174 replies to this topic

[xxx WreckinBallRaj xxx]

We all knew this game shouldn't have hit Open Beta yet. It has horrible MC purchase values. It has a downright broken economy. It had no MM.(What we have now, we should have had at day 1 of Open Beta) It's still very unfriendly and harsh for new users.(A single tutorial video doesn't cut it) Did you really have to launch without the ability to edit controls in combat and without weapon tooltips? Players have no idea how far a weapon can reach or how much they hit for without digging up a forum sticky chart. I myself have this stuff charted in Excel sheets because it's totally absence from the actual game client. I have a lot of things charted because they aren't found in the game itself. Want to know how fast your Mech will go with that Engine upgrade? Well either buy it and find out or dig up an excel sheet.

I don't know why they launched it so obviously premature. I'm guessing IGP finally pushed it out in order to get MC revenue coming in. But I think they are just shooting themselves in the foot. With such horrible MC purchase values, how many people are really going to drop cash on this?

[MrPenguin]

Comguard, on 14 November 2012 - 02:52 PM, said:

When are these game modes to come?

AFAIK we're getting conquest in December and I expect to see community warfare around February/March.

Edited by MrPenguin, 14 November 2012 - 03:04 PM.

[flackee]

zmeul, on 14 November 2012 - 02:59 PM, said:

I could employ a crawler and fetch it, but I have no idea on how PGI would react to the increase in bandwidth usage

Historical data pre-open beta on new account registrations? I figured it was lost (to us) ...

Edit: I (eventually) figured out how one could come up with those numbers and how that would require a lot of page grabs, gotcha.

Edited by flackee, 14 November 2012 - 03:43 PM.

[Shelshoq]

zmeul, on 06 November 2012 - 08:03 AM, said:

the 386k of users created before OBT was launched would beg to differ, and also the fact that the game accepts payments
and if you have to compare it with HAWKEN's CBT stage 1, the number is small - sadly

I would love to see how may of those accounts are Alpha+CBT+founders, but I guess it needs a crawler and PGI won't be happy with the bandwidth usage
in the end would be impossible since the Alpha and CBT users are not marked like the founders

you cant compare this to other ftp games THIER IS NOTHING TO COMPARE bt has always had a NICHE of people so i mean you can try crunching numbers but its not comparable

[zmeul]

flackee, on 14 November 2012 - 03:06 PM, said:

Historical data pre-open beta on new account registrations? I figured it was lost (to us) unless it was archived somewhere ala waybackmachine, in which case it wouldnt be PGI's bandwidth. I'm kinda confused by that, and interested to know where it is if it is effectively available.

I would need access to the original CBT forums
because there is no way to determine who was a Alpha, CBT user vs regular users; even now it's impossible to distinguish users, we have no distinctive member status (except founders)

[zmeul]

Shelshoq, on 14 November 2012 - 03:10 PM, said:

you cant compare this to other ftp games THIER IS NOTHING TO COMPARE bt has always had a NICHE of people so i mean you can try crunching numbers but its not comparable

as you can see, PGI wants to exit that circle and invite the "casual player" in
that's why they want that 3rd person view, in spite of them saying no to it this whole time

[Rokuzachi]

Shelshoq, on 14 November 2012 - 03:10 PM, said:

you cant compare this to other ftp games THIER IS NOTHING TO COMPARE bt has always had a NICHE of people so i mean you can try crunching numbers but its not comparable

Of course you can't compare the IP.

But you can compare the game type; competitive, team-based match with progression.

Edited by Rokuzachi, 14 November 2012 - 03:22 PM.

[Chemie]

Data is data. hard to argue. You can argue the "why" but that number of new accounts is very ugly.

[TheMightyWashburn]

Why is this game on steam? Seems to me that would really help. And it also seems its a big enough studio to skip greenlight

[Like a Sir]

zmeul, on 14 November 2012 - 03:19 PM, said:

as you can see, PGI wants to exit that circle and invite the "casual player" in
that's why they want that 3rd person view, in spite of them saying no to it this whole time

Image their reaction, when the casual players don't come, and they lose 95% of the existing players/customers lol Wait the game would be dead, and I don't actually want that!

[zmeul]

Like a Sir, on 14 November 2012 - 03:39 PM, said:

Image their reaction, when the casual players don't come, and they lose 95% of the existing players/customers lol Wait the game would be dead, and I don't actually want that!

I can see that
PGI is stuck on WoT's performance and they're drooling over it

[mekabuser]

Hawken has higher numbers? geez... well now you know how i feel about mwll and their numbers...
Fix the damn combat devs... the netcode, etc.
then you have a chance.. otherwise... nope.

[Bubba Wilkins]

Using forum registrations is not a good metric for determining anything at this point.

The only two metrics that matter are the number of unique players on a weekly basis and the total number of hours played by them.

It was nice of zmeul to go through the process, but his findings, results, and interpretation have very little connection to what is actually going on.

[Vassago Rain]

Bubba Wilkins, on 14 November 2012 - 06:34 PM, said:

Using forum registrations is not a good metric for determining anything at this point.

The only two metrics that matter are the number of unique players on a weekly basis and the total number of hours played by them.

It was nice of zmeul to go through the process, but his findings, results, and interpretation have very little connection to what is actually going on.

They told us to use that, and since every account in game has a forum account, it works.

[Vassago Rain]

Dakkath, on 14 November 2012 - 02:26 PM, said:

This game will REALLY take off once community warfare is in. The Metagame is a very important feature for customer retention IMO, as well as a good word-of-mouth hype machine.

You're ignoring the obvious fact that we don't have community warfare now, or even much content, and that failure to deliver is killing the game.

[ChaosEngine]

Many people won't bother with "betas" anymore.

I know of some that even wait at least half a year after the final launch
of a game before they bother to have a look at that game, because
lets be honest todays final releases are more often then not still betas.

And to the community, least argument I heard of one of them:
"Occasionally looking into this forum and seeing that a community
with at least 50-75% 30+ agers (guesstimation), bitchslap itself about
this and that, day after day, I am not sure I want to play this game."

[Elizander]

The very first hurdle are the Trial mechs. No matter how much the veterans argue that you can 'own face' in a Trial mech, most new players will have no clue about heat management and firing discipline.

The next is the lack of any mechanics to speed up the grind for a new player. I really don't see the harm in letting people get their first, second, or even third mech a little faster than the current grind allows through fixed discounts for new accounts. An even easier method is to start someone off at 1,000,000 or 1,500,000 C-bills and let them grind from there.

We lack a serious in-game tutorial. We already know that the majority of players 1) Do not read forums, 2) Do not read e-mails and announcements, 3) Don't bother to ask others on what they need to know about the game.

If they do get past all that and start building their mech, the lack of tooltips and in-game help will make them build some monstrous Ferro/XL/high ammo mech that will kill their earnings. There is nothing in-game to warn them about it.

I'm doing what I can to help new folks in the forums, but that's about as far as I can go. There are others doing a ton of helpful stuff too. Rogbull and others putting up 'Trial Mech' guides on how to play them efficiently, we got Ohmwrecker and company compiling useful data, we got Mason and the others putting up links to player builds for mechs, and we have the crazy guys in the Meme Thread keeping us all entertained between matches.

If new players are the issue, the game seriously needs to treat them a hundred times better than it is now. I'm a hardcore guy. I'd play this game if there were no text in-game and just item names and even if I have to guess all the commands. Most other people aren't that patient.

[Pangorin]

Some of you guys oversee an important fact, and I'm very confussed because a lot of people screeming it out very loud!

There are more then 15000 new players/month (if numbers of OP are correct) and this with this unready, as a lot of people say, game! I guess most publishers would be very happy with this numbers!

The other thing is that MWO was never planned for 11 million players, I think some of you dream a little much. Take a look to Eve Online and there active accounts and its still alive. Next is, not the number of accounts are important, its the number of paying members!

So, relax a bit and see what happens!

Edited by Pangorin, 15 November 2012 - 02:16 AM.

[Edi123]

Pangorin, on 15 November 2012 - 02:15 AM, said:

There are more then 15000 new players/month (if numbers of OP are correct) and this with this unready, as a lot of people say, game! I guess most publishers would be very happy with this numbers!

The other thing is that MWO was never planned for 11 million players, I think some of you dream a little much. Take a look to Eve Online and there active accounts and its still alive. Next is, not the number of accounts are important, its the number of paying members!

You are right, its not 15k new players but 15k new accounts. While no one besides PGI can tell how many of them became active players, we can guess that a significant amount of them just tried the game out and left (probably all of us know of friends we told about the game and maybe tried it out for just a few days).
So assuming that idle account are at least not yet deleted, we stand with a total maximum Playerbase of 400k. Probably closer to half of that due to inactive accounts. Though i dont have detailed insight into the industry, i would guess that this is a bit low for an f2p-game, where the majority of the active players doesnt even pay much or anything at all. So while EVE online may survive with a comparable number of Players, most of them pay a monthly fee.

[Riffleman]

MrPenguin, on 14 November 2012 - 03:03 PM, said:

AFAIK we're getting conquest in December and I expect to see community warfare around February/March.

Now lets set these goals by PGI standard time.

Conquest march.
Community warfare july
clans never, nobody left to fund.

Nobody wanted this game to succeed more than me, except the people actually building it. 80 dollars for new headphones, 100 dollars for joystick and foot pedals (lol to that bonehead move-joysticks) 300 dollars to upgrade my graphics card specifically for this game. And a founders package was the only thing I could salvage out of these expenditures.

I have to face facts, the game is not developed well, is missing key components to mechwarrior (really, they think this level of joystick use for a mechwarrior game was acceptable?) has a dwindling playerbase interested, and at the worst times is unplayable. There are dozens of equally important mistakes, but that is enough for me.

My guess is someone will try a relaunch of the series 10 years from now again....