86 replies to this topic

[Xetelian]

WarHippy, on 01 June 2019 - 08:53 PM, said:

To be fair you are both not wrong. Its true PGI has made a lot of mistakes, but it also true that you seem to have your head shoved rather firmly up your rear end. If this is truly the end so be it. We had seven years of giant stompy robots, and while it would have been nice for things to have lasted longer and been done better what we got wasn't exactly all bad either. It is what it is.

I quit after phoenix dropped and missed clan wave one (I played a few games, saw how utterly broken the game was by the addition of extreme range high damage alphas) and played League of Legends for over 3000 matches (at 25-60 minutes each) and ran a guild of 100 players, with new players coming in all the time and spent a lot of time teaching people how to last hit mobs and jungle. Which means I played a lot of support and lost a butt load of games. I have EVERY champion released up to the middle of 2014 when I quit. I played some WoW and I played a few other things then came back to MWO and had my Founders AS7 D and a SDR 5D and played till I had what I have now which is 136 mechs and bought a lot of them.


Is it too much to ask that our company president keep his promise that MWO would be fine even with MW5 coming out?
He literally said he wasn't taking funds from MWO to self publish MW5, so either he took out a bank loan or used MWO money. Since he said that MWO was dead, and couldn't sustain his company (which wasn't at all what he assured us of) it has been an absolute Earth shattering experience.

The only one with their head up their butt is our fearless leader who waited a year or more of losing money on mech packs before considering changing his monetization strategy. I know people who bought multiple gold mechs. I know people who have spend thousands upon thousands on thsi game and have over 600 mechs and play as much as their work and family lives will allow.


Over the years the clan nerfs have been so hard that I couldn't get my real life friend who CBT'd this game with me to play anymore. He bought Wave one up to the SCR and TBR, all of wave 2 and 3 and then slowly stopped playing because it just seemed like he couldn't win any matches. Let alone all the people that used to play on the various Youtube/Twitch influencers'
discords. 2 years ago we use to have multiple discord channels between the various servers I'm in, running full teams in faction or group queue, or scouting. Now I'm lucky if I can get 5 people to play on a Fri night and most of the people have left those discords and the game for good. We used to have new people join in after watching a b33f or baradul youtube video and teach them the game and I haven't had that happen in a long time. We had so many people in )MM( that it cost 15,000,000 to invite one player. That is about 200 people. Now we're so tired of kick inactive people we just aren't doing it.


They didn't leave because they were having soo much fun it killed them.

They left because of the absolute garbage balancing act this game has been struggling with.

It sucks to have a good niche that works for you suddenly gone. Maybe it was SRM splat, maybe it was laser vomit, maybe it was gauss/ppc sniping, maybe it was something else but everything has been beaten raw with the nerf hammer.

I feel bad for everyone (including myself) who bought the KDK pack. Because they're hot garbage.

I feel bad for anyone who bought the ACH wave or the steam pack or the GAR or EXE because cSPL are useless.

Our player/balance underling said small lasers are good at poking. He didn't mean 200m cSML he mean the IS small laser. That is our balance team. He said that at mechcon.




Is my head really up my own butt when I say this game has been mismanaged like so many other MMOs with developers that don't understand power creep or how to balance? They only introduce a mech a month and that mech only comes out for everyone like 6-9 months after its original release and they wonder why people don't feel like the monetization is a good way to go. Now they admit as much. We have said for years that the 3 mech 20$ baseline is absurd now that we don't need 3 mechs anymore but they didn't listen and now we're being told that we're not buying enough of them.


Is my head up my keister because I said if we kill PPFLD we'd be all using laser vomit? I said it in 2015 you can forum search it. Then they decided that they needed to nerf lasers when I was saying BUFF the other weapon systems instead. If nothing can compete with lasers its not a nerf to lasers that is needed it is a buff to the other weapon systems that is needed.

Was my head up my rear when I asked the balance underling if he planned on giving the 100 ton mechs like the AS7 agility boosts so they can be viable again during an NGNG interview and he said yes and added 2 points to the agiltiy? Then 2 years later gave it a bit more?


Was my head up my backside when I said instead of making hoverjets out of the jump jet how about we just add shake on the way down so people can't do precision jump sniping? Instead we get hoverjets and people often don't even take them on their mechs.


All I'm saying is we have been calling them out for years on here and elsewhere, (twitter, reddit) and they still throw a dart at a board and balance based on what they hit.


It really isn't fair so say my head is up my derrière?

[Xetelian]

RickySpanish, on 01 June 2019 - 08:58 PM, said:

He was being honest, that's a rarity in this industry. Mech packs probably aren't selling because of the lower population. The cost of making mech packs probably isn't a great deal more expensive with one vs three variants. MW5 was always the end goal of PGI, if you look at their early concept video they were always aiming for a single player campaign. When I dropped cash on this game as a founder, I was funding the idea that Battletech might live on, not necessarily that MWO would continue forever. I always wanted to see a single player Mechwarrior again, and the fact that PGI are actually making it moddable speaks volumes, that as well is rather rare among games these days. As for people's conduct here ok fair enough, you have been perfectly polite. However I think by and large there has been some rather personal hostility directed at the developers which is out of order. On OutrageHPG for example people repeatedly mention Russ's personal life, and let's not forget the "omg Russ shoved a child" debacle. A few years ago I watched the studio a friend of mine had founded that I worked at finally close its doors. He and I built the prototype that eventually got us funded, and he managed to keep things running for a decade. In that time we managed to produce some very neat games, including one in particular for children who were ill. Sadly, two of our big clients went **** up more or less at the same time, and after that we struggled for a while. I remember some rather odious comments from people not only on the dev team, but also from other businesses criticizing the way the studio had been run. However they themselves had never lifted a finger to attempt to pursue their goals, they were just happy to **** on someone elses misery. So, I do rather understand how regretful it would be for PGI to suffer the loss of this game, and that being forthrite with the so called fans of MWO probably took bigger balls than most of them will ever see.

His honesty doesn't remedy the situation a year before now and it doesn't speak well for the mindset and shot calling to be had around their office.

His honesty doesn't make him blameless in self publishing MW5 and having everything hinge on it and he did promise us that it wouldn't effect MWO at all.


His dishonesty about that is what galls me the most.

[Rosh87]

- so I've read a lot of threads on the Announcement, and the one thing I don't quite get is people who are like "the CEO said the game is dead" - I don't think he ever actually said that, or suggested it (as such). People seem to be EXTRAPOLATING that, from what he said / excessive reading between the lines, but I didn't get the full idea that 'all is lost' just from that news update, etc. Where is the extra pessimism coming from ? (admit I'm new to the game, as of 2019 - so maybe this is built up from years past ?)

[Asym]

For YEARS now, I've been saying MWO was going the wrong way............. years. As have a great many others. Occam's solution is simple but seriously dangerous: revert all weapons, heat, and mobility to the December of 2016 levels and start over....

The Nerf'ing has created so many "compounded errors" that the game is dead internally with no where to go ! The 2017 changes simply and actually ran off thousands of players in half a year !!! FOR WHAT? WHY?

You reap what you sow........ And now, the "chickens have come home to roost" as the saying goes and it's time to step up and completely revert back to a better spot or...................close it down or sell it because there is just about no one left....

This is sooooooooo sad and did not have to happen.

[RickySpanish]

Rosh87, on 02 June 2019 - 04:34 AM, said:

- so I've read a lot of threads on the Announcement, and the one thing I don't quite get is people who are like "the CEO said the game is dead" - I don't think he ever actually said that, or suggested it (as such). People seem to be EXTRAPOLATING that, from what he said / excessive reading between the lines, but I didn't get the full idea that 'all is lost' just from that news update, etc. Where is the extra pessimism coming from ? (admit I'm new to the game, as of 2019 - so maybe this is built up from years past ?)

It's coming from literally a dozen or so arm chair game designers who think the developers should do what they say right now and because they didn't the game is defacto dead. Despite having eeked out enjoyment from the game for the passed 6 or 7 years, they feel like they could have gotten more enjoyment God Damn It, and they just don't understand why PGI haven't realised that they have been making the game Wrong this whole time. Also get off my lawn.

[MrMadguy]

We all knew, that it would happen sooner or later. Simply because 'Mech packs aren't endless, you know, so monetization model, based on selling new 'Mech packs only, has been doomed right from the beginning.

Edited by MrMadguy, 02 June 2019 - 10:42 AM.

[Weeny Machine]

FRAGTAST1C, on 01 June 2019 - 07:07 PM, said:

It might be a year or so before the life support is discontinued OR it can have a resurgence if MW5 does well and brings the interest to the Battletech universe.

That's a big "IF". Have you ever thought about what happens IF MW5 stinks?

[AncientRaig]

While I agree with a lot of your points, I'm not entirely sure if I agree with you blaming the playerbase for PGI's decisions. I can remember when a lot of these changes were announced. I can remember the sheer rage that flooded the vast majority of each and every announcement page as well. MWO is not doing poorly due to a playerbase wanting bad changes. It's doing poorly due to PGI continuing to maintain a balance team that has no idea what they're doing and barely plays their own game. Balancing by looking at a spreadsheet to see what the most popular weapon and mech is each month and then hitting that with a nerf because it's clearly OP is how we got the ML nerfs. It's how we got the LFE and CXL nerfs. It's how we got the Warhammer nerfs. It's how we got the IS LPL nerfs. All of the above nerfs were made as a result of those items being more heavily used than another other item available, but the reason players were using them was because none of the other options were viable (with the exception of MLs. MLs have been and will always be one of the best weapon systems in any BT game because they provide decent damage at decent range for practically no weight investment, and PGI thought this was a problem that they needed to solve).

That being said, I don't quite agree with all the doomsayers. I can still get fun out of MWO. The game keeps dragging me back, and that's not something I can say about a lot of F2P games that I've played over the years (ones that I've put even more money into than this one). Maybe MWO will die in the future. Maybe not. Maybe MW5 will sell like hotcakes. Apparently, the pre-orders did very well, so PGI still has a good amount of goodwill with a good majority of the community it would seem. And I don't think they would make so many of the items given by those pre-orders MWO-exclusive if they didn't plan to keep the game going for a while. So, I'm going to remain cautiously optimistic about the future.

Edited by AncientRaig, 02 June 2019 - 11:46 AM.

[Xetelian]

AncientRaig, on 02 June 2019 - 11:42 AM, said:

While I agree with a lot of your points, I'm not entirely sure if I agree with you blaming the playerbase for PGI's decisions. I can remember when a lot of these changes were announced. I can remember the sheer rage that flooded the vast majority of each and every announcement page as well. MWO is not doing poorly due to a playerbase wanting bad changes. It's doing poorly due to PGI continuing to maintain a balance team that has no idea what they're doing and barely plays their own game. Balancing by looking at a spreadsheet to see what the most popular weapon and mech is each month and then hitting that with a nerf because it's clearly OP is how we got the ML nerfs. It's how we got the LFE and CXL nerfs. It's how we got the Warhammer nerfs. It's how we got the IS LPL nerfs. All of the above nerfs were made as a result of those items being more heavily used than another other item available, but the reason players were using them was because none of the other options were viable (with the exception of MLs. MLs have been and will always be one of the best weapon systems in any BT game because they provide decent damage at decent range for practically no weight investment, and PGI thought this was a problem that they needed to solve).

That being said, I don't quite agree with all the doomsayers. I can still get fun out of MWO. The game keeps dragging me back, and that's not something I can say about a lot of F2P games that I've played over the years (ones that I've put even more money into than this one). Maybe MWO will die in the future. Maybe not. Maybe MW5 will sell like hotcakes. Apparently, the pre-orders did very well, so PGI still has a good amount of goodwill with a good majority of the community it would seem. And I don't think they would make so many of the items given by those pre-orders MWO-exclusive if they didn't plan to keep the game going for a while. So, I'm going to remain cautiously optimistic about the future.

What I said has two sides.

The people who raged at PGI because they didn't fulfill their promise of faction play. The others and same that said PGI didn't fulfill their promise of Solaris 7, and then didn't play any of it as soon as the newness wore away.

We also had people that spent a boat load of time meticulously going over each weapon and giving numbers for each of them to better balance the game. They looked at that and said "LOL NO" and carried on crushing this game under their boots.

I have real life friends that quit over things like "getting headshot by strikes" "getting headshot my LRMs" "the neutering of their favorite clan mechs (TBR, GAR, EXE, ect.) and their weapons. The nerfs to mobility/agility, the nerfs to splat weapons that with the previous nerf killed brawling in an Atlas.


I begged the balance underling to restore the agility/mobility to assaults and heavies and mediums and lights negatively affected by the engine de-sync. I specifically asked if he was going to change the a/m of 100 ton mechs and he said he'd look into it then raised the atlas by 2 points. when the dragon has like 90-120 ish points.


I never wanted this game to fail, I've put too much money into it to want it to not be available. I have tried to get my real life friends to play, I have tried to get my own brothers to play with me. I've gotten them to jump in and have some fun, then their favorite way of playing gets nerfed and they can't help the team carry anymore and lose interest.

It started way before medium lasers had a duration+cycle time longer than larger lasers.

No one is having boat loads of fun in sluggish stare downs when they used to be able to twist.

Solaris 7 is a travesty, the divisions are so mishandled its insane. Some divisions have assault mechs that don't belong there and light mechs that don't belong there and some divisions are just the same mechs against each other over and over and PGI just doesn't get why people don't want to play it.

Faction play was unbalanced out of the gate, some maps just outright sucked to attack against because of the lack of cover. Some quick play maps suck because of the lack of cover.

The glaring issues are very glaring. How many years did Escort fail before they removed it finally (to the joy of everyone)?

The incremental one thing at a time once a month balancing act they're putting on is NOT how you balance
an MMO.



After the major heat change last summer I stopped playing, I got talked into playing again my a couple guys on discord. We manage to get 3-4 people on a Fri and play once a week when they're off on the weekend. We also do movie nights on another day through a streaming service.

I can't bring myself to even do grab bag events anymore. Those were my favorite events, I did the previous ones like the VTR (C) challenge, kill someone, get an assist, survive the match. Now I can't be bothered outside of incidentally completing one on a fri evening.

Edited by Xetelian, 02 June 2019 - 12:52 PM.

[Burning2nd]

CuddlyZebesian, on 01 June 2019 - 06:38 PM, said:

Geez you guys really got dat head up your butts in the forums huh?

OH they have it deep.. somewhere mechwarrior has given all these soft finger keyboard warriors this sense of entitlement: like they are the elite internet or something.. its quite comical really

I would like to think that if these elites where so elite, they would be looking for a way to keep this able to be continued after pgi decides to stop paying the server bill.....

eventually your going to come to the website and there is going to be a banner accross saying.. this is the last day yada yada yada we are hanging it up.. its been fun and thanks for the good times.....

I think a lot of you are going to die inside lol

[Xetelian]

Burning2nd, on 02 June 2019 - 01:07 PM, said:

OH they have it deep.. somewhere mechwarrior has given all these soft finger keyboard warriors this sense of entitlement: like they are the elite internet or something.. its quite comical really

I would like to think that if these elites where so elite, they would be looking for a way to keep this able to be continued after pgi decides to stop paying the server bill.....

eventually your going to come to the website and there is going to be a banner accross saying.. this is the last day yada yada yada we are hanging it up.. its been fun and thanks for the good times.....

I think a lot of you are going to die inside lol

Are you a day laborer with rough fingers?

Are you coming up with ideas to play this game beyond expiration?

I know K2B and a couple other guys who know code can probably string together a server like Living Legends, one of my friends is working on Living Legends in his spare time.

It wasn't us that let mechpaks roll out for over a year while being in the red.

It wasn't us that made the decisions that shrank the player base over and over and over.

Did you forget the community balance changes offered? The community got together and offered the best possible solution to making as many weapons viable as possible, and PGI said "LOL NO" and carried on.

Was it our decision to make tiny changes once a month to an unbalanced MMOPVP game?

Was it our decision to introduce heaps and heaps of power creep for profit?

Clans, Civil War, KDK, MCII, MAD IIC, before most of these were nerfed they spent a long time being very very powerful and one of them still is extremely powerful.

Was it our idea to use the DWF as a baseline for all mech agility/mobility?
Was it our idea to use the IS small laser as a baseline for all lasers? Clan and IS nerfs.

Was it our ideas that killed brawling and made mid range vomit, dakka and sniper builds reign supreme?

I don't think we did this. I think some things are the community's fault, like the insistence that we needed faction play and solaris 7 more than we needed to fix group queue.

I don't think it is our fault they went from weight class elo to useless tiers.

Edited by Xetelian, 02 June 2019 - 01:35 PM.

[Burning2nd]

BEEN here since day one buddy

Its not our fault.. but we should probably start using our awesome hostile mechwarrior attitudes collectively or this drop ship is coming to its last flight

[Xetelian]

Burning2nd, on 02 June 2019 - 02:16 PM, said:

BEEN here since day one buddy

Its not our fault.. but we should probably start using our awesome hostile mechwarrior attitudes collectively or this drop ship is coming to its last flight

I could be wrong but I don't think I was being overly hostile.

Critical of various design choices and since we're not allowed to refer to staff directly I alluded to someone as balance underling.

Maybe some people are being overly hostile but I am not trying to be.

[Burning2nd]

you fine man..I was just making a point about the community as a whole.. Which is why in 7 years or so i only have 700 something posts

[Thiccacuga]

Burning2nd, on 02 June 2019 - 03:09 PM, said:

you fine man..I was just making a point about the community as a whole.. Which is why in 7 years or so i only have 700 something posts

I've heard of the legendary "forum dads" myself, which is why when I started peeking about the forum I was surprised to see General Discussion turn into a REEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEfest after the dev talk.

[Xetelian]

CuddlyZebesian, on 02 June 2019 - 03:46 PM, said:

I've heard of the legendary "forum dads" myself, which is why when I started peeking about the forum I was surprised to see General Discussion turn into a REEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEfest after the dev talk.

Did you not see a popular twitch streamer literally drunk cry after what Russ said?

This is a few people's livelihoods, not just a game to them, but their jobs.

[Thiccacuga]

Xetelian, on 02 June 2019 - 03:52 PM, said:

popular twitch streamer

[Xetelian]

I know a few, and moderate the discord for one.

A couple of them are popular enough that they don't have day jobs and make their entire living through twitch/youtube accounts.

It may seem silly, but that is a legit job and if you can't respect that then you should look at PewDiePie's possible income, which makes him in the millionaire club.

I'm sure a lot of these guys can stream other games, and most of them do, but a few of them are very dedicated to MWO.


No one wants to see someone they have played with and are part of the community of, break down while guzzling some rum because of this.

Edited by Xetelian, 02 June 2019 - 04:07 PM.

[Thiccacuga]

Yea I'm sure the appeal to those poor video game dudes' emotional turmoil is gonna fix this game.

[Xetelian]

CuddlyZebesian, on 02 June 2019 - 04:07 PM, said:

Yea I'm sure the appeal to those poor video game dudes' emotional turmoil is gonna fix this game.

Now you're just being rude.