32 replies to this topic

[LordNothing]

there are threads suggesting grand ideas to improve the game, granted some of these threads are full of wishful thinking and little pragmatism. some are encouraging cheap and dirty shortcuts to improve the game. save some money cross developing with mw5. others are happy with the same old game. the half baked map reduxes and blatant asset reuse. the inability or lack of desire to develop simple novel features.

meanwhile the jarls numbers are tanking. they have been lower and only seemingly resurrected from the dead due to a global pandemic. yet that seems to be waning again and i wonder if this is the time they will fail to recover. people are still clamoring to buy the hatchet man, so it seems to me there is no shortage of funds going into the game. i even sill throw a few bucks there way from time to time, despite seeing little reason to do so. i play the game sparsely, events only, and only until i complete them. a couple days a month. it feels like work, not a game.

a drop is an exercise in muscle memory, you've done it thousands of times before, maybe thousands more to come. you arent thinking, you are just a zombie, looking for that mech brain. and when the counters make their goal you quit and go about your life. you play other games, that cost less than the latest mech pack, and have a good time for a couple weeks. then you come back to mwo and its practically unchanged. do the next event, leave.

why do people defend the adherence to the status quo? why dont people demand exciting new features. new mech pack, they made mech packs for years and it did little to change the game, why now, why this mech? was it only because the mesh was sitting there in the mw5 assets? you think the game will be any less of a slog because of it. they did that for years, and only the civil war pack was a real paradigm shift for supplying us with new build opportunities. now its just chase the quirks that make some weapons marginally better on a particular chassis than others. we have builds for all the weapons in the game. a boat in every possible flavor, and copies in some other chassis. many copies. has this improved the game in any significant way when carried to absurd proportions?

do something, do little, do nothing. who really cares anymore. pgi continues to act like pgi. see you at the next lootbag event.

Edited by LordNothing, 03 December 2022 - 01:03 PM.

[Davegt27]

yep see you at the next loot bag event

[martian]

LordNothing, on 03 December 2022 - 12:58 PM, said:

why dont people demand exciting new features.
...

From what I have heard, the current PGI's MWO consists of approximately 4-5 people:

• Matt Newman
  
• Daeron Katz
  
• unnamed Level designer
  
• unnamed Gameplay / Mech Designer

You can not expect miracles (or you can, but you will be probably disappointed).

[John Bronco]

Event queue is about the only thing they've got to shake things up a bit, but don't seem to want to use it for whatever reason.

[Darian DelFord]

The problem is PGI failed to deliver the product they originally promised folks during the kick starter. Then every major update after that was basically a failure as well. I can not recall one major addition that was met with open arms that succeeded and met expectations.

I have always said since I first played Neverwinter Nights on AoL, (First major MMORPG for you young in's) That if Mechwarrior ever had something like that I would never leave the game. MWO has just been a disappointing game right out of the gate.

Edited by Darian DelFord, 03 December 2022 - 02:43 PM.

[JediPanther]

Pgi has always failed hard at doing anything but mech packs but since that is all russ/paul/pgi/eg7/whoever cares about to funnel the money into other projects...that makes mwo a dam great sucess and f the players that aren't spending money.

Oh look a new skin for old mechs. This time with a boost. That works. I quit spending money when the game started to focus on only mech packs and power creep. Especially noticeable within the light mech class of 20t vs 35t.

Pgi before eg7 always mad very horrible decisions and ignored all the fourms' advice/complains. Long Tom? Yeah lets let an automated nuke just waste fq for a while. Gold skins? Sure for $500 per skin. AI? Let's have a weaponless,directionless, walking atlas that can hardly move down two or three paths be our ai.

Knockdowns? Very abused and ****** game play mechanic so bad it took trolling paul in the k2 for him to see how bad and remove it. The only smart decision he ever made.

Just leave the game as-is and play it until it goes off line. We now have mw5 and bt with the same mwo assets to get our modern day mw fix.

[sycocys]

I spent a lot of time before I left trying to get them to implement a meaningful CW mode, they decided e-sports tournaments and Solaris was a better use of their time and all the income they got from the player base.

PGI spent something like an extra entire year designing alleyway maps and a near useless meta game map for what became FW which from my recollection they dropped concurrently with massively unbalanced clans. Piled onto the poorly balanced original skill tree by expanding it out 20 times and making it more of an unbalancing mechanic.

I'm coming back after a couple years, the game is still basically the same exact game with more mechs and random **** up for purchase, some of it edging towards asian mmo cosmetics - may as well start selling alpaca mounts. Honestly didn't expect it to be any different other than probably an even smaller player base than when I left because the game was and is never developed out to make it a more engaging experience.

End of the day, MWO is MWO just have to take it for what it is because the company leadership is either uninterested and/or incapable of making it a better game.

[LordNothing]

martian, on 03 December 2022 - 01:17 PM, said:

From what I have heard, the current PGI's MWO consists of approximately 4-5 people:

• Matt Newman
  
• Daeron Katz
  
• unnamed Level designer
  
• unnamed Gameplay / Mech Designer

You can not expect miracles (or you can, but you will be probably disappointed).

ive seen mod teams do more with less.

[Darian DelFord]

December 13th,

Master of Magic is back!!!!

Till then I am in ESO

[LtPoncho]

Shouldn't have pulled so many BT3025, MW and Battletech heartstrings before cutting them all so many times - death by a thousand paper cuts.

Look - the community was vibrant when this game came out and so many voices were advocating the potential of what could be; the direction and management is why we are where we are. That disastrous side-bar development of a Star Citizen clone by PGI was one of many factors, add to the lack of true IP support on other fronts. (D&D is back in full force again, why isn't tabletop Battletech revamped?). The Faction play really fell so short many wondered what the point was besides following through on age-old development promises.

When a game gets to a point where you have to beg your friends to play it again - is it the game or are you just fooling yourself with denial?

LordNothing, on 03 December 2022 - 06:10 PM, said:

ive seen mod teams do more with less.

They should have opened this game to modding years ago - most older titles survive long after their engine gets old because of that. Nah, we will be fine - let's just sell another mech package.

[Pixel Hunter]

I'm sad that were not seeing more "upgrades" of IS mechs like in MW5 mods. I guess a lot of IIC clan mechs exist in lore that we don't see. just tweak some existing IS mechs to clan components and call them IIC!

[sycocys]

LtPoncho, on 05 December 2022 - 11:04 AM, said:

They should have opened this game to modding years ago

Should have opened it to at the least community map making way back in beta. Even with limited modes and models/assets players would have ended up with far more interesting maps and probably at least half functional modes than PGI delivered for years.
How much money could they have saved by letting the guys that actually wanted to do that work do it, then doing the one thing they are actually good at and art the maps up a bit. Could legitimately have 30-40+ different maps of each biome designed around objectives and it wouldn't have taken much effort on their end at all to put that into a campaign warfare mode that people actually wanted to get down in.

[pbiggz]

The fact that this game has lasted as long as it has is fairly impressive; it effectively died, then came back, and now its attriting players at sort of an expected rate given there hasn't really been major development for it.

Dont expect miracles, I think its had its run, and its probably winding down now.

[martian]

LtPoncho, on 05 December 2022 - 11:04 AM, said:

Shouldn't have pulled so many BT3025, MW and Battletech heartstrings before cutting them all so many times - death by a thousand paper cuts.

Look - the community was vibrant when this game came out and so many voices were advocating the potential of what could be; the direction and management is why we are where we are. That disastrous side-bar development of a Star Citizen clone by PGI was one of many factors The Faction play really fell so short many wondered what the point was besides following through on age-old development promises.

When a game gets to a point where you have to beg your friends to play it again - is it the game or are you just fooling yourself with denial?
They should have opened this game to modding years ago - most older titles survive long after their engine gets old because of that. Nah, we will be fine - let's just sell another mech package.

sycocys, on 05 December 2022 - 07:52 PM, said:

Should have opened it to at the least community map making way back in beta. Even with limited modes and models/assets players would have ended up with far more interesting maps and probably at least half functional modes than PGI delivered for years.
How much money could they have saved by letting the guys that actually wanted to do that work do it, then doing the one thing they are actually good at and art the maps up a bit. Could legitimately have 30-40+ different maps of each biome designed around objectives and it wouldn't have taken much effort on their end at all to put that into a campaign warfare mode that people actually wanted to get down in.

PGI's stance has always been strictly against any modding of MWO (although it quietly tolerates some "adjustments").

Accepting some suggested 'Mech loadouts, adjusting some maps when suggested by the community ... but no true modding as we have seen with the Mektek and MW4:Mercs, or with MW5:Mercs.

LtPoncho, on 05 December 2022 - 11:04 AM, said:

add to the lack of true IP support on other fronts. (D&D is back in full force again, why isn't tabletop Battletech revamped?)

The tabletop BattleTech has a different owner.

[TheCaptainJZ]

martian, on 03 December 2022 - 01:17 PM, said:

From what I have heard, the current PGI's MWO consists of approximately 4-5 people:

• Matt Newman
  
• Daeron Katz
  
• unnamed Level designer
  
• unnamed Gameplay / Mech Designer

You can not expect miracles (or you can, but you will be probably disappointed).

Matt and Daeron are not exclusively just for MWO I don't think. They're also not artists or coders who can do the actual work besides a handful of things. We're still waiting on what "matchmaker explorations" they can do or what they've found out. Event queue was a nice addition, but is currently underutilized. I can only assume this is because Daeron's attention is being diverted elsewhere.

[Davegt27]

sycocys, on 05 December 2022 - 07:52 PM, said:

Should have opened it to at the least community map making way back in beta. Even with limited modes and models/assets players would have ended up with far more interesting maps and probably at least half functional modes than PGI delivered for years.
How much money could they have saved by letting the guys that actually wanted to do that work do it, then doing the one thing they are actually good at and art the maps up a bit. Could legitimately have 30-40+ different maps of each biome designed around objectives and it wouldn't have taken much effort on their end at all to put that into a campaign warfare mode that people actually wanted to get down in.

CW is always a great topic for me
I spend some of my time in twitch chats telling people how it was at the start of CW/FW/FP

I have only played FP once this year lol

I do think they are missing an opportunity to make some changes to FP (or try some different stuff)

I did hear the new map guy is taking a look at some of the FP maps
but with out knowing the history you could easily screw things up

the caldron has turned into a polo shirt club (big deal you changed the rate of fire for MGs you will just change it back 6 months from now)

fix FP, now you've done something

Quiaff

[Weeny Machine]

Darian DelFord, on 03 December 2022 - 09:13 PM, said:

December 13th,

Master of Magic is back!!!!

Till then I am in ESO

Cheers! I didn't know it would get out already.

[hbgpanther]

I demand nothing because having observed the game in one form or another for years, I expect very little. So I just hop in from time to time and it seems to work out fine. There's more mech fish in the sea, at least for me.

[sycocys]

Davegt27, on 06 December 2022 - 01:03 PM, said:

I did hear the new map guy is taking a look at some of the FP maps
but with out knowing the history you could easily screw things up

It could be made mildly better with maps (honestly not sure if they ever bothered to release more maps since I left), The mode itself its going to continue to be bad unless they change the mechanics of it.

The siege/defend mode in itself isn't a horrendous idea, it's made that way by dropping in the same map/mode 4 consecutive times with one objective. If you are going to drop 4 times in one session then it needs to be split up into 4 integrated sections/objectives leading towards the finish preferably not every one of them being 12v12 deathball, - They would have to make massive maps with less detail and successive drop points so the combat could be spread out then culminate in a siege type final bout.

What would (imo) be the best solution and probably within PGI's limited programming capability is matching up two teams for 3/5/(some odd number) of separate matches. They have a bunch of alternate maps already, just need a few more for each biome and have the realization that they don't need to be hyper detailed maps. If they split up team sizes to determine modes/maps in the next set of matches they'd be well on the way to having something resembling a campaign.

[Nightbird]

Just buy mechs, play them for 1 day when they come out, then go back to your other games.