80 replies to this topic

[Stormbringer13]

who's fault is it?

[MauttyKoray]

Mcgral18, on 07 July 2016 - 06:18 PM, said:

You'd be wrong
Community is far from Toxic, and the problem is PGI


Their direction, features and occasionally poor announcements make for bad feelings.
What makes you dislike the game more? A Cryhard calling you a Terribad, or the CEO telling you your opinion doesn't matter?

I dunno, that last approach works well for Battlefield, CoD, Halo, etc. All the major online multiplayer games really.

PGI is the only company I know of that keeps communication open between players and devs, and the CEO himself releasing statements, information, having discussions, etc? Haha, name me another that does which run a game like this?

IMO, the community having LESS of a say in how to run this game would be beneficial, because no matter what happens the players will always be biased in their personal gameplay. i.e. "Those ******* lights have too many weapons, nerf them." or "My Assault isn't agile enough, needs more quirks." etc.

Edited by MauttyKoray, 09 July 2016 - 06:29 AM.

[MW Waldorf Statler]

MauttyKoray, on 09 July 2016 - 06:27 AM, said:

I dunno, that last approach works well for Battlefield, CoD, Halo, etc. All the major online multiplayer games really.

PGI is the only company I know of that keeps communication open between players and devs, and the CEO himself releasing statements, information, having discussions, etc? Haha, name me another that does which run a game like this?

IMO, the community having LESS of a say in how to run this game would be beneficial, because no matter what happens the players will always be biased in their personal gameplay. i.e. "Those ******* lights have too many weapons, nerf them." or "My Assault isn't agile enough, needs more quirks." etc.

Gaijin from war thudner and Star Conflict ! for example ;-) and many other not AAA companys

Edited by Old MW4 Ranger, 09 July 2016 - 06:49 AM.

[Jon Gotham]

MadcatX, on 07 July 2016 - 06:38 PM, said:

I've found the in-game community to be fine, the worst really being the first guy who dies blaming his death on the rest of the team (and 99% of the time it's not due to a push attempt, they just ran off and died) and the "you guys are stupid noobs" at end of match guy.

Otherwise it's rather pleasant in game and it's really only the forums who are salty.

And generally new players don't visit forums, at least not initially.

A lot of the time that player's death is due to most of his/her team imitating statues. A lot of the timew when they chide the team, the team should be taking it on the chain and should be learning. a moving team is a winning team.
Getting all defensive when the nasty man/woman calls you on standing still, passively idle is not the correct behaviour.

Every single person i have brought to the game has quit because of one reason alone:
Passive, camping team mates.

It makes quickplay especially EXTREMELY frustrating. Most of my friends have come from other games, where that type of camping and passivity is frowned upon. It basically frustrated them out of the game, and frustrated their wallets away.

[B0oN]

RagingOyster, on 07 July 2016 - 06:00 PM, said:

Is PGI perfect? No, obviously. Are they a good dev team? Yes.

Sorry, but no .
PGI sadly is far from being a "good" Dev team .
They´ve got a pretty good mechartist though, called Alex Iglesias aka FlyingDebris and a pack of other people that show good effort (network engineers for one), but besides that ?
Bleak outlook buddy, VERY BLEAK, if things don´t really change tremendously at the top of the company .

Oh boy, I think I need a quick walk around the block now to stop laughing that hard ... it starts to hurt actually .

P.S.: I´m fairly well known for being a grumpy arse, but at the same time I´m a helpful carebear, odd eh ^^

Edited by B0oN, 09 July 2016 - 07:02 AM.

[Mister Blastman]

I get upset due to the awful matchmaker. And now that we have leaderboards, we have proof it is awful. I'm going to start a thread about it.

[Spleenslitta]

The reason i'm a forumwarrior that doesn't play anymore is quite simple and has nothing to do with the community.
1- Too few gamemodes. Free for all Solaris where you have no allies only enemies is the key to reviving MWO for me.
2- Russ promised us a new mechanic that would stop us from firing alphas repeatedly throughout the match. I'm waiting for it.

Those are my reasons. Pure and simple.

[TheVent]

Spleenslitta, on 09 July 2016 - 07:14 AM, said:

2- Russ promised us a new mechanic that would stop us from firing alphas repeatedly throughout the match. I'm waiting for it.

I don't mean for this to sound rude, but doesn't that mechanic already exist? I think heat generation does a pretty fair job of keeping people from continuously alpha striking. And if you're in a mech with a build capable of alpha striking multiple times, you probably need that ability to not only keep yourself alive but also to do any significant amount of damage.

[Spleenslitta]

TheVent, on 09 July 2016 - 08:21 AM, said:

I don't mean for this to sound rude, but doesn't that mechanic already exist? I think heat generation does a pretty fair job of keeping people from continuously alpha striking. And if you're in a mech with a build capable of alpha striking multiple times, you probably need that ability to not only keep yourself alive but also to do any significant amount of damage.

No offence taken. Russ talked about something else. Something that would limit us to firing only a few alpha strikes each match.
He said that we would be lucky to be able to fire 2 or 3 alphas each match with this mechanic. Unfortunatly i have only heard this second hand.
Some guy had a pic of what Russ said on Twitter. Don't remember the topic since i read it a few months back.

Too bad so much of the really important news is on Twitter rather than here on the forums.

[A PLUMP BABY SEAL]

It find it a bit humorous that the people that disagree with Raging Oyster's point are the ones that have been playing for 2-5 years. Most of these players had prior knowledge about Battletech Mechwarrior, etc. Most truly have no idea how hard it is to start this game as a fresh newbie that does not know anything about Battletech/Mechwarrior. Of course they didn't have any issues when they started their alt accounts - they already knew what they were doing! Please hear me out.

As newbies, we go thru the tutorial which barely scratches the surface of game play but we don't know that. Afterwards we are full of excitement, take our sweet trial mech out to play and are overwhelmed by players telling(yelling in caps) to git gud, learn 2 play, wtf, etc. We realize that we really don't know much about the game at all. Also, we have no idea about how to build mechs, heatsinks and overheating, and many many other things. By time we get thru the agonizing 25 matches we are already jaded by other tier 5 potatoes yelling at us. And we have watched our PSR go down each game which is even more demoralizing.

Then FW looks like it might be more fun/change of pace so we click faction play and have NO ******* idea what to do. I don't know which to choose: loyalist, mercenary much less the difference between IS/Clan. Yes, PGI gives us a short description but no real background or history. We don't want to pay later for making the wrong choice now. We don't want to ask others questions because of all the **** talk in our QP matches and we think if we do ask questions players are just going to look down on us even more.

Forums? We've never had to take to a forum or google to figure out the basics of game play for any game before. Who does that?

So my friends, I think it is a combination of two things that drive new players off: mostly PGI and also lots of tier 5 ********. I don't think the people that have been playing MWO for a while have any part of making the game bad. I wish I would have known starting out how friendly and helpful the vets are. Most are passionate about the game, encourage newbies, and teach us tricks of the trade. I'm an adult with patience so I studied up on the game, made a few friends and now find it fun. However, many players just quit the game.

This is my experience and my opinion. I don't expect everybody to agree with me. But I do believe this is why so many players leave.

[TheVent]

LOL yeah, Twitter isn't the best method of getting information out to your playerbase. I think it would be interesting to have a mechanic like that in the game, it would definitely add a bit more strategy to it. The only problem I see with it is that alpha striking doesn't always do what you want it to. An alpha strike simply fires all of your weapons at once, it does not ensure that all of those strikes will land or that you won't immediately overheat and shut down from a single alpha. I've definitely built some assault mechs that aren't even capable of handling the heat from a single alpha strike. So as it is already, really the only mechs that should be constantly alpha striking should be lights. So if this happens, assault players will rejoice that they're not getting cored in two hits from behind anymore, but everyone else is going to be pissed.

[Cizjut]

I love the game, but there's not much to do besides quickplay.

I mean have you ever tried to sell the game ot another friend to play with you? i'ts very hard considering there's not much to do and FW plain sucks, no sugarcoating it. Quickplay is solid and fun, the game is there, the mechs and visual design are pretty good and the sounds and graphics are nice, but the gamemodes aren't really addicting as they could be and the meta is stale. No new weapons and few tactics to be used all around since forever. This glances pretty soon for some new players, and they realize all these cool customizeable options and mechs fall moot when you can't show them up and brag them as a clan on any gamemode that actually matters.

I think PGI knows they have a solid game that could be something btu it's not quite there. Still the only people responsible for the success of the game are PGI themselves.

When 4vs4 or 8vs8 on Solaris championships arrive or FW gets remade I expect a big influx of people that will stay and love the game as we all do.

[DaZur]

Madame Death, on 09 July 2016 - 08:40 AM, said:

It find it a bit humorous that the people that disagree with Raging Oyster's point are the ones that have been playing for 2-5 years.

It needs to be kind'a appreciated that many of us veterans have ridden through some extremely rough patches and as a result are heavily jaded and opinionated. It's not so much as disagreeing as it is refuting.

Mind you, there's a huge difference between general malaise / frustration expressed by veterans and the vitriol laced rants of the disenfranchised bittervets...

Common denominator is we all love this particular franchise, hold it near and dear and have extremely high expectations for this IP. PGI has done a wonderful job of bringing this IP to life and providing a gateway to this genre we so endear.

They just need to drop the hubris and learn to understand and appreciate some of the fundamental issues that the majority of use take umbrage to.

[Jackal Noble]

Ya no. Blaming the player base, especially the dedicated niche fans of battletech is wrong and idiotic for the most part. In my experience and opinion, the salty, the bittervets, the micragers(so funny) are actually resultant from being a highly dedicated intelligent and stubborn group, watching their only real escape get tied down to a chair whilst having a razor blade dragged across the skin, slowly, painfully bleeding out all the while. I would dare to say that a number of Battle Tech fans left for good after the latest mechwarrior iteration. HBS might salvage them and bring em back, but who knows. After the abuse of this brand suffered from this game, I'd venture to say some aren't coming back.

[Geek Verve]

I haven't played in quite a while, and it's not because of the community. Every one of these games has a small contingent of players who just never seemed to figure out that being a jerk doesn't make you look cool. I ignore them. They are a non-factor in my game experience.

I don't typically *expect* anything from game devs beyond trying their best to do what they say they're going to do. After all it's their game, and if I don't like it, I just play something else. I quit because I got tired of feeling like PGI was bending me over at every turn. Now I play something else. /shrug

[Narcissistic Martyr]

RagingOyster, on 07 July 2016 - 06:00 PM, said:

Edit: Looking back, I'd definitely have to agree that in-game most people are great (save the guy that rushes in and blames his death on his "bad team") and it's more the forums where you find the toxicity

I'd say the community at large is more disillusioned than toxic.

[Spleenslitta]

TheVent, on 09 July 2016 - 08:43 AM, said:

LOL yeah, Twitter isn't the best method of getting information out to your playerbase. I think it would be interesting to have a mechanic like that in the game, it would definitely add a bit more strategy to it. The only problem I see with it is that alpha striking doesn't always do what you want it to. An alpha strike simply fires all of your weapons at once, it does not ensure that all of those strikes will land or that you won't immediately overheat and shut down from a single alpha. I've definitely built some assault mechs that aren't even capable of handling the heat from a single alpha strike. So as it is already, really the only mechs that should be constantly alpha striking should be lights. So if this happens, assault players will rejoice that they're not getting cored in two hits from behind anymore, but everyone else is going to be pissed.

There are ways to limit the number of assault mechs or any mech for that matter from dying to a single alpha in the back and such.
There are two ideas that has been frequently on the Feature Suggestion part of the forums in many different forms.
Something that would make MWO a genuine thinking players shooter like the devs wanted. And that is....

1 - The energy generation, storage and recoil system. Your reactor produces energy and everything you do consumes energy.
Firing energy weapons (maybe Gauss too) consumes the most energy.
Walking/running consumes energy the closer you are to going full throttle the more energy is consumed.
As long as you don't fire too many weapons you will be able to go full throttle all the time.
Ballistic and missile weapons takes less energy to fire but the more ballistics you fire all at once the more you stress your gyro.
If you severly tax your gyro it will consume a lot of energy to keep the mech on it's feet. Missiles takes more energy than AC's but doesn't produce recoil.

2- High heat makes mechs sluggish. The higher your heat goes the more sluggish the mech becomes.
Slower maximum speed, slower torso/arm twist, data on targeted enemy mech takes longer to show on HUD.


If either or both of these ideas was implemented we would have to carefully judge whether we got the necessary energy/heat to fire an alpha.
Get too hot or too low on energy and you will be easy prey till you recover. In the lore and the novels a hot mech was sluggish to respond and alpha striking was an act of pure desperation.

With this we would maybe see more builds similar to what we see in the lore. When i play i use this on my Kit Fox and it works just fine because i play in ways that adapts to any situation and opportunity i'm given.
Kit Fox Build - 4x MG's, 1x ERSL, 1x ERML, 1x ER PPC. JJ's and ECM.
All the opportunities i manage to grasp with my versatile weapon loadout makes up for my lack of specialisation.

[Stormbringer13]

MauttyKoray, on 09 July 2016 - 06:27 AM, said:

I dunno, that last approach works well for Battlefield, CoD, Halo, etc. All the major online multiplayer games really.

PGI is the only company I know of that keeps communication open between players and devs, and the CEO himself releasing statements, information, having discussions, etc? Haha, name me another that does which run a game like this?

IMO, the community having LESS of a say in how to run this game would be beneficial, because no matter what happens the players will always be biased in their personal gameplay. i.e. "Those ******* lights have too many weapons, nerf them." or "My Assault isn't agile enough, needs more quirks." etc.

Bioware Online Age of Champions had a great forum and HUGE communication between players and developers. It was another situation where a good portion of the player base had in depth knowledge of the game mechanics and was able to point out when the game was going wrong, even when Devs would say otherwise.

Mecha Galaxy has daily, sometimes hourly contact with it's developers on Facebook. THey closer to players than some family members.

[EgoSlayer]

Mudhutwarrior, on 08 July 2016 - 10:01 AM, said:

Another unicorn poo eating thread.

<snip>
But I am on an island. Pay no attention to what i say. Myself I am in good company here without all the unicorn poo eaters.

Some people like ice-cream

[Quaamik]

One reason is the active player base shrinks in the June - Aug months. The average age of people playing is older, and the summer months for north America have a lot of competing things (good outside weather, vacations, family things).

That said, a few things that PGI could do to improve things:

- Don't run time intensive events such as the last tournament. Play dies off for everyone else during it, and in the weeks immediately afterwards due to burnout.

- Don't make drastic changes to balance during the months when fewer people are here. It discourages those that are not playing every day or two.

- To improve new player retention, PGI should lengthen the period of better rewards (premium time) for new players.

Other than that, I agree with the OP. People who are d**ks in game tend to discourage new players. Just simple offhand comments like "why do people still bring LRMs" or "get your own locks, don't expect to milk off your teammates" are quite crushing to a new player (especially in a trial mech) that has a bunch of LRMs and is trying to work as team. Its much easier and better to just shut up, or say "roger", or say "more of your missiles will hit if you keep line if sight with your own target".