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[Jaded Jasper]

After more than a thousand matches (plus more during closed beta! )I find myself greatly enjoying MWO, and now feel comfortable speaking my mind in the hopes of improving the game and also lightening the posting tone around here which is normally so... painfully negative and unconstructive.

First some quick stats (someone is bound to ask), from about 95% Pug matches, the rest playing with one or occasionally two friends:
Wins: 715
Losses: 617
K/D: 2.74
Avg. XP: 643.58

So I've played a fair bit and am not a bad player, but nor am I great. Still, I feel I have some insight into the game.


Things I like:

- Mechs have the right feel. The light mechs aren't handled well by the netcode yet, but that looks to be changing.

- The weapons are well balanced all things considered. I'm still not fond of pulse lasers or the lbx-10, and machine guns and flamers of course suck, but I find a use for most everything else. Except vanilla SRM 2s I guess!

- PGI's willingness to deviate from the (frankly broken) tabletop rules while still retaining the essence of Battletech. A difficult path to tred, and I think you guys have done a great job.

- Maps are well done. Subtle, but important!

- Looks great!



Things I think could be better:

- New players have a rough time. Documentation is hard to find, and lots of stuff isn't obvious if you haven't played Battletech before. Then you're dropped into your first match against veterans straight away -- without even a chance to check the map, look around, or set weapon groups before the action starts. Hopefully Elo matchmaking will help address this!

- Not enough maps! It'd be nice if certain features of the maps could be somehow randomized, so you could get much more mileage out the same maps. One trick I've seen done well for other wargames is to make bigger maps, and then use some random (same size as now) part of it for any given match. Or maybe just collapse random buildings or something.

- Conquest Mode. I'm really not fond of its sports metaphore, or that the mode selection is random so I still wind up playing it when I forget to select Assault after a crash. I'd love to instead have actual wargaming like modes, with victory conditions that aren't so abstract and gamey.

- Consider a mode that allows players to field 2 or 3 mechs, switch to "reinforcements" when they are cored. This would dampen the "snowball" effect from early kills leading to more kills, yet still avoid FPS style infinite respawn zerging.

- The Mechlab GUI needs work. It's cluttered, and requires too many clicks to do common things. Oh, and clicking the "Ready" button makes you unready -- oops!

- The pilot XP trees are really boring, with zero costumization or variation -- everyone is the same and they've no point other than as a leveling treadmill. It'd be nice to have to make some choices! Modules are only slightly better.

- Mech Scaling. Light mechs are completely out of scale with the larger mechs, assuming remotely similar densities -- they should be more than 50% bigger in each dimension! Fixing this would alleviate much of the pain from their lagshields...

- ECM. I understand you guys say it's fine, working as intended -- but you're wrong. It's easily the most overpowered piece of equipment, and the only reason that 95+% of mechs don't field it is because their favorite mech can't pack it. Add some counters (e.g. BAP), make the effects not so rock solid, diminish the benefits of stacking, and make it garble friendly positions rather than shroud them, whatever, but nerf it. Consider treating it like AMS so everyone can pack it, and see what happens.

- Double Heat Sinks are similarly broken, but since everyone can use them it sort of balances out. The mechanism is also obtuse, with engine heat sinks working differently than those you add. Confusing! Consider making it a flat 1.5x dissipation or something.

- Streaks. I'm find with streaks right now, but should you ever introduce SSRM 4s or 6s...