Got maybe ten matches of Incursion.
- Kill counters at the top of the screen are bugged; plzfix
- "ACT" is confusing to some people. Why not just "AIR"?
- It's actually kinda hard to figure out which towers are which when you want to deposit a battery. You can press your Target Info Overlay key, but I'd rather they just had unique icons on the map - even something as simple as their three letter abbreviations.
- Grabbing fuel cells and powering base assets provides zero reward.
Like actually absolutely nothing. Big big problem. The rewards for these needs to be huge, because you're basically doing nothing else if you're busy carting batteries back and forth.
- The recharge stations could be better distributed on some maps - first to come to mind is Forest Colony, where basically if you send your main body to the center of the map, you can easily control all three battery thingies. If you're winning and pushing the enemy away, they'll never get the buffs because you control them. The stations should be spread out further so that must be independently contested - so that you actually have to divide your team something fierce if you want the monopoly. Plus this has the added benefit of inciting small skirmishes on lesser used parts of the maps.
- The dropship and jamming towers are worthless. The dropship only starts to matter when you're about to lose the game and the enemy is in your base - it doesn't actually help you win, and doesn't actually help prevent you from losing (just wait for it to time out and stop visiting if necessary...) About the jamming tower... I actually don't know what it does. It's so useless that I don't remember it doing anything at all. Does it cause map-wide low sig? I'm literally guessing.
- The radar tower, despite being free wallhacks, still isn't really worth having a light mech on duty to keep it running all match (or even at any point in the match). Basically, if you go over 160 kph, you can afford to grab a battery at the very start of a match, take it back to base, and get back to the fight in the middle of the map in time to not miss anything. But after that? You're just wasting time not being in the fight. Not being in the fight helps you lose the match. And if you're slower than 160 kph, or even just on a particularly large map? You're probably going to miss some action even on the first run. Not worth it.
- Just ignore the batteries, ignore the towers, and go kill the enemy. None of the tower buffs actually matter. That's the biggest problem with this game mode - you could just go kill the enemy while they have light heading back to base to feed the towers.
- Turrets are outrageously overpowered. Even if they dealt only 1 point of damage, they would still be outrageously overpowered. Or a less cryptic way of putting it: THERE SHOULD BE NO TURRETS***. If you leave a flank open and a light mech slips past, gets to your base, and singly handedly destroys it, then you failed so hard as a team. It should actually mean something to scout, cover all flanks, and properly defend your base. But as long as you have turrets that deal damage then light mechs can't do their job of exploiting open flanks and going on the offensive. Should there be radar so you can always see enemies that are inside your base? Sure, absolutely. But no damage dealing turrets. I didn't boot up Mechwarrior ONLINE to fight an NPC turret in a no-respawns game mode.
***caveat: if turret AI was improved to be more human like and/or more turret like, then I might be okay with them. By this I mean, they are either inaccurate (Kanajashi suggested just giving them a perpetual wobble to their aim), or they have maximum rate of tracking (right now turrets track targets infinitely fast, they are pinpoint aimbots that can't miss. If you coded them so that they could only rotate so many degrees per second, then they wouldn't be able to track fast moving mechs very well, and it would be much easier to torso twist their damage away. Either way, the aimbot precision has to go.
- This game mode needs respawns. By that I mean, it would be great for CW, but rather pointless for Quickplay (and no, I don't want respawns in Quickplay, that would defeat the purpose of it being "Quick.")
- PTS still needs rewards. You get nothing in return for playing PTS. We're basically giving our time to help the developer add to the game.
"Oh, but testing new things and helping the developer to improve new features is the reward itself!" ... no, it's not. If it was, then surely more people would be on the PTS. But there's not. For most of tonight there were not enough players to even run two concurrent matches.
- About finding matches... We have to come together as a community to agree on a time and place to meet and drop to actually get matches on the PTS, otherwise people are spread across various buckets (solo queue, group queue, private lobby), and there just aren't enough people coalescing to kick off matches. Somebody has to have initiative to get the ball rolling and organise the entire community by spreading it throughout the various media. It's a shame that organiser isn't the developer. Is it too much to ask? All you need is a post, "Join us at 6 PST for evening drops on the Public Test Server!", have Tina streaming, and/or have Phil/Bombadil streaming, just something to attract bodies.
Edited by Tarogato, 25 March 2017 - 12:01 AM.