Mech Warriors Online.

[spartinslayer]

I noticed there is no M.W.O thread so I made one.
Official website --------------------> http://www.mwomercs.com/
It seems a oddly unpopular game for how good it is. I love the game but cant get any of my friends to play. I am wondering what the community as a whole thinks.

[Sable Dove]

There was a topic about it quite some time ago. It's just fallen away because the game isn't all that popular.

The game is terribly unbalanced, and the devs don't seem to care. The game has improved in many respects, but the gameplay becomes repetitive after a while. Honestly, the only reason the game is still active is partly because it has a popular IP to work with, partly because the art team is pretty good at interpreting the absolutely awful mech art from the tabletop, and partly because the game has basically no competition. I don't know of any other relatively recent mech-sims out there.

The game is filled with grind if you're the kind of person who wants to own a lot of mechs. And unless you're content with four of the 100+ mechs, it's going to cost you money. About 1.25 to 1.50 USD per mech over the four, because every mechbay costs money. And that's if you buy the mechs with in-game currency.

Everything is grossly overpriced. For a camo pattern for one chassis (all variants of a single mech) costs 3.25 USD. Specialized patterns cost about 5 dollars. Individual colours, while usable on all mechs, cost between about 2 and 5 dollars. This means that to fully customize one mech, it costs probably between 3 and 20 dollars.

They sell some individual variants of mech for 30+ dollars, and then in order to make them competitive, you have to buy two more variants of the same chassis and grind out the mech efficiencies.

Not to mention that at least once, they have refunded peoples MC (the game's real-money currency) for paints and patterns, then significantly increased the prices, forcing players to either pay more money to get the content they already had, or be stuck with MC that they didn't necessarily have a use for.

Basically, the game's largest failings are that the Devs don't give a [censored] about the quality of the gameplay. Balance is extremely low-priority, while anything they can monetize gets all of the productive time, even if the community doesn't even want it.


The community has been waiting for 'Community Warfare' for over a year, at least. If they just implemented a lobby system, the community easily could have taken care of community warfare, and probably in much better ways. However, the developers instead insist on their own - heavily-monetized - form of community warfare.


A lot of features have been left by the wayside because they wanted to get the second iteration of the UI implemented, and thusfar, they have put out a couple of terrible test-builds that are largely worse than what we have now, and far worse than fan UIs that have been around pretty much since the game's beginnings.


TL;DR: The game has improved a fair bit over the last year, mostly in the engine, but in terms of balance and interesting gameplay, it's no better than when I started playing about a year ago. The devs put exceptionally low priority on game balance unless they make a dumb change that almost literally makes the game unplayable because they buffed an already overpowered weapon, so if you don't have a mech that can mount 2-3 of them, you might as well not play.

I suggest playing to see if you enjoy it, but please don't give them your money for now. The best bet we have for a good mech-sim is that this game will fail, and the IP will be sold to a more-competent/less-greedy developer (though hopefully the same art team can stay on it).

[spartinslayer]

Well thank you for the honest reply. i under stand what you are saying but it's just that i loved the whole series before the online so i'm inclined to love this game. yes the game is a grind and not balanced but like you i hope it gets sold and improved. But for now I guess I better grind for three days.

[HeckobA]

I've played it quite a bit. Really loved the Mechwarrior series.
Stopped playing when it failed to update once and now the updates have built up and it still won't install that one...
Might redownload it some time, but probably not in a while.

There's also the thing where the devs made some promises to the original backers, that they've now broken. It was to make the game more appealing to the general public, as opposed to what the people who loved the game enough to back it originally wanted.
Me, I don't particularly mind, but you can see how that might piss people off about the game.

[MeaCulpa, S.C.M.]

I played this game way, way back in the day, and I forgave most of its failings since it was in beta. The fact that the balance is every bit as [censored] as it was when I left it makes me sincerely happy mektek is still around to scratch that particular itch (even if MW4 isn't anywhere near as pretty). It's been a good while since I've played either though.

[Sable Dove]

Were you around for the "launch"? Literally the only special thing they did for the official launch is remove the 'beta' tag from the logo. The patch that week wasn't even a very good patch. And now they're talking about UI 2.0 and Community warfare as the 'launch package'. They literally launched the game without the launch package.

In case you're interested, the current 'meta' is thus: Dual-AC20 Catapults or Jagermechs (Jager is better); dual-Gauss Catapults, Jagermechs, or Cataphracts; Highlanders with AC20+2PPCs; or anything boating Ultra AC5s (hint: the cash-only Ilya Muromets is pretty much the only mech that can viably use triple-UAC5s, making it borderline pay-to-win.


The current huff is about the introduction of Clans, and how they're selling them for 10$ a variant, or 30$ per chassis, but they don't all come individually. For instance, if you just want the Mad Cat/Timber Wolf, you have to buy the 210 dollar package. And this is for content that they've slated for a June 2014 release, and considering Community warfare is over a year behind schedule, the concern is basically that they're charging obscene amounts of money for something that might not actually be out for a couple of years. Also, they've given no actual info on the mechs other than a partial piece of concept art and the name. No indication of speed, agility, or hardpoints.

The whole thing stinks like a desperate cash-grab as the game dies. Wringing out those suckers with more cash than sense, who are probably going to get a month to play with their toys before the game shuts down because priority is on monetization, rather than gameplay.

[HeckobA]

Well, I HATE that clan mechs have to be bought with money. Because the moment I saw them, I just got a little nerdgasm or something. All those beautiful awesome mechs I know and love from Mechwarrior 2 (my first proper game ever, which I replayed umptillion times)
So detail, such awesome.

[Sable Dove]

Well they will eventually be released for C-Bills. Plus, if you buy them now, you don't actually get them until June. Conveniently just past the point where you can take legal action through most banks.

Plus, they're going to be 'balanced' with IS mechs. But don't worry, they're still 50% more expensive. Because people aren't paying for enough content, so obviously the solution is to increase the cash prices and the grind!


Also, they bragged about how Microsoft told them they were doing a good job, and extended their rights to the IP, which a lot of people took as a slap in the face. "Good news! We're so good at exploiting our monopoly that you're not going to have a chance for a competent development team to make a Mechwarrior game for seven more years!"

When Microsoft says you're doing a good job, you probably shouldn't tell your customers that.