28 replies to this topic

[Yoho]

First of all, it's far from that yet. I'm still greedy for the experience, I still go into Quick Play for a couple of hours every day, and I still have fun shooting and hiding from the enemy fire. But I decided to say this up-front, before time. The reason being: I know myself, and I know that when I finally feel that it's enough I will just stand up and walk away, not wishing to do or say anymore. So I'd better write it all now, while I still feel compassion for this game, and while I still track every little detail of my experience. Maybe (just maybe) someone will make use of this.


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.

------


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.

[Sjorpha]

Well, the game is 8 years old and on it's last legs. There is no active development anymore really.

You're not going to see any of those things addressed. All we can do now is enjoy it for what it is while it lasts.

[Horseman]

Quote

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.

Reality:
Even as a F2P player you're going to be getting mechbays and mechs faster than you can level them. Complaining that you're not getting them even faster is just confusing need with greed.

I've been running a completely F2P alt account, Horseman IIC, for about two years now. Playing events nets me somewhere around 1000-1500 1500 MC a month, and I've made my way to 57 mechs (and corresponding mechbays, and I haven't even bothered to farm FP for the free bays) including 9 heroes, five of which (Cinder, Purifier, Virago, Deathstrike, Scorch) were purchased with event MC. I've ended up with 4.5k MC again, so you can add a 10th hero to that list as soon as I decide which one to get.

Quote

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.

T5 experience, I guess. Mine's rather different.
If you want more organized gameplay, look for a comp team.

Edited by Horseman, 11 September 2020 - 05:19 AM.

[Yoho]

Horseman, on 11 September 2020 - 05:18 AM, said:

Reality:
Even as a F2P player you're going to be getting mechbays and mechs faster than you can level them.

Maybe it depends on how much you already own? For now I only managed to earn 50 MC (and some cockpit stuff) while leveling 4 mechs to 91/91. To be honest, I spent quite some time thinking that there are no events (because their location and existence are not really obvious), so we can put this as 2 fully leveled mechs at least. Well... what shall I get first, 25kk C-bills, or 250 MC more?

[Brauer]

Yoho, on 11 September 2020 - 05:58 AM, said:

Maybe it depends on how much you already own? For now I only managed to earn 50 MC (and some cockpit stuff) while leveling 4 mechs to 91/91. To be honest, I spent quite some time thinking that there are no events (because their location and existence are not really obvious), so we can put this as 2 fully leveled mechs at least. Well... what shall I get first, 25kk C-bills, or 250 MC more?

It's true that the event UI, and game UI in general, is not great, BUT Horseman is correct that there is quite a bit of MC up for grabs right now. I also think you overstate the importance of collecting all the mechs. Sure, it is helpful to get many, but most mechs in the game are bad and don't even fill a viable niche. So really a player is probably working toward something like 25% (or less) of the mechs and far fewer are required to have viable mechs for each mode.

[Beorning]

A decent read OP.
1. It is going to happen even if every body plays their best, sometimes an early start leads to a rout. Probably why peeps lose there bananas when some newbie wanders off in an assault.

Yep the waiting is the hardest part. Luckily we have forums, or streamers to watch.

The UI is dreadful. I got either can't seem me ocher color or cyan hard on old eyes blue for target reticule. Don't get me started on what they did to thermal vision.

I actually like the sort of LOS radar.
I am ok with the way the F2P so far as the grinding goes. The way the MC was set up was pointlessly confusing - oh wait, let's not confuse what the devs would like and what the bean counters insist on, but in the end the bean counters did more harm then they know. Less BS might have helped.

Personally after a month I usually throw money at an MMO, and that's usually when I get bored of it, but I never feel ripped off for paying for my entertainment. I have games I do not play at all.

6. We used to call nascar chasing the tail in MW4, it's not new, just overused. Sometimes someone calls a counter nascar and it works.
There is only what.. 17 maps? I won't say I know all the ins and outs of them after a month or so, but you are right about how they lend themselves to that toilet bowl swirl.
make them bigger, don't make balanced Unreal tournament maps..

7. lol. Maybe pay your devs the extra $5 to use the LOD feature.

[Horseman]

Yoho, on 11 September 2020 - 05:58 AM, said:

Well... what shall I get first, 25kk C-bills, or 250 MC more?

MC. If in doubt, go for MC.

Yoho, on 11 September 2020 - 05:58 AM, said:

Maybe it depends on how much you already own?

Maybe, but overall - you get to that point even if you only play the events and barely touch the game outside of them (that's my play pattern for the alt).

Quote

For now I only managed to earn 50 MC (and some cockpit stuff) while leveling 4 mechs to 91/91.

An average doesn't mean it will be that amount each and every month - events come and go, and the biggest payers are usually the 3-4 loot bag events at 1-2K per event, after that the 4-times-a-year solaris season kick-offs, and beyond that there have been been events with single goals worth 250-500 MC (not a cakewalk, but doable)

Edited by Horseman, 11 September 2020 - 09:03 AM.

[Yoho]

Horseman, on 11 September 2020 - 08:58 AM, said:

MC. If in doubt, go for MC.

Ahhah, no, I didn't mean choice. I meant that I would probably earn those C-bills faster while trying to do the events for the sum of 250 MC.

Horseman, on 11 September 2020 - 08:58 AM, said:

An average doesn't mean it will be that amount each and every month - events come and go, and the biggest payers are usually the 3-4 loot bag events at 1-2K per event, after that the 4-times-a-year solaris season kick-offs, and beyond that there have been been events with single goals worth 250-500 MC (not a cakewalk, but doable)

Hm. Okay. If that is so then I was wrong about mech bays part. Honestly, I was thinking that a very occasional 50MC reward is all I gonna get.

Thanks for clarifying the economy for me.

Brauer, on 11 September 2020 - 06:55 AM, said:

I also think you overstate the importance of collecting all the mechs. Sure, it is helpful to get many, but most mechs in the game are bad and don't even fill a viable niche. So really a player is probably working toward something like 25% (or less) of the mechs and far fewer are required to have viable mechs for each mode.

Well, there're different ways to play a game. Some people play 'being the best', they are interested in game property as long, as it helps them win. Others play 'tasting it all', while not really caring for being the best in battle. Progression is rather for the latter ones. There are other types of a player's intentions, too.

Edited by Yoho, 11 September 2020 - 10:05 AM.

[Horseman]

Yoho, on 11 September 2020 - 09:37 AM, said:

Ahhah, no, I didn't mean choice. I meant that I would probably earn those C-bills faster while trying to do the events for the sum of 250 MC.

Unless you heavily overuse consumables, C-Bills will stack up faster (including from event rewards). On that alt I've been bankrolling my unit's recruitment costs and still kept racking up C-Bills faster than I could resonably expect to spend them. Eventually ended up splurging on several mechs I barely play.

[LordNothing]

il quit one day. lol. seriously though anyone still left is either new or completely unhinged. i fall into the latter group.

but il bite:

1. have you tried fighting? aggression may not work every time, but the chase is often better than the catch.

2. ive been complaining about this for a very long time. the solution was faction play. it guaranteed you stayed in battle for at least 4 mechs. but the bulk of the player base decided that it was too hard.

3. load times are just as bad in other games. this problem is connected to the #2 though, stop and go play means that every time you die you go through another mm+vote+load+connect+play+die cycle. its better one load offer many matches but thats not the design the chose. maybe provide an option to turn off 2k textures. the way texture formats are organized, it sticks the top level mips first, and its easy to load the header, and skip the biggest one, so only a partial file is loaded, the small part. idk any games that do it, but im sure they exist.

4. ui design is better than it used to be. scaling would be nice though. i run in 4k and have to really squint while in the mechlab.

5. standard f2p baggage. there is a thing to consider though. pgi gives away a lot of free stuff. you just have to play all the events. the other thing to consider is once you own a certain number of mechs, loot starts pouring in. i have 54 heros and north of 300 mech bays, i probably only paid for 10% of them with cash, if that. id rather pay one fair price once and get the whole game than all this nickle and dime bs. as fair as it seems this will be my last f2p. not to mention how hideous the game looks because of ugly bolt-ons, dekkles, out of place cockpit items, and people too cheap to buy paint. i am so sick of puke green primer.

6. this is why its pgi and not some well respected developer. the lack of big picture design, slow development, and constant caving to loud minorities.

7. the crysis hole. while crysis ran a state of the art engine at the time, it was not future proofed well. its not that they didnt try, but they made some bad predictions as to which way technology was headed. they could not have forseen the breakdown of moore's law in following years. they had assumed that within a couple years from its launch, we would have single core performance in excess of 5-7ghz. such machines never materialized beyond a few brutally overclocked machines running exotic and expensive cooling solutions. instead came the core war, and while you can get a cpu with an absurd quantity of cores, they are slow < 4ghz cores and games seldom use more than a couple. the engine is ok if you dont push it, but the whole point of the engine was to push it. id say pgi bet on the wrong horse.

Edited by LordNothing, 11 September 2020 - 11:03 PM.

[w0qj]

Newly playing MWO for the past 10 weeks (gone since the days of the founder package days).

Having loads of fun!

Actually paying for mech packages to make up for lost time.
And I'm still paying much cheaper than when MWO first started back then!
(And don't even get me started about the Gold mechs...that's what promoted me to uninstall MWO as a [very] occasional MWO player back then).

[Ignatius Audene]

I still don't understand why people are so upset because of the gold mechs. Standard mechs, which offers 0 benefit. If people are willing to throw 500$ at a gold skin, to support the game and/or show they are a whale, is fine for me.

Edited by Ignatius Audene, 12 September 2020 - 03:19 AM.

[w0qj]

I actually like the Gold mechs; don't get me wrong...

BUT consider this: what if MWO is allowed to get away with US$500 Gold Mech packages... then they would create US$800 or even US$1,000 packages as the next tier!
I voted with my wallet after that (despite a founder package patron).

Just look at what happened/happening at St*r Citiz*n, top "package" is into 5-digit US Dollars!

Surely you won't want MWO to head in that direction.
Me neither.

[LordNothing]

Ignatius Audene, on 12 September 2020 - 03:18 AM, said:

I still don't understand why people are so upset because of the gold mechs. Standard mechs, which offers 0 benefit. If people are willing to throw 500$ at a gold skin, to support the game and/or show they are a whale, is fine for me.

i dont mind them, but every time there is one in my match, i get more team damage for some reason. perhaps the glare is messing with my aim.

Edited by LordNothing, 12 September 2020 - 04:40 PM.

[Yoho]

I am okay with Gold mechs too. I would even be okay with Diamond ones for $5k+ — as long as they are not mandatory to buy (including not being pay-to-win). IMO if some guy has 500 bucks to throw at a game I play for free, he must be provided with a way to do so, and THANK YOU my hero of the wallet! Golden mechs? Great idea! Much better than warhorns, at least.

[w0qj]

Game makers can easily become addicted to game "whales" (aka those who spend massively on the game).

When this happens, the temptation is to jack all game package prices in only one direction... and it's prices "up".
ie: A death spiral where prices keeps going up, putting off casual players and only whales can buy... and the cycle repeats until even the whales give up.

That's why the "gold" mechs were nipped in the bud, thank goodness.

Yoho, on 13 September 2020 - 12:11 PM, said:

I am okay with Gold mechs too. I would even be okay with Diamond ones for $5k+ — as long as they are not mandatory to buy (including not being pay-to-win). IMO if some guy has 500 bucks to throw at a game I play for free, he must be provided with a way to do so, and THANK YOU my hero of the wallet! Golden mechs? Great idea! Much better than warhorns, at least.

Edited by w0qj, 13 September 2020 - 07:32 PM.

[Davers]

The game is designed to snowball the team that gets the first kills. One sided games is literally MWO working as intended.

[amenophis]

I just want to add a short comment. Sense the last mantainance downtime PGI did something to the matchmaker. Sense then I have had almost all matches that were all stomps. Win or loose they are almost all stomps. This makes the matches very short and this makes them boring. Been playing sense the beta days and never seen it this bad. there may be a short future ahead.

[The6thMessenger]

Honestly, it sounds like the game will quit on you first. MWO is basically on life-support that PGI is still not willing to just let the poor old girl die, and so far personally I feel that this is only alive because of MW5 still not hitting steam or have multiplayer that involves killing one another instead of cooperative PVE.

[Bud Crue]

The6thMessenger, on 16 September 2020 - 01:54 AM, said:

MWO is basically on life-support that PGI is still not willing to just let the poor old girl die, and so far personally I feel that this is only alive because of MW5 still not hitting steam or have multiplayer that involves killing one another instead of cooperative PVE.

This reminded me of Russ's exchange with SeanLang last month on Twitter (https://twitter.com/...6834891776?s=20), where Russ said there were some great internal conversation about some exciting possibilities about MWO's future.

I know it's premature to ask ("90 days" to never being PGI's normal response time for these sorts of things), but anybody heard any follow up?