32 replies to this topic

[Agent005]

I'm not sure if this is the appropriate place to ask this question (or if this question is even appropriate to ask in this forum period), but I'm just asking as a new player who's jumping into Mechwarrior for the first time. A lot of people around the internet have shared fond memories of playing the older Mechwarrior games when they were kids, but the minute Mechwarrior: Online is brought up, they instantly turn bitter and have nothing but bad things to say about this game and how it ruined the franchise. It ultimately doesn't affect me, but it's still something I find a bit jarring. Why does this game get so much hate outside of its fanbase? Is it just because it's free to play? Because even though I have some problems with its business model (mainly concerning the pricing of cosmetic items), this game seems to have a much better F2P model than most others I've seen. I'm not in any way meaning to flame bait or troll with this topic; I'm just genuinely curious why this game seems to court such a bad reputation.

[Anunknownlurker]

I believe a lot of the hate is based on the past. I started playing just over a year ago and even then picked up on a lot of legacy stuff from the times of the previous company involved with the game (IGP?). There seemed to be a massive amount of negativity generated by them and it has taken a couple of years for PGI (I believe the similarity in name is coincidental) to recover from that.

In part I think it stems from inevitable conflict between the "old-school" tabletop players who wanted almost a PC simulator, the MW2/3/4 players who have massive nostalgia for those games, and the newer players who just want to stomp around in robots with fricking lasers in their heads!

In part it's based on a lot of missed promises from PGI and some notable failures in both communication and delivery of in-game content.

Mechwarrior and Battletech in general has always been a "niche" game, the tabletop version never really achieved the massive sales and popularity of other, similar games (Games Workshop, D&D etc.) and MWO has a slightly older player base (at least that's my impression) than other online multi-player games and in many ways, us oldies are more demanding and less forgiving of a company which doesn't deliver what we want.

All that being said though, since we as players can't even decide what we want - just read some of the stuff on this forum let alone Reddit and Twitter - I am not sure that ANY company could deliver the desired result!

That's all just my opinion of course

[Michal R]

Because in this game you need to have skill and you must think.
This is hard game for COD and CS:GO kids

[MarineErrant]

Personally, I think MWO is okay but it's far from great. They did a lot of things right:
1) Different firing modes for ultras
2) Ability to toggle ECM and AMS
3) Changes to your mech's loadout are reflected on the model
4) Nice fixed and moving reticle system. It's much nicer than MW3's
5) Weapon size as far as critical space
6) Damage drops off with range instead of ending magically at max
7) A lot of mechs actually look really damn good

But then they did bad things like:
8) Camo patterns are bought on a per mech basis (i.e. one for Cataphract, one for Catapult, etc)
9) Colors are retardedly expensive for what is otherwise a meaningless modification
10) The heat system with ghost heat and heat sinks that are not doubles...what is that even?
11) Annoying menus that popup when you log in and can't be closed quickly with ESC like in other games
12) Made mechs that have absurd hardpoints like 9 missile
13) Hit reg on srms and PPC is bad
14) Splash system on clan ppc lowers it's effectiveness and the range advantage doesn't make up for it in my opinion
15) Gauss rifle charging up is silly. In lore, those things blow up when hit. To me this implies they're always charged ready to fire during combat. So, instead we get a delay to charge followed by a cool down. Why not just make a longer cooldown to factor capacitor recharge?
16) IS quirks, specifically weapon quirks, are pretty nuts on a few mechs (Oxide I'm looking at you)

Aside from that MWO just lacks a story to go along with the mechs to really immerse the player in a different world. It's just shooty scooty robots with the same exact tactics played out ever match on every map. Death ball. Nascar. LRM spam. MW3 and MW4 had missions where you had 2 teams of 12, one defending a base and the other attacking. There were CTF matches, FFA matches, team death matches, many many more maps, and the team play didn't seem quite as predictable. That said, MW4 featured tons of gauss poptart Madcat MK2 and Highlanders..then the Gladbags. MW4 devolved into a PPC/Gauss/JJ game which got old real fast.

[Kurbeks]

15) cause of dual and quad Gauss builds. So charge up is ok..

[Nick Makiaveli]

MWO isn't a SP game so hardly right to pan them for not having missions.

As to colors/camo prices, they give away MC and mechbays regularly, so they need to make money some how.

[Rogue Jedi]

I think the main issues are as follows;

way back in 2012 when this game was selling the Founders packages PGI implied or promised some stuff which for whatever reason did not come to pass or took longer than was expected, things like a promise that no-one would ever have to play against someone using 3rd person view ^{(despite the fact that 3rd person is vastly inferior to first)}.

The fact that IGP (the former publisher) refused to give PGI (the developer) resources to proceed with new map creation or work on the Community warfare game mode, which was due in early 2013 but ended up arriving very late in 2014 ailienated some players.

Many people are unhappy with the way PGI is interpreting Mechwarrior, there are those who think that Clan Mechs should be twice as powerful as comparable Inner Sphere Mechs as in the lore but that IS should have twice as many players on a team, ^{(which of course could work fine when you are managing an army but would cause pretty much everyone to go Clan if it was implemented in MWO as it is)}, where as PGI are doing everything they can to make Clan and IS technology different but roughly equal, and people who think this should be a pure simulator as opposed to the FPS with simulator elements which we currently have.

Some people are still angry about the $500 gold Mechs which IGP tried to sell in 2013/2014

Others hate the fact that there is no single player or PvE gamemodes ^{(I myself would love to have a single player campaign)}

There are also people who hate the fact that they cannot single handedly take on several Mechs with a realistic chance of winning as happened in earlier games

you also have some people angry that their favorate Mech is not yet available

many people are not happy with some of the game balance decisions PGI has made (look up ghost heat or quirks and you will find dozens or hundreds of threads complaining about them)

some people hate alpha strikes which were supposed to be a last resort not the preferred attack method.

I could go on like that for hours and list every objection I have heard, but I think the biggest problem is people have unrealistic expectations of what a small developer can do with this game, 15-25 years ago when Mechwarrior 2-4 were in development the level of discourse we have with the developer would have been unthinkable as would 4 years of development on a game after players first got hold of it, the previous games were released completed and got upgrade packs to enhance them, MWO is a continuous work in progress, I think that is the biggest problem.

[Threat Doc]

Jimmy DiGriz, on 30 April 2016 - 08:03 AM, said:

I believe a lot of the hate is based on the past. I started playing just over a year ago and even then picked up on a lot of legacy stuff from the times of the previous company involved with the game (IGP?). There seemed to be a massive amount of negativity generated by them and it has taken a couple of years for PGI (I believe the similarity in name is coincidental) to recover from that.

All true. It's more than just what IGP did, though, and you seem to point it out further below.

Quote

In part I think it stems from inevitable conflict between the "old-school" tabletop players who wanted almost a PC simulator, the MW2/3/4 players who have massive nostalgia for those games, and the newer players who just want to stomp around in robots with fricking lasers in their heads!

Agreed, wholeheartedly. The real problem is, the tabletop guys have never really had a MechWarrior game based fully on BattleTech. The MechWarrior 2 series was close, but unlimited jump jets and a few other small issues really killed that one. MechWarrior 3 is basically the pre-cursor for MWO, and was the most perfect version of BattleTech on the PC until MWO was released; that said, MWO has far from perfect numbers, but it has a better 'feel' of BattleTech than any of its predecessors than MW3. MechWarrior 4 was a total joke, related to the BattleTech universe in names only; the 'feel' of that game was all wrong, the numbers were so blown out of proportion as to be laughable, and the game was Heavy Gear with BattleTech universe names. I know there are a lot of folks out there who love MechWarrior 4, and I don't fault any of you for your love of that game, but it's not BattleTech in the least, and that game doesn't even use BattleTech for decent background information.

Quote

In part it's based on a lot of missed promises from PGI and some notable failures in both communication and delivery of in-game content.

{growl and grumble} Absolute truth.

Quote

Mechwarrior and Battletech in general has always been a "niche" game, the tabletop version never really achieved the massive sales and popularity of other, similar games (Games Workshop, D&D etc.) and MWO has a slightly older player base (at least that's my impression) than other online multi-player games and in many ways, us oldies are more demanding and less forgiving of a company which doesn't deliver what we want.

When compared to other games, you are correct that BattleTech did not make the sales that Warhammer 40k did for the combat simulation tabletop games, nor the sales that D&D or Warhammer Fantasy Role-Play did for tabletop role-playing. However, consider that, at its' height, in the mid-'90s, it had a fan-base of more than 25,000,000 players around the world (yes, twenty-five million). Also, it's not that "us oldies are more demanding and less forgiving of a company which doesn't deliver what we want", it's the fact that promises were made, as you addressed, above, and neither they, nor a lot of content the developer said was going to be in the game, ever made it in. The fact is, we oldies remember the glory of what BattleTech became, and we HAVE EARNED THE RIGHT to see that in the game, as far as can possibly be taken. PGI is still growing, as a company -when they delivered Transformers three years late, and Duke Nukem Forever more than a decade late, they were a ****** little company who couldn't do things right, and now they have done some amazing things with MWO, but they still have a long way to go- and, though we the older player base understand all of that, we still want that glory, so who know what the future holds.

From my viewpoint, right now, especially after last night's Town Hall, the future doesn't hold much; but PGI could change all of that if they would truly pay attention to the things we players know will save this game.

Quote

All that being said though, since we as players can't even decide what we want - just read some of the stuff on this forum let alone Reddit and Twitter - I am not sure that ANY company could deliver the desired result!

That's all just my opinion of course

So, where that leaves us is with PGI delivering on what we Founders paid for in the first place, the game PGI originally wrote about in the opening Blogs on this forum, which are no longer there, because PGI was ashamed to keep them online. We have 'Mech Warfare, and it's actually quite good, near-perfect. We have Community Warfare, but we were told they wanted to do objectives and BattleTech-style contracts, and they've barely scratched the surface with maps and modes, let along touching actual BattleTech-style contracting, and they constantly complain about how much their engineers and programmers cringe when new features are mentioned in a podcast somewhere; so, what has now been changed to Faction Warfare is nowhere near where it's supposed to be. Information Warfare is something Paul recently touched on, but it's now been nine months since all of that was supposed to go down, and we've heard nothing further about it; this 4v4 Scouting mode is supposed to be what Paul was talking about, I guess, but if it is, it's as weak as the remaining features in this game. Finally, Role Warfare... the types of 'Mechs were supposed to be separated into various types (brawlers, snipers, scouts, boats, etc.) but they have not been and, as was pointed out some pretty ridiculous hard point designs have been placed on newer 'Mechs. PGI were also supposed to build unique efficiency trees for each of the 'Mechs, and then one for pilots, as well, that wasn't just about securing new modules for your 'Mech, but could actually show some growth of Piloting and Gunnery Skills.

Now, let's add in the fact they began the player rankings with Elo, which was a measurement of one's ability in Chess, and designed for one-on-one play, and PGI tried to adapt it to this game, with amazingly failed results. Now, they've changed over to Pilot Skill Rating, and it's a fine enough addition, if you they would remove the threshold requirements for whether you gain or lose PSR due to whether you're on the winning or losing team, regardless of how well you did. If you're on the losing team, your damage has to be an average of 300 points higher in order to get an up arrow or even an = sign to remain static in your PSR score. That's not working fairly for players at all, and players should be rated based on how high their match score is, regardless of win or loss because, right now at least, if you score 150 points damage or more in the game, and you're on the winning team, you automatically get an up arrow to your PSR, while if you're on the losing team and you score less than 350 points damage you get a down arrow, while 350 to 749 you can get an =, and then 750 and above you gain an up arrow. That's pretty ludicrous.

So, in conclusion, it's stupid crap like this, which has been going on since the announcement for MWO first went out on October 31st, 2011, that makes it increasingly harder for players to stay here. PGIs methods of self-sabotage and game-killing make a lot of us pretty desperate when holding onto this game that will never be Camelot.

Edited by Kay Wolf, 30 April 2016 - 09:00 AM.

[TheLuc]

Agent005, on 30 April 2016 - 07:47 AM, said:

I'm not sure if this is the appropriate place to ask this question (or if this question is even appropriate to ask in this forum period), but I'm just asking as a new player who's jumping into Mechwarrior for the first time. A lot of people around the internet have shared fond memories of playing the older Mechwarrior games when they were kids, but the minute Mechwarrior: Online is brought up, they instantly turn bitter and have nothing but bad things to say about this game and how it ruined the franchise. It ultimately doesn't affect me, but it's still something I find a bit jarring. Why does this game get so much hate outside of its fanbase? Is it just because it's free to play? Because even though I have some problems with its business model (mainly concerning the pricing of cosmetic items), this game seems to have a much better F2P model than most others I've seen. I'm not in any way meaning to flame bait or troll with this topic; I'm just genuinely curious why this game seems to court such a bad reputation.

Hi Agent005,

As you could read from other members of the forum, there is many reasons about the hate. The Mechwarrior franachise already sets some expectations which in MWO we do have the skin put it pretty much stops there. Its been 4 years already that the game is in a stale state with no real change. Lots of players did throw cash in various forms to support and hope for a better development of the game which so far didn't happen. The game is only PVP death match and after so much time the player base did shrink, some of those who supported the initial founding are beyond mad, some are bored to the point they hardly play or just quit. Now there is that E-Sport thing going on that has nothing to do with fixing the game that's gets lots of players even more mad. MWO been around for 4years and believe or not but some players did sink tons of cash to support the game in hoping to get the Mechwarrior experience, no it didn't happen yet and at this point I doubt it will ever happen, it is still the death match only tank shooter with a Battletech skin over it. Many as myself sticks around in hope but after 4years its normal to feel bitter and cynical.

To top it all, the upcoming decal feature wont have custom ones, that might change once its there of course but again that kind of disappointment became a regular thing.

So here you have other reasons.

``Edited for Rogue Jedi``

Edited by TheLuc, 30 April 2016 - 11:55 AM.

[TooDumbToQuit]

I also play Madden NFL. When it went online where you could play against others, it went from a good game to a must have (even when it sucks)

I've read all the Mechwarrior books and I tried playing the old games and they sucked.

I'd rather lose to another human then beat up on the CPU.

[Rogue Jedi]

TheLuc, on 30 April 2016 - 09:01 AM, said:

those who supported the initial founding are beyond mad, some are bored to the point they hardly play or just quit.

please do not speak for me, if you had phrased that as "some of the founders" rather than sugesting all of us are "beyond mad" I would have been OK with that sentence but I regularly play alongside several other founders who who are OK with the direction this game is heading.
Could MWO be better yes, I personally would prefer more of a simulator feel.
Am I excited about every decision PGI make, no but on the whole, in the opinion of this Legendary Founder they are doing the game justice.

MWO is my favourite game and PGI's plans are, on the whole, looking good.

while some of the Founders are certainly of the opinion you suggest it is most certainly not all of us.

sorry for the minor rant

Edited by Rogue Jedi, 30 April 2016 - 11:55 AM.

[XxXAbsolutZeroXxX]

Agent005, on 30 April 2016 - 07:47 AM, said:

A lot of people around the internet have shared fond memories of playing the older Mechwarrior games when they were kids, but the minute Mechwarrior: Online is brought up, they instantly turn bitter and have nothing but bad things to say about this game and how it ruined the franchise.

This is somewhat of an ugly topic that might best be avoided but I might be able to somewhat answer that. I don't hate PGI and think they're doing a decent job with this game but I can understand where at least some of the hate comes from.

The first thing you have to know is MWO isn't the first time someone has tried to implement Community Warfare/Faction Warfare true to the mechwarrior/battletech universe inside of a 3d FPS shooter. The last attempt was made around 2001 in the form of a game called: Multiplayer Battletech 3025. Here's its wikipedia page.

https://en.wikipedia...BattleTech_3025

This is what the description says under gameplay:

Quote

Gameplayedit

Players of 3025 connected to an MMOG-style server, selected an affiliation in the form of a Great House, selected a planet, then descended to the surface to engage in a virtual four-on-four battle with opposing players. The results of such battles were planets being won and lost for the five major houses, shifting the borders of various factions in the Inner Sphere. 3025 used many more of the original BattleTech rules than the MechWarrior series.

Here's a video clip of the predecessor to Battletech 3025 called Battletech Solaris.



And a trailer for Battletech 3025(what does this remind you of?).



For those who know what the 3025 beta is, and were there when it was in beta, MWO CW/FW is the game some of us have wanted since 2001. Think about that for a second. There are some people in this game's player base who have wanted CW/FW for nearly 15 years.

Prior to the 3025 beta there was a predecessor 3d fps shooter called Battletech: Solaris. It was basically arena deathmatch with no matchmaker and didn't support CW/FW functionality but since all games were essentially public or private lobby based matches players emulated CW/FW functionality by arranging the appropriate unit vs unit battles. Basically people wanted CW/FW badly enough that they would arrange private matches to emulate CW/FW. Imagine if there was no CW/FW and people in this game had to use private lobbies to emulate CW/FW functionality and keep track of who was winning the planet war, that's what people actually did back then. My memory isn't perfect but they might have been called SLL's - Solaris Lance Leagues.

This is just some background exposition, some of the information base someone would need to put things into perspective. I don't think it explains the hate for PGI or why some dislike MWO but I'm getting to that part. Essentially the idea and concept for CW/FW isn't new. One might say that those who have played previous versions of BT/MW multiplayer games have been playing CW/FW in one incarnation or another for a very long time -- more than a decade and a half in some cases.

Now I'm going to explain where things become problematic: imagine if games like Battletech: Solaris and Battletech: 3025 which people were playing in 2001 and earlier might actually have been superior to MWO in some ways. Certainly those old games couldn't compare to MWO in terms of graphics or technology. But in terms of gameplay, attention to detail and implementation I'm sorry to say that someone could make a case that MWO is inferior to those long defunct games.

To compare MWO this way is a bit silly, essentially its impossible to compare MWO to older games like Battletech: Solaris or Battletech: 3025. There are no copies of those older games lying around that would allow someone to fire them up and compare the experience to MWO. All people are really left with are memories from 2001. But I might not be exaggerating in saying that those older incarnations of MW/BT are like the original star wars trilogy or the original indiana jones trilogy to some people. With those types of classics the bar and expectations are lifted so high for following sequels maybe there's no way the reality could ever live up to the expectations.

On the flip side, it is possible that some of the people PGI contracts to work on this game don't understand the appeal of MW/BT games. They don't understand the basic fundamentals of what makes MW/BT great which could tend to exacerbate things. Knowing your market and understanding your product might be two aspects of basic business that apply here. I wouldn't mind if all of PGI's employees and subcontractors were required to play through some of the mechwarrior and mechcommander games to be qualified to work on this project. If anything I don't think that titanfall, world of warships or other F2P games are MWO's main competitors. The main competitors of MWO are the previous MW/BT titles that have come before it. Its not on the basis of how well MWO does against War Thunder or Dreadnoughts that will determine how positive or negative this game's player base views MWO as a whole. But rather how MWO stacks up to previous MW/BT titles.

If you bothered to read this far you might be noticing some parallels. In some ways MWO is like a remake of Battletch: 3025. There could be parallels to the movie industry with its numerous remakes. And one of the biggest powder kegs for remakes is whether or not they chose to remain faithful to the originals. Some do remakes without knowing much about the original and that is often followed by a decent amount of negative backlash. That could be something like what we're seeing here. At least in terms of some of previous MW/BT players.

I can't say anything about TT -- I don't really remember many TT diehards being around and certainly I've never seen any of them try so hard to change the rules in their favor or impose "lore" on an entire games player base before, that's something wholly unprecedented.

That said there are probably many other reasons people dislike MWO.

With Global warming people seem to be more agitated, irritated and hostile on a regular basis. Its hot outside, people are uncomfortable and its contagious. With the economy and unemployment stats not being great that's also fuel to the fire.

There could be a decent number of unhappy, unsatisfied, malcontented people who could be looking for easy targets to lash out at. And in some ways PGI could be an easy target that some will try to turn into a punching bag.

Whatever the reason, I'm just happy I have a MW/BT game to play (for however long that lasts) and I'm going to try to enjoy it while I can.

Edited by I Zeratul I, 30 April 2016 - 11:29 AM.

[Tylerchu]

why is your name blue?

[Tarl Cabot]

Tylerchu, on 30 April 2016 - 11:54 AM, said:

why is your name blue?

He is a rookie/recruit. Either based on combat drops or posts or both.

Edit, it has to be based on the number of combat drops. I just ran across another blue named player who has over 2k posts that started in 2012. With the number of resets until the last one, it is likely that player has not played since the last reset.

Edited by Tarl Cabot, 01 May 2016 - 07:47 AM.

[Cy Mitchell]

Many ardent BT/MW fans (short for fanatics) have played every variation of the Mechwarrior franchise that was ever produced for the PC. Some have also delved deeply into the BT tabletop game or the lore of the Battletech and Mechwarrior novels. Because they are fanatics most of them have their own vision of what the perfect Mechwarrior game should be. (This includes me.)

Then you can throw in the FPS shooter insta kill crowd that want the same type action that is found in CoD, CS, Halo et al. These folks can be just as fanatical and demanding but their wants and desire often run contrary to those of the BT/MW crowd so you have even more divergent demands on the game developer.

When the company that has control of the Battletech/Mechwarrior IP license does not live up to each fanatic's personal vision of the game a lot of frustration, rage and hate ensues. It is really as simple as that.

[Appogee]

It all boils down to breach of trust on the part of the developers.

When PGI was seeking funding for this game, they outlined a grand vision of a "thinking man's shooter", including a complex "Community Warfare" meta-game similar in scale and concept to Eve Online. Instead they pocketed the Founders' investments, are believed to have used a lot of it to defend a legal case from a previous botched Trophy Bass Fishing licence, and delivered a minimally viable arena shooter with Mech skins, late.

They demonstrably outright lied to customers for more than a year about the state of development of the Community Warfare meta-game. Having promised it would be launched '90 days after Closed Beta", and that it was 'in development', they strung people along selling Mech skins while delivering very little on maps or gameplay. Instead they delivered things the community actively didn't want, which included 3PV, consumables, modules and Ghost Heat.

It later emerged that they hadn't even started coding CW all through this time, as they'd secretly been waiting to see whether they would be able to renew the MW IP from MS to make it worth their while.

Compounding all of the above have been hamfisted game mechanics and balancing, very slow addressing of long-standing basic bugs, and a range of other issues.

Edited by Appogee, 30 April 2016 - 12:53 PM.

[Bud Crue]

Speaking only for myself, I have no hate for PGI, just an exasperated disappointment. What causes this is mainly when PGI identifies a problem such as imbalance, role warfare,heat scale, alpha dependent game play, cheating, etc. to the community and then goes silent on those problems, "solves" them in some horridly counter intuitive overly complex way , or then decides at some point down the road that the problem(s), which they (PGI...NOT the community, not whiners, but PGI) identified are suddenly not a problem anymore; and doing all of this often with no official communication with the community.

I've only been around for a year and I have seen this conduct repeatedly. I can't imagine how folks who have been around for years deal with it.

Secondary to the above, is PGI's refusal to actually put any mechwarrior or battletech flavor into the game. I mean besides the blurbs on new hero mechs and the brief blurbs for faction descriptions there is literally nothing in MWO that actually provides context to the BT universe. That seems kind of silly.

Finally, game play mechanics that are totally contradictory. My personal pet peeve has always been giving us a huge and ever growing number of mechs to play but giving us game modes and mechanics that only encourage us to play a select few.

In the end analysis most of us love this game, love BT and/or love big stompy robots; and are to varying extents grateful to PGI for making the game and letting us play it. But yes, many of these same people get really frustrated with what they see as PGI's false promises, misplaced priorities, and seeming contempt for many off its customers.

I don't have hate, I have hope, PGI just makes it hard to maintain the latter and seems to go out of its way sometimes to foster the former.

Edited because I am on a phone.

Edited by Bud Crue, 30 April 2016 - 12:53 PM.

[Koniving]

Agent005, on 30 April 2016 - 07:47 AM, said:

I'm just genuinely curious why this game seems to court such a bad reputation.

This is a very difficult thing to answer in any timely manner.

There are a number of things.

• PGI's original claims to be producing a simulation (not a game) based on Battletech with a 1:1 scale with the tabletop... the prior PGI has shifted gears away from and broke the rearview mirror. The latter was never true.
  For the most part the people actually heading any designing elements have spent approximately "1-2 hours" of Battletech, or in the other case "Years of tabletop games" with no experience in Battletech as his thing is Warhammer 40k. Thus they are getting basic ideas from the rulebooks and Sarna.net and going "Hey, wouldn't this be cool?" (Note: When PGI first started on Mechwarrior Online in the form of Mechwarrior 5, they had Jordan Weisman who was one of the cofounders of original Battletech creator FASA and one of the original guys in BT. Then the project was abandoned (due to Xbox exclusive requirement and many other issues that would have sunk PGI into the ground of bankruptcy) and when PGI was finally able to start again, Jordan was part of it for maybe 6 months for just the basic setup and disappeared from the picture before the closed beta. The closed beta was perhaps the closest to Battletech MWO could ever hope to be. Everything from that point on has strayed farther and farther from all the goals and outlines for the project developed during Jordan Weisman's involvement. (Search: Devblog 0, Devblog 1, Devblog 2, Devblog 3, Devblog 4, Devblog 5)
  
• Tremendous problems in the underlying foundation of the game's mechanics have been ignored for 2 years and when addressed, are "bandaged" without removing or fixing them. See "Ghost Heat," "Gauss Firing Limit", "Power Draw" concept (ditched), "Press R to activate full damage Damage for Lasers" partial concept of "Information Warfare and sensor ranges". These are bandaids for factors of "high pinpoint alpha damage."
  
• IGP (the former publisher)'s marketing practices [500 dollar gold mechs] and alleged 'shackles' on communication and over shoulder 'control'.
  
• Overoptimistic promises / hype / impossible release dates. A common problem of smaller development companies. "CW by December 2012"... not here until 2015 and nothing meaningful until "Phase 3" just now.
  
• Lack of other titles or low experience of game development of no more than 80 employees (when PGI started on this they had something between 29 and 35 employees).

Most of the damage had been done during the first two year and that is where much of the bitterness comes from.

I personally feel they have improved in droves since then. Even so, if I could, I'd like to go back to the closed beta for MWO and scrap everything since. Fixed the underlying issues and then add the mechs since then. "Quirks" and the like would be mostly unnecessary and issues of power creep would be pretty much non-existent.

[Koniving]

Quote

Many people are unhappy with the way PGI is interpreting Mechwarrior,

This is a good summary of the first and second bullet points I gave.

Given the same basic source material but coming to very different interpretations by remember that Battletech has provided us with a unit of time for all things to occur, MWO could be a very different game with very different mechanics and have a very different host of merits and problems.

For example, BT uses 10 seconds as a unit of time for the tabletop, but all actions descriptions bring up "0.1" to "5 seconds" for anything done. For example an AC/20 has a rating of 20 damage in 10 seconds.
It also has the description that classes of autocannons are "loose categories of expected output." Meaning that it could do 19 damage or 21 damage, etc. This depends mostly on brand names and the condition they are in.
It also has an additional rule, that "standard" (regular) autocannons can fire twice as fast at the excessively high risk of a jam (which is about impossible to clear in the field without a hand actuator or the help of your comrade in another mech and usually had to wait until the battle was over to fix).
In comparison Ultra ACs do the same thing but have a comparatively lower jam rate.
There is also one Super Important thing noted in the Tech Manual: "Battletech as a tabletop game is a simulation summary of events." It even points out that damages reports are forced to specific body parts to simplify the experience. So while the source material may have an AC/20 firing up to 100 bullets to deliver 20 damage scattered all over the target in about 5 seconds, tabletop says "1 use AC/20, blam left arm, 20 damage." Thus leading to one of the most fundamental issues that has plagued balancing in MWO since the beginning: Pinpoint, front loaded damage.

The listed bandaids in the second bullet point never would have happened or been necessary when keeping this example in mind. Neither would have "doubled armor and structure," or "I must have an XL engine" or "You Must have Double Heatsinks."

However, to fix any of these issues would cause an even bigger outcry from the people who are enjoying the game as it is. The Battletech fans either abandoned it or have come to accept it as it is and as such there are some who say they would enjoy it being fixed, it'd be another drastic change.
It's simply too late to make the changes or to reinterpret Mechwarrior.

It will never be the Mechwarrior based on Battletech it claimed it would be, and this is why it makes me sad.

(For those interested: Consider this very "Battletech" example of weapon mechanics for the Atlas variants. Where instead of 'quirks', it is brand name weapon variants, brand name equipment, etc.)

Edited by Koniving, 30 April 2016 - 02:28 PM.

[Koniving]

Now: If taken as a game of its own and not compared to the source material or the past and definitely very difficult to play past games (which were more simulations in and of themselves while MWO has the control scheme of a console game or first person shooter), MWO is actually a really good if somewhat basic game that is fairly solid considering the tiny development firm behind it and lack of publisher's funds.

It has a few issues with time to kill, high damage, teetering the edge of power creep and "laser vomiting" that shouldn't exist but PGI has tried a few solutions for mixed results as they still have the stated caveat: "It is and should be a plausible method of attack." But otherwise it was and is definitely a lot better than most free to play games that existed in 2012, especially when faced with the many problems that an early, incomplete version of CryEngine that PGI had licensed and put to use (and PGI has stated that later versions were unusable due to how many modifications that were put into the engine for MWO, they couldn't just update).

The changes between 2013 and 2015 are absolutely amazing.

(But it still isn't Battletech. )