD Classic ForumWarrior Argument, it crops up in five or ten new threads every week, and I despise talking about it because being unable to hit what you aim at in a first-person shooting game is a fundamental failure on the part of the game designers.
Anyways. NEXT.
14.) Something Piranha had been planning on for a while before it got implemented, sorta-kinna their sad, sad attempt to bring some faint echo of the tabletop’s rich combined-arms experience into MWO, and more their attempt to create a repeatable C-Bill sink/minor income stream. You equip consumable modules in your ‘Consumable’ slots in the Modules tab of the ‘Mechbay, then use your choice of a few different keybinds to place the consumable at wherever your crosshairs are pointing in a match.
Artillery Strikes are a circular bombardment of explosions, Airstrikes are a linear carpet bomb (with a random line orientation, SO USEFUL), and the UAV is a hovering spydrone that marks enemies on your minimap whether you can see/target them or not. The UAV also hard-counters ECM, though this is somewhat more acceptable as the UAV can be shot down, costs money to use, and is temporary anyways. Some players claim that not using all of your consumable slots in every match is equivalent to deliberately sandbagging, some players (such as myself) hate the entire system as a grindy mess that is deliberately antagonistic towards new players and have never once equipped a consumable.
15.) *Sigh*
If you’re looking for the algorithms behind it, Piranha refuses to release those. If you’re snarking off, shame on you. If you’re wondering how, in general, it works…players are assigned into one of five Tiers, based on a hidden formula that tabulates their end-of-match performance and uses it to adjust a hidden value supposedly equivalent to that player’s Skill*. Players are put into matches according to their Tiers, until/unless something happens to force the matchmaker to blow a release valve in its coding to avoid players waiting for a match for an hour.
Much like convergence, it’s one of those Ancient ForumWarrior nonsense arguments – some players insist the matchmaker is horribly, horribly broken and there is no skill balancing, while other, saner players acknowledge that MWO is a very complicated game, and also one which is by design very prone to snowballing. One nasty mistake at the beginning of a match by one player can force that player’s entire team to fight from a disadvantage for the rest of the game – there is no way to account for that sort of variance in a one-life resource-based game like MWO, as opposed to a constant-respawns arena schmup like Call of Duty.
Long story short: the matchmaker is as solid as Piranha and the laws of reality can make it. Ignore the idjits who say otherwise.
16.) Streaks require a lock-on, but if you can get that lock-on and fire, you’re guaranteed to hit the enemy (provided, of course, there’s nothing between you and the enemy and that you’re within the Streak launcher’s range). They use a special targeting algorithm which randomly distributes each missile to one of the ‘Mech’s bones (i.e. bits of their animation rigging), which generally correspond to in-game hitboxes. As such, they’re guaranteed to hit but impossible to aim. They’re guaranteed to spread their damage across most of the enemy ‘Mech, making them very inefficient for scoring kills (but excellent for farming damage for C-bills!).
The usual use for Streak missiles is as a counter to light ‘Mechs – Streaks are one of the most reliable methods in the game of delivering damage to twitchy, sometimes laggy lights, and light ‘Mechs don’t have enough armor to withstand heavy Streak volleys. A ‘Mech with a large number of Streak missiles is an absolute terror for lights but is not very good against heavier units, since they have the armor to shrug off a few Streak missile-showers and the focused, amiable firepower to punch the Streak platform in the nose and make it wish it hadn’t brought missiles to a gunfight.
17.) At a time deep in the distant past of MWO, Thermal vision was essentially Predator vision. It cut through the visual cover/clutter/Fog of War on maps and was an enormous benefit to snipers. Many players never actually turned thermal vision off; it was held to be strictly, 100% superior to ordinary vision. Piranha decided to remix the alternate vision modes to try and make their use a tactical, in-the-moment choice – Thermal for picking up ‘Mechs in a tight, low-visibility scrum (but being bad at seeing terrain and at a distance), NV for navigating in low-light conditions (but being bad at targeting enemy ‘Mechs and also seeing at a distance) and normal vision for distance shots in well-lit conditions.
The system is overall better balanced this way, but occasionally you do still get people pining for the old boom-headshot Predator Vision thermal imaging.
18.) Try introducing approaching two hundred different machines which all use the same pool of 70-ish components and have some of them not be lemons. It’s just the way game design works, man. Also TableTop – as has been mentioned at least a dozen times, this game is based on an old, celebrated tabletop gaming property for which Great Balance was not a primary concern. Some ‘Mechs were specifically and deliberately intended to suck. Like UrbanMechs.
19.) Again, I have no idea. I do know that CW does not use any skill-based matchmaking whatsoever – it’s a shark tank, by the specific request of the people who fought to get it implemented. Prepare your butt any time you step into CW, and be aware that CW is, in fact, an optional game mode you don’t need to deal with.
ALL RIGHTY THEN. Does that help clear things up, man?
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Wow. The fact you don't know us, yet took more time than the developers to explain things pretty much puts everything into perspective.
Well, thank you for your time in answering many things that wasn't really clear. The game assumes you already know everything there is to know about how its supposed to work. It just seems like there is so much unfinished about this game it's a huge turn off, and I honestly have no idea why people would stick around for such a lacking experience.
It really just feels like this game is made for the veterans only, and screw anyone else who might be interested unless they are willing to devote their life to the game. Not my flavor of koolaid.
Minimal Viable Pilot, on 18 December 2015 - 08:14 AM, said:
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Wow. The fact you don't know us, yet took more time than the developers to explain things pretty much puts everything into perspective.
Well, thank you for your time in answering many things that wasn't really clear. The game assumes you already know everything there is to know about how its supposed to work. It just seems like there is so much unfinished about this game it's a huge turn off, and I honestly have no idea why people would stick around for such a lacking experience.
It really just feels like this game is made for the veterans only, and screw anyone else who might be interested unless they are willing to devote their life to the game. Not my flavor of koolaid.
Again, your time was very appreciated.
Being fair, answering most of these sorts of questions is why a game developer puts a community forum together. As well, as the AnswerStorm made abundantly clear, this game is heavily based in a long-established, itself-very-complex tabletop gaming franchise, one with a rabidly devoted fanbase, and for better or for worse MWO is also the successor to a long-running, very beloved PC game franchise.
There is a metric manly muttonton of expectations attached to this title; most forumgoers who are being fair will admit that even the Blizzards of the world would've had trouble trying to work with this property. Piranha is a B-sized independent developer biting off an A-sized game with a franchise history of AAA excellence; they spent the first three years of their development cycle for MWO choking on this project while they figured out how to transition as a company from a shipped-and-done shovelware game developer to a company that maintains a successful* persistent online game in one of the most deeply valued tabletop universes in existence.
You can't really blame them for making a few missteps, or relying on their community to patch up knowledge base holes. That's sorta what we're here for; they're here to develop the game.
Well, it was explained a dozen times why this is the better option for a multiplayer game.
Yes, everyone knows that.
But, PGI could have chosen a different IP, or the 3025 era, or the Dark Ages. But, no, no, no, in their infinite wisdom they just had to chose the Clan Invasion and then completely junk one of the defining characteristics of that era.
7
1453 R, on 16 December 2015 - 11:18 AM, said:
I received pretty much the game I expected but I must admit that I have constantly hoped for more. Over time it has become apparent that PGI moves very slowly since they have invested a minimal amount in development and that their vision for what the game will be and my ideas on the greatness it could be do not match up. 
