Mechwarrior Online

Just got into this in the last week. I'm really loving it! I had tried it out on some free weekend or beta or fuck if I know, a long time ago, and didn't really like it, but they've really come a long way. I'm sitting on 17.5m cbills with no real idea what I'd like to build for myself, so still using the free mechs.

The FTP model is very strange to me. Buying premium time, or extra mech bays, or even "gold" mechs (as far as I can tell) don't seem out of line or anything. But the amount they want you to spend on certain special mechs and such blows my mind ($500 for a single mech). Overall I'm ok with their FTP model, and this is the first FTP game I've seriously considered spending some coin on (other than PS2 but they had further to go before I was willing to plink down the cash). I think their matchmaking system seriously needs to replace disconnected players, but otherwise I so far have no issues with the game.

They seem to be adding some meta-map in the future (another year or more?) so fights mean more than just random matches - and this is needed - but even as is it's pretty damn fun, even for a noob like myself. I feel like if they can expand upon what they've done so far, this is, or most certainly will be, the game us paper and pencil players have been waiting 20+ years for technology to allow.

My advice as someone that spent a good amount of money on this game is to not do that. I spent the money pretty much based on what you say in your last paragraph, and by now I doubt that vision will ever be realized by this company. They have gotten nowhere with their concepts in the last 1.5 years and are pushing back their milestone again and again, while coming up with a new special bag of mechs every 6 months to draw money from the community. Factional warfare was supposed to come outa year ago, and just recently they outlined another pushback of their schedules which puts it towards the end of 2014...

The game is fun, I still play here and there, but strictly as a simple mech shooter with no expectations for it to become something more then that anytime soon. Everything points to them just putting in the minimal effort required while putting out gold mech deals, or being incredibly incompetent at their jobs. I'd just stick with the F2P until they actually come through with some of their plans.

Hrm noted.

OneofOne_sl said:

Hrm noted.

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Seconding what Creed said, as a founder who quit after the first month and a half of open beta. Came back last month to play 30ish games to see if there was improvement. I actually feel the game is worse now than when I left it. I absolutely adored closed beta ~August/early Sept, but then they reworked the economy for monetization and pushed the game out before they had anything other than TDM in place. In the command chair recently they admitted that had put off working on things like community warfare because they only recently got the MW license extended past 2015 (who knows what they spent the year doing meanwhile). And every new feature is supposedly bottle-necked behind the UI 2.0 release now pushed back to February 4.

It's really kind of a self-defeating monetization model. New mechs are the only acquirable "content" in the game, but buying them with $ pretty much defeats the purpose of playing the game. Not sure if you've ever played a Japanese-style mobile game or any game really with a cheat code that gives you content right away. It can work if there's some depth and you're just bypassing the grind to get to fun. But the 12v12 TDM grind is really all this game has, so you:
1. Enjoy the grind, get cbills while grinding, and don't need to spend $.
or
2. Don't engine the grind, spend $ to bypass it, and are left with mechs that you don't want to play because there's nothing to dobutgrind.

This is why a lot of early adopters/spenders have buyer's remorse. Spending money just means less content in the game. There are founders who own every mech in the game and have over a billion cbills leftover because there's nothing else to do. You seem to fall into the first category at the moment, so just find a weight class you like and use your money buying 3 variants of the best mech in that class. Get DHS, adjust the armor/engine and optimize your weapons. 17.5m is plenty of currency to get started on that, especially if you go with a big, versatile medium like the shadowhawk. You'll need 3 variants of the same chassis to unlock XP levels beyond basic. By the time you master your first three variants, you'll have a much better understanding of the economy and the game overall and can decide if you want to put money into it.

Just don't hold your breath for it being any more than the 12v12 TDM before the studio shuts down/they switch to a different project. The studio leads (Russ and Bryan) had a shell company called Jarhead Games that put out some pretty amazingly bad shovelware for over a decade:


Also notable Jarhead games are the marine sharpshooter trilogy and "Elite Forces: Navy SEALs - Weapons of Mass Destruction" if you want to look at some amazing youtube let's plays.

Game is great for playing with 1-4 friends just to dick around once a week or so. I agree sinking large amounts of money into the game is currently a bad idea due to the awful and stagnant development cycle.

If you are looking to spend money efficiently to get a couple starting mechs that allow you to experience most/all play styles I recommend the following:

Jenner JR7-F: For when you want to go fast, and do equal damage to assault class mechs.

MWO:Mechlab

Highlander HGN-733C/ Or the Heavy metal (will be limited on Missile boat options): Allows you to play any role you would ever want to play with a larger mech. Can be configured as a close range brawler, missile boat, or long ranged harasser. Has jump jets on one of the largest chassis. I recommend getting a basic 2xac5, 2x ERLL setup before getting fancy with other builds.

Essentially with these two mechs I never have to be wanting for any other chasis type. That being said., buying anything beyond these two with real money is probably a bad decision due to the chance that this game won't be around for longer than 2 years

Nah, I wasn't looking at buying mechs or anything, just extra mech bays (once needed) as I'm a bit of a collector, AND since you need 3 per mech you actually plan to plan to get the elite "skills" - and I couldn't sell off the extras once done with 'em =P You guys are seriously harshing my mellow, but I appreciate the real feedback to someone new here.

And 6 ML's on a Jenner? Damn... I need to mess around with that build site more. Thanks for the builds, I really am pretty clueless. I do find it somewhat unfortunate that you can't really see how well an idea works out until you actually spend the cbills to try it out. I'm enjoying the free Highlander right now, if for no other reason than I can usually live long enough and do enough damage to both feel useful and get decent cash/exp, so I may just say fuck it and see about that. How does your version look?

OneofOne_sl said:

I'm enjoying the free Highlander right now, if for no other reason than I can usually live long enough and do enough damage to both feel useful and get decent cash/exp, so I may just say fuck it and see about that. How does your version look?

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I was actually impressed with their base build for the trial mech, it's pretty solid. Other variations for fun would be an ac20, 2 medium lasers, and srm's for brawling. Or several lrm15's w/ tag laser, and artemis system for a missile boat. You dont have to get too fancy, pretty much anything is servicable with that highlander variant.

Well any entertainment is worth 10 bucks so if its just a few bays dont sweat it. My warning was more about starting to buy several mechs or bling, thats somehing the company doesnt deserve until they come out with working community warfare.

I said fuck it Remmy and created your Jenner. Fun as fuck, but man, seriously makes me hate the volcano map!

I'll still never throw them any money after the way things went down with MW:LL. Here's to hoping sometime this century all these companies can stop fucking around with the mechwarrior/battletech licensing bullshit and we can get some quality MW games again.

The game is ok...the developers suck and it's a waste of the IP. But if you are just playing casually it's not bad.

The two times I've purchased MC were during their Christmas sales. And I wouldn't buy anything until you see it on sale (aside from mechbays which are never on sale)>

The art department is top notch at least.

It's a rough game though.

OneofOne_sl said:

I said fuck it Remmy and created your Jenner. Fun as fuck, but man, seriously makes me hate the volcano map!

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Yes you do have to do a bit of hit and run to manage heat there with any mech. Luckily with the jenner and it's speed you actually have that option. Generally for weapon groups I have the left 3 and right 3 bound to their respective mouse buttons, and in safe situations only fire 3 within 1 second. And then i switch to chain fire on one group if i need continuous fire when running hot. If doing hit and run just alpha a few times then peace probably.

Big thing if you are going to keep playing. Read up before buying anything with C-bills. There is a lot of broken/crappy stuff. Do your research on mechs. Some have crappy hitboxes, low weapon hardpoints, etc. And I'd pretty much avoid any type of modules for a while.

Also there are certain mechanics, ECM, ghost heat, SRM hit detection etc. that aren't very apparent. So you kind of have to know where to look to understand why your weapons might be causing large amounts of heat or you can't seem to use your missiles, etc.

Was playing star conflict which is similar to this then thought what the hell, imma try MWO had forgotten about it.

Having quite a bit of fun, i read up on mechs and decided on a cataphract-3d. Thing i didnt know was that this was gonna put me in the bracket with experienced players and im getting my ass handed to me. Kinda sucks cuz im skipping playing on my mech so i get more practice against noobs like me. Getting better though. Is there a way to tweak the cata3d so i drop down a bracket?


A game like this with more of an open world would really be awesome. Still plays nicely though.

Im saving up for my cata loadout. Any tips for pilot xp? i noticed it went up by 10 points in one game, im at 1kish and i need 5k for advanced zoom (which im guessing is what my first pilot buy should be since cata is sniper style)

General exp is slow as fuck, and is based upon the exp you get in games, so, just try and get as much exp as possible in games.

Delicateflower_sl said:

Any tips for pilot xp? i noticed it went up by 10 points in one game, im at 1kish and i need 5k for advanced zoom (which im guessing is what my first pilot buy should be since cata is sniper style)

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Advanced zoom should absolutely be your first buy. Forums QQ about it constantly because it's low res but will absolutely help out with long range shot placement/target spotting.

No idea how elo or placement system works for games. I just was consistently doing sub par for a good amount of time until I fleshed out my builds and learned the maps. But there does seem to be some sort of elo system. I was getting 500-900 dmg games on average and lately the skill level of my opponents has absolutely risen so i'm down to about 300-600 dmg range.

Some of the utterly ridiculous stompings I've been involved with (on both sides) really makes me doubt any such ELO or other matchmaking system exists at all.

OneofOne_sl said:

Some of the utterly ridiculous stompings I've been involved with (on both sides) really makes me doubt any such ELO or other matchmaking system exists at all.

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You can't think of it like a LoL-type ELO system, where you're put with teammates and against enemies who are all similar skill levels. MW:O just tries to balance out relative skills on each team on an individual basis. So you can have low and high skill players on both teams, with the hope that it "evens out." So say ELO 1 is a new player, 5 is a medium skilled vet and 10 is godlike. Each team might have 4 of each of those categories, and each side totals 64. They do it this way because there just isn't a large enough playerbase to have a LoL-ish system (while I don't play LoL, the upper ELO queues look ridiculous when I happen to catch a stream even with their huge numbers).

You end up with the stomps just due to the nature of the game. The meta is forming deathballs and sniping until you have a numbers advantage- then charge/cleanup. So the first team to have it's fodder low-ELO players get caught out and die gets swarmed/obliterated. The old 8v8 felt like it had more options for flanking/elite solo play; 12v12 means there are just too many people around to sneak around/do critical damage before being gibbed. It will be worse in a few months, if that launch module ever releases. They're going to eliminate the 12 man queue and allow 12 man teams to drop against pugs. Premade 8 mans vs pugs were a slaughter in closed/early open beta, so I imagine we'll be back to that unless they put in some pretty draconian group tonnage limits.

I know theres a clear separation between when i use the trial mechs and my cata. Im not sure why because ive seen an atlas in my trial mech games. But when i play my cata, i get grouped vs the big guns and good players and get destroyed often

Remmy_sl said:

Advanced zoom should absolutely be your first buy. Forums QQ about it constantly because it's low res but will absolutely help out with long range shot placement/target spotting.

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Talking about the pilot skill, not the mech module right?

Not sure what weapon ill be using yet so im upgrading the DHS and I think an xl300 engine first (already bought DHS)