Mechwarrior Online

[Falconeer]

I can only think of a couple of obvious flaws: the afore mentioned absence of Community Warfare and metagame, which will be added later but it's really needed as soon as possible, and most importantly the very low performance of all ballistic weapons (Except the Gauss rifle, which is over powered since it doesn't have a minimum range penalty yet). This is mostly because of the netcode, which puts a weird delay between the time you press the trigger and the moment your weapn is fired (on top of the bullet having a travel time) but considering how hard it is to hit with anything ballistic unless your target is standing still and on top of the fact that you have limited ammunition, at the moment the game is mostly lasers and missiles which work very well and are as snappy as you'd expect from a game where you shoot stuff. I trust they will fix this by release, but as of now this stands as my biggest gripe.

EDIT: One more flaw! The UI in the mechlab and the menus is really ugly. What the hell.

[Goreschach]

Short of it is that the game could be absolutely great if they closed down and stuck it back in the oven for two more years.

But they're not going to do that. They are, and will continue to be, rushing out a buggy unfinished product the likes of which even god, and mmo's in general, have not seen.  To call this a beta would be disingenuous. What we have now is strictly an alpha, and sometimes feels more like a proof of concept prototype. The majority of the game isn't even implemented. Content is sparse. The grind is terrible. Balance is nonexistent. Most of the game feels like placeholder. And when they drop this on the public it's going to flop and die.

A shame, really. In the end it just makes me want for Mechwarrior 5.

[Falconeer]

if they closed down and stuck it back in the oven for two more years.

But they're not going to do that.

I am under the impression that they would if they could. But money is super tight and the only way to keep improving it is not waiting, but releasing and cashing on it. Indie is indie. Or non-major. Whatever, problem still stands.

That said, I think you are exaggerating pretty much everything.

[apocrypha]

I got into the beta a long time ago and struggled with it immensely.

Performance on my rig was atrocious, almost unplayable with frequent crashes much like yours sound Merusk. It's the only game I have that does this and my PC is no slouch - I play most games at 2560x1440 with details cranked up almost to max, but not this one.

I've was also solo the whole time, and as others have mentioned that sucks. None of my group of gaming friends seem to have any interest in this game at all apart from some Americans, which leaves me in the wrong timezone for grouping with them.

I really, really want to like this and play it but I was having such a shitty time with it that I gave up a couple of months ago and haven't gone back to it. I'll give it another try sometime and see if the performance has got any better, but overall I'm totally disappointed with the beta so far.

[Ghambit]

I shouldn't be so hard on the solo game, because truth be told most of the time you're going up against PUGs as well.  If you layout a plan in chat before the game starts you more times than not will win the match, assuming you dont have a slew of newbs of your team.  The only other caveat being afkers.  The game has a serious flaw with dropouts before the game even starts.  Imo, if the game hasn't started there's no reason for the team to not be full.   So say at this point you'll lose maybe 60% of your pug games assuming good skill.

And who's bright idea was it to start matches even if the teams are uneven??  Bad flaw, assuming they haven't instituted tonnage balancing.  I've been on 7v8 teams wherein the team of 7 had a tonnage advantage, so I assume this is the case.  I hope?  You're still way better off having a full team than having a tonnage advantage.  A wolfpack of Jenners can pretty much take out 2 heavies easy if they're not tackling.

Gauss?  I nvr have issues with em on the receiving end because most folk cant track a moving target with em.  The delay causes issue, so I just put a lot of transversal on a gaussapult for instance and have no problem getting in tight and blowing off a limb w/o getting shot.  Now, from outside radar range the gauss owns flat out, aside from the ER PPC (which tends to splash dmg too much).  This is where learning to use your thermals is important.  See a sniperblob turned your direction??  time to duck and cover.

Performance-wise, if you dont have Win7, 8+ GB of RAM, and quad-core or better, you can't play.  The game doesnt rely on GPU much, but will bake your CPU easy.  And the textures are too complex for much less than 8GB of ram... especially with the particle-effected levels (which is like all of em.)     It's one of the few FPS-style games coded with multi-threading in mind.

[Falconeer]

Sounds like they are gonna transition to the next version of the Cry engine (3.4) next tuesday, so you might want to wait for that since that's the engine they've been optimizing internally for a while now.

[Ghambit]

Sounds like they are gonna transition to the next version of the Cry engine (3.4) next tuesday, so you might want to wait for that since that's the engine they've been optimizing internally for a while now.

Is this the one that allows dual-core users to play?  Hope so.

[Merusk]

My rig isn't the problem, it's only 10 months old, Nvidia GTX 570, i7 2600k @ 3.4ghz and 16GB Ram.  I keep drivers and OS up to date weekly.   I can definitely say it's not me, it's the game.

To be fair I just patched up (yay vacation) and gave it another go.  No crash after 2 games, which is new.  Still sucks playing anything but a light, which is not.

[HaemishM]

I'm glad I didn't pay to get in the beta, because right now, I'm not feeling the desire to pay them for the money to buy mechs. I want to like it, but I haven't booted it up in a week, having spent more time on one game of LOL than I have in two or three play sessions of this thing.

First off, it is one of only 3 games that absolutely tries to melt my goddamn motherboard - the other two games being Total War: Napoleon and fucking Civ 5 of all things. I'm going to have to add another case fan, because my giant fuckstupid large Nvidia 460 GTX's fan blows directly into my CPU fan. The computer is otherwise is a great box except for that space issue. But on most games, it doesn't matter - a CryEngine game, however is made to flash fry silicon.

The engine itself, for all its bluster, is somewhat underwhelming. I think that's mostly due to the REAL IS BROWN, Y0! style of texturing. LOTS AND LOTS OF BROWN. Mechs look kind of terrible from far off, even in motion, and up close you are too worried about the lasers to the face instead of the pretty glowy graphics. I don't feel like what I'm saying should be taxing my motherboard temps this badly. But it does run smoothly so for that I'm happy.

The grind... FUCK ME WHAT THE HELL? I get a choice of 4 shitty style of mechs for freebies, can't customize them at fucking all, and the cheapest piece of shit light mech will take approximately 92 matches to afford with XP. Are you kidding me? I realize you want me to spend real money but dude. It's $10 for a light mech, $15 for a medium mech and I haven't even done the calculations for a heavy. The goddamn miniatures were cheaper than that. So part of the fun of the game, customizing mechs, is pretty goddamn steep to get into. That is going to turn F2P players right the fuck off. Once there isn't a steady stream of noobmeat, the wolves are going to get bored and leave. They really need to look closer at League of Legends monetization because those guys have got it just about right. At least allow some limited customization of the trial mechs.

The matchmaking is pretty alpha - uneven matches because of disco's, people just quitting, mismatch in tonnages, not really good ways to communicate before the game from within the client. The game seriously needs some work. The shooty bits aren't bad - probably the best part of the package. Solo players though, are absolute meat if the opposition has any sort of organization. Which means the noobmeat above who can only use 4 free mechs? They are going to leave REALLY RIKI TIKI QUICKIE once they see how badly they get owned and what it'll take to get a half-decent mech.

Bottom line? This game should not be charging people for anything yet.

[Falconeer]

and the cheapest piece of shit light mech will take approximately 92 matches to afford with XP.

This specific part is incorrect. It was "barely" like that a couple of patches ago. It's not anymore.

[Ghambit]

Yah, it's definitely doable after maybe about 5 long nights (not in gametime) of playing until you can buy a mech with cbills.  It's really not that bad.  And of course if you go premium even better, founder better still.

Kinda dumb not buying at least a mech and a few night's premium though.  Your buy-in will be around $15 and nets a much more efficient xp/cb gain at release-time when it matters most.

[Shannow]

Don't you guys know that its beta so they are running all sorts of logging software and that's why performance is so bad! 

This is a fun little game for about an hour (and less if your without squad mates) but after that .....

It lacks 3 important things.
1. Content
2. Content
3. Content

Not enough mechs. 4?!? maps (and they are tiny at that). 1 style of gameplay and zero strategic overlay. I want to love this game so much but right now am feeling like a jilted lover. (oh the mmolg players lament)

Seriously only 4 maps 

[veredus]

As someone who has never really been into Mechwarrior, after spending an evening playing this I can't see why to play this over WoT. Playing made me feel like I was stuck in a stock T1 tank in T3 or T4 matches. Just really wasn't fun. Maybe if I loved mechs I could slog through and get a better mech, but meh. Too many games that are fun right now to put up with frustrating play to find the fun.

[Falconeer]

Ugh. I don't see any overlapping with World of Tanks. WoT is 3rd person while MWO is 1st person. WoT has 1 weapon per tank while MWO has plenty. WoT has tiers where low tiers cannot hurt higher tiers while this doesn't exist in MWO. What else do they share outside of the fact that you drive slow vehicles made of metal?

I agree on the lack of content, specifically maps and even game modes, but most importantly the problem is the lack of Community Warfare. That said, people seem to love random bashing each other in World of Tanks, they've been doing that for ages regardless of content. So I wouldn't worry too much about that. Once you nail the gameplay (and they did) all you need to add is enough maps, gamemodes and mech and it will work fine. They already have two more maps planned before release and a few more 'mechs.

[HaemishM]

and the cheapest piece of shit light mech will take approximately 92 matches to afford with XP.

This specific part is incorrect. It was "barely" like that a couple of patches ago. It's not anymore.

Does the lightest mech not cost 3 million cbills anymore? I haven't logged in since last week, so I could be wrong. That reminded me of the other thing - in all the matches I played, no matter how bad or good I did, no matter if the team won or not, I got 36k Cbills. That's where I got that figure from.

[Falconeer]

You get more money now with each match, and you get even more money based on how you perform. And cheapest 'mech is about 1.8M now.

[Arthur_Parker]

The game has been unplayable for me for some weeks now.  I don't know exactly what the problem is, but I'll play 1-2 matches and get the blue screen of death.

I had a weird blue screen issue last week, really serious and was totally preventing boot up.  After a lot of messing about in safe mode I tracked it down to my anti virus install going corrupt.  Was very odd though.

[Arthur_Parker]

As for the game itself, best game ever.

I'm really struggling to think of anything I've ever enjoyed more, elite on the bbc, doomdarks revenge on the spectrum, xcom on the amiga, ac1, uo pre trammel, CoD, hell even mario kart on the wii.  This game beats them all for me.  I think I've played well over 2000 MWO matches since I got in.

[Amaron]

I'm glad I didn't pay to get in the beta

I'm actually really happy I paid to get in.  The grind they're going to put in to monetize everything will ruin the game.  Beta was like buying a boxed copy and just enjoying it for me.

[Arthur_Parker]

Not likely to make their front page.

Machine Gun Bukakke

[Lightstalker]

Without shot scatter it plays very differently than the board game - and opens itself up to aim-botting with dual AC/20s for instance. 

I love it, but haven't played much recently as I've been solo and unreliable in when I can play.  Grabbing a few quick games alone really isn't that enjoyable as these maps really favor coordinated play and PUGs aren't.  Topping 1000 damage becomes quite irrelevant when you are the only person on your team landing your shots.  LRM boats are really vulnerable to being isolated by PUG teammates, leaving you the option of pure speed or super-heavy brawler like an SRM Atlas.  Community Warfare could address this with more "standing" groups to drop into and coordination between players who end up queuing with each other frequently - right now the player pool is too anonymous for coordination to develop easily.  As a solid player in a pug you can maintain 1:1 ratios and generate positive cash flow if you are careful about what Mechs you run.  In a coordinated group you'll be running 25:1 or higher and be giggling to yourselves about how bad the opposition are all the time.

They don't get to use the "We're an Indy and broke" excuse anymore, they've shifted a lot of Founders packages.  There is a laundry list of basic known issues in the interface and as others have mentioned a lot of it feels placeholder in nature.  They've got the core of a fun game, they just need to finish it quickly.  Mechlab losing track of state and not saving the right equipment, for instance, just shouldn't still be happening after this many months of running into it.  They aren't putting features in the done column, they are moving from feature to feature without ever actually finishing anything.  Just about every screen in the UI suffers from stale state display, and the messaging and grouping interface is rudimentary at best.  Second to giant robots blowing up, player to play interactions really have to be handled better.

The wild build to build variations in economy, slapdash engine limits, and "hey lets double armor" suggest they really don't have much of a plan about how to fix what they think is broken, it just feels like rookie software development getting distracted by their passion for the game.

That said, still a really fun game despite the limitations.    I'm still going to play the shit out of it, even in the current limited deathmatch setup.

[Merusk]

Yah, it's definitely doable after maybe about 5 long nights (not in gametime) of playing until you can buy a mech with cbills.  It's really not that bad.  And of course if you go premium even better, founder better still.

Kinda dumb not buying at least a mech and a few night's premium though.  Your buy-in will be around $15 and nets a much more efficient xp/cb gain at release-time when it matters most.

No, that is bad and wrong and will cause anyone picking it up just to try it out to drop.   

This gets to one of the issues I wanted to point out - the newbie experience is HORRIBAD.  Like, "fuck me, we didn't think anyone who hasn't been playing MW1-4 nonstop for the last 12 years would pick this up" bad.

There is no tutorial, no explanation of the interface, no overview of how to do things.  You are let to do this on your own.  WoT did this as well, BUT it stuck you in against other newbies.  In MWO your first game will be against players who have maxed-out piloting skills, customized mechs and possibly a clan.  It'll be as much fun as sticking a Tier 1 tank into a Tier 10 clan battle.  Nobody's going to follow-through on this shit.

It was underscored when I went to play today and my newbie mech was getting assraped by guys with pulse lasers who were chain firing while I was on heat overload after two medium laser shots.  That's not balance that's fodder for wolves, and UO taught the smart developers that sheep will drop out from that sort of bullshit.

Lacking any sort of tiering system, there's little they can do.  One fix would be to actually Tier players in queue based on their level of Xp in that mech.  At least then you're only screwed on being in a stock mech when others have customized heatsinks and weapons.

[Falconeer]

Merusk, I am not gonna say you are wrong because as of now you are right. But it's hard not to repeat over and over that it's beta and that the matchmaking in particular is something that they stated multiple times it's going to be changed in a reasonable way before release.

Of course I want this game to succeed and if I've ever been a fanboi this is that one time, but regardless of my easy enthusiasms, this one keeps changing a lot from patch to patch, and some issues are known and being worked on.
That said, I am confident they will change the matchmaking, but at the same time I admit that it's a very noob unfriendly game and I am pretty sure THAT is not gonan change before launch.

[Engels]

The good: this game was designed by mech nerds
The bad : this game was designed by mech nerds

the end

[Ghambit]

Yah, it's definitely doable after maybe about 5 long nights (not in gametime) of playing until you can buy a mech with cbills.  It's really not that bad.  And of course if you go premium even better, founder better still.

Kinda dumb not buying at least a mech and a few night's premium though.  Your buy-in will be around $15 and nets a much more efficient xp/cb gain at release-time when it matters most.

No, that is bad and wrong and will cause anyone picking it up just to try it out to drop.  

... blah blah

The trial mechs are just there to basically get you used to piloting, etc.  If you're planning on playing regularly using a vanilla mech, that's your ass.  Especially so if you expect to pug every match.  We've had Trial mechs in our lances, but they werent pugs obviously... so yah.

You're mixing "barrier to entry" with "absolutely free to play" and blaming the studio for not making it simultaneously free and perfectly painless.  That's hard to do in a simple deathmatch game of this type.  In this sense it's no different then a non-certed newb in BF2142, etc.  And those games are $50 before double-clicking the icon.  smh

The jist of it is you need to spend some lunch money to really get off the ground running or at the least join an organized clan.  I'm not sure how they'd alter the matchmaking to appease absolutely everyone.   The one benefit though is after the initial entry-barrier there's not much else left to separate you from the veterans except some very minute piloting differences.  That $15 gets you a fully tricked out mech any way you like pretty much.  So it's not like BF3/PS2 and such where you have to essentially dump so many hours before you can even get a whiff of a capable weapon.  In MWO's case it's just sidegrades after the 1st purchase.

[veredus]

Ugh. I don't see any overlapping with World of Tanks. WoT is 3rd person while MWO is 1st person. WoT has 1 weapon per tank while MWO has plenty. WoT has tiers where low tiers cannot hurt higher tiers while this doesn't exist in MWO. What else do they share outside of the fact that you drive slow vehicles made of metal?

They both scratch the same itch for me, a slower paced session based shooter. WoT scratches it a hell of a lot better for me though. So I personally don't see the reason to power through the shitty experience of getting your ass kicked every match for several days. It just plain and simple was not fun. Maybe I'll check it out again if they ever make the newbie experience more newbie friendly.

[UnSub]

Merusk, I am not gonna say you are wrong because as of now you are right. But it's hard not to repeat over and over that it's beta and that the matchmaking in particular is something that they stated multiple times it's going to be changed in a reasonable way before release.

APB and Fury said the same thing. Fixing matchmaking ended up being sidelined on the path to launch by other issues and both titles were hurt by all the baby eating that happened as a result.

[Sheepherder]

The game has been unplayable for me for some weeks now.  I don't know exactly what the problem is, but I'll play 1-2 matches and get the blue screen of death.  That's a fucking feat in Windows 7.  It is always some sort of video or memory overflow error, and it happens most frequently on the forest map.  Tech support has been unhelpful since my crashes don't produce any sort of log.  It would have to not freeze-up Windows itself for that, y'knkow.

A BSOD isn't a freeze, it's the OS terminating all higher level functionality before it does something retarded.  More like pulling the eject handles.

Check Event Viewer -> Event Logs -> Application and Event Viewer -> Event Logs -> System.  If your computer makes it to the blue screen it should have produced a log.

[Arthur_Parker]

Upcoming Content [UPDATED Oct 3, 2012]

Next BattleMechs:
Cicada (October 16th) - Updated
A Hero Mech (October 16th) - Updated
Cataphract (November 12th) - Updated
Next Maps:
River City Alternate (Mid November) - Updated
Frozen City Alternate (Early November) - Updated
Forest Colony Alternate (October 23) - Updated
Caustic Valley Alternate (Mid November) - Updated
Map 5 (Late November) - Updated
Map 6 (Mid December) - Updated
Next Visual Items:
Cammo Patterns (Late October/Early November)
Cockpit Items (Late October/Early November)
Decals (Late November/Early December)
Next Game Modes:
Conquest (October 30) - Updated
DropShip Mutator (Late November)
NOTES: All dates are projected to the best of our ability and are subject to change.

Upcoming Features [UPDATED Oct 3, 2012]

General Features:
Matchmaking overhaul (Late October)
New BattleTech Gameplay Features:
Endo Steel (October 16)
Double Heat Sinks (October 16)
Ferro-Fibrous Armor (October 16)
ECM (Partial Implementation Late October/Full Implementation Early/Mid November)
Active (Beagle) Probe (Late October)
Artemis (October 16) - Updated
New MechLab Features:
PIP Zoome Module and Pilot Skill (October 16) - Updated
Cammo Pattern Selector (Late October/Early November)
Colour Selector (Late October/Early November)
Decal Selector (Late November/Early December)
New Pilot Lab Features:
3 Pilot Skils (Early October)
General FE UI:
NA
NOTES: All dates are projected to the best of our ability and are subject to change.

Matchmaking change I imagine is going to restrict trial mechs to only battle other trial mechs.  Which should help a lot with the world war I & II new pilot experience we have at the moment.

[Falconeer]

Artemis fascinates me and scares me. Really curious to see how it will change gameplay and tactics.
I am disappointed about new maps coming so late (couple of months at best).

Everything else is sweetness. Oh, I thought of another huge gripe of mine: not being able to look at the 3D model of my 'mech in the 'mechlab. It's stupid. Especially if I pay for them, I want to be able to look at them from every angle (especially cause there's no 3rd person view in game) as if they were miniatures, and swing them around as you can do in World of Tanks, EVE and, well, every other MMO more or less.

[Ironwood]

I thought some of that tech didn't arrive in the Inner Sphere until the Clans did.  Odd.

[eldaec]

If you enjoyed playing the straight multiplayer death match mechwarrior games you'll like this. Otherwise you won't. If you never tried mechwarrior, does a slower and more tactical CoD appeal?

It isn't remotely f2p, but on the other hand once bought in you don't need to continually buy gold ammo or equivalent.

I'll probably play it a bit more, but ultimately it will need more variety in the scenarios, and more flexible mech design / roles to stay interesting. The hardpoint system needs to be there, but is implemented in a very restrictive way. Look at something like eve ship building for the sort of thing I would like.

It is much prettier than I was expecting.

[eldaec]

And they were stupid to release that feature timetable. They won't keep to that schedule and entitled twats will scream the forum down.

[Merusk]

Yep.

Falc and Ghambit; I get that you want the game to succeed.  I'd like it to as well, but Falc you have a proven history of fanboisiim that's proved fatal and Ghambit, ignoring concerns with a handwave doesn't make them go away.   The game costs more to get in to than LOL, WoT, or TF2 the three closest competitors I can think of.  It's for a different crowd than most, but not WoT.  Right now I'd play WoT over this game because 1) Proven track record of dev 2) It works on my machine 3) friendlier noob experience 4) while you lose more often without a clan you don't get raped.

Without a significant enough player base, nothing matters. Without changes to the MM and noob experience *now* the game will tank.  That's my view and where I think they should focus their efforts on the design side.  Send the artists off to come up with some more goddamn maps and refine the ones they have in the interim.

The game has been unplayable for me for some weeks now.  I don't know exactly what the problem is, but I'll play 1-2 matches and get the blue screen of death.  That's a fucking feat in Windows 7.  It is always some sort of video or memory overflow error, and it happens most frequently on the forest map.  Tech support has been unhelpful since my crashes don't produce any sort of log.  It would have to not freeze-up Windows itself for that, y'knkow.

A BSOD isn't a freeze, it's the OS terminating all higher level functionality before it does something retarded.  More like pulling the eject handles.

Check Event Viewer -> Event Logs -> Application and Event Viewer -> Event Logs -> System.  If your computer makes it to the blue screen it should have produced a log.

Good to know, thanks. You'd think their tech support woulld have known that and pointed me to it when I said I was BSODing.

[Ironwood]

The game itself is great; both in looks and how it plays.
The maps are far too few.
The Mechlab is great, but plagued with annoying bugs.
The Mech choice is far too narrow right now.
The skill system is annoying in that playing different variants is lame.
The weapons are good, but some need a second look; Gauss in particular is well OP and Missile Fleets make baby Jesus Cry.
The communication and grouping systems suck ass.
The Matchmaking needs a bit of work.
The Random Players that end up on your team are utter fuckholes.

I have enjoyed the hell out of it and will continue to do so.  I think it's perfectly viable right now, since it's pretty much FTP no matter what anyone says. 

Also, SRMs are awesomely fun.