41 replies to this topic

[Quicksilver Aberration]

Saved By The Bell, on 18 January 2025 - 10:10 PM, said:

Yes, like DATA said, a group creates toys for themselves.

Lol, a bit ironic you bring up data whining about that when he was probably the worst of all of them. Don't forget how he is probably the main person who is biased towards blue lightsabers that I know this forums loves.

[PocketYoda]

LordNothing, on 18 January 2025 - 05:54 PM, said:

i admit its harsh, but it is the reality of how i see it. the dwindling population of players and developers pretty much ensures the game's decline. the remaining population has its camps, some steer the course of the game and others get ignored. even if they could agree on a plan of action, pgi do not have the resources to move any positive change forward at any rate that would make a difference. what op has said is probibly something id have said 5 years ago. where did those debates get us? its a dead horse that has been whipped so much you can no longer identify the remains as a horse. just bone chips and maggot moltings.

That doesn't mean a jaded population needs to enforce making the game worse for any new players that may or may not stay.. With that attitude you literally are causing MWO's death.

[LordNothing]

PocketYoda, on 21 January 2025 - 04:11 PM, said:

That doesn't mean a jaded population needs to enforce making the game worse for any new players that may or may not stay.. With that attitude you literally are causing MWO's death.

attitude has nothing to do with it. the population is declining because the game is old, it looks old, and its full of old bugs from a decade of neglect. it doesn't even look good on modern hardware. this is why the population is jaded, because the developer does not care about it as much as they do. its also why new players aren't sticking around. but lets blame the grognards anyway. its not going to reverse the population decline trend. the only thing that can do that is massive investment into the game, some modernization, a successor product, anything. minimal investment equals minimal results.

Edited by LordNothing, 21 January 2025 - 06:50 PM.

[VeeOt Dragon]

people keep bringing up graphics and thats not really true. no its not as crisp and high end as modern games but you would be surprised how little that really matters to most people. hell games like Halo 1, or even Runscape still have a massive following and they are really dated looking. honestly other than some terrain hit box issues i think the game has aged rather well on the graphics score (then again i still use a 780p monitor so it doesn't really mater even with my new more powerful PC. if it ain't broke why replace it)

now to the subject at hand. given the limitations of what PGI is able/willing to do programing wise there are many things that just aren't feasible. so we are only really left with very few options.

-as already mentioned even a text based mechlab tutorial wouldn't go amiss though this is pushing it since it would require actul effort on PGI's part.

-the biggest thing MWO needs is something i have said many times and that is ADVERTISING. most people don't even know the game exists. its a niche title already add to that its age and a complete lack of anything in the public eye and no wonder we get so few new players. hell there are only a handful of youtubers out there that still play and many of them are so toxic when it comes to their view on certain weapon systems (cough, LRM, cough) that they aren't worth anyone's time. add to that the algorithm and its rare that anyone who doesn't already watch Battletech/Mechwarrior content will ever see it. i am not an expert in such things but i am sure if they reached out to a few more diverse gaming youtubers they could get some affordable add space. or even some small adds on other sites.

- monetization wise i think the best way to bring in more revenue is to actually lower the prices on the older mech packs. even the original mech packs are still the cost of a full AAA game. its one of the reason i personally have never spent any real money on the game (i did win a free Striker pack from a forum contest years ago). i am not saying to lower the price on new stuff even if i still think its far to much. just stuff thats something like over 4 or 5 years old. people are more willing to spend money if it doesn't break the bank. whales will still be whales but the real money is in many little fishes. if i am ever gonna spend $60-$70 on a game its gonna be on a FULL game and not some small pack of mechs all of the same chassis (i actually have only a handful of mechs that i own more than one variant of).

Edited by VeeOt Dragon, 21 January 2025 - 09:26 PM.

[LordNothing]

ive been saying the prices on older content need to go down for years. what did pgi do, they upped the base price of a standard mechpack from $20 to $40. they did legends, a good value given the goodies they come with. but your $15 ultimately buys a new variant with different hardpoints and a new skin balanced by the cauldron for free. this seems to indicate to me that they were trying to sell to whales rather than bring in new players.

if you could sell old mechs for a few bucks each, i have a feeling the transaction overhead would consume most of it. i think the $3 urbie is as low as any single item has ever gone for. they aren't really set up to handle actual micro-transactions. i imagine roll up packs. $50 mechpacks with blocks of 100 or so classic mechs in release date order. the first hundred, the second hundred and so on. there are over 1100 mechs in the game so you could sell 5 or 6 of those initially and roll out new ones as mechs accumulate while discounting the older ones. then new players can catch up and have a useful inventory of mechs at their disposal. of course good luck selling those to people with already huge inventories.

Edited by LordNothing, 22 January 2025 - 12:42 AM.

[sycocys]

Had a thought about quick play + MM that may be viable. The vast majority of the time the queue is ~80% (roughly) heavy/assault, it might be beneficial to the drop times since they won't reduce the drop count to change the weights desired for a match.

If far less people are looking to drop in light and medium maybe change the drop priority to 1/1/5/5 or 2/2/4/4. Seems like it would make sense to adjust this based on what players are actually looking to drop with.

----
If they are planning to move to MWO2, my personal opinion is that the older packs should just be granted as a strategy to create some new player-side hype for the game since they refuse to do any actual marketing.

If the plan is to stick here as long as they can then price reductions and/or substantial sales on older packs and the "micros" in the game should be going on. They should also spend some time overhauling the store in the game because you can't purchase any of the packs from there to my knowledge.

[AnAnachronismAlive]

Plethora of sophisticated feedback given back in late 2021 on how to improve MWO - be it (new) player experience, monetization and so on. While some got picked up over the last couple of years, most substantial suggestions just got "shot" by the lack of dev-time /dev-ability to work with cry-engine.

Just check out the Command Chair forums and enjoy what ye got until whatever may happen over the course of 2025.

[LordNothing]

AnAnachronismAlive, on 22 January 2025 - 07:40 AM, said:

Plethora of sophisticated feedback given back in late 2021 on how to improve MWO - be it (new) player experience, monetization and so on. While some got picked up over the last couple of years, most substantial suggestions just got "shot" by the lack of dev-time /dev-ability to work with cry-engine.

Just check out the Command Chair forums and enjoy what ye got until whatever may happen over the course of 2025.

this is pretty much the jist of it. none of these ideas are new. people were saying to advertise back when the game was new, calls for more tiers is pretty much as old as the tier system. they tried to include training, and that was under developed and poorly representative of actual gameplay. running cored is nice and all until you have six mechs shooting at you from different directions.

pgi deved themselves into a hole way too early in the life of the game. that has been all but impossible to dig out of with diminished staff and very few people who understand the inner workings of the mutant engine in any significant detail. it is far too late to expect miracles. attempts to rebrand have flopped or have failed to bring in new players (though the legends are probibly keeping the game afloat). mwo successor product is needed, its the only way to draw in new players and rectify old mistakes.

[Xypherious]

At least let us choose our 'mech AFTER map selection. "Oh, Alpine Peaks! I brought a brawler...."

[pbiggz]

So what im gathering from page 2 here is two other consistent issues the game has had.

Issue #1 is we essentially have beta game modes; assault is more or less unchanged. Conquest is more or less unchanged. Skirmish barely even counts as a game mode. Domination is just skirmish with an extra step. Conquest and Assault are also basically just skirmish with extra steps.

The fundamental issue with game modes is that its almost always more rewarding, and quicker, to end the game by just ignoring the game mode and killing the enemy team. It has always been this way, and any suggestions on how to change it are often met with open hostility.

Issue #2 is linked to 1, insofar as killing the enemy team is the quickest way to success. This game does not respect your time. In a 15 minute game loop, you might spend a third of your time actually playing this game, with the remaining time split, not evenly between being in queue, and doing mechlab stuff. Since there are no respawns, when you die, your game loop is ended, and you start over. If you die prematurely because you made a mistake, or just got unlucky, that feels punishing, if not insulting.

The solution to both problems is simple, and has already been mentioned. It is respawns. PGI has shown they have the ability to more or less switch this on without too much effort. If match timers were restricted to 10 or 15 minutes at most, that would preserve the quick turnaround on quickplay matches, but allowing dropdecks/respawns would mean you get to enjoy the whole 10-15 minutes actually playing the game, rather than spending possibly more time in queue than you spend actually in a match. Respawns also refocus objectives as a viable way to quickly end a match, as it might actually be faster to rush a base on assault, and respawns mean playing the defense wouldn't be such a gamble.

I expect this will get major pushback. It always does. For whatever reason, MWO player seem to find respawns distasteful, which is a typical example of players not knowing what's actually good for them.

[pbiggz]

Dark Fenrir the Fluffy, on 11 February 2025 - 12:26 PM, said:

I completely agree. The resistance to change and for some (like lord whatever) the resistance to others thinking and having some hope for the future of this game will be the SOLE reason for its death. We are fighting the good fight even if the odds are 1000 to 1, isnt it our choice to toss around these ideas and then send em to PGI? Are we to not think of new or even old ideas (god forbid because if they wernt heard once or twice we know they will NEVER be heard) and try to fight this fight to help this game because the "Lord" has spoken and took a dump in our dream oatmeal? Good for you for ignoring Lord whats his face and coming up with some good stuff.

Oh no he's right, none of this is going to happen. This game is on life support. It would certainly be nice to be proven wrong, and i appreciate that even in the state its in we get fairly good interaction and feedback from developers and consultants, but im not holding my breath on any major renewals of the game. A third of PGI got let go a few weeks ago, that is not a sign that the studio is a lean mean development machine, its a sign that EG7 is looking to eliminate line items on the budget.

Dont feel too bad. MWO ran its course. Its older now than Mechwarrior 4 Mercenaries was when MWO was new. Its an artifact of the freemium era, and as such, its a very expensive game to make and maintain compared to more modern offerings. The fact that it got a whole 6 or so years of life beyond the 2018-2019 population crash was nothing short of a miracle for a game like this. We should count ourselves lucky its lasted this long, and I don't think anyone can fairly interpret the game's record as anything but a reasonable success after 14 years of constant operation.

[pbiggz]

Im not telling you not to discuss what you think is good for the game. At the very least its a fun exercise, and the devs do read these forums so sometimes good ideas make it back to HQ.

Im simply saying measure your expectations, because we probably aren't getting much.

[Equuleus]

This genre has not really been expanded on since it's inception. You still cannot get out of your mech and there are no other real elements in the game, just mechs.

No actual experience as a people, in a giant mech battle outside of the mech, which, IMO, is where the immersive place starts.

The point of view aspect is sort of lost. Granted, you can't bring your speedo swimming suit to a mech fight but if I am wearing the same suit all the time, then my mech is a speedo swimming suit and the game immersion starts to suffer.

This game is on the cryengine and if you ever played crisis you would know about people in an augmentation suit, yet the game has never let you get out of the mech in it's entire time as a game, which is how many remade times now? I have discs going back to the star siege days and mech warrior discs? It's the same thing, just newer graphics.

What for you might ask? You are just going to be dead right? Why do you need a light and an ultralight and jump jets on mech?
Small groups of humans can take out a tank or help take out a tank, surely as an ejected pilot with jump jets and an augmentation suit, you can do something, like shoot a small laser or rocket launcher?

Yet for all the years of this genre, you still have not been able to experience it outside of the mech?

If you don't build it, they will not come.

Which is why I am a free to play player. Already bought this game several times?

I still enjoy this game and do not suggest that you should not play, but at this point it starts to feel like I am playing monopoly as a board game rather than an evolving genre? I already have monopoly! How many times do I buy the same game?

Kudos to you who have kept it alive this long though!

Thanks for that part!

Edited by Equuleus, 11 February 2025 - 02:33 PM.

[GreyNovember]

Equuleus, on 11 February 2025 - 01:38 PM, said:

This genre has not really been expanded on since it's inception. You still cannot get out of your mech and there are no other real elements in the game, just mechs.

No actual experience as a people, in a giant mech battle outside of the mech, which, IMO, is where the immersive place starts.

Try Front Mission 3.

If you REALLY want to be forced out of the mech you bought the game to play in and run around as a meatbag to do obligatory foot sections, it's got you covered.

[LordNothing]

pbiggz, on 11 February 2025 - 12:19 PM, said:

So what im gathering from page 2 here is two other consistent issues the game has had.

Issue #1 is we essentially have beta game modes; assault is more or less unchanged. Conquest is more or less unchanged. Skirmish barely even counts as a game mode. Domination is just skirmish with an extra step. Conquest and Assault are also basically just skirmish with extra steps.

The fundamental issue with game modes is that its almost always more rewarding, and quicker, to end the game by just ignoring the game mode and killing the enemy team. It has always been this way, and any suggestions on how to change it are often met with open hostility.

Issue #2 is linked to 1, insofar as killing the enemy team is the quickest way to success. This game does not respect your time. In a 15 minute game loop, you might spend a third of your time actually playing this game, with the remaining time split, not evenly between being in queue, and doing mechlab stuff. Since there are no respawns, when you die, your game loop is ended, and you start over. If you die prematurely because you made a mistake, or just got unlucky, that feels punishing, if not insulting.

The solution to both problems is simple, and has already been mentioned. It is respawns. PGI has shown they have the ability to more or less switch this on without too much effort. If match timers were restricted to 10 or 15 minutes at most, that would preserve the quick turnaround on quickplay matches, but allowing dropdecks/respawns would mean you get to enjoy the whole 10-15 minutes actually playing the game, rather than spending possibly more time in queue than you spend actually in a match. Respawns also refocus objectives as a viable way to quickly end a match, as it might actually be faster to rush a base on assault, and respawns mean playing the defense wouldn't be such a gamble.

I expect this will get major pushback. It always does. For whatever reason, MWO player seem to find respawns distasteful, which is a typical example of players not knowing what's actually good for them.

while i totally agree, this is "you just asked us to spend 2 million dollars" territory. and honestly it would probibly cost that much to get a coder up to snuff with the way things work in the game to be able to deploy changes directly into a live environment. im not sure if an "engineer" (i really hate that term, because it makes a guy who essentially "drives an engine", like in a train, sound like a guy who designed it) can do it without getting into the lower level code. but i figure if mwll could do it mwo could too (our engine is newer).

i always wanted the game to be more like mwll. which let you respawn but kind of discouraged you from doing so by allowing you to rearm and repair in a live game, and earn enough cbills to be in assaults by the end of the match, people who could not keep their mechs alive would be in mediums and heavies by the end of the hour long match. the game was grueling, more so than fp, but in a good way.

Edited by LordNothing, 11 February 2025 - 03:47 PM.

[Quicksilver Aberration]

pbiggz, on 11 February 2025 - 12:19 PM, said:

I expect this will get major pushback. It always does. For whatever reason, MWO player seem to find respawns distasteful, which is a typical example of players not knowing what's actually good for them.

I mean, I don't like respawn gameplay because it typically ends up with more mindless play than without respawns. That said you aren't wrong about the issue being that you spend so little of actual gameplay. I don't 100% agree that the answer is respawns though, it would definitely help but you don't have to look far to see how that can also go wrong (faction play spawn camping during stomps were about as fun as scorestreak spam in CoD).

The truth is there isn't really a silver bullet here because a good solution would require engineering time. Whether it be smarter/dynamic respawns, launching players into a series of matches rather than a single one (so you'd do best 2 out of 3 or something instead of just a single match before getting sent back to the matchmaker), and/or a lobby like MW4 where once you die, you can immediately mechlab while you wait for the next match to start (probably more useful for the case where you fight in a series of matches). Each has their own challenges so it's not like one is a clear winner.

[LordNothing]

static spawning leads to such behavior. thats why mwll had cappable spawns, so if you were getting spawn camped you can just have your team spawn elsewhere. lack of dynamicity is one of this games real issues. and to be clear im mostly posting this for the successor product, not mwo itself, i doubt that would materialize

some times in mwll you would get pushed back to your starter base and get stuck there. that was a problem mwll had, it had a lot of problems but it did a lot of things right. so you get rid of the starting bases. in mwo dropship landing was essentially an animation, and you could only drop players that were ready to spawn when the sequence was about to start, in a preset location. but then in mw5 we got dropships that could put a lance down anywhere in a procedural generated map. take that a step further and be able to land in any passible grid square not controlled by the enemy. aa emplacements can blot out sections of the map that are entrenched. perhaps by calling down buildings, walls, turrets, etc.

another issue with the spawn camp is mwo would always drop 1 or 2 mechs at a time rather than a full lance. so i imagine the ultimate spawn system would be where every time you were down a lance, respawning players would be loaded into the drop ship, would be allowed to select mech from the deck (each mech would have a cd and cant be used again until the cd expired). then when the dropship was full, and after a 15 second delay to allow the last respawner to select mech, the the lance commander can choose a drop location (or any player in lance if there is no lance commander, or the default set by the company commander, or the map default, in that order). there would be 15 seconds to change location. 30 seconds later the dropship drops you at that location.

id also allow players to come and go as they please. then the battle can be tug of war like in that you always have new lances dropping, the goal would be to control more territory than the other team at the end of the match. control is defined as having implacements or mechs which are not contested by hostiles in the same grid. whoever holds the most grids wins. or insted of grids use hexes instead for the tabletop grognards. i suspect this would be played out on a megamap of sorts.

base building could be done through consumables, everyone has a set number of things they can call in, per mech, and there would be a cd limiting how many could be brought in (in orbital drop pod action). implacements can be destroyed in the usual way and would be needed to control a square held by the other team. figure capping by destroying things. islands in contiguously held territory would count as controlled if no enemy mechs are held within. this gives scouts something to do other than to shoot butts.send em out to section off parts of the map, and once held, you can spawn anywhere within.

Edited by LordNothing, 11 February 2025 - 04:36 PM.

[Rondoe]

LordNothing, on 11 February 2025 - 03:56 PM, said:

static spawning leads to such behavior. thats why mwll had cappable spawns, so if you were getting spawn camped you can just have your team spawn elsewhere. lack of dynamicity is one of this games real issues. and to be clear im mostly posting this for the successor product, not mwo itself, i doubt that would materialize

some times in mwll you would get pushed back to your starter base and get stuck there. that was a problem mwll had, it had a lot of problems but it did a lot of things right. so you get rid of the starting bases. in mwo dropship landing was essentially an animation, and you could only drop players that were ready to spawn when the sequence was about to start, in a preset location. but then in mw5 we got dropships that could put a lance down anywhere in a procedural generated map. take that a step further and be able to land in any passible grid square not controlled by the enemy. aa emplacements can blot out sections of the map that are entrenched. perhaps by calling down buildings, walls, turrets, etc.

another issue with the spawn camp is mwo would always drop 1 or 2 mechs at a time rather than a full lance. so i imagine the ultimate spawn system would be where every time you were down a lance, respawning players would be loaded into the drop ship, would be allowed to select mech from the deck (each mech would have a cd and cant be used again until the cd expired). then when the dropship was full, and after a 15 second delay to allow the last respawner to select mech, the the lance commander can choose a drop location (or any player in lance if there is no lance commander, or the default set by the company commander, or the map default, in that order). there would be 15 seconds to change location. 30 seconds later the dropship drops you at that location.

id also allow players to come and go as they please. then the battle can be tug of war like in that you always have new lances dropping, the goal would be to control more territory than the other team at the end of the match. control is defined as having implacements or mechs which are not contested by hostiles in the same grid. whoever holds the most grids wins. or insted of grids use hexes instead for the tabletop grognards. i suspect this would be played out on a megamap of sorts.

base building could be done through consumables, everyone has a set number of things they can call in, per mech, and there would be a cd limiting how many could be brought in (in orbital drop pod action). implacements can be destroyed in the usual way and would be needed to control a square held by the other team. figure capping by destroying things. islands in contiguously held territory would count as controlled if no enemy mechs are held within. this gives scouts something to do other than to shoot butts.send em out to section off parts of the map, and once held, you can spawn anywhere within.

Wow, us tabletop players are grognards now?

[pbiggz]

Rondoe, on 12 February 2025 - 01:15 AM, said:

Wow, us tabletop players are grognards now?

The ones that spent the last 14 years demanding tabletop balance and shrieking about the timeline definitely are.

[BlueDevilspawn]

I'm a Battletech/MW universe lore fan. I started on MW2 and play MWO, MW5, HBS Btech, and tabletop (participated in the last 2 kickstarters).
There is a meta for each and in particular the difference between TT and MWO (PvP) is the replacement of dice chance with mechanical and situational awareness skill. This is an online first person shooter, not a "sit in cockpit and click roll dice virtual button." Therefore, balance is necessarily done differently.