Mechwarrior Online

[Samprimary]

while certainly your respectable and valid personal opinion, a nd while I agree that the trial mechs are _FAR_ from optimal and not so enjoyable due to the lack of the tweaking fun, feels to me like a huge exaggeration and misrepresentation of the actual experience.

EDIT: clarified.

Go fire the PPC's on the trial awesome.

[Typhon]

I don't always like internet slap fights, but when I do they are usually about mechs

 

[HaemishM]

But no question, if they want to grow their game, they're going to need to get a way to teach newbies how to play, a better way than youtube and trial and error.

This. I have no problem with a high learning curve. I'm not a HUGE Battletech fan, but I've played and enjoyed the tabletop from back in the '90's. If I didn't have the love for the franchise, I wouldn't have bothered past maybe 3 or 4 matches. It's just that unforgiving. Even worse, it doesn't do a good job of telling you WHY you suck, HOW you suck, or how to get better at it (one hint being spend real money to get better fucking mechs). I'd say out of maybe 40-50 matches I've played total, I've enjoyed 1/4 of them, and a lot of that could be fixed by giving me a mech I could 1) customize beyond weapon groupings and 2) giving me a mech that wasn't poorly tuned.

I keep going back to League of Legends because it's noob model is VERY encouraging. And I say that despite the player community of that game being full of antisocial mongoloid cockgobblers whose only wish in life is to make you feel like the dumbest creature alive. Within the first week of playing LOL, I had access to 10 free champions and had the free IP to buy at least one out of another 6 or 7 other cheap yet viable champions.

4 shitty trial mechs for free makes noobs very unhappy.

[Segoris]

Does it have issues? Absolutely, and I do have some complaints, but they're not big enough to make me say the game is anti-fun or anywhere near that (that's crazy talk imo). It's mostly balanced besides a couple of loadouts (streaks for one, which is being adjusted and missile boats which will not be as easy with tomorrow's patch), and I don't feel I'm at a disadvantage against any mech if I'm thinking about ways to counter their strengths and my weaknesses which comes with practice (just like any other pvp game), and I'm also not expecting myself to be able to win every single 1v1, it is team based after all even if players aren't joining as teams. The maps aren't too bad either, but a couple more would be nice. I think they have spot on controls for throttle, turning, and aiming but the UI absolutely needs some improvements and the stability for things like the crashes to desktop, yellow screen bug, broken radar bug, inability to select "ready" in groups bug, game freezing when buying a new mech could be fixed.

My issues would be this though:
The trial mechs absolutely need some improvements, namely in heat management (though they can't be so good that people don't want to buy their own mechs), but a much better learning program would be if there was a customization tutorial which shows new players how to customize. The first thing they could show someone to do would be to add a heatsink....two birds one stone and all that. Or, just have two mechs from each class as options. Lastly, a small map with 1-3 non-moving mechs to target and learn to shoot and manage heat on. Keep in mind that both the new player/pug and premade experiences will be improving with 8player groups being in place as that will remove the premades from the pug matchmaking. This will also lower the barrier of entry's cockpunching and the grind on the trial mechs as it will reduce the chances of someone one-shotting their core. It won't be perfect as there will still be a mix of trials and non-trials, but it will be a lot better.

In-game tooltips are mandatory for basic info, and they need to get on that. Even if it's just a quick solo run vs a non-moving mech to show the HUD and learn the weapons with their min/max ranges. In the mech lab they need better descriptions as well. Min/max range, reload time, and preferrably a damage per shot value (though I'd be happy if they even did not include the damage per shot value and went with something that just said "slow reload, high damage weapon" or something like that as it would still be an improvement). I also wouldn't mind if when you died if you could see X enemies shot you with Y weapons for Z damage

Lower RL money costs on everything except mech bays (mech bays really are priced perfectly imo) and if you buy something it should be your's forever and not this crap where you have to pay RL money every time you want to re-paint your mech with a color you've already bought.

Even having said all that, the game is very fun and I'm finding I'm spending too much time in it actually. A big part of that is because I'm also using the TS servers which Calapine had posted earlier in this thread. The game a whole different experience when grouping - even with strangers in that TS channel. While it is not provided by the developers, it is a great bandaid for a problem, and helps keep this game to be more fun then it was when I was first starting before finding out about it. The community has been great overall, and people have been friendly with helping others with suggested loadouts to try or use as a base (example: this helpful thread, this entire forum).

As for an F13 guild/battalion/whatever, I have not had too many issues with time zones, I've found more people are just anti-social and just did not want to group. It's pretty different than it was in TSW where there were groups running nightly (again, regardless of timezone) but it's similar to D3 which leads me to believe maybe it's the game type and the lack of a guild/f13 chat channel which makes it tougher to get things going.

[Shannow]

How about noob specific arenas.  Maybe for trial mechs only and under a certain amount  of xp.

Personally I'd like a whole bunch of customizable arenas that I could choose from,  light/med only,  stock mechs only. Etc etc

[Segoris]

For trial/noob specific, if there's enough of a growing player base and trial mech usage to do that I'd be for it. Otherwise I'd skip it as to not split the player base if it was not in a needed direction, and after seeing the effect of 8 person groups.

The arenas idea is just incredibly non-attractive for my tastes, but I'm sure a good amount may like it.

[Falconeer]

I think noob only arenas, just for trials, for your first 25 - 50 matches or so would be a great idea.

[apocrypha]

Wasn't there supposed to be some kind of balancing of the matchmaking going on, specifically to avoid newbs vs vets situations? Works great in World of Tanks, MWO doesn't have to reinvent the wheel every single step of the way, surely?

[Samprimary]

They could legitimately be doing it to test the total advantage of organized play overall

[Arthur_Parker]

Wasn't there supposed to be some kind of balancing of the matchmaking going on, specifically to avoid newbs vs vets situations? Works great in World of Tanks, MWO doesn't have to reinvent the wheel every single step of the way, surely?

Currently each match has premade groups limited to a max size of 4.

The patch today is meant to reintroduce group sizes of 8, but they have to be a minimum size of 8 and will only match against another premade group of 8.  This is in addition to the current matchmaking method of groups up to a size of 4.  So they are splitting the playerbase into premade groups of 8 and everyone else.

There is a thread here on the mwo forums about trial mechs, if you aren't having fun in trials you could take a minute to let them know why and I'd appreciate it.  

As you'd expect the thread has the typical mmo fan who feels the need to defend horrible/unfun/difficult to use new pilot mechs.

[Samprimary]

There is a thread here on the mwo forums about trial mechs, if you aren't having fun in trials you could take a minute to let them know why and I'd appreciate it.  

As you'd expect the thread has the typical mmo fan who feels the need to defend horrible/unfun/difficult to use new pilot mechs.

Will phase 3 magically fix heat dissipation, so that heat sinks stop lagging 1.5 tier behind weapons? Will it fix ammo loads, which are often insufficient to down two mechs on trials because of double armor, after which the weapon becomes 7-10 ton glorified paperweight?

T1 overheats with singles very easily (evidence: trial anything), needs dubs or an extreme load of singles.

T2 overheats with dubs (evidence: trial "awesome" can't shoot half its weapons twice before shutdown, cools down 20 seconds on FC). Would probably need clan freezers in bulk to remain operable, currently nothing can shoot ER weaponry, and nothing would want to shoot pulse weaponry for their heat generation.

At this rate, Clan weapons will likely need Eldar heat sinks, on loan from WH40K.

hahahahahaha

some people are talking about how when they encounter the stock awesome they just leg it for extra salvage.

I literally did this last night in a jenner. I was like 'oh, stock awesome, let me do more sustained output with small lasers'

spoo spoo spoo

[Falconeer]

Will phase 3 magically fix heat dissipation, so that heat sinks stop lagging 1.5 tier behind weapons? Will it fix ammo loads, which are often insufficient to down two mechs on trials because of double armor, after which the weapon becomes 7-10 ton glorified paperweight?

T1 overheats with singles very easily (evidence: trial anything), needs dubs or an extreme load of singles.

T2 overheats with dubs (evidence: trial "awesome" can't shoot half its weapons twice before shutdown, cools down 20 seconds on FC). Would probably need clan freezers in bulk to remain operable, currently nothing can shoot ER weaponry, and nothing would want to shoot pulse weaponry for their heat generation.

At this rate, Clan weapons will likely need Eldar heat sinks, on loan from WH40K.

See, this is a perfect example of useless post. I don't know if you are aware that the MWO playerbase is divided into two factions. Those who pursue absolute heat-neutrality in the mech-lab, and those who feel the mech-lab only brings you that far cause heat management is a pilot's responsibility. BEWARE, I am not saying in any way that the game is fine the way it is, we know it lacks tutorials and balancing and UI improvements and netcode, etc etc. But there's just some players who want to shoot more, according to their own perception of what a 'mech game should be or what the tabletop was like (which is an impossible comparison since in the TT there were no cooldowns, no aiming, 10 seconds turns, etc...) and just have their own idea of how this game should have been designed, and how many times, according to their lumchbreak-scribbled napkins a REAL LIFE AWESOME was meant to be be shooting.

This is not about supporting the game or not. I just see lots of players acting as if they've been insulted cause the game doesn't have the pacing THEY wanted, or their TT designs that were extremely efficient in the TT being obsolete and underperforming in MWO.

There's a million things this game could do better, but beware of those who have been designing their own heat system based on their own trigger needs and scream foul at PGI for having a different plan. A plan that, as I mentioned earlier, works for half of the playerbase (And please let's stick to those who are playing for once, instead of always pulling in the debate the "potential" players). So who's right?

[Samprimary]

haha, I could care less about the debate on the heat meta. it's not really a useless post, especially when what you are talking about is the trial mechs. The trial mechs are bad-broken and a big reason why is because they are designed around stock loadouts that don't factor in whatever heat heavy methodology the game designers have noodled in.

Again, go try out that ossum. It is a useless loadout. Can only sort of cycle one of its ppcs, so the total effective damage output is garbage. Internal loadout is deathtrap. All its space is wasted with ultimately ineffectual heat management tonnage. I have already provided a perfect anecdotally witnessed example of why not to make the first mechs a person touches anything like what these trial mechs are.

[Arthur_Parker]

MWO: DECEMBER TRIAL MECH ROUNDUP

CONCLUSION

If you’re looking for a winner here, it’s probably the Hunchback, but only because it’s the least horrible of the options that are available. The trial mechs all suffer massively from being stock designs from the tabletop game, and over there every weapon’s cycle time is ten seconds because that’s how long a turn is. With most weapons in MWO able to fire two or three times in that same interval, but confined by the tabletop heat dissipation and capacity mechanics, an inexperienced player (the typical trial mech pilot) is going to shoot themselves into a heat coma within the first minute of every match. In fact, they’re probably going to do that a couple of times, then put the game down and go and play something like CoD instead because spending half of your game time shut down and another quarter of it dead BECAUSE you shut down just isn’t fun.

PGI's got all the long time BattleTech/MechWarrior fans now. Everyone that understands why these builds are as they are has either ponied up and bought a mech to customise themselves or slogged through the trials knowing the sweet, sweet mech customisation is coming. Those players new to the franchise, which PGI needs for MWO to be all it can be, don’t want to spend four to six hours driving one of these lemons, and they’ll go and take their money and time elsewhere. Even if they don’t want to spend the money on something like the latest CoD there’s plenty of other Free to Play games out there.

ALTERNATIVES

The whole thing is worth a read.

Also patch notes are up.

PATCH NOTES - 1.1.161 - 04/12/2012

[Strazos]

I think I gave the game an honest shot. I'm into Mechwarrior (but not tons; I never owned the tabletop stuff), and I love big machines blowing shit up.

However, the game isn't fun. The trial mechs blow, the client has performance issues, and the UI doesn't give the sort of feedback I'd like. It could also use a training mode against a bot or something, so I could at least practice aiming and shit in a controlled environment.

With the new patch and my difficulty in pulling down large updates, I'm probably done with this. Call me when fun is patched in.

[Arthur_Parker]

Fun is there in spades it's just past the trial stage, I've played nearly 1300 matches since OB.  For me this beats everything I've ever played before.

Four drops so far against 8 man teams, absolutely brilliant change, ecm might be a bit buggy.

[Tmon]

But no question, if they want to grow their game, they're going to need to get a way to teach newbies how to play, a better way than youtube and trial and error.

This. I have no problem with a high learning curve. I'm not a HUGE Battletech fan, but I've played and enjoyed the tabletop from back in the '90's. If I didn't have the love for the franchise, I wouldn't have bothered past maybe 3 or 4 matches. It's just that unforgiving. Even worse, it doesn't do a good job of telling you WHY you suck, HOW you suck, or how to get better at it (one hint being spend real money to get better fucking mechs). I'd say out of maybe 40-50 matches I've played total, I've enjoyed 1/4 of them, and a lot of that could be fixed by giving me a mech I could 1) customize beyond weapon groupings and 2) giving me a mech that wasn't poorly tuned.

I keep going back to League of Legends because it's noob model is VERY encouraging. And I say that despite the player community of that game being full of antisocial mongoloid cockgobblers whose only wish in life is to make you feel like the dumbest creature alive. Within the first week of playing LOL, I had access to 10 free champions and had the free IP to buy at least one out of another 6 or 7 other cheap yet viable champions.

4 shitty trial mechs for free makes noobs very unhappy.

Actually being able to kill something in my trial mech would go a long way to convincing me to spend money or time on this game. 

[Segoris]

From the patch notes

ECM is here and personally I can’t wait to ruin some streak cats day with this excellent piece of equipment. I am going to be honest with you ECM is a game changer so let us know how you feel about ECM on the forums because lately I think you guys have been holding back and not telling us how you really feel.

 

[Samprimary]

potential solution:

 When you use a trial mech, you do not have to pay any repairs but you get reduced cbill income and can only play in games in which everyone is in the trial mechs, and they cannot be organized teams or impact the game world or have any pilot experience bonuses applied to them. The trial mechs will cycle and they will no longer be stock designs but will be custom-built to provide a variety of weapons experiences and will generally preference heat dissipation over large weapons loads, so that new players can cut their teeth with protracted fights that don't require a great degree of heat management. Eventually however you're going to want to buy your own mech and have your own custom models, in order to join the real fight ... as well as your friends.

[Arthur_Parker]

We did 11 8 man drops, though I crashed in the last one so didn't see it, it's like a totally different game.  LRM's & streaks are not anywhere near as good as they were, which is a good thing.

[Lantyssa]

A Trial 'Mech versus Trial 'Mech mode would actually be cool, because they'd be on the same level.  Having the option to opt into normal play, if you know what you're getting into, would be okay.  But it really is a problem for new or very casual players.  They need to stay around long enough to put money down, not be scared off because they didn't.

[calapine]

I am sort of annoyed by the Christmas items. 7$ (6.95 to be exact) for a cockpit decoration, really? 

Forum whine regarding it is massive though, so I hope they get the message and start 'adjusting' soon...

FakeEdit: To quote myself from official forums, the only way that price would be acceptable if all proceeds were donated to a charity.

[Segoris]

Heh, just seeing the prices and reading the forums myself, absolutely agree. First post is someone trying to give PGI benefit of the doubt in that someone put the decimal one place over

[Lantyssa]

Two matches with my little Commando-2D.  Previously the chassis was... sub-standard.  I still filled out my basic tree and was working on my third Commando model so I could start spending at the Elite level.

ECM makes this awesome.  I don't do a ton of damage, but I'm useful to my group and I'm not obliterated by LRM fire.  Maybe because the 8-man groups are in their own thing, too.  But the 2D might have just become my favorite Commando out of the four.

[Arthur_Parker]

Just posted for those with performance issues.

Performance Update

We know that performance slowly declined for a number of users to the point of becoming unplayable in recent patches, obviously we’ve been progressively adding content and features to the game and we’ve also been trying to keep performance in a playable state but clearly we haven’t done enough and need to do better. We’ve been going over all the games systems in detail and building a complete picture of where the key costs for MWO lie and how we can work to improve them and I wanted to share our findings so far with you.

HUD

As I’ve mentioned in other posts MWO does not have a cheap HUD it contains a lot of detail and we always planned to have Scaleform 4.0 as part of the CryEngine 3.4 update which is much more optimal than the version currently in MWO. Sadly this integration did not come as part of the 3.4 update, so we are now taking the time to make the HUD more optimal until such time as we can upgrade MWO to the latest version. A minor improvement goes out today which was a bug fix for an issue that was causing the cockpit monitors to use more draw calls than necessary.

Levels

The levels were created with performance in mind but not as the primary goal and visual quality was more important to us initially. Each level is now getting a cleanup pass and the changes will roll out in upcoming patches all of them should be done by early in the New Year. This work has already been making its way to production Forest Colony and Frozen City are already done and other maps are coming down the pipe, part of the reason the full impact hasn’t been felt yet is the costs in the HUD and in the Terrain.

Terrain

We’ve been looking more closely at the Terrain code in 3.4 and noticing that it is generally responsible for much of the streaming/hitching happening in game. We are working to tune it for min spec machines; this work should help all platforms feel generally ‘smoother’ in terms of performance. There were also a few regressions caused by a cleanup pass that happened a few weeks ago which have been caught and re-exported correctly that go out on production today.

Ray Traces

Mechs sure can fire a lot of lasers and also use ray traces for range finding, tagging etc. These can add up fast especially on a Swayback, we’ve recently done some work to reduce the amount used where possible and to optimize the underlying system to make it faster which should be making its way to production in the next couple of weeks.

Audio

We’ve also recently done some audio cleanup passes that should help performance that go out in today’s patch.

Engine

CryEngine 3.4 was a great update for us and lays the groundwork for many good things to come, but it also set back some earlier optimization work. There are no more planned updates in the foreseeable future so the community should feel reassured that stability and performance will both continue to improve from here forwards and remain a high priority for us here at PGI.


We’ve also significantly tightened up on our process for internal performance testing of upcoming builds to ensure builds don’t go out with any significant performance regressions. We appreciate that there are some outstanding performance issues awaiting fixes on production 4fps bug and degradation over time, we continue to actively track these and work with the community to help resolve them.

Starting today we hope you will experience some improvement in today’s build with a much more significant improvement in the following build that we hope will bring us much more in line with where performance was earlier in closed beta and then only ever the same or better from there.


As always we thank you for your support and patience and hope to see you on the Battlefield.

[HaemishM]

MWO: DECEMBER TRIAL MECH ROUNDUP

That guy makes a fuckload of good sense.

[satael]

So, fired up the game to see how it's doing:

-first fight is ok except for sound cracking up (2 kills but a loss due to enemy capturing the base)
-a quick check on the forums shows that the sound problem isn't just me.
-second game starts ok but a little careless and shutdown due to heat... and the graphics for the shutdown stay for the rest of the (short) game making it impossible to do anything except run around like a headless chicken until the mech gets turned to swiss cheese.
Didn't feel like continuing, maybe after the next patch

[Arthur_Parker]

That's the shutdown bug been there for a few weeks, you can power off/on to clear it but you are more likely to die, really annoying when it happens.

[Tmon]

MWO: DECEMBER TRIAL MECH ROUNDUP

That guy makes a fuckload of good sense.

Yes he does, this pretty much describes me.

[qote]...an inexperienced player (the typical trial mech pilot) is going to shoot themselves into a heat coma within the first minute of every match. In fact, they’re probably going to do that a couple of times, then put the game down and go and play something like CoD instead because spending half of your game time shut down and another quarter of it dead BECAUSE you shut down just isn’t fun. [/quote]

[Arthur_Parker]

I'm toying with the idea of leveling up a free account in my spare time that f13 regulars could borrow for a few days to try the game out.  I'm thinking about just unlocking the elite pilot skill level tree in jenners to start with, so account would have jenners F, K & D, plus an xl280 engine to switch between them and obviously weapons.  So that's a mech at speed cap with a decent heat/weapon loadout.  

Trial mechs are horrible, so you could try the game out and see what you think without having to grind through the trial stages.  I'm reasonable at the game now so it wouldn't take a lot of effort on my part but I obviously don't want to do it if there is no interest here.

[Merusk]

So.. tease them with fun and then throw them into the grist mill until they've paid their dues?  Yeah that's a legit solution.

[Arthur_Parker]

Well I don't work for PGI, I've done what I can to make them see that their trial mech strategy could be a lot better, which has consisted of making a couple of useless forum posts about it.  I'm actually interested to see the result of trying this, but again there might be no interest in it here.

[Lantyssa]

I imagine most of us really interested in this already have accounts.  It's a good gesture for those on the fence, but I'm not sure that's a lot.

[Tmon]

... I'm actually interested to see the result of trying this, but again there might be no interest in it here.

Speaking for myself it wouldn't be worth it.  I bought the table top game when it first came out, but it never hooked me.  I played crescent hawks inception on my Amiga but that is the extent of my history with mech games.  I think if you love the IP then this game is worth the hassle, but I don't know a jenner from an atlas and can't be bothered to learn. 

[Falconeer]

I know I am in the minority here, but I am pretty convinced that while there are obviously issues with the trial mechs, those who tried the game and haven't been impressed by it won't change their mind over a better performing build. It's a combination of unappealing UI, depressingly decoloured maps and slow gameplay with a steep learning curve that either clicks with you right away or gets filed under: "meh". I am by no mean saying this is valid for everyone, not even remotely, but my anectodal experience is just that. The few friends I had to try the game were super hyped about it and they all (about eight of them, versus one who liked it) just played ONE or two games at best and left it with a "meh". Not a negative, disgusted reaction. Just something like "sure, I need to spend more time on it, I can see it's complicated, I'll try it again tomorrow..."... but they didn't.

So the bottom line is that in my opinion there's lots of general user-unfriendliness in this game that in an era of fancy tutorials and flashy UIs MWO's slow paced roughness combined with a certain beta state buggy feeling just turns away whoever doesn't have an instant crush on it.

World of tanks is a perfect example of the opposite if you ask me. Not only the game is somewhat more straightforward (one weapon with no heat issues) hence naturally easier to learn and more noobfriendly, but the presentation and the maps were so colourful, neat and smooth that it hooked people that wouldn't have never cared about a tank game. PGI's problems with UI and general presentation are doing the opposite: turning (some) Mechwarrior lovers away from Mechwarrior.