I’m not quitting yet! But here’s the list of my reasons to quit one day — the most important to the least important.
1. Too many one-sided battles. At least 50% of all the matches in QP are decided by a steamroll that starts very early (at 2:0 kill count roughly) and happens very fast. Half the team may die over the course of several shots. It's not even that you always lose... The steamroll happens both ways. It's just that you feel like you do not participate, unless you happen to be where killing starts. You take position, you aim, you exchange several hits… Boom, it’s 1:6! So, most of the time it's not a battle going on, but a hunt for the survivors (and that is quite a different game!)
2. Fight/Wait ratio is too low. An average battle goes for 7 minutes for the best survivor. For the ‘lower half’ of the team it’s 2-3 minutes at the most. And if you add up all the loading back into the hangar, changing mechs, matchmaking time, map/mode voting, scene loading, ready waiting, all this 'reactor online, all systems nominal' animation, it will be somewhat ~3-5mins. It takes too much time to get into fighting, and the fighting is too short. (On the average! I stress this.) You know, I am not here to play waiting. I am here to play walking and shooting.
3. Loading. A lot of time-consuming loadings everywhere that can’t be fixed even with SSD.
4. Overly complicated and non-optimized UI/UX, including: hangar UI, combat HUD, aiming and camera controls, in-battle communication. It’s not that you it prevents you from doing any task… It’s just that you will spend too much excess effort and time. First, this poses a real challenge for a new player, averting many and many from the game, making it look way more complex than it really is. Second, many operations take obviously more time than they should. I already made a topic of how converting XP to Skill points is time consuming. And that is just one example of many.
And all these points can be summarized into one single big issue: MWO makes you spend too much excess time not actually playing the game. You know, just like those bureaucratic government places where you mostly sit in the queue, wait for the papers to be processed, while not actually doing anything useful to speed-up the result. In both these cases you lose time for nothing. And you feel only boredom.
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5. Mech bays. Now, I know that EU/US players find it bad not to be 'thankful' for ‘free stuff’, i.e. to demand anything from a F2P game, instead of buying it for money. Once you do this, you're a 'greedy kid', your reputation ruined forever. But cool down your justice engines for 5 minutes and let me share my F2P experience, because comparison is the paragon.
In terms of in-game property management MWO stands between World of Tanks and League of Legends. The progression is absolutely horizontal, like in LoL, but the monetization works like in WoT: you move XP between mechs, buy unique premium mechs, speed up earnings, increase storage space. The thing is… these two schemes do not really fit together, because their end-game goals are different. In LoL you want to own all the playable units (‘champions’), and that’s why there’s no limit to buying them except the currency. That’s why you play even when you can’t progress in Ranked! And in WoT your goal is to earn a Tier 10 unit (all the lower ones not really needed in the endgame). That’s why in WoT you may have your storage limited: you always sell units in order to buy the next ones in the progression tree, you do not really need all the 800+ tanks, you only need ~10 top ones.
And now, here’s MWO with its absolutely horizontal progression and unit-collecting metagame (hello, LoL) on one hand, and on the other and you have mech bays that limit your storage (hello WoT) further emphasized by SP that are lost when you sell the mech.
You see, what makes you farm and level up harder in a WoT-like vertical progression, turns into a paywall in League-styled horizontal one. A soft paywall, true, because there are ways to earn MC and even earn mech bays — but still a paywall. What’s ‘luxury’ in vertical progression, in a horizontal one turns into a basic need. And being limited in this need is like being locked inside a demo version (because in a collecting game the endgame is where you have collected everything). This is kinda telling a player: if you do not pay, you’re not really welcome here, try for free, then pay.
6. 'Killing ground'. I.e. this body of game design decisions that makes all the players gather in a single spot (always the same one) and stand there face to face, shooting each other. Or run that famous ‘nascar’. I say ‘body of game design decisions’, because there’s a lot of little reasons for that: vision system, communication system, combat tempo, TTK, level design, the design of game modes (which are too many IMHO). As a result most battles are very dumb even when they are not a steamroll. No real reason to play objectives, no reason to go anywhere but the very same killing ground at the center of any map. There's no real difference, whether it's a lot of mediums, or a lot of assaults. It's always the same dumb way to fight. Same lack of variety.
7. In-battle performance issues. C'mon, it's 2020 now! I upgraded my PC several times already since the MWO release. I played Doom (the one before the “Eternal”), I played the latest CoD, and other modern titles, but I still get bad lags in MWO now and again, and my FPS is not that high. Add here 150kph mechs that lag out of your aim. This could be less important if the game was in better state overall… Alas, it is not.
Edited by Yoho, 11 September 2020 - 02:43 AM.