Mechwarrior Online

[Chavelo]

Hello.

I've been playing Mechwarrior Online since late Closed Beta. The game officially launched last year. I thought I might try to drum up some interest for it in these forums. Though I know there's a bit of a divide between anime mecha fans and battletech fans, at least in some circles. But I think it's a good enough mech game that shouldn't matter.

Mechwarrior Online is a hard game. There's a learning curve in terms of learning to pilot. As well as getting a feel for what to do in different situations. There is no respawn. So mistakes can be unforgiving. But if you can stick with it and find the play style that suits you best. It can be a lot of fun to dominate the battlefield.

There are people on the forums that are eager to help new players. See here New Player Help

Some of you may not know. But Battletech actually used some of the designs from Robotech, Dougram and Crusher Joe for it's early releases. Example here.

Unfortunately because of some legalese that is a bit hazy. They lost the right to use them. Even so. There are legion of old school Battletech players who remember them and would love to see them in game. Robotech being greedily hamstrung by Harmony gold, we'll likely never see those particular designs in game. But they did work out a deal to release redesigns of the mechs based on Dougram and Crusher Joe.

Dougram
ShadowHawk

T10C Blockhead
Wolverine

H8 RoundFacer
Griffin

F4X Ironfoot
Thunderbolt

HT128 Bigfoot
The redesign more closely follows this picture Battlemaster 4S
MWO Battlemaster

And lastly. The Ostall of Crusher Joe fame, becomes the Locust in MWO.

I'm not sure of how many artists they have. But their primarily concept artist is Alex Iglesias. Aka Flyingdebris on deviant art. You can find his other works here.

Here's him doing the concept art for the King Crab, which was given to players who've supported the game through mech purchases. Obviously much jelly over his skills and a lot of love for his reworking of old Battletech designs.

There is a passionate, if at times a little virulent, community.

Here's some videos some fans have painstakingly put together https://i.ytimg.com/vi/EOLZ_AHr_sM/mqdefault.jpg
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iMIVnlTcd3U
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EOLZ_AHr_sM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VEQTorVoTy8
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6pu4unpJ36Q

This one someone animated. Which deserves special praise. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=56yGc-zVH_E

If you're interested in joining in on the fun. Please head over to http://mwomercs.com/ and download the game!

[Toxicity]

There doesn't seem to be much interest in Mechwarrior amongst the members of this forum from what I've seen. Back in the day I advertised Mechwarrior Living Legends and even bought several copies of Crysis Wars to give away to anybody who was interested. I think I only ended up giving only a single one away.

I've played MWO on and off a bit over the past couple years and to be brutally honest, I think its shit and I don't recommend it to anyone. Among many other glaring problems that have been present since closed beta and never fixed, the grind you have to go through in order to get anything remotely decent puts even the worst offenders in the MMORPG and JRPG genres to shame, unless of course you fork over some real life currency. If you're itching for some 'mech action on your PC, play Hawken or planetside or one of the older mechwarrior titles rather than this P2W disgrace.

[Chavelo]

There doesn't seem to be much interest in Mechwarrior amongst the members of this forum from what I've seen. Back in the day I advertised Mechwarrior Living Legends and even bought several copies of Crysis Wars to give away to anybody who was interested. I think I only ended up giving only a single one away.

I've played MWO on and off a bit over the past couple years and to be brutally honest, I think its ZOINKS and I don't recommend it to anyone. Among many other glaring problems that have been present since closed beta and never fixed, the grind you have to go through in order to get anything remotely decent puts even the worst offenders in the MMORPG and JRPG genres to shame, unless of course you fork over some real life currency. If you're itching for some 'mech action on your PC, play Hawken or planetside or one of the older mechwarrior titles rather than this P2W disgrace.

I've played far worse grindy games. Even the much vaunted World of Tanks causes you to lose money at a certain tier. You never ever lose money in MWO. If you keep on playing, you can get an Assault mech. But it does take effort and time. Which honestly is the same thing required of you in other games like this.

The fact you suggest Hawken as a better title says something. The devs of that game are selling it off.

P2W? Really? You have access to everything that everyone else does. You just have to work for it. Even then, they always have some weekend event giving away mechbays, or C-bills, or whole mechs if you can get enough points that weekend. They've even rebalanced the Clans so they're not outright better. Though it's still an on going affair. Most of the current Clan Mechs are available for C-bills.

Don't get me wrong. I don't like the grind either. But I also don't have to pay for anything except mechbays. Fortunately getting ranks in Community Warfare gets you a few mechbays. As well as the odd weekend event.

Edit: There is a way to lose money. You have to be a team killer. Though the penalty isn't high enough in my opinion.

[Toxicity]

I admit I haven't played hawken recently so I'm in the dark regarding whatever the developers are currently doing with that game, but when I did play it I had a hell of a lot more fun with that than I ever had with MWO.

There's no way you're going to convince anybody with their head on straight that MWO isn't a shameless cash cow, so stop trying. They sold golden mech skins for 500 dollars apiece for fucks sake. Sure, technically everything may be available using ingame cbills but the game is designed in such a way that taking the time to earn all those cbills to buy your Daishi or Madcat or whatever is clearly the less desirable option because its going to take you an eternity to do so.

Steam says that I have spent 16 hours total playing Hawken, and in that time I was able to earn the currency ingame to purchase 5 or 6 mechs of varying price and weight class to use. After maybe 30 hours total gametime in MWO all I own is a Blackjack and a Victor, and according to the statistics on the MWO website my average cbill payout per match is under 120 thousand cbills. I'm not sure how that compares to say yours or another player's, but I've got positive ratios for kills/deaths and match wins/losses so I know I'm no slouch.

With my statistics it would take roughly 145 matches to earn the required cbills to buy a Daishi. According to my map statistics, it looks as if the average MWO match seems to last about 5 minutes. Add in time spent in lobbies and in the mechlab in between matches and I feel 10 minutes would be a fair number for average time spent from one match start to another. With that information, I calculate it would take just over 24 hours total ingame time in order to earn the 17.5 million cbills for a Daishi.

Fuck. That. MWO doesn't aim to make earning rewards fun or challenging, it aims to make earning rewards as lengthy and as time consuming as possible in the hopes that you'll buckle and give them money so that you can avoid playing their shitty game for a literal day straight in order to purchase a single battlemech.

[Chavelo]

$500 gold mechs that you hardly ever see in game. And it wasn't just $500 dollars for one mech. You got the whole pack if you bought it. It was purely a superficial thing. I don't know why people take issue with that. I doubt they made all that much money. I honestly think whoever bought it is so ashamed of it, that they don't want to pilot in the regular queue for fear of being trashed.

They practically give you mechs in Hawken. I played for a while. And it was fun. But it just didn't hold my attention. I couldn't get into there mech designs or the game mechanics.

120K C-bills is about right. Unless you can farm up some of the side bonuses. They added a few other ways to earn c-bills. Yeah it's a grind. And it does suck without premium time. But somehow I have like 10 mechs. 3 of which are Banshees. It took a while. But I had fun with most of them. Love the Blackjack X1 and the Banshee 3M.

Community Warfare isn't a great per hour money earner. But if you're in a decent unit. You can pull in a decentish amount and enjoy yourself as you do.

The thing is. If you enjoy the gameplay. You forget all about C-bills. But it does suck when you get tired of a chassis. And then you realize, you have to play hours to get the next mech : /

If you're not enjoying the gameplay itself. You should just not play. It's not the kind of game where you can just collect em all easily. Unless you want to spend money.

[Toxicity]

People take issue with the gold mech skins and their price because PGI asking those kinds of prices for that kind of thing shows that the only thing they care about is lining their own pockets. They don't care about making a game that lives up to the quality of previous titles in the franchise, they don't care about making their playerbase happy, all PGI cares about is money and the Transverse fiasco only reinforces this - PGI saw people giving Chris Roberts millions and millions of dollars for Star Citizen and they wanted in on the action too. It backfired because everyone knows PGI's track record with keeping promises from their experience with MWO.

As for gameplay, MWO's isn't all bad. It can be fun if you've got people to drop with, but that's merely a cherry ontop of an enormous pile of dung and it doesn't come close to making up for all of the other shortcomings of the game and its developers.

[Chavelo]

People take issue with the gold mech skins and their price because PGI asking those kinds of prices for that kind of thing shows that the only thing they care about is lining their own pockets. They don't care about making a game that lives up to the quality of previous titles in the franchise, they don't care about making their playerbase happy, all PGI cares about is money and the Transverse fiasco only reinforces this - PGI saw people giving Chris Roberts millions and millions of dollars for Star Citizen and they wanted in on the action too. It backfired because everyone knows PGI's track record with keeping promises from their experience with MWO.

As for gameplay, MWO's isn't all bad. It can be fun if you've got people to drop with, but that's merely a cherry ontop of an enormous pile of dung and it doesn't come close to making up for all of the other shortcomings of the game and its developers.

You clearly feel the game cheated you in some way. I don't want to get into a flame war over it. So let's just leave it at that.

Keep Calm and Urbanmech!

[Toxicity]

I'm not here to troll or flame, only to voice my opinion, and MWO has never cheated me out of anything except maybe a catapult I lost during closed alpha when the servers got wiped for a large update.

Additionally, if you'd bothered to use the search function or do 30 seconds' worth of digging through the gaming subforum you'd find this thread and observe that at one point I was probably the biggest supporter of MWO on these forums before PGI began to show their true colors.

[Chavelo]

Actually I did look through the pages and found it on the sixth page. That's when I decided to make my own thread.

I just really don't see the reason for the hatred. They tried to make a scifi title, when scifi titles are really popular, that's a smart business strategy. Like the legion of zombie/survival games that came after DayZ.

I just don't see what specifically they did. Aside from not living up to a vague notion of what the game should have been.

[Chavelo]

Urbanmech day!

Beef does a video showing off the release of the Urbanmech. A mech that by most accounts was considered a joke mech. But people claim to be much more.