Hey IceSerpent, First off thanks for replying in a profession manner. This is the type of post I'd rather see, Arguments on something, a suggestion, and wrapped in a mostly neutral tone. So thanks for that.
IceSerpent, on 16 January 2013 - 11:01 PM, said:
Yeah, it was a problem, but that particular problem already had a solution (and a fairly obvious one, I must say) - if you want mechs to fire more often than once per 10s, you increase RoF and decrease damge by the same exact percentage, and decrease heat generation by the same exact percentage, thus keeping the same old TT balance in place. If you want mechs to survive longer, you increase armor and increase ammo count per ton by the same exact percentage, thus keeping the balance.
Despite being told about this by numerous people, what did PGI do? Right, increased RoF by itself, screwing the heat scale in the process, and doubled the armor while only increasing ammo count by a little bit, screwing the balance for ammo-based weapons.
Same goes for weapon convergence system - cool idea in theory, but tell me, who in their right mind designs a convergence system that doesn't provide any feedback whatsoever? Again, numerous people posted all sorts of good ideas on convergence implementation, yet we ended up getting one that plain doesn't work.
I particularly agree with you on this. But I didn't like dying so quick back then. If I had a choice I would choose this balance instead of the old one but its not the solution.
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Economy was just fine, except for new player grind. The only thing that we needed was "cadet bonus"...and we got it, except we lost R&R in the process, so economy is pretty much non-functional at the moment. There's no reason to use founder's mech and there's no reason to use premium time - after you "levelled" a few mechs that you actually like to play, there's absolutely nothing to spend c-bills on. We get roughly 100k per match, but it could have been 10k or 10mil - there are no c-bill sinks and the amount of money you have makes no practical difference.
I don't like the removal of R&R either. There is no risk for playing. If there is no risk then people have a tendency to waste their life. So I do agree with you on this one. But once again I trust PGI to do something about it. It is also a step in the right direction and you can not deny that this is working better than everyone barely scrapping by with a 50K gain per match not accounting for R&R.
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I am not talking about bug fixes - bugs happen and often take a while to fix, that's just the way it is. I am talking about design decisions - weapon balance, match maker, CW (lack of such), etc. Even after people posted very detailed explanations of how things should work, despite the fact that a lot of this stuff has been done before in other games, we still get implementations that either simply don't work or make no sense.
I don't fully agree without because most of the suggestions that have been made are horrible. Weapon balance has been and probably will always be an issue, especially if clan tech does become available. Things like matchmaking I will always contest. I dislike using ELO. It punishes people who play solo and often get bad teammates. It can lock people who want to improve on the lower scale. But this and many other variations have been suggested and this won out. For this one they listened. ELO is not a system of ranking designed for teams. Besides an ELO ranking doesn't fix things like team compositions. And battlevalue or tonnage lmit is not going to help by adding more values for the matchmaker to account for.
CW is something that devs have talked about and is a major selling point. I can't talk for them. Maybe it is being developed but not released. We don't know yet. I reserve judgement on this. Also what implementations have gone so awry? If you say equipment stop there. We all know TT equipment did some times that MWO doesn't but thats because TT is played from a different perspective of god aerial. PGI has to make up what they should do and how they act and then adjust accordingly. And Netcode is just an issue of insufficient programmers in that respect but they now have a dedicated team for it. Things like collision are tied to that so it might not have worked but by god PGI knows it and will fix it.
MustrumRidcully, on 16 January 2013 - 11:46 PM, said:
So you're at least not talking about me.
But you are wrong if you believe that negative feedback doesn't do anything. The devs at least get an impression that something is off, even if it will take more work to figure out what it is.
Tons of the negative posters I saw also posted details on what they dislike and how they'd fix it. But if things don't improve, they feel no compulsion to repeat all the details again.
I don't mind negative feedback. If i am angry about something I will say it. But I don't like people slandering PGI and the HARD WORKING developers that made this game for them to test and enjoy. I don't like how some threads start out with PGI sucks or some other iterations.
Constructive criticism is good, Senseless insulting of the dev team is bad. There is a distinction between negative feedback and downright being idiotic [Redacted].
Mechwarrior Buddah, on 16 January 2013 - 11:54 PM, said:
an example (albeit not from this game) is the "greed is good" fiasco and the Summer of Rage" from EVE.
If you dont know Google it. The in game riot and people leaving the game effectively halted the devs in their tracks, cost the game company 20% of its staff, and made them realize they were ******* off the golden goose.
I would rather not have it that PGI loses developers... Then it would slow down development of the game. Then the game quality drops because in the end what we wanted of them caused them to crash. You can't abuse the Player - Dev relationship. Imagine if players did the same to Minecraft or some other popular game that was freely given during development. And then what... Notch drops development of minecraft during early beta, and the halloween patch would never have comes out?
Edited by Tichorius Davion, 17 January 2013 - 12:49 AM.