13 replies to this topic

[Ghost Owl]

Hi all i played this game up until the end of 2013 and came back to the game 7 weeks ago and having now played 1000+ games thought I would share some of my thoughts/suggestions for quickplay for discussion.

For clarification I am a bad player, everyone has their own opinion and that's cool and this applies to quickplay only and I have only played quickplay since I returned to the game.

1. Remove team damage - what does this add to the game? It punishes genuine mistakes which often are not even the firing players fault who is then penalised, it can also increase toxicity even though it was totally accidental. I do not believe their is an issue with team damage abuse. With weapons like PPCs wide round and volley fired weapons and the width of some mechs it just makes me think that team damage is not needed in this game in quickplay.

For example team damage was removed from World of Tanks (not saying this is the best game in the world) after realising there were more negatives than positives to having it in game.

2. Map vote to be removed from quickplay. There are so many other maps in the game which I rarely get to see or play and I think even if the "bad maps" are improved people will still vote for what they know. Sometimes you get a map you don't like but without map vote at least you know you won't get it 3 times in a row. Also if all maps were equal why would anyone vote for hot maps as it just impacts mech performance. Removing map vote from quickplay would also speed up the time to get in game. Yes I still think there should be a game mode vote but that could be on the ready up screen and chosen once the map is known.

Map vote can also be skewed by having groups if a 4 man group all set for Sniper/LRM for example they can skew the vote in their favour further increasing their already considerable ability to influence a match.

3. Groups in quickplay ideally removed or reduced to 2. I fully get that people want to play with their mates but having a third of a team be in a coordinated group is oppressive. I think that pre-mades should make up no more than 20% of a random pick up team without having excessive influence. I get the player base is not massive so having a queue just for groups is a problem maybe faction play is or prearranged comp matches is where it should live?

Just to be clear I am not saying the team with the 4 man pre-made always wins but often groups are made with people of similar player ability so good players in a group with good players and they we have a huge influence on a match and more often than not stomp the other team.

4. Override engaged warning to be much smaller and elsewhere on the hud it currently is a bit immersion breaking where it is as it is on from the moment you drop in until the end of the match either that or change so you cant activate it until you reach 80% heat or something.

5. Remove PSR tiers from matchmaker calculation and make cadets a tier of their own e.g. tier 6 and they can't meet tier 1&2.

TLDR
Holy Batman a great big wall of text, these are just some quickplay suggestions for some chilled discussion from a returning player after playing 1000+ games.
1. Remove team damage
2. Remove map vote (not game mode)
3. Remove or reduce groups in quickplay to 2
4 Ovrride engaged warning smaller in the hud or operate differently
5. Remove PSR tier from MM cadets become tier 6 and can't meet tier 1&2

Thanks for your time and discussion in advance.

Ath

Edited by Athariel, 14 June 2022 - 01:55 AM.

[Mr Nice Mech]

+1

Group play kills this game. A 4-player team of tier 5 players will be put up against a T1 comp team and you will lose most of the time.

I am tier 2 and I still see cadets. You explain this to me. Well, your player base is so smal,l that this is reality.

[Teenage Mutant Ninja Urbie]

agreed on most things.

I'll say this for teamdamage, though: it makes factionplay "more fun" in every way imaginable, and I'd hate to see it go there. but agreed that in QP nobody "needs" it, and it doesn't make the game better there.

map-voting is the bane of map-diversity, and yeah: let's get rid of it. or rework ALL maps to make em more popular.
so.. getting rid -> by far easier.

groups in solo: well, nobody (in their right mind) wanted that from the start; "make groupplay (as it was before) accessible to solos" was all there was needed. But PGI being PGI.. well.

Edited by Teenage Mutant Ninja Urbie, 14 June 2022 - 05:55 AM.

[Curccu]

Agreeing with 2 and 4.
5 is bit problematic as some cadets are recruited by their tier1&2 friends and they want to play together...
Maybe block solo dropping cadets from meeting T1&2?

PS. you are not bad 80% of playerbase is worse than you...
https://leaderboard....arch?u=Athariel

Mr Nice Mech, on 14 June 2022 - 03:27 AM, said:

Group play kills this game. A 4-player team of tier 5 players will be put up against a T1 comp team and you will lose most of the time.

Sounds like match maker issue not group issue, why does MM match T1 group against T5 group.

Mr Nice Mech, on 14 June 2022 - 03:27 AM, said:

I am tier 2 and I still see cadets. You explain this to me. Well, your player base is so smal,l that this is reality.

Some cadets are recruited by other veteran players and drop in same groups. Sometimes might be playerbase issue on slow times.

Edited by Curccu, 15 June 2022 - 05:39 AM.

[kalashnikity]

Mr Nice Mech, on 14 June 2022 - 03:27 AM, said:

+1

Group play kills this game. A 4-player team of tier 5 players will be put up against a T1 comp team and you will lose most of the time.

I am tier 2 and I still see cadets. You explain this to me. Well, your player base is so smal,l that this is reality.

Groups enhance the ability to recruit new players into the gamer (friends) by at least an order of magnitude or two.

As for OP's suggestions... theycare bad and OP should feel bad. Lol.

The game as it is now is the production production of years of tuning. What's up with people showing up recently and demanding major changes?


I think it's great as is.

[Curccu]

kalashnikity, on 14 June 2022 - 10:24 AM, said:

Groups enhance the ability to recruit new players into the gamer (friends) by at least an order of magnitude or two.

As for OP's suggestions... theycare bad and OP should feel bad. Lol.

The game as it is now is the production production of years of tuning. What's up with people showing up recently and demanding major changes?


I think it's great as is.

And some of us who have played since beta like you agree with OP on some points, PGI has failed many times and loads of stuff could be improved pretty easily.

Like having that checkbox in options to have override on by default.... and that override banner is huge, could be a lot smaller and less annoying.

[kalashnikity]

I know this is a founder account, but I only started playing recently. Anyways, when I first started I tried to get a friend to play with me, but we never could get a match together. He quit.

Team damage is good for several reasons. First of all sometimes your team mate is being a jerk. Lol. Second... it maintains the realism. Lastly.. it's cannon. And p.s. it teaches valuable life skills.

Since op been gone, maybe op doesn't know... MM already doesn't match cadet with T1 unless the server is dead.

[kalashnikity]

Curccu, on 14 June 2022 - 10:32 AM, said:

And some of us who have played since beta like you agree with OP on some points, PGI has failed many times and loads of stuff could be improved pretty easily.

Like having that checkbox in options to have override on by default.... and that override banner is huge, could be a lot smaller and less annoying.

Iirc 2018 or 2019 was the first time I got to play MWO, because lack of internet.

Anyways, now that I've played a few year I see just how much the constant complainers are (to put it politely) full of poop... i start to have doubts anything was ever as bad as I've read on the forums.

I'll admit to having some complaints.

Weapon door lights are literally a no brainer, I almost applied for a job at PGI just to spend a few minutes coding a different weapon door light, one that either had a reliable color change or shape. That and to make the alleged color blind reticle work. At all.

So, yeah, PGI isn't perfect. But dagnabit, I started Battletech in the 90's and then MW2 and kept MW3 going until 2015 on an XP machine. The only thing I'm disappointed with is I didn't get to start playing mwo sooner. I love this game, and there is nothing wrong with the current state that makes it unplayable. In fact, I've seem some improvements recently. The cauldron rebalance fixed the Timberwolves, for instance, and its actually playable without being over powered.

I'm ambivalent about the planned RL change, but I think they will pull off another miracle there too.

I do have issues with some things, but over all they are minor things, and more a matter of taste and lore than actual playability.

I do look forward to MWO2, based on a MODERN physics engine. Something more like UE5.

Edited by kalashnikity, 14 June 2022 - 11:07 AM.

[Bassault]

NO. I don't want to get alpine more than I do now. I don't want to get Emerald Vale more than I get now. I don't want to get Caustic valley more than I do now. These maps suck, period. I do think cadets shouldn't be fighting tier 1's though.

Edited by I LOVE ANNIHILATORS, 14 June 2022 - 12:28 PM.

[TheCaptainJZ]

Athariel, on 14 June 2022 - 01:51 AM, said:

1. Remove team damage
2. Remove map vote (not game mode)
3. Remove or reduce groups in quickplay to 2
4 Ovrride engaged warning smaller in the hud or operate differently
5. Remove PSR tier from MM cadets become tier 6 and can't meet tier 1&2

Thanks for your time and discussion in advance.

Ath

1. Sensible reasoning. Gameplay considerations should trump lore and realism considerations most of the time. It's a mechanic that can be abused and serves no actual purpose. Now whether it can be turned off easily is the question. I'm guessing they'd need engineering resources to change it.

2. Well, in a perfect world, we would pick the map based on where we choose to fly dropships to fight on the Inner Sphere map, but that never materialized. It used to be random and lot of people asked for a voting solution so one was developed. I suppose it gives some sense of player agency to leave it in and if the multiplier is working again, it gives you some weight if you never get your choice. I think it's fine as-in. Not all maps are created equal. The ones that don't get picked are usually worse maps actually. If they were better, they might get picked more. (I'm looking at you, Alpine!) I do wish we'd reduce the weights on the classic maps since they do appear to show too often. Also, Frozen City gets picked over Forest Colony. I'd like to see the revamped maps changed to be closer to their originals and then drop the originals as intended. Or, actually, move them to Private Matches and Event Queue.

3. This was intended but there's matchmaker issues with this. What I'd like to see is Event Queue dedicated to groups +solos on a regular schedule and remove groups from QP. They now should have the capability to do this.

4. Agreed. Maybe make it a HUD icon. People have also be asking for a change in the override mechanic for 10 years so it's a persistent setting. I don't see a reason not to. I know the PGI argument at the time was something about gameplay but I never felt it was a strong argument.

5. Definitely need something different for players in Tier 5. The problem right now is the Matchmaker is broken when Event Queue is open. Until that is fixed, just gotta endure it.

Edited by TheCaptainJZ, 14 June 2022 - 12:31 PM.

[ThreeStooges]

Team damage must remain. Those who want it removed entirely have never played mwo before there was even a hint of reporting/banning system in mwo. A simple alt-tab could cause a massive in-fight to where a team would kill most if not all of itself. The remainder either gave up and left or were just farmed in moments. True there have always been actual tkers/greifers but since the report/ban system they have massively dropped in numbers.

A minute of ff off on match start would simply stop many alt-tab ff incidents.

Groups should be extremely limited in quick play. I've had matches where one side were cadets and the other side full of unit tagged people. No one will last 25 matches when they lose 4-5 matches in a row because they will be pissed off.

The population is so low now that I just assume the c tags are alts.

[YouKnowNothing]

Athariel, on 14 June 2022 - 01:51 AM, said:

[...]
wall-o-text
[...]

1. This would remove one of my sources of fun and content generation in the game, but I do get that some of what I consider fun others might see as toxic. But honestly I wouldn't want it gone, it has its uses besides trolling. I just can't think of any right at the moment.

2. I wouldn't care less personally if map voting was removed and we got random map assignment back. But what I do care is not having groups influencing the map picking.

3. Dunno about group play, this is too big of a thing to be discussed in a void, everyone's talking about secondary MM balancing, if/when that's gonna be implemented, it might fix some of the issues groups are causing in soopQ.

4. Don't care about override either, never been bothered by the text. The part about not being able to activate it unless you're at 80% heat is a thankyoubutnothankyou. It defeats the purpose of an override. In fact, make it a toggle-able feature in the menu, to have override on at the start of the match.

5. The remove PSR thing gave me a chuckle. Especially the bit about a separate queue only for new people... no one's ever gonna find a match or it'd be 50-50 seal clubber smurfs and players who have potentially never played this game before.

[Ghost Owl]

Hi all,

Thanks for taking the time to read through some of this.

Just wanted to clarify I am not demanding anything and I will not suddenly quit the game if not implemented. I think it is always useful and welcome for fresh eyes to look at something to see if it can be changed for the better. New and returning players look at the game from a different background and experiences in other games and also represent the only way for the player base to increase so I don't think we should be dismissed outright because we haven't played the game for years.

I did wait until after 1000+ games to try and get a decent feel for things and these are only suggestions for the veteran players to say bad idea because ..... Good idea too hard to implement its been tried or Good idea more of us would like to see that change. I made these suggestions because I have enjoyed and care about the game but have run across some things that caused me personally some frustrations.

Also just to clarify my thinking on a couple of points:

1. I am suggesting friendly fire off totally i.e. you cannot damage or kill friendly mechs. I am also a big Battletech fan and I get the realism aspect as well but in online games I personally feel gameplay is the critical factor and realism and lore can also be negatives from an online PvP game standpoint.

5. I am suggesting Tier ranking system remains in place but is not used in QP MM calculation so Tier 5's can meet T1's. I am suggesting that cadets are a Tier 6. Tier 6's are in the MM calculation and cannot meet Tier 1 and 2. The main point is about removing Tiers from the MM calculation not protecting cadets (currently in place) Overall the game has few cadets as a percentage of the player base but still wouldn't want to screw them over.


Again thanks for the discussions it is useful for a newer player to get the veteran views about some of these topics.

Ath

[Quandoo]

They simply need MWO2 in unreal engine 5. This game is done, all they do now is to cash grab as hard as they can. More and more packs and events.

Edited by Quandoo, 16 June 2022 - 02:16 AM.