81 replies to this topic

[Catnium]

Yeah i remember Hawkin alright ... bunch of F,A's
Those were the douchebags that where like HERE IS A SALE..
And i was like OMG PINK HEART CAMO for everybody!! yey!!
And then 3 months later they was all like: OH we are quitting pc and moving to console only...



mother $@$@W$

Edited by Catnium, 29 April 2019 - 05:31 AM.

[Athom83]

Catnium, on 29 April 2019 - 05:28 AM, said:

Yeah i remember Hawkin alright ... bunch of F,A's
Those were the douchebags that where like HERE IS A SALE..
And i was like OMG PINK HEART CAMO for everybody!! yey!!
And then 3 months later they was all like: OH we are quitting pc and moving to console only...
mother $@$@W$

Agreed. While my earlier post seemed to try and defend Hawkin... **** no. The game deserved to die off at the end with terrible direction by the new developers after the original guys were pushed off.

[Bloodwitch]

MeiSooHaityu, on 29 April 2019 - 04:11 AM, said:

If there is a MW:O 2, then I'd imagine that they will make it different and unique enough to drum up interest in it regardless of a privately run server version of MWO: 1.

Doesn't seem like the smartest idea to have an mwo:2 service going while offering an alternative for free.

[R Valentine]

The Hawken debacle was simple, and a symptom of a more pervasive problem that permeates the entire gaming industry: over monetization and release broken/fix later mentality.

Hawken went from a 2012, to a 2013, to a 2014, all the way to 2016 release, never actually being completed as a game. It was one of the first of the major "early access" games, essentially a produce released in a post-alpha(not even beta) state for players to test drive, only they still had to pay money in order to access all of it. It's a cancer that infects even the biggest of big budget games anymore. Fallout 76, Anthem, Battlefield V, even MWO were all released before they were completed, most released before they were even half completed with the promise to release more "content" along the way. The problem is, people don't buy games to have them fixed later. They expect a complete product at the start and the more you sour the milk, the less they drink it. Hawken at least had the benefit of predating the biggest waves of player hatred like the current attitude towards EA and Bethesda, but it still couldn't just be a finished game that was actually released. The fact that the release date kept getting pushed back over and over and yet you could still pay money into the thing as if was released was very telling.

[MeiSooHaityu]

Bloodwitch, on 29 April 2019 - 06:05 AM, said:

Doesn't seem like the smartest idea to have an mwo:2 service going while offering an alternative for free.

For one, if the sequel is better in every way than the original (which clearly, according to this forums posts, wouldn't be difficult), then it will draw a strong crowd regardless. Remember that despite Destiny 1 existing, people were plenty happy enough to go to Destiny 2 when it launched. People will naturally gravitate to a new game regardless.

Also, as a side note to this. MechWarrior: Living Legends existed throughout the entire existence of MW:O (even though the MW:LL team had voluntarily halted development of it for a few years during). MW:O did just fine while LL was a viable option.

In reality, If PGI released MW:O server info for a server side emulator. The crowd of people actually playing it through a private server would be pretty small, and there is a good chance they would be playing both anyway. Account info couldn't be shared, so everyone playing MW:O 1 would have to start from scratch too. It's impact would be minimal at best.

The obligatory...I am not a lawyer, this is not legal advice. Ok, now...

And as I hinted earlier, technically...TECHNICALLY they might have to provide the bare minimal to keep the game going by law. This is something that none of the companies that create "Games as Service" are doing, and I think a much bigger occurrence would have to happen to actually bring this to court and establish a precedence. Essentially, one can ignore the law if they never get called out on it.

Again, I'd refer you to that video by Accursed Farms on YouTube because he is WAY more thorough than I could ever be when it comes to this.

[jss78]

I'm not sure those mistakes apply too well to MWO.

Balance changes -- I just don't see it. When did this really happen in any significant numbers? There's always that small,noisy "YOU NERF MY ROBIT WHY YOU KILL THE GAME" crowd.

Bad MM, again I don't see it. Wargaming is richer then Croesus without ever even having a MM. What MWO has, though rudimentary, is better than that (keeps the T5 novices away from old-timers, at least on a good day).

PGI's kind of an overarching failing has been in game mode development. They never really figured out who the game is for, making this bad compromise that sucks for solos, small groups and big units alike. They ended up spending a lot of money on a mode (FP) that sucks so badly effectively no-one played it. It's always been miserable for small groups, no matter what they play. What we have now is a random queue, where we only play a handful of maps (~half of all maps are in FW, or theoretically but not practically available in Randoms because they're voted out). All the random queue game modes play curiously like a skirmish.

So for all the long development, the effective gameplay diversity is a skirmish on a curiously small number of maps.

That said PGI hasn't done poorly. The core gameplay has always been good, and their arts team has revitalized the whole franchise.

[Koniving]

It doesn't help that cheating....is a lot more prevalent on Hawken, since like very early days.. I loved the training, its exactly what I had described PGI should have done (years before PGI would ever actually make a training scenario; my pitch was a nostalgic MW2 style cheap environment and pegging it as a "virtual reality" or simulator, map, etc.) only months prior.. Played the game, the fast TTK wasn't really for me, but it was part of the flavor along with twitch shooting.

But even in its early days you could get into a match and be killed by someone firing his cannon at the wall.

Came back a few months later and in the second match I played, there was an enemy outside of the map randomly killing players.

Hadn't played it ever again.

Edited by Koniving, 29 April 2019 - 10:16 AM.

[Jman5]

Pain G0D, on 28 April 2019 - 01:26 PM, said:

Never played hawken in my life and what has it to do with MWO ? Was it even a free to play game ?

Way back when, many disgruntled players would passionately insist that everyone is going to leave for Hawken and/or Star Citizen over whatever outrage of the month was happening.

[Bloodwitch]

Jman5, on 29 April 2019 - 11:34 AM, said:

Way back when, many disgruntled players would passionately insist that everyone is going to leave for Hawken and/or Star Citizen over whatever outrage of the month was happening.

https://leaderboard.isengrim.org/stats

Not entirely wrong about it.

[RickySpanish]

Having watched the video, I found it generally to be rather poor. Something about the narrator's usage of grammar irked me, he kept reusing the same words and once I noticed that I begun to notice other quirks that made no sense. A lot of the so called mistakes made by those developers were also made by Piranha, but MWO is still going.

[A Rabid Raccoon With A Shotgun]

Xetelian, on 28 April 2019 - 12:29 PM, said:

Quick video about where Hawken went wrong and how it affected player counts with their changes.


Similarities to MWO.

1; Publisher died
2. Game balance constantly getting revamped making players leave
3. Arena shooter (though hawken also was a class based)
4. Detail customization for your ride locked to individual mechs and not universally unlocked. (like our camo).
5. Horrible match making system
7. Veteran players have advantage of better stats than non-veteran players.

Just a few off the top of my head I didn't view the video more than once and some of these parallels are thin.



Up until the new heat system I had played almost every day. I participated in every event and it was my main game. Now I play once a week with a couple guys and that's about it if I actually bother to show up. Most of the MWO guys i followed on Twitch are playing new games like Apex Legends and other things instead of MWO.

Feeling my passion die is regrettable and the last heat nerf really killed the game for me. I wonder how long until this Youtube channel does a death of a game on MWO.

Speaking as someone who actually played Hawken, was a veteran for a long *** time (6k+ hours logged), what really killed Hawken are as follows

1. Extremely toxic community, if you weren't in the "in crowd" aka, someone who fronted cash for the kickstarter, you were alienated into leaving the game. False hack reports, accusations of distributing hacks, etc, etc anything to make you look like garbage or get you banned.

2. The game could never figure out what it wanted to be, it bounced from arena shooter, to tactical shooter, to MWO like, back to arena shooter, back to sim like, to tactical shooter, to before it was laid to rest a hybrid tactical arena sim shooter.

3. Lack of communication from the developers, Adhesive Games, Reloaded Games, and 505 Games, all of them left players in the dark. Adhesive was the worst with the "Great Silence" as it was known in the community, which was a 2+ year gap between the last patch they done, till the acquisition by Reloaded Games/Gamers First, there was no news, no forum managers, no nothing. Turned out during the silence Adhesive went bankrupt.

4. Changes to game meta on a whim as demanded by players.

5. Over abundant allowance of game config file changes which gave players in the know, a massive advantage over others that didn't. Wanna turn faster, aim steadier, shoot quicker? All of essential settings like that were stored in local configs that were loaded into the server for that players use.

6. None of the developers or publishers advertised the game.

7. The way the cash shop was ran, everything was made exclusive to one mech and one mech only, paint and camo were never account wide, it was only made account wide after players complained enough, even then it saw a rise in per paint/camo price increases.

8. Unless you were very good at the game, the grind for new mechs was extremely slow, slap a couple extra 0's onto every mech here and you got the equivalent grind that took place in Hawken.

9. Outrageous costs for mech packs, the original Nemesis bundle, which gave 3 mechs was priced at $60. That was followed by the Hawken Initiate, Prosk, Mercenary, and G1 Unlock bundles priced at $50, $40, $40, and $100.

10. Favoritism by forum staff and developers, if you were friends with any of the staff, you could get away with murder, nothing would ever happen rules didn't exist for you. Because of this it caused an extreme divide in the community, I actually was witness to the community actually doxing someone once, just for the hell of it, and developers and other moderation staff stood by and did nothing.

[Anjian]

Kiran Yagami, on 29 April 2019 - 06:07 AM, said:

The Hawken debacle was simple, and a symptom of a more pervasive problem that permeates the entire gaming industry: over monetization and release broken/fix later mentality.

Hawken went from a 2012, to a 2013, to a 2014, all the way to 2016 release, never actually being completed as a game. It was one of the first of the major "early access" games, essentially a produce released in a post-alpha(not even beta) state for players to test drive, only they still had to pay money in order to access all of it. It's a cancer that infects even the biggest of big budget games anymore. Fallout 76, Anthem, Battlefield V, even MWO were all released before they were completed, most released before they were even half completed with the promise to release more "content" along the way. The problem is, people don't buy games to have them fixed later. They expect a complete product at the start and the more you sour the milk, the less they drink it. Hawken at least had the benefit of predating the biggest waves of player hatred like the current attitude towards EA and Bethesda, but it still couldn't just be a finished game that was actually released. The fact that the release date kept getting pushed back over and over and yet you could still pay money into the thing as if was released was very telling.

The pervasive problem obviously didn't stop Fortnite and PUBG.

[Y E O N N E]

Koniving, on 29 April 2019 - 10:14 AM, said:

It doesn't help that cheating....is a lot more prevalent on Hawken, since like very early days.. I loved the training, its exactly what I had described PGI should have done (years before PGI would ever actually make a training scenario; my pitch was a nostalgic MW2 style cheap environment and pegging it as a "virtual reality" or simulator, map, etc.) only months prior.. Played the game, the fast TTK wasn't really for me, but it was part of the flavor along with twitch shooting.

But even in its early days you could get into a match and be killed by someone firing his cannon at the wall.

Came back a few months later and in the second match I played, there was an enemy outside of the map randomly killing players.

Hadn't played it ever again.

Hawken's TTK was not really fast, it was actually pretty comparable to MWO's if you look at how long it took two matched players to go from initial contact to a frag, with the caveat that there is no possible way to insta-gib a fresh opponent in Hawken while there is a small possibility to do it in MWO. Not even the Heavy class mechs in Hawken could insta-gib a Scout-class.

By the end, though, they had sped up TTK considerably. Just hose the target with bullets long enough to get out two TOW rockets and gg.

[Mazikar]

I tried to get into that game but it was just not my thing. It screamed console shooter.

[Koniving]

Y E O N N E, on 29 April 2019 - 06:30 PM, said:

Hawken's TTK was not really fast, it was actually pretty comparable to MWO's if you look at how long it took two matched players to go from initial contact to a frag, with the caveat that there is no possible way to insta-gib a fresh opponent in Hawken while there is a small possibility to do it in MWO. Not even the Heavy class mechs in Hawken could insta-gib a Scout-class.

By the end, though, they had sped up TTK considerably. Just hose the target with bullets long enough to get out two TOW rockets and gg.

In 2014 using a scout-class, I would have to disagree. True there wasn't any insta-gibbing, but between being spotted to being dead there was hardly enough time to get into a full sprint (which mind you is almost instant), jump and spin in the air to make a counter shot, before even finishing that maneuver I'd be dead... and never-mind any repair ability, the maps were tiny and the animation could hardly finish before another contender would swing by to strike me even after hiding. It is worth pointing out though, that I was a player that had not levelled out anything, got the base unit and took it to combat., then bought a scout and immediately took it to combat. Likely against people level 20 or however it went.

And while my stats here are marred quite substantially due to years of not giving a ****, being disgusted by meta taking the very soul out of this franchise (MW/BT), etc., I was quite the twitch shooter. A glimpse of it can be seen here within 30 seconds from the start point. The flashed-over-to-scene for comparison of the Gauss Rifle snapshot was to Combat Arms, a twitchy f2p shooter marred heavily by a similar-to-MWO-but-quite-crappier buy-a-weapon [no, seriously not even a pack, buy a weapon, 20 to 30 dollars to unlock a weapon] pay-to-win scheme [all bought weapons are superior to their f2p counterparts, often better animated too] and cheating. In the instant of another video in which it is flashed over to, I used a double barrel shotgun at the feet of an enemy whom evaded it by doing a flying-super-jump (significantly higher than anything a player can normally do) so I immediately swapped to one of my 4 secondaries (yes, four) and shot him out of the air with a headshot on a gun that most complain about because it is incredibly accurate (meaning most of the time the average twitch shooter is gonna miss since there's no "chance" of it going to any pixel but the one its directly on).

My point being I'm not a stranger to twitch shooters and wouldn't want you to think "oh its just because he sucks." Though I do admit I often prefer to play slower moving tankier characters than ultra-fast characters even in said shooters, perhaps because the fast ones don't tend to survive after the first mistake they make. Level one starting scouts did get killed with lightning speed, sadly, against upgraded machines and weaponry.

[Burning2nd]

lets see a abandoned founders account (*because you could not change your name years back)

and up until the psr and weapons change.. The grind was real.. Every day struggling for cbills and what little mech credit you could find... I mean..

always being around 20-30 million.. struggling to get colors, a few heros and a mistakenly bought champion early on....

FOR years grinding.. Doing well having fun..

WEAPON CHANGE: some mechs became useless (*at this point the writing was on the wall, stuff was starting to get dissuaded to the side)

PSR rating : became RICHER then blake went from a few million to a billion plus: mech credit became easy to get.. At this point i just rolled the window down and started tossing cbills out the windows , Like a coal fired mech except i was tossing cbills in to the boiler...

there is litterally nothing left to this game.. Its nothing more then Shooter mech, they have stripped it down to its most basic forum while masking it as events and stats are the only thing left,

Over the last 20 years though ive seen this happen.. with many online games: This will slowly die... and after mw5 comes out.. you can bet your butt you will see half of what we have now, (At least)

if your still spending money on this you have bigger wallet then me.. I stopped spending money on this years years years back, way b4 the psr change... having a hero was special, having a champion showed you bought it.. having colors meant you where pretty serious: there is literally nothing special left to this game... For the exception of pulling out a classic mech that is in the rear of your drop ship with a classic build and classic load out,

It feels good to pull out a old dragon from the dragon bowling days Or the original rain maker

Ive loved mechwarrior since 1988

some things die slow

[Khobai]

Bloodwitch, on 29 April 2019 - 06:05 AM, said:

Doesn't seem like the smartest idea to have an mwo:2 service going while offering an alternative for free.

doesnt seem like the smartest idea to shut down mwo:1 then charge money for the same exact things in mwo:2 that people already paid for in mwo:1 either.

if PGI is going to do that they need to leave mwo:1 running. otherwise its going to piss a bunch of people off who are heavily invested in mwo:1.

Edited by Khobai, 30 April 2019 - 01:28 AM.

[Kanil]

Khobai, on 30 April 2019 - 01:27 AM, said:

doesnt seem like the smartest idea to shut down mwo:1 then charge money for the same exact things in mwo:2 that people already paid for in mwo:1 either.

if PGI is going to do that they need to leave mwo:1 running. otherwise its going to piss a bunch of people off who are heavily invested in mwo:1.

Given that people complain endlessly about the dwindling playerbase right now, I can't imagine PGI would have to leave the MWO servers up post-MWO2 for more than a month or two.

Those "heavily invested" players will just be pissed off either way, either about having to switch, or about PGI stealing all the players.

[General Solo]

MWO still dieing since 2012

[General Solo]

Mystere, on 28 April 2019 - 12:50 PM, said:

If people think the matchmaker is at the top of the list of MWO's problems, then there really is nothing else left to say. <shrugs>

Well a lot of game modes (FW, Group Queue, Solaris) are not very popular and thus not as well populated, IMO due to skill gap and I believe and am of the opinion sub optimal match maker/ or lack of match maker are the main cause.

When I paid money for this game in 2012 I paid for an arena shooter with battlemechs (Mech Quake).
And Im still playing an arena shooter with battlemechs so Im not disappointed.

Constant nerfing, yeah but I can understand PGI targeting the lowest common denominator to increase its player base. So less Mechquake but.....its business nuthing personal

My biggest disappointment is the consistency of my team mates quality, makes me sad when focus fire is so rare. And this situation is due to match maker.

IMO

Hawken?
Never tried it, aint got time for two stompy giant robot games.

Edited by OZHomerOZ, 30 April 2019 - 02:45 AM.