13 replies to this topic

[darqsyde]

PGI has royally borked the roll-out of the Skill-Tree.

They NEED to look at the way EVE Online does new system rollouts.

First, post an overview of the system on the forums. Get discussion and feedback for a month or so. Players will at this stage find the obvious flaws, and perhaps be able to suggest some solutions for you.

Second, deploy initial build to PTS. Give players the ability to find the more subtle flaws in the system. Incorporate fixes in a timely manner to the PTS. This should last at least another month. If the system is found to be inherently flawed, this is the time to arrest it's developement.

Third, deploy near final build to PTS, the final play-test stage. This really only needs to be for a week or so to see if there are any major remaining flaws. This build should be production ready.

Giving yourself only one month of lead time on a Major system is foolhardy and, as you have found out, likely to cost more in the long run than giving plenty of time for testing and feedback.

Come on PGI, you are smart enough to know this, but why haven't you done this? I pray it was just an oversight, and not hubris. Ultimately, your schedule for rolling out patches should be "When It Is Ready"

[Sandpit]

darqsyde, on 14 March 2017 - 09:33 AM, said:

Come on PGI, you are smart enough to know this

6 years of evidence to the contrary would say otherwise...

[Almond Brown]

6 years of listening to a group of players who couldn't agreed on anything among themselves ffs is the only issue PGI ever really did wrong. They tried. Really they did. They just could never be right about anything, ever.

You make it sound like the "community" has been good for the game ffs... LOL!

Even the "whales", a generally derogatory term for those who "fund the game" are derided as a bad thing around here. Go figure. Thanks for the chuckle though...

"Whales unite. Let us allow the Cheapskates to win yet again and then see how long MWO lasts..." LOL!

Edited by Almond Brown, 14 March 2017 - 10:19 AM.

[JasonIIC]

The problem is the very vocal group of forumites who will complain about ANY changes, and the fact that PGI listens to them. I would guess that 90% of active players don't even browse the forums, let alone comment. And yet every initiative that would significantly gameplay gets killed because the devs are scared that twenty people represent the entire community.

Personally, I think that while the current PTS build wasnt optimal, it was a step in the right direction. I would have liked to see it implimented and then tweaked over time rather than sent to the info war energy draw purgatory. At the very least, it game them more options to adjust values. I figured we would see value changes to mech trees that would eliminate the need for quirks.

But if the vocal minority keeps crying, we'll never see any changes, and the game will remain stale, and the population will continue to decline.

[El Bandito]

The day this community can fully agree on something is the day I quit the forums.





Help me quit the forums!

[cazidin]

El Bandito, on 14 March 2017 - 10:29 AM, said:

The day this community can fully agree on something is the day I quit the forums.





Help me quit the forums!

Follow my lead and my vision and we'll be OK.

[Scout Derek]

El Bandito, on 14 March 2017 - 10:29 AM, said:

The day this community can fully agree on something is the day I quit the forums.





Help me quit the forums!

*creates a twitter account for the forums, goes on a "vacation" again*

[R Valentine]

JasonIIC, on 14 March 2017 - 10:29 AM, said:

The problem is the very vocal group of forumites who will complain about ANY changes, and the fact that PGI listens to them. I would guess that 90% of active players don't even browse the forums, let alone comment. And yet every initiative that would significantly gameplay gets killed because the devs are scared that twenty people represent the entire community.

Personally, I think that while the current PTS build wasnt optimal, it was a step in the right direction. I would have liked to see it implimented and then tweaked over time rather than sent to the info war energy draw purgatory. At the very least, it game them more options to adjust values. I figured we would see value changes to mech trees that would eliminate the need for quirks.

But if the vocal minority keeps crying, we'll never see any changes, and the game will remain stale, and the population will continue to decline.

"Vocal minority". Right, curious to see your citation on that claim.

[MechaBattler]

The only thing pgi did wrong this time was thinking it was okay to charge people for mastering mechs they'd already mastered.

The rest of the skill tree was fine. I've seen dozens of threads in the PTS forum arguing about how it should be. With plenty of detractors for each. Reddit is trumpeting that one guy's video as the second coming. But I don't like the idea for the firepower tree.

Ultimately we'll see PGI's newest iteration. Honesty they should just concern themselves with the cost issue. The rest is still better than live and people can only agree that it should be smaller. Something that in my opinion won't really change the tree's overall effect anyway.

[Sandpit]

Almond Brown, on 14 March 2017 - 10:15 AM, said:

6 years of listening to a group of players who couldn't agreed on anything among themselves ffs is the only issue PGI ever really did wrong. They tried. Really they did. They just could never be right about anything, ever.

You make it sound like the "community" has been good for the game ffs... LOL!

Even the "whales", a generally derogatory term for those who "fund the game" are derided as a bad thing around here. Go figure. Thanks for the chuckle though...

"Whales unite. Let us allow the Cheapskates to win yet again and then see how long MWO lasts..." LOL!

*yawn*
your bait and troll skills are slipping. Get better material and go spray that BS fertilizer on a field that wasn't here from CB on. PGI is one of the most horrible companies I've ever seen in regards to communicating with their customers, listening to feedback, building a community, and last (but most definitely not least) speed and pace of content creation.

I haven't played in...... a year? give or take.
How much content outside of mechs has been added?
New maps?
New modes?

PGI was handed an IP with a built-in fanbase willing to spend millions. Their ineptness created a very stale game that continues to be a very niche product for a small player base.

It's neither here nor there. This game and population size are exactly what I (and many others I might add) predicted it would be. A small group of diehard Btech loyalists with an every changing rotation of "fresh" players combined with a smattering of a few returning players periodically. The free nature of the game is what has kept it going. Not any kind of innovating gameplay.

What made me actually come back around and just read up on information? Russ announcing that MW5 will have all the features such as economy, fighting across the galaxy, etc. that were originally promised to be in THIS game. So now instead of putting them into the game that was originally pitched and many dropped millions of dollars into is going to be an entirely new and separate game that you can purchase independently and has absolutely nothing to do with this game.

MW5 (if it's halfass decent anyhow) will be what destroys MWO is it has ANY kind of multiplayer because this barebones arena shooter will be discarded in favor of players being able to put together a real "community warfare" (Succession Wars PGI) system with an economy and such that they've been doing for decades but seemingly is too complicated and continues to elude the professional developers here at PGI.

TL;DR
PGI will kill off MWO (whether it's intentional or not) when they release MW5 if it has the MP aspect like previous versions had because this community already knows how to run a real CW campaign and will do it a thousand times better than PGI ever thought of because PGI chose to ignore players who had been doing it for decades.

[darqsyde]

MechaBattler, this isn't a critique of the Skill Tree itself, or the implementation of it, this is a critique of PGI's methodology of testing/rolling out new systems.

As for my opinion of the Skill Tree, while still flawed, I believe the second iteration of it was getting close to a reasonable system.
The true major flaw was not in the Skill Tree itself, but in the reimbursement for all players. I believe that(as of the NGNG Podcast on the 10th), PGI finally saw the flaw in the reimbursement system, but had yet to come up with a functional replacement. ...and then Russ stuck his foot in his mouth...that cheapskate...

Edited by darqsyde, 14 March 2017 - 10:52 AM.

[JasonIIC]

Kiran Yagami, on 14 March 2017 - 10:34 AM, said:

"Vocal minority". Right, curious to see your citation on that claim.

No citations. This is an internet forum, not a college thesis. My opinions are based on the difference between the user base i see in game and those I see in forum. It's also based on the fact that in 12 plus months and more money spent than I care to acknowledge, the biggest change I've seen is the addition of QP modes to FP. That's why I think the game is stale.

[FireStoat]

JasonIIC, on 14 March 2017 - 10:29 AM, said:

The problem is the very vocal group of forumites who can perform simple math calculations of a situation pre and post change, and spent hours on the test server looking for both the good and the bad, and the fact that PGI listens to them.

Fixed that for you.

Edited by FireStoat, 14 March 2017 - 11:28 AM.

[SmokedJag]

JasonIIC, on 14 March 2017 - 10:29 AM, said:

The problem is the very vocal group of forumites who will complain about ANY changes, and the fact that PGI listens to them. I would guess that 90% of active players don't even browse the forums, let alone comment. And yet every initiative that would significantly gameplay gets killed because the devs are scared that twenty people represent the entire community.

Personally, I think that while the current PTS build wasnt optimal, it was a step in the right direction. I would have liked to see it implimented and then tweaked over time rather than sent to the info war energy draw purgatory. At the very least, it game them more options to adjust values. I figured we would see value changes to mech trees that would eliminate the need for quirks.

But if the vocal minority keeps crying, we'll never see any changes, and the game will remain stale, and the population will continue to decline.

This. There is no updatable game where the official forums are going to be a source of net positive comments. People whine like hell to protect their interests (famous WoW joke is that every class is underpowered and useless in PvP) and it's biased heavily towards rants and trolls over "Yay!" or especially the "meh" most people greet patch news with. It is bloody rare to see rants and protests budge overall direction of the product at all unless something is so bad as to be a real media scandal (i.e. Blizzards ill-fated involuntary social networking proposal). Disputing each and every patch? F no. That gets steamrolled.