King Hrothgar, on 27 October 2012 - 05:06 AM, said:
Is the game complete? No, of course not. Is it buggy, glitchy and downright frustrating at times? Absolutely. Are there serious balance issues? Clearly. And this ladies and gentlemen is why it's called "beta." The key requirement for an open beta is a reasonably stable program that works and has the core elements of the game. MWO fits that description. It has the basic mech on mech action and the program doesn't CTD every 5 minutes. It's core problem right now is a lack of content, screwy interface and lack of documentation. That is completely acceptable for an open beta.
Here's the problem with the way you view it. You're a founder, which means you bought in to support this game. It means that you are willing to see it through for the most part to the bitter end. I'm not saying thats bad. Not everyone is a founder and the majority don't share your views. So PGI sold like something close to 50,000 founder packs, ACROSS THE GLOBE. They made 5.2 million dollars ACROSS THE GLOBE. It's not like they sold 50,000 packs in just one continent or one demographic. Basically everyone who was or is a Mechwarrior or Battletech fan bought a founder pack. Those that are but didn't are probably waiting to see if the game gets better.
PGI has already saturated their target demographic. Open Beta is a push to get it exposure to a whole different demographic. The problem is that the majority of gamers don't want to spend money or play a game that's as buggy as this game. Most of us do because we haven't seen a Mechwarrior game in 10 years. The rest could care less if this games name is Mechwarrior or Hawken or Mech Assault. They want the game to be fun, they want to be able to learn it, and they don't want the headache of bugs interrupting their game.
Right now the game is stale in content. I could care less about Endo or DHS or FF, because only Endo is really useful and DHS doesn't work right now, and judging by their reply it may never work correctly, that has yet to be seen. The core of the game is a deathmatch with 2 dropship beacons at each end of small buggy maps. It gets old very quick, because the games are so fast, and in trial mechs they are even faster because you just leave and join in another one. Mechwarrior is not a game about who gets to the dropship faster or who kills more mechs within 15 minutes. It's about taking planets, assaulting bases, protecting VIP's, protecting bases, tactics and strategy to achieve those goals. This is not Mechwarrior but World of Mechs right now. We've got mechs that look like Battletech Mechs and we've got the name on a product along with some of the tech to go with it, but quite frankly this does not feel like the Mechwarrior that I know and played more than 10 years ago.
Faith in this product would be easier to hold if they didn't ignore the community and simply do things that spite them in order to uphold unrealistic deadlines. For the most part, everyone knows this game is not ready for Open Beta even though it is called Open Beta, it is still a public launch. It is when everyone in the public gets to play it and see it for what it is and make up their minds. If it was a little buggy and more feature complete, I would say it has a fighting chance. The state it is in right now I would say the chances are slim to none at best. This is a F2P game which means that when they launch it, no one has to pay as so many of you have pointed out. No one has to feed PGI's stomach's or pay their running costs. It's not like a retail AAA title than can run on a franchise and be sold for $60 bucks on consoles and PC's where the Developers and the Publisher's recoup their costs in record time. They have to make their money from constant sales and microtransactions. That means there has to be people playing and there has to be something worth buying. Without that, this game is dead.