Ahh, here it is!
Anybody out there who is new to the game needs to know a few things:
MWO is based on the BattleTech fictional universe, as many of you may know. The original tabletop Battletech game dates back from the 1980s, and many of us were drawn to MWO because of how much we enjoyed that game during our childhoods - I still have the original, much-abused box. This helped get MWO its initial support, and is probably the reason we have the game today, but it also meant that some players had unreasonable expectations about how the game should play - based on nostalgia, not reason.
This would not have caused much difficulty in itself, but Pirhana Games Inc. was originally under a publisher, Infinite Games Publishing - and IGP was not a good publisher. Thus, MWO got off to a slow, rocky start, with a snails-pace of new content release and and development. This was bad, no two ways about it - but do notice the past tense. After PGI and IGP parted ways a while back, the pace of content release and bug fixes skyrocketed. We've had new maps, new game modes, reworks of old maps, and revamps of game systems since then, and the future is looking good. It's CERTAINLY good enough to play the game, and the pace of matches means that while the game retains a relatively small following, it is hardly "dead."
However, the problems from the first few years of development spawned a toxic minority of inconsolable players who were -ever- so wronged in the past, so that their world will never be right again. They know who to blame, however, and so they haunt the forums - and now Steam - badmouthing the game and hurling personal invective against the developers - all in an attempt to drive new players away from the game. They are vindictive, and disinclined toward fairness or intellectual honesty; their activities have ranged from posting nonconstructive, acrimonious feedback to any change, to creating threads to misinform and frighten away new players, to even creating dummy accounts and going on teamkilling sprees until they are banned. Many of these players do not even play the game any more! They simply want MWO to fail in order to justify their endless complaints - and they think nothing of stooping to lies and propaganda to make that happen.
In short, there's a lot of history here that a new player won't know about - nor should you care. The game is free to play, and there are NO pay to win elements; we won't stand for any. The game has enough players to get you (and me) matches; it has a dedicated and very active newbie helper community, and it's been improving little by little in every way for more than a year now. Don't be manipulated by the dishonest! Come to MWO if it looks like a fun game for you, and find out for yourself!
See you on the battlefield, Mechwarriors.
Edited by Void Angel, 03 January 2016 - 04:22 PM.