124 replies to this topic

[Asym]

I invited a few of my friends over to watch MWO in action....

We are all retired Six Sigma, Lean and TQM efficiency types that want to do something together after sun sets. So far, so good. And, a majority of us have been playing video games since computers could run them (and, a few before.....)

So, after an evening of watching my matches on the big screen HD, the operative question came up: "OK, how long does it take to "master" a new mech if we jump in?"

Well, the stock answer was between 90 and 140 games.... In a stormcrow I mastered with experience points only, 143 games at a .42 win-loss average.... "did you like that?" was the question...... "no.......it wasn't any fun at all..." was the answer in all honesty.

The response was "OK, let's see how this works then..."

I purchased a Hellbringer and off we went: it costs 800 exp points per skill tree node. That's 72,800 for the mech..... A two day average playing is 100 skill points per match with a .35 W/L ratio.....................

How many of my friends are signing up for MWO? Zip, Zero, Zilch.

So, for us retired guys, "Critical to Quality" is having an enjoyable experience, having some fun and chiding each other on VOIP/Teamspeak.... It's not hours of people screaming at you, endless losses that you can do nothing about and a "grind" that is counter-intuitive: buy a degraded mech and suffer returning that mech to how is was manufactured in the first place???

Do you think a space capable universe would issue degraded equipment to front line forces?

What are your thoughts on this.....

[Coolant]

The goal of playing MWO is not to master mechs, it's to have fun. If all I had to look forward to was mastering mechs then I would've stopped playing a long time ago. I play because I enjoy the game. Even if there were only a couple of weapons, mechs, and no skill tree/modules/Elite/Master I would still play because I enjoy Mechwarrior.

Oh, and has been mentioned before, all MMO's have grinding, some much worse than MWO.

[Gusevich]

Yeah sure, but having more mastered mechs is THE ONLY point in MWO. There's no incentive or goal or endgame in this "MMO", i feel the same thing OP. I did try to get my friends who are a mild fan of BT to play this "game", but no luck as well.

[Jay Leon Hart]

Coolant, on 08 July 2017 - 07:48 AM, said:

Oh, and has been mentioned before, all MMO's Free-To-Play games have grinding, some much worse than MWO.

Fixed, because MWO is not an MMO...

[El Bandito]

Help your friends to buy actually good mechs first. After that, help them to understand, and get better at the game. Mastery of the mech does make a difference but I suspect your low WLR has more to do with group queue's bad matchmaking, and lack of personal skill, rather than the mastery of your mechs. Besides, socializing is the most important aspect. If you are getting yelled at, just mute everyone else except your group and have fun. Without violating the CoC, of course.

I had 0.25 WLR for the first 6 months of playing MWO, starting way back in 2012. I persevered despite that cause I love the BT franchise and the feel of piloting a mech. I don't remember blaming my low performance on unskilled mechs.

Edited by El Bandito, 08 July 2017 - 08:15 AM.

[MischiefSC]

They need to drop with someone well over 1.0 w/L to teach/carry them. That would help a lot.

[CFC Conky]

Hello all,

In pug matches, having an unskilled mech doesn't mean you can't do well in it. I found that if I'm earning enough xp every game for one skill point, or at the very least every other game, I continue with it until I have enough xp for 10-15 nodes. It usually takes at least this long to figure out what the mech needs in the way of skills. If I need to skill up, I do or if the mech is still performing well enough, I just keep going without unlocking anything.

In quick play, you don't have to skill up if you don't want to, your build will have much more impact on performance than any skill nodes, imho.

Good hunting,
CFC Conky

[Asym]

Good points all...

I just exited a match and had 40 points and died before I ever got a chance to face the enemy due to, now get this, no less that 4 arty strikes and an air strike.

All of us new players love mechwarrior; or, we wouldn't be here... But there is no fun in being "someone else's points cash cow or a target dummy..." Especially, in un mastered mechs that won't see radar dep and survival mods anywhere in the near future...... Heck, my HBR AMS ran out of ammo in the first 1/3 of a recent polar.

And no, there are several games where the grind is long, but intentionally fun ! Where you can see a future and work towards it.

I hope PGI is reading these posts because Critical to Quality needs to be sustainable and challenging fun. Since competition is out of the picture for a vast number of MWO players, there needs to be "fun" because there isn't anything else...

My military friends went to space games after the new skill tree and nerf's that went with it. The civilian friends think this game is just "impossible" and they can't see where there can be any fun..............if all you do is get crushed every match...

I'm hoping someone out there can get PGI's attention or even an answer to the questions we keep asking....

[Jay Leon Hart]

Energy Draw was, at the concept level, something that would help the New Player Experience.

Being able to actually survive first contact with the enemy is vital to a game with only one life per match. (CW? What's that?)

Alas, it got bastardised into something horrid and never heard from again.

[Gwahlur]

Gotta agree with the OP. The first phase of skilling a new mech is a painfull experience, and I really feel sorry for newbs starting the game at this point.
I don't know if it's because I'm just used to playing skilled out mechs at this point or if things really were a bit easier for newbs when I started out 3 months ago, but the newb experience seems reeeeeeeally rough at this point.

[Antares102]

The problem is that it only gets "enjoyable" if you invest money when you start fresh.
Or you know what you are doing, but this would fall into smurfing.

Well, PGI wont learn from this anyway as they are not reading the forums.
And this ind of feedback has been given gazillion times, that new players are:

• Paried with T1 (much more experienced players) immediatelly destroying the new players game experience
  
• Cadet bonus is not enough to get into the game especially when you buy the wrong mech
  
• You have to grind like hell if you do not want to invest real money.
  
• If you make a mistake (which you will do plenty as a new guy) you well get punished hard with the skill tree system

So kudos to the OP for writing this new players experience.
Unfortunatelly, as I said it wont reverberate with PGI's game design.

Edited by Antares102, 08 July 2017 - 08:44 AM.

[Antares102]

Sent you a friend request in game if you want to some hints for easing the pain.

Edited by Antares102, 08 July 2017 - 09:31 AM.

[Gwahlur]

Hm.. Come to think of it though, the framework is there for making the newb experience not totally suck.
How does it work right now? You have the 25 cadet bonus games that will give you like 20-25M cbills, and at the end of it you get 50k gxp?

A couple tutorials/tips popups during the cadet period could make things a lot easier.
Things like
- Recommended first mech purchases (I got lucky/did my research and bought a GRF-2N, some people screw up by buying bad first mechs)
- Don't buy your first mech untill you've tried all trial mechs, and preferrably not till you've done all 25 cadet games.
- Use GXP to level you first mech
- And a better tutorial to the mechbay.

These things could easily be improved

Edit: These things should also be emphasized heavily at the very start of the newb experience, so they know the first grind ahead of them isn't as bad as it seems

Edited by Gwahlur, 08 July 2017 - 08:52 AM.

[Yellonet]

Yep, this game is quite punishing to new players.


....and for not so new players as well

[MischiefSC]

They need to be dropping with someone over a 1.0 w/l to carry and teach.

I do agree the grind is pretty harsh for a new player but it's massively, massively easier to do with some good help.

[Antares102]

MischiefSC, on 08 July 2017 - 09:23 AM, said:

They need to be dropping with someone over a 1.0 w/l to carry and teach.

I do agree the grind is pretty harsh for a new player but it's massively, massively easier to do with some good help.

That's what I am trying to do.

[Tier5 Kerensky]

My new account with about 70 games on it, has nice shiny Marauder IIC D with XL 325 engine which costs 5.0 milllion. The mech itself costs 11 million and I kept the stock XL 255.

And the account still has 6 million left, together with 7500 GXP. And the mech has 97 nodes open of which of course 91 selected. The mech also has already 43k exp earned but doing average damage of 740 is not possible for new player, on any mech.

A fresh account can buy any cbill mech for full price, upgrade it and fully technically master it in about 40 games. Mastering even the easy and powerful mechs, as pilot, takes a lot more. But technically mastering a mech takes only the 25 first games in which you a huge cbll and GPX flat bonuses, win or lose, doesn't matter.

Edited by Teer Kerensky, 08 July 2017 - 09:25 AM.

[Gwahlur]

Teer Kerensky, on 08 July 2017 - 09:24 AM, said:

My new account with about 70 games on it, has nice shiny Marauder IIC D with XL 325 engine which costs 5.0 milllion. The mech itself costs 11 million and I kept the stock XL 255.

And the account still has 6 million left, together with 7500 GXP. And the mech has 97 nodes open of which of course 91 selected. The mech also has already 43k exp earned but doing average damage of 740 is not possible for new player, on any mech.

A fresh account can buy any cbill mech for full price, upgrade it and fully technically master it in about 40 games. Mastering even the easy and powerful mechs, as pilot, takes a lot more. But technically mastering a mech takes only the 25 first games in which you a huge cbll and GPX flat bonuses, win or lose, doesn't matter.

You are not a newb though so your experience is quite frankly irrelevant

[LT. HARDCASE]

Yeah it will take a bad player a long time to skill a mech, but they need to understand that 90-140 matches for a single mech is not the norm.

Some people will pick the game up much faster than others.

Edited by LT. HARDCASE, 08 July 2017 - 09:32 AM.

[Angel of Annihilation]

Asym, on 08 July 2017 - 07:12 AM, said:

I invited a few of my friends over to watch MWO in action....

We are all retired Six Sigma, Lean and TQM efficiency types that want to do something together after sun sets. So far, so good. And, a majority of us have been playing video games since computers could run them (and, a few before.....)

So, after an evening of watching my matches on the big screen HD, the operative question came up: "OK, how long does it take to "master" a new mech if we jump in?"

Well, the stock answer was between 90 and 140 games.... In a stormcrow I mastered with experience points only, 143 games at a .42 win-loss average.... "did you like that?" was the question...... "no.......it wasn't any fun at all..." was the answer in all honesty.

The response was "OK, let's see how this works then..."

I purchased a Hellbringer and off we went: it costs 800 exp points per skill tree node. That's 72,800 for the mech..... A two day average playing is 100 skill points per match with a .35 W/L ratio.....................

How many of my friends are signing up for MWO? Zip, Zero, Zilch.

So, for us retired guys, "Critical to Quality" is having an enjoyable experience, having some fun and chiding each other on VOIP/Teamspeak.... It's not hours of people screaming at you, endless losses that you can do nothing about and a "grind" that is counter-intuitive: buy a degraded mech and suffer returning that mech to how is was manufactured in the first place???

Do you think a space capable universe would issue degraded equipment to front line forces?

What are your thoughts on this.....

However let me give you a contrasting opinion.

Lately with the Resistance Sale we recently had plus the Assassin coming out for C-Bills, I have bought about 8 mechs. Because of the new tech rolling out on the 18th and the fact that to retrofit all my mech collection to the new equipment is going to cost me something like 200 million C-bills, I have bee saving each and every C-bill I can scrap up. This means I have not been spending C-bills on Skill Points. However I am playing every one of those mechs and working up the 72,800 XP I will need to master them for when I finally do have C-bills to spare.

The point I am making is that while the skills can significantly improve a mechs performance, it is absolutely not a requirement that they be skilled up to perform well or be fun to play. I mean my stats aren't falling because I don't have skills on these 8 mechs and I am still having fun with them despite not having one point invested in the skills. I would even go so far as to say I am improving as a player because I am forced to learn to play the mech without having the crutch of having mastered skills to rely on.

So if we analyze this, the problem isn't necessarily the skill point grind, not really. The problem is your perception of the skill point grind. You straight up told your friends that the grind sucked and wasn't fun. That's poor salesmanship on your part. Instead you should have said, "The game is a lot of fun and only gets better as you get your mechs mastered out." because in general this is how I feel when I play unskilled mechs.

On another note, do you know the reason why so many games fail anymore? Because they give you everything on a silver platter and make it easy. That is great initially but soon gets boring and tedious and what is worse, because you haven't had to work at anything, you don't have an ounce of investment into the game. It is that feeling of investment that keep you coming back to the game. Without that, your friend would end up leaving rather quickly anyway.