6 replies to this topic

[Sunstruck]

Many people including myself remember phase 2 being a better cw experience than 3, why was this? What should phase 4 implement from phase 2.

[Tarl Cabot]

First - some sort of outline of what did come before.

Prior to CW2 - Jan 2015

https://mwomercs.com...anuary-roadmap/

Spoiler

Here is a small retrospective look at the year 2014 and some minor insight into the January road map.

First I want to thank everyone in the community who really recognized the hard work put in by the team these past couple of months and in particular in the month of December to bring CW phase 2 onto the live servers. For the most part everyone respected the holiday season and the well-earned time off - played the heck out of CW and patiently waited for January 5th before applying too much pressure on the development team. Thank you.

Now of course tomorrow we are back at it and I am legitimately excited to get back in the saddle and continue moving forward but more on that in a moment.

As to 2014 what a busy year!

As early as January/February of 2014 we knew we might have a chance of buying back the publishing rights from IGP but it was a slow patient process to complete that deal 6 months later. We also released the Clans which was a very big undertaking in all aspects of the game, not the least of which of course is balance. Although far from perfect I think we have achieved a greater sense of balance between IS and Clans than any past product has managed and we still have plenty of time to improve it further.

Other items on the list of 2014 would be UI 2.0, Private matches, CW Phase 1 and of course climaxing with CW phase 2.

The only real blemish on that list being UI 2.0, wait for more information on that subject over the next couple of months.

All in all a year we can look back on with some pride in seeing just how far MWO progressed during those 12 months. Which brings us to the year 2015 in which we have even more reason to be optimistic.

There is a very high level of excitement knowing that we will work the entire year for ourselves and the community in making improvements to MWO. An entire year that will look to you the community like September through December 2014 did.

As to some thoughts on the January road map, at this time I can really only provide some thoughts into the process rather than actual items and I will describe briefly why that is.

Tomorrow on January 5th we will gather back at work, the first thing we notice is that we should have a patch on January 6th but obviously there is no content ready for that patch. The patch next after that would be January 20th, now even this patch if we follow our normal testing procedure should be going into test by no later than the middle of this week, meaning we really don't have much of a chance for a patch on January 20th which pretty much kills the entire month on top of the Christmas break we just went through.

Obviously this is not an ideal way to keep up momentum for a great but newly born Community Warfare feature.

Therefore tomorrow will start out with my pulling a large amount of the development team into the boardroom for a production meeting. I will be instructing them that we need to maintain a "triage" mentality for a little while longer. This means likely lots of drawing on the whiteboard and discussing all of the top issues and problems with CW and prioritizing those items, then deciding which of those items we can actually do something about quickly and which of the longer term items should be started immediately.

The goal will be to come up with a plan to ensure we get some fixes and improvements into the live product in the month of January and salvage a patch or perhaps even 2 in the month of January.

However I won't be able to commit to the number of patches or what might be in those patches until we all get together in that war room for likely a several hour long meeting and I will keep you updated as best I can.

Some of those items being discussed will be:

- European players - how best to include them in crucial times of battle window.
- Grouping with all faction members.
- How can we improve the queue information further?
- What can we do about auto wins to improve that?
- counter attacks can they be represented better by another mode such as skirmish.

The hope would be that after another few patches we can settle back into a regular patch cycle in February, but I just can't say at this point.

So thanks again for a great 2014. Happy New year and here is looking at an even better 2015.

*************************************


Update and further details for Upcoming patches.

Grouping with any Faction members - Self-explanatory. Currently being worked on and we hope to be testing it by early next week.

Release: January 20th Patch.


Call to Arms Improvements - Call to Arms is an excellent idea in principal that unfortunately isn't working very well at the moment. The biggest issue is that all matches being kicked off on a planet currently trigger a call to arms. The original thinking was to attract as many players as possible to this contested planet. However now that we have seen it in action in the live game environment we see that most of the time there is no need to send off a Call to Arms. For instance a heavily contested planet might have plenty of strike teams on both sides of the battle line and they are simply bumping into each other, or in other words there is no actual need to call in players, plenty there to fight already. This caused the majority of solo or small groups that clicked on a call to arms to end up in the queue and not actually getting into the match being mentioned by the Call to Arms window.

We have made a few key changes to the way the system works. First a Call to Arms will only be sent out when there is a true need for players. By example when a 12 man strike team lines up to initiate an attack and there are fewer than 12 players on the other side. On top of this if the situation persists that there is a need, the Call to Arms will be repeated at intervals and if things are getting very close to kicking off an auto win for that attacking group a final Urgent Call to Arms will be sent out.

This should greatly increase the effectiveness of the Call to Arms pop up for solo and small groups and should further decrease the amount of auto wins.

Release: January 20th Patch.


Ceasefire Window Improvements for Non NA Players - This is a very change to Community Warfare that is a challenging problem to improve. Our goal was to include multiple windows where other parts of the world could participate in the critical final few hours before a planet can flip ownership. There were multiple possibilities explored but in the end we did not want to introduce new restrictions on players or greatly increase the number of planets up for contention.

In the end the solution settled on was to change from one single 24 hour battle window to three 8 hour battle windows (7 hours and 20 minutes minus the ceasefire). This solution allowed us to keep it at the same number of planets that are contested now but allow North American, Europe and Oceanic to each be able to participate in closing out a battle window. It has the added bonus of allowing players in other parts of the world that are able to play outside of their own evening peak time to participate in multiple planet flips per day. In the end it should greatly increase the amount of action and players that find value in participating in CW.

The three battle windows including the 40 minute ceasefire are 10 pm Pacific for North America, 6 am Pacific for Oceanic and 2 pm Pacific for Europe (Ceasefires start 40 minutes prior). Yes North America is pushed 1 hour later to create a little more fairness between the East and West Coast splitting the difference a little better. This allows a similar effect in Europe from the UK to Germany to Russia that reflects the NA time zones as best we can. This also puts Sydney Australia ending their battle window at 1am local time similar to our NA East Coast players. It is necessary at the moment that the three battle windows be separated evenly by 8 hours therefore I think we did the best we could to include everyone as fairly as possible.

Release: January 20th Patch.

Those items represent I feel very nice changes to MWO and Community Warfare and we will push hard to get those into your hands on January 20th.

A few other items in the pipeline I can provide an update on.

Queue Info changes - This represents further refinements to the Planet Info and Lobby screens to more clearly show players how many of the zones currently have an active match and if all of them are currently contested and if they have additional strike teams queued up to fight. This is valuable information a 12 man unit or any players would like to have so they can potentially decide that there is time enough for them to attack or defend somewhere else since they would only wait at the current planet. There are a number of improvements like this still being refined. We hope work will start on these improvements shortly with a release in a following patch perhaps Feb 3rd.

Counter Attacks - We are currently putting the final touches on a design to change counter attacks to more of an aggressive “clearing the enemy out of your territory” mode. A Sort of Skirmish / Assault feeling, my hope is we can introduce this on Feb 3rd but not confirmed.

New CW map - The third Canyon networks themed map is receiving feedback and adjustments now and we hope to have it in test by tomorrow. We are still attempting to have this released into CW with the Feb 3rd patch.

Loyalty Points - We need to finish off the work to allow the displaying of titles in game as well as the granting of all the LP package rewards. This will come after Feb 3rd, for now we will aim for and hope for a Feb 17th patch release.

That represents the latest information. Thanks for reading.

April-May 2015 CW2
https://mwomercs.com...5-may-road-map/

Spoiler

Quote

April summary: A quick glance back shows us many great features such as the looking for group tool, a new CW map, the Urbanmech! and important CW fixes including one that biased the game mode in favor of the heavier population. Things culminated in our first lore based event in the battle of Tukayyid and Community Warfare entering Beta 2. This time around Community Warfare will have the following improvements in play from the outset to go along with the fresh Inner Sphere map reset:

- Pre-queue and strike team information.
- Greatly improved Call to Arms functionality.
- Population bias improvements such as the game mode bias fix and longer auto win timer.
- Counter Attack game mode.
- VOIP.
- Looking for group.
- Faction groups.
- Faction chat.
- Increase to 6 total maps by tomorrow's patch.

Work on incremental improvements to CW such as better spawn protection with the associated improvements to the maps will continue while work on CW phase 3 gets underway in the month of May.

Here is what we have in store for you in May with patches on the 5th and 19th.

---

May 5

- Vitric Forge – new CW map - HPG themed map.
- Jagermech Champion - JM6-A(C)
- Faction camo fix for Ghost Bear
- Some 3D HUD fixes and improvements
- NARC indicator on the HUD
- Moved “Create Private Lobby” to the social screen - Play now properly goes straight to searching.
- Saved Dropdeck now properly carries over into gameplay when saving in the lobby before a full strike team is formed
- Clan Wave III month 2 and 3 rewards

May 19

- Faction and unit chat now available in the Queue lobby.
- VOIP (voice transmission quality improvements)
- BattleMaster BLR-2C and Cataphract CTF-0X variants - Gift Store first.
- New Mastery bundles.

Things do feel light on patch content for May 19th mostly because such a huge effort is going on in the background on the new Mechlab. This takes up resources in every department, but were happy to say it is getting very close and will likely get a public test very soon, perhaps even this week. The live release date for Mechlab is likely June 2nd. There is also a lot of effort going into the underlying bones of Mechlab to improve save time and to fix the Invalid bug, this work will likely be ongoing beyond the initial Mechlab release. Work has also been underway to support the upcoming MASC technology coming with Wave 3 mechs. So yes we are expecting fairly heavy patches in June with the new Mechlab and Wave3 content.

Thanks for playing and your support.

added spoilers to reduce text seen at one time.

Faction Play 3
https://mwomercs.com...65-19-apr-2016/

Edited by Tarl Cabot, 10 December 2016 - 08:35 AM.

[AnTi90d]

In v3, Scouting was invented which allowed large groups (organized or not) to spam Scouting and farm the bonuses and then move to Invasion, where they had a distinct advantage. That caused the other side to either fight an uphill battle or let those guys ghost drop and fight in another queue. Now, in a one queue system, there is no getting away from the Scouting bonuses.. so, if you don't enjoy playing Scouting, you'll either fight an uphill battle or go back to Quickplay.

This is letting the 4 man queue shut down the 12 man queue. It's a poor game design.

Also, temporary loyalty contracts were awesome. You could float around while farming rank 2 mechbays and get to know the FP population to see which faction had people that you could mesh with. Then, if you decided to form a permanent contract, you got a large loyalty point bonus.

Honestly, I'd pay cash to go back to phase 2.

4.1 looks like PGI is trying to cater to the QP-onry derps by giving them QP with dropdecks. It might be semi-popular for a couple of weeks, then they'll get sick of being spawn camped, not having any matchmaker and sometimes having to play Invasion mode and they'll go back to QP.. leaving the people that actually liked FP with some perverted QP garbage mode.. Ugh.. Domination with dropdecks?.. Conquest with dropdecks?.. Some people hate those modes and played FP to get away from them.

PGI is trying to please everyone. That never works. They're just going to piss off more people with 4.1 than they would have by just going back to v2.

[Jack Booted Thug]

Phase 2, it was still kind of new and shiny to a lot of people, and the expectations of better things to come kept people playing.

Once the luster wore off and development was stalled.......the end of phase 2 was wearing pretty thin for many, myself included.

Plus there was smack talk and some rivalries going, but the core mode itself was still a minimal viable product.

[FallingAce]

Phase 2 had a framework where loyalist had their place with rewards and penalties for being a loyalist.
Mercenaries(temp contracts) had their place with rewards and penalties for being mercenaries.

Instead of fixing the core issues of faction warfare(namely gameplay and balance), they decided to blow up the framework.

Phase 3
Mercenaries became the 11th faction complete with it's own rewards tree.
In return for meaningless voting, the Loyalist got the shaft.

Phase 4 is just a continuation phase 3 where factions mean nothing. Loyalty means nothing. Planets mean nothing. The map means nothing.

Faction warfare is now just QUICKPLAY 2.0

Edited by FallingAce, 10 December 2016 - 11:31 AM.

[Monkey Lover]

Once they change the battle windows it all went to heck. They were at a bad time for most the people in the U.S. They made people not want to play if they didn't even have a shot of taking the planet. They made people not play if it was too early. So there was a very small window when units will try to take a planet and only if it was in range of taking.

The number one killer was when they made deference of a planet better to not fight then to defend.

So basically beta1 and 2 were better because we could play and take planets. phase 3 made it even worse and added very little to the game mode.

Edited by Monkey Lover, 12 December 2016 - 12:49 AM.

[LordNothing]

phase 2 was a few minor tweaks posing as a major overhaul. phase 3 was a major overhaul that backfired horribly. deciding which is better is like getting to choose whether to get shot in the knee cap or the gut. the only thing phase 4 has to learn here is what not to do.

Edited by LordNothing, 12 December 2016 - 06:46 PM.