23 replies to this topic

[MTier Slayed Up]

So I'll try to keep this constructive.

I have a love hate relationship with this game, the community, and the dev team. I've had some wonderful moments, met some great people and had some type of action from said dev team against certain really toxic players (ironic coming from me). But I've also had a flipped coin in this which are more often than the former. Some really goofy, awkward, really cringe, or just downright not fun to play with or even against players that just make it a goal to ruin it for others, moments where I want to toss my monitor out the window because of how just badly this game runs in alot of aspects, and being briefly banned for talking crap to other players who usually instigate it. (To which I say, grow up, sticks and stones). It takes an act of God or a copious amount of booze to just start MWO again, because I already know what my experience is going to be.

What exactly lead myself personally to just not want to play this game after putting in x amount of money and over 3000 hours? Short answer: It ain't fun.

Long answer: There's been a vicious cycle over the years that I can relate with only two other games, one which just killed it's player base almost identically to MWO (Overwatch). The cycle is as follows:

1. Piranha took too long to update MWO.

2. Updates hurt the game and made it less fun.

3. Community backlash is ignored.

Rinse and repeat and this went on for literal years.

1. You were lucky to see a significant update within a year. I don't count mech releases as an update. It's just a mech release. I'm talking about addressing balance issues. Listen to the guys that play comp. They know how to abuse the mechanics. They will tell you whats wrong with the game. I don't know why there is a complete disconnect with the community but I would honestly say this is what killed the game and has put us into this state. We have maybe 200 or 300 regulars now? Maybe?

"The game is still alive Soap!"
200 to 300 people is not an alive game. It's a corpse. Be real about it. Unless we have some real whale wallets here who are keeping this game afloat, it's not going to keep pumping this way for much longer. Better to face a cold hard truth now. I really hated seeing these nay sayers back then saying "GAH DA GAME DEAD" when it had consistent players of well over thousands, but again, years ago, and now I fall into this pity party.

2. One of the biggest goofs has been ghost heat. Limiting builds, alpha strikes and now we're stuck with a bug that still isn't addressed. I remember this lovely update because this was the first time I had quit for roughly a few years. Give or take this happened in 2016 at the end of the year. No one wanted this. The amount of time to kill wasn't an issue then, and you still have builds that work around that "issue" *coughAC2spamcough*. One somewhat prominent player back then was Fantastic Tuesday, who addressed this issue and did his own constructive cristicism. How was this met? Blocked on Twitter by Russ Bollock and after being made for blocking said player, he undid it. But that's the company we're dealing with. I honestly think they just generally don't care. I mean, they were shadow banned off of reddit for a reason. Lol.

The other big oof has been engine desync. No longer was the "bigger engine = better." It's now become to "Invest in this mess of a skill tree and hope your mech doesn't suck or actually has some decent quirks." This update alone killed off a literal crap ton of mechs that we're incredibly good but not broken. My go to back then happened to be the Black Knight. Had an amazing twist, could tank relatively well, and the heat wasn't difficult to manage. But again, it wasn't overpowered by any means. It had a rather large CT, hard points we're super super low, and it was pretty tall for a 70T mech, and I believe it's nearly the same height as an Atlas, just slimmer. (Correct me if I'm wrong).

Other minor changes has been just unnecessary or nonsensical like making the Jenner and Firestarter the giants of light mechs. Nuking the ever loving crap out of the Timber Wolf to where it's now a joke and you're just memeing if you're piloting it, nerfing the clan heavy lasers because there was a 91 alpha that put you could only shoot once every minute or so, at a relatively short range, and was a bad build to begin with but whatever, nerf that and all the other clan mechs that needed it, and putting in this messy skill tree which takes waaaaaay longer to grind out than just buying three different variants and mastering it. Like, the latter promoted the use of using other mechs, albeit, different variants, but you weren't always guaranteed to see the same meta build of the same mech unless you're doing comp or sometimes community warfare. This was primarly the reason why we had a site called "Meta Mechs" until basically the past two/three years.

3 Again, this has to do with the disconnect. I get it, you're a company and you need to make money, but do you really need to piss off your community with almost everything?
Remember when Star Citizen was getting some traction? Guess who tried to abandon MWO to make a cheap knock off with a "go fund me?" Piranha. Know what you would get after $5,000 was donated for that junk heap? Space Flight. In a space flight simulator. I can't make this up.
I bring this up because this company doesn't and hasn't cared about any individual of the community. I don\t even think they're BattleTech fans. I think they just pulled up a wiki and went "hmm mm hmm mm, okay, put that in." And to be quite frank, this isn't even MechWarrior, it's a point and click and shoot with robots. It should just be called Rock em Sock em Robots. We're driving tanks, nothing should be pin point accurate. Instead, we get this stiff simulation where your playing the slowest FPS imaginable.

Take this for an example, and don't tell me you didn't cream your pants when you first saw it in 09.



I love MechWarrior. I loved it as a kid. I loved MWO when I first played it, but over time, after so many years and again, 3000 hours put into this with God knows how much I spent, it's just been a sick joke. I truly wish we can get a MechWarrior game that actually feels fluid and not just some rushed together piece made by the lowest bidder.

TL:DR - I've been drinking and am butt hurt about my childhood.

Edited by DrtyDshSoap, 19 July 2020 - 04:45 AM.

[LTC Kilgore]

It feels to me like people play this game because of the community and nostalgia, and in spite of the devs. There are a lot of quality people playing this game (or there were). Thats what made the games enjoyable. That is what made you be able to get past the truly head scratching decisions of the devs and still play.

[LordNothing]

is it just me or are outrageous wait times and the quantity of **** posting closely correlated?

[Jman5]

Where do you get the idea that there are only 200-300 regular players? As of 3 days ago there were already 2700 people who had played enough games to move out of tier 3. As of today, there are about 3,700 people who have played 100 games or more. That's about an hour a day worth of games.

Does the game have a declining playerbase? Sure. Has development essentially stopped? Sure. But it's not decling because of all the balance reasons you listed. Those things don't drives player counts. The fact of the matter is that when you go outside social media and the hardcore players, most people just don't care or notice. What drives player counts is DLC-level content development. With no real content development, you will always get a declining playerbase.

Honestly, the fact that thousands of people still play such an old game that hardly gets any development attention is what really surprises me.

Edited by Jman5, 19 July 2020 - 06:54 AM.

[OneTeamPlayer]

LordNothing, on 19 July 2020 - 05:37 AM, said:

is it just me or are outrageous wait times and the quantity of **** posting closely correlated?

There has been more posting in the past few months than i've seen in quite some time.

Happy players are often to busy playing the game to post on its forums.

Increase in posting after group mere, massive increase in posting after Tier Reset, with a second wave after valve closing.

Sound about right.

[MTier Slayed Up]

If there were thousands of players still playing this, the que wouldn't take forever and a day to find a game during evening hours pacific. Group drops would also be more frequent. Faction as it is is only active during certain hours, completely dead otherwise.

Now is Steam going to be my all to end all be all argument (even though I'm off nearly 200)? No. Does it offer a somewhat good insight of the state of the game? I'd say yeah, fairly. We don't have the droves of players coming in masses nor is there a huge lineup of people going "OOO OO! CAN'T WAIT TO PLAY!"

As for your numbers, I have no idea where you pulled them out of. I checked Jarls List as well and it's telling me 1,700 new players as of June with a whopping 15,000 active. Which I call BS. If I'm consistently seeing the same players day in and day out, with Solaris mostly dead until the season restarts as well, I really really don't think we have the 3,700 players active. Maybe in 2018 yeah, but not now.

Here's the steam chart:

Edit - For whatever reason, I can't post a screenshot. But here are the numbers.
Last 30 days - Avg 477 with a peak of 869
June saw a dip with an Avg of 482 and a peak of 795

Edit edit - Woops, idk why I thought your numbers weren't linked. Again, I really do see more of the same people than different. Either the supposed 5000+ (I checked matches and just kept clicking away until I gave up with 68 games) are all in a lower tier, somehow, or the hours they play at are completely different.

Edit the edit of the edit - Aside from player count, the original intent of this post was just to complain about something that's been happening for years and why a lot of the original player base had left, to only return every blue moon or so.

Edited by DrtyDshSoap, 19 July 2020 - 07:47 AM.

[YueFei]

Jman5, on 19 July 2020 - 06:53 AM, said:

Does the game have a declining playerbase? Sure. Has development essentially stopped? Sure. But it's not decling because of all the balance reasons you listed. Those things don't drives player counts. The fact of the matter is that when you go outside social media and the hardcore players, most people just don't care or notice. What drives player counts is DLC-level content development. With no real content development, you will always get a declining playerbase.

Balance changes don't drive away hardcore players, because the Mechwarrior brand attracts and holds a dedicated group of players. The hardcore players will just change-up their mechs/weapons with the changing tides. But poorly-executed (un)balancing changes can drive away "casual" players. By that I don't necssarily mean players who don't have the mindset to "git gud", I mean guys who aren't as dedicated to the Mechwarrior brand name.

I introduced a friend to MWO, a guy who plays competitive Counterstrike (so he's not a potato). He enjoyed brawling. PGI nerfed the crap outta AC20 and SRMs. He quit playing, and never came back. Whilst he could've chosen to stick around and adapt to the changes, as I said, he wasn't a hardcore Mechwarrior fan, and he was perfectly happy to spend his time playing other games instead.

That's the problem with the way PGI balances things. They slam things with the nerf hammer, instead of taking more nuanced approaches. The casual player doesn't read all the patch notes, doesn't read the forums to try to keep up with the revolving door of the meta. All they know is that they login to play, and suddenly their robot and its guns just don't feel the same for some damn reason.

So PGI goes around swinging the nerf hammer at whatever "nail" happens to be sticking up at that point in time. Maybe that "nail" just needed a few taps, but PGI tends to smash it. Each time they do that, they're hemorrhaging some players who just had their favorite robot stomped on.

Jman5, on 19 July 2020 - 06:53 AM, said:

Honestly, the fact that thousands of people still play such an old game that hardly gets any development attention is what really surprises me.

The Mechwarrior franchise has had a loyal, passionate fanbase stretching back in time for decades, even if that fanbase is relatively small. That's probably the only reason it's still kept going up to this day.

[JediPanther]

The game is meh pure and simple. I ran the worst mech in the game the past two days recording just to make a video on how bad the mech is even with a paper tiger quirk. Half the time you can't make use of the quirk because you simply aren't getting the one-two game modes it was designed for. Then when you finally do you need a really good luck of the draw team to carry hard since you are literately doing nothing for damage off alone. Your reward? 100 cp no xp.

The Jenner is neigh unplayable as it took the most nerfs out of all of mwo's current life span and is obsolete to many mechs in the light weight and has a few mediums that out do it as well. If the REscale didn't kill that mech is was the two point difference in arm armor between it and a mech 15 tons lighter.

[LordNothing]

OneTeamPlayer, on 19 July 2020 - 07:04 AM, said:

There has been more posting in the past few months than i've seen in quite some time.

Happy players are often to busy playing the game to post on its forums.

Increase in posting after group mere, massive increase in posting after Tier Reset, with a second wave after valve closing.

Sound about right.

most of my posts are during the wait times. and the longer those are the ******** the posts.

[Horseman]

Jman5, on 19 July 2020 - 06:53 AM, said:

Where do you get the idea that there are only 200-300 regular players? As of 3 days ago there were already 2700 people who had played enough games to move out of tier 3. As of today, there are about 3,700 people who have played 100 games or more. That's about an hour a day worth of games.

Probably from misreading Steamcharts: https://steamcharts.com/app/342200
Far as PGI's recent statements go, it seems the population is still 50/50 between Steam and PGI's own client.

DrtyDshSoap, on 19 July 2020 - 07:33 AM, said:

If there were thousands of players still playing this, the que wouldn't take forever and a day to find a game during evening hours pacific.

"Concurrent players" isn't "players concurrently queued", mate.

Quote

Group drops would also be more frequent. Faction as it is is only active during certain hours, completely dead otherwise.
If I'm consistently seeing the same players day in and day out, with Solaris mostly dead until the season restarts as well,

The vast majority of the game's playerbase just goes vroom in Quickplay.
FP and Solaris are not very casual-friendly (or potato-friendly) so they're not the main point of attraction unless there's an event on.

Quote

As for your numbers, I have no idea where you pulled them out of. I checked Jarls List as well and it's telling me 1,700 new players as of June with a whopping 15,000 active. Which I call BS.

To appear on Jarl's for a given month, a player has to do a whopping ten games in QP over that entire month. That really isn't much.

Edited by Horseman, 20 July 2020 - 01:10 AM.

[MTier Slayed Up]

Horseman, on 20 July 2020 - 01:09 AM, said:

Probably from misreading Steamcharts: https://steamcharts.com/app/342200
Far as PGI's recent statements go, it seems the population is still 50/50 between Steam and PGI's own client.

As I said, rough estimate and a relatively good grasp on the state of the game. Not an end all be all argument.

Horseman, on 20 July 2020 - 01:09 AM, said:

"Concurrent players" isn't "players concurrently queued", mate.
The vast majority of the game's playerbase just goes vroom in Quickplay.

See "average."

Horseman, on 20 July 2020 - 01:09 AM, said:

FP and Solaris are not very casual-friendly (or potato-friendly) so they're not the main point of attraction unless there's an event on.

They are still included because they are part of the game and part of the playerbase. My point stands.

Horseman, on 20 July 2020 - 01:09 AM, said:

To appear on Jarl's for a given month, a player has to do a whopping ten games in QP over that entire month. That really isn't much.

Which is why I, again, I said regulars, not just some guy that pops in some random time for an hour or two.

[MTier Slayed Up]

And again, Jesus Christ, I'm not arguing player count

Read the entire damn thing or don't comment.

"DEHUUR I READ A PARAGRAPH AND YOUR ENTIRE COMPLAINT IS NULL AND VOID! "

I typed out my butt hurt decently. Show me the same courtesy and read the ******* thing first and actually bring something of substance related to the original.

Edited by DrtyDshSoap, 20 July 2020 - 01:33 AM.

[Aidan Crenshaw]

Well, yes you were.

DrtyDshSoap, on 19 July 2020 - 07:33 AM, said:

If there were thousands of players still playing this, the que wouldn't take forever and a day to find a game during evening hours pacific. Group drops would also be more frequent. Faction as it is is only active during certain hours, completely dead otherwise.

Now is Steam going to be my all to end all be all argument (even though I'm off nearly 200)? No. Does it offer a somewhat good insight of the state of the game? I'd say yeah, fairly. We don't have the droves of players coming in masses nor is there a huge lineup of people going "OOO OO! CAN'T WAIT TO PLAY!"

As for your numbers, I have no idea where you pulled them out of. I checked Jarls List as well and it's telling me 1,700 new players as of June with a whopping 15,000 active. Which I call BS. If I'm consistently seeing the same players day in and day out, with Solaris mostly dead until the season restarts as well, I really really don't think we have the 3,700 players active. Maybe in 2018 yeah, but not now.

And no, nobody was arguing your whole complaint would be void, just the part about player numbers. So maybe don't get too defensive just yet... Peace bro!

[LordNothing]

jarls give pretty good player count numbers. but remember 15000 does not mean there are 15000 players on all the time. i tend to play at least some games every season and as a result i am counted as an active player, and i might only play a few games every month.

[Tarl Cabot]

LordNothing, on 20 July 2020 - 05:58 PM, said:

jarls give pretty good player count numbers. but remember 15000 does not mean there are 15000 players on all the time. i tend to play at least some games every season and as a result i am counted as an active player, and i might only play a few games every month.

To be counted you have to have played at least 10 games/each month to make it to the Leadership Boards. PGI added that after a few players (some alts) would play a few games and have a Win everything - lose no games, ranking, or super high avg MS, etc.

Edited by Tarl Cabot, 20 July 2020 - 06:20 PM.

[MeterH1]

Currently? Because PGI is doing everything they can to make players lose interest in the game. For example, right now if you were to drop in incursion and as a team decide everyone except for lights will fight and lights will go attack the base and you win, every single light will be penalized for playing as part of the team effort and drop in rank... Despite the fact that they A - played the gamemode, B - won the game, and C - played as a team on a team strategy. Basically, PGI has made it where if you do your job as a light, you go down. If you play the selected gamemode, you go down. If you do anything other than cause damage, you go down.

[JediPanther]

MeterH1, on 20 July 2020 - 06:34 PM, said:

Currently? Because PGI is doing everything they can to make players lose interest in the game. For example, right now if you were to drop in incursion and as a team decide everyone except for lights will fight and lights will go attack the base and you win, every single light will be penalized for playing as part of the team effort and drop in rank... Despite the fact that they A - played the gamemode, B - won the game, and C - played as a team on a team strategy. Basically, PGI has made it where if you do your job as a light, you go down. If you play the selected gamemode, you go down. If you do anything other than cause damage, you go down.

Exactly this. Here's me literately doing your abcs from the past few days game play.

[MW Waldorf Statler]

MWO ist build with a Heavy modified Cry3 Engine
many of the Guys with experience leaves the Party 2014/15 (Transverse Disaster) and the Jo Market with Cry3 Guys is empty since Years ,other Guys goes to RELIC or build own Companys ...so MWO =no Future , only a MWO2 with a new Engine

[Bud Crue]

DrtyDshSoap, on 19 July 2020 - 04:31 AM, said:

Other minor changes has been just unnecessary or nonsensical...

Anyone who has been around this place for years knows what PGI has done. We know how their conduct has impacted the player base. We know with vivid recollection the moment they made our favorite virtual toys "massively unfun." But at this point, if you are still around and logging in even just occasionally, you must also recognize that it is a choice to play this game in a way that is "massively unfun". The refusal to play the game in a way that is something other than "massively unfun" is a personal choice we can all make, because we know what PGI broke, and we know exactly how to compensate for their various follies, but many of us just refuse to.

Want to have fun? Drop with a group. Want to have more fun? Stop playing the game the way you think it ought to be played, and instead play it the way the game is designed to be played. If you want still even more fun, recognize the reality of all the criticisms that we have all made about the game and what PGI has done to it over the years, and stop trying to make your oversized Jenner, your stiff as a board Firestarter, your inherently nerfed Timberwolf or whatever mech PGI kicked into mediocrity, be as playable as you think it ought to be, and instead play the mechs that are in fact still decent in the game as it presently exists.

If you have been around for years and can identify what has been broken, or even just what is left that isn't, then you are have all the information you need to make the choice of continuing to play in a way that is "massively unfun" or not. I too hate a lot of the things PGI has done to this game, and I too have been very "vocal" about many of their decisions over the years, but despite it all, I still choose to drop nearly every night for a couple hours, and most nights I have a great time.

[OneTeamPlayer]

@Bud Crue

In general it's a mix of stubbornness, effective skinner box, and sunk cost fallacy (yes, we wanted to buy a mechpack) with a side of strangehold on a unique IP no matter how poorly implemented and a dash of nostalgia and in-game contacts.