62 replies to this topic

[Spheroid]

Every single "old" game I have ever picked up and still has an active player base is populated with hardcore enthusiasts who play continuously for years. They are generaly skilled and know what they are doing.

However it is my opinion the player skill displayed in QP has steadily and noticeable worsened over time. In this regard it seems very different from most of its competitors.

You can see it on display every single match in the positioning, the reaction time between seeing a target and shooting or the ability to predict the future positon of a target. These are behaviors for which there are no objective stats but instrinsically you know play a huge role whether a game will be a stomp or not.

You can account for differences in ping, team weight or mech composition and not arrive at a predictive model without the obvious conclusion that your teammates simply sucked.

What is the explaination for this suckage? This game was marketed to veterans of MechWarrior 2-4. The population of those gamers is a fixed and finite number. Nobody should be coming to MWO in 2018. It doesn't have an advertising budget and PC Gamer hasn't done an expose in years. I deliberately warn people I know NOT to play this game because I don't want the reputation of the IP damaged. Who should be blamed for continuing influx of potatoes?

Why are the potatoes coming in 2018 and not 2012? Was it the lack of regional servers? Was the case of Celerons being inadequate to run Crytek in that time period? Why now and not previously? Good and bad players could have evolved together had they started the race at the same time and the gameplay would have been better for it.

Edited by Spheroid, 27 February 2018 - 10:10 PM.

[FupDup]

The specific nature of this playerbase (old men who play board games) might be a factor.

[Scyther]

It might be nice to find some kind of facts to back up subjective impressions gained from random matches.

Are you using average match scores compared season over season on the leaderboards? Complaining about 'general mass suckage' just sounds like "I had some bad matches" venting to me unless you have something to back it up.

Edit: just thought of a potential cause of what you are observing... the fact that people claim the PSR is an 'XP bar' which puts you in tier 1 eventually if you play enough games.

Are you possibly seeing the inevitable placement of more and more people in tier 1 fights that wouldn't be there if PSR was performance based? I'm not sure how you would measure/compare that since I have never seen tier population trends charted by anyone.

Edited by MadBadger, 27 February 2018 - 05:41 PM.

[Anjian]

There are many potatoes and AFKers in the early era of the game just as they do now. And just about the same with every other game besides MWO that I also played.

The one thing I have not seen in this game yet, are gamers who deliberately scuttle their stats so they can play and seal club in lower leagues.

[Bombast]

Anjian, on 27 February 2018 - 05:57 PM, said:

The one thing I have not seen in this game yet, are gamers who deliberately scuttle their stats so they can play and seal club in lower leagues.

People have tried. PSR just makes it pretty much impossible.

[Nightbird]

Diversion of resources to MW5 over the past 2 years leading to less new content in MWO? I mean, what else could it be?

[Anjian]

Nightbird, on 27 February 2018 - 06:12 PM, said:

Diversion of resources to MW5 over the past 2 years leading to less new content in MWO? I mean, what else could it be?

I think the amount of content has not significantly changed, you still get about a new mech each month. New maps are rarer now though, although its said they are working on new ones.

What I think has changed is the thought and effort behind the new content vs. the old. There seems to be a lot more QC and thought behind the production of older content. The newer ones just seems bleh and meh. Further more, QC failures are seeping in, like poor leg and movement animations, improper scaling, poor design of arms and joints, and the overall feeling that the in game 3D mechs don't look as good as the ones in the sales page. Its kind of like the picture of the food in the menu looks a lot better than the food that's actually served in front of you.

[N0MAD]

Anjian, on 27 February 2018 - 05:57 PM, said:

The one thing I have not seen in this game yet, are gamers who deliberately scuttle their stats so they can play and seal club in lower leagues.

You dont need to tank your stats in this game to club seals as all tiers are thrown into the same games anyways.

[El Bandito]

Anjian, on 27 February 2018 - 05:57 PM, said:

The one thing I have not seen in this game yet, are gamers who deliberately scuttle their stats so they can play and seal club in lower leagues.

There is FP for that.

[Nightbird]

Why do you need to tank anything? Even tier 1 is full of seals.

[N0ni]

Spheroid, on 27 February 2018 - 05:23 PM, said:

Every single "old" game I have ever picked up and still has an active player base is populated with hardcore enthusiasts who play continuously for years. They are generaly skilled and know what they are doing.

Spheroid, on 27 February 2018 - 05:23 PM, said:

What is the explaination for this suckage?

You can be a hardcore enthusiast of a game and over time your "skill" will in fact drop, making way for the next wave of talent who probably will be younger than you. Doesn't matter which game.

A perfect example is APB (using myself in this regard). In 2010, i would get absolutely hammered by most people (mostly because it's hard to play with 20-30 fps in a reflex game).

"Upgrading" to a better "PC" a couple years later i noticed not only did my "skill" skyrocket, but i would still get hammered by the usual suspects of really good players/clans. Not necessarily outsmarted, just they would nail TTK whatever they were using better than me.

When i built my own PC (end of 2015 ish i think idk) i went back to APB once again, this time the usual suspects of top players/clans were either just on par with me or below. I still question that, how did these good players all of a sudden suck so bad? Bad enough for them to send a whisper (private message) accusing me of "closet cheating", the same guys others accuse of that. I'm convinced that given enough time you'll lose what skill you formerly had.

Age could be another factor, the older you get the slower you start to do things. Things like Aimbooster and Osu! are good to train your reflexes, to mitigate deterioration.

[Peter2k]

Waning interest in playing?
I k ow mine has, been playing since 2012 and I can't say PGI is doing a lot to keep one interested

Aside from a new Mech, what else is there they work on content wise?

Been playing team death match in Mechs in thousands of battles, and if anything PGI makes it less fun over time

Nightbird, on 27 February 2018 - 06:12 PM, said:

Diversion of resources to MW5 over the past 2 years leading to less new content in MWO? I mean, what else could it be?

Probably spot on

If you take out Mechs as new content there is very little being put out and worked on, well compared to the endless number of other games out there
Sure Solaris, not that there are that many interested in it from the start

Anjian, on 27 February 2018 - 06:20 PM, said:

I think the amount of content has not significantly changed, you still get about a new mech each month. New maps are rarer now though, although its said they are working on new ones.

Well one might consider Mechs not content at all
This thread is about vets, might have a big enough staple of Mechs already, and nostalgia only goes so far

There is 1 new map, a city map
There was a teaser like in January, wonder when the map will be pushed back

And some Solaris maps

One could say on average there is 2 maps per year, but not necessarily for the game mode one might want to play

And map voting alone makes sure you don't see all maps anyway

Edited by Peter2k, 27 February 2018 - 08:40 PM.

[S t P a u l]

I didn't know this game existed until 6 months ago. I was replaying the mech games I liked as a kid and decided to do a google search.

Edited by S t P a u l, 27 February 2018 - 08:56 PM.

[justcallme A S H]

Spheroid, on 27 February 2018 - 05:23 PM, said:

However it is my opinion the player skill displayed in QP has steadily and noticeable worsened over time. In this regard it seems very different from most of its competitors.

Easy answered. The good players are leaving in droves for better games because MWO has become stale/boring and other games out there are proving to be more attractive.

After FP3.0 there was a drop... The next big one was Skill Maze... That one right there was the final nail for most people I played with regularly.

Just our unit 54MR alone had 100 members with 70 or so active before skill maze. Most of them were well above average players too. We are currently down to about 15-20 people regularly playing now and that is on a good week. Most people are still around the TeamSpeak but at all playing other games and rarely even firing up MWO.

Given population drop over 25% in 18 months and has then sat stagnant at that low number - yet my friends list dwindles down further each month... Essentially I can deduct that good players are leaving, the people left playing MWO are of lower skill and just topped up whatever new players are coming in.

Edited by justcallme A S H, 27 February 2018 - 09:10 PM.

[Xetelian]

This game is effectively driving away its good players on a regular basis. Each unnecessary nerf and each major change is hurting the population.

91 skill points out of 200+ skills was a very stupid idea. They could have easily cut that number in half and doubled the amount each node gave you. What do you do when you need a full minute to do one mech up and you own hundreds of mechs? A little at a time is the only way to do it but I swear every time I feel like playing a different mech it is one of the ones I haven't gotten around to skill-ing yet.


The nerfs to Jump Jets was a huge problem and the beginning of the heavy handed nerfs in this game. We call them hover jets for a reason.

[Asym]

NERF's ! As the battlespace becomes neutered, there is little reason to improve..... Add the PSR to that and a totally hosed MM and guess what..................nothing works.

[ANOM O MECH]

justcallme A S H, on 27 February 2018 - 09:08 PM, said:

Easy answered. The good players are leaving in droves for better games because MWO has become stale/boring and other games out there are proving to be more attractive.

After FP3.0 there was a drop... The next big one was Skill Maze... That one right there was the final nail for most people I played with regularly.

Just our unit 54MR alone had 100 members with 70 or so active before skill maze. Most of them were well above average players too. We are currently down to about 15-20 people regularly playing now and that is on a good week. Most people are still around the TeamSpeak but at all playing other games and rarely even firing up MWO.

Given population drop over 25% in 18 months and has then sat stagnant at that low number - yet my friends list dwindles down further each month... Essentially I can deduct that good players are leaving, the people left playing MWO are of lower skill and just topped up whatever new players are coming in.

But I am sure starting to look round these parts with all the talent gone.

Now that I get to play with more players that are stationary targets I am even getting head shots!!!

Last weekend I was even accused of hacking!!!

Luls when you can be hot garbage at a game and have others who are so much appreciably worse they think you are cheating....

[Champion of Khorne Lord of Blood]

The game doesn't cater much to the more competitive crowd and so the competitive crowd is the one that has been declining steadily. Things such as extra high TTK, balancing weapons by average or low skill play, and nerfs to weak things leads to a stale meta that gets boring after awhile in the top tiers. Its all also heavily compounded by the matchmaker's only goal being to separate new players from old players rather than balance matches, meaning that there's very little competition for the good players to hone their skill on.

[Thermoluminescence]

How they set up LRM and Gauss/PPC, at least that I read about lately since I havn't played in a long time tells me they cater to noobs. There is more energy invested by the Devs to build the game around incompetence then skill. Makes sence then that skilled players leave, there isn't much for them to focus on and enjoy in this game.

Edited by Thermoluminescence, 28 February 2018 - 12:01 AM.

[Dogstar]

Bombast, on 27 February 2018 - 06:00 PM, said:

People have tried. PSR just makes it pretty much impossible.

Play the Piranha more, it's very good at getting zero damage matches.