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Mechwarrior Online Developer Redefines Community Warfare
New submitter MeatoBurrito writes "The latest iteration of Mechwarrior was crowdfunded (without Kickstarter) as a free-to-play first-person mech simulator. However, despite promises to the founders, the game has been shifted to a third-person arcade shooter and now the community is rioting. This followed a series of other unpopular decisions; the developers decided to sell an item for real money that had a significant impact on gameplay, crossing the line separating cosmetic/convenience items and 'pay-to-win.' Then they added a confusing game mechanic to limit its use, which had the unfortunate side effect of making some strategies completely useless. From the article: 'PGI’s community practices showcase a fundamental misunderstanding of both freemium development and community management. The developer has never had to deal with such a large player base before, and it has never had to deal with the strains of continuous development before. Rather, PGI seems to be handling Mechwarrior Online in much the same way they might a AAA game: by keeping quiet and only discussing its work in vague terms. ... Mechwarrior Online’s road to launch is a cautionary consumer tale, fraught with anger and betrayal. It shows how a company can take a fan base dedicated to an old IP and completely alienate it through lack of communication, unpopular features, and oathbreaking. It shows how players need to be cautious of supporting a project based solely on the IP backing it.'"
The top tier Cool Shot is what the author is saying was pay-to-win. I never used one. I built my mechs to not overheat and thus take advantage of opponents who did.
I've been playing the game for 6 months. It's been fun, but I've just been finding it too repetitive lately. I'd still recommend it to anyone who likes the MechWarrior concept. Just be prepared to spend time on the forums learning how to play, as no tutorial is provided by the developer.
They were selling all of the mechs people want to play with for cash. The entire stable of mechs. All for sale.
This is very wrong, so much so it must be an intentional lie. Out of 93 'mech variants, only 12 are cash-only. 81 are available for in-game currency.
Can you download and drop into an atlas and go killing? Hell no. You got a very very limited selection of what to do. And what you could do with it.
As a new player, you'll start out in a selection of trial 'mechs while you earn in-game currency to purchase your own 'mech (that you can then customize to your liking for more in-game currency). To facilitate this, you get a rather hefty in-game currency bonus for your first 25 games. At the end of those 25 matches, you'll have enough both to purchase and customize and Atlas, if that's what you want.
Every battle quickly shaped up to be paid players stomping the shit repeatedly out of free players.
Almost the entire point of the mechwarrior series was behind a credit card. Thats not any sort of free to play. That's flat out pay to play
It's also not true. The Hero 'mechs (the cash-only 'mechs) aren't superior to the in-game currency ones, and there's generally not enough of them on a team to make a difference anyway. People generally play in regular, non-Hero 'mechs. What is happening though is that organized teams "stomp the shit" out of disorganized groups of non-team players. But hey, it's a team game.
these people ruined it.
While there's no love lost between me and PGI, they haven't actually ruined the game yet. They seem to do their damndest to get there, but they haven't quite managed yet. At its core, the game is a really great 'mech simulation; it's just all the other bits that suck.
Oh and the fact that it's getting less and less BattleTech with every patch. That sucks really bad as well.
"Total destruction the only solution" - Bob Marley