36 replies to this topic

[bob]

So I've been hitting MWO pretty hard lately and I've been really enjoying it and I found out that theirs a lot more to MWO with faction play, except 80% of the time its a PUG group vs a full enemy unit and there is no chance of winning. Why did the devs think this was a good decision? It just seems to alienate people people who don't have a lot of time dedicated to a unit/guild/clan.

It makes more sense to have actual close games, instead of widely one sided battles. I just played a game and we were actually super well quarantined but it wasn't even close. Can they just make a PUG vs PUG and Unit vs Unit system?

So my question is just stick to the "quick play" and not put any real money into other mechs since I don't need drop pod mechs?

[AnimeFreak40K]

To answer some of your questions is... difficult. Or, rather it is difficult to do in a short amount of time and almost impossible to do so without context, but here it goes anyway

Community Warfare -
Back when I first started into the game (August/September of 2013), Community Warfare was something that was promised and "being worked on".
What I understand the mode to consist of was the Inner Sphere Map that would have dynamic borders as planets were taken and lost by the different factions in the game. These planets were to have value and Units (Guilds, Mercs, Companies, whatever you want to call them) would have to invest in-game resources (C-Bills) for a Drop Ship and the ability to move from world to world and deploy. The implication was that if your unit wanted to field multiple attack forces (that is, multiple 12-man teams) they needed to have multiple drop-ships. Additional resource costs were implied as being part and parcel to the deal in varying degrees as well.

Again, to my knowledge, none of this was actually promised, only implied, and even then if it was, I know it wasn't promised upon release.

Either way, PGI constantly kept stating stuff about technical limitations, lack of resources or, well, pretty much a lot of different reasons that (to quite a few people) started to sound like excuses. Eventually, towards the end of 2014, PGI released Community Warfare.

While it did not start off as the place for PUGs to get their faces kicked in by organized 12-man groups, it was something that happened often enough, but was not the objectively terrible experience for PUGs/Solos that it became.

How it got to that point is a combination of different factors (Note - I am very well aware that this is not completely accurate. This is a basic picture painted with broad brushstrokes from my perspective and understanding and should be taken as such):
- There was constant (and growing) backlash against organized teams (12-man or otherwise) stomping all over people. There was very little that could stop this due to the way the public queue matchmaker was set up at that time. However, changes were made and there was the creation of the 'Group Queue'.
After the Group Queue was made there were continued grumblings about lack of balance between the teams. So things like 3/3/3/3 (that is no more than 3 of any one weight class regardless of group size) was put in place and a bunch of convoluted stuff regarding matching tonnage and such was also thrown into the mix. This received mixed results and there was more and more backlash against comp units and groups. These comp units eventually shifted to move to CW because it was a place where they could throw down against each other and not have to worry about things such as tonnage balance and such.
(Note - this is why you have comp-minded people occupying the Faction Warfare as it is now)

- Units would organize and start working for the express goal of taking planets to put unit tags on them. Don't get me wrong, there was plenty of politicking involved with "peace treaties" and/or "wars" being brokered and declared. So there was a lot of back and forth in this regard, but for a fair number of people, they found the mode pointless. It took too long to find/set up matches, matches (on either side) far more likely to contain an organized group, planets didn't have any value and all-in-all many folks just found the mode to be not fun...so population in Faction Warfare waned. The response to this waning population was 'corrected' by the "Call To Arms" feature. The hope would be that people who cared about what was going on in Faction Warfare but didn't want to go through the (admittedly) painful process of trying to find a match; the nag-screen that would pop up would tell you what planet needed what sort of help. This... is/was mildly successful (in my opinion)

- PGI has made alterations to the way planet tagging has worked and what is needed to be done to flip a planet (this mostly happened after the Tukayyid 1 event that occurred in early 2015). The result of this ended up being that those units that were all about taking planets found it far more effective to only go on the attack and never defend worlds. This means that the defense of planets was (or, rather, is) falling to those who answer the above-mentioned Call To Arms.

In any event, between Faction Warfare bleeding casual-players and the competitive players not really having any place to really go to face off, the concentration of competitive tryhards just increased. Further, because in the minds of some of these guys, it is better/more effective to attack all the time, this means that if you are defending, you're more than likely going to face off against a 12-man team or, at the very least, an organized group.

TL;DR version - PGI didn't set it up that way at the outset, but it became that way over time due to a series of events.

Question - Can't PGI separate PUGs from Units in CW?
Answer: I think the technical ability to do so exists, but there is no actual reason to do so. This is because doing so (more or less) defeats the purpose of Faction Warfare (that is, it was always intended to be Unit (or organized group) vs. Unit (or organized group) combat. The idea being that the fate of a nation's borders should not be in the hands of the individual, but rather organized groups. PUGs have a place in this, but primarily as a means to fill in gaps or form an organized force themselves (kinda like a local militia instead of an organized army).
My understanding is that the general population of MWO doesn't support this action either. As it is, Faction Warfare suffers from a population deficiency, separating things like you (and many others) are asking would make it even more difficult for people to find matches and only increase the wait-times further.
If you do not wish to face off against units, then you should join a unit (so you aren't fighting alone), focus on trying to get matches by attacking (that is, look for ways to get into a group where you are attacking a world...easier said than done, I know) or just leave Faction Warfare alone for the time being.

Question - Should you stick with Quick Play?
Answer: In all honesty? Probably. There is nothing wrong with this, but unless you are willing to join a unit/group (or form your own with your friends), you are probably going to get kicked around a lot. No, I do not necessarily care for this response, but at the same time, that is how things are at this time.

Question - Should you get more mechs?
Answer: That really depends on what it is you want out of this game. For me, I really like the idea of just having a variety of options. I mean, if I feel like playing with my Atlas for awhile, I have that option. If I change my mind and decide to move to a Stormcrow, I can do that too...or if I start feeling guilty about leaving my LRM Troll-Cat sitting around collecting dust, I can pull that one out for a bit too. I have these options because I have more mechs than I know what to do with.
To be clear, this would be the case even if Faction Warfare wasn't a thing, because I was starting to have the problem of 'too many mechs' before Faction Warfare was actually released.

Question - Should you spend real money on mechs?
Answer: Hard to say. Me, I am a ***** for giant stompy robots and, like the ***** I am I have bought almost every release pack on pre-order at the maximum level (I say 'almost' because I never touched the Gold Clan Mechs and I gave the Phoenix Saber Reinforcement Pack a pass).
I realize that people don't have that kind of money (I don't either, but I can't help myself sometimes...), nor do they have the overriding desire to keep that amount of variety (...or desire to play Poke-mech).

So my suggestion to you is the following:
- If you have the MC (or the money, if you're willing to spend it to get MC) and buy yourself some mech bays
- Pick a few chassis with variants that you enjoy and get those with C-Bills
- If you don't have the C-Bills, grind them out by playing the mechs you already have.

Above and beyond all of this, you should consider what it is you find fun and enjoyable about this game and go and do that.

[bob]

Great answer Animefreak40k!! I hope this serves to be a guide to others loners curious of venturing off into the mess of what is meant to be a guild warfare system.

I just thought it was supposed to support more, although now this does shallow the game for me a bit because it looked so promising.

It seems Piranha is in dire need of better programmers.

Edited by bob, 03 January 2016 - 10:52 PM.

[Not A Real RAbbi]

One suggestion to make CW a little more successful for you...

When you go into the Faction Warfare tab, and click on a planet, you have two tabs for that planet's page. One is the Planet Info, and the other is Queue Info (or something... anyhow, planet _____ and queue ______). Click on the queue tab. There are numbers across the bottom, 1-11, and there will be yellow ticks above some of those. Each number represents a group size, and each yellow tick represents how many of that size are waiting to get up to 12 so they can queue for a match.

SO, find a planet and queue in which there is a tick over a higher number. You're playing Jade Falcon, for instance, and want to defend JF territory against whatever. Cool. Look at the planets whose names are in blue in the Planet Finder, and check the queues in each. Sooner or later, you're going to find a group of 3, 4, maybe 6, maybe even 9 or 10, wanting to defend there. When you DO, then DEFEND THAT PLANET with them. You're filling in a gap in their team to get to 12, but they have a real interest in making sure that you're included in the strategy. They're more likely to work together with you, to include you in what's going on, to communicate with you as things inevitably change with the flow of the battle, etc. It benefits THEM, and THEY have resources and experience. It's MUTUALLY beneficial, because you seem to give a hoot, and therefore will likely be an active team player. And who knows? Maybe you'll make some new friends and find a home with that team, or something. At least, most teams are quite cool about taking on casual players to fill in a 12-man, when they don't have another 12 of their own hanging out waiting for a drop. We at [QQ] do it quite a bit, anyhow, and see a lot of others lately doing that as well.

Good luck!

[Wintersdark]

The non-novel form - not that previous answers are bad, but they are long:

CW is a mode intended for groups. Solo players can join, but there is a warning the first time you go there that its meant to be hardcore.

So: Stick to quick play, build a stable of mechs.

Join a unit. There are lots of all sorts of units, casual, hardcore, competitive, whatever. They'll teach you, practice with you.

Simply saying "Hey, guys, I'm interested in playing Faction Warfare without being butchered solo!" Is the price of admission for many.

THEN get into faction Warfare.

[AnimeFreak40K]

bob, on 03 January 2016 - 10:44 PM, said:

Great answer Animefreak40k!! I hope this serves to be a guide to others loners curious of venturing off into the mess of what is meant to be a guild warfare system.
I just thought it was supposed to support more, although now this does shallow the game for me a bit because it looked so promising.
It seems Piranha is in dire need of better programmers.

In defense of PGI, they are a small company (less than 100 employees) with limited resources. This is something to consider, when you realize that some game studios are so large that a PGI-sized element is used to work on one facet (like characters *or* scenery *or* maps *or* programming) of a game.

With regard to the game being made more shallow, I have some good news for you; PGI *is* taking steps to improve the game with the hope of making it both more immersive and appealing for new people. Things such as further improvements to Faction Warfare that make it more welcoming to both new players and Lone Wolves and even PvE.

While this is stuff that is going to take awhile, and all of this stuff is a Work In Progress, you can at least be assured that things will improve with time.

[Rhaezor]

OP that's exactly what I feel.
There should be a system where, if the other team has 3+ ppl from the same clan dont put them against some ppl that saw the pop up and pressed it. It may be a fast way to get meat for the grinder but it is also a fast way to LOSE your most casual/starting players.
Look, I know who makes money for this game, and I bet the playerbase is not that big (unfortunatly) but the only way to make it more attractive (new players) is in your hands, why not a gamemode with respawns that doesnt allow clan stacking? add team scramble etc...
I love the game engine but the players ruin it sometimes.

edit: I have this small suggestion,it would help. If we see the game is lost. If they are camping the dropship... let us surrender, allow a vote to end the game. We are just racking up deaths for no reason, it feels like a punishment for playing.

Edited by ShinRazor, 04 January 2016 - 09:17 AM.

[MechWarrior3671771]

@OP - PGI is aware of this problem (premades vs newbie stomps) and is looking at ways to fix it.

So hang around a bit longer. CW should be getting much better in the coming months.

Edited by Fen Tetsudo, 04 January 2016 - 09:03 AM.

[Major Lag]

nvm.

Edited by Major Lag, 08 November 2016 - 03:06 PM.

[Leone]

You know, the IS forms units too, and solo CW warriors have been known to bad together to defeat premade groups. CW is truely hardmode, and yes, I drop solo often, I understand this.

What you hafta do is not launch expecting a win, but the toughest fighting you'll see. I use it as a means to training and like nightmare difficulty for other games. The greatest test for any of my builds is to see how much damage they can eek out whilest the enemy team is focus firing it. If you can embrace that mindset, then you shall never fear getting tired of CW.

If not, mayhaps CW is a sometimes mode for you.

The natural progression, as I under stand it, is supposed to go 'Quick Launch', 'Looking for Group, and Group Queue' and then 'Community Warfare'. I don't think it works too well, as I mostly use LFG to merge existing groups, and mainly suggest trying CW and asking to join groups whilest there.

Also, you often have a higher chance of getting a pug opfor by attacking rather'n defending. Just cuz I'm crazy, doesn't mean you can't learn from my experiences ^__^ v

Good luck out there Mechwarriors.

~Leone

[bob]

We just need to find an answer ....

I was thinking about this last night, a half measure.

Add a third type of battle mode option, it acts just like FW where you have 4 mechs but instead of finding a planet, it just launches you into a PUG group, made for people who have more time than just 10 min to spend on a quick battle.

It would last 20-30 min a battle just as FW battles do but you vote on the maps.

This way it doesn't detract from the FW side but the quick battle lone fighters.

Everything is there so it wouldn't take much resources and would add a huge amount of depth


Thoughts?

Edited by bob, 04 January 2016 - 11:27 AM.

[Khereg]

Major Lag, on 04 January 2016 - 09:06 AM, said:

No defense. When a game developer says, we don't have programmers to do this and this job, they need to hire some. Simple as that.

Not to slam you, but this isn't viable. PGI is a business. They have to make money (or at least not lose it) to keep going. If they hired all those programmers you think they should, they would be doing it with the hope that it will attract enough players to generate enough revenue to make the investment pay off. That's a big part of what the steam release is all about: bringing in new players who hopefully start spending money on the game. If they hire the programmers and the players/revenue don't come, then PGI shuts its doors after 90, 120, or 180 days and there's no more MWO for any of us and any money we spent on the game is just gone.

The numbers aren't that hard to figure out, either. Take a SWAG at the size of the active player base (those likely to actually spend money on the game). You'll get some quibbling around the margins, but this has been done in the past and usually comes up with values between 50,000 and 100,000 players (some would say much less).

Now estimate the average amount of revenue each players generates. Some people never pay a dime, others order every mech pack, get impatient and buy mechs for MC instead of grinding out c-bills, etc. My personal guess is that, on average, players are probably dropping between $40 and $80 per year toward the game.

Now, combine those numbers and add maybe 10% for revenue generated from other sources (i.e. art licensing agreements, etc.). Let's say 70,000 active players at $60 per year revenue each plus 10% = roughly $4.6 million/yr in revenue.

That sounds like a huge number, but it isn't. A typical full time employee with benefits probably costs PGI $40,000/yr in base salary plus another 40% in fringe costs (i.e. benefits, taxes, etc.), or about $56,000/yr each. If employees make up roughly half of PGI's total costs (the other half being server rental, office space, and other expenses), you can quickly noodle out that PGI can afford about 40 full-time equivalent employees. Some of their employees may be part time, so an estimate of roughly 50 isn't a bad number to use. I think I've heard a number similar to this thrown around as PGI's actual number or employees.

Now, if steam pays off and the playerbase doubles or more (assuming average revenue per user, commonly called ARPU, stays at roughly the same levels) then PGI can hire a lot more people. But I think we're way too early following the steam launch to know if that's really happening. I think it takes some time for a new player to get hooked and start actually spending money on the game, for starters.

All this said, PGI has delivered a lot more over the past 18 months than they had been prior to that, so I think they have a commitment to delivering new content and features. They just need the revenue to support it.

Edited by Khereg, 04 January 2016 - 02:52 PM.

[Appogee]

bob, on 03 January 2016 - 09:01 PM, said:

80% of the time its a PUG group vs a full enemy unit and there is no chance of winning. Why did the devs think this was a good decision?

Because it was the quickest and easiest thing for them to code.

This wasn't just a lack of pride in product. They were 18 months overdue to deliver CW and had basically stalled for most of that time while they waited to see whether they could get ongoing rights to the Mechwarrior IP.

Once they had those rights they finally got the inclination to get something coded. A matchmaker wasn't considered a necessary part of ''minimum viable product" so they declared CW would be "hardcore mode" to avoid the need to code it.

These devs always choose the easiest path. That's why there's no matchmaker in CW. That's why grand forum posts about "a complete rework of ECM" turn out to be the halving their range... and that's it. That's why Flamers are still useless. That's why cockpit monitors said "no signal" right up the patch before the Steam Launch, and why most of them still have meaningless graphics on them. That's why every single drop in CW has exactly the same tonnage restrictions, why the Planet Information is mostly incomplete, and why there's scant use of BattleTech's rich lore anywhere in this "A BattleTech Game".

It's a circular argument to say that PGI can't afford more coders because not enough people are playing MWO. In fact, not enough people are playing MWO because the devs kludged together a minimally viable robot-skinned arena shooter, called it "A BattleTech Game", bored many of their fanatical customers into walking away, and are having trouble keeping new customers because they refuse to put any effort into improving the actual underlying game.

"Please buy some more Mech skins as you wait for the revolutionary CW Beta 3."

Next time someone tells you that some aspect of CW is broken because "not enough people are playing it" remember that they're not playing it mostly because the devs either lack the vision, or can't be bothered, to code a product more people will want to invest their time and money into playing.

@Bob: enjoy MWO for what it is. If you want to play CW, join a unit and become part of the seal-clubbing cadre. The lead dev has promised CW Beta 3 by Spring. There has been progress over the last year. I still hold out a glimmer of hope that CW Beta 3 will finally be worthy of our perseverance and our investment.

Edited by Appogee, 04 January 2016 - 12:16 PM.

[Not A Real RAbbi]

I, too, am looking forward to the new CW, with that 4v4 mode (whatever the f*** that is) hoping to add another entry gate for new players into CW/FW. <fingers_crossed>

[AnimeFreak40K]

Major Lag, on 04 January 2016 - 09:06 AM, said:

No defense. When a game developer says, we don't have programmers to do this and this job, they need to hire some.

That's plenty of defense. Do you know how a business works? Do you know how much time and effort it takes to actually *make* a video game? You do realize that PGI has less than 100 employees (Wikipedia says 65), and that not all of them are necessarily working on MWO, right?

When a developer says "we don't have the programmers to do X", that is them effectively saying "we would like to do X, but the people we have don't know how so either we are going to have to take the time for them to learn now to do it or we are going to have to find some way to generate enough revenue to hire people that do."

By the way, programmers don't come cheap. I'll be quite honest, some of those numbers thrown out by Khereg regarding employee salary don't sound high enough (average salary is probably closer to 60,000 per year). If PGI isn't paying their programmers that much, then either Canada has a significantly lower Cost of Living, or they don't have very experienced/established people on their team.

The fact of the matter is that PGI is doing the best they can with the resources they have available.

[Khereg]

AnimeFreak40K, on 04 January 2016 - 01:39 PM, said:

By the way, programmers don't come cheap. I'll be quite honest, some of those numbers thrown out by Khereg regarding employee salary don't sound high enough (average salary is probably closer to 60,000 per year). If PGI isn't paying their programmers that much, then either Canada has a significantly lower Cost of Living, or they don't have very experienced/established people on their team.

No doubt. I stayed on the low side to be more optimistic. If PGI has 65 employees, even if many of them are part time w/o benefits, I'd say I'm a little low in estimating their revenue, which either means the player base is larger than I think or the ARPU is higher than I think, or both.

Edited to add: PGI may also have additional sources of revenue not related to MWO (although I don't know what those could be). That could account for the higher number of employees given the estimates for MWO related revenue.

Edited by Khereg, 04 January 2016 - 02:39 PM.

[vanillaBeanz]

I think pug vs pre made aside. The players in cw are just crazy good sometimes. In quickplay i might get lucky and take one out. But try doing that 4 times and i know i got no chance lol.

Having said i m enjoying the mode. Sometimes theres a noob like me on the other team so we duke it out while the big boys sort it out.

[Not A Real RAbbi]

vanillaBeanz, on 04 January 2016 - 02:29 PM, said:

I think pug vs pre made aside. The players in cw are just crazy good sometimes. In quickplay i might get lucky and take one out. But try doing that 4 times and i know i got no chance lol.

Having said i m enjoying the mode. Sometimes theres a noob like me on the other team so we duke it out while the big boys sort it out.

Kinda the opposite, actually. In public 12v12 matches, you get one shot against that ace. In a CW drop, you may get a few shots at that same ace. You'll have more opportunities to find him/her in a less advantageous position, to learn from last time you tried to step up, to get that shot right this time, etc. I'd think that you'd have a BETTER chance of catching your unicorn in a single CW drop, than in a QUICK PLAY drop. And since the solo queue AIN'T exactly known for team focus, there's even less chance there of getting an assist from a teammate.

Look for the names of those players in CW, who have the little gold '1' under their names in the forum, and go run with that big dog. ;-) One way or another, you'll make your name known.

[vanillaBeanz]

Lol i ll wait for the red single leg . Take the last hit and screenshot that one time i took out the gold 1 star.

[Not A Real RAbbi]

If you're not stealing kills, you're not trying hard enough!