Posted 08 August 2012 - 04:33 PM
Personally, I think there are alot of limitations in the current beta model. Yes, everything is match based. These matches also appear to be random at present.
How much control will the players have over things like borders, control of planets? That remains to be seen, but I find it an ambitious undertaking for the devs to basically try to incorporate a planetary league into the game itself. Ask anyone who has ever run a planetary league what kind of hassle it is to run... It is a labor of love, but labor is the first word in that phrase...
I also agree that it really kinda' pointless what you call the game if it is a great game! I am playing this game because it is MECHWARRIOR, not because it is MMOECHWARRIOR. Though if they could implement that by the strictest definitions i.e. massively persistent world/universe, I would just become a vegetable with matrix-like uplink nodes so I could live in that universe. Yes my name is Monolith. I like to play MechWarrior.
If you really want to quibble, you could say that by a looser definition, when this game goes live, it will be an MMO: Thousands of players at once, on different planets, different battlefields, with different objectives, all affecting the overall universe in a very real way. Could they make it even more awesome by implementing combined arms? By somehow making a completely persistent universe where you could control the struggle for the planet from the moment a jumpship warped into the system to the moment either someone won or someone retreated? Hell, even continue that if command said pull out, but individual lances wanted to continue guerrilla warfare against overwhelming odds until they either turned the tide or were annihilated. You could go crazy with how crazy you want to get with this. If even the sky was no limit and we could have a nirvana-like state of mech-warfare induced bliss, unfortunately, this is still a simulation of a fictional reality in a very real world.
Also, let me analyze one other thing that noone (as of beginning of this post, don't know now...) seems to have considered. In BattleTech, there is very little in my mind that would be able to qualify as being able to satisfy fully the strictest definitions of an MMO. There were probably thousands of mechs with hundreds of individual commands on Tukayyid (had to doublecheck the spelling on that one... Kinda' like how some folks have a hard time spelling Mississippi.), but little else in my admittedly fluff-cannon and video-game fueled knowledge of Btech suggests that even large battles over major planets contained even more than a few hundred mechs on a single planet at a time. And you know what? Usually they were spread out across several fronts if there were that many. You might see 50-100 mechs on a major battlefield if you were lucky (or unlucky depending on your view.), but they would be spread across many kilometers of ground. And you know what else? Even if they could manage to pull off 40-50 mechs on a single huge (And I do mean HUGE, with multiple drop zones, bases, and objectives with miles between them) persistent battleground, I would be in mech HEAVEN. If they could add in combined arms, I would die and go there.
I will end this lengthy post with a caveat. I once saw a meme with a humorous picture and a (possibly) offensive tag-line. I also realize that given this post, I am condemning myself to ******-like status. Tag-line went thusly:
Arguing on the internet is like running in the special olympics: Even if you win, you're still retarded.
(Again, no intent to offend. I have known quite a few with down-syndrome-like disorders and all were, without exception, some of the nicest, happiest people I have ever known... So maybe that saying is completely false, because internet trolls are usually phallus-heads...)
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Derek Icelord, on 08 August 2012 - 03:40 PM, said:
I *know* those games all have a multiplayer aspect and that doesn't make them MMOs, but why is no one then defining MMOs? We know what wikipedia says; how do you define it?
