3 replies to this topic

[Bruteboss]

TL:DR: introduce a firing range or test lab where players can try out their build before they put their credits down. Same concept of test driving a car before buying.

Overall I find playing MWO extremely fun, and having put in quite a few hours since early closed beta, I know my way around the various mech types, weapons and configs.

But it took me a ridiculous amount of testing, in the closed beta environment (where resets were constant) and reading these forums and the battletech wiki to figure out how to properly build a mech. Without the option of getting a reset of my MC and mechs every 2 weeks or so, I probably would have given up.

This game is extremely punishing to experimental or new player mech builds. It's a pretty safe assumption that the majority of players will never read the forums and don't want/care to study up on mechwarrior and battletech to learn how to properly build and play a mech in this game. They want to jump in and start shooting things. The trail mechs give them that option but the real heart and soul of MWO is building and piloting your own custom mech. The trouble is actually getting a useful/fun build out of it.

The cost of parts, upgrades and new mechs is extremely high, which I understand is all part of getting people to put more hours in and invest some real money. It takes time and experience to figure out a good build for a given type of mech, and even which mech you actually want to pilot. Players can easily burn through millions of credits and their entire MC supply building and testing different mech types and might end up with nothing good to show for it without extreme care.

What I suggest (and forgive me if this has been mentioned before) is a firing range where you can try your build before you make the final purchase of it. That includes everything from parts to upgrades like FF armour and DHS. Some of the choices are incredibly expensive and a player should be confident that what they are making will actually work on the field.

The firing range could be nothing more than an empty room with a row of targets set at increasing ranges from your mech. Allowing movement is optional, but ideally you would be able to assign weapon groups here and really get a feel for how they work with your mech.

What this does is lets players get a feel for the mech they are building and if they really like the way it plays. It might not convey how the mech moves in game but at least you'd know how hot your weapons run and how to aim them, as well as what kind of a difference the various upgrades make.

In a perfect game world, we would be able to do this with any mech before we purchase it but I can understand not allowing the test range until a given mech type has been purchased.

Now I'm not an expert on programming games/running servers so I don't know if this presents a massive challenge to keeping the game running smoothly. But I can't imagine a cheap and easy work around isn't available (ie, making the test lab an off-client download that just runs on the user's PC).

Adding a feature like this to the game will reduce a huge amount of the stress and frustration new players encounter when trying to work their way through playing the game and saving up for their own custom. No one is going to get it right the first time but you are going to lose a lot of potential customers and long term players if they don't start seeing some results. This gives them a chance to figure that out in a safe environment and rewards time spent thinking about and earning their mech build.

[madpeople]

I was going to start a similar topic to this. My suggestion was a "Virtual Reality Testing Arena".

Essentially you could pick any mech you wanted, with any loadout you wanted and enter a single player "simulated arena" which would essentially be a very simple level where buildings are simple grey boxes, the ground is a flat plane with a grid texture (well, it could have a number of levels).
There would be stationary turrets that would fire at your simulated mech as well as simulated "tanks" (moving grey boxes that shoot) that follow simple patrol routes. - Things to shoot at that shoot back.
That way you could test a simulated version of a mech to see what it was like before buying it for real.

I suspect the devs already have a level like what I describe (but without the turrets and tanks) because it's essentially the same as a test level devs make when making a game and they only have place holder objects instead of real art assets.

This would all be single player, you gain no money or xp obviously.

Edited by madpeople, 03 November 2012 - 12:53 PM.

[Tuku]

These exzist in the lore and im sure will be implamented at launch or even sooner . I also think I remember them saying something about a weapons testing grounds or something of the sort.

[LaCai]

i would be happy even if you need to buy everythink, it can ruin your round and others if you just made new kinda mech and forgot to add your autocannon ammo or SRM`s/LRM`s/Streaker Ammos.
or you notice that heating become big issue and the mech aint working as you had in mind.