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The Tale of MWO Sounds A Lot Like STO
gooddaytodie39
Member Posts: 0 Arc User
http://www.gamefront.com/mechwarrior-online-forum-ragesplosion/
The info on page 3 of the article struck a chord with me. Particularly the part about so many players wanting a game to be something it's not. Also, the hope that a game would go under, so another more competent Dev could pick up the IP and make a quality game with it.
I go back and forth on my feelings towards STO. Sometimes I really like it. Sometimes I don't. It does seem though that the longer the game goes on, the farther away from the IP we love it gets.
I don't want this to turn into a debate about canon or Cryptic bashing. It's just food for thought and an interesting read about a similar game community.
The info on page 3 of the article struck a chord with me. Particularly the part about so many players wanting a game to be something it's not. Also, the hope that a game would go under, so another more competent Dev could pick up the IP and make a quality game with it.
I go back and forth on my feelings towards STO. Sometimes I really like it. Sometimes I don't. It does seem though that the longer the game goes on, the farther away from the IP we love it gets.
I don't want this to turn into a debate about canon or Cryptic bashing. It's just food for thought and an interesting read about a similar game community.
Post edited by gooddaytodie39 on
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Nothing new. =p
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I don't play STO religiously. I could if I got the Deep Space Nine Bundle, but that's kind of expensive for the Bajoran Vedek costume pack...
STO might have some similarities to MWO, but those similarities are seen in multiple MMO's, many of which are still alive and thriving today -- including some of the negative aspects.
I was given a permanent ban from MWO after initiating a chargeback to get my Founder's Pack money back, in addition to getting a refund for my Project Phoenix pack. This is the only game I have been willing to 'poison the well' over because of just how mishandled it was.
The changes we have seen to STO have largely been positive as compared to launch. Yes, there are controversial decisions made. Yes, there are times I wonder what goes on through Cryptic's head when it comes to decisions I see as blatantly unhelpful -- and is then later proven true as a result. Yes, there are times I've thrown various devs under the bus for calling them out on decisions that were not as harmless as they were pitched to be.
But MWO took that to an entirely different level. That article is fairly truthful, with very little in the way of exaggeration.
Cryptic would have to do several things to even be compared to PGI.
First Reason: Give an absolution on something reviled by the majority playerbase as never happening, and then changing their mind.
Why That Isn't Going To Happen: The playerbase is far more divided and diverse than MWO's community was. The gameplay was basic enough that any change could have easily tipped the balance into a new 'meta'. STO's community on the other hand has such a variety of opinions on various topics and what they want to see out of the game that it's rarely, if ever, as black-and-white as the decisions at PGI were.
Example: The majority of the STO playerbase (which again is largely improbable given just how diverse opinions are) would have had to ask the EP if there were any plans to implement a C-Store Option to simply buy all their reputation system XP instead of having to earn it.
The EP would then have to say something like, "That's never going to happen, we want players to work their way through the rep system."
Then a few months later, that happens -- and the playerbase is obviously outraged, with the EP backing up their decisions by giving weasely responses such as, "Our data shows that there is not a signifigant change in how the game works with this new c-store option to buy all your reputation xp."
Their forum moderators were actually very cool about multiple things, including negative criticism. But they weren't going to tolerate any "PGI Hatefest" threads. To be perfectly honest, I think the STO forums could use some more heavy-handed moderation. Too many posters get away with too much. PGI let people get away with things, but not to the extent PWE's forums do.
There were some other similarities -- namely that PGI's devs chose to communicate on Twitter rather than their own forums. This is a parallel I see with STO's forums. I think there should be less of that.
And what else... oh yes. Saying something extremely controversial is going to be implemented, but only limited to a particular ruleset in gameplay -- and then implementing it across the board on launch day without telling anyone.
It would be like Cryptic saying that there would be "Open PvP" on various social zones or planets, but only in those particular areas, and if you did not want to participate, there were non-PvP zones of those same instances so everybody wins.
And then on launch day every social zone in every instance is Open PvP and then them not telling anyone, not even in the patch notes.
And then the EP giving an extremely convoluted non-apology over it.
PGI's company is about as ethically corrupt as EA or SoE. They pitched MWO as 'the thinking man's shooter', with robust information warfare and role-based tactics. But after many controversial changes, the game transformed into this twisted mess of lies, deceit, and an unwillingness to listen to their players.
They dumbed the game down to pander to the lowest common denominator, something STO does -- but STO was never pitched toward a very narrow market niche like MWO originally was. They claimed they were willing to buck trends and provide an extremely immersive 'mechwarrior' experience in a way no other game has, and they did not care how unpopular they were going to be because of it.
This isolated those players (including me) because they wanted to expand their market to include the really dumb players I happen to despise in many games who can barely feed themselves without assistance. These decisions included the controversial 'cool shot' implementation after the EP plainly spelled out there would be no 'coolant flush' systems in MWO because they wanted players to be responsible with their mechs' heat levels -- and coolant flushes were seen as a cheap method to rapidly reduce heat after firing your weapons irresponsibly.
When the EP first said that, it made me smile because the company was willing to punish players for not being responsible and smart with their equipment. But when they went back on that, it understandably frustrated many because it was more evidence of removing personal responsibility and impulse control for the sake of more players who could 'easily' drop in and play.
It was like watching Anakin Skywalker gradually turn into Darth Vader. And unless you were there, nobody could fairly say Cryptic is doing the exact same thing PGI is, because they aren't.
TL;DR: Cryptic isn't anywhere as bad as PGI. I was there at the beginning. I was in STO at the beginning. Comparing Cryptic/PWE's decisions to PGI's decisions is like comparing Vanilla Ice Cream that might have a fly in it to Medical Waste Flavored Ice Cream.
MWO probably should have been an AAA title with SP content and MP maps, make money the old fashioned way by selling boxes. F2P is killing gaming.
I've played many MMORPGs but one stood out head and shoulders as the worst handling of a game and its community. SOE and Star Wars Galaxies in 2005 with the "NGE" changes. I won't get into the long specifics for what happened there, but SOE had a blatant disregard for the paying players (this is in the day when Sub-based games were the norm).
SOE sold the "Trials of Obi-Wan" expansion pack that was designed under the previous ruleset / gameplay. People bought the pack thinking, "Hey, I can use this for my ___ with his professions!" Then within a day or two of selling the expansion pack, SOE rolled out the completely unannounced changes (the "NGE" I mentioned).
Anyways, SOE forced massive, core game-altering changes that simplified the game, sweeping aside aspects of the game into complete nonexistence, etc. It rendered parts of the brand new expansion pack obsolete since it was deleted.
I can still remember the huge rage this caused in the community. I can still remember so many players from once large, vibrantly populated servers clearing out within a week. I remember Ahazi, one of the larger servers, becoming a ghost town when people put their money where their mouth was and quite the game. I remember many threads begging for a rollback, but SOE replies that they can't do that anymore. They lost the old code or some stupid TRIBBLE like that.
Anyways, I can REALLY go into far more details into the SWG debacle, but I don't feel like getting myself depressed for the rest of the night
Sorry to hear this for the MWO fans. Nothing like loving some game, supporting it, then having it changed into something completely changed for the worse.
cryptic take note of MWO
Go back in history and read up about SWG
SWG should never have failed ................Never Ever
MWO should not Fail
STO should learn from these mistakes.......If you dont learn from history.....Well you know the ending
Warmaker i saw the NGE comming from things happening on the Forums and the jhon smedley report i read bout how SOE used those forums as a vent valve
Sold my Imp jedi for 500.00 USD$ and quit the game ...best luck call Ive ever made
Saphire.. Science ground......Ko'el Romulan space Tac
Leva........Tactical ground.....Koj Romulan space Eng
JJ-Verse will never be Canon or considered Lore...It will always be JJ-Verse
What's happening with MWO is a real shame because I love Battletech & MechWarrior.
Joined January 2009
hopefully they see the writing on the wall before its too late.
Been around since Dec 2010 on STO and bought LTS in Apr 2013 for STO.
STO has terribly balanced and underdeveloped PvP, but you know what - it has a lot of PVE content, and PvP is realyl an afterthought.
MW:O has terribly balanced and underdeveloped PvP - and nothing else.
PGI has continually failed to deliver to their own promises. "3 months after open beta, we will have Community Warfare" - 2 years later, it's still not there.
"The game is frist and foremost 3PV, and we will never require you to play with or against 3PV players" - a few months later, 3PV is default option and you can't say whether you want to play against 3PV players or not. But hey, not only that - the reason they wanted 3PV was to make it easier for new players to familiarze themselves with torso twist seperate from movement direction - and they harmstrung the 3PV so hard (of course to appease the opponents of 3PV) that it doesn't have a mini-map, and you can't actually see your legs very well either. But you can still look around cover (the reason people hate 3PV in Mechwarrior games).
So they not only went back on their assurances, they also picked the worst possible implementation that could satisfy none of the design goals you could hope to achieve with it.
Normally I assume incompetence before malovolence, but this seems to be the worst combination of both.
That said, neither 3PV nor Community Warfare is my big issue. Not even the bad UI 2.0.
The big issue is the lack of game balance in a game that is purely PvP.
STO would be very, very difficult to fix. I have no idea where to start, really, other perhaps than from scratch (which is not feasible).
MW:O has a few big issues that cause most of the fundamental problems for which plenty of solutions have been proposed, and from there, yo ucan probably iterively improve the game.
And then you have things that are just disappointment. The concept of role warfare and information warfare as outlined in the original dev blogs sounded cool, and I think also feasible. But the game has achieved very little, seemingly with no real effort to try.
It's the first game I ever went out of my way to get banned from. I normally do not believe in asking for my money back -- since I know there are people that need to pay the bills and doing a chargeback is what I normally consider a shady and underhanded tactic.
However, PGI went above and beyond just being a bad development studio. It was a combination of things, most of which were pointed out in that article. It was never just one thing I was really passionate about, or two. As the article pointed out, I wasn't the only one who asked for a chargeback, either (the way Canadian Law works, unless the product is shipped, it's considered 'non-delivered' and you can ask for a return, which is how we were able to get a chargeback. The game was still considered 'in beta' even though to anyone else it was beta-in-name-only, but in Canadian business law it still counted as 'non-delivered goods').
The downside was getting a permanent ban from the game if we went that route. It's a permanent ban I was not only happy to take, but one I'm shamelessly proud of.
If it was one or two things I was unhappy with, that's one thing. I'm a big boy and I can deal with disappointment. But what PGI did was a systemic failure in business, development, and public relations from the very top of the ladder to the very bottom -- though to be fair the moderators were generally pretty chill.
I mean it's pretty bad when you have Garth asking for submissions on what the paintjob for his 'mech should look like while the players are producing torches and pitchforks for the TRIBBLE they were pulling.
From titles I have played, MMORPGs or not, once the dev team goes a certain direction of devlopment, they're never going back. I'm sure there may very well be cases of the opposite, but I do not know any. Fighting games, FPS, strategy, MMOs. Didn't matter. Once the patch implemented, it was never going back.
For me, SWG was the biggest example of that. SOE clearly saw a massive exodus of once paying customers, once busy servers being emptied out. All those regular subscriptions, actual money coming in.
Gone.
And it stayed that way. I lingered on in SWG for a handful of months after the massive changes, after all the departures. It was eerie traveling around seeing once bustling, busy player hubs empty of people. Player cities that hosted player stores and merchants, no longer operating. Matter of fact, the departed, angry players customized their shop signs displaying their anger with SOE before they left (their buildings remained until the maintenance pool of their housing was used up). When I left, it was still empty and nobody came in to replace us.
I'm sure SOE with their data saw all this. Yet they never rolled back. They never undid the changes and notified the departed that things will go back to like it was.
They rather sit with the changes and do nothing to get once loyal customers to come back.
That example with SWG is very extreme. It's also why I believe the devs for MWO won't turn it around. They're fixed on a direction and they're going that way regardless. Maybe for the sake of their playerbase this won't be so. But I'm not an optimist.
What's funny is that the guys at SOE said they weren't concerned with SWG Emulators since they weren't any threat to the game. But the SWG Emulators are not only the currently functioning SWG servers around, but the major SWG emulator is one of the most popular out there in the industry. SOE suffered a severe case of being out of touch with their customers, just like PGI.
It's also why I'm pretty vocal about things like 'retiring' fleet-level ships. I want to at least try to turn it around so Cryptic won't go down this road that they paved with the Fleet Patrol Escort. Whether they do or not, I have the clear conscience I tried to help.
Thankfully Cryptic isn't anywhere near on the level as SOE or PGI. If they were, I would probably be a lot more negative toward them than I usually am.
As far as a cautionary tale for STO, I don't think Cryptic is anywhere near that, and not headed that way.
My character Tsin'xing
My character Tsin'xing
I died in almost every game but I enjoyed the balance. Only reason I left was STO and a friend. His PC could not handle MWO and he has been a friend for almost 30 years, so I jumped on the fact that he could handle STO.
What they have done to the game in MWO is such a shame. It was amazing and fun. It was bound to happen though, with enough new mechs and added features like cool shot, it was bound to happen.
Shame.
I still loves me some sto though:D
But honestly, everything wrong with STO pales in comparison to what happened with MWO. I played a little bit of MWO since early beta and decided, due to the low end computer I was using at the time, to wait and see further development from it. To my disappointment, I hardly saw any. PGI seemed more hellbent to sell overpriced mech packages and make a quick buck off Battletech fans. I kept tabs with the games development from time to time. 90% of all feedback that I've read has been extremely negative. It wasn't until they announced that they would be adding overpriced clan mech packages into the game that I really lost it. I simply could not believe such a company would have the gall to pull this kind of stunt. (though I'm sure there are far worse cases than this)
It was then, for me, that MWO suddenly put a lot of other online games into a more positive light.
Been around since Dec 2010 on STO and bought LTS in Apr 2013 for STO.