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MWO or Mech Warrior Online

Papa Môlé

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Actually the Commando is the strongest mech in the game right now due to their entirely fucked up implementation of ECM combined with lagshield and streak missiles.

However, that Commando will cost you around 8 million C-Bills for double heat sinks, high grade XL engine, ferro fibrous armor, ECM, streaks and streak ammo, and endo steel internals. It's also a about a third of your earnings to repair and rearm should it be destroyed if your side wins or half your earnings if destroyed and your side loses.

Like I said, the economy is atrocious.
 

Destroid

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Yep, the free reloads and repairs are bullshit. Being able to keep the XL engine unrepaired at 25% is bullshit.

unfortunately it's "pay if you don't want to gouge your eyes and rip your balls off out of boredom before being able to buy anything slightly worthwhile".
See, there's the problem. If you don't enjoy face painting mechs with lazors... maybe it's not a game for you.

If your idea of "slightly worthwhile" is: I need a fully kitted Catapult or an Atlas, XL engine, Gauss Rifles, ferro fibrous armor, or else I'm not gonna compete... yeah this will just lead to more frustration, especially when you see the repair bill.
News flash, a commando is just as viable a a jenner, which is as viable as a cicada, which is as viable as a hunchback... etc. If you don't know how to work the system and have fun trying out all the stuff that's available... maybe it's not a game for you.
Which is perfectly fine.

Took me less than one day of playing trail mechs (no, not grinding, I genuinely used that time to learn the ropes, map layout, check out how the various weight classes work and how to team play)
until I was able to get a Hunchback 4SP, which is arguably the best brawler in its weight class (I routinely get 1-2 kills per PuG match, 6 kills at best, even though I am not a 15 y.o. counter strike vet).
The repair bill, worst case scenario, is a mere 40,000 cbills. If I feel like it, I can quickly change it into a LRM boat in under a minute. I'd say it's more than slightly worthwhile.

A commando can be gotten in about 4 hours of playing you can say it's "worthless", I say L2P.
It's a fucking MMO, there is no grind, the grind IS the game, love it or leave it.

MWO is no more an MMO than call of duty is.
 

Vaarna_Aarne

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Excuse me, I just can't help it.
 

spectre

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However, that Commando will cost you around 8 million C-Bills for double heat sinks, high grade XL engine, ferro fibrous armor, ECM, streaks and streak ammo, and endo steel internals.
Just to put that into perspective, 2/3 of this amount is the XL engine, all it gives you is the lagshield and a higher repair bill. good thing to have, but not mandatory to be useful on the battlefield.
Ferro fibrous is argualby useless on a light mech, it gives you less than one ton of free space but eats up lots of critical slots, especially together with endo steel (which is a much better choice).

It's also a about a third of your earnings to repair and rearm should it be destroyed if your side wins or half your earnings if destroyed and your side loses.
Not sure how this proves that the economy is atrocious.
Commando is possibly the best non-hero mech moneymaker in the game, standard engine variants cost below 20 000 to fully repair, depending on loadout.
With good play, it eats up 25% of your earnings if you lose and get killed, 15% if you win and get killed.
If you slap the XL engine on top of it (which is notoriously hard to repair), it becomes slightly worse than a standard medium mech at making money.

To compare, in a typical arrangement, an XL engine heavy mech eats up 90-100% of your earnings on death and a lost match, 60% of your earnings if your side wins and you get killed.
This means you have to accept the smaller payroll or alternate playing with a more economical setup when you need more money.

There is some retardation in the current system, but as it is I actually think it is beneficial to the game. Expensive toys cost more to repair, assault mechs cost more to repair.
Without this, we'd have Mechwarrior 4 all over again, assaults and heavies being the only viable mech classes in game.
The current economy favors light and medium mechs, while most people instinctively lean towards heavier chasses.
I think in the end it promotes build diversity.

due to their entirely fucked up implementation of ECM
Do elaborate.
I like a lot of things about the ECM, even though I think it does a little too much for the tonnage.
For one, it opens up a new dimension of the game, allowing for electronic warfare and stealth.
Second, it made people play ravens, cicadas and commandos. Before ECM you'd rarely see one in the field, unless it was a trial mech.
One patch earlier you could easily get into an all-heavy match, with only a handful of mediums at best. Now, people are suddenly playing lights again.
Finally, it's a nice counter to noobtube streakcats and LRM boats. Before ECM, the former became a bit of a problem.
 

Norfleet

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The current economy favors light and medium mechs, while most people instinctively lean towards heavier chasses.
I think in the end it promotes build diversity.
An economy SHOULD favor the light and medium units. Heavy unit should be uneconomical prestige showboats. If heavies were the big earners on top of the big hitters, no one would play anything else. The endgame would consist entirely of heavy units. This is, of course, silly and unrealistic. The alternative is to arbitrary balance units such that all units are essentially statistically equal, which is, similarly, also bollocks. So there has to be a reason why a player should choose what is, statistically, an inferior unit, and that reason is economy: The unit may not be as flat out capable per head as a higher-class unit, but it's a hell of a lot more economical to field.
 

Papa Môlé

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Not sure how this proves that the economy is atrocious.
Commando is possibly the best non-hero mech moneymaker in the game, standard engine variants cost below 20 000 to fully repair, depending on loadout.
With good play, it eats up 25% of your earnings if you lose and get killed, 15% if you win and get killed.
If you slap the XL engine on top of it (which is notoriously hard to repair), it becomes slightly worse than a standard medium mech at making money.

Minimum winnings per match in a non-trial is 75k without premium, a very good win is about 150k. Let's be extraordinarily generous to the typical new or casual player, who is in reality going to get rolled nonstop by groups of vets, and say he earns 100k a match. That's 80 matches at a minimum, not counting him bothering to repair or rearm to earn a decent 25 ton mech, the lightest in the game. Total match time is 15 minutes but let's again be generous and say those matches average out to 7 minutes. That's over 9 hours of playing, not counting downtime and the frequent CTDs to get one mech. Outfitting any light is going to cost similarly because of the necessity of an XL engine on them plus the necessity of DHS on everything. Not putting an XL on your light, especially your Commando with paper armor, in order to go maximum speed is making yourself a death trap.

To compare, in a typical arrangement, an XL engine heavy mech eats up 90-100% of your earnings on death and a lost match, 60% of your earnings if your side wins and you get killed.
This means you have to accept the smaller payroll or alternate playing with a more economical setup when you need more money.

You never *need* more money. This is a deathmatch shooter. The only reason to have money is to have a different thing to shoot things with but having a different thing to shoot things with is at the same time the only real draw of the game. Playing "economically" means gimping yourself so you can actually play the game content you want to later. It also means being a liability to your team and potentially slowing down their earnings thusly, especially at this stage of the game, where barely anyone new is playing and everyone already has mini-maxed mechs.

There is some retardation in the current system, but as it is I actually think it is beneficial to the game. Expensive toys cost more to repair, assault mechs cost more to repair.
Without this, we'd have Mechwarrior 4 all over again, assaults and heavies being the only viable mech classes in game.
The current economy favors light and medium mechs, while most people instinctively lean towards heavier chasses.
I think in the end it promotes build diversity.

Balancing by economy in a random drop f2p online game, and not a strategy game with a long-term campaign, is terrible. It's not actually balanced at all and has merely led to the proliferation of botting, akfing, scripting, suiciding, etc. in order for people to "earn" what they want to play. No one is running lighter mechs because they are cheaper anyway. They are running them because of a mix of lagshield and a terrible game mode that allows trivially easy backcapping. Their original claim was to balance weight classes on role warfare, but all that has turned out to mean one undefended, open red square directly on the other side of the map.


I like a lot of things about the ECM, even though I think it does a little too much for the tonnage.
For one, it opens up a new dimension of the game, allowing for electronic warfare and stealth.
Second, it made people play ravens, cicadas and commandos. Before ECM you'd rarely see one in the field, unless it was a trial mech.
One patch earlier you could easily get into an all-heavy match, with only a handful of mediums at best. Now, people are suddenly playing lights again.
Finally, it's a nice counter to noobtube streakcats and LRM boats. Before ECM, the former became a bit of a problem.

Yeah, it made people play Ravens and Commandos but now no longer Jenners unless they don't want to feel like they wasted their money getting one. Basically, all it did was swap the balance from everyone who wanted to be competitive having a Jenner to having an ECM light. Which is the problem with ECM, it's virtually mandatory to play even mildly competitively. Making a piece of equipment which is only limited to a few chassis mandatory in a game where drops are random has reduced build diversity not increased it. It's becoming clear to me you aren't playing 8mans or you wouldn't have said this. Every single 8man outside of the one I'm in runs 5 or 6 DDC Atlases with ECM and 2 or 3 Ravens or Commandos with ECM and the whole metagame is about stealth capping your opponents or base camping to prevent stealth capping. The gameplay at the top tier is entirely degenerate.
 

spectre

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Yep, I don't play 8 man drops. I usually PUG or stick to a 2-3 man premade which is where the game has its sweet spot. I entirely believe you when you say that such kind of play is becoming degenerate... because it's only natural,
especially given the limited game modes available.
In most MMOs I know (and that wouldn't be too many), players that push the whole competitive e-sport aspect of the game tend to devolve into cookie cutter builds and behaviors, just because it gives them a +1% advantage. It's hardly MWO that is at fault here.

Minimum winnings per match in a non-trial is 75k without premium, a very good win is about 150k. Let's be extraordinarily generous to the typical new or casual player, who is in reality going to get rolled nonstop by groups of vets, and say he earns 100k a match. That's 80 matches at a minimum, not counting him bothering to repair or rearm to earn a decent 25 ton mech, the lightest in the game.
Just to nitpick, is it a "decent" mech now or "the strongest mech in the game", because it's a totally different kind of fish.

That kind of play nets 8 million. To put that into proper perspective you an get two stock light mech for that money, and almost any mech in the game that is not fitted with an XL engine.
If you decide to buy, say a hunchback 4SP with that money, it leaves you enough spare change to buy endo steel structure and a good selection of weapons to experiment with.
I'd say, you get quite a bit for the ~10 hours invested. I don't have too much experience with other MMO, but comparing it to the ones I do know, it's pretty good progress knowing that you can get a good mech for competitive play in one or two days of playing.
 

Papa Môlé

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Just to nitpick, is it a "decent" mech now or "the strongest mech in the game", because it's a totally different kind of fish.

The COM2D is currently the best but any decent light will run around 7 million.


In what kind of insane world is 5 hours per day considered normal?

I posted a WTF response to someone in the PS2 thread saying it "only" took them 10 hours to get a single shotgun (and they were pretty good) and the response was l2p. It seems it's disturbingly normal now to accept these levels of grind in online games.
 

Norfleet

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In what kind of insane world is 5 hours per day considered normal?
Most of it? Assuming you work a normal 8 hour day, and are a lazy bastard and waste 8 of it sleeping, that still leaves another 8. What the hell are you doing in that time?
 

spectre

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Speaking of which, there's a big update due today that will attempt to rebalance the economy, add a new play mode and give starting players a cash earning boost.

When it comes to grind, hey, the model agruably works (at least for the developers, which is why it will most likely persist) - you are either an unwashed, unemployed manchild, so you have the time to grind your ass off,
or you have a job and little time, so you can cough up the dough to skip the parts you don't like. That said, what a bloke does with his time is nobody's business.
 
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they promised a modern multiplayer battletech 3025. i won't return to the game until it has enough features to be considered a modern multiplayer battletech 3025.
 

KoolNoodles

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Is this game still a piece of shit? I'm afraid to click the shortcut and see, because I'll probably have to download 2 gigs of patches only to find that nothing is fixed and I have to grind for two weeks to get a Cicada.
 
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At one point they introduced a bonus to cbills earned for the first 25 games you play or so. When I logged in I suddenly had 8 millions cbills as they were awarded retroactively. Apart from the introduction of - imho - way too good ECM, nothing has changed really.
 

Papa Môlé

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Is this game still a piece of shit? I'm afraid to click the shortcut and see, because I'll probably have to download 2 gigs of patches only to find that nothing is fixed and I have to grind for two weeks to get a Cicada.

I wasn't really playing anymore either but I came back for the Spider introduction patch. Needless to say they did not fail to disappoint.

There is a new capture the square x5 "conquest" game mode, lag-shielding lights who now have radar invisibility, slowered c-bill progression once you get past the rookie bonus, the almost completely useless Spider mech, rent-a-camo paint system, and a couple of map re-skins. Also a start up sequence with Betty and of course random balance changes I can't even remember.
 

Country_Gravy

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Is this game still a piece of shit? I'm afraid to click the shortcut and see, because I'll probably have to download 2 gigs of patches only to find that nothing is fixed and I have to grind for two weeks to get a Cicada.

I wasn't really playing anymore either but I came back for the Spider introduction patch. Needless to say they did not fail to disappoint.

There is a new capture the square x5 "conquest" game mode, lag-shielding lights who now have radar invisibility, slowered c-bill progression once you get past the rookie bonus, the almost completely useless Spider mech, rent-a-camo paint system, and a couple of map re-skins. Also a start up sequence with Betty and of course random balance changes I can't even remember.

So they fixed it?
 

spectre

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Actually, the lag shield got fixed quite a bit, (unless he's got 300 ping, but there's no going around that I guess) and that is pretty good news.

The bad news is, the atrocious matchmaker hasn't been changed, so don't go playing it alone.
And yep, the spider is pretty bad. Two laser hardpoints on one variant, three lasers on another, the third one has quadruple ballistics. On a 30 tonner.
It's only redeeming feature is that it handles like a charm, but still quickly dies to anything with SSRM.
 

Country_Gravy

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The last patch seems to have some good performance increases. Once the netcode and matchmaking gets fixed and community warfare is introduced this has the potential to be a really good Mechwarrior game. They have made some big strides in the last couple of patches.

They still don't have a lobby where you can pick what map and your team before dropping. They will need more maps for that anyway and probably the community warfare too. There has been talk of play modes where the objectives are different for each team like one team attacks and the other defends. Protecting/attacking a convoy could be cool as well if done right.
 

KoolNoodles

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The last patch seems to have some good performance increases. Once the netcode and matchmaking gets fixed and community warfare is introduced this has the potential to be a really good Mechwarrior game. They have made some big strides in the last couple of patches.

They still don't have a lobby where you can pick what map and your team before dropping. They will need more maps for that anyway and probably the community warfare too. There has been talk of play modes where the objectives are different for each team like one team attacks and the other defends. Protecting/attacking a convoy could be cool as well if done right.

It all just seems like no-brainer stuff that should have been in ages ago? I mean, there's hardly anything there, and it's still terribly optimized. I realize it's beta, but some of this is closed beta or even alpha stuff. There are four shitty small maps in the entire game, with one victory mechanic between them(not counting TDM kill em all). I mean, more power to them, but I just don't think the current development team has a) the talent, or b) the resources to make this anything other than a "what if" game of yesteryear.
 

Claw

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Anyone still playing this? Despite some grievances I like the basic gameplay alot.

But the matchmaker is so awful, most matches are onesided steamrolls.
 

Country_Gravy

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I play quite a bit. Community Warfare might be good, but the forums blew up when they mentioned that they might only let premium (paying) customers form merc groups. I am having a blast with my Jagermech. I think they are collecting a lot of data to implement the Elo ratings which will help out matchmaking. I think they are about 5 good updates from making this thing really click.
 
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I was it it from early beta, stopped playing around christmas or so. I really hate how much it reminds me of WoT and all it's faults.

Might still hop on to my centurion if any 'dexer wants to play.
 

KoolNoodles

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Stopped playing around Christmas, never looked back. They started with a broken system and piled on to that. Just don't think all the proposed band-aids can really fix a broken game to begin with(damage model, heat model, netcode, gameplay, optimization, etc.). Also, where's the content? There's almost nothing there.
 

Papa Môlé

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I think the thing that sealed it for me was some "event" I went out of my way to be on for only to see how incredibly unprofessional they handled it. It was some contest to kill the devs in a match, but only one dev at a time was on, they only played for like an hour or two counted all together (not individually), and they didn't even have a system in mind to be able to have a chance to drop when they did. They tried setting it up on stream later but then often messed up, forgot, and even purposefully gave the wrong times. The whole thing looked like a couple of guys just stayed an hour later at the office one night to play two or so games. On top of that, it was obvious they devs that played had no idea how their own game worked, let alone what the meta was like.
 

spectre

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I really liked their recent response to the ECM problem. Basically they conceded that they're not gonna change anything because now they (supposedly) reduced the lagshield effect and made PPC counter it for a few seconds.

Same here, I gave it a pass around christmas as well. Though a friend of mine still plays quite a bit, so I get freqently gen an earful about what's new. So far, not much, they introduced two really big maps, which seems to bring some incline to the build variety,
two new mechs and a few hero mechs that are pretty nice and all, but don't really bring that much new to the table.
They also added a test run feature for the newbs to get the lay of the land and shoot some targets which is nice. I also saw that flush coolant is back in form of a purchaseable 1-shot module.

I think I will leave this one for a few months, until more new features creep in, though I would really welcome a proper game lobby of sorts. I really have a soft spot for the game, dunno why,
but as of now the game doesn't feel like it's being handled professionally (and the fact that the devs said they never really planned any lobby speaks volumes).

Would be neat to play a 4 man premade with some 'dexers around some time in the future.
Anyways, if anyone's interested, I may be persuaded to take my Hunchback for a walk, unfortunately I won't be on Teamspeak.

I also have a few dragons and about 16 milion bucks to spend. Was planning to get me a cat or something with ecm, but eventually haven't gotten round to it. And the recent missile nerf didn't please me either.
 

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