374 replies to this topic

[Kin3ticX]

Mech The Dane, on 30 January 2018 - 05:57 PM, said:

I wouldn't blame Chris so much as PGI not playing their own game. Many other studios require that their developers play x amount of their game every day. So that they don't lose touch with whats going on and the player experience.

Something it feels like PGI has never had a good handle on. How many Long Toms do you figure fell upon Russ before the community FORCED him to remove them?

There were a few things going on with longtom

1. Long tom was featured in the phase 3 teaser at the Steam Launch party. By the time we saw this longtom teaser, the Community Warfare lead left the company or was about to within a couple weeks.

2. PGI scaled CW way back from its Launch Party plans where Bryan Ekman promised up a storm. Originally, it was supposed to be Invasion and Planetary Assault. It was downscaled to Invasion and Scouting... and PGI wanted to connect the modes, make or break intensity, to the outcome of 48v48 fights. However, they broke a critical game design rule on top of it being silly OP ( Atomic Long Tom). The counterplay of Longtom actually needed to be in fight but instead the counterplay was quit and go play 4v4 or just quit. They had to at least have an option to blow up some radar dish or something to end the longtoms.

3. PGI doubled down on Longtom and made it the centerpiece of a promo video.



So, PGI had kind of put so many eggs into one basket for Long Tom.

Even if Long Tom didnt happen, I still think phase 3 would have failed. Mercstar ran into problems with crippling attack lanes and worse search times than phase 2, not so much long tom blowing us up every game.

Edited by Kin3ticX, 30 January 2018 - 11:11 PM.

[Anjian]

Mystere, on 30 January 2018 - 08:23 AM, said:

No argument there ... You're kidding, right? War Thunder has around 30,000 concurrent players on a slow day. That's MWO's player numbers for an entire month.

30,000 players concurrent is the slow HOUR. Asian-Euro-Russian hot hours you can see as much as 65,000.

[Racerxintegra2k]

I couldn't put my finger on why i wasn't having fun in this game anymore. This video, just explained it for me. I agree 100%.

[Bud Crue]

Kin3ticX, on 30 January 2018 - 11:01 PM, said:

Even if Long Tom didnt happen, I still think phase 3 would have failed...

Long Tom (Apri), drove away the casuals.
Unit Tax (September), pissed off a lot of the units, especially some of the bigger ones.
Russ repeatedly saying everything is fine during the first round table drove away a lot of dedicated players.
Rewards path changes drove a lot of loyalist to merc and added to the imbalance of what population was left.
Russ admitting that they had allowed CW to remain undeveloped and unassigned internally at PGI for 6 months made some remaining folks wake up and realize that the mode was not and would not be a priority for PGI, and so they too left.
One Bucket drove away the lorenerds and those who liked the player created inter-faction drama.

Yeah. Long Tom was just one aspect that brought about the death of Phase 3 and the dramatic decline in the mode that we are still enjoying to this day.

[Mystere]

Sniff! Sniff!

I loved the Long Toms!

Sniff!

[Sjorpha]

Bud Crue, on 31 January 2018 - 05:24 AM, said:

Long Tom (Apri), drove away the casuals.
Unit Tax (September), pissed off a lot of the units, especially some of the bigger ones.
Russ repeatedly saying everything is fine during the first round table drove away a lot of dedicated players.
Rewards path changes drove a lot of loyalist to merc and added to the imbalance of what population was left.
Russ admitting that they had allowed CW to remain undeveloped and unassigned internally at PGI for 6 months made some remaining folks wake up and realize that the mode was not and would not be a priority for PGI, and so they too left.
One Bucket drove away the lorenerds and those who liked the player created inter-faction drama.

Yeah. Long Tom was just one aspect that brought about the death of Phase 3 and the dramatic decline in the mode that we are still enjoying to this day.

Also the fact that many many players and units held out during phase 2 mainly because of the promise of more strategic depth in phase 3. Phase 2 was the best phase but it was still very undeveloped and not satisfying in the long run, so when phase 3 reduced depth rather than increase it the dissappointment was not only over the problems it caused, but also over the abscence of improvements.

Phase 3 was a disaster, but the truth is a lot of people would have left even if there was no phase 3, because the anemic features of phase 2 wouldn't have been enough for long either.

Rather than build on what they had, they destroyed half of it and dumbed the rest down. It's a sad story.

[Jarl Dane]

i am pretty sure PGI's lead CW developer quit a month before Phase 3 was released.

[The Lighthouse]

Mech The Dane, on 01 February 2018 - 10:40 AM, said:

i am pretty sure PGI's lead CW developer quit a month before Phase 3 was released.

Yes, and he made a right choice after all, probably realized Paul and Russ were not going to support him enough to make phase 3 workable.

Quote

I wouldn't blame Chris so much as PGI not playing their own game. Many other studios require that their developers play x amount of their game every day. So that they don't lose touch with whats going on and the player experience.

Something it feels like PGI has never had a good handle on. How many Long Toms do you figure fell upon Russ before the community FORCED him to remove them?

Well, I think you don't get the mindset of owners of small business companies, particularly in North America.

"Listening to their own customers" is hardly their forte, quite down to the bottom the list of importance.


Community did not force Paul and Russ to remove Long Toms, period.


It was their own decision unrelated to the community's concern. All they saw was continuous decline of FP playerbase, thus they finally removed it to prevent any further decrease. That's it. No outside advice or anything. All they cared is numbers, and finally at 10th month they figured out Long Tom was hurting their numbers.


Another typical to those companies, is that usually the 'solution' comes really, really late, even the simple ones. So the solution to Long Tom situation was to simply remove it, but they took way too much time to remove it that it didn't make any difference ultimately.

This is why Russ's twitter about discussing video with Chris is about as useful as IS Small Laser in this game. All they want is to pour out fire and keep holding the numbers. Zero thoughts and reconciliation on why did your video show up in the first place.

There is another (in)famous American small business like PGI, it's called Stardock, run by a guy named Brad Wardell. Google the company and the guy's name, and you will understand.

Only meaningful difference between Brad and Paul&Russ is that Brad does not even try to hide what he really is while Paul&Russ are a bit more nuanced enough to avoid making too many enemies like Brad has now.

[Gas Guzzler]

Can we unban PPC-Gauss to bring some more variety back to the poke game please?

[Gas Guzzler]

Also, the whole HSL and HML pre-ghost heat alpha being less than or equal to the ER laser pre-ghost heat alpha was a huge mixup from day one.

[Kin3ticX]

Gas Guzzler, on 01 February 2018 - 02:58 PM, said:

Can we unban PPC-Gauss to bring some more variety back to the poke game please?

What this game needs to be is 1 notch less "a battletech game" and 1 notch more a spiritual successor. That will give PGI the elbow room to better define the pecking order of mechs and weapons.

Its okay to have a really strong mechs but PGI has to leave us strengths to find in the lesser tier mechs. The problem is, there isnt much to discover. There isn't a there there. People just play the strong mechs or play the bad ones and accept they will play worse in the bad ones. That might be great if you are trying to sell Deathstrikes and such but its shortsighted and we end up with a poop meta.

Nerfing PPC-Gauss was significant because it removed a predator from the field, one less enemy for general Laser Vom or Gauss-Vomit from Deathstrikes and such to worry about. So PGI has to treat balance as an ecology of sorts as well. What about MRMs? They work more like alt-SRMs than MRMs. They dont answer against the strong midrange stuff very well like laser boats, especially clan lasers. Perhaps PGI thinks MRMs are working good at midrange due to lack of tweaks on them. If MRMs were any good you could fill that Bad Baby hero with MRMs and get work done but its like the worst or 2nd worse variant of the ANHs next to the energy variant.

Everything is starting to point towards mech and weapon buffs to help weaker mechs fight the current strong ones. Nerfing the strong mechs at this point is going to homogenize the game. Wave 1 launch was another story. Anyways, many mechs are not sensitive to mild quirk changes (unless they are soo big they get silly like 50% cooldown). Quirks can help but I think balance has to be attacked from a higher level than just quirks.

PGI has a lot of babysitting to do for all these variants they pump out which they don't do so well. Since the mechs are based on stock hardpoints and loadouts there is often a lack of game design from variant to variant.

PGI is pretty good at power creep but they are not so good at spreading that powercreep fairy dust around.

I'd like to see buffs to the agility tree and the jump jet tree, big ones. The skill tree meta tends to favor consumables, firepower, survival, and often operations over mobility and JJs which have last dibs (unless its a fast medium or a light which speed tweak is more valuable). So many mechs have poor jumpjet thrust, even when maxed....Onos we might have poptarts come back. Great, another potential predator to go after strong mechs.

Edited by Kin3ticX, 01 February 2018 - 07:05 PM.

[PocketYoda]

Yeah the elitist competitives and lore fanbois are really holding this game back..

Edited by Samial, 01 February 2018 - 08:54 PM.

[Luminis]

Kin3ticX, on 01 February 2018 - 06:47 PM, said:

What this game needs to be is 1 notch less "a battletech game" and 1 notch more a spiritual successor. That will give PGI the elbow room to better define the pecking order of mechs and weapons.

Wish they had stated as much from the get-go.

Harebrained Schemes did exactly that and whenever somebody gets their knickers in a twist about something not being a 1:1 rendition of the TableTop or the lore, they always get shot down with the "spritual successor" tagline.

[Cyrilis]

https://mwomercs.com/blood-asp

and there we go with the next Clan 10E hardpoint laservomit 'Mech...

[Gas Guzzler]

Cyrilis, on 01 February 2018 - 10:45 PM, said:

https://mwomercs.com/blood-asp

and there we go with the next Clan 10E hardpoint laservomit 'Mech...

Unban PPC-Gauss if you don't want laser vomit to be so dominant.

[Mcgral18]

Gas Guzzler, on 01 February 2018 - 10:59 PM, said:

Unban PPC-Gauss if you don't want laser vomit to be so dominant.

We could also make non-Ultra ACs less bad

#PGIplz velocity

[Curccu]

Samial, on 01 February 2018 - 08:41 PM, said:

Yeah the elitist competitives and lore fanbois are really holding this game back..

Comp players how?

[Sigmar Sich]

Samial, on 01 February 2018 - 08:41 PM, said:

Yeah the elitist competitives and lore fanbois are really holding this game back..

How so? I'm very curious to hear logic behind this statement.
I struggle to find any influence of the lore on this game.

[Black Ivan]

Gas Guzzler, on 01 February 2018 - 10:59 PM, said:

Unban PPC-Gauss if you don't want laser vomit to be so dominant.

They could also make non UACs and ther stuff work first. PPC Gauss ghos heat was made for a good reason

[Jiang Wei]

FireStoat, on 30 January 2018 - 10:12 AM, said:

I'm glad it's just a rumor. I was extra salty when he claimed on the podcast that the Timber Wolf was not only the best 75 ton mech, but that it was also the best for its weight class and that the metrics backed it up. It proved that they balance by potato instead of going with the input and numbers that competitive players crank out.
I've mostly calmed down and realized that the dude inherited a messy game with a LOT of mechs & variants and that he's probably being strict with the hours he puts in, and walking away at the end of a workday. He's probably overworked to hell with past, current, and future content. It would also be difficult to take competitive player input at face value and run with it, because every player has an agenda.

I don't expect much to come of this. It would be really nice if some moderate steps were taken in moving the game in a more fun direction, like the video pointed out with times of diverse weapon loadouts actually happening in competitive play, as opposed to laser vomit and/or laser+gauss vomit. And seriously, the deal of nerfing SRM grouping + the Artemis nerf still leaves me perplexed. All it accomplished was a shift to more lasers and machine guns, weight of the mech depending.

Alot of those issues would go away if they removed double heat sinks.