140 replies to this topic

[Podex]

KahnWongFuChung, on 18 March 2016 - 10:13 AM, said:

Sorry my friend but MWO is not BT and its not MechWarrior.

BT was all the book and lore combined with all the MechWarrio2-MechWarrio4 mission play in the old PC games.
MechWarrior was the MSN gamming zone/chat social and private Leagues with thousands of maps and multiplayer choices from stock to C1 lasers to pure ballistic battles and lrm battles.

Trust me I would have liked MWO to be both the BT universe and the MechWarrior universe but we got was WOT with mech skins.

True. Oh, how I don't miss going against that PPC overpowered dropship.

[Bilbo]

KahnWongFuChung, on 18 March 2016 - 10:22 AM, said:

Where are you getting this 10k number from anyway. Looking at steamspy I get this:
Owners: 636,458 ± 18,370
Players in the last 2 weeks: 41,799 ± 4,712 (6.57%)
Players total: 385,107 ± 14,296 (60.51%)
Peak concurrent players yesterday: 2,013
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
I was just AVG over MWO'S time on steam the only numbers to work with but 18,000 is not that far from 10,000 if its 18,000 its not great news but its somewhere to try to rebuild the community from.

18k is the predicted margin of error not the number of owners.

[wanderer]

Quote

I have no idea whether these numbers are any closer to reality than the one one you pulled out of thin air. Barring PGI coming out and saying what the numbers actually are though, they make more sense to me than a 10k playerbase.

When Steam numbers were near their peak, Russ mentioned that they made up roughly 50% of the playerbase. Thus the "10K" number, as we were around 5K Steam population.

MWO has not had a player counter since the closed beta, however. Honestly, a game afraid to post it's own numbers is giving itself negative advertising simply by the inference that results.

[RangerGee412]

You know what would get more players?

A battletech movie, and I bbbet movies based off the battletech franchise would be f ING awesome.

[SplashDown]

EVE online did 1 TV ad that ran 1 month and in that 1 month the server pop went from 28000 players to 65000 players..just from 1 TV ad.

[ArmandTulsen]

SplashDown, on 18 March 2016 - 10:54 AM, said:

EVE online did 1 TV ad that ran 1 month and in that 1 month the server pop went from 28000 players to 65000 players..just from 1 TV ad.

A live-action TV ad interspersed with game play footage to make it look like one continuous movie clip would do wonders.

Something vague with names and jargon dropped in to make people curious and wonder, "whoa, what is THIS? Looks like a cool new show. Oh, it's a FREE GAME? I gotta try this out."

Edited by ArmandTulsen, 18 March 2016 - 11:27 AM.

[Triordinant]

TexAce, on 18 March 2016 - 08:57 AM, said:

On the other hand I see TV ads for F2P games which are 1000x more crap than MWO could ever be on non-stop rotation.

[ArmandTulsen]

Triordinant, on 18 March 2016 - 11:30 AM, said:

So.. we need a beautiful woman playing a mechwarrior getting ready to strap in and start the mech, then show the battlefield that already has **** happening and things blowing up, and she rolls in and starts kicking ***.

[-Natural Selection-]

Only so many times you can kill the same people over and over for no reason before you get bored.

[Jables McBarty]

I've only been playing 4 months and I feel like these threads are omnipresent...
http://mwomercs.com/...r-base-shrinks/

I think anybody who came to MWO with some prior MW/BT experience agrees that it would be nice to have more. But as I see it, in the end PGI is not a big company, so they are very limited in what they accomplish. They certainly have grand vision, and it appears that their overzealous early vision led to a lot of disillusionment among early players.

In the end, the BattleTech IP is not major cashcow, which is why we went a decade between MechAssault II and MWO. The IP rights are an absolute clusterf***. I'm not surprised that PGI are making a big deal out of the Reseen/Classic 'mechs because, by my limited understanding, it took a lot of negotiation to get those rights, something that has not been done for a long time.

I think that doing more lore-based tie-ins beyond the fiction blurbs that go with the mech releases would go a long way towards making the game feel more complete. Just adding filler text here and there beyond the GamePlay Tips would introduce new players to the immersive feel of BT (for example, where does the game fully explain the difference between Clan and IS tech?).

A lot of this could be done with minimal coding.

I think I Tristan has some good ideas here, but I don't think that PGI has the bandwidth to really do major expansions.

Tristan Winter, on 18 March 2016 - 09:33 AM, said:

See, this is another argument for why MWO could have profited from major expansions instead of gradually trickling out new content. They should do like many other MMO-type games and have major releases once or twice a year, and make it a big deal by:

• Short bursts of advertisement
  
• New, professional trailers for each major release
  
• Big, lore-based events to mark each major release
  
• Pushing the timeline forward
  
• Resetting the CW map, but with subtle changes to indicate the progress from the previous period since the last major release.

Controversial idea:

• New, low budget surprise mech packs being made available for sale. Not released 6 months into the future, but made available to play the second they're available on sale. Ideally, this should be new variants of existing mechs, which would be interesting to both old and new players. For example, pay $20 to get a brand new variant of the Jenner, the Griffin, the Black Knight and the Victor for Inner Sphere players, or $20 to get a brand new variant of the Adder, Shadow Cat, Hellbringer and Warhawk for Clan players. New variants are cheap and easy to make, and you could take advantage of a temporary surge in activity and interest as both new and old players are flooding to the website.

Based on my experience in the software development world, they are aware of what we want, and they have long-term hopes on what they can do, but they are also constrained in the short-term by (1) keeping the lights on and (2) fixing bugs and balance.

[Jables McBarty]

KahnWongFuChung, on 18 March 2016 - 10:13 AM, said:

This problem could have been avoided by PGI/IGP by not destroying the old player base thinking they could replace it with new kiddies and not bringing the 2 sides together in a better gamming environment.

Maybe this can be fixed and resolved before the game goes BYE BYE?

Can you clarify what you mean by this?

[Johnny Z]

wanderer, on 18 March 2016 - 10:05 AM, said:

Honestly, I'd say they're more afraid of attention at this point. There is a long line of negative, public reaction to MWO and advertising seems to dig those bones up with gusto.

I disagree with the negative sentiment. Its the same trolls that are trolling Fallout 4 and that's a 10/10 game. I do however think that they are avoiding making to much of a splash until the game is ready to make advertising worth while.

[Rhialto]

I quit playing over 3 weeks ago but I'm not far... the last 3 weekends had no interesting events.

I'm pissed by the fact I claimed the 3 days of Premium Time then logged in 2 weeks later only to properly report a bug and that started the counter and I wasn't ready at all to play so 3 days in the trash.

Was also waiting for Warhorn to be fixed after over a year and I know last patch have a fix on it but I still haven't played...

There is something else I also enjoy to play from time to time... and on the 24th it will be Samorost 3 so I don't know when I'll come back.

See you!

[Johnny Z]

ArmandTulsen, on 18 March 2016 - 11:43 AM, said:

So.. we need a beautiful woman playing a mechwarrior getting ready to strap in and start the mech, then show the battlefield that already has **** happening and things blowing up, and she rolls in and starts kicking ***.

I don't know if they will ever try this. They havnt tried anything so far. The World of Tanks and World of Warships owner just reached some kind of mile stone for huge money.

This is how they announce updates.



Crap game by the way so don't waste the time.

Edited by Johnny Z, 18 March 2016 - 01:46 PM.

[Lyoto Machida]

Triordinant, on 18 March 2016 - 11:30 AM, said:

They even had a Conor McGregor ad awhile back haha:

[oldradagast]

Johnny Z, on 18 March 2016 - 01:41 PM, said:

Crap game by the way so don't waste the time.

Strongly disagree with that statement regarding WoWS, but to each their own...

As for MWO, Battletech is a narrow genre, and PGI advertises basically nowhere, which is part of the problem.

[DAYLEET]

ArmandTulsen, on 18 March 2016 - 10:02 AM, said:

It has already been said: Advertising.

An advert campaign would rejuvenate the game with renewed vigor and bring in the desired numbers.

Everyone wished that there would be more people to play with but...

Steam is the biggest advertising stunt you can do and they did it. Stop asking for advertising it wont do any miracles. The people interested enough in the franchise to play and spend cash in it already know about it.

What would cost nothing though is email telling me about every weekend events in my mail box. I might not need them but others might.

/rambling/
Its a game that is never going to be finished in the sense that they will always develop it. People will inevitably grow tired and go play other new games and hopefuly will come back eventually, replacing other players taking a break from their tour of duty. You can't ask people to exclusively play a fps for ever, it's not realistic or even logical. Im in Path of Exile right now and before that i was in Elite, im sure many others are elsewhere taking a break. It must be the nature of a game that never dies to create a new better and improved offspring where everyone go for the next 2 years.

Recently they had to take actions to alleviate the bleeding of players and those action in turn nudged some people away from the game. Not an easy time to be in mwo but bigger things are comming, even though i dont like most of them they just could be the things that give me more people to shoot in pubs game.

[Deathlike]

DAYLEET, on 18 March 2016 - 03:23 PM, said:

/rambling/
Its a game that is never going to be finished in the sense that they will always develop it. People will inevitably grow tired and go play other new games and hopefuly will come back eventually, replacing other players taking a break from their tour of duty. You can't ask people to exclusively play a fps for ever, it's not realistic or even logical. Im in Path of Exile right now and before that i was in Elite, im sure many others are elsewhere taking a break. It must be the nature of a game that never dies to create a new better and improved offspring where everyone go for the next 2 years.

While in a sense true.. on the other hand, it's also false.

If any game that is F2P or whatever decided "we need to stop active development for a year, in order to provide you a better/new game after that period" (servers would still be up of course), the question you would ask yourself is this... would that game survive?

In the case of MWO, the answer is NO.

There are many games... including F2P games that can last such a transition. Even a game as popular as Counterstrike (classic) has survived that.. sure it won't have the playerbase than its more popular/updated version, but there would be people and a community to keep things alive... however faint that may be.

For this game, you would literally see people disappear.. and while it won't be the majority... just understand that this game for many of its veterans plays very much the same ultimately as it did back in Beta and having an already crippled CW that still has yet to have actual information (why this has escaped the more recent town halls is amazing to me) and by the time we'll get it like we did Domination... I'm not sure you can continue to give PGI the benefit of the doubt when it took literally a year after UI 2.0 to acknowledge the mechlab needed to stop being complete garbage.

Ironically, you mentioned Path of Exile in your example... and when I don't play MWO.. I play it almost religiously (and it's not even my main game, which MWO happens to be). If the devs doing POE decided to do what I was proposing (1 year of no updates for an engine upgrade)... while I wouldn't be playing at the same rate (because it's all about the leagues), I would have no problem amusing myself playing in the base game, knowing that there will be no further content. The game would still be "complete" despite having obvious missing lore elements/conclusions, but the game is fully functional... and wouldn't be considered "a beta" like MWO would be to many people still playing it. People would still be throwing money at it.

I don't see people throwing money at this game even if you trusted PGI or guaranteed that after a year that a "miracle engine update" would somehow save this game while little to no progress of existing content (like actually improving gamemodes and CW) would even keep this sieve operational. It's unrealistic an expectation.


There's so much to fix in this game that goes beyond the obvious gripes... that expecting greatness when consistent mediocrity is provided in return is lunacy.

Edited by Deathlike, 18 March 2016 - 03:55 PM.

[Johnny Z]

oldradagast, on 18 March 2016 - 02:49 PM, said:

Strongly disagree with that statement regarding WoWS, but to each their own...

As for MWO, Battletech is a narrow genre, and PGI advertises basically nowhere, which is part of the problem.

Its true its not all bad. I tried it just by chance just before and during its launch just as they started those nice update videos.

Maybe if some day they combine all the various world of games into a giant game it would be cool. That may happen who knows.

Sci-fi is way more fun. World of Warships treats its customers really good from watching the update videos. I think MechWarrior Online does to, these week end events for example, a lot of effort put into balance for another and minimal grind for yet another, but doesn't make it as well known.

I think these other games that also have mostly dudes playing them don't mind treating them like dudes. I would say men but that may be politically incorrect.

Edited by Johnny Z, 18 March 2016 - 04:11 PM.

[Ryokens leap]

RangerGee412, on 18 March 2016 - 10:47 AM, said:

You know what would get more players?

A battletech movie, and I bbbet movies based off the battletech franchise would be f ING awesome.

Not a movie, an R rated, big budget cable series. Theres 20 seasons of content ready to go.