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The game is highly tactical like the board game instead of running around firing massive alphas that are 100% accurate or doing 360 degree no scope headshots in mid air (aka poptarting). Jump jets are used to quickly reposition and for fast movement instead of poptarting or climbing small hills, and putting the maximum number of JJs on a mech is actually a competitive choice.
In this universe, we have a balance director who constantly uses marketing tools like focus groups and surveys to find out what the communtiy thinks about balance and who actually plays the game so he knows which mechs/weapons are underutilized. We also have a community manager who actually askes the community what they want for patches and spends most of his time talking to the community to gather data. The devs as a whole read and communicate through the forum instead of Russ's twitter and the decisions they make largely make sense and are easily explained.
In game tool tips include ALL relevant information, instead of having to dig through old patch notes to figure out what heat dissipation the first 10 engine heatsinks have. DPS, DPH, etc, figures are all listed in the mechlab. The skill tree is balanced and doesnt encourage boating one type of weapon. Strikes function more as actual area denial weapons rather than a time delayed grenade that can be ignored most of the time. FP matches dont consist largely of 10-15 mins of walking from the drop zone and there is a working matchmaker. PSR doesn't infinitely increase your tier, it's entirely determined by how well you do in matches rather than whether your team wins or loses.
The devs constantly scrutinize tournaments to see which mechs/builds are over or under utilized. Bad maps like alpine or polar are quickly redone to create more varied strategies other than "ridge hump with 12x ER LL boats". The old ability to choose the game mode you wanted to play was never replaced by the map voting system which most people despise. Every game mode forces players to fight all over the map like conquest where mobility is important instead of forming static firing lines facing each other over the center.
The game has full color blind support and allows players to eaisly mod things like text color, position of HUD elements or sound effects to their liking as long as it doesn't give them an unfair advantage. Hit reg issues are next to non-existent and even competitive teams agree that a 200-300ms difference in ping makes little to no difference in terms of game play. Invisible walls on all maps are removed. Dropships actually drop you facing the enemy team, instead of your rear armor facing the enemy team.
Scouting mode actually forces players to fight instead of hiding. The choice of faction actually matters rather than simply determining your faction tag. There is a fullly working critical hit system where you can crit engines, gyros and actuators, and critical hits actually matter because you can't simply take out a side torso in two alphas. The differences between clan and IS mechs are minor and both sides are equally balanced.
The business model is more like path of exile style micro-transactions rather than pushing out mechpacks, which frees up development resources to go back and touch up maps and existing mech models, animations, etc. The game is highly optimized to run on both Intel and AMD hardware. Balance changes are easily and quickly made via editing a xml file so that the results can be fine tuned rather than making minor changes every 6 months to little effect.
The game population is several times higher and waiting times are nearly non-existent as the game is widely considered to be a success story and the devs are highly respected in the industry. PC Gamer and other magazines constantly write articles on how other companies should emulate MWO's success in engaging the community and delivering the gameplay experience that players want.
Im tired so I will stop here for now.
Edited by Jun Watarase, 13 October 2017 - 04:14 PM.
