78 replies to this topic

[Bud Crue]

Sigh.

I’ll bite:

1) PSR/Tier system.
Paul once asserted that this is working as intended, as it is only intended to keep truly new players away from veteran players (or something to that effect). The resultant system, allows fairly incompetent players such as myself to reach tier 1, and stay there, despite consistently mediocre performance. That is a recipie for pissing off the truly competitive folks who want, well, competition.; and pissing off the mediocre players who have a low tolerance for being farmed. Not exactly a great way to build a divers community of happy players and customers.

2) The lie of balance.
PGI asserts from time to time that they make changes to mechs, weapons, underlying mechanics, etc. for the purpose of addressing perceived over performance, perceived under performance, to meet “internally established target values”, to “establish a base line of performance”, etc. Yet they have never shared their threshold values, their criteria for what they find to be acceptable performance differences or even bothered to explain what exactly balance means or if it is even relevant to variants, chassis, weight classes tech differences onis vs battlemechs, or any other criteria.

As part of this fiction, the devs regularly assert that “balance is the best it has ever been” but then they give us month after month of changes where anyone playing, even a little, can empirically observe that balance (whatever that may be) is most certainly NOT better than it was a month ago, a year ago, last Tuesday.

All this does is make people frustrated or outright angry. We buy your Kodiak, then you break it (along with everything else) and tell us it is for the sake of “balance”. Yet oddly enough, ext month there is a new mech called the MCII-B that will be available which shockingly can do exactly what your now nerfed mech used to do, but do it better! Never you mind that in a few months we will be reassessing our “internally established target values” and will shockingly conclude that yep, for the sake of balance that new mech needs a good smack with the nerf bat. The best part is, is that that will be just one thing we hurt. So if it isn’t that mech, it will be something else. Whatever that process is, it’s not “balance” and you telling us it is, is either lying or incompetence. Illustrations either of those things to your customers and eventually they wil recognize your conduct as one or the other and then even the most dedicated ones will be driven away.

3) Failure of Vision.
Mechwarrior Online A Battletech game! Join community warfare and be immersed in the rich battletech universe and rewrite the history of the Inner Sphere! Those were once phrases PGI actively touted as the core basis of the game. So too: Mechwarrior Online, a thinking mans’s shooter! Mechwarrior Online the highest skill tournament in E-sports! Mechwarrior Online Solaris 7!
Mechwarrior Online...quick play is just a place holder. Remember that one?

By failing to provide its audience with a clear and consistent vision of what they want the game to be, PGI has drawn in a wide variety of folks with preconceived notions, notions which PGI encourages with its diverse and ever changing emphasis, and then disappoints many if not all of those folks when they decide to refocus on some tangential aspect of the game that convinces portions of their audience that PGI doesn’t care about what that audience came to the game in the first place for. And they keep doing it.

4)Lack of openness
From the transverse days on down, PGI has failed to be upfront with its players and customers. NGNG podcasts and town halls where they field softball questions, round tables where they all but ignore what is being said, to posts like those related to the recent PTS where they make broad almost meaningless statements of intent. This obtuseness just shows a lack of faith in its community, and it comes off occasionally as absurd but more often as contemptuous. There should be no surprise here that when you exhibit such traits to your customers, that those customers will turn away.

There are other things too that PGI does or does not do that I think have directly or indirectly kept their active player numbers trending downward for the last 2 years, but I think the above is enough to mention for now. What I don’t think is a problem is the primitive nature of the game. This IP has a dedicated base who just want BT based mechporn and a competently provide place to play with it and will put up with antiquated graphics, code glitches, and other things related to cryengine and its implementation. Sorry for all the typos, this was straight up stream of consciousness.

[Tetatae Squawkins]

PGI never really cared about this game. They wanted to make MW5 and this was a means to an end.

[Alexandra Hekmatyar]

For me I did quit because the Lurms, it was already terrible before the last patch but it just became more and more after the patch.
Teamies bringing them, enemies bringing them heck even the 'elitists' are bringing them it just became a cesspool of annoying and boring gameplay, and I'm just sick of it.
And the waiting to get a match in faction play takes just too long for inner sphere loyalists.

[Ken Harkin]

I play.
I enjoy it.
This community is poison.

[SpessMarine]

Tetatae Squawkins, on 02 August 2018 - 04:48 AM, said:

PGI never really cared about this game. They wanted to make MW5 and this was a means to an end.

Let's hope so. Convention holds that you don't prepare for the big game by screwing up in practice for 5 years.

[Bud Crue]

Ken Harkin, on 02 August 2018 - 04:51 AM, said:

I play.
I enjoy it.

Me too.

But if the question is why the game is dying (25 months and the current and new player numbers are still trending downward), I think we have to look beyond the mere possibility that the community is toxic as the prime driver of that trend (even if I agreed with that, which I don’t). After all, if folks like you and I still enjoy playing the game...and presumably playing it within that community, it can’t just be the toxicity of the community driving that downward trend. Something else must be pushing those numbers down. I just think PGI’s conduct toward that community and toward development of the game is a larger factor than any that the community could possibly be responsible for.

[razenWing]

Look, the game is like 5 billion years old. Even if PGI did everything right up to this point, it's rare for a niche franchise to remain relevant after year 2-3 at best. The fact that this many loyal fans stuck around despite all the WRONG choices kinda shows the commitment of BTech/MW franchise fans (like me!)

One could obviously argue that had the game made all the RIGHT choices, would the decline be slower? Or the drop from apex be a lot higher to start with? All of that is true. But none the less, this is a game 5-6 years in the making, made all sorts of blunders, and honestly have no moved on from the shooty mcshooty mode.

Which again, I have to stress how remarkable this is. Look at all modern PVP games from various genre, MOBA, Last Man Standing Shooters, Arena Shooters (like Overwatch), they all attempt to add to the complexity of their games by having players do more or different stuff all the time so that people don't get bored.

But straight up PVP games like Depth, Last Light (or whatever that zombie game is called), and the likes all gained massive following in the beginning but are all but dead at this point.

Well, that's all there's really to say.

[Dark Wooki33 IIC]

I quit for being a slow learner ...

Remember the Long Tom? People quit saying the developer was clueless ... damn right.

And it took me years to get to this conlusion.

A lot that went bad was somewhat "forgivable" (engine desync,volumetric scaling, we wanted it. We wanted mechs with smaller engines to be less painfull to pilot, we wanted some assaults/heavy mechs to be smaller, they delivered, in their unique way.)...

Then these ******* used their time/energy to tinker around with energydraw to fix things that werent broken.

We wanted our monthly dose of mechporn (they delivered), maps (just to keep us intrested, but a ******* joke, if you think about it from todays perspective), fresh gamemodes(with two of them beeing awefull) and some imersion(some mechpacks had flavourtexts ).

Not to mention the balancing approaches ... Poptarting,Lpl,spl,erppc,erppc/gauss alot of fun stuff disapeared.

Broken promises about factionplay, time and time again.

Solaris, again wasted time on something nobody really wanted.

This years tournament ... stock mechs and ammo buffs.

Boring gameplay in general due to lrms (that got the nice velocity buff (that was needed), the ammobuff to make shitmechs viable and as icing on the cake less heat for their launchers) and bad mm/lack of players.

And the reaction of the developer to the unfun state of the game was?
"We concluded that balance is off. too many people are running laservom and we have these 2 outlier mechs (with one we came up ourselfs to sell them like crack). And now we are going to **** you guys in the face and say its chocolate."

It was simply to much **** they piled up lately, not even with the benefit of the doubt or the fond memories ... it simply was not tolerable anymore for me.

They understand nothing.

[Pain G0D]

Sure genius , the games dying , that's why there is a vapour eagle to early adopt and will only be available in 4 months ....

[Tetatae Squawkins]

Pain G0D, on 02 August 2018 - 05:32 AM, said:

Sure genius , the games dying , that's why there is a vapour eagle to early adopt and will only be available in 4 months ....

Yeah why would a company keep taking peoples money if things are going badly. That's absurd.

[Lt Blackthorn]

Bud Crue, on 02 August 2018 - 04:41 AM, said:

Sigh.

I’ll bite:

1) PSR/Tier system.
Paul once asserted that this is working as intended, as it is only intended to keep truly new players away from veteran players (or something to that effect). The resultant system, allows fairly incompetent players such as myself to reach tier 1, and stay there, despite consistently mediocre performance. That is a recipie for pissing off the truly competitive folks who want, well, competition.; and pissing off the mediocre players who have a low tolerance for being farmed. Not exactly a great way to build a divers community of happy players and customers.

2) The lie of balance.
PGI asserts from time to time that they make changes to mechs, weapons, underlying mechanics, etc. for the purpose of addressing perceived over performance, perceived under performance, to meet “internally established target values”, to “establish a base line of performance”, etc. Yet they have never shared their threshold values, their criteria for what they find to be acceptable performance differences or even bothered to explain what exactly balance means or if it is even relevant to variants, chassis, weight classes tech differences onis vs battlemechs, or any other criteria.

As part of this fiction, the devs regularly assert that “balance is the best it has ever been” but then they give us month after month of changes where anyone playing, even a little, can empirically observe that balance (whatever that may be) is most certainly NOT better than it was a month ago, a year ago, last Tuesday.

All this does is make people frustrated or outright angry. We buy your Kodiak, then you break it (along with everything else) and tell us it is for the sake of “balance”. Yet oddly enough, ext month there is a new mech called the MCII-B that will be available which shockingly can do exactly what your now nerfed mech used to do, but do it better! Never you mind that in a few months we will be reassessing our “internally established target values” and will shockingly conclude that yep, for the sake of balance that new mech needs a good smack with the nerf bat. The best part is, is that that will be just one thing we hurt. So if it isn’t that mech, it will be something else. Whatever that process is, it’s not “balance” and you telling us it is, is either lying or incompetence. Illustrations either of those things to your customers and eventually they wil recognize your conduct as one or the other and then even the most dedicated ones will be driven away.

3) Failure of Vision.
Mechwarrior Online A Battletech game! Join community warfare and be immersed in the rich battletech universe and rewrite the history of the Inner Sphere! Those were once phrases PGI actively touted as the core basis of the game. So too: Mechwarrior Online, a thinking mans’s shooter! Mechwarrior Online the highest skill tournament in E-sports! Mechwarrior Online Solaris 7!
Mechwarrior Online...quick play is just a place holder. Remember that one?

By failing to provide its audience with a clear and consistent vision of what they want the game to be, PGI has drawn in a wide variety of folks with preconceived notions, notions which PGI encourages with its diverse and ever changing emphasis, and then disappoints many if not all of those folks when they decide to refocus on some tangential aspect of the game that convinces portions of their audience that PGI doesn’t care about what that audience came to the game in the first place for. And they keep doing it.

4)Lack of openness
From the transverse days on down, PGI has failed to be upfront with its players and customers. NGNG podcasts and town halls where they field softball questions, round tables where they all but ignore what is being said, to posts like those related to the recent PTS where they make broad almost meaningless statements of intent. This obtuseness just shows a lack of faith in its community, and it comes off occasionally as absurd but more often as contemptuous. There should be no surprise here that when you exhibit such traits to your customers, that those customers will turn away.

There are other things too that PGI does or does not do that I think have directly or indirectly kept their active player numbers trending downward for the last 2 years, but I think the above is enough to mention for now. What I don’t think is a problem is the primitive nature of the game. This IP has a dedicated base who just want BT based mechporn and a competently provide place to play with it and will put up with antiquated graphics, code glitches, and other things related to cryengine and its implementation. Sorry for all the typos, this was straight up stream of consciousness.

tl/dr PGI done ****ed up and they almost certainly won't un**** things with the current troika of incompetence at the helm

[The Teddy Bear]

I quit in early phase 3. The slaughter of teams and solos was real and I was just too soft to continue. After that I still play a few qp games here and there, mostly in between other games as I am right now. So I just bought myself an MCII-B and thought I will skill it up in the old fashion way for a change, instead of using the shortcuts availiable for some.

If we look at the latest years develpment in the game I believe the major ones have been comp play and solaris. I will do some guessing here that comp play would probably not attract more than max 10% of the player base. Solaris probably not more than 20% of the player base. This is most likely a very generous estimation. Seeing it in this perspective the majority of the players have not seen any real development other than a couple of maps and a few new mechs for a long long time.

[GBxGhostRyder]

0Carbon0, on 02 August 2018 - 01:05 AM, said:

Before the LURM patch, I used to get matches until 5AM EST constantly in the group queue. Now, I can wait an hour in the queue for nothing.

I don't really care about the LURM buff, but its obviously having a negative effect on the population. PGI needs to do something about this.

The reason MWO is dying is 2 Jr Wannabe Devs are running it C&P and PGI wont listen to any real reason on game development from there community.

By the way MW5 will flop hard just like Solaris has because PGI/Devs/staff still don't understand this game IP and probably never will.


And the stupid thing is all they have to do is listen to there community on how best to fix this game Starting with Social aspects long over due for 5 years and make the game fun and retain players on one aspect and competitive on the other for FP and comp then get rid of all the hackers and exploiters.

P.S and for the love of god fix Solaris right starting by Divisions by Chassis groups not mixed BS like lights VS all other chassis groups.

Edited by GBxGhostRyder, 02 August 2018 - 07:34 AM.

[JediPanther]

Simple. Pgi keeps adding such fun and varied game modes while abandoning ones they've already added as they nerf mechs like the Jenner along with the weapon nerfs that would incur age diversity of weapon load outs. Also there is no focus on team play any more since pgi focused on 1 vs 1 and 2 vs 2 solaris even rebranding the game. QP is nothing more than you vs them either using meta mechs or troll-for-fun mech builds.

[Tom Sawyer]

I'm not dead yet, I want to go home!

[Asym]

Bud Crue, on 02 August 2018 - 04:41 AM, said:

Sigh.

I’ll bite:

1) PSR/Tier system.
Paul once asserted that this is working as intended, as it is only intended to keep truly new players away from veteran players (or something to that effect). The resultant system, allows fairly incompetent players such as myself to reach tier 1, and stay there, despite consistently mediocre performance. That is a recipie for pissing off the truly competitive folks who want, well, competition.; and pissing off the mediocre players who have a low tolerance for being farmed. Not exactly a great way to build a divers community of happy players and customers.

2) The lie of balance.
PGI asserts from time to time that they make changes to mechs, weapons, underlying mechanics, etc. for the purpose of addressing perceived over performance, perceived under performance, to meet “internally established target values”, to “establish a base line of performance”, etc. Yet they have never shared their threshold values, their criteria for what they find to be acceptable performance differences or even bothered to explain what exactly balance means or if it is even relevant to variants, chassis, weight classes tech differences onis vs battlemechs, or any other criteria.

As part of this fiction, the devs regularly assert that “balance is the best it has ever been” but then they give us month after month of changes where anyone playing, even a little, can empirically observe that balance (whatever that may be) is most certainly NOT better than it was a month ago, a year ago, last Tuesday.

All this does is make people frustrated or outright angry. We buy your Kodiak, then you break it (along with everything else) and tell us it is for the sake of “balance”. Yet oddly enough, ext month there is a new mech called the MCII-B that will be available which shockingly can do exactly what your now nerfed mech used to do, but do it better! Never you mind that in a few months we will be reassessing our “internally established target values” and will shockingly conclude that yep, for the sake of balance that new mech needs a good smack with the nerf bat. The best part is, is that that will be just one thing we hurt. So if it isn’t that mech, it will be something else. Whatever that process is, it’s not “balance” and you telling us it is, is either lying or incompetence. Illustrations either of those things to your customers and eventually they wil recognize your conduct as one or the other and then even the most dedicated ones will be driven away.

3) Failure of Vision.
Mechwarrior Online A Battletech game! Join community warfare and be immersed in the rich battletech universe and rewrite the history of the Inner Sphere! Those were once phrases PGI actively touted as the core basis of the game. So too: Mechwarrior Online, a thinking mans’s shooter! Mechwarrior Online the highest skill tournament in E-sports! Mechwarrior Online Solaris 7!
Mechwarrior Online...quick play is just a place holder. Remember that one?

By failing to provide its audience with a clear and consistent vision of what they want the game to be, PGI has drawn in a wide variety of folks with preconceived notions, notions which PGI encourages with its diverse and ever changing emphasis, and then disappoints many if not all of those folks when they decide to refocus on some tangential aspect of the game that convinces portions of their audience that PGI doesn’t care about what that audience came to the game in the first place for. And they keep doing it.

4)Lack of openness
From the transverse days on down, PGI has failed to be upfront with its players and customers. NGNG podcasts and town halls where they field softball questions, round tables where they all but ignore what is being said, to posts like those related to the recent PTS where they make broad almost meaningless statements of intent. This obtuseness just shows a lack of faith in its community, and it comes off occasionally as absurd but more often as contemptuous. There should be no surprise here that when you exhibit such traits to your customers, that those customers will turn away.

There are other things too that PGI does or does not do that I think have directly or indirectly kept their active player numbers trending downward for the last 2 years, but I think the above is enough to mention for now. What I don’t think is a problem is the primitive nature of the game. This IP has a dedicated base who just want BT based mechporn and a competently provide place to play with it and will put up with antiquated graphics, code glitches, and other things related to cryengine and its implementation. Sorry for all the typos, this was straight up stream of consciousness.

BINGO ! An absolute winner ! TARGET CEASE FIRE.....

PGI bit off more than it could chew from the very beginning.... Even with terrible reviews at inception, it takes "an enlightened and creative" design team to pull off rendering a single player story line game into an open, multi-player arcade FPS....

I suspect they started that way and quickly, lost control....because of huge expanse non-single player games require???

Good thread....really well said.

[n8d0g]

I posted somethign similar on reddit.

But now is a really tough time to be a F2P game, with the rise Fortnite (and the whole genre of Battle Royale in general), the F2P market is becoming very crowded. Additionally World of Tanks has improved greatly over the last few years.

The game is 3 years old, there's no real innovation. As a new player coming in, Faction War is still a massive grind away to get 4 mechs, Solaris didnt make any sense. And Im not sure what the Comp tab even is? Someone explained to me that it's a competitive mode for pre-arranged teams, but it would make sense to merge Faction and Comp together and not split the player base.

Its not like World of Tanks where the game has a big competitive scene. Which actually in this case is a good thing, because I hate Wargaming's tier system. MWO is the my fav F2P game, enough for me to actually go buy some Hero mechs during the last sale.


From my limited time here, the game is on the decline because its getting old without getting anything new that's worth playing. I'm sure some of the nerfs may have driven people away, but I get the impression that those numbers may in fact be exaggerated . Indirectly it might be true, MWO is a reasonable complex game, any most F2P players are not into complex experiences; they just want a free game that's fun. < This might be the biggest reason why its never really grown.

[Teenage Mutant Ninja Urbie]

Alexandra Hekmatyar, on 02 August 2018 - 04:49 AM, said:

For me I did quit because the Lurms, it was already terrible before the last patch but it just became more and more after the patch.
Teamies bringing them, enemies bringing them heck even the 'elitists' are bringing them it just became a cesspool of annoying and boring gameplay, and I'm just sick of it.
And the waiting to get a match in faction play takes just too long for inner sphere loyalists.

^this

I blame PGI for A LOT of things. however, the lurmtarding is totally on the playerbase.
upt to a few months ago everybody in fw sneered at puggies bringing lurms, not doing their share and so on.
for the most part that was rude, but right.

when I add together the dozen or so fw-drops I did in the last few days - nearly ALL off them had 1, most times 2, premade teams - and they're all lurm-trolling.

few months ago we had a little, yet friendly fw-community. now all that is left is bitterness and trolling each other with lurms.
I remember having fun in fw, it's what kept me in the game the last 2 years. nearly every match was fun, no matter if win or defeat.
today I really wanna puke even thinking about dropping once more on caustic, polar or whatnot.

and it's not PGIs fault. yes, they buffed the lurms to obscene levels. yet.. YOU are the ones trolling each other with em.
grown ups treating each others like that - a new low in mwo-fw, and no game anymore I enjoy.

cu folks, and enjoy your lurm-fish.

[MechaBattler]

It's end of the world because they buffed LRMs a bit? Were you here for the real Lurmgeddon? When they head shotting people because of overlapping damage?

We've been dying for years here. Ain't nothing new. Difference is now the nerfs are targeting Clans only. So it's the end of the world!

[Kubernetes]

People have lost faith that PGI will ever make this game better. The same issues that existed 2-3 years ago still exist today. Think of all the things promised (eg, real FW, IK) and all the resources wasted on nonsense (Solaris, ED, Long Tom). AFAIK these guys just look at the numbers but never actually play the game. I have an absurd number of matches played, yet I've seen an actual PGI tag in game less than a dozen times. Blows my mind. PGI's leadership should have been replaced years ago.