There was a talk a ways back about how to make free to plays work properly. The MW Tactics team is just doing it wrong. Rule #1 is you do not sell power.

I'll use Tribes: Ascend as the quintessential Free-To-Play done correctly. You CAN buy enough gold to unlock all the items you want, but that only means you get them sooner than someone who played long enough to earn XP and get the same unlocks for free. The ONLY things that cannot be bought with XP are purely cosmetic things like voice packs and skins.

That said, MW Tactics doesnt look "ruined" from any reasonable perspective. It would seem that instead the hopes of some fans have merely been crushed. The MW Tactics team does have to be careful though, because their primary market base is going to be Battletech fans looking for a Battletech game, and if they dont get it, they wont play for long. You absolutely NEED a large community for the free-to-play business model to work.

Well, I occasionally still buy MtG boosters even though buying singles is far more efficient use of money...but admittedly I don't see any incentive in buying random perks for a PC game

It's also more or less early beta. Like, half the game isn't implemented yet.

Which the new beta testers don't seem to understand - they keep acting like it's the final implementation and having fits over every little thing.





-k

I remember people saying that about SWTOR as well... but in that case the beta pretty much was the final product, even the early betas didn't have much added or removed.

Let's not forget the other extreme, the guys who have decided the game will be the best thing since sliced NERPS and shout down any criticism...both probably what can be expected when selecting people for the beta just because they paid for it.

Personally, I'm taking a rather laid back view of the matter.
I hugely enjoy the stompiness of the mechs. The small maps seem to be well done and the game principles work. For me, it feels like the best mechwarrior game yet, but I do admit that there's still a lot to be done.
However, the roadmap they presented seems to adress most issues I currently have with the game. We'll see when it hits open beta, and then release.

I got to play with the Mech Pods at GenCon, I'm happy.

Then why the fuck are they calling it a beta test? The entire purpose of beta testing to push out to a wider base to test the product for glaring defects that your internal test team (alpa testing) missed. The only reason to add/remove content during beta testing is due to it showing up that some feature just doesn't work and needs a different solution. If half the game isn't finished then what they have isn't anything close to a beta test. This is at best a unit testing.

Probably:"Because World of Tanks did it too!"

"Beta" is kinda a broad term.

Beta testing ranges from as early when as your software can run without crashing on regular client machines rather than just the special testing rigs, to what is more or less finished product in need of final stress testing.

Currently, the game runs and doesn't crash. Most folks can log in, create mechs, and play the game without major glitches showing up. The core engine runs and it runs fine.

What is not yet implemented are about half the maps, half the mechs, and at least three other campaign modes. The repair system was just put in and they are tweaking the associated costs and numbers to see what is too much, what is not enough, and what might be just right. The matchmaking system had a crippling bug when it was put in a couple of weeks ago, but that seems to have been mostly fixed. Voice chat was also just put in but so far only works for pre-made teams.

There's at least three months of closed testing ahead before they can even think of going to Open Beta.

I will say that they let "paid" testers in a lot earlier than most other games I've seen. Usually the paid testers don't show up til late in closed beta. It's more of a marketing thing than an actual testing thing.

It may have been a mistake to do so.

I for one am an old time game and other software tester, been doing it for nearly two decades now. So I'm pretty patient with the process. I find a problem, I fuss with it to see if I can reproduce the bug, and I file a report. Then I move on.

The "pay" testers are likely to have little or no understanding about testing.

Example: Recently they raised the repair cost for XL engines by a large amount. They'd been saying these kinda of changes were going to happen all through Beta. They are simply trying to see what a good balance is. Next week they might lower it again, or even raise it further. Balance testing.

As soon as the change hit, the beta forum was FLOODED with hundreds of "OMG OMG OMG THE GAME IS BROKEN THIS IS HORRIBLE I'M QUITTING IF THIS STAYS" posts. Literally a dozen new threads popping up every hour. The handful of "guys, it's beta, if you think it's a bug, report it and move on" posts pretty much got lost in the deluge of outraged angry posts that mostly seemed to have no understanding of what "testing" means.

So yes, the pay-to-test folks probably should not have been let in yet. But I suspect it was the marketing team that made this decision, not the development team.



-k

Let's start a different track.

My MWO name is PerfectTommy. Feel free to invite me to your friend list and maybe we can go have giant robot battles together.






-k

I dunno about MWO but that is one of the best names.


How come I have to give her my jacket?

Cause you're perfect.

A unit test is for individual modules which have not even been integrated yet. The game is there, it's working, it is just missing some high-level functionality and the numbers have to be tuned.