The Rage of the Mechwarrior Online Community (2013)
gamefront.com
gamefront.com
The reason for the fork? The other mod made missiles follow slightly wider turning arcs, so they were harder to dodge by going around corners. It seems like a tiny difference, but high-level competitive players want their missiles exactly right because different missile tracking leads to different viable tactics. "That shot into that tunnel is a sure kill" turns into "that shot is unlikely to hit"; "I can dodge that" turns into "I have no option but to run". The primary developer of the other mod was not a high-level competitive player and did not see this as a problem. Merely suggesting the fix (which my wife originally coded as a patch to the other mod), with simulations, a mathematical proof of correctness, and uniformly positive feedback from many top-level pilots, was enough to touch off a flamewar that wasn't settled for weeks.
People can be fanatical about their video games.
[0] the game is Descent (1 and 2). Her mod can be found at https://github.com/CDarrow/DXX-Retro . The other mod is at http://www.dxx-rebirth.com/ . Current competitive 1v1 play is at http://descentchampions.org/ and group play is at http://descentrangers.com .
If you were active on Kali or Kahn and want to reconnect with old friends, also check out https://www.facebook.com/groups/kalikahn/ . We've recently had an influx of early online players (kiln, Scoundrl, Grax, Lioness, Dtile, Arch_Angel!, R2D2, Vlider, Moon, Merl, and the list goes on.)
The flip side of being fanatical about our game: we run into people we used to play with/against 20 years ago, and we're instantly friends.
Not the first for me, but Doom 2 and Descent were the first one that have been successful in my circles. I remember having played Descent 1 and 2 for long hours, completing both solo and played Descent 2 coop with friends, then on a whim, tried to hop into Kali and tore basically everyone apart, as most people were clueless about 3D ambushes and dogfight mechanics.
The descent series were underrated, innovative gems. That D2 intro had some of the most memorable lines to me[0]. Still have the original (badly scratched) disc somewhere.
Luckily it's just a promise but I still think that's a bit fucked up.
By higher profit they probably mean any profit at all. Gamers have zero ability to read between the lines. This isn't a bunch of greedy devs driving Ferraris that want more money to buy a Lambo. This reeks of a desperate hail mary to save the studio and avoid shutting down. The game is probably a total failure and they are doing anything and everything they can to not lay the whole team off.
Gamers have a right to be angry I suppose. Go ahead. Be angry. If a company can't make payroll it doesn't matter of it's community is angry or happy.
It's why I can ever work in the videogame industry, a fickle and unsympathetic user base who often has no comprehension or respect for the scale of the product they are using.
Except this is an example of features being added that the community didnot want.
I think PGI could have saved themselves a lot of grief by:
- Getting private matchmaking out much earlier than May this year. It's been requested since day one, and would have kept the hardcore folks busy until community warfare.
- Learn the art of tweaking game balance. They drop patches every two weeks. Instead of making huge, sometimes game wrecking, balance changes every three months they could have nudged the balance slightly each patch. "Missiles seem slightly too easy to avoid - making them 3% faster" doesn't make anyone blow a gasket. "Bumping missile speed 75%" will.
There are quite a number of features or promised features that have elicited rage from the community and I think the way these have been handled continues to fuel that rage.
The game model is based on the wildly successful world of tanks, and the core fan base is older with deep pockets. Everyone I know who plays has put in at least $50-100, and some I know have spent as much as $700(!).
If the studio is on the brink of disaster, sure, I could see hail-mary moves being made. What doesn't seem to make sense is not making those moves be crowd pleasers.
It seems like the lead designer really is both disconnected with the fans and loves to troll parts of the community. And the community managers that have been put in place compound the problems.
If the game isn't making money it's a shame - but it's probably a mismanagement issue.
A failing game is always a shitty situation. Shitty for the players. Shitty for the devs. Shitty for the studio stakeholders. No one wins. :(
It may be that the existing game is great as is, they just need to find players who want to spend money on that game but don't know it existing. User acquisition is a big deal these days. It's very difficult to do well. That assumes it can be done. If a game is too niche then the potential audience just may not be big enough.
So they went with the next option, change the game to try to increase the size of the potential audience. This has a high risk of alienating your current base, which is what happened here.
Like I said in another reply, it's a shitty situation all around. Shitty for players. Shitty for devs. Shitty for company owners.
This comment just took me back to my time in The Matrix Online, and the perpetual anger the community had with Sony and their lack of development/interest/activity etc. Of course it turned out they had a few hundred subscribers that simply didn't cover costs of keeping the game online let alone improving it.
Mistakes were certainly made by Monolith and subsequently Sony, but that's not the point. It's hard when you're emotionally invested in a game to accept poor communication and seemingly inevitable wind down, especially when the game is purely online.
There's a similar theme of broken promises there. However, Chucklefish has been updating pretty regularly and acting on a lot of constructive player feedback, so the overall negativity strikes me as somewhat confusing.
Another rather notorious and perhaps more justifiable example of community backlash can be found by looking at forums[2] for, and general controversy[3] surrounding, Infestation: Survivor Stories (formerly The War Z).
[0] http://www.reddit.com/r/starbound/
[1] http://community.playstarbound.com/index.php
[2] http://steamcommunity.com/app/226700/discussions/
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infestation:_Survivor_Stories#...
As time went on and they didn't deliver people got agitated again. Chucklefish's response: 'Communicating so much with the community has ruined morale and killed productivity.'
Community's response: 'Wait what? It's our fault you aren't getting anything done?'
Chucklefish: 'No no we're getting things done.'
The regular updates consist of art, 'what I ate for lunch today'-esque non sequiturs, and empty promises (feature lists any zealous 12 year old would make up). Those do nothing to quell the growing negativity.
The outpouring of negativity in /r/starbound did not come quickly or easily and could still be reversed. Chucklefish just has to deliver.
The response was that they didn't want to encourage people using password managers. I pointed out that what they were effectively encouraging was password reuse which is far worse. And of course no two-factor and the forum password (same as account password) is not transmitted over HTTPS according to one thread.
I moved on to try Hawken. Hawken had the exact same problem and my support post in the forum elicited no response.
Hard to get excited about whatever they have to offer with my massive backlog on Steam. Warframe was a lot of fun for the 20 or so hours I typically put into a game.
When it comes to large projects I tend to generalize. Lack of attention to detail at any level usually comes from the top down and is pervasive.
* For instance the sovereignty system in Eve Online is quite controversial with some very large and powerful factions complaining and even trying to "break the game" until a change is made.
[1]: http://themittani.com/news/b-r5rb-biggest-battle-all-eve
Not that the situation has improved much since (Helloooo $500 golden clan mech cash grab and general clan release screw-ups), but probably needs a (2013) in title.
The article doesn't quite touch on how hostile / trolling some of the PGI staff (Paul) have been to their community.
The community became so broken that the sub-reddits split (See /r/mwo for the haters and /r/outreachhpg for the believers)
The rage has mostly died down I think because most people but the true believers have given up and moved on to other games.
Putting out "gold plated mechs" for five hundred bucks basically sealed the deal for a large portion of the player base. Also, they took up the trick of having sales for items to be delivered three to six months out. That lets them avoid the charge back period on credit cards, so if they are really late or never deliver there is no recourse.
Combine that with forever missing deadlines on key features; namely giving the game a long term point other than endless death matches; and its not a great place to be.
The even co-opted an early friendly site to where the postings by that sites presenters are routinely shouted down on reddit.
It gave fans of the genre very nice looking mechs but deliver a multi player version of MechWarrior 2 many wanted.
People don't just buy into your product, but they buy into your values and your vision. If you change your underlying values without good communication and reason, your users will revolt in the worst way possible.
Reminds me of Simon Sinek's talk http://www.ted.com/talks/simon_sinek_how_great_leaders_inspi...
"People don't buy what you do, they buy why you do it"
To this day, many proponents of 3D printing really dislike Makerbot, and will discourage anyone from buying one.
I feel like this is a preference setting. Either at match level or user-level (e.g. when two 'pro' players fight each other in the game coolant dump is disabled)?
If you decide to try it, my nickname is 'shadelesss' ;)