1453 R, on 28 December 2016 - 02:16 AM, said:
Trying to shoehorn size limitations into MWO at this point, without any of the other supporting design decisions MW4 made, would do nothing positive. The fact that AC/20 Ravens offend your sensibilities is irrelevant. Light 'Mechs with AC/20s existed in the tabletop canon; they even had light 'Mechs with the even heavier Gauss Rifle. They all suffered from exactly the drawbacks Yeonne mentioned - they were slow, they carried very limited ammunition, they generally had nothing or less in the way of supporting weaponry, and they were often poorly armored, as well. These were very special use-case 'Mechs with specific, narrow niches in the tabletop game.
In MWO, they're gags more than anything else.
This is a 'solution' for a problem that doesn't really exist.
MechWarrior is traditionally a deeper and more complex game than your modern Call of Duty. Anyone familiar with the franchise at all is expecting it to be less forgiving than other games, and the sheer existence of Dark Souls proves that you can be a game that actively hates everyone that plays it and still be massively popular. And unlike Dark Souls, you can correct mistakes you make in the MechLab given enough time investment.
I started the game in Dragons, way back when, on the assumption that taking a bigger-engine'd heavy would let me pull the ol' classic "outrun whatever you can't outgun" saw that had gotten me through several previous MechWarrior games as well as many other games of other types. We all know how that worked out, ne? But that's okay. It's just what happens.
The trap with New Player Retention ideas is getting stuck on the idea that it's possible to retain everyone who plays your game. It isn't. What's more important is making a game that strongly retains the specific audience you're trying to market to, which first of all requires you to pick an audience, then requires you to have a strong vision that audience can get behind and help you push. This is where MWO has stumbled, not in the 'MechLab.
Nobody really cares that the MechLab can confuse new people; the sort of people who'd get turned off and walk away after one bad run in the 'Lab are the people we weren't going to keep anyways.
That's true, that MWO caters for a specific market making it a niche game. However, the mechlab is strongly related to performance in the game as this is largely a multiplayer game! If you keep losing its unlikely you will continue playing if you can't win. I haven't met a person who plays video games and consistently likes to lose.
I guess players can see what other players use and that turns out to be their salvation. If they couldn't see I believe things would be a lot different and there would be far more complaining than what we see now. In short, people who start to play this game start for different reasons and also have different expectations based on other experiences in other battletech / mechwarrior games.
When I played table top I never customised any mech. The game took way too long as it is. I forget how much customisation was available in MW2. I don't think much.
Anyhow what I would like to see is a way to label your variants or mechs as opposed to giving them a name. Then show all mechs with the same label in a dropdown. Then we could choose a brawling build or LRM build or sniper build much easier from a list.