31 replies to this topic

[ScrapIron Prime]

They did recently close one of those farming paths. AMS shooting down missiles isn’t worth much if anything now. Previously, you could play a medium mech, mount an AMS, and clue yourself to a larger mech for the match and rack up an extra 20 points easy with Protected Medium and all the free sky candy for the missiles shot down. Protected Medium is still worth points, because that is literally teamwork.

[LORD ORION]

I've come back after a 2 year break, match maker seems better than what I remember. (of course I am remembering T1, compared to reset T4 now) so I don't see how it needs to be tweaked and possibly made worse.
With the exception of 4 player drops, it seems to do an adequate job at making even teams. But face reality, 4 guys on comms who play together are always going to be way better than 4 individuals of equal skill. Carry harder.

[ScrapIron Prime]

The character of the games changes slowly as you rise in Tier. At 3 you start encountering the most lethal players, at 2 you encounter them with frequency and few new players. The kinds of builds you can run and still be competitive narrows a bit. But the basics don't change... know your mech, know your location, be aware.

And welcome back!

[BellatorMonk]

Heavy Money, on 13 August 2022 - 11:44 AM, said:

If you take people who have avg 300 matchscore because they do a lot of damage and kills, and you put them against people who have avg 300 matchscore because they collect proximity, scouting, etc that don't relate to actually killing the enemy, you're going to have a really bad time.

The primary purpose of the matchmaker is to keep the top 10% of the playerbase in terms of actually killing mechs separate from the bottom 70-80%. The current system is trying to do this, it just isn't great at it. Artificially inflating the scores of currently lower ranked people for no reason undermines this goal. Almost all complaints about MM, groups in QP, etc are complaints about top % players ending up in lower ranked games.

If the top players were not in a 4 man lance together I doubt very much they would perform as well in QP if they were solo. Barring intentional synch drops (something to be fixed, but obviously never will) I would wager these top players would no longer be "top" in the current PR system.

Someone also mentioned playing these "top" players 1v1 at least 20 times in a row and most people would lose against them 20 times in a row. Wasn't that what Solaris 7 was all about? I was not here for that short lived game cycle and it obviously failed for some reason? I would have to look at the Seasonal Leaderboards for those time periods to compare who was top in Solaris versus QP and bolstered by a lance of people willing to sacrifice themselves and or complimenting each other's builds to attain such "great" gameplay?

Lastly, the comments about "EG7" did not register for me until I started looking in the current state of PGI online and found this amongst all the other info out there. https://massivelyop....ht-out-for-24m/

This assures the fact I will not spend a dime on this game unless the Company shows some serious goodwill effort into fixing the many concerning and broken mechanics being discussed.

Seems people like me will simply have to accept the game as it is and stop believing it will change for the better. It is my understanding there are about 30k regular players at this point (I doubt that is a daily average as well), so all this discussion about monetization, etc seems rather foolish and would only decrease the player base more..not increase nor pay for salaries and increased/fixed content.

No one is talking about "eliminating" Group play...so stop making arguments on that point alone.

Edited by BellatorMonk, 14 August 2022 - 03:03 PM.

[1453 R]

Anyone who thinks that banning/disabling group play for MWO will result in "a better MWO" doesn't know what they're talking about and their opinion can be reliably ignored.

Just in the last two weeks, a friend of mine's been trying the game out. He mostly plays while grouped up with whoever's available. We don't coordinate builds, and we don't coordinate play over Discord more than any of us do in the regular game, but we do offer him build pointers, spectate his games in the rare occasions we die before he does, and generally guide him along the path of understanding this janky, awful game's myriad roadblocks and obstacles for new players. This game is NOT newbie-friendly; we're still explaining where to find everything in PGI's absolutely godawful UI design to this guy. These are people who play Dark Souls, famous for its "the tutorial is dying enough to figure out how to avoid death", and they're still baffled by the U.I. in this game alone.

That guy would've bounced off the game in an hour if we weren't allowed to help him. All the stanky janky butthurt in the world, all the blithering monkeys who cannot stop mining salt about how Mean Nasty People-With-Friends killed them that one time and they'll never get over it, can kindly be quiet. turning off grouped play means turning off the only remaining avenue for new players in this game, and that means turning off the game.

As toxic and awful as the sentiment is, git gudder. As a T4 weenie who continually hangs out down here after my three-year break because I keep playing hinky junk and Trying **** instead of just getting in Scorch and farming matchscore? I guarantee you the reason you lose games is staring right at you in the mirror. You are not, in fact, the second coming of Kai Allard-Liao, you never were, and you never will be. Assuming the game owes you an unbroken string of steady victories that are only denied you because People-With-Friends maliciously conspired to steal your stuff is...well. Words that will get me in trouble if I can type them, but they rhyme with "Bum", "Short-Knighted", "Cupid", and "NVidiotic".

Grouped players are not the issue. They've never been the issue. They're simply your excuse for your own suck, and I refuse to be penalized for your suck any harder than I already am by playing on your team.

Edited by 1453 R, 14 August 2022 - 02:16 PM.

[Heavy Money]

BellatorMonk, on 14 August 2022 - 01:40 PM, said:

If the top players were not in a 4 man lance together I doubt very much they would perform as well in QP if they were solo. Barring intentional synch drops (something to be fixed, but obviously never will) I would wager these top players would no longer be "top" in the current PR system.

It depends what top players you are referring to. Many already solo drop a lot of the time. Many probably would lose some of their score, sure, but its not really the point. For the true top players, you could remove half their average PSR and they'll STILL be in the top few % of players. The performance gap is very large. This isn't merely some case of having a few players who are only a tiny bit above average but are ranked high because of groups or meta builds. Most of the top ~500 players will score above average in pretty much any context short of being forced to play a stock urbanmech.

What really matters in this case is if they are significantly better at destroying other mechs and winning matches than other players. And they are. Messing around with the number we assign to that doesn't change it. Limiting their ability to coordinate is a double edged sword of also limiting the people who can coordinate against them.

The question is if ranking primarily based on dmg and kills is properly detecting the people who are having the largest impact on matches. And it is. It could be doing it better, but it is the right sort of thing to do (it would probably be better if we switched to a system purely based on W:L though.)

It would probably be nice if things other than damage/kills mattered more for the outcome of a match. But changing the match score rewards does not change what wins games. And people are not out there blasting each other to bits instead of scouting or capping because they think it earns them more points and would go do the others if they awarded more. They are doing it because that's what the game, as it exists, is about.

BellatorMonk, on 14 August 2022 - 01:40 PM, said:

Someone also mentioned playing these "top" players 1v1 at least 20 times in a row and most people would lose against them 20 times in a row. Wasn't that what Solaris 7 was all about? I was not here for that short lived game cycle and it obviously failed for some reason? I would have to look at the Seasonal Leaderboards for those time periods to compare who was top in Solaris versus QP and bolstered by a lance of people willing to sacrifice themselves and or complimenting each other's builds to attain such "great" gameplay?

Solaris was kind of its own funky thing with its own funky meta. I don't know a ton about it either. I don't know how much overlap there was between top Solaris players and top QP players. It was not a widely played mode afaik. But you can bet that top QP players will still crush average QP players if both are dropped into Solaris.

You can also just go do some lobbies with some high ranked players and see how it turns out. Feel free to add me in game. I think I've seen you a bunch recently, so we're playing in the same timezone (West coast nights?). You're welcome to come group.

BellatorMonk, on 14 August 2022 - 01:40 PM, said:

Lastly, the comments about "EG7" did not register for me until I started looking in the current state of PGI online and found this amongst all the other info out there. https://massivelyop....ht-out-for-24m/

People keep looking at this merger and acting like PGI has lost any incentive to improve now that it has gone through. But it talks there about the performance needing to continue. If anything, this incentivizes them to keep trying to improve MWO. And they have. The game has plenty of issues, but the doom and gloom around this merger thing doesn't make sense.

Edited by Heavy Money, 14 August 2022 - 02:24 PM.

[TELEFORCE]

Dogstar, on 13 August 2022 - 10:07 AM, said:

Don't forget that it's both a seller's market and thatthere's a LOT of mobility in the developer employment at the moment, and a LOT of tech companies reassessing staffing and productivity, so no I'm not surprised that people have jumped ship this year, it's a very popular activity and almost the only way to get a pay rise or better conditions.

Totally true. These days the average worker spends about two years at their job before moving on to something better. It's really funny how many workers get snubbed for promotion at one place then find another place where they are valued far more!

[Heavy Money]

TELEFORCE, on 14 August 2022 - 03:28 PM, said:

Totally true. These days the average worker spends about two years at their job before moving on to something better. It's really funny how many workers get snubbed for promotion at one place then find another place where they are valued far more!

Yeah very common in tech work of all sorts. You have to quit and get hired somewhere else to get real raises!

[LordNothing]

turnover sucks in game dev. its one of the reasons i decided not to go that route.

[1453 R]

Look. Everybody knows MWO is a dead project. The core code is a black box, and it'd cost Piranha more than they'd ever get back from it to reboot the game into a more modern format they could actually support - especially since asking everybody to spend all their godawful gobshytes of cash on New Robits all over again would drive away just about everybody involved.

The devs know it's a dead project. The corpo monkeys at the top know it's a dead project. The ultracorpo overlords at EG7 know it's a dead project - they bought Piranha to apply its manpower and experience to chunks and pieces of other games, not for MWO. The Cauldron knows it's a dead project. The players know it's a dead project. The fact that we got enough life out of its twitching corpse to get an entirely new chassis is nothing short of a Christmas miracle; freemium games that decline and die off do not come back. Ever. Gaming news websites entirely unrelated to the BattleTech community were running pieces on the miraculous revivification of MechWarrior Online.

Every match you play is Bonus Time. Every robit you kill is a bonus victory. Every dollar you spend should you still buy stuff is as temporary and consumable as a dinner out. Everything that's happened since the pandemic started at the game was somehow switched back out of Maintenance Mode is a long sendoff party. Enjoy it for what it is, and don't expect another MechWarrior game...frankly, ever again at this point. MW5 exists now, and it is not joining the annals of Legendary 'Mech Games of Days Yore. We're not getting a MechWarrior 6, we're not getting a MWO 2.

Enjoy what you've got while it's here.

[TheCaptainJZ]

mytilus edulis, on 13 August 2022 - 03:00 AM, said:

If PGI is losing people like Mark and Francois they really need to work on whatever was causing that. A lack of staff retention combined with a lack of player retention is indicative of a company (management) cultural issue.

I was happy to splash out a lot of money in the last year because I thought PGI had turned a corner, but I guess management was playing the staff all along.

Mark said something about the workload being a lot which I can totally see with such a small team at PGI. I don't know how big their staff is but an early number was ~50 but that was supposedly the entire company. I'm guessing it's lower than that today plus some are outsourced. I'd guess their total dev team across all projects is closer to 20? Probably 2-3 people for any given position with some overlap.

I know some people have suggested poor management. Without working there, I am not going to jump on that bandwagon. It's likely that the team is constantly being pulled in different directions or the work simply takes a lot longer to implement than it would seem. I work in IT so I'd imagine it's a bit like that. At the end of the day, they have to have money to hire more guys to do do more work to make more content to sell to make more money. I get the impression PGI has always just been barely staying afloat financially. The management is probably fully aware of the issues, but realistically don't have much they can do about it. And people leaving just puts more pressure on those that stay. I totally can see that.

[LordNothing]

1453 R, on 14 August 2022 - 07:05 PM, said:

Look. Everybody knows MWO is a dead project. The core code is a black box, and it'd cost Piranha more than they'd ever get back from it to reboot the game into a more modern format they could actually support - especially since asking everybody to spend all their godawful gobshytes of cash on New Robits all over again would drive away just about everybody involved.

The devs know it's a dead project. The corpo monkeys at the top know it's a dead project. The ultracorpo overlords at EG7 know it's a dead project - they bought Piranha to apply its manpower and experience to chunks and pieces of other games, not for MWO. The Cauldron knows it's a dead project. The players know it's a dead project. The fact that we got enough life out of its twitching corpse to get an entirely new chassis is nothing short of a Christmas miracle; freemium games that decline and die off do not come back. Ever. Gaming news websites entirely unrelated to the BattleTech community were running pieces on the miraculous revivification of MechWarrior Online.

Every match you play is Bonus Time. Every robit you kill is a bonus victory. Every dollar you spend should you still buy stuff is as temporary and consumable as a dinner out. Everything that's happened since the pandemic started at the game was somehow switched back out of Maintenance Mode is a long sendoff party. Enjoy it for what it is, and don't expect another MechWarrior game...frankly, ever again at this point. MW5 exists now, and it is not joining the annals of Legendary 'Mech Games of Days Yore. We're not getting a MechWarrior 6, we're not getting a MWO 2.

Enjoy what you've got while it's here.

they are going to milk the thing as long as they can though, until it finds itself in the red one quarter. there will be a meeting and it will be canceled. however with a stable 20k population i think is sufficient to maintain the servers, provided those players continue to make, even small, regular purchases.

there are a number of possibilities for a successor:

mwll is still kicking around. its hard to set up but still playable.

living legends 2 is currently in development.

mw5 mod or dlc to add pvp and enable it to replace mwo.

community driven reverse engineering of the mwo client to restore some semblance the game.

or the even more unlikely event of pgi releasing the server side.