10 replies to this topic

[ESX]

I would like to buy some items with real money. But I do not want the game to fold like some others in the past.
There are always the dooms day whiners, "the game is dying", "the population is leaving", etc.... It seems like a good game, but I have seen posts about fans hating it, especially in the beta stage. Although I am starting to like the game.
What is the honest answer, do we have a stable or growing population that will cause the game to last many years? And are the developers making enough money to support the game for the long term?

On a side note, does anyone know why I can not post in the general game play section?

Edited by ESX, 03 January 2016 - 02:37 PM.

[GotShotALot]

People will whine and moan about everything. I've been in games where the exact same people post in the forums every week about how horrible the game is and how it will die in short order. Most of those games are still around.

On the other hand, a profitable game with a stable population can shut down in no time (eg. City of Heroes). No one but PGI is going to be able to tell you how healthy they are.

I spend on games with pretty much the expectation that, if there is no current shutdown announcement, the game will last at least 6 more months. If I spend, it's not 'an investment', or a long-term thing... those are my entertainment dollars and if I will get $X of entertainment out of them in the next 6 months, then it's worth spending.

If you want some 'hard' evidence of 'player population', just take a look at the current event counters:
http://mwomercs.com/tournaments

How many players do you think have to be playing to rack up 41,192 individual giveaways of 1 day of premium time? (Since Dec. 22nd start.) Or 43 billion in C-Bills? I'm guessing the answer is 'more than a few', although that is winter holiday event crowd so probably higher than normal.

Posting in any section other than New Player requires finishing your 26 cadet battles first, although for me I think it was still a day or so after that before I could post elsewhere.

[Hexenhammer]

People have been screaming the game is dead or dying for 3 years. Let them. This game like every online game has a life cycle and we can either run around like chicken little or play the game.


past that, play through all the basic stuff, cadet bonuses, and the tutorials, read up on the forums and have fun.

[Koniving]

"25 cadet battles." Assume the 26 was probably a typo.

This game has some players very unhappy about balance decisions but that will always happen in every game and every balance decision that has ever existed. With steam, the population is growing. Some will pick it up, be overjoyed and stay. Some will pick it up, decide it's not for them and leave. It's all a matter of how they see it.

I personally think the game needs a better 5 minute hook. The first five minutes you spend in a game are the most important. Much like movies on netflix or an experience in a demo, the first five minutes are the "first impression" a game has. This certainly could use some improvement.

The game has a learning curve, but it also has a helpful community.

It has balancing issues and a slow means of addressing them, however the issues are minor and there is a way to counter for almost every issue. "Stormcrows seem to be invincible and they're so fast! OP plz nerf." "Have you considered shooting their legs?" "Stormcrows are easily killed, speed means nothing! UP, plz buff." "You again, seriously?"

PGI has the license for another 10 years. It isn't going anywhere, this is PGI's only project. That said, it needs to grow a bit and branch to a second project soon. It tried this before, but it was at a bad time where the publisher IGP was putting muzzles on developers speaking with the community and controlling marketing. With the publisher gone things have improved. I personally think they could go much better in terms of the product's balance but for that, they'd need to start from scratch (which isn't happening). It's improving.

[Wintersdark]

It's solid enough. Steam numbers are good, and there was a good set of players before that. Growth has been pretty constant since IGP left. I dunno either way about the year leading up to that event; I was here, but there was no way to tell. Of course, the game has it's share of BitterVets, people who've been around a really long time, typically don't even play anymore, but insist on complaining anyways.

The reality is: Any game - particularly F2P games, but ANY game - you'll lose a lot of players over the years. Most players just aren't into playing the same game continuously for many years, and those who do won't play as often. Players come, and players go. But most of these old vets pay no attention to the players coming.

With that said, there are no guarantees. There are never guarantees. I've seen many seemingly successful games close up shop suddenly, and many practically empty games linger on for untold years.

A lot of that is simply profitability. Games with low costs (small dev teams, limited server demands, etc) can remain viable and profitable with much lower player counts, whereas larger, more complex games (particularly large persistent world games) require a lot more server resources and dev staffs. These higher costs require more players paying to keep the lights on.

An upside for PGI here is that this game's model is quite scaleable, and their costs are low. With 12v12 battles, server requirements are pretty limited and can be tuned pretty dynamically, and their staff is pretty much tiny. Being a small, lean company, they can be profitable with far fewer players. Given how much a lot of us spend here, I think PGI is probably very profitable.

A profitable game isn't going anywhere anytime soon.

[Wildstreak]

No one really knows if the population is growing well though I would guess it has a stable one. I have been here since Open Beta in 2012 and seen the Doomsday Prophecies yet this game continues through them all. I don't expect it to go away anytime soon. A majority of the players do not even come to the Forums or most other MWO Social media like Facebook that has its share of Forum types, you just cannot tell who they are since FB uses real names, not IDs.

As for money, someone pointed out PGI is and has been involved in other projects that provide it income too.

Due to how new your account is, that is why you cannot post some places yet.

[Alaric Hasek]

Don't ever listen to complaints on a game forum or assume that such complaints show the declining health of a game. People who are having fun rarely post and so you'll mostly read butthurt complainers posting.

[Void Angel]

Lemme go hunt up my boiler plate in response to the misinformation campaign mounted on the Steam forums - two days before the game was even released.

[Void Angel]

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.

[Not A Real RAbbi]

There have been naysayers for a long time. Almost three and a half years ago, when I started playing in open beta, there were doubters. The game's still here.

Take that for what it's worth.

[Wintersdark]

TheRAbbi, on 03 January 2016 - 04:35 PM, said:

There have been naysayers for a long time. Almost three and a half years ago, when I started playing in open beta, there were doubters. The game's still here.

Take that for what it's worth.

Yup. When I started in 2012, there was an endless slew of "this game is dying" posts.

It's done nothing but improve (except in a couple graphical areas - I miss you so, inverse kenetics!) and has really taken off over the last year.

The whole time, there have been "this game is dying!" posts. Usually from the same people.