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So far even though I hate to admit it there are things that look like money grabs. The revenue has certainly slowed down now since the Founder program is no longer getting any extensions, so more people MAY mean more revenue. I doubt in its current state that it will & I don't think I need to list why. If you're looking to bring in more revenue now then the way I look at it is, if the core is not finalized with all that it needs to have to at least be sufficient (DX11, destructible/interactive environments etc.) then when someone spends some money why would they not want to know how the environment may affect their equipment? I said quite a while ago how the mechs will need to slow down when they hit the water. I want to know what that's gonna mean for a Jenner vs. a Fatlas before I consider spending any real world money to help buy one or the other. If you're looking for more revenue then I can't see why anyone would want to spend money in game if absolutely anything could still change since it's still classed as "beta". Let's say I'm a new player after "OB" & I spent real money on FF armor & I use it, then you decide for whatever reason to change some property of it that effectively ***** on my current application of it, what then? Or will that kind of thing not happen? How about falling down? That's an even better example of one of those things. It needs to be finalized BEFORE people CAN spend money that won't be reset. I like to think I was a bauce in Jennifer before, but now we're damn near unstoppable. I think it would be very bad if a new player comes along at a point where a game mechanic hasn't been sorted & they spend their non-refundable in game money before & without knowing it could or will change. You stated that "the game will never be finished" meaning as the timeline moves along so will the introduction of new **** to keep it fresh & persistent. New things can come after you're taking non-resetting funds from people, changing existing things cannot.
The introduction of a paint job or a new missle type or even a new game mode should not have much potential to break the game (should it?), but new engine implementations & major overhauls to the "internal systems" of the game can. It already did & it's still broken. What happens when DX11 comes in or any of the major things that MWO needs to have to succeed? As it sits, the so called Mech simulator is not very immersive. It lacks a lot of fundamental details that I don't think "Joe" cares to hear planned dates or promises made for. I expect that the worlds MechWarriors are here, now. The worlds "gamers" aren't. Those gamers are looking for something new & entertaining to jump into. CTD, freezing after matches, incredibly short "rush to the red square & stand in it" matches ('cuz somehow that translates to MORE experience) which is the only game mode, only 4 simple maps with essentially nothing of value in them & many of the small details that are necessary for immersion being missing, is not the way I would try to deal out the first impressions to those "gamers".
I'm not so much concerned about content as I am about stability. Right now things are broken. I saw tons of DCs last night, I'll see more tonight. I got tossed to my desktop & had at least 4 freezes after matches. These things to me are very bad, especially when they continue occuring after numerous patches yet didn't exist for months before the patch that started some of them. I'm not sure how it is of any benefit to bring in more players to see how things work when they already don't work now. If your servers are having trouble now & can't keep players connected at the start of matches then WTF do you need more people for? Maybe it's a problem with the players connection?
Soon I hope you will deliver an alternative to the stand in the square game mode available now. We load these things up with weapons to use them on **** do we not? So what's with the standing in the red square ********? The things Hawken has players doing are equally dumb, but there's at least a lot more of it at this point & they aren't showing what they got to too many people. They're nothing more than a UT clone with walking tank suits. We need meaningful things to do in this so called simulator. Standing in a square simulates nothing of value to me & right now it shortens the **** out've most of the matches I drop into. GET RID OF IT!!! Or get something better to go with it very soon (like maybe one team drops in, in a dropship to invade a real fortified base with defenses to grab a high priority item & retreat back to the ship with it? Maybe not soon, but some day?). "Assault" mode needs something in it to assault & an incentive to assault it.
The last thing that I don't see much talk about & that I started a topic for, is crediting damage done. Some other players also mentioned damage received. That really led me to realize that they can't be mutually exclusive but would have great value in improving the game overall using both. At least a stat for them would be nice. Like I mentioned, we build our mechs to win fights & put some hurt on the enemy (especially in "Assault" mode) & we all (the legit players) enter the match to do some damage. There is a problem with suicide farmers & a problem with "my team sucks I'm not scratching my paint" cowards. I'd like to see the scoring/award system use the damage done to multiply damage received by some factor & the sum of which would determine, or add to, the XP &/or C-bills awarded to the player. If you snipe or launch LRMs, you get credit for damage done but if none was received you'd get less & that's the trade off for a lower repair bill. If a spotter was required to put LRMs on target, they get half, or some portion of the damage done because it couldn't have been dealt without them & if they took damage they'd get extra credit for being the one in harms way at the time. The amount of damage done would affect credit for damage received so there is much more benefit to not suiciding &/or not "cowarding" & screwing the team one way or the other. I'm pretty sure "MechWarriors" for the most part come here to put damage on targets & not stand in one spot looking at a shrinking red bar. I'm also pretty sure none of us are here to get ****** by people who won't play 'cuz they don't get their way. Reward participation in combat, not fleeing from it. Give us real military installations to penetrate & tasks that have value to complete, with our "hands" or with our weapons. The only reward I think should be given for standing in a square (if standing in a square remains an in game "activity") is whatever is given for winning the match, nothing more. How about them killshots? Unless a killshot was delivered through an untouched part of the mech or wouldn't have needed it to be touched anyway I don't think a killshot should be given any reward except for its damage value. Include it in stats but nothing more. Same goes for assists. Isn't the current method such that if you hit each enemy only with one MG bullet each, you'd get credit for an assist if they're destroyed? No more than 8 MG bullets fired could mean 8 assists? Reward an assist for most damage done to the area of the killing blow & diminish reward proportionally to whoever did damage necessary for the killshot to make the kill. Honestly, if someone did 90% of the damage to the area of the killshot & the killshot would've only dealt a fraction of that damage to the area then I think the kill should go to who made it possible, not who got the lucky last shot. Credit for "Kill" should be different than for "Killshot". The way credit is dealt for things now vs. what it's not dealt out for seems very fucky. So's the lucky, fucky crit system.
Bottom line for me is that I think new content needs to take a back seat to fixing broken content. I'd still rather lose a match to a suicider or a coward (or someone who loitered our square) then have to sit around waiting to get my mech into another match after being tossed to my desktop. I thought a beta was supposed to be an IP where the core content & mechanics are in & then handed to a broader community with more time, more perspectives & more types of hardware to tweak & fix what remains. Community Warfare isn't here, isn't that a significant portion of the game? What if that's littered with bugs? This is the only multiplayer game I've ever really played (a little Hawken Alpha/Beta, Portal 2 co-op, UT back in the day, briefly) so I don't have the experience that most people do but when I think of something like WoW, which I know follows a different model, but when they release new content, which they tend to do sometimes, is it buggy as all ****? Their engine is hugely dated. The graphics are super dated, because the tools they were going to use were all there at launch & they stuck to what works. Delivering new content is probably the easy part. You wonder why OB is such a big deal to people. It's the first impressions on the people that aren't necessarily looking for MW, but just for a game, that everyone who wants this to be a success are concerned about. When will X-Play & EP get on it? What will they say? If the game is never done, then is there ever a launch? If not then OB is the deciding milestone the way I see it (& so do a lot of us). Do what you like for OB, it is yours after all. A lot of us here just think part of it is ours too & we're worried about it. I just hope we won't be here in some months time sayin' "atoadaso".
Edited by Freeride Forever, 26 October 2012 - 11:40 PM.
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