96 replies to this topic

[Foxfire kadrpg]

There is nothing more that the community can do.

This game has been available to the public for what, Six years? I say this because, by now, the public know what the game is, and have made their decision.

The only way from here to boost population numbers is to innovate the game play in a way that is different from its present experience.

I enjoy the mechanics of this game, but for the most part, it's just been six years of 12 players piloting one mech (or 4, if you can wait the ridiculous amount of time to que) verses another 12 players.

No vehicles, no lore fluff in the game.

Heck, the messaging and friends system in this game is a pain. How would a casual player be expected to pick up friends and play alongside of them? "go to a special discord and join a cliche, abiding by their rules in addition to the game" is not an answer.

This is a fun game, but it has, for the most part done the same thing it's been doing all along, so how can you expect the end result to change?

[Dimento Graven]

Queue someone posting a meme with "Jehova's Witnesses" knocking the door stating, "Hello neighbor! Have you heard the good news? Everlasting stompy robot goodness is here today!"

Because due to PGI's lack of advertising, we the community are having to proselytize it ourselves.

Edited by Dimento Graven, 05 June 2019 - 11:31 AM.

[HGAK47]

There was a TED talk GDC panel by the developers of a game called Path of Exile, they talked about how they came to understand how their game would grow in certain ways and how being smart with new content, big updates, fixes etc.. and doing things in certain cycles had a huge influence over player retention (*or lack thereof) and player base growth. It was a fascinating talk and as a laymen it seemed to me like all developers could take a leaf out of their book and learn a thing or two.

Edited by HGAK47, 05 June 2019 - 12:24 PM.

[Lykaon]

My opinion may not be a popular one but here it goes.

Let me first frame my statements with some context.

When players spend time playing a multiplayer game they should expect to interact with other players.

When that game is PvP oriented they should expect to play against other players. Not all players are equals in how effectively they play a particular game. Some will be better others worse.

So how does a player get better at playing a game? Well you practice and evolve to improve your ability to adapt and over come.This will take time possibly a lot of time.

There is however a means of shortening the time it takes to adjust to a particular learning curve and that is being advised by players that have already spent the time practicing and improving.

This is where play association/guilds or in MWo's case player units come in. Player units offer new players access to veteran advise and this can rapidly reduce the time to acquire some semblance of skill in this game.

In other games a player joining an association of players/guild/unit can also gain the advantage of materiel support in the form of equipment and other resources. MWo lacks this mechanic and it should not have.

So that is how player units are advantageous to new players. But there is an advantage to a game publisher for incorperating player associations into their games.

Player retention.

It's very simple,a player with "friends" who enhance or improve their game play experiences tend to play more than a frustrated solo player. Unit members have joined a community and in a way have made a commitment to other players in this community.

Where player units should have been in the forefront of community development by PGI the reverse was frequently what happened.

Instead of improving (or in many cases simply providing) improved communication in game such as VOIP,Factional global chat channels (useful for new players to find units to join) LFG tools or even a mechanic for units to provide material support to members we instead got groups isolated from solos and units cut off from their source of new players and new players cut off from their source of information,community and potentially material resources (if it was ever a feature added)

Instead of providing incentives to join a community of player units solo players requested for an easier game and they got it by essentially kicking the very players that would supply this game with longevity to the curb.

Now with units and grouped players seperated from solos the player run units began to slowly bleed to death. With limited access to new blood the units shrank while to transient solo players did likewise.


Of course there will be the claims of "seal clubbing" and groups "farming" solos etc and so on but how much of this was actually the case and how much of what was actually the case was addressed by providing a mechanic to balance teams or any means of incorperation?

what was attempted to be inclusive? not a heck of a lot we got the quick fix then and the slow bleed up until now.

[0111101]

It's impossible for the community to stop the devs from slowly strangling the life out of their own game, just look over the last 7 years of community outcry, balance suggestions, player feedback, and PGI's response to all of the above time and again and it's quite apparent.

Edited by 0111101, 05 June 2019 - 02:48 PM.

[Zigmund Freud]

You know what would really boost player-base? If they let 2-3 people groups into QP. Now you can't introduce a friend to a game and play together without waiting for 5 minutes to lunch and then throwing a newb into coordinated pre-made *** kicking.
Sure, QP works fine for single players, but as far as team base games go, MWO is the most unfriendly to small casual teams game I've seen.

[N a p e s]

I honestly just don't think there's that much interest for this type of game unfortunately. And for all the talk of bad new player experience, it has improved significantly. The fact is that the mechanics of the game do take some time to figure out unless you have a unit or a friend guiding you and even then, it remains somewhat tricky.

IMO, what would work best for gaining some mass appeal would be based around PVE but thats counter productive to MWO since it doesn't solve the problems that we're seeing in regards to a PVP focused game. Its doubly counter productive at this point because that would overlap pretty significantly with MW5, which should end up being similar to a MWO PVE experience, with some extra bells and whistles and different flavoring.

I'd love to see that initial vision of MWO with units coordinating for invasion and defense of planets and reaping contextual lore driven rewards but it does seem quite hard to implement in this sort of game. It also would have been my prefered choice that PGI push towards the mech simulator route versus going towards e-sports. That being said, I've been mostly happy playing MWO for what it is for the last 6.5 years and this is the game that I've spent the most hours in by a HUGE margin.

[JadePanther]

Khobai, on 05 June 2019 - 01:03 AM, said:

same. ive seen multiple friends quit because of the state of group queue.

people want to play games with friends. but its not enjoyable when your small casual group of 2-3 players loses every single match because of elitest groups that team stack and farm casuals.

thats when people just quit and go play other games that they CAN enjoy with their friends.

I wouldnt say its the biggest problem MWO has but its up there. top 5 certainly.

large groups are fun you say?
win hands down you say?

lol.. you've never been in a 10 man stacked up against nothing but 2-3man groups in enough assualts to put it into a 10:1 ratio... Yep nothing says a garunteed win for a 10-12 man group than bieng out tonned by 400T when the enemy team has 10-12 assualts...

large groups only really can be functional if min/max'g is applied, cheesing the crab rush hard, and or everyones in META only mechs... I've lost count the number of times a large group of my freinds are forced to fight an enemy team of 6+ assualts when we'd only have one... now if like 4 of us went in pirahnas or fleas then we'd prolly have like 3 assualts to try and stand up to that..

TBH if you are trying to group with more than 5 people you are better off splitting up into 2 groups and trying to get dumped in the same match.. tonnage penalties on larger groups can mean giving the other team an advantage of half your entire teams weight.. cause that moment, when you realize youre about to get mowed over by 8-10 assualts that have soo much beef they dont need to stop or take cover as they walk right over top of you, is just glorious fun..

[Feral Clown]

Yes, we could collectively gather a pool to pay kids in third world countries to play MWO.

SeventhSL, on 04 June 2019 - 05:50 PM, said:

No! The community seal clubbed the player base to death and PGI let it happen. Attitudes haven’t changed.

All things like advertising does is bring in seals to club to death and seals aren’t an endless resource.

Imagine if we had an effective PSR system that didn't put all the seals on one side instead of tagging those seals with tier one badges?

[Lazor Sharp]

Lykaon, on 05 June 2019 - 01:36 PM, said:

My opinion may not be a popular one but here it goes.

Let me first frame my statements with some context.

When players spend time playing a multiplayer game they should expect to interact with other players.

When that game is PvP oriented they should expect to play against other players. Not all players are equals in how effectively they play a particular game. Some will be better others worse.

So how does a player get better at playing a game? Well you practice and evolve to improve your ability to adapt and over come.This will take time possibly a lot of time.

There is however a means of shortening the time it takes to adjust to a particular learning curve and that is being advised by players that have already spent the time practicing and improving.

This is where play association/guilds or in MWo's case player units come in. Player units offer new players access to veteran advise and this can rapidly reduce the time to acquire some semblance of skill in this game.

In other games a player joining an association of players/guild/unit can also gain the advantage of materiel support in the form of equipment and other resources. MWo lacks this mechanic and it should not have.

So that is how player units are advantageous to new players. But there is an advantage to a game publisher for incorperating player associations into their games.

Player retention.

It's very simple,a player with "friends" who enhance or improve their game play experiences tend to play more than a frustrated solo player. Unit members have joined a community and in a way have made a commitment to other players in this community.

Where player units should have been in the forefront of community development by PGI the reverse was frequently what happened.

Instead of improving (or in many cases simply providing) improved communication in game such as VOIP,Factional global chat channels (useful for new players to find units to join) LFG tools or even a mechanic for units to provide material support to members we instead got groups isolated from solos and units cut off from their source of new players and new players cut off from their source of information,community and potentially material resources (if it was ever a feature added)

Instead of providing incentives to join a community of player units solo players requested for an easier game and they got it by essentially kicking the very players that would supply this game with longevity to the curb.

Now with units and grouped players seperated from solos the player run units began to slowly bleed to death. With limited access to new blood the units shrank while to transient solo players did likewise.


Of course there will be the claims of "seal clubbing" and groups "farming" solos etc and so on but how much of this was actually the case and how much of what was actually the case was addressed by providing a mechanic to balance teams or any means of incorperation?

what was attempted to be inclusive? not a heck of a lot we got the quick fix then and the slow bleed up until now.

Very, very well put...! I have posted this very rant several times. PGI did their damn'ist to kill off units in a TEAM based Game.... The very vet's in units that are going to teach new players the ropes since their were no tutorial's.... they gave no tools to recruit new players....

There are always going to be hard core solo players (I've seen the list of excuses for not joining a unit), but they should be the lesser number of players in a TEAM based Game than players in units. PGI completely failed in understanding this concept.

This Game has always needed the I only want to play with my 2-3 friends mode, and I think that MW5 with 4 man coop with give them that PvE have fun with my friends mode, where they are not getting seal clubbed by T1 players because of a flawed PSR.

This will also give the vets a chance to train new players in a PvE environment, and get them up to speed so that they can play PvP MWO / MWO2.

Basically, MW5 PvE needs to be the Training Grounds for MWO2 PvP, and have some kind of Hook from one game to the other game, so players can go back and forth easily.

[LordNothing]

the fact that southpark has several episodes that describe everything wrong with this game is a good sign of where its headed.

HGAK47, on 05 June 2019 - 12:21 PM, said:

There was a TED talk GDC panel by the developers of a game called Path of Exile, they talked about how they came to understand how their game would grow in certain ways and how being smart with new content, big updates, fixes etc.. and doing things in certain cycles had a huge influence over player retention (*or lack thereof) and player base growth. It was a fascinating talk and as a laymen it seemed to me like all developers could take a leaf out of their book and learn a thing or two.

you got a link to that?

Zigmund Freud, on 05 June 2019 - 02:53 PM, said:

You know what would really boost player-base? If they let 2-3 people groups into QP. Now you can't introduce a friend to a game and play together without waiting for 5 minutes to lunch and then throwing a newb into coordinated pre-made *** kicking.
Sure, QP works fine for single players, but as far as team base games go, MWO is the most unfriendly to small casual teams game I've seen.

i feel this is firmly in too little too late territory.

[Khobai]

Dimento Graven, on 05 June 2019 - 11:30 AM, said:

Queue someone posting a meme with "Jehova's Witnesses" knocking the door stating, "Hello neighbor! Have you heard the good news? Everlasting stompy robot goodness is here today!"

Because due to PGI's lack of advertising, we the community are having to proselytize it ourselves.

spreading the game by word of mouth does no good though.

the problem is even when you tell your friends about it, the moment you hop in a casual group with them, you go up against some elite group that stomps you. and it happens every game. at that point your friends want to go play something else and the whole idea of MWO is forever ruined for them.

this is one reason why MWO cant retain new players. because group queue makes zero allowances for small casual groups, especially ones with newer players in them.

Edited by Khobai, 05 June 2019 - 10:11 PM.

[Dimento Graven]

Khobai, on 05 June 2019 - 10:04 PM, said:

spreading the game by word of mouth does no good though.

the problem is even when you tell your friends about it, the moment you hop in a casual group with them, you go up against some elite group that stomps you. and it happens every game. at that point your friends want to go play something else and the whole idea of MWO is forever ruined for them.

this is one reason why MWO cant retain new players.

How do you get a constant stream of new customers?

You advertise to people who may not already heard of your product.

All the atrociously simplistic, naive and otherwise, wrong, business analogies aside, here is what PGI has been doing for the last several years:

Create a new 'mech pack, maps, game mode, etc.: Spam everyone who already knows about MWO.

That's a limited audience, and even if the (let's be generous) 20 million unique people who know of and have ever downloaded and played the game decided to buy every single 'mech pack and pay cash for every single color, decal, bolt on, and war horn available, it's STILL a very low percentage of the POTENTIAL customer base if you'd just advertise your game a few times during prime time (ala: WofWS, WofAS, WoT, etc., etc. etc.) where, at least in The United States of America your potential customer base adds an additional 280 million (10 times the previous number) and then there's Europe, the rest of North America, South America, Pacific, etc., etc., and now you're talking from a potential customer base of a mere 280 million, to something on the order of about 3.6 BILLION.

There's a reason why smart businesses invest millions (hundreds of millions) in ADVERTISING (even businesses with ****** products, like pretty much anything sold at Wal-Mart, or hell, Wal-Mart itself).

People can't find value in something they've never heard of. People won't even begin to consider something to have value unless you tell them it does have value. You repeat yourself about your product and its value long enough and enough times, and eventually a significant portion of the audience will try it out, at least once.

So ultimately to the point: You get enough "new people" streaming in, you provide the current PSR process the 'fodder' necessary to provide "new players" a better initial gaming experience as they'll be more likely to encounter other new people verses battle hardened vets.

That's the truth of it. That's the truth of almost ANY MMO.

[Karl Streiger]

Khobai, on 05 June 2019 - 10:04 PM, said:

spreading the game by word of mouth does no good though.

the problem is even when you tell your friends about it, the moment you hop in a casual group with them, you go up against some elite group that stomps you. and it happens every game. at that point your friends want to go play something else and the whole idea of MWO is forever ruined for them.

this is one reason why MWO cant retain new players. because group queue makes zero allowances for small casual groups, especially ones with newer players in them.

Ha this is also one of the points were things went off, you remember CB when there were no differences between Groups and Solos? In retrospect this was the correct approach - the only thing people asked for was that both sides get groups of the same size. Instead we get limits and more limits and even more limits and queue splitting.

[Rebel Ace Fryslan]

Ok, now we have some replies.

1) I read so many with "mememe" and blaming this and that and history.
That's not usefull to work with and helps no one.

2) some suggestion PGI could take up, but evne if they would we can't change the game much.

3) some things the cummunity can do.

• Improve the learning for new players. Get some information together for new players.
  
• Be helpful on the battlefield, welcome new players.
  
• Advertise.

I have added them to the OP

Any critics on that.
How can we implement them.

Edited by Rebel Ace Fryslan, 07 June 2019 - 03:41 AM.

[Asym]

N a p e s, on 05 June 2019 - 04:54 PM, said:

I honestly just don't think there's that much interest for this type of game unfortunately. And for all the talk of bad new player experience, it has improved significantly. The fact is that the mechanics of the game do take some time to figure out unless you have a unit or a friend guiding you and even then, it remains somewhat tricky.

IMO, what would work best for gaining some mass appeal would be based around PVE but thats counter productive to MWO since it doesn't solve the problems that we're seeing in regards to a PVP focused game. Its doubly counter productive at this point because that would overlap pretty significantly with MW5, which should end up being similar to a MWO PVE experience, with some extra bells and whistles and different flavoring.

I'd love to see that initial vision of MWO with units coordinating for invasion and defense of planets and reaping contextual lore driven rewards but it does seem quite hard to implement in this sort of game. It also would have been my prefered choice that PGI push towards the mech simulator route versus going towards e-sports. That being said, I've been mostly happy playing MWO for what it is for the last 6.5 years and this is the game that I've spent the most hours in by a HUGE margin.

Because teams are toxic as all get out ! Teams farm........ That isn't the point of QP..........that is what FP and competitive are for !

If you don't have a "safe place" for new players to grow in, there is no future for the game........

[N a p e s]

Asym, on 07 June 2019 - 05:18 AM, said:

Because teams are toxic as all get out ! Teams farm........ That isn't the point of QP..........that is what FP and competitive are for !

If you don't have a "safe place" for new players to grow in, there is no future for the game........

And PVE is that safe place?

[East Indy]

MechaBattler, on 05 June 2019 - 09:50 AM, said:

What really hurt this game's growth is the inability to play with small casual group of friends. Even just introducing them to the game is difficult. You'd think it wouldn't be because it's a 'team game'. But that's actually working against it. Group queue you face organized larger more experienced groups.

This, right here.

Allow room for one 2-man party on each team in Solo Queue.

This might've been controversial a year or three before players generally agreed PSR turned Quick Play into a non-ranked open game mode anyhow. There is absolutely nothing to lose, and so much to gain.

[Lykaon]

SeventhSL, on 04 June 2019 - 05:50 PM, said:

No! The community seal clubbed the player base to death and PGI let it happen. Attitudes haven’t changed.

All things like advertising does is bring in seals to club to death and seals aren’t an endless resource.

So the blame is on the players? What players? I assume only the ones that are good at playing since your sympathies seem to lay squarely in the poor little clubbed seals camp.

Should players be blamed for playing a game well? I would say no,doing so would definitively create a divide in the community. Players with competency and players lacking in competency.

I would go as far as to say this (your) opinion is wrong thinking when considering the health of a game and the preservation of a strong player base.

Eventually players will become competent and become a member of the "clubbing elite" so basically anyone who puts any effort into MWo is "bad" according to this idea.Thus creating a bottom up persecution of the very players who are playing the game well.

So no it's not the players doing anything wrong it was PGI making an error in not providing a competency scaling feature from the get go. The introduction of an effective matchmaker early in the game's history (like before public release) would have solved this issue.

Edited by Lykaon, 07 June 2019 - 12:14 PM.

[Lykaon]

Asym, on 07 June 2019 - 05:18 AM, said:

Because teams are toxic as all get out ! Teams farm........ That isn't the point of QP..........that is what FP and competitive are for !

If you don't have a "safe place" for new players to grow in, there is no future for the game........

How are teams "toxic as all get out !" ?

Why do you get to define the purpose of quick play?

So let me get this straight...If players want to play in groups their choices are ...

A: don't or B: go play in the least developed portion of the game with no match maker to speak of with the smallest portion of the population (because of it's lack of support ) ensuring most of you time online will be waiting in a queue to play.

I would say that the very concept of a "safe space" is laughable in the context of a game where players choose to play in a PvP competitive environment.

There will be 24 players playing and only 12 will be on a winning side. It's a guarantee that half of the players will lose the vast majority of the time.

Confirmation bias aside what players should get is a matchmaker that creates a reasonably level playing field for as many of the 24 players in a match as is possible.

Blame is not a solution.