213 replies to this topic

[KursedVixen]

Quicksilver Aberration, on 13 July 2025 - 09:09 AM, said:

Monetization in this game has been the same for literally the past decade going back to the success of the Phoenix/Clans packs. The engine is definitely not why people leave, but it's always hilarious hearing people use this argument.

but the legend packs.... though they are nice they feel like lootboxes of items.... intially the mechs were limited time things too.

Edited by KursedVixen, 13 July 2025 - 09:36 AM.

[Quicksilver Aberration]

Khosumi, on 13 July 2025 - 09:24 AM, said:

People enjoyed FP because the team combat was fantastic.

Let me stop you right there, FP was never good. The combat boiled down to "go through this funnel" or "rush the base with lights", FP was always bad. If you wanted coordinated play, comp was and still is the best place to get it.

Khosumi, on 13 July 2025 - 09:24 AM, said:

Underlaying engine issues such as the horrific terrain hitboxes are a genuine detriment to the game, and that has never and will never be fixed.

Terrain hitboxes =/= engine issue, it's just bad hitboxes which should've been adjusted but didn't (unless for some reason for terrain that's not decoupled but I doubt it). That's more on the polish side of things though rather than fundamental issue. Polish issues can definitely hurt a game, but there's definitely worse things going on in this game than that.

Edited by Quicksilver Aberration, 13 July 2025 - 09:33 AM.

[Khosumi]

Quicksilver Aberration, on 13 July 2025 - 09:31 AM, said:

Let me stop you right there, FP was never good. The combat boiled down to "go through this funnel" or "rush the base with lights", FP was always bad. If you wanted coordinated play, comp was and still is the best place to get it.


Terrain hitboxes =/= engine issue, it's just bad hitboxes which should've been adjusted but didn't. That's more on the polish side of things though rather than fundamental issue. Polish issues can definitely hurt a game, but there's definitely worse things going on in this game than that.

Hahahahahaha

[LordNothing]

epikt, on 12 July 2025 - 09:13 PM, said:

Naive question from someone playing the game in low settings: are there really people playing MWO for how good or not it looks?

this game is unplayable at high detail settings. not because of performance, but because the fancies introduce visibility issues, and the game is very competitive. these two things are at cross purposes. e-sports games, and this is one it seems, benefit more from lo-fi graphics.

[LordNothing]

Khosumi, on 13 July 2025 - 05:18 AM, said:

i'm so tired of hearing this copeout of an argument.
Engines and code can be updated. The problem isn't the engine age, it's the halted development on it.

games that last 20 years have continuing development. our engine dev here stopped at minimally viable product. long standing game crippling bugs are evidence of that. fortunately workarounds exist for most of them. they have managed to keep it alive by selling skins and hardpoints in the form of mech packs.

i dont think the engineering void is a problem that can be addressed, anyone who knew anything about the inner workings of mwo has let the company and have taken that knowledge with them. they still got everyone they need to do mech packs but that wont fix engine bugs, that wont add features, that wont bring back players.

of course one has to look at how they got the game out of the mw5 slump. that is the model you need to copy to bring back players. while i dont think a repeat of that is going to happen, it shows that if you build it, or at least provide the illusion of building it, they will come. any surge in activity from pgi will be met by a surge of returning players. you probibly wont bring in a whole lot of new players, but if you bring back a bunch of retired players you can extend the life of the game. you wont however save the game. just delay the inevitable.

KursedVixen, on 13 July 2025 - 06:33 AM, said:

isn't Mechwarrior living legends built on the same engine? it doesn't look better but i feel like it plays better.

its actually built on an older version of cry engine.

[LordNothing]

Quicksilver Aberration, on 13 July 2025 - 09:31 AM, said:

Let me stop you right there, FP was never good. The combat boiled down to "go through this funnel" or "rush the base with lights", FP was always bad. If you wanted coordinated play, comp was and still is the best place to get it.

Terrain hitboxes =/= engine issue, it's just bad hitboxes which should've been adjusted but didn't (unless for some reason for terrain that's not decoupled but I doubt it). That's more on the polish side of things though rather than fundamental issue. Polish issues can definitely hurt a game, but there's definitely worse things going on in this game than that.

bad collision hull conformity. someone should have told the artists to avoid concave shapes whenever possible. tormaline was the worst example of this, all those little crystal nubs need their own hit box, but that was computationally expensive so they just wrapped a larger hull around rows of crystals, so gone is the possibility of sneaking shots through the gaps. they put too much micro-detail in some places. remaking those terrain dodads (terrain is generated from height maps i think, but static models are placed to break up the monotony of generated terrain) replacing them with better ones with better hit boxes and fixing what you can fix is pretty low hanging fruit and really just requires an artist that understands the problem. the real problem is that almost all of those models are badly done.

Edited by LordNothing, 13 July 2025 - 11:37 AM.

[Quicksilver Aberration]

LordNothing, on 13 July 2025 - 11:36 AM, said:

bad collision hull conformity. someone should have told the artists to avoid concave shapes whenever possible. tormaline was the worst example of this, all those little crystal nubs need their own hit box, but that was computationally expensive so they just wrapped a larger hull around rows of crystals, so gone is the possibility of sneaking shots through the gaps. they put too much micro-detail in some places. remaking those terrain dodads (terrain is generated from height maps i think, but static models are placed to break up the monotony of generated terrain) replacing them with better ones with better hit boxes and fixing what you can fix is pretty low hanging fruit and really just requires an artist that understands the problem. the real problem is that almost all of those models are badly done.

Yeah, but things like the tourmaline crystal are static additions afaik similar to buildings or other additions given they had the tourmaline without any of them for that one patch. Which just means they did overly simplistic hitboxes on them (unlike missiles which the model alone has an obscene poly count, don't doubt the hitbox is much better). PGI always had an issue with prioritization, and FP was a huge time sink for them in the early days let alone UI 2.0 and the skill maze.

[Khale MacGregor]

What really killed MWO, in addition to what D A T A putout, it started when Solaris was implemented. Given what was advertised and hyped, we were going to get fights like what we saw during MW4: Mercs, free for all's, 12 plus mechs slugging it out, not catering to these " come at me and 1 v 1 me bro! " try-hard, fortnite / CoD drop outs. Ended up being a huge disappointment.

secondly adding Mercs to the game so that Clans and IS could use them. since the dev's refused to follow lore and add crap that did NOT belong, they have a totally unbalanced IS v CLAN dynamic. It was bad before, but its far worse now. There are far more Clan mercs than anything else.

3rd. Adding Quick play modes to FP in favor of scouting. QP modes have no place in FP at all! FP was great the way it was. 3 modes, pie chart, then the addition of scouting gave it more flare which was great! units had a reason to play FP. because you could put your unit tag on a planet and generate MC into your units coffer! Then getting rid of scouting, yet forcing the scouting drop decks kept in the game.

4th: It doesnt help that the devs and a lot of the GM's and Cauldy's are clan fetishists so naturally the game shifted to clan meta.

and then what really killed it for me, was hearing one of the devs say, ( im paraphrasing but it sounded like this ), oh we cant do much to improve the game because math is hard... I believe it was on a twitter or instagram post. I cant remember.

But I know this is probably not what is happening, but a part of me hopes, that with the new DLC release to MW5, adding non-modded clan mechs to the game, that they are slowly working to turn MW5 into MWO2. Like i said, I know thats probably not the case here, but I know for myself I am hoping.

Thats just my 2 cents

[Tyrant One]

Make skill points free since removing them would unbalance mechs too much.

New players should only worry about buying and affording a mech, not having to grind an un-skilled mech while facing people who have not only fully skilled mechs buy the know-how in how to utilize them.

[KursedVixen]

Tyrant One, on 13 July 2025 - 01:24 PM, said:

Make skill points free since removing them would unbalance mechs too much.

New players should only worry about buying and affording a mech, not having to grind an un-skilled mech while facing people who have not only fully skilled mechs buy the know-how in how to utilize them.

yeah make skill points buyable by c-bills maybe? i have found buying a new mech and leaving it unskilled puts me at a disadvantage. Even though i have general EXp to spend i'd like to save as much of it as possible for later.

Edited by KursedVixen, 13 July 2025 - 02:58 PM.

[105howitzer]

Can't buy love, or bribe love. Stop trying, those who love the game will never leave, new people will come along.

[BlueDevilspawn]

1. MWO gets part of one dev (Tiyos making mechs and whatever he has time for) and parts of multiple devs (e.g., web, db manager, quality) for patches. There are no coders and certainly no senior coders; they are exclusively and specifically on MW5. To be clear, this is also a passion project for him - he was hired as an artist. He TAUGHT HIMSELF coding, animation, minimal map editor functions, became a de facto community manager, developed an easy input tool for the Event Queue. No one else. Regardless of whether you have software dev experience or not (and it frankly does matter because some of you have no clue what you're asking), it's easy to see from a portfolio standpoint that MWO is not a priority and there is not a "flip the switch" option to "just make things better."

2. Migrating engines (from an old custom version of Cryengine to UE5) is like developing travel to Pluto. Not happening unless we get a net new product.

3. Engine is not the issue for hit reg. Server tick rate and terrain meshes/hitboxes (causing mechs to bounce around) are the cause of most hit reg issues.

4. FP is a total numbers-based "matchmaker". As in it takes 12 players on either side and makes a match. We have already seen what happens in group queue when there's a skill disparity. FP has no actual matchmaker other than totals and you can see the disparity of skill. EQ once tried to make events with large groups and immediately in the first setup the folly of a non-matchmaker group queue was seen. Large group EQ will not be proposed again.

5. I find it funny that if I scroll up the previous posts I find a Clan loyalist decrying the "IS loving cauldron" while an IS loyalist is decrying the "Clan loving cauldron" a few posts later. Thankfully no one in the cauldron actually prefers either faction tech base.

[LordNothing]

Quicksilver Aberration, on 13 July 2025 - 11:46 AM, said:

Yeah, but things like the tourmaline crystal are static additions afaik similar to buildings or other additions given they had the tourmaline without any of them for that one patch. Which just means they did overly simplistic hitboxes on them (unlike missiles which the model alone has an obscene poly count, don't doubt the hitbox is much better). PGI always had an issue with prioritization, and FP was a huge time sink for them in the early days let alone UI 2.0 and the skill maze.

i called them doodads but other engines have different names for them, unity calls them statics. idk what cryengine calls them. and yes they are primarily clusters of simple hulls wrapped around overdetailed graphics. improving these models and their boxes might be something a semi-technical artist can do, even if they do a few every update cycle. but its like polishing the metal on a dumpster that is on fire. prioritization problems indeed.

missiles shouldnt even be using anything more complex than a sphere collider. maybe a capsule collider or an oriented bounding box, but spheres are computationally inexpensive because they can be done in world space without transforms (hello pythagoras). even ray collisions require transforms. axis aligned bounding boxes are even simpler and dont require a square root, but they are kind of ugly and are used mostly for preliminary culling tests to help reduce complexity. games tend to use a myriad of methods for whatever matches the situation (usually with the preference being the least expensive type you can get away with) and have to define interactions between collision object types (eg ray-sphere, which comes into play when you shoot down a uav). collision detection in general is a can of worms, i still havent found the bottom yet.

Edited by LordNothing, 13 July 2025 - 03:30 PM.

[LordNothing]

KursedVixen, on 13 July 2025 - 02:50 PM, said:

yeah make skill points buyable by c-bills maybe? i have found buying a new mech and leaving it unskilled puts me at a disadvantage. Even though i have general EXp to spend i'd like to save as much of it as possible for later.

seems almost every new mech pack comes with the skill points included. the legends certainly provide you more than enough when you complete the battlepass (which can be done in a few drops honestly, a lot faster than leveling manually). i have over a thousand gsp just from events and surplus from legends. i like to time purchases with eq events that usually give you tripple xp and then sit on the gsp for other mechs. in those cases usually have them mastered before i unlock the 50gsp, sometimes the second 25 gsp.

Edited by LordNothing, 13 July 2025 - 03:39 PM.

[Quicksilver Aberration]

LordNothing, on 13 July 2025 - 03:29 PM, said:

missiles shouldnt even be using anything more complex than a sphere collider. maybe a capsule collider or an oriented bounding box, but spheres are computationally inexpensive because they can be done in world space without transforms (hello pythagoras). even ray collisions require transforms. axis aligned bounding boxes are even simpler and dont require a square root, but they are kind of ugly and are used mostly for preliminary culling tests to help reduce complexity. games tend to use a myriad of methods for whatever matches the situation (usually with the preference being the least expensive type you can get away with) and have to define interactions between collision object types (eg ray-sphere, which comes into play when you shoot down a uav). collision detection in general is a can of worms, i still havent found the bottom yet.

Oh I'm well aware, that was some of my pet projects in college was around that sort of thing and I realized collision detection in discrete time is way harder than most realize on top of just how you do culling unnecessary comparisons (kd trees was an interesting learning experience).

[VeeOt Dragon]

yeah these days i only seem to return to MWO when there is a loot bag event or a free mech event with a mech i might be interested in (so not Clan mechs). to be perfectly honest i think i have just gotten bored with it. don't get me wrong i still love the franchise but these days i just don't feel the whole PvP thing.

there are many things the might breath life back into it but as long as nobody really knows the game exists anymore any effort game side is wasted. what we really need to do is get some advertising going. at the same time we need to do something about the tutorials since they are very out dated and bare bones. (oh and it would help if those few MWO youtubers that are still active didn't wine like children every time they so much as get scratched by an LRM/Thunderbolt.)

but yeah most of the folks i talk about MWO to donn't even know what it is. what keeps a game like MWO afloat isn't the die hard players, or the spending whales, its a gradual influx of new blood. we need new players to replace those that leave (no matter the reason they leave).

[LordNothing]

the game consistently brings in that 800 or so new players every month, barely enough to cover those that leave. id bet a good chunk of that is alts.

another disturbing stat is the 81 games a season average. thats under 3 games a day. i bet its mostly concentrated around events.

Edited by LordNothing, 13 July 2025 - 08:58 PM.

[Saved By The Bell]

I don't see any big problems in the game, except hit registrations and my bad ping. Still its the best, what I have at the moment and I stay with it.

[Davegt27]

if I where to give you the keys to MWO (so to speak) what would you do ?
that is within 30 days that is

??

[LordNothing]

Davegt27, on 14 July 2025 - 05:39 PM, said:

if I where to give you the keys to MWO (so to speak) what would you do ?
that is within 30 days that is

??

does that include source code and intimate knowledge of the back end? we would probibly fix the full screen bug at least. maybe fix the heat bug. add a few new mechanics. meanwhile others would be making an effort to reverse engineer the backend, for the future.

Edited by LordNothing, 14 July 2025 - 07:37 PM.