I remember when I started two years ago. Exactly two years ago.
Thirty days in, I had a KDR of 0.17 and a WLR about 0.2. I was >< that close to quitting. You can't get a lot of Cbills saved up at lower levels, and the cash you got for the 25 game bonus went fast when you had no clue how to spend it or what was important. Modules were expensive at a time that it was very difficult to save up 6,000,000 Cbills to buy yoour first radar deprivation module. And it was under the old ELO system that really meant no matchmaker at all in the pug queue. Plus, you had to have three mechs of each chassis to master one under the old system. The learning curve was near vertical, and my computer was a potato, which made things worse.
LRMing is what saved me, followed by a computer upgrade. LRM skirmishing is easy to learn, but very hard to master. I'd bought an X5, my very first hero mech. Bad choice. But it had missile mounts and I started running around with LRM5s. I ended up selling it-the only time I ever sold a hero, and much later during a sale I bought another one and mastered it-and I sold every other mech and piece of equipment I had, to get JUST enough Cbills to buy a Catapult C1 in the store to put LRM skirmishing to the test.
It worked. I began to be able to play, create damage, survive. I basiced it out, the very first time I was able to basic a mech. But to get to the next level I needed two more and could not easily amass the Cbills to buy a second-it would have taken much time. I had not ever tried premium time at that point. So, I bought my first mastery pack: Catapult Mastery. It came with the A1 missile Cat, the Jester, and the K2. And I began the Quest of Catapult Mastery, with the intent to master all the Catapults in the game. The Jester taught me about use of direct fire, mobility, and jump jets. I have over 300 drops in the CPLT-J, which still is my single most dropped-in mech, and Catapults still are three of my top five. I had all six mastered at the time of the skill tree transition. And today, my global KDR is 0.74, but my global WLR is nearly 0.9. Mediocre, yes. But I overcame a huge amount of very bad stats to get there. I'm T2, having worked my way up from the very bottom of T5 with that 0.17 KDR when the PSR system started in September 2015. I have 84 mechs now, and my best overall mech is one of the 85-ton assaults, a Warhawk, with 86 drops, a 1.8 WLR and 1.3 KDR. My next best mech is a Rifleman, a chassis I have a 20-plus year association with, and I never thought I'd ever be able to run a direct fire build routinely. And I joined one of the mid-range FW guilds, running group queue or FW a couple times a week with them since August 2015.
The social aspect of this game is vital to long term engagement and success. I love MWO because it's the only Mechwarrior game out there, I like to drive the mechs myself. I'm a veteran of the Mechwarrior series and I got my first taste of it in 1992 with Kesmai's Multiplayer Online Battletech, where I rose to the rank of Chu-Sa second grade, and ended as commander of the 17th Rasalhague Regulars of the DCMS when I lost my computer and left the game as a result. Kuritan warriors in MPBT were role players. We treated MPBT like a big role play, even learning rudimentary gamer's Japanese to greet each other in chat rooms with "konnichi-wa," and calling our Coordinator, a player who won his rank in combat, "tono," Lord.
MWO's social aspect was different. Of course, I wore the Dragon when I first started, and thus I was approached and tested early on by some nice guys from a long time Kurita unit-the 9th Sword of the Dragon, but at the time I didn't measure up to what they were looking for. One of them, Mighty Wings, took the time to go into private matches with me and give me some tips that I use to this day. I greatly appreciated his help and still do. Shortly thereafter, one of Kell's Commandos, Leone, took me under his wing and I ran several group drops with him. I still run group queue with Leone and some of the new players he tutors from time to time. Shortly thereafter I was recruited into the Seraphim Regiment, and now am ranked a veteran. I was a militia lance leader when we had our militia program, and I'm one of the few women in their ranks. These experiences kept me trying in the dark days when I couldn't win for losing and was fighting just to get that first Catapult mastered. New players need a sensei/rabbi to help them get started the right way. Mechwarriors like Leone and Koniving who make it their business to do that ought to get rewarded somehow in game. And Catalina Steiner's LRM guide helped make me a decent LRM skirmisher back before I transitioned into mostly running direct fire units. I still like to have one launcher as an adjunct, but my favorite guns are 10-class autocannon and large lasers now
.
MWO is the most punishing game to new players I've ever played. I stuck with it for one reason, and that is that I love Battletech since I played MPBT on the GEnie servers. New players that don't have the Battletech/Mechwarrior/Mechcommander connections won't put up with the pain that Lore fans like me will. And the grind is worse than ever with the skill tree now, I've played around with it and end up going to my store of GXP and Cbills to master chassis that don't have legacy GSP from the module buyback program. I said when the skill tree dropped that the 25th mission needs to bring with it enough GSP to master one mech through 91 nodes, and enough Cbills to buy any one mech variant in the Store. And explicit instructions that the intention of the endowment is to give them a chance to master that one mech. And playing the trial mechs ought to build experience points, like it used to. There is no real incentive to run unmastered trial mechs, most of which sport meta builds requiring skill and experience to make work.
One last observation: The Hellbringer is a mech requiring high skill and experience-it is not new-player friendly. It's an aggro-magnet, it's hot, and its firepower is too high for its tonnage, unmastered you will shut down a *lot*. I'd recommend something along the lines of a true laserboat like one of the Thunderbolts as a new player direct fire mech on the IS side, or one of the IIC Orions on the Clan side. That's just my opinion.
By the way, I was trained as a Deming/TQM manager
. I still manage that way. It's old school but I like it.
Edited by Chados, 08 July 2017 - 02:21 PM.
4
El Bandito, on 08 July 2017 - 11:30 AM, said:
