Author Topic: MechWarrior Online  (Read 270011 times)

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Offline NGTM-1R

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I love my Commando for its good days. But it doesn't have them often.
"Load sabot. Target Zaku, direct front!"

A Feddie Story

 

Offline Scotty

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"FrankenMech" does not mean that.  FrankenMech means that the 'Mech has been cobbled together with non-standard or non-fitting parts so that it's not actually a production 'Mech at all, and its own one-off custom ride in a way that even a custom variant of a 'Mech is not.  It's what happens when you take that Highlander's right arm, and that Catapult's left torso assembly and put it on an Atlas center torso.

The word you're looking for is "Zombie", and refers to 'Mechs that mount neither XL Engines nor ammunition or gauss weapons that could conceivably explode.  The only ways to take down Zombies are by definition to decapitate the 'Mech, or to completely destroy the center torso.  There is literally no other way to cease its function.

 
The word you're looking for is "Zombie", and refers to 'Mechs that mount neither XL Engines nor ammunition or gauss weapons that could conceivably explode.  The only ways to take down Zombies are by definition to decapitate the 'Mech, or to completely destroy the center torso.  There is literally no other way to cease its function.

Legging?
"You need to believe in things that aren't true. How else can they become?" -DEATH, Discworld

"You can fight like a krogan, run like a leopard, but you'll never be better than Commander Shepard!"

 

Offline Scotty

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In the tabletop, legging does not destroy 'Mechs.  Severely impedes their movement, yes, but if you've been reading my Let's Play, you'd know that losing a leg is sometimes only a minor inconvenience. :P

Honestly, by the time you've lost one leg, unless your pilots are god-tier already, losing a second leg is as inconsequential as it comes, and honestly the second leg might as well be additional armor.

 

Offline Al-Rik

  • 27
Wait, I can probably play this game now!

Anybody got recommendations/advice/whatever for a rookie?
Try to find a Merc Unit to join - those are Groups of Players with own Teamspeak Server.
There are many recruitment threads in the official MWO forums.
MWO is much more fun if you can play with friends and teamspeak.

The alternative to Teamspeak is the C3 Voice Chat. The group function of MWO that allows you to play with friends in a group supports this application, but you have to download it separately.

Gameplay Tips:
Play fast Mechs first, but stay next to other, bigger Mechs.
Acting as Backup, and fight other light Mechs that try to hit and run.

If you get enough C-Bills, buy a Jenner or Raven.
Buying a XL Engine is also a good Idea, because you can remove the Engine and use them in an other Mech.
But be aware that a XL Engine is also destroyed if a Side Torso is destroyed, so use it only for fast Mechs.

Upgrading Mechs:
All Mechs are limited by the weight they have for weapons.
You can get more free space by upgrading:
A XL-Engine gives you the most free space, but makes the Mech more vulnerable
Double Heat sinks are expensive, but can save a lot of space otherwise used for additional Heat Sinks
Endo Steel give you between 1 to 5 additional tons
Ferror Fibrous is a waste of critical Slots, and only to consider if your Mech has a lot of free slots after upgrading to Endo Steel, Double Heat Sink and XL-Engine.

Targetting:
Always target your enemy with R, and aim for weak spots.
If the enemy Mech isn't damage, aim for the Arms, because that's the Zone with the thinnest armour.

 

Offline NGTM-1R

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Wait, I can probably play this game now!

Anybody got recommendations/advice/whatever for a rookie?

Don't.

PGI published an "apology" recently that is actually their extended justification for why they have lied to us, feel justified in doing so, and will continue to lie.
"Load sabot. Target Zaku, direct front!"

A Feddie Story

 

Offline BloodEagle

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http://mwomercs.com/forums/topic/132637-3rd-person-an-update-and-apology/page__pid__2678285#entry2678285

For posterity:

Quote from: Guess
Today I wanted to post an updated explanation on the recent patch which added the third person view into MechWarrior Online. Although we have long known this was a contentious issue and adding it to MWO was going to meet resistance, there was also a major failure in community management and communication. I will endeavor to explain how we got to this point. A couple of weeks ago I created a command chair post about “Why Third person” which explains the process in which we decided that adding a third person perspective was essential for teaching new players how to play MWO. During that time period some news leaked into the MWO community from a podcast on our intentions of releasing a third person camera and the reaction was very negative. Here is where we made a critical error with the community and it wasn’t because we don’t care about the community but quite the opposite, you could even say we cared too much. Instead of weighing the impact of the feature in every way we simply reacted very quickly and told the community that you will not have to play against players in third person perspective. Now this was many months ago and we weren’t even close to working on third person yet as it needed to find its way into our feature backlog. Now we fast forward many months and a design for third person is created. The mandate applied to the designer was something along the lines of “create a third person mode that mainly allows new players to quickly learn the nuances of a Battlemech’s movements” and furthermore that “the more experienced the pilot becomes the more time he will want/need to spend in First Person”. In order to accomplish this the HUD was reduced with the removal of the mini-map and Lance mate information and the camera was brought in tight with no ability to pan around your mech, finally there was a floating drone behind your mech to give explanation for the view point but would also act to give your position away. Once this design started to come into focus both on paper and through early test sessions I think the overwhelming feeling in the office was very closely along the lines of “Wow were going to split the community into two different buckets for this?”. The feeling was that the original design goals had not been achieved 100% but very close to it and it was feeling like a non-issue from a competitive perspective. I guess it really felt like we shouldn’t be splitting the matchmaking pools especially in public drops until we at least had more real world data. This is where the next big communication failure happened. It was the intention at this point to communicate all of these findings to the community and ask for some leeway while we released third person into the general population without segregation so that we could collect real world metrics on everything from how many people were using it to determining if there really were any unacceptable tactical advantages. This communication just never happened and I can blame staggered vacation time for various executives to other management types but regardless it was a failure. In the end Bryan put up a brief post after the feature went live which may have seemed like our attempt to sneak it in after the fact but it only came across that way because we missed the window we intended to use.

So here we are and all I can do at this point is reiterate that we truly feel we made the best decision for MWO and its future but this meant we needed to go back on previous statement and then we communicated it poorly to boot. To make it perfectly clear, there was never any meeting or particular moment at PGI where we decided that we would never provide the separate Queue’s for “Hardcore” (the mode where third person is not allowed). We simply decided that we felt it was likely not necessary and probably detrimental to split the community and with that in mind not worth delaying or holding out of the product when we could possibly see great benefit from the feature as we approach and cross over into official launch. But again it’s not impossible that we will provide the segregation. But this is where I need to be real careful to not make the same mistakes again with some kind of promise. Perhaps the community would not care if there was no segregation in Public matches if for instance Community Warfare provided the segregation. Final answers or decisions just can’t and shouldn’t be provided yet.

Since the patch went live we have played hundreds of matches, Ghost spectated hundreds more and have yet to see evidence of third person being used in any significant way. However were still willing to say that at the moment we don’t have enough data and were still working off our assumptions. I really want to remove the assumptions from the process and hopefully we can work together to uncover the full truth of the features impact. I’m positive we will be more than willing to make any number of small tweaks and adjustments to third person as we go along. In the end I think the community has shown amazing acceptance of our proposed direction of MWO if they feel it would be best for the future of MechWarrior Online and growing this great brand. So I assume the community is much more upset about the broken promise then how they have seen people using third person in matches.

In Summary we apologize for the manner in which communication failed over the release of this major feature and in closing, it is still possible that a separate Queue will be created but the timing just isn’t right for that currently as we just need more time to gather conclusive facts about its impact in the live game sessions.
Thanks for reading.

Russ "What a Complete Asshat" Bullock

 

Offline Dragon

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Yeah, "bad timing". Don't make promises you don't intend to keep.

 

Offline StarSlayer

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This wasn't the Community Warfare I was expecting.
“Think lightly of yourself and deeply of the world”

 

Offline NGTM-1R

  • I reject your reality and substitute my own
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"Load sabot. Target Zaku, direct front!"

A Feddie Story

 

Offline NGTM-1R

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Just...

God damn it. This game, man, this game was good, it was fun, it was a MechWarrior game. You could feel it the first time you dropped.

And it's all gone to **** on me.
"Load sabot. Target Zaku, direct front!"

A Feddie Story

 

Offline StarSlayer

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http://loadeddicecast.blogspot.de/2013/08/what-happened-to-mechwarrior-online.html

Yep saw it on the MWO forums,


Indeed.

It's sad I had high hopes for the game as well.  Loved my HBKs.
“Think lightly of yourself and deeply of the world”

  

Offline docfu

  • 27
Wow, I was all set to install the game when I read this post. Sounds like the kickstarter was seriously abused just to milk the fan base for money...

Can you actually enjoy the game without having to give them your credit card number?

 

Offline Scotty

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Yes.

 
lol, the settings default to starting the match in 3rd person view now, until you change the setting.
It's pretty, but quite useless, and I don't imagine anybody actually using it.

That said, it's still generally the same game it was when it hit open beta, just with more (mostly inconsequential) stuff, and a lot of balance tweakage. As long as you like deathmatch or conquest, it hasn't changed much. Which I guess is part of the problem.

Can you actually enjoy the game without having to give them your credit card number?

Also yes. I only bought some ingame gold to buy another mech bay and a hula girl. The rest is mostly untouched. Premium time seems like a waste unless you're willing to really invest in it, a poor proposition at this point.

 

Offline Aesaar

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I was holding on to hope since closed beta ended, but I'm done.  This game sucks and PGI isn't a competent enough studio to fix it.  They'd need to be aware of the problems to fix them, but they've obviously convinced themselves they're doing a great job.

I'm not talking about balance.  The weapon and mech balance is better than it's ever been.  I'm talking about the core gameplay.  10 minute deathmatches on the same maps, over and over again.  It gets boring fast because there's no depth to it.  What's Community Warfare supposed to do to change this?  Our results will influence lines on a strategic map.  Ooh.  This still doesn't make the core gameplay any better.  How can we believe our 12v12, 10 minute deathmatches over unremarkable coastlines and empty deserts are conquering worlds?  Neither Community Warfare nor the Clans will resolve this.

If this game had gone in the same direction as MW: Living Legends (a vastly superior game); long (~45min) games on big, varied maps with combined arms and 60+ players, something closer to Battlefield, it could have been absolutely incredible.  Instead, we've got World of Tanks with mechs and more customisation.  I'd blame it on being Free to Play, but then again, Planetside 2 manages (it's got its own problems, but still).  Even War Thunder feels bigger, despite having a similar amount of players in a team.

I've spent 60$ on worse things, so I'm not too torn up about having bought a Founder's package.  What really, really annoys me is it's a waste of those fantastic mech redesigns, and that we'll probably have to wait another 10 years for the MechWarrior name to recover from MWO's failure.

« Last Edit: August 24, 2013, 02:51:16 am by Aesaar »

 

Offline docfu

  • 27
Thanks for that last post. This reminds me a bit of League of Legends. I checked it out last year and was surprised to play a game like that. It was the first real Free2Play game I ever checked out.

For a while it was fun but then you start to wonder why the game has almost 100 characters and a few hundred skins...but only 3 maps. The developers just don't care to develop the rest of the game.

Your last line really says it all though. Mechwarrior games seem to come around every 10 years...and Mechwarrior 3 was the only one that didn't fall short. I wonder if Hawken is any better than MWO...

 

Offline Patriot

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If PGI was smart, they'd introduce gameplay similar to Planetside 2, a persistent map with people just piling in on each other to make sure they hold their bases/factories/whatever.

That's what i hoped to see in MWO, but didn't. Finally uninstalled just now, after having it gathering dust on my hard drive for so long.

 

Offline Scotty

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Um, for a moment I'll just take the last few posts, and mention that, if any of those things had been done, it would not be the same game, at all, and I would personally dislike it.

Having long battles means instituting some kind of system for respawns, which I, personally, emphatically do not want in my BattleTech.  It was bad enough in MechAssault, which was at least arcade-y enough to warrant it.  Without respawns, you're locking players out of their 'Mechs for half an hour at a time, which is also bad.  Without locking players out of their 'Mechs while it's in game, you're hugely incentivizing suicidal charges at the beginning of a game to farm experience and cash.

Re: gameplay, I'd mention World of Tanks, which has survived (and even thrived) with the same three game modes for at least a couple years now (I've been playing for two and a half almost), and before that it had just one: deathmatch with a base.

Then again, that's kind of the problem.  For World of Tanks, which is absolutely designed to be grindy and reward players with better vehicles based on a tier system, MechWarrior Online doesn't.  Any 'Mech is available the instant you can muster the cash for it.

MWO tried to be something that worked in one setting, and utterly failed in converting it to a different setting, for reasons which are intrinsic to the setting, and fail to see why that's a problem.

If, for example, there were some objectives that were randomly generated upon mission start, and not necessarily the same for both teams, it could be interesting.  There could actually be a reason for 'Mechs to shoot at each other all day long.  But at present, there isn't, and that's frustrating.  I would probably play the **** out of it if the objective was more in depth than "Shoot 'Mechs, stand in base".  I got bored of the same kinds of fights in the tabletop almost as quickly.

 

Offline Aesaar

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You don't need classic respawns.  Just do it the way the hypothetical dropship mode was supposed to do it: you respawn as long as you have mechs to respawn with.  Games last longer, people get to play with all the mechs they've got, and it provides incentive for people to buy more mechbay slots rather than constantly selling off their mechs.  Give 3 or 4 slots for free, have a couple paid for with CB, and more bought with MC.

War Thunder does it this way and it works very well.

Also, i wasn't thinking MechAssault.  I was thinking about MW Living Legends, which is much better than MWO is despite being a mod for Crysis 1.  Sure, it looks less pretty and mech animations look awkward as ****, but the gameplay's immensely superior.
« Last Edit: August 24, 2013, 12:35:08 pm by Aesaar »