Community Warfare. Like was promised LONG ago. But before CW came the endless hero mech releases, air strikes, coolant, 3rd person, terrible weapon balance and the days of terrible netcode induced lag (infamous lagshield).
I played in the to closed beta and then for a while in the open beta and this is my opinion. Overall the developers have communicated (willingly or not) that they don’t have a clear plan for the game beyond “making it big”. Promises are made and broken. Stuff not promised suddenly takes precedent over what was promised. The game itself as a platform to shoot lasers with is solid and I had a lot of fun with it. The developer acts like a chicken with its head cut off, not knowing which way its going until it gets there.
Zylon
1982
“Satellite link, established.”
I don’t even know what community warfare is, but maybe it’s like that series which was really good, and then got cancelled which sucked.
Adding meta is not trivial to this type of game, but making a good robot fighting game is what I respect them for
I never even played, but I was watching videos every few months and waiting for the point when mechs actually collided with trees. :-)
That, and I didn’t like their F2P model. But I guess I’m not in their target demographic (despite my fondness for Battletech and Mechwarrior)
meeper
1985
My seven friends and I may not be representative of MWO players at large, but we’re all feverous BattleTech fans, we all hotly anticipated MWO, and we all purchased founders packs of varying degrees.
That said, we all also stopped playing late last year. There wasn’t a riot, or a forum post, or a change log item that pushed us over the edge (frankly, I think the article in question over-dramatizes the casual player response). We did, however, take note of the relatively slow roll-out of new features/maps, the oft delayed (and frankly mysterious) ‘Community Warfare’, and the general shift in how elements of the game were shiftly from openly F2P to becoming somewhat restricted (eg, mech availability).
The mech shift was quite an eye opener for us. When MWO first came out, new mechs were being dribbled out for everyone at first (for purchase with either MC or CBills). That changed mid-way through the first year after release when mechs became available exclusively via MC for a few weeks in advance; then exclusively for pre-orders two months in advance. Then the clan announcement.
For what it matters, we’re a pretty free spending group and I don’t think more than one of us hadn’t dropped less than $200 on MWO since release (some substantially more) and we all maintained periodic subscriptions. That said, the clan prices shook us. Here we were, having just dropped ~$100 on the two unseen packs and then they announce a $240 pack for clan mechs and ‘gold’ mechs for $500 a piece (remember, this was even before they’d delivered on the Sabre reinforcement stuff). We all sort of realized at that moment that with the introduction of clan tech, MWO was going to be shifting into an arms race with real dollars (not just subscription dollars) deciding when we’d get to play with various toys.
I love BT. I enjoyed MWO. I may go back to it someday. But their pursuit of dollars drove at least eight players away.
Is it free to play you don’t like or the overall format of the game? Personally I am pretty happy that people can play this game without paying any money, it makes it much easier to rope in new players and expands the playerbase considerably beyond any previous mechwarrior game.
I would have like a traditional, standalone, single player mechwarrior game with a multiplayer component, but I have to concede that that format of game means usually minimal ongoing development and balancing; also usually not the kind of game that can be reasonably tackled by a small developer with a limited budget.
I dunno, I think you need to register on their forums (since it’s the same account as the game account) to play, and right now they are ar 590k members. A year ago that figure wasn’t much lower, so I don’t think they are seeing new players at all (exaggeration, of course there are new players, only that they don’t seem statistically significant. And of course I might be wrong about this).
This is probably what drove the F2P aspect up, since if they have no new players they need to milk the existing user base. the problem is that by doing that they are making the game way less approachable now (the pay wall to be competitive with the new shiny toys is becoming huge). I played pretty frequently up until the first bunch of “packs” they released, and by then newly introduced mechs were more effective than older models.
This is all a shame, since the mechanics are sound and the production value significant. But the business model is making this waaaay too niche.
pg1
1988
Interesting to hear why you guys quit, one could even argue you guys were whales ($200, etc). I was recruited into a MWO unit (~30 guys) to play with them but we’ve all quit. Most of us stopped in the first half of 2013. Probably half were founders and all of us had spent money on the game. Most of us had thousands of drops. The money arms race wasn’t why we quit however. It was because balance and gameplay in MWO is terrible. The game is all about jump sniping aka pop tarting for more than a year now. Sniping reins supreme in MWO. Given what I’ve seen of the clans mechs it seems the only mech you’d ever need currently is the Timberwolf (ultimate poptart right now). Given that maps are random and more than a few maps are extremely bias towards sniping you’re nuts to take anything but a sniping mech and ideally a jump sniper (poptart). Some maps like Canyon Network virtually require jump jets and others like Alpine heavily favor sniping.
I’ve always found brawling and up close combat more fun in a shooter. MWO had strong brawling when it first went open beta (I didn’t play closed beta) until around spring 2013. After that the CTF-3D 2xPPC/Gauss poptart reigned for roughly a year or so. Then the HGN-733C 3xPPC/Gauss followed and upped the ante. Recently the HGNs were nerfed which resulted in the VTR-DS (P2W mech) becoming the top poptart. Now we’ve shifted to TBRs (Timberwolves, more P2W). Frankly I think sniping being dominate and the only way to play kills any FPS. I can’t think of one FPS off the top of my head where sniping is dominant that is popular. Sniping is what killed the game for me, it’s random and boring. You just peek corners and hope to see a target. It’s slow and campy and punishes aggressive play. Most high level competitive matches involve poptarting for 10-15mins until either a mech is sniped or a lucky call in strike gets a kill. Then the team down 1 mech is forced to push into the enemy poptarts and they almost always lose, it’s virtually impossible to attack into jump snipers. The even worse part about it was I was good at poptarting and I still didn’t enjoy it. They promised not to let MWO devolve into poptarting like past MW titles did but they broke that promise too and now it’s crap. Poptart builds can outfight brawler builds even at short ranges. It’s sad.
Until the clan pack release, the original Assault - Atlas - was king of the hill. So not strictly so. Still can’t tell where the Atlas will fall once the clan dust settles, but the original 4 are still good chassis for the most part.
Yeah, I was never into Mechwarrior multiplayer, so this game was never my ideal.
However, I’ve played a ton of Tribes and TF2, so I was open to an online-only competitive game. But every time I did some reading I was turned off by the way they were handling mech sales and customization. The idea that (as meeper describes above), I’d have to spend >$200 to ‘own’ just a small fraction of the mechs I was used to seeing in other MW games was a big turn off. Likewise, I never really understood the equipment and mech variants being offered, but my impression was that I’d need to buy a bunch of variants just so I could explore all the customization options for a single chassis. All of that stuff sounded like the worst kind of F2P design (i.e., dissecting the ‘normal’ game experience to try and extract cash from players at regular intervals).
In every mech game I’ve played (MW, Heavy Gear, Armored Core), I always loved and spent a ton of time on customization. So the idea that I’d need to spend a ton of money up front or do a ton of grinding, just so I could collect a handful of mechs to customize (and a lot of the early mechs didn’t appeal to me anyway since most of my favorites were 3050 and Unseen 3025s). And the fact that the grinding and F2P experience sounded pretty poor (as described in this thread and elsewhere), and the larger strategy and game balance seemed to be in constant flux with IMBA issues… It all sounded like I’d be wasting my time/money.
I don’t like playing competitive games in beta. I don’t have time in my life anymore to be relearning game balance every other week when the developers introduce another radical swing with the nerf hammer. Prior to this recent kerfuffle, I’d been waiting for the balance issues to settle down and to hear some good news about how they’d improved the noobie F2P experience. Then I would’ve tried the F2P as a demo…
Ultimately though, I’m sure I never would’ve had the time to grind my way into a satisfyingly large mech garage, and there’s no way in hell I’d be spending >$500 so I could collect all the mechs I’d want. These were not the mechs I was looking for… So I’ll move along.
Just to clarify, you never have to spend money to own any if the standard mechs, clan or inner sphere, they will become available for cbills in due time. All the things you describe, purchasing multiple variants to master one mech type, can be done without paying any money.
In short there is never really a reason to spend money unless you are impatient, or you want to be bleeding edge competitive (in which case you can get away with spending very little)
Regarding balance issues, the fundamental balance of the game has remained unchanged for over a year now. Most people actually regard that as a bad thing.
Of all the things to ding this game on, it’s accessibility to the free rider is not one of them.
What about the airstrike function? I never used it (left around its implementation) it can be purchased for real money or in game C-bills but reality says if a player wanted to use it more often and had the real money to do so then that is pay-to-win-more-often.
What F2P game asks players to fork out $500 on something as if asking for $500 is more akin to asking for $50? $50 dropped on any game should net the player more than just a single mech, let alone asking for $500 for a single mech. I feel for the development team and players because somebody in the company is killing the game off too early. Its sad because the game itself (balance issues aside) is a solid platform for big mech shooty fun.
MWO, as it currently stands, will be a discussed in ten years time as an example of how to things poorly.
pg1
1993
I actually disagree with this. The only time the Atlas was very strong was when brawling was good long ago. Then the AS7-D-DC with 3xSRM6, 1xAC20 and 2xML was quite a beast especially in packs since you could take turns in the front and shield each other. It could torso twist amazing and alternate between firing AC20 and SRMs. No other Atlas build is even as close to good as that one is. The problem with the Atlas is a few things which keep it down, no jump jets (big one), low slung weapon hard points (bad for sniping) and it’s extremely slow.
WOW. This is a shocking amount of spin. First off you can’t buy clan mechs with CBills for months still (I think you can buy the Timberwolf, the best one, in November?). Also no one knows how much they will cost in CBills, perhaps as much as 50-100% more than IS mechs! So yeah, have fun grinding out CBills to buy them. It’ll take you probably 100-200 hours to master one Timberwolf for free! That’s just insanity. Given the pay for content creep they have going on there will likely be another mega grab deal pack for $100+ before the end of the year. That pack will again be time locked to free players for months and likely up the ante with power creep so if you don’t have them you can’t compete at the highest levels.
I’ve long since come around to the opinion that if content is time locked or the grind so huge it takes more time than a full time job to get things in a reasonable time frame then it’s grossly P2W. That’s MWO now, there’s no doubt about it. Before the CBill nerf and punishing Elo system was implented, along with longer wait times which add 1-5mins on to each match, I could average about 1m CBills an hour. Now I’d be lucky to get around 500k. If Timberwolves cost 20-30m CBills it’ll take 40-60hours to buy one and you’ll need three of them to do the stupid pilot skills grind to elite/master them. I think even more glaring is how new pilots get basically 10m CBills in 25 matches then after that it’ll take you roughly 133 matches to earn the same amount of money. Even if you buy a hero mech and premium time you’ll never earn that much again so fast.
Call in strikes for air and artillery are terrible too. They cost lots of CBills if you use the free version and they are required to play at highest levels. In high level matches you sit back and snipe for 10-15mins and hope to get lucky with a call in strike. It’s about the most boring gameplay imaginable. Often one lucky call in strike can get an instant kill (headshot) or do more damage than most players will average in the match. It’s real shitty game balance for them to be so strong and required as they are random spam shots with almost no direct player control involved. The top level strategy in the game is use mechs which can carry 2 strikes each for maximum spamming. Luckily some of the competitive leagues have enough respect to not use them but you’ll never see PGI remove them from public play. Strikes are the only real counter to poptart play but since strikes are limited and cost resources the poptarts are still way stronger.
Soapy sometimes I wonder about you man. How many drops are you up to now? It’s got to be near 8-10k.
The cbill cost of clan mechs is known already (double the sell price + cost of upgrades), and their price is quite close to inner sphere mechs with comparable upgrades. 100 hours of free to play matches assuming about 6 matches an hour will earn you around 40-45 million c-bills, which is ample (never mind the cadet bonus which gives a free 12-15 million for your first 25 matches). The cash grind in this game is simply not that bad.
Yes clan mechs are currently only available for real money, but if you are patient they will become available for c-bills. Your implication that you can’t compete at the “highest levels” whatever you think that means if you are a free player is nonsense on two levels: 1) the competitive scene is player run, and clan mechs in general are banned from competition until they are available for c-bills, 2) if you really wanted to compete at the “highest levels” dropping 30-60 bucks, one time, on a game you can otherwise play completely for free is just not that unreasonable.
That said, I think that they made a serious error making people wait for the timber wolf until November, and in fact an even more serious error in giving the timber wolf jump jets; they really do suck when it comes to balance and it appears to be that they are in a sort of denial about the state of high level play. We can only hope they come to their senses; really the jumpjet ting timber wolf is an affront to game balance right now, without that mech the Victor (esp Dragon Slayer; but that’s another example of how they don’t comprehend weapon balance at high levels) and Cataphract would still be contenders for best mech, probably up against the summoner.
Soapy sometimes I wonder about you man. How many drops are you up to now? It’s got to be near 8-10k.
Yes. ~9400 drops I believe not counting private match play. For that I finished mastering every mech in the game quite some time ago. Although I play premium (because I am impatient!) I have found the grind trivial, and would not have had a problem playing for free. Also I never use strikes, I rarely resort to the pop tart meta, and I sit at an uncomfortably high elo (based on who I bump into with regularity).
The game has problems but I really feel they are much more balance/feature related. The grind is just not a thing, esp. compared to other free to play titles.
Hugin
1995
I only have about 2400 matches, but these mastery hours numbers seem rather high to me. As far as I can tell mastery takes about 40-50 hours? A bit longer if you have a big slow mech. Say 60 hours for an Atlas sort of mech. Not 100 hours, certainly nowhere near 200 hours.
Not counting 1st match of the day bonus xp, an average pilot should be able to master a single variant in an average of 75 matches, so @225 matches for 3 variants at about 8 minutes per match is about 30 hours. If you just want to master 1 and elite the other 2 then its more like 22 hours. With 1st match of the day bonus, if you tend to play just a little each day it will actually go a lot faster in total time spent.
225 matches will also earn you about 18 million c-bills non-premium, if you are an average pilot.
I was a founder, at the Hunchback level, and still have a fair number of unspent whatever the premium currency is. I haven’t played in, oh, six months? More? I can’t figure out the MechLab, for one thing. When I want to browse which mechs are available for purchase, I have no idea how (or if) I can compare stats, or even see any stats. It seems to be just a buy this blind sort of thing–or spend a lot of time somewhere else researching things that should be explained right there. I certainly could be missing something, but I have no idea what’s going on in that store. Also, it seems Byzantine to actually modify or do much at all in the MechLab–the whole interface blows goats.
Also, I’ve had numerous technical glitches, with games crashing, the MechLab crashing, etc., and I often have waited quite a bit longer for matches than I find comfortable, certainly a LOT longer than World of Tanks.
I was a long-time BattleTech fan, with a bookshelf of books and board game/miniatures stuff, and a veteran of every MechWarrior computer game there ever was, but MWO has managed to kill my interest pretty much dead. Hell, I can’t even get “into” it enough to be pissed off by any P2W features that may or may not be there!
In the mechlab any mech you have or could buy once you select it there is a “mech details” in the bottom left of the screen that shows you that mechs’ full loadout.
The interface is not great to say the least. I assume none of them are particularly competent UI designers. They keep talking about having a smurfy style mech editor but that has not come to be yet.
Hugin
1999
Yeah, the Mechlab interface is hot garbage. I have no idea what they can’t implement a simple paper doll builder look like every other Mechwarrior game ever/Smurfy.
Heh, I’ll have to look for that. I have never seen that button, but I’m sure it’s there somewhere!
