Asym, on 29 November 2017 - 02:10 PM, said:
Oh, good Holy Lord, here we go again.......
Nothing is going to change. PGI is NOT going to ever consider changes to MM nor anything they've done in the past because they will not disturb the cash flow of Status Quo: people are buying stuff consistently to keep the books in the black.
Otherwise, they'd be reading the forums to figure where we are coming off the rails and not buying....
Why discuss something we have no control over and PGI will not fix????
Except, y'know, this is demonstrably false. The current matchmaker and its criteria are very different from the original matchmaker. We
used to have a ELO based matchmaking, which even gave each player four distinct scores based upon weight classes. Afterwards, we got the 3x4 matchmaking criteria (attempt to give each team 3 mechs of each of the 4 weight classes), then the current Tier based system and the weight limits on group sizes in the group quickplay queue.
{Tangent-Rant Begins Here}
I swear, every time someone says something like this, whether out of ignorance, arrogance, or outright deceit, it sets actual progress backwards, and makes honest, intelligent discussion harder. Because if this crud isn't corrected than you start moving forward and building upon a false premise. The community is
constantly doing this. And we have several folks, many of them very toxic, that keep
insisting we start from a position that does not reflect the facts.
I'd like to believe that many of these people genuinely are in the dark as to the facts, I'd like to believe that their words are inspired by a genuine affection for the franchise... Instead, I believe these toxic people, rather, are inspired by an unthinking hatred for PGI, which likely was inspired by PGI quite frankly biting off more than they could chew. I've said many times, PGI makes promises like a cheerful drunk, and in the morning when they sober up, they turn around and say, "Wait, I said I'd do WHAT?!" So, yes, I understand these people feel betrayed. A certain amount of it makes sense, PGI made promises that either they could not keep or could not deliver upon in good time. Maybe it is that what they see as betrayal of both themselves and a beloved franchise has caused them to embrace this irrational hatred. And I have no sympathy for them once they subscribe to irrationality and hatred. It just isn't productive. These people do not pass up an opportunity to say things that are as disenfranchising to the rest of the playerbase (especially new players) as possible. Because despite the fact that some of them still play, they won't be happy until everyone is as miserable as they are, and they can point and trumpet their "I told you so!" to the heavens.
Even better, these toxic people seem to ignore the fact that the franchise sat dormant, without investors since MechAssault 2. The first MechAssault sold 1.13 million copies. The second a mere 360 thousand. After that, investors didn't want to touch the franchise. Some will point to the Smith & Tinker MechWarrior 5 trailer from several years back, but they ignore the fact that the trailer was made in an effort to woo investors so the project could get off the ground. An effort that failed. It wasn't until PGI & IGP picked it up that a new MechWarrior game happened. No one else wanted it (or at the least, no one that could pay the money to purchase a license from Microsoft). And PGI had ideas. Ideas that people liked. And despite helping get the project off the ground, IGP seemed to be the biggest obstacle to making most of these ideas happen. (In fact, if you go back and listen to the first townhall that PGI President Russ Bullock had after the dissolution of IGP, you can hear in his voice and his words how hard he was trying to NOT throw IGP under the bus. Not because they didn't deserve it, but because he knew talking crap about them would make himself and PGI look bad, and poison other companies, especially investors, against PGI, thus making any future projects unlikely.)
I know it's the failure of Community/Faction Warfare that drives some of the hatred. I know it is. It wasn't until after IGP was out of the picture that real work on Community/Faction Warfare began (IGP was constantly using their influence to torpedo it). And since its launch PGI has been on a nearly Quixotic quest to tweak or rework it into a state that will make the community happy. And in case people have failed to notice, PGI has never made any moves to monetize FW. Not a one. From the first day it came out, it was unpopular; and most of the player base seriously does not care about it anyway. But for that 10% of the playerbase, and to at least attempt to make the promise of a real, enjoyable FW system, PGI has dumped hundreds upon hundreds of man-hours into it. Into a project that the company steadfastly has refused to monetize. And yet, we have toxic people in the community that insist that PGI is just trying to milk us for every penny they can and is purposely destroying the franchise, etc... I mean, the reality just doesn't align with that viewpoint. It's like dealing with a damned flat-earther.
Now, I'm sure I'm going to have people accuse me of white knighting and such at this point. And you know what? The people that make that accusation don't matter. They say things like that because they cannot refute the argument, so they resort to the
ad hominem attack. I'm not trying to invalidate anyone's feelings, I just want people to be, y'know, factual. I know that's asking a lot these days. As for my attitude towards PGI, I give them a LOT of slack. They're a relatively small developer, and MWO is the biggest project they've ever taken on. And they
have made decisions I disagreed with. Yes, if I was in charge of FW it would be a lot different. Yes, PGI has made balance decisions that made me scratch my head and ask, "Why did you think that was the right move?" (Like in open Beta when they decided to
decrease AC10 velocity, despite the fact that it was the least popular ballistic in the game due to lackluster performance compared to other heavy cannons.) Now, when PGI says that
{fill in the blank} is a problem, I tend to believe them, but that doesn't mean I agree with the steps taken to correct it. (The recent nerfing of Artemis missile clustering I thought was uncalled for. Yes, it combined with the skill tree Missile Spread nodes to create tighter missile clusters than they wanted, but in light of the bonus durability from the survival tree I disagreed with it being a real issue.)
TL; DR version - Get your facts straight, dump your emotions and ego, then make your analysis. Because if you don't we just waste time on false starts.
{End of Tangent-Rant}
And as I say, be good, stay safe, kill no one I wouldn't, happy gaming, and I'll catch ya' whenever the next time I catch ya' is. Later, fellas.
Edited by Escef, 29 November 2017 - 04:25 PM.
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