159 replies to this topic

[Lightfoot]

November11th, on 03 December 2018 - 01:28 AM, said:

for some reason i was thinkig it was catalyst game labs. I say we band together and call microsoft out about what PGI is doing to the franchise.

Microsoft sat on MechWarrior like an 800 pound gorilla for 10 years. Had no plan of resurrecting MechWarrior for PC or XBox and were happy to just own it and do nothing more with it.

My advice is make 4 bigger maps for Solaris 7, like twice as large would be sufficient to make the mechs roar. I like Solaris 7 okay, but the constant brawling gets stale. Bigger maps would create a higher level of tactics. Could be more fun.

.............. oh yes, find a way to remove the Gauss Rifle charge-up and still keep the weapon balanced. Or modify the charge-up so it is less of a gimmick. It's just one of those PIA things that relegates the Gauss to fewer players and fewer mechs. (IMHO)

Edited by Lightfoot, 03 December 2018 - 06:39 AM.

[Nightbird]

PGI since the beginning should have created a section in the forums for ideas that are being considered. All proponents and detractors can present their cases. If nothing else, it's a good idea of brainstorming and creating a list of pros and cons.

The worst thing that can happen is listening to influencers without debate, since they don't necessarily be able to defend their ideas and some common sense arguments could cut them apart. Better to save a ton of money you can't afford to waste.

To prevent spamming, limit the number of posts per person to 1 per thread there.

[Davers]

Wow, is PGI really pulling out the old "we want to communicate better" card? Must need to finish strong for the end of the year.

[TheCaptainJZ]

I think it's clear there is a lack of vision or direction for MWO. If the devs aren't excited about it at their own event, we shouldn't be either.

And I don't see much excitement for MW5 either so that doesn't bode well.

Edited by TheCaptainJZ, 03 December 2018 - 08:43 AM.

[Jon Gotham]

Grumpy Old Man, on 03 December 2018 - 02:54 AM, said:

Since people disagree on pretty much every topic, it is physically impossible to "just listen to the community".

You can't have a community built on a group of people all thinking super solo.

[Grus]

@title thier own ecochamber?

They can listen till the cows come home but if they dont communicate with said community then whats the point?

[S 0 L E N Y A]

Grus, on 03 December 2018 - 10:16 AM, said:

@title thier own ecochamber?

They can listen till the cows come home but if they dont communicate with said community then whats the point?

Also this

Also listening to the community is not the same thing as being responsive to the community. Further implicit in all of this is general competence, but that is a different topic altogether.

[LordNothing]

i remember in some older games actually having technical discussions with their programmers and technical artists. these kind of things promoted confidence in the company. you got a sense that they knew what they were doing and more importantly that they cared about the game. id love to see something like that from pgi.

when pgi talks about anything, it seems like they dont know what they are doing. i dont get any sense of them having the skills needed to make a game. it seems like they use a lot of words to say absolutely nothing.

Edited by LordNothing, 03 December 2018 - 02:13 PM.

[Alan Hicks]

To whoever they listen, the game progression and its state has shown those are obviously not the appropriate people to focus their attention.

Since PGI developed MWO, they don't only need to listen to other sources, but additionally have the right ideas to make it better.

Anyway, we saw results speak for themselves: the game population went down and dwindles...

[Konrad]

Totally agree. I was a squirrel. We worked hard to assist in the game. Not often were we listened to. In fact several of my suggestions are in game. That took years. And certainly it wasn't a result of suggestion.

I haven't logged into MWO in a long time.

That said. I am excited for MW5. It does feel like the MechWarrior experience I am looking for.

Edited by Konrad, 03 December 2018 - 03:00 PM.

[JediPanther]

Who ever buys the ultimate tier mech packs monthly is who they listen to. It's certainly no one that posts in these fourums or to russ' twit account. Pretty sure the top mwo teams of which there around what? Three? They have to have 'something' to do for their own event besides just get drunk,mumble something something notes..tired...list...something...buy a mechpack...while forced to do their one hour made up presentation. Such a shame three people make the whole rest of pgi that work their asses off look like they work for one of the poorest ways to run a game development studio.

Pgi is carried 95% of the time by their art dept and customer support staff.

[UnofficialOperator]

As long as they stop listening to bad pilots.

Like that guy who had those rows of porn tabs.

[Chris Lowrey]

So had my flight back home from Vancouver today and just woke up from a long nap after a very long Sunday which included an early morning face to face round table with a handful of players from our finalist teams all the way to pitching in for a bit in breaking down the convention itself with Bandit, MDM Zero, BB, and a handful of other co-workers and volunteers into the early morning. So this is going to be a fairly brief post for now that may not cover all of the points that people will want to hear. But I'll come back in tomorrow when I have a bit more energy and pick up from there where I can.

Anyways, the short answer to the OP's comment is that we listen to everyone. There are no favorites when it comes to player feedback. Just because someone is not at a certain skill level does not make their own personal impressions invalid from their own individual perspective.

Slightly more complex answer: At the end of the day the systems within MWO have to accommodate Solo play, Group Play, Faction Play, Solaris Play, and Comp Play all under one unified game system. While some changes can universally improve things, more often then not, doing things to improve the outlook for one group can often negatively impact another. We listen to all forms of feedback from the forums, tickets sent through our support e-mails, personal interactions through streams or talking with anyone in-person at Mech_Con to get the opinions of all parties and then discuss internally where we see the red flags in the feedback we get and if this is the design intent behind how certain things are supposed to work.

As I have said in the past when Solaris was released, we treat Solo, Group, and Competitive Play as our balance "anchors" for a vast majority of the weapon / Mech / Equipment tuning we do in MWO, but this dose not mean we can ignore feedback from other aspects of the game to ensure that critical issues in those modes don't go overlooked. And its only by listening to the greater whole that we can help both identify and prioritize potential things to what we internally wish to see improved.

I'll have to leave it at that for now. I'll swing by here tomorrow after I recover a bit more from the long weekend.

[Tiewolf]

To the people buying mechpacks?
To the comp players?
To the average player?
To the silent majority?
To the new players?
To QP player or FW players?
To unit members or solo pugs?

Depending on the player group you ask you can get any result. But one thing is sure - at least one group of the player population will be dissatisfied with any decision made by PGI.

Honestly I think PGI made this no clue show up on purpose, so that they didn`t have to anounce anything tangible. Now nobody can blame them for anything and if you listend to Russ closely: "MWO is a very mature game..." you could get the impression that there is no interest in MWO at all and is just still around because pgi got some major problems with development of MW5.

[MW Waldorf Statler]

You will make a game for all ...you dont have a game ...only a patchwork idea factory

Edited by Old MW4 Ranger, 04 December 2018 - 12:55 AM.

[Wil McCullough]

Chris's answer is great for pr but terrible from a balance standpoint.

You shouldn't balance for "everyone". That's a recipe for failure. It's like a marketer saying "my target audience is everybody". No one gets what they want and no one ends up happy. That is why there's so much salt.on the forums and players leaving faster than new ones come in.

Unless of course you only listen to all but act on the opinions of a few.

[MW Waldorf Statler]

Thats the problem since the day as russ say ..the old founder from mwo not longer the target group ,now the esport fration we will bring to mwo ...and nearbye we make the new transverse game ...A ship thats not have a
Habour or course ...

Edited by Old MW4 Ranger, 04 December 2018 - 04:58 AM.

[Bud Crue]

Chris Lowrey, on 03 December 2018 - 10:56 PM, said:

As I have said in the past when Solaris was released, we treat Solo, Group, and Competitive Play as our balance "anchors" for a vast majority of the weapon / Mech / Equipment tuning we do in MWO, but this dose not mean we can ignore feedback from other aspects of the game to ensure that critical issues in those modes don't go overlooked. And its only by listening to the greater whole that we can help both identify and prioritize potential things to what we internally wish to see improved.

I hope you are just trying to be politically correct with the we listen to everyone line, because it is a recipie for disaster. Trying to listen to everyone in a crowd and all you will hear is noise. And this community is one hell of a noisy crowd.

You may “listen” to all input equally, but you obviously have to decide to whom you are going to be responsive too and that implicitly means you are going to have to ignore -at least perceptively so- the feedback from at least some part of that “greater whole” you mention, and that’s fine. Own that.

Let’s look at an example:
When you guys buffed the HGR range, you specifically stated that the range buff was in direct response to input from competitive players. Yet there are dozens of comments on these forums (from even before that buff) from all sorts of players asserting that dual HGR builds are OP and need a nerf, etc. You may have listened and contine to listen to both of these points of view, but obviously and empirically you are ignoring the feedback of one.

Good on ya. Do this more. Pick an audience to whom you wish to cater to and listen to them. Don’t do what you guys have historically done with CW and end up with something no one is really happy with. Instead listen to those who understand the issue and ignore the rest. Alas, I don’t think you guys “listen” to any particular part of the community let alone the whole community as you and Russ have stated (I suspect you listen to whatever you think is right and to hell with what the community thinks...again see the state CW and the written record as to how it got there for example), but if you do, I sure hope for the sake of the game’s future that you are being more selective than you are insisting above.

[Jonathan8883]

There were two things I wanted to see announced at MechCon:
1) A matchmaker/PSR revamp and fix for Quick Play. I believe that 80%+ of MWO drops are QP; if so, this is where the bulk of your attention should be focused (sorry Ash). Unbalanced match assignments kill fun. There are some of us who do not belong in T1 and who don't want to be there (it's not fun to be the team potato, or alternatively to be on a team of potatoes). My wait time in queue for matches is usually less than 10 seconds, so there's room for changes to be made without causing undue wait times, at least in the time zones I know.
2) A new map or two. I've heard they are expensive, but maps are the content that other content (mechs) are played on. We like new scenery from time to time. Some of the FP maps are abominable to play on (caustic, boreal vault), so perhaps hit two birds with one stone by fixing the FP maps and making a QP-compatible fork at the same time.

and (bonus) fixing S7 by letting someone join multiple queues at a time instead of having to guess at which one might have someone join.

Instead, we got "I'm too tired to print out a list of everything I said I'd been working on, sorry." This is partly on Paul, and partly on Russ as a management and preparation failure. It's a pretty epic failure that's not going to go away though, as this is the ONE presentation a year that the MWO team gets to make direct to fans.

Edited by Jonathan8883, 04 December 2018 - 05:53 AM.

[Bud Crue]

Jonathan8883, on 04 December 2018 - 05:50 AM, said:

There were two things I wanted to see announced at MechCon:
1) A matchmaker/PSR revamp and fix for Quick Play. I believe that 80%+ of MWO drops are QP; if so, this is where the bulk of your attention should be focused (sorry Ash). Unbalanced match assignments kill fun. There are some of us who do not belong in T1 and who don't want to be there (it's not fun to be the team potato, or alternatively to be on a team of potatoes). My wait time in queue for matches is usually less than 10 seconds, so there's room for changes to be made without causing undue wait times, at least in the time zones I know.
2) A new map or two. I've heard they are expensive, but maps are the content that other content (mechs) are played on. We like new scenery from time to time. Some of the FP maps are abominable to play on (caustic, boreal vault), so perhaps hit two birds with one stone by fixing the FP maps and making a QP-compatible fork at the same time.

and (bonus) fixing S7 by letting someone join multiple queues at a time instead of having to guess at which one might have someone join.

My expectations were far lower. I expected an Faction Play 5.0 announcement based on Paul’s FP thread, not a big change but at least it would be something. I expected the new mechpack. And I had hoped for a little more clarity as to how PGI intended to keep folks interested in MWO as a whole in the face of their obvious emphasis on MW5, and so expected a presentation with a few bones thrown and promises for the future (maybe a new map concept slide show, some new mode for solaris proposed (maybe 4v4 and dump scouting for example). Well. We got a new mechpack. So 1 out of three.