What's happening in MWO these days? Last I checked they just introduced the community warfare thing. Did this ever take off they way it was intended? (Knowing PGI, probably not)
Nope. They added the Invasion game mode and a bunch of UI elements and let it languish for a year. Then they came in and added Scouting mode for Phase 3, wherein victories would result in instant-death nukes falling on the Invasion battles every two minutes. Somehow, organized units were dissatisfied with this addition. PGI then let the game languish in that state for
months, while organized units moved on and the player base hemorraged.
It took a community-organized intervention with Russ to convince PGI that something was wrong. In a rare moment of lucidity, they implemented all of the changes that were suggested in the community roundtable, though it took an additional four months to even begin rolling those changes out, all while players continued to move on. Oh, then PGI perma-banned the guy who was chiefly responsible for that meeting actually happening (as opposed to being an empty promise that came up in Russ' semi-regular filibuster of the NGNG podcast). No good deed goes unpunished.
So with the most recent revamp of Community Warfare, the player population has stabilized, but it's still critically and noticeably small. Part of the Community Warfare revamp was to collapse the number of queues to accomodate the smaller player base. On top of that, the solo queue has had its matchmaker adjusted to the point of basically turning it off. (After sixty seconds of search time, the matchmaker drops all the normal restrictions, allowing day-one newbies to be matched with top-tier veterans.) You can get fast matches, but unless you're playing during prime time, on a weekend, during an event, the skill levels of each team will be all over the place, resulting in frequent, lopsided stomps.
In what I view as a desperate ploy to draw players back in, PGI recently announced that they're advancing the timeline to 3060 to introduce new tech to the game. This comes after a recent raft of balance changes that have collapsed the number of viable builds to about three. I could go on about the balance changes, but I recently had a rant about one of those changes
on another forum. Suffice to say, when they don't understand how easily they can **** up the precarious balance that the game had achieved, I'm not optimistic about their ability to add a truckload of new equipment in a way that won't backfire, driving off much of the remaining population.
Really, the timeline advance smells of a final, desperate cash grab. 3060 will be half-assedly implemented this summer. The Mad Cat II preorder will be announced within a month of that (because sweet Christ, the ForumWarriors will not shut up about that chassis), and PGI will shutter MWO by the end of Q1 2018.
I'm sorry if that comes across as excessively salty, but being a long-time MWO player is a frustrating experience.
