They had grossly incompetent developers, and they eventually pushed everything aside in favor of monetization in the most offensively pay 2 win form possible. At one point, when they were getting ready to introduce the clans, testers told Paul, their head designer jackass, “Hey, you can’t make a variant of the Timberwolf with Jumpjets. It’s going to be entirely broken.” Paul told them that they were just there to find bugs, and not tell them how to balance the game. But literally anyone who has ever played mechwarrior with any degree of competence knew that mech was going to be broken. And sure enough, when it came out out, it was the most ridiculously dominant mech ever… for months. And PGI exploited it, because you had to pay real world money to drive it at that point. And that’s just one example of the clusterfuck that was MWO’s development. Hell, at one point, when Star Citizen was first enjoying its kickstarter success, PGI even thought for a short while that they were gonna drop Mechwarrior and make a space game, with ripped off spaceship models and stuff (which never happened because they only raised like $10k).
They got a good chunk of my money out of nostalgia and because I kept thinking they were gonna make the game they promised, but they never did. I would not give them money again.
Now, MW5 is a single player game I guess? So they may not be able to exploit the P2W stuff as bad… But it demonstrated to me that they were not folks I wanted to support.
But hey, that’s just me.