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[sneakolai]

(Preface: I know I am perhaps late to this bandwagon; such is life.)

"You know what would make Mechwarrior a lot more fun? Spending extra time in the User Interface." -- No One Ever

You may not have noticed, PGI, but your game has a lot of errors in it. I know it's hard to prioritize things, but I also know you've probably heard that Mechwarrior Online often feels like a game that's still in beta. There are terrain geometry glitches with getting stuck or flying forever, invisible walls, hitbox and damage registration issues, a relatively small number of interesting maps, the stumbling attempts at making Faction Warfare really work, the tiny matter of cheaters affecting the game and so much more.

You know what I felt wasn't really an issue? Buying modules and picking and choosing 'Mechs carefully to make sure quirks matched your playstyle.

But let me backtrack a bit.

Once upon a time I would grumble about MWO's user interface with a sort of wry smile and say, drolly, that the UI made me want to go back to school for graphic design. "I can do better," I said.

Your game's UI is about as visually appealing as a brick. Now, bricks are useful. They are literal building blocks. When you have very good brickwork you have a solid facade and structure. Really good design will make brickwork stunningly aesthetic. But Mechwarrior Online's UI is not a wonderwork of architectural design. It's a brick. It sits there and it kind of sort of does its thing in a minimally effective kind of way. It's more of a paperweight than a building material. It works. That's about it.

Sometimes.

While the recent addition of timestamps to note the last time your friend logged on and the added functionality of "joining up" on a unitmate's group just by clicking on the name are most welcome, the UI is still really, really bad. The delays are annoying, the default size of the text is kind of "...what?" most of the time, and the chat function can't really be called a function; it's laughable.

So why on Earth would you make the Next Big Thing a game function that's a whole new series of terrible menus and submenus with little hierarchy and even less visual excitement? What made anyone think it was a good idea to make a honeycomb tree with all the graphical sophistication of Qbert-style blocks? And this honeycomb is what players are investing their hours in?

I'm not sure if this is a mindblowing idea or not, but I figure I'd share it: when someone logs onto a game, they expect to have fun. I suspect there might be some people out there really into the beauty of spreadsheets and other charts, but I, personally, don't relish the idea of logging on to count my virtual coins and start stacking them in factor trees I thought I was done with in grade school. I log on to play neither Elementary School Math Simulator 2017 nor Qbert nor Microsoft Excel Online.

And not only will I be expected to cross my t's and dot my i's far more than I was before, but I'm presumably expected to grind it out even longer for the privilege of working out my right index finger for data entry clicking -- and God forbid I make a mistake and need to pay to erase and redo something.

How about taking some of that, uh, creative energy and using it to find solutions for existing problems? You are spreading your butter way too thin, and it was starting to go rancid as is. Simplify. Don't add progressively more complex things just because someone thinks it's a good idea. Really look at your audience -- gamers -- and think about what they want to do. I'm pretty sure it isn't "click on hexagons."

Unless of course you want it to be marketed as Mechwarrior Hexagonline.

Yes. Yes I did hop into the public test server to fuss with this tree. And that's what it was: fussing. Can't we just skip the fussing and get to funning? It actively annoyed me, largely in part because I am a lazy git and I just want to shoot the pretty bright lights or swooshy missiles or bangy bullets at the big stompy 'Mechs. Am I crazy that thinking this is preferable to spending time in the user interface? Am I the only one?

What was "broken" about the previous (current as of posting) skill and module system -- apart from weird menus that could stand to be reorganized? (Note: reorganized, not redone.) I have said it before, but you need to hear it again and again and again and again and again and again: if it ain't broke, don't fix it. You have plenty to fix already. You might want to start with how certain changes are guaranteed to annoy and drive off a portion of the player base.

Come to think of it, Q-bert is starting to sound pretty good about now.