45 replies to this topic

[adamts01]

This is the only salvation for this game. The wait time for matches, disconnects, terrible matchmaking, and lopsided fights have only gotten worse and worse.

Combine the dead CW and dead Group Que with Quick Play on some huge maps with tons of players and add new players to the side with less territory. Let the base on each side of the map be full of so many AI turrets that it can't be camped and let it be the last place that the losing team can regroup for a push. Repair/ream stations would need to be a thing. Lights could always be free and mechs could cost increasing resources based on tonnage.

The playerbase needs to be consolidated, and groups of 2 or 3+ need a fun place to drop for a few an hour or two. There really is no other option other than waiting for the game to continue to wither out and die.

The mode doesn't need to be fancy, just 3 or 4 lanes depending on the amount of players the server can handle, with ladders along the rails that lights can use to back cap heavy pushes.

No matchmaker, no tiers, just let players drop in to the mode with whatever they want and let players swap sides to make good fights happen, similar to games with private servers.

This game has a great community that would jump at something like this and make it fun. MWO players just need an area like this and they'll take on the challenge and make it work.

Edited by adamts01, 29 June 2018 - 03:33 AM.

[Hanky Spam]

So in short: do the Multiplayer like the Battlefield series does it?

Stomps will still happen in this case, but brown sea pilots could leave such matches without any penalty
Actually I was always looking forward for a more dynamical & faster multiplayer, especially a more "in-depth" CW mode with more objects and bigger maps but I doubt that PGI will do any *major* changes to this mode...

[Anastasius Foht]

Spawn camping need real fix, its just bad at current state, losing initial fight and here we go.

[Mechwarrior1441491]

Anastasius Foht, on 29 June 2018 - 04:06 AM, said:

Spawn camping need real fix, its just bad at current state, losing initial fight and here we go.

The only solution is to have a longer travel time to engagement, but if you've been beaten back to your drop zone in the first wave their are other problems going on. Little to no punishment for dying means people are willing to hang out in drop zones while getting ripped up.

[Daggett]

adamts01, on 29 June 2018 - 03:32 AM, said:

This is the only salvation.

Whoever say this to any topic imaginable is usually dead wrong. There are always alternatives.

I think your proposal would kill the game if implemented. That's because players have different tastes. I like short team-based matches without respawns, others like longer matches like FP and some prefer duels like in Solaris.

So when you say "lets remove all gamemodes and consolidate everything into a single new one" then chances are high that lots of players are pissed.

Edited by Daggett, 29 June 2018 - 05:48 AM.

[Anastasius Foht]

Mechwarrior1441491, on 29 June 2018 - 05:15 AM, said:

The only solution is to have a longer travel time to engagement, but if you've been beaten back to your drop zone in the first wave their are other problems going on. Little to no punishment for dying means people are willing to hang out in drop zones while getting ripped up.

I was thinking about it, and how to fix. Only idea that came to mind is battle stages, after last mech from first drop of one team died, there is loading screen where lost team choose their second wave mechs, survived winners stayed in their damaged ones + dead mechs choose new chasis. Every map have 3 different battlefields (3 different maps with 1 theme), like Stage one "Battle for the gates" (goal same as now - destroy generator open gates and secure entrance, outdoor map with walls and turrets), stage two " Clear the Factory" (indoor map with huge angars and stuff, something like Solaris Arena indoor maps), stage 3 "Fight for life" (can be battle in mountains or hills near enemy shuttle if you are defending side, or destroying/capturing some key factory stuff/HQ/anything if you are invaders. Key point there is no respawn, if you team fail to "open gates" and you all 12 died there, loading screen - choose new mechs from dropdeck - drop at "stage one" map again, all enemies start at their usual drop point. Proceed to stage 2 only if you win. Can add some bonuses for winning team - like top 3 score mechs can repair 20% of current mech damage or replenish 50% of ammo, mby if you are defender - fix some destroyed turrets/gates. Many ideas - too late to implement them.

[Asym]

Occam's razor: more people.

Find a way to recruit and retain new players in this game. As the population has been seriously dropping since May of 2017, the skill based is separating into distinct and opposite groups of pilots. Because the skill base is so bi-polar, the game has become bi-polar. There is nothing that can fix that other than a healthy population. No tools, no tricks, no code, no amount of money or even a change of game engines can fix low population.....

Sorry. This is an extreme niche market with a seriously low population that may just get even lower with MW5 and several other new games that will release before the end of the year..... Sorry, we are reaping what has been sown in 2016 and before.....

Recruiting !!! is the only fix. I've tried and "just can't sell the game" with the current generation of VG players. Even my team mates in other game won't even consider this game. That should say something because we've been playing as a team since the early 1990's.....

[adamts01]

Hanky Spam, on 29 June 2018 - 04:05 AM, said:

So in short: do the Multiplayer like the Battlefield series does it?

Stomps will still happen in this case, but brown sea pilots could leave such matches without any penalty
Actually I was always looking forward for a more dynamical & faster multiplayer, especially a more "in-depth" CW mode with more objects and bigger maps but I doubt that PGI will do any *major* changes to this mode...

I've never played Battlefield. What comes to mind is something similar to Squad, but maybe with more lanes to take advantage of the speed of lights. The overall feel of that game would mesh perfectly with MWO, with the different lances working together and all, but being forced to split up out of a death ball.

I've been here since just after Beta, and everyone always thought big, but I don't even think it's necessary to add much to get this game at least playable for any size group. We have capture points, we have bases with AI turrets, we just need a drop-in drop-out mechanic, a repair/rearm ability, and a very simple lattice. Just some place were people can go shoot eachother without going through this terrible quick play lobby experience.

Col Jaime Wolf, on 29 June 2018 - 04:06 AM, said:

I feel as tho your ideas are a bit misguided.

you wont get people that want to play group or FW to play a new game mode when they are dropping in group or FW because thats the game mode they want to play.

You're misguided if you think this would turn players away. You'd have to have satisfied players in the first place for that to be a case. Even PGI has been saying for years that CW doesn't have enough players to consider putting resources in to it. [Redacted]

Right this moment is a perfect example. There was a guy begging for an hour for people to switch to Clan so his group would have someone to fight in CW. Crickets. [Redacted]

Asym, on 29 June 2018 - 06:19 AM, said:

Recruiting !!! is the only fix. I've tried and "just can't sell the game" with the current generation of VG players. Even my team mates in other game won't even consider this game. That should say something because we've been playing as a team since the early 1990's.....

There's zero point recruiting if there's nothing to recruit in to. Online games need a community to thrive, and without decent options for a couple friends to group up and participate in, there's just no way anyone will stick around.

I give the players of this game more credit than any others. If there were an open world where we were given the ability to drop a few players out of one side and on to the other, I'm confident that our outfits would keep the fights good. The lack of that ability was always the biggest failing of group que.

Take Planetside 2 for example. The game has its problems. I'm only here because their servers have been a wreck for a month now. But with zero match maker I could take a noob and let him gun in a vehicle, squad up with plenty of fiends, get him in to an outfit, and he'd have a group to call on after just a day in the game, and most importantly something to do with them. Where here your group is just waiting for noobs to stumble in to CW. Hell, my wife has never played a shooter in her life but I get here using an anti-infantry gun in my aircraft and we flew around for hours having a blase. Anything even close to resembling that is completely missing in MWO.

Edited by draiocht, 29 June 2018 - 12:02 PM.
unconstructive, Quote Clean-Up (source error)

[VonBruinwald]

adamts01, on 29 June 2018 - 03:32 AM, said:

No matchmaker, no tiers, just let players drop in to the mode with whatever they want and let players swap sides to make good fights happen, similar to games with private servers.

The problem with this it caters to three types of players:
- ADHD Caffine fuelled kids who have no patience and will inevitably end up becoming...
- Extreme min-maxers, who bring Direstars just so they can score a kill on the first target they see, and will at the first opportunity become..
- Spawn campers who will do nothing but farm kills on disorientated players the moment they drop, and won't care if a dropship kills them after they've put themselves in a positive K;D for the match. And will doubly NOT care if they've ruined someone else's fun in the process.

If you're going to do drop-and-play you're going to have to take a lesson from MechAssault, small teams with a pre-set rosta of stock-mechs that are (relatively) balanced against each other, basically MWO:WC2018 with respawn.

Edit;

Even better, just make MechAssault 3, throw in crossplay with PC and consoles to hook the lite/casual players and inevitablly some will migrate towards the 'hardcore' version, MWO, of course, some MWO players will go over to MA3 but that's the way things go.

Edited by VonBruinwald, 29 June 2018 - 07:10 AM.

[Dragonporn]

Planetside-esque gameplay wouldn't work for several reasons, one of which is maps size (all maps are incomparably small for such a thing) and optimization. Game can barely handle 24 mechs on tiny map already, extend it with respawns, more assets on the field and your system will choke pretty quickly.

That not to mention that PS2 visually looks brutally dated by now and most modern systems can't handle real massive fights on high settings steadily enough, dread to imagine MWO in this state...

Although fixing and overhauling Faction Play, turning it into actually interesting, populated and fun gamemode would be awesome, considering how much potential it holds.

[KoalaBrownie]

adamts01, on 29 June 2018 - 03:32 AM, said:

Combine the dead CW and dead Group Que with Quick Play on some huge maps with tons of players and add new players to the side with less territory.

Pretty sure that Unreal engine can't support the game you're proposing. Your idea would require the game to rebuilt on an entirely different engine.

Edited by KoalaBrownie, 29 June 2018 - 07:44 AM.

[adamts01]

Dragonporn, on 29 June 2018 - 07:20 AM, said:

maps size .....
That not to mention that PS2 visually looks brutally dated by now and most modern systems can't handle real massive fights on high settings steadily enough, dread to imagine MWO in this state...

I did mention that maps would have to be expanded. And you couldn't be farther from the truth about PS2 looking dated. It looks infinitely better than MWO https://www.google.c...iw=1745&bih=861

Part of this is because in-game settings have always been lacking. You can unlock ultra settings that aren't available in-game through the user options file. That game does take quite the machine to max out settings, but you can still play pretty well on gaming laptops or a $600 rig.

VonBruinwald, on 29 June 2018 - 07:05 AM, said:

The problem with this it caters to three types of players:
- ADHD Caffine fuelled kids who have no patience and will inevitably end up becoming...

Semi-open world settings let players play how they want, which is where PS2 succeeds and MWO fails. Group up with another light and back-cap if you want. Group up with some assaults and push the front line if you want. Play fire support if you want. Keep in mind that I'm not proposing anything near the scale or complexity of PS2, just a much larger map with spread out capture points with the flexibility to cater to all types of players at once, all within the same mode. This could be the the single mode to tie group, solo, and CW together. Winning the map could just mean winning the planet, and you could progress across the galaxy after each hour long session. I don't know how many players this engine could handle, but even 24 vs 24 over a massive map would be a monstrous improvement. We haven't had enough players for group que in probably 3 years. And build options are terrible in quick play, as you have a new team every match. It's like playing russian roulette bringing a Narc Raven. It's just so sad how small this game is.

VonBruinwald, on 29 June 2018 - 07:05 AM, said:

- Extreme min-maxers, who bring Direstars just so they can score a kill on the first target they see, and will at the first opportunity become..

Fine. That's exactly what most players do in MWO anyway. Min-maxing is what most of us love about Mechwarrior and the mechlab.

VonBruinwald, on 29 June 2018 - 07:05 AM, said:

- Spawn campers who will do nothing but farm kills on disorientated players the moment they drop, and won't care if a dropship kills them after they've put themselves in a positive K;D for the match. And will doubly NOT care if they've ruined someone else's fun in the process.

Like I said. Each far end could be a base so heavily fortified with AI turrets or dropships that players couldn't be spawn camped.

[SilentScreamer]

adamts01, on 29 June 2018 - 03:32 AM, said:

This is the only salvation for this game. The wait time for matches, disconnects, terrible matchmaking, and lopsided fights have only gotten worse and worse.

Combine the dead CW and dead Group Que with Quick Play on some huge maps with tons of players and add new players to the side with less territory. Let the base on each side of the map be full of so many AI turrets that it can't be camped and let it be the last place that the losing team can regroup for a push. Repair/ream stations would need to be a thing. Lights could always be free and mechs could cost increasing resources based on tonnage.

The playerbase needs to be consolidated, and groups of 2 or 3+ need a fun place to drop for a few an hour or two. There really is no other option other than waiting for the game to continue to wither out and die.

Some good ideas in there. I tried a similar pitch a few years ago. https://mwomercs.com...ctive-war-zone/

The problem is most likely the persistant map/server that would be required.
As KoalaBrownie said, the game engine probably can't support it. Also, PGI polled to reduce gameplay to 8v8 from 12v12 not long ago to improve game performance. We will never se more than 12v12 unless the gameengine is changed/overhauled.

The server for MWO sets up a fresh instance of the map on a server when a game starts, players join, play, then leave and server is closed down. You'd have to tell each new player that joins which trees have been knocked down, which cars have been crush, what turrets are still active and which are destroyed..... That's quite a bit of extra code and bandwidth to keep track of all that stuff. It is already coded (when a player Disconnects then Rejoins a match), but the change would be from "once or twice a match" to " constantly during match." Leaving a server up would be much more taxing and PGI probably hasn't coded the maps to work that way with any efficiency.

Edited by SilentScreamer, 29 June 2018 - 10:38 AM.

[adamts01]

SilentScreamer, on 29 June 2018 - 09:45 AM, said:

As KoalaBrownie said, the game engine probably can't support it. Leaving a server up would be much more taxing and PGI probably hasn't coded the maps to work that way with any efficiency. You'd have to tell each new player that joins which trees have been knocked down, which cars have been crush, what turrets are still active and which are destroyed..... That's quite a bit of extra code and bandwidth to keep track of all that stuff.

None of us know what the server could handle. But I'd be perfectly fine with indestructible turrets guarding the spawn and no destructible terrain if it meant having a decent game mode. I'd settle for MW2 graphics if the gameplay was great. With as empty as everything but Quick Play is, there really isn't much to lose. Anyone who stuck with this game for this long would stay with it till the servers shut down. Other games have been doing drop-in drop-out for a long time. It can't be that taxing. My Arma 3 server cost $15 a month and could handle 30 players plus AI. Planetside handles 1,000+ players at once, and they're probably a comparable size dev team. I'm sure it could happen. It's just this stupid e-sports nonsense this game has pushed for. It got us forever trapped in a simple lobby team death match shooter. I really do hate PGI.

[Tetatae Squawkins]

As much as many of us dream of a larger scale Mechwarrior game where combined arms, objectives, logistics and game world persistence matters. MWO is never going to be that.

[KoalaBrownie]

adamts01, on 29 June 2018 - 10:22 AM, said:

None of us know what the server could handle.

We do know because of the engine that they're using. The Unreal Engine is not made for massive multiplayer encounters, it's for comparatively small games. Just because ARMA has a lot of players doesn't mean anything, ARMA is using an engine that Bohemia Interactive created. Planetside 2 has its own engine as well. Battlefield has Frostbyte.

Remember that the Unreal engine is the engine that Star Citizen discarded because it wasn't capable of creating open world with a large number of players. But if you can point to a game that uses the Unreal engine and creates the sort of game you're looking for feel free to list it. Wikipedia has a list of all the games that use the Unreal 3 engine

Edited by KoalaBrownie, 29 June 2018 - 01:37 PM.

[Bombast]

I personally have zero interest in such a mode, and I find it laughable that you think the creation of a 4th mode would somehow consolidate the playerbase. You can't consolidate with division.

EDIT: Oh. Oh. I missed the part where you called for the elimination of everything. Except for Solaris, the actually dead mode.

Yah, autopass. That's just dumb.

Anastasius Foht, on 29 June 2018 - 04:06 AM, said:

Spawn camping need real fix, its just bad at current state, losing initial fight and here we go.

I used to think that, but now I consider 'spawn camping' to be a feature. If the enemy gets into the position, you lost ages ago anyway, so you may as well get this mess over with fast.

Edited by Bombast, 29 June 2018 - 01:48 PM.

[Antares102]

I am all for drop-in drop-out.
However this would mean some sort of continuous respawn which too many players hate.

[Nema Nabojiv]

Antares102, on 29 June 2018 - 01:50 PM, said:

However this would mean some sort of continuous respawn which too many players hate.

Yeah, I'd love respawn mode without gens, basecamping, and premades. Yet we got solaris and that's probably the last big thing for MWO. GG.

[LordNothing]

wait times are the biggest buzzkill in this game. even just getting into quick play, with a light mech even, seems like its taking way too long.

i remember the good old days of yore when you could join a server, stay as long as you want, respawn when you die, and if you dont like it switch to a different server. the only interruptions were periodic map changes.

unfortunately i think pgi made their bed with match based gameplay. its so ingrained into every aspect of the game that changing it would break every mode there is, or add buckets that we dont need. id like to see a long play format for things like fp or even qp, hour long matches with ingame repair bays, 8 mech drop decks, and no less than a one hour game clock. or just play living legends.

Edited by LordNothing, 29 June 2018 - 03:45 PM.