3696 replies to this topic

[the Gingerbread Man]

When you're facing poor (or negative) growth for your product and questions from your publisher, it's easy to construct phantom problems. In this case, they're blaming 1st person view in a 1st person shooter. Bit of a reach.

I will always contend that the biggest reasons for LoL and WoW's successes were accessibility and stability/responsiveness. Both of those games can (or at least used to, in WoW's case) run on toasters and have regional servers. This allows people of little means to participate. Both of those two games had great tutorials and eased new players in with quick rewards. Those rewards slowed over time, but by that point the player was hooked. Both of those games weren't always stable, but major client crashes/bugs were addressed within hours via hotfixes and minor patches. Both of those games had engines where input was met with immediate response (good netcode and lag compensation code), and compared to many other MMOs this is a night and day difference in the "feel" of the game.

MWO needs a decent machine to run, and the technical director has discouraged people from tweaking the user.cfg in order to get the game more playable. It's not accessible to people on lower-end machines. There are no regional servers to let people outside of NA be competitive.

MWO has no in-game tutorial or walkthrough. Doesn't even have hints or tooltips. Many of the systems are counter-intuitive. This isn't a fault of first-person, it's a fault of introduction.

MWO has no early-game rewards. No first champion/mech earned after two tutorials. Not even experience gained from running the only mechs available- trials. A new player gains nothing but cbills, and most do this for hours before he can actually do anything other than click the launch button. There is no hook.

MWO has terrible netcode, hit registration and lag compensation. High ping players teleport across the screen even as seen by low ping players. Stationary players can be shot with high alpha with shots that register in the client and the paperdoll, but with no damage done. There is a firing delay on some weapons because there isn't good lag compensation to sync animations.

MWO has a bad "feeling" engine. Step on a rock or a 2" ledge and your mech teleports up and down, hitching out of control. Shooting at a light mech who turns and grazes a wall, he hitches back and forth on your screen- then teleports 100m away because he actually was moving the whole time. I listed the current crashes/problems in another thread but I'll do it here again. I play this game quite a bit, and I have seen all of these. Even after re-install. Even on the lowest settings. Even though I have an OC'd 2500k and a 6950. It just feels, broken:
-Crash to desktop whenever 3+ people look at you
-HDR bug turning screen black in forest colony
-Crash to desktop randomly when dragging things in mechlab
-Crash to desktop randomly when adjusting armor in mechlab
-Losing HUD when coming back from overheating
-Black screen on game entry
-Block letters/flashing screen on game entry
-Gold screen on game entry
-Entering games with unrepaired internals even though the mech lab said they were at 100% health
-Paper doll not updating so you can't tell how you die
-Randomly dropping to 4 fps (slideshow)

The game was pretty stable for me before the late-October patch. But it's been like this for weeks, without even a pure-bugfix update. Each patch since September has seemed to lower stability. I'm a masochistic gamer by nature (I played EQ1 for a decade and spent hundreds of hours on D3 at release), but there aren't many of us left these days. You won't become huge by only appealing to we poor souls.

Like I said, it's very easy to construct an artificial problem as to why your product isn't succeeding. It's harder to look at yourself and realize your product just isn't ready for prime-time due to stability and infrastructure. It feels like an alpha, yet it has been opened to the public. Utilize resources wisely, pause content-creation if you have to. Fix the infrastructure.

[WolfinExile]

Frosted, on 14 November 2012 - 06:00 AM, said:

3rd person can't be balance if it's in game you have to use it to be competitive what is that you don't understand. Stop brown nosing

And here come the personal attacks. Just because I play the devil's advocate by supporting 3rd person cam doesn't mean i'm 'brown nosing'. And 3rd person isn't even implemented yet and you talk about 'competitiveness'.

Well guess what, no matter how much anybody complains and whines, 3rd person is going to be in so deal with it.

Dr Killinger, on 14 November 2012 - 06:01 AM, said:

That's assuming that this will be easy to achieve, and not buggy. There will invariably come a time when a mech is somehow deemed "invisible" by this LoS system, and will not be displayed when he should clearly be visible. Play a bit of XCom: Enemy Unknown and see how a system like this works. I love XCom more than any other game released in the past 5 years, and it's singleplayer so I don't mind, but sometimes the system can only make a best guess, and oftentimes it isn't good enough.

Please devs, don't do this to us.

I have played XCom: Enemy Unknown. And I have played many, many other games with LoS implemented. Don't take 1 game's buggy LoS implementation as a sure sign it isn't feasible.

RTS games have had LoS systems that worked perfectly, and Total Annihilation released in 1997, a game from 15 years ago even had "true" LoS that even took into account obstacles like trees, rocks etc. and could support hundreds of units and their line of sight calculations to work in multiplayer games.

Don't tell me that in this day and age, with much more powerful systems and internet speeds that leave those 28.8kbps connections in the dust, that LoS is impossible or impractical in multiplayer. And missile behaviour already takes into account the terrain for obstacles, there is no reason it cannot be used for LoS as well.



PGI has decided to put in 3rd person, and what we should do as a community is to come up with constructive suggestions on overcoming the inherent drawbacks that come with it.
And they didn't even clarify whether its going to be an option for new players only to get used to the mech's movement and torso twist, so its abit too early to get all wound up about it.

Some of you might personally feel that MWO should be only for hardcore players, and that people who are new to Mechwarrior can go to hell if they can't get to grips with the game just by watching tutorials or reading guides, but I tell you that's being very selfish and ultimately will not get more people to start playing.

But like it or not, new blood is the only way the Mechwarrior universe is ever going to expand. I want to see a single-player campaign, and more spinoff games like MechCommander. That will probably not be possible if new people don't find the game fun and accessible.

[Ozzalin]

I know where this is going if the devs refuse to listen to the community, implement 3rd person crap, and focus on big money instead of an amazing and serious game they have on their hands.
Its soooo simple.

SWTOR....
Devs refused to listen to the whole community.
Community got veeeery angry.
750 000 Players left the next week, and closed their accounts.
250 000+ more, the week after that.

Transforming the most popular game that month into...
a total ghost mmorpg where they had to close 90% of all servers, and went F2P the next month.

So to our beloved devs: Before you mess everything here.
Think twice before you spit on your loyal players.

[Derek Icelord]

If they really think this is the way to help new players, we've already lost.

What they should do is have a tutorial section in the game that explains the basics. At the very least the launcher should point you to a video.

Or, better yet, let them learn by having it beat into them. This won't happen, of course, since the "casual gamer" is what most companies try and attract these days. I could make a 2+ hour podcast just ranting about the "casual gamer" crap that afflicts games these days...

Edited by Derek Icelord, 14 November 2012 - 08:10 AM.

[flackee]

Z0MBIE Y0SHI, on 14 November 2012 - 08:05 AM, said:

Is that really in there? I skipped to the stuff on 3rd person view.

He said 'we are going to go more into our official launch pretty soon'... 'no exact date .. we have number of features, polishing that needs to be in place'

The words that jack left out change the meaning, from talking about official launch to actually launching.

Edited by flackee, 14 November 2012 - 08:12 AM.

[Adrian Steel]

I'm enough angered on this topic that I hope this turns into a threadnought and bombs the forums.

Handle this with care, PGI. Handle this with care....

[Jacmac]

I won't be playing in any 3rd person matches. If they make it an option to stay out of 3rd person matches, then I don't really care. If 3rd person ends up dominating the game, then I guess that will be when me and MWO part ways...

[DeathofSelf]

Oh man! Great Idea! They should also do armor re-gen and aim assist too!

(sarcasm)

[Korobug]

Third person shouldn't be included in this game. A huge part is keeping your situational awareness, and when you use third person, you don't need to focus as much on that. It also renders incredibly close range tactics far more difficult to pull off. for example, I have a centurion with 3 SRM 6 and my tactic is generally to find an enemy focusing on one of my allies, get RIGHT behind him, literally with the missile launchers against his mech, and fire two volleys to his back killing all but the most resilient mechs. If they could just watch me walk behind them then that tactic is rendered useless, lowering the amount of options I have to play, as well as the fact that players should HAVE to be paying attention to prevent my cheesy method from working. I think third person would have a massively negative effect on this game.

[xenoglyph]

Why is everyone against this so much? I think it's a good idea.






Nah, just playin'. I think it's a horrible idea just like everyone else.

[DraigUK]

PGI are intent on ruining mechwarrior with recent decisions and balls-ups. This is just the latest idiotic idea that they are wasting time on instead of dealing with the real issues.

Like crap net code and memory leaks.

[cmopatrick]

been at this for months... this is the first time i have gotten that sick feeling about the game... i hope i am wrong.

[Oriius]

I'd be interested to hear from people who are for it, why exactly you think it would be good?. Again if it is to do with making it eaiser for newbies (such as myself btw), then could you also explain how you think the mechlab would look to such people?

I'm not sure I understand the dev logic here, clearly I think the dev's need to make their case in more detail than the podcast here has done. Would be most interested to see what more they'd have to say on it.

[Quxudica]

RedHairDave, on 14 November 2012 - 08:07 AM, said:

there is little content because its beta...

Quarter 1, their targeted release date is a maximum of four months out. We have four maps, one retextured map, one game mode that barely qualifies as more then Team Death match, no variety in ammo, equipment that is still place holder, only a youtube video as a tutorial, not even a hint of Community Warfare and countless problems with almost every aspect of the game. It would take a certain amount of denial to not admit that this title has problems if it's planning to release that soon.

[Orzorn]

Its nice and all they they'd split the games so that you either play first person only, third person only, or either, but the issue is that this splits the fan base.

What happens when community warfare (If, I should say) comes along? Do we have 3 different galaxy maps so that third person players won't interfere with first person players?

The system is just unworkable. You can not introduce third person into the game and not change EVERYTHING.

[Z0MBIE Y0SHI]

They're actually talking about full launch with limited maps, broken netcode and one game mode.


I'm not a buisness major, but this just seems borderline full ******. I really hope they're holding something back.

Edited by Z0MBIE Y0SHI, 14 November 2012 - 08:26 AM.

[Corvus Antaka]

christ...do people have problems WALKING? EXISTING?

Is humanity so bloody stupid they need third person to get out the door of their own house?

retardness at it's finest.

This is a mech sim, and no, we do not need third person. All it takes is a week of practice to figure it out.

This world is going to hell with all the hand-holding ***** footing out there these days....

[MW Waldorf Statler]

if more such requests come from Mechwarrior-incompetent, we might as well play Amored Core,Ace Combat with Mechs or mechassult who can not play in 1rd view should rather go back to his console back and never will be a MW because he lacks talent and the most basic skills for .
who is unable to control a mech in the normal view, or run well in real life with 3rd View through life, as 3PV, and who is not able to aim, which then gets a new computer, and who in no movement can fire, a slow-motion mode in Red Dead gets redemption?

by Kerensky ,This 3PV player not MWs! lesser as Freeborns and Solahmas ...Pure useless Guys

Edited by CSJ Ranger, 14 November 2012 - 09:08 AM.

[Redneckpanther]

Kribson, on 14 November 2012 - 04:47 AM, said:

They should absolutley introduce 3rd person for the people that have problems steering their mech. Moreover there should be an option to activate an aim bot for people having problems with that. Another great idea would be a to add an infinite ammo and armor mode, cause i noticed some people find it difficult to evade enemy fire...

Whatever you do...in the end the game should become as boring and least challenging as possible

Second this. 3rd person will be a game killer. I for one will stop. H*ll I am on edge with this freaking 4 man only drops. They need to quit listening to the whinny part of community and listen to the ones that actually play the game like it is suppose to be played. If they keep up it won't even make launch as a Mechwarrior game. Instead it will be freaking Wow with robots. Give me a freaking break already. Let all the Wow losers stay in Wow. We really don't need them and their whinning in the player base anyway.

Edited by Redneckpanther, 14 November 2012 - 01:32 PM.

[Atayu]

Adding 3rd person view is a bad idea. It will split the community if they get to pick what kind they want to be in. Then you also have the fact that person in 3rd person view would have a advantage in a fight because they can see whats behind and beside them where they should not be able to see. So you can not mix the 2 and have a fair fight. But if you force 3rd person view by making it so they get put together it will force people into playing 3rd person to have a chance against those that do. Forcing people to play 3rd person destroys the feeling of the game. This is just a bad, bad idea.