196 replies to this topic

[meteorol]

MischiefSC, on 06 November 2017 - 12:41 PM, said:

Don't kid yourself though. People quit FW not because of MM but because it's little more than QP with respawns and no MM.

That's strange though, because QP offers zero immersion/lore/politics/grognardism/whatever aswell, still between 90 and something like 97 % of the playerbase (depending on time) don't play CW.

If both modes don't offer anything in regards to immersion, it has to be something else that makes people hate CW. From the top of my head i can think about

• They don't like respawns (which, imo, is the most unlikely reason)
  
• Invasion gamemode is utter trash and the invasion maps are horrifically bad (which is the case, but this pain is reduced by QP maps in CW).
  
• People don't like to play in a group vs solo player environment in either case (as group or solos)

MischiefSC, on 07 November 2017 - 07:12 PM, said:

Except I've based that opinion off of having played with literally close to 1,000 people in FW. Most units, every faction, listening to them talk in TS. Also in Davion officer WhatsApp, listening to the leaders of every big unit in FW talk about exactly why their members quit/left.

Don't mistake the population that's left now with the many thousands who played FW 1/2, up to 3.

If people are quitting for the lack of immersion/lore/politics/grognardism/whatever, the gamemode itself, as in gameplay mechanics, maps and matchmaking isn't good enough to make them stay without those elements. Which comes down to what i wrote above.

CW started bleeding players massively a few weeks after its initial release. the "many thousands" who played CW in 1-3 were also just a tiny fraction of the total playerbase back then. We could see how many players queued a planet. I did spent several hours waiting for a drop during off hours back in phase 2, when i could get a QP match in less than 10 sec.

It's not like 90% of the playerbase quit MWO. shortly after CWs release. They stopped playing CW, quickly. If they could (and can) enjoy QP without immersion etc, it's clearly not the main reason why CW trainwrecked.

Edited by meteorol, 09 November 2017 - 01:03 AM.

[MischiefSC]

meteorol, on 09 November 2017 - 12:51 AM, said:

That's strange though, because QP offers zero immersion/lore/politics/grognardism/whatever aswell, still between 90 and something like 97 % of the playerbase (depending on time) don't play CW.

If both modes don't offer anything in regards to immersion, it has to be something else that makes people hate CW. From the top of my head i can think about

• They don't like respawns (which, imo, is the most unlikely reason)
  
• Invasion gamemode is utter trash and the invasion maps are horrifically bad (which is the case, but this pain is reduced by QP maps in CW).
  
• People don't like to play in a group vs solo player environment in either case (as group or solos)

At one point it was viewed as immersive and we made our own space nerd politics.

When it was clear that was as much as would ever be (or less) and the other stuff (logistics, et al) were never coming, people voided.

Then FW 3, then LT, then One Bukkit.

That simple.

Remember, FW was full of people for almost 2 years.

Invasion was iffy at best. More maps was good. Ironically the Invasion gamemode PGI said they would do (centrally located with multiple approaches) never actually showed up.

Groups vs Solos never really existed until groups started leaving. It was incredibly rare to see all skittles until FW 3. Usually it was some pugs and a unit, or just mixed units.

[meteorol]

MischiefSC, on 09 November 2017 - 01:02 AM, said:

When it was clear that was as much as would ever be (or less) and the other stuff (logistics, et al) were never coming, people voided.

Yeah, but why did they void at a much, much, much steeper rate than the slow player decline in QP (MWOs total playerbase?)

If people enjoyed CW as much as they do enjoy QP safe for immersion, shouldn't the rate at which people leave be somewhat compareable since both don't offer any immersion?

Why could the overwhelming majority of the playerbase (for all of CWs existence, btw) live with the total lack of immersion in QP, but not in CW?

If the playerbase, on average, would enjoy the core mechanics of CW as much as they enjoy the QP mechanics, CW should have a lot more players. Not just now, but even back in phase 1-3.

Edited by meteorol, 09 November 2017 - 01:12 AM.

[MischiefSC]

meteorol, on 09 November 2017 - 01:12 AM, said:

Yeah, but why did they void at a much, much, much steeper rate than the slow player decline in QP (MWOs total playerbase?)

If people enjoyed CW as much as they do enjoy quickly safe for immersion, shouldn't the rate at which people leave be somewhat compareable since both don't offer any immersion?

Why could the overwhelming majority of the playerbase (for all of CWs existence, btw) live with the total lack of immersion in QP, but not in CW?

If the playerbase, on average, would enjoy the core mechanics of CW as much as they enjoy the QP mechanics, CW should have a lot more players. Not just now, but even back in phase 1-3.

The immersion wasn't the same. There was, at least, the impression, the promise of immersion in FW at first.That was the selling point of FW and while waiting for PGI to deliver all that awesome stuff that would never come they made their own. They made alliances and plans and space nerd politics. They decided on fronts to focus on, they talked mountains of trash in TS, they said 'we're going to all go Steiner to help them against CJF because Steiner-Davion are besties!' and they said 'We're going to go stomp on Liao because Liao is bad and we hate them.'

That loss of the illusion of immersion, the hope of it showing up, was the killer. That long dry spell in FW 2 where there was..... nothing. PGI didn't even have anyone assigned to look at FW at the time. Just.... months and months of nothing. The same all day every day. Dots meant nothing. Once people started to void it turned into a torrent and.... KA-WOOSH.

Many never played QP.

The mechanics for FW were always bad. They were worse, originally. For those who remember. What you're missing completely is that thousands of people, tens of thousands for a while, played QP for months on end when the mechanics were worse than they are now. By far.

There's some nice mechanics to FW in context of drop decks and respawns and in some instances on some maps Invasion was fun but people liked FW in spite of its many, many flaws. Almost everyone who's in units in FW now (or even outside of FW at this point) played FW with mixed units or pugging. Tons and tons of units exist because they started as a FW unit and broke up or split off.

Now? The illusion and everything that even leaned toward it is gone. Put the maps/modes in QP for people to play, require grouping up to play FW, see what happens. If it fails, so be it. PGI can admit to having failed to deliver on it and we can move forward.

Oh, and people don't play QP because they enjoy 'the environment'. They do it to play stompy shooty robbits. QP is also a pretty terrible system with an XP bar instead of a real matchmaker and balance so full of holes that if you fired a shotgun at it you would miss more than you hit. People play it for the stompy shooty robbits because it's the only option available for it. Not because QP is so well designed.

[meteorol]

MischiefSC, on 09 November 2017 - 01:22 AM, said:

Oh, and people don't play QP because they enjoy 'the environment'. They do it to play stompy shooty robbits. QP is also a pretty terrible system with an XP bar instead of a real matchmaker and balance so full of holes that if you fired a shotgun at it you would miss more than you hit. People play it for the stompy shooty robbits because it's the only option available for it. Not because QP is so well designed.

Yet again, people are playing "stompy shooty robbits" in QP, not FW, and the vast majority of players did for all of CWs existence.

Neither offers brilliant gameplay mechanics. Still, the vast majority of the community chose QP over FW. When confronted with "no immersion" in both cases, they chose QP over FW. They do now, and they always did. FW never had a playerbase compareable to QP, safe for about 2 weeks after its release.

You are not adressing my core point:
For as bad as QP is, and was in the past, the overwhelming majority of people always picked QP over CW even though they both offer zero immersion. People who are playing mainly quickplay (~ 90% of the playerbase) are obviously not bothered by lack of immersion, since QP offers non. If it's not the lack of immersion that stops 90% of the current (and historical, tbh) playerbase to play FW, what is else the reason they don't play it? Imo, the main reason are the three points i lined out above.

Edited by meteorol, 09 November 2017 - 01:37 AM.

[MischiefSC]

meteorol, on 09 November 2017 - 01:36 AM, said:

Yet again, people are playing "stompy shooty robbits" in QP, not FW, and the vast majority of players did for all of CWs existence.

Neither offers brilliant gameplay mechanics. Still, the vast majority of the community chose QP over FW. When confronted with "no immersion" in both cases, they chose QP over FW. They do now, and they always did. FW never had a playerbase compareable to QP, safe for about 2 weeks after its release.

You are not adressing my core point:
For as bad as QP is, and was in the past, the overwhelming majority of people always picked QP over CW even though they both offer zero immersion. People who are playing mainly quickplay (~ 90% of the playerbase) are obviously not bothered by lack of immersion, since QP offers non. If it's not the lack of immersion that stops 90% of the current (and historical, tbh) playerbase to play FW, what is else the reason they don't play it? Imo, the main reason are the three points i lined out above.

Yet your argument is based on the idea that whatever most people play is the best option. So why do we have a comp queue? Why do we have MWO instead of a freemium phone game? Clearly most people prefer the latter.

FW was never intended to appeal to the general QP audience. Neither is group queue. Or comp queue for that matter. Nor MWO in general appeal to the general shooter audience.

The majority of people pick QP because it's fast and easy and a F2P FPS game with stompy robbits.

I have no interest in FW being appealing to the majority of the QP population. That was never the point of it, any more than it's the point of comp queue. The point was always for FW to be appealing to the people who were originally drawn to the idea, that wasn't fulfilled.

Now? Well, PGI never provided the experience that was promised for FW, so people largely left or moved on to do other things. PGI continued to dial FW back to be more QP-ish.

As a side note, more people played MWO when it was a mixed queue of groups and pugs together every single match in QP, which was the only thing we had, than play currently. By a huge stretch. So by your same logic clearly that's what people want - 8 v 8 with no matchmaker and 4mans in the mix.

People don't play FW because it doesn't really offer much aside from respawns that QP doesn't. The illusion of immersion and deeper content (or the coming promise of it) is gone. More people play QP than group queue, by a huge stretch - so why not just close group queue, or make it 2mans only? I mean that's the majority of what people play.... right?

[meteorol]

MischiefSC, on 09 November 2017 - 01:46 AM, said:

I have no interest in FW being appealing to the majority of the QP population.

Well, if you don't want to have a gamemode appealing to the majority of players, then you will end up with a ghost town. Which we actually did.

MischiefSC, on 09 November 2017 - 01:46 AM, said:

As a side note, more people played MWO when it was a mixed queue of groups and pugs together every single match in QP, which was the only thing we had, than play currently. By a huge stretch. So by your same logic clearly that's what people want - 8 v 8 with no matchmaker and 4mans in the mix.

More people play QP than group queue, by a huge stretch - so why not just close group queue, or make it 2mans only? I mean that's the majority of what people play.... right?

Anyway, it seems like you don't understand my "logic" or you are willingly moving goalpoasts right here.

First, a considerable decline in playernumbers is normal for a 5 year old F2P game, and it's not necessarily a strong indicator of changes in quality. People move on over the years. I wouldn't expect otherwise.
I'm sure you can see a difference between MWO losing considerable parts of it's playerbase over a span of 4 years, and CW losing huge numbers of players within a few weeks (months on top, if we are generous) after it's release? You can also see the difference between comparing the playerbase of two different gamemodes at a single point in time to comparing points in a timelime 4 years appart?

Secondly, you are literally comparing queues (group queue, comp queue) of a gamemode (QP) as in a type of matchmaking, to a gamemode (CW) in total. I'm sure you can see how massively flawed this argument is?

Anyway, there is not much reason to continue discussion here. CW is done for the points lined out thousands of times in thousands of posts by thousands of people.

Well. atleast we have a core number of people preaching "join units, muh CW is hardmode" like a mantra without a positive effect on player numbers for years now. By now, the only hardmode thing about CW is finding matches outside of the few primetime hours. Over and out.

[McHoshi]

Khobai, on 04 November 2017 - 08:45 PM, said:

They did do something to prevent it. They put large lasers on dropships so they had the range to cover the whole spawn area.

But then people cried about how strong dropships were and how they couldnt farm and spawn camp so they took the large lasers off dropships and replaced them with medium lasers which allowed spawn camping again.

The solution is to put large lasers back on the dropships again. We know it worked because it made people cry.

People didn´t moved out of their own DropZone that´s why the dropships got nerfed!

[Khobai]

Quote

People didn´t moved out of their own DropZone that´s why the dropships got nerfed!

but people still dont move out of their own dropzone if theyre being spawn camped which means nerfing them did nothing

[Fuerchtenichts]

Khobai, on 09 November 2017 - 03:59 AM, said:

but people still dont move out of their own dropzone if theyre being spawn camped which means nerfing them did nothing

I have seen 12er unit premades trying to make use out of the OP dropship gunners and hide in or behind their drop zone right from the start to get a certain advantage. Obviously, neither solution has been working up to date.

If it is technically possible, I would prefer to let the players choose their drop zone before dropping and keep the medium laser drop ships.

[PFC Carsten]

1st) Give drop commander a button so he can force Lance (4) or Company (12) to drop together, helpful in PUG mode.
2nd) Let new mechs spawn inside dropships (protected intially against spawn camping). Fix the bug where mechs can take damage while inside dropship.
3rd) Designate a drop zone, in which the drop commander can select where his team is going to be dropped, including facing of dropship hangar door (esp. viable in combination with egg-shaped dropships, see below)
4th) Stagger dropship weapons (many small, some medium, few large lasers)
5th) Have a timer (10-30 seconds maybe?) for the dropped mechs to leave the dropship. If it expires, mechs are forced out.
6th) If you're feeling generous, make Union class dropships hovering over the dropzone while creating jetblast which diminishes visibility (also in backscatter/IR/lowlight mode)


This combination should solve most of the spawncamping issues I can think of right now - except of course 12 PUGs who vigorously deny playing together at the most basic level or people grabbing company command and trolling their players. Yes, trolling is also possible for people hiding in one lone mech, preventing company drop - go lance in that case or have a force-eject for the commander.

[Nightbird]

Carried pugs yesterday who insisted on dropping multiple urbies. Did not team kill em, but would farm him 100% if ever on other side. It's easy to blame the other.team, but the main cause to getting farmed is complete unwillingness to engaging in the act of cooperation.

[Captain Caveman DE]

Nightbird, on 09 November 2017 - 08:09 AM, said:

It's easy to blame the other.team, but the main cause to getting farmed is complete unwillingness to engaging in the act of cooperation.

this. atm, people are just farming their lootbags and fw is full with puggles. which would be fine, if they'd at least listen/talk with each other. but 9of10 times they don't.
I can bear this in qp for a few matches, but having 30min of fw when you know from minute1 that it's gonna be a fail is ..tiresome.. we really need some kind of gate for fw, at the very least for invasion.

[ANOM O MECH]

Phoolan Devi, on 08 November 2017 - 10:17 AM, said:

It actually does since it is needlessly prolonging the game w/out helping the team to win.

Btw, it is even economically a waste. You don't make that much more money with killing all mechs and thus loosing money by wasting time! Having three games instead of two in the same timeframe pays more!

Wow.

Ok I am going to concede that you likely will never accept that your interpretation is way off. Badly and comically so.

You should definitely contact support every single time you are spawn camped and perhaps they can clarify the CoC for you. A little hint...if it was a violation, PGI would have done something already.

When part of the victory conditons are to kill all mechs, killing all mechs (unless cheating) is never going to be a violation of anything but people's pride.

[Quandoo]

Faction Play is boring as hell since it limits me too hard. Remove tonnage limit and let me play like I want to.

Edited by Quandoo, 09 November 2017 - 01:37 PM.

[MischiefSC]

meteorol, on 09 November 2017 - 02:43 AM, said:

Well, if you don't want to have a gamemode appealing to the majority of players, then you will end up with a ghost town. Which we actually did.

You mean like group queue and comp queue?

meteorol, on 09 November 2017 - 02:43 AM, said:

Anyway, it seems like you don't understand my "logic" or you are willingly moving goalpoasts right here.

First, a considerable decline in playernumbers is normal for a 5 year old F2P game, and it's not necessarily a strong indicator of changes in quality. People move on over the years. I wouldn't expect otherwise.
I'm sure you can see a difference between MWO losing considerable parts of it's playerbase over a span of 4 years, and CW losing huge numbers of players within a few weeks (months on top, if we are generous) after it's release? You can also see the difference between comparing the playerbase of two different gamemodes at a single point in time to comparing points in a timelime 4 years appart?

Secondly, you are literally comparing queues (group queue, comp queue) of a gamemode (QP) as in a type of matchmaking, to a gamemode (CW) in total. I'm sure you can see how massively flawed this argument is?

Anyway, there is not much reason to continue discussion here. CW is done for the points lined out thousands of times in thousands of posts by thousands of people.

Well. atleast we have a core number of people preaching "join units, muh CW is hardmode" like a mantra without a positive effect on player numbers for years now. By now, the only hardmode thing about CW is finding matches outside of the few primetime hours. Over and out.

FW had a huge population for about a year.

Group queue has no matchmaker. Didn't you know that? It's like FW in context of who gets matched vs who.

There has always been a huge split in the player base. Several, really. Lore purists, people who came for FW (which was originally advertised as the whole point of the game. QP was just a 'place holder' originally) and people who came for casual QP stuff.

FW was supposedly there for all the big unit, group oriented folks who wanted a bigger war game than QP. It was a good sized group of players. PGI never delivered that game, just a sort of QP with respawns and a map shaped leaderboard.

PGI didn't really deliver the FW that was promised so the people who were there for that left. Games total population dropped a ton and all that leaves is QP... which is pretty stale and without big organized groups of players constantly looking to recruit and train new people there's no real NPE to draw/keep people.

[Khobai]

sure FW was originally for groups

but theres not enough groups left to sustain it now

it has to evolve or die. it needs to be more pug friendly. allowing groups to keep farming pugs is not how you make it pug friendly.

especially when you only get the contract bonus for winning, if you lose youre screwed out of it

[Gas Guzzler]

Kin3ticX, on 04 November 2017 - 07:44 AM, said:

10 second godmode after spawn

OMG, no heat gen too. I would drop in a Dire Wolf last every single time.

Strange Love, on 04 November 2017 - 06:25 AM, said:

pgi thank you for Created single lobby mixed with pugs , new players and 12 men trolling all around

stop trolling the drop zone ,, this main reason why we never get new players
and I'm talking about all sides .. clans and IS


fix this shi%$#@

Play quick play.

[ANOM O MECH]

Khobai, on 09 November 2017 - 01:51 PM, said:

sure FW was originally for groups

but theres not enough groups left to sustain it now

it has to evolve or die. it needs to be more pug friendly. allowing groups to keep farming pugs is not how you make it pug friendly.

especially when you only get the contract bonus for winning, if you lose youre screwed out of it

It may have to evolve, but that absolutely does not mean it has to be more pug friendly. They tried that by adding QP maps and the majority of folks tried it out and went back to QP.

Whatever it's faults are, CW is the place for those heavily invested players who want to play as a team and co-ordinate. If a player is not willing to pay the entrance fee, then they get what they get especially when they have choice to go play another mode.

Driving poor players who do not want to learn how to play or want to play only as a solo in a team focused gamemode is a good thing. The ones that stick it out and do what they need to, to start having some success is the player you want.

I am glad for capatalism though. If you were to stop by the known and some of the bigger units active in CW you will find that some of the biggest whales MWO have live in this space. Most of the guys I know with 200+ mechs are either CW players or comp guys. So for those of us who are heavily invested in time and money into this game, changing it anymore to cater to people who won't stick around or are not as heavily invested as those that are, is not likely going to happen.

[gamingogre]

Strange Love, on 04 November 2017 - 06:25 AM, said:

stop trolling the drop zone ,, this main reason why we never get new players
and I'm talking about all sides .. clans and IS

I have said this very thing several times. The spawn rapers love behaving this way and they whine far more, so they get there way. It's lazy programming on PGI's part as well. It would not surprise me if it is a bunch of fifteen year olds. And before someone tells me their age, all you would be doing is proving your immaturity(your inner age) to me.