Asmudius Heng, on 14 February 2013 - 02:36 PM, said:
Dead on.
Fixing a communication problem is what I do for a living. If an employee in your business says or does something stupid to a client I'm the guy who gets to fix the business relationships back up.
At one time I worked in the gaming industry but that was a while ago so I'm vaguely familiar with it but not the F2P business model. I'm not sure it's going to work the same as what you or I are used to for dealing with consumers. In a way it's a lot more ruthless and the value of new players is quite possibly far less important than it is for most models.
Consumers are always hungry for data but can't be trusted with handling it in my experience. They twist it, blow it out of proportion, often attempt to use it in the worst possible light.
I would absolutely agree with your take on communication though. The largest part of my job is just petting people, telling them that they are pretty and no no we're still friends and they're the prettiest princess we work with and no we absolutely value your business. There are a lot of ways to express that but it's kinda the gist of it.
What concerns me about ECM/missile balance isn't that it's game-breaking. It's that it's skewed and effectively introduces two relatively OPed aspects that need to be balanced or the whole match goes a bit askew. Fixing it by adding more complex counters and counter-counters just exacerbates the problem - it's balancing a game wide metric in a way that only a tiny percentage of users can really employ. Thus everyone else has to use kludgy work-arounds like only using ECM mechs so their side will be guaranteed of having one, dropping a laser in favor of TAG so that your sides LRM boats are not just screwed - if you happen to have any, which in pugging you usually don't. You just all accept that you're at a disadvantage and try to muscle through and hope the other side makes a mistake.
That's not fun. It's not skill based it's luck based.
The response from PGI comes across as defensive and dismissive. I don't know how it's intended but it feels that way and it damages my calm so to speak.
Not that they have a lot of choice. There's a huge disparity in the pbase on what they want from missiles and ECM and the like and I don't think there's a happy solution. It's just irksome to be on the losing side of that equation.
I really want to be a MWO fan. I really do. I want to pour money into it and feel justified. You can't please everyone though and sometimes you just need to accept that you're part of the everyone that isn't going to get pleased.
Next question becomes 'in spite of the ECM/missile balance will you still play'. That's going to depend more on X3:Rebirth, Star Citizen, Limit Theory et all more than any other MWO feature I guess.