Tristan Winter, on 22 December 2016 - 04:01 AM, said:
I was interested about what Bryan Ekman had to say in 2013. Then they threw 80% of that out the window, and now I've given up on CW. The one time they actually sat down some community members to discuss in a roundtable, they spent the time talking about... buckets and long tom. That's it. And that was the only roundtable in... how long?
And PGI lost their publisher IGP because they went bankrupt. Losing your publisher really ***** with timelines and features. Not to mention there arent enough players for MWO to have implemented that system that was discussed back then. Like seriously, other than certain hardcore units, FW is a ******* wasteland until 4.1 hit. If you were a pug, you got ******* stomped. Most of the invasion maps are ******* sniper corridors designed specifically for clan range superiority. And lets not forget that Clans have won every battle for tukayyid.
If MWO had the playerbase of LoL or even WoT, then maybe something like the original faction game mode back in 2013 would have worked very well. Just using Steamspy (which is people who have MWO installed via steam, not including people who still use MWO old patcher/installer system) the game is running just under a million installs. Which aint bad at all. But I can sure as hell tell you that back in the first year of the games release, there were probably not even a quarter of those installs at the best of times.
You and I may hate it, but the only way most game developers can keep their doors open is by getting more casuals into the game. Its the casuals in most games (especially online games) that keeps the doors open and the servers running. Pandering only to the most hardcore games (lets say dwarf fortress) nets you a very dedicated but small following while completely eschewing making any kind of profit. So spending a lot of time talking about buckets, trying to make things more enjoyable to the casuals who keep the game afloat (instead of the bitter ******* who have nothing better to do than spend all day in the forums bitching about never buying a mech pack and demanding the FW original concept). They playerbase wasnt there for that concept, and the playerbase still isnt there (yet) now. So appealing to the more casual players (the people who actually spend money on this game) makes more business sense then trying to recreate a game mode that doesnt have enough people to keep alive and is just for the hardcore players to stroke their epeens.
Want a real world apples to apples comparison? Take a look at EVE online and DUST514. I use to play the **** out of both of those games. I was in DUST514 since Mordu's private trials (really early closed beta) and DUST was suppose to bridge the gap between the massive space battles in the MMO while fights for planets happened on the ground in DUST. And you know what happened? Dust worked well early on, but the devs completely screwed the pooch when it came to merging the two games. It almost took 2 full years since DUST514 was fully released before you could request an orbital bombardment from an EVE player. 2 ******* YEARS, AND YOU STILL CANT REALLY DO **** OTHER THAN THAT. The cross game interaction never happened. You couldnt have your EVE character buy and transfer over equipment to your DUST character. There were no space stations you could walk around. THEY STILL HAVENT EVEN PORTED DUST514 TO THE PS4, its dead in the water on the PS3 and has become pay2win ********.
I am glad they never went with the FW plans they had back in 2013. They didnt have the team, financial support or enough players to actually try to pull it off (just like EVE didnt have the manpower to do DUST514). While I would be happy to see something like that happen now that we have a much larger playerbase than we did in 2013, PGI is in a much better financial situation (and has a good partnership with HBS), AND potentially most important of all, PGI is actually taking criticism and actually talking with the players before pushing terribad ideas onto us (take a look at powerdraw as an example, as well as FW 4.1 changes thanks to the FW townhall we had roughly half a year ago).
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