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[CoolHandLuke106881]

I was told once that the most important thing in running a game is managing the players' expectations. This advice came from the person who had run some of the most enjoyable games I had ever played including a couple of very long running TT mechwarrior campaigns, so I tend to trust his advice. And by expectations, I don't mean wish list since its impossible for any game to be everything for every player. The best that any game designer can do (whether computer or table top) is provide the players with realistic expectations of what the focus of that game will be. This task is made much more difficult in a game like MechWarrior because of the long and rich history that the title brings, and the expectations that those of us who love this game bring with us.
A lot of the frustration that I see on the forums has to do with the mismatch of game to expectations. Here are a few examples tha come to mind

As late as August/September, the MWO website proudly advertised a game that would be fun for lone wolves as well as teams. Whether its possible to create a game that pleases both of these groups or not, I don't know. But this fact seems to have created more frustration and more discussion threads than I can possibly count. I have looked for examples of this advertising on the current website, and it seems most references to lone wolves have been dropped, so it seems PG has been working to fix this expectation. They may want to explicitly discourage this expectation though rather than just hiding it. Judging from the forums, there are still a lot of players who are frustrated because of a lack of this lone wolf experience. It may be better to lose this group before they start playing than have them sign up and be frustrated.

But equally important to how the developers market the teaming aspects of the game is how they implement it. At the moment, most of the game flow makes it easier for new players to go the PUG route than the team route. Someone signs in, they choose a mech and launch. The default option is playing solo. To join a team is much more complicated. You need to find and add friends in game, you have to come to some teaming arrangement with them without being able to chat with them first, and if you want a really successful teaming experience, you have to download and install a third party voice program. If the devs want teaming to be the default option, they are setting the wrong expectations to many players by making single player PUGS the easiest, default option.

The type of simulation that this game represents is another expectation that pops up in the threads. For some its too 'tactical' and not enough like a first person shooter, for some its opposite. For some its too much like the table top, for others not enough. All of the MW titles have had to deal with this as they convert a turn based game into real time, and they have all chosen some point along the strategy/shooter continuum. Again, just let your players know what to expect. This is not and cannot be TT, but state the elements that you plan on keeping. Let new players especially know that combat will have some elements of FPS skill but also slower paced tactical thinking.

Finally, I will mention 'open beta'. Again, there is frustration in these forums over the current state of the game, netcode, content, bugs and crashes. PG has explicitly said that the game is still in Beta stage, and therefor expectations should be low. But their actions suggest otherwise. The MWO business model, such as it is, is fully active. They are accepting money for services, and charging customers for everything that they intend to charge for under their final business model. While more businesses seem to be following this fuzzy release/beta line, the expectation of most is that beta's have testers while final products have customers. As long as the advertised (beta) doesn't match at least some of the cues (release) there will again be a mix of expectations and a mismatch in expectations for those who believe this game should be closer to a final release.

In short, this game is now open to all, and players are jumping in preloaded with a lot of unmanaged expectations. PG cannot possibly meet all of these expectations, so they really need to start guiding them at the outset. They may end up with a slightly smaller audience, but likely a much happier one.