193 replies to this topic

[Jordanecus]

new players are at an extreme disadvantage to an already hard PvP game with a steep learning curve

• better sales for new players and to tempt vets to gift new players
  
• double c-bill matches from 25-50 matches
  
• Make trial mechs hero mechs for everyone to try and test out? (but you cant edit or change loadout/skills)
  
• or make champion mechs give more GXP instead of mech xp and keeps (c) trial mechs, but unlock all the nodes so players can play around with and learn the skill system
  
• ask community about which (c) mechs to have as trials (or maybe just let all champion mechs be available at all times?)
  
• we need something that breathes new life into Solaris 7 for new and old alike, maybe better rewards and advertising of the ranking system? better matchmaking? the ability to customize trial mechs for free?
  
• missions: for both merc units and factions to kill so many x faction players, or do scouting missions. Missions give extra loyalty points
  
• DEFFINTELY give new players a few more mech bays
  
• increase incentive to do the all the training challenges and at least qualify , give a small amount of mc and good amount of c-bills for each qualification, and a good amount of mc and large amount of c-bills for qualifying all challenges and GSP for completion (not sure how many challenges there are, but players should get enough MC for a hero medium. and enough c-bills for a clan assault mech)
  
• keep faction play rewards, maybe even improve rewards, and give faction points for wins in QP if you dedicate to a faction
  
• add an 8v8 mode to quick play that is solo que only, and will increase chances of playing your tier level (and maybe a faction 4v4 or 8v8 that allows groups and drop decks?)
  
• more tonnage restrictions per team (find a way to balance and make lighter tonnage mechs more appealing for 12v12 QP)
  
• for tier: make it so the first 10 matches are a special "cadet" tier perhaps. if there are not enough players in que that are cadet then maybe they get a buff? just an idea that seems easier to implement then adding AI matches
  
• or 4.5 is a good idea so that if they have a knack for the game then they wont be seal clubbing for however many matches.
  
• i do like the idea of a more "long term" bonus for new accounts to get some free mechs. there are alot of good suggestions in this thread on how to do that. starting out giving a hunchback 4p, then a thunderbolt 5s, a raven 3L, and a battlemaster 1G. AND i would add, one omni clan mech, something versatile; the timber wolf perhaps? All come with 91 SP. this way the players can play battles, learn the game, and know that eventually they will at least have one of each mech for free! (obviously these mechs come with bays to hold them)
  
• turn off displaying tiers and showing your progress or lost progress by default PLEASE. the loudest might care about this, but certainly not the majority
  
• option to join FP que (or any que ) while still being able to customize and move around the UI, heck maybe even do a drop or two while you wait? idk
  
• a better experience for everyone would also include making the 1500 MC purchase of camos a permanent unlock for ALL mechs
  
• update class indicators to MW5 system of 1 dot, 2 dots, 3 dots
  
• add some unlock criteria for new players so they have to do 10 QP matches before they can go to sellaris, and when it unlocks there is a good tutorial to walk them through it. same for faction play. (tutorial should tell them how to get back to free play, and explain the tiers and why all their mechs don't show up, the new players i played with didnt understand IS vs Clan)
  
• incentive for new players to learn in private matches: let players earn a maximium of 50,000 c-bills per private match (take normal scoring into matches, but you get about 1/3 of the performance bonus, and it cant exceed 50,000. if you want to be generous at the chance of some cheesing you could just give a base 50,000 to all players as long as the match lasts for 5 minutes, just something small to where players still feel like they are making progress)
  
• i know you have to think about sales for new players as well (hopefully new players means new sales). this is why i mentioned better sales, and gift ideas for new player. Maybe make the Sales tab more obvious for mechs, camos, and colors so players know to check that tab often. Once some of these changes are implemented, and hopefully there is a new player influx, do an MC event AND sale so people who want more mechs, heroes, colors or what ever are incentivized to go spend $10-$20

all new cadet bonuses should apply to accounts up to a year old i would think.





And lastly, please get in contact with those of us that have been trying to get the best ideas in one place and re-posting them. I for one, would love to give feed back on rolling these features out and help get them approved. What ever it takes to improve the state of the game and get new players coming in!

Thank you for giving the community at least a little bit of hope for this game after all. I have a few ideas on how to keep this game alive until the next online mechwarrior game, or until the servers turn to dust, please reach out if slightly interested

Edited by Jordanecus, 08 February 2021 - 03:50 PM.

[Jasper5431]

what about changing the double heat sinks in mech lab?
IS mechs have builds that could benefit from boating single heat sinks to use up tonnage saved with engines yet it costs every single time to switch to heat sinks you already bought and paid for.
this hinders creativity and becomes a heavy cost burden on mechs that already require large sums of cash to try out different engines to make builds work.

[Alreech]

MFBoom, on 03 February 2021 - 03:31 PM, said:

Once Solaris took over the game went down hill.

Solaris 7 never took over MWO.
Solaris 7 was designed as game mode for fast matches without teams and fair matchmaking.

But most MWO players are just fine with playing solo quickplay & whining about bad teams and bad matchmaking.

Quote

The game just has a hard time appealing to new players. It's pretty complicated for someone that's never played it & it takes forever to get enough cbills to get a new mech AND especially the weapons you want to upgrade it with. Even for old players like me (I've been playing since the beginning), just messing around with making a mech build is so complex that it takes up at least 75% of the time in the game!!! This is not a game you can just jump right in to & start playing unless you know exactly what your doing, & the different guides for noobs take forever to figure out that most people are put off just by reading them!!!

Sounds like a Mechwarrior game to me.

Yes, PGI could make MWO much easier, more like Fortnite or CoD. To be honest, for the Solo Quickplay of MWO it would be even the best choice to get rid of all the old Battletech stuff & rules like heat and component destruction and just only use the look of the Mechs with modern game mechanics like health & ammo regeneration.

Quote

Why that sounds like lots of fun for us vets, noobs won't find that fun at all. I mean who wants to have to find a group, then go through hours of training, all that just to learn to play a new game?!?!?!

so you arguments are:

• MWO is so hard too learn11!!!!!
  
• New players don't want to find a group to learn the game
  
• so there is no need to make finding a group easier by improving the LFG & adding voip to the group screen

[RamRanchCowboys]

Joined around 2 months ago. The new player experience feels like a constant lack of c-bills to experiment with after the cadet bonus wears off. I saw that they increased it by over 30% after I joined which is a step in the right direction.

The UI is pretty bad and was probably the biggest offput.

Resolution support needs to be addressed as well. Above 1080p text gets small the higher the resolution. On 4k I'd assume it's borderline unreadable, on 1440p it's already incredibly small.

Optimization is not great either. Solaris City tends to tank frames by like 30%, probably being CPU bound as it appears the game doesn't utilize multiple cores very well. For reference my build is an overclocked 5900X, EVGA FTW3 3090 Ultra gaming, 32gb 4400mhz Crucial Ballistix RAM, with the game on a samsung EVO sata SSD. I know for a fact I'm not thermal throttling either, my CPU and VRM temps never hit above 45 on my custom loop. Somehow that map makes my framerate dip to 100 depending on where I'm looking.

Feels like the game needs a lot more behind the scenes work before focusing on adding new stuff.

Edit: On an unrelated note, supply caches could drop like 30% faster.

Edited by RamRanchCowboys, 24 February 2021 - 04:09 PM.

[WilkyGLI]

I have some feedback, as someone who is about 8 months in to MWO helping a new player start out..
First a couple questions.
1 What is the purpose of not allowing cadets to use voice comms?
2 would it be possible to set up a way to "edit" IE reconfigure the trial mechs as a temporary type of optimization?

As a Player who helped a new player in person and was able to take the controls to show them things and tactics in game.. Not being able to use voice comms as a cadet seems to be a huge handicap. instead, this dead new player has to stop fighting and type or use the command wheel (still pauses his effort to escape) instead of verbally asking for help.. or helping his own team.. (calling a stealth mech, ambush, so forth)

As for the trial mechs, I know there are some things coming in this next patch to hopefully improve them. My Second question above, entails somehow making it so the trial mechs can be temporarily outfitted with any loadout and skillpoints available to that variant (at no cost) so that it could help teach newer players mechlab and allow them to experience fully skilled mechs. these optimizations could reset after each game, when you change to another mech, log off. that way it will make abusing the free optimized mechs less likely.. experienced pilots could use them to test loadouts in actual battle instead of target shooting corpses..

cadet bonuses are about perfect, he now has 4 mechs (thanks to the heavy sale), one fully skilled and regularly does 500 damage with it... After 26 ish games..lol He's just bummed he couldn't get the huntsman event done in two days...( he almost did) he really wanted the mech (I let him pilot mine once )

Edited by WilkyGLI, 03 March 2021 - 02:30 PM.

[Aidan Crenshaw]

WilkyGLI, on 03 March 2021 - 02:24 PM, said:

I have some feedback, as someone who is about 8 months in to MWO helping a new player start out..
First a couple questions.
1 What is the purpose of not allowing cadets to use voice comms?

To deter low-effort trolls abusing the comms-system that just make new accounts if banned due to amassing reports. It's better this way.

[MUNTAFIRE2]

Here is a clip of the effects lag has on the game... Notice that the clock counts down and then goes back up after the game registers the hit and ends the game almost half a second late. Is this good for a new player experience? I have to play with this lag.

MUNTAFIRE2, on 12 April 2021 - 04:36 PM, said:

Here is a clip of the effects lag has on the game... Notice that the clock counts down and then goes back up after the game registers the hit and ends the game almost half a second late. Is this good for a new player experience? I have to play with this lag.

It is especially bad when you are trying to target an enemy then spot them and coz of the lag it is just a garbled mess, I miss the spotting of the target if the window is too short, even though I do everything within my humanly powers to execute the command.

I just want to point out how this is as an experience for me as a player. So I shoot the gun. I see the shot hit the mech... I continue to swipe right and track the mech coz for some reason there is no hit even though the shot clearly hit the target... All of a sudden the game ends and the timer skips back to 03 seconds from 02 seconds as the hit I had made registers and ends the game. The feeling of tracking a ghost mech that is phantom in it's nature and bred purely from the loins of the lag is something a player should not have to deal with. This is the end of the game a light mech attacks and you hit the thing.... It seems to end the game, but he runs on and then the game ends anyway and the timer changes wtf man wtf ghost mech has lived on here and the guy in the video even says it. I said "wow that lag is bad" (you can't hear my mic) then a guy says just as the video ends "you notice it, too? Yeah, that was..." you can guess what he said next it was "bad" you can hear him say it. He say the ghost mech probably twice as bad as I did in an alternate transformed state of ultra phantom ghost mech.

Edited by MUNTAFIRE2, 12 April 2021 - 04:54 PM.

[MUNTAFIRE2]

In this one we have something happening with a PIR. Who knows aye?? Good for a new player experience I say. Keeps them on their toes.

[MUNTAFIRE2]

MUNTAFIRE2, on 28 April 2021 - 06:05 PM, said:

In this one we have something happening with a PIR. Who knows aye?? Good for a new player experience I say. Keeps them on their toes.

see some teleporting in this video on a mass scale. the teleporting is happening all the time when you slow down the playback speed to 0.25x you can actually witness the continuous teleporting of the PIR throughout the encounter.

[Botaine]

Trial mechs should have a full skill tree on them because new players will be using them and they are already at a disadvantage because they are new. No skills on the trial mechs makes them at even more of a disadvantage and they may blame it on the fact they are new, when in reality they actually are outmatched because most players are using fully skilled and optimized builds they are very familiar with. The skills for trial mechs should probably be unchangeable because it might interfere with the regular skill trees on owned mechs if not. If you are concerned that having skilled out trial mechs will disincentivize people from buying their own mechs, reduce the number of trial mechs available at one time so they get tired of them eventually and want their own. If they have c-bills they will spend them anyway.

Most of the trial mechs feel kind of bland to me, probably in part to the lack of skills. If you need ideas on what to make into trial mechs, you could watch some of the top performing players and copy their best performing mechs and skill trees exactly, then make them the trial mechs (and award them a little MC?). Maybe make an event out of it, and say the best performing mechs for a particular month get made into trial mechs for everyone to play for a while until you have the next round of trial mechs determined the same way.

Edited by Lehv, 21 June 2021 - 03:51 PM.

[Sawk]

hi LEHV
Guess what, its a game like any other, you have to earn it, myself i took few months playing a jenner till i could build a mech, or you spend money, and you still have to skill it.
There are NO GOD modes in this game, LIKE any other game, you need to learn, you need to make CASH, you need to find friends, you may even need discord and/or team speak.
Hope you do better than me, i can afford any thing in this game, but the only friends a got--- want me dead.

SAWK

[Botaine]

Sawk, on 21 June 2021 - 03:41 PM, said:

hi LEHV
Guess what, its a game like any other, you have to earn it, myself i took few months playing a jenner till i could build a mech, or you spend money, and you still have to skill it.
There are NO GOD modes in this game, LIKE any other game, you need to learn, you need to make CASH, you need to find friends, you may even need discord and/or team speak.
Hope you do better than me, i can afford any thing in this game, but the only friends a got--- want me dead.

SAWK

It took you a few months to skill out a single mech? It only takes me two-three hours or so. There are a couple different kinds of experience points so maybe you aren't spending them all. Having skills on a mech isn't god mode, it just puts you on even playing ground with everyone else.

Edited by Lehv, 21 June 2021 - 03:57 PM.

[Sawk]

oh my
you need to learn, i skilled my first mech out of the first BETA, it took a little longer, i been playing for 10 YEARS, you really think i am lesser pilot, then CHALLENGE me.
I will tell at this date i am only TIER 5, i never learned, i have not done a solo challenge in few years, been quiet, if you need some help, there are plenty of free team speaks around, i not use DISCORD, I have seen guys at the top of this GAME after 2 months, but you want it in 5 days, sorry spend your time.

SAWK-- CLAN -- mongoose