Mechwarrior Online (Previously MW5/MW3015)

[Elcs]

i do something similar with the Cat, except i drop in 2 ERPPCs, 2 MLasers with an XL265 max armor except for a little in the legs, AMS and all the heatsinks i can squeeze into it.

3 LLasers is a good time too.

K2 is still my favorite Cat varient.
4 MLasers, 1 Gauss

or lately 2 AC5's and 2 MLasers

Agreed on the K2.

Just posted my Founders Cat build as backup for your position. It's far from useless

 

[Gonad the Barbarian]

Stock Founders Hunchback with a couple of items moved around, Small Laser removed, CASE added, more ammo added, engine downgraded slightly.

Beast... if you can aim and handle the heat.

I see it having two problems though. One, unless you can effectively find a way to use more than one ballistic hardpoint (and I've yet to see a decent build that does) you are (at least potentially) better off with the 4H. Two (really an extension of one), it really doesn't have the tonnage/space to make the best use of ballistic weapons and can be much more effective packing lasers and/or missiles. And personally, I wouldn't run any HBK build that's any slower than it already is.

I personally plan on using the founders atlas until I have enough to purchase a 300XL engine, which has the side benefit of being the best engine for the Jenner, Hunchback, Raven, and Atlas (if you don't mind having a squishy Atlas).

Hunch can only go up to a 260 now.

 

[Fallen Kell]

Everyone has different likes and goals. yours appear to be "kill everyting by yourself" which is fine. I like to play a more supporting role.

Not entirely. My goal/like is to not have my stats beat down because I have 3 people who do not have a clue how to play, don't listen/read the team chats, don't look at radar/map, don't stay together on my team and we all die because of that.

 

[Fallen Kell]

Hunch can only go up to a 260 now.

Well that sucks (you can see the last time I played in them). I guess they wanted to stop all the laser hunchbacks running around at 102kph beating the hell out of all the lights that didn't drop in the 300XL and then tearing through the rears the assaults.

I think I have only been in a jenner or raven the last 3-4 weeks with just a match here and there in the Atlas to make sure things didn't change too much on them...

 

[OSULugan]

Hunch can only go up to a 260 now.

Well that sucks...

It really sucks because it forces you to maintain a stable of additional engines for each 'Mech. Previously, when I wanted a "Fastback" Hunchback, I'd swap the 300 XL into there from my Atlas K. If I wanted to speed up the Catapult, I could swap it over to the CAT. With arbitrary "balance" choices like this, it makes you grind up more C-Bills to buy more engines/parts. That's just fine at the old rate of making money w/o repair/re-arm, but update the economy to the grind-fest that it is now, and you have a much more limited ability to maintain a good stable of 'Mechs to swap around to depending on the needs of your team.

 

[greenhawk]

The Cat is "ok". It isn't the Cat that people will be using as it isn't the K2. Unless they fix heat or heatsinks, it is useless.

The Jenner sucks until you get a 300XL engine. I would not even bother using one until you do that, so that means lots of matches getting creamed until that happens if all you get is the founders jenner.

re cat, I have to agree, the need of the missle doors to open delay makes it's use as anything besides a missle boat hard, espically if only using srm's as a backup weapon to do some brawling in. Given the lack of mounting points, I run my founder cat as a dual ER laser (or ER PPC if you want to deal with the heat) sniper as it is pointless for must else.

re Jenner, +1, I did not bother playing it until I had the money for the engine. A bit of a letdown that, but with 4 s.lasers and 2xsrm4's it has a sting and can chase down other lights, even other 300xl equiped jenners

 

[Ns1]

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MechWarrior Online Update

PGI Response to the major concerns of the community.

We would like to let you all know that we DO listen and DO carefully follow the forums, Facebook, Tweets, PMs and support tickets. We have a team of committed staff whose entire job is to tell us these things.

Game development is similar to trying to steer a very large ship. To make changes in direction takes time and accurate judgement calls. Even after the decision to change direction has been made, it takes a lot of time to make sure the change is working and the direction is valid. A lot of the feedback on the forums specifically are in the pipe for implementation, but again it comes down to time to get them ready and tested before sending it out to you folks on the live servers.

That being said, we’d like to address the concerns and worries that many of you have regarding Open Beta, Match Making, Founder’s Premiums, Game Balance, New User Flow and the future of Community Warfare.

Open Beta:

We have decided to push Open Beta back. We agree that the game's current state of stability is not allowing us to get the latest experience across to new and veteran players alike. This is a short push back on the date and will depend on the stability and playability of the build.

Current Gameplay Issue:

The instability (lag to completely dead FPS) has been identified and we will put out a fix tonight. We also want to make sure this fix works on the Live game servers so you will get a new patch very soon.

Match Making:

The developers at PGI are all veteran game players. Many of us were or still are competitive gamers and truly know the feeling of a great match played between two equally matched teams.

The next 3 stages of planned releases for Match Making involve the following:
Phase 1:

Reduce the maximum # of players in a group to 4. This means when players form a group, they will only be able to add 3 people. When that group launches, they will be put in a bucket. The match maker will then fill the rest of the 8 player team with 4 PUGs or any partial groups that are looking for a match at that moment. The same will happen for the other team. Matches will still be 8v8 but instead of playing against 8 people in an organized premade, you will see a max of 4.
Now before you light your pitchforks, we know that this does not address all the issues and that 8-player groups are the mainstay of community and organized team-play. This is why we move to Phase 2 VERY soon after Phase 1.
Phase 2:

Players will be able to convert their 4-player group to an 8-player group similarly to how World of Warcraft’s group to raid conversion works. With a click of a button, a group leader can convert a 4-player group to 8-players and invite 4 more players to the group. There is a limitation to this however. If the group leader decides to convert to an 8-player group, they MUST have 8 players in order to launch. (i.e. you cannot launch a game with 5,6 or 7 players). In addition to that, your 8-player group will be matched to another 8-player group ONLY. This does reduce the change of finding a match quickly but at the same time 8-players teams will finally be matched to other 8-player teams exclusively.
At some future date we will also want to include the ability to challenge a specific 8-player team to a match in a competitive/eSport manner. But as stated, this will be coming at a later date.
Phase 3

We have been examining the various ranking systems in other games/structured tournament play etc. This includes ELO, TrueSkill and others. Our current plan is to use a hybrid system that uses the mentality of ELO with a weighting system that we’ve determined that drives down to player effectiveness/skill in a match. In order for this to work properly, we will need to do heavy pre-release testing before it goes live to the community and hence the amount of time to get it implemented.

We currently cannot go into detail as to how this system will work because we are not going to over-promise something that may change during implementation. We will try to keep you as up to date on this as possible.
Founder’s Premium Account Status:

We have heard your cries and we are responding to them…

On the date of Open Beta, your Premium Account timer WILL start ticking. Around Open Beta, a button will appear that will allow YOU the Founder’s account holder to decide when the timer starts to tick down. At the same time as this button appearing, your used Premium Account time will be reset to its full value. At that point, you can click the button to start your timer but you cannot stop it. It will be up to you to decide when the Premium Account starts to tick.

Please note that this only applies to Founder’s Premium Account Bonus. Founder’s Mechs behave as planned from Open Beta onward.

Players who purchase a Premium Account AFTER Open Beta will have their timers start immediately upon purchase.
Game Balance:

The game is fairly close to where we want it but the last few items are finally coming into play in terms of Mech on-board systems and items such as Double Heat Sinks, Ferro Fibrous Armor which directly relate to weapon balance and combat experience. Now that those systems are in place, we will be looking into balancing factors such as heat and damage/damage over time etc.

For more information about where weapons are going, check out this link.
New User Experience:

We are adding a lot of tutorials for new players, and we believe this will help greatly. We’re also tightening the UI to make the flow easier to understand. In general, we’re adding a lot in the coming days, and we do understand this is needed to help new players the various complexities of MechWarrior Online.

Videos of every aspect of Mech Warfare will be coming soon, including moving your Mech, arming your Mech and tactics with your Mech.
Community Warfare:

Let’s start off by re-quoting the original Community Warfare Pillar from our game description:
Community Warfare:

MechWarrior® in all of its incarnations has always had a loyal following of players in one of the strongest on-line communities in gaming history. Piranha-Games hopes to bring this community together in a friendly conflict of universal control. This may sound a little odd, but it is the fun competitiveness that will keep the game alive and kicking for years to come. Utilizing the BattleTech® Inner Sphere, we plan to have skirmishes amongst the Great Houses in BattleTech® lore. Allowing the player to have an active part in this conflict is one of our key directives in designing this game. Players will be able to create, manage and customize their Merc Corp's player base and appearance, while banding together to really delve into the Inner Sphere conflict where House alignment reigns supreme. Merc Corp leaders will bid and fight for occupation rights to some of the most valuable planets across the Inner Sphere and challenge other Merc Corps for control of planets reaping large rewards.


Nothing has changed from this original vision of where we want to take Community Warfare. The thing about Community Warfare the decision to push it out further post Open Beta, is the sheer size of the feature and the amount of time to implement. Right now we want the dev team to focus on getting the current game feature set into the live build and then stabilize the build as people join us through the first few weeks of Open Beta. Soon after, a large segment of the entire team will shift over to getting Community Warfare coded and implemented so we can get this into the hands of internal/early beta tester’s hands so we can launch the feature in the future. Because of the sheer workload of this feature we cannot give you an accurate timeline for delivery for this but we will start rolling out information as we begin development of Community Warfare.
After this big gameplay injection, we will look at the plan for the Clan Invasion.
We thank you for your patience and we look forward to seeing you on the battlefield!

- The MechWarrior® Online™ Team

MechWarrior® Online™
Piranha Games Inc.
Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada
http://mwomercs.com/

from email

 

[child of wonder]

Agreed on the K2.

Just posted my Founders Cat build as backup for your position. It's far from useless

I've been just steamrolling people in my K2 with a Gauss Rifle and AC/20. With DHS and Endo Steel coming soon I should be able to switch to dual AC/20s. /evil

 

[child of wonder]

The Jenner sucks until you get a 300XL engine. I would not even bother using one until you do that, so that means lots of matches getting creamed until that happens if all you get is the founders jenner. I personally plan on using the founders atlas until I have enough to purchase a 300XL engine, which has the side benefit of being the best engine for the Jenner, Hunchback, Raven, and Atlas (if you don't mind having a squishy Atlas). But WITH the 300XL, it is (in my opinion), the 2nd best mech in the game (the Raven with the 300XL is the best). Why do I say it is the best? Because you don't need to rely on your team to survive. You are faster or as fast as every mech in the game so you can simply run. Because of your speed and size, you can take cover just about everywhere and only take minor glancing hits from lasers. If you pilot it correctly you can get behind every mech in the game and core their weak rear armor. I have a round where in my Jenner (it wasn't the founders, but it could just as easily had been), I had 7 kills and 1 assist with many of those kills being 1v1.

lol I eat annoying Jenners for breakfast. I can't even count the number of times one has begun to circle me, I lead a nice shot with an AC/20, and 1 to 2 shots later I have another kill.

 

[greenhawk]

I should be able to switch to dual AC/20s. /evil

it is fun and I was running it with my k2 for a while. But guasscats and their first hit precision make toast of you, assuming a light does not get near you (have to downsize the engine to get enough ammo as well as the dual ac20's).

great fun on caustic

 

[Agent11]

The heat build up of lasers and srms is insane. a few volleys with small pulse lasers and srms and im about ready to overheat in my centurian. They need to speed up heat dissipation badly.

 

[greenhawk]

The heat build up of lasers and srms is insane. a few volleys with small pulse lasers and srms and im about ready to overheat in my centurian. They need to speed up heat dissipation badly.

that depends, but what was the cooling rate given for that mech config you used?

 

[FallenHero]

The heat build up of lasers and srms is insane. a few volleys with small pulse lasers and srms and im about ready to overheat in my centurian. They need to speed up heat dissipation badly.

Thats the tradeoff for using lasers. But I do agree, with all the adjustments that have been made from TT to in-game, heat needs a good makeover. Double-heatsinks should provide a much needed respite for some builds.

 

[lupi]

glad they will let you delay premium. Will probably do so and play sparingly until christmas break and then have some fun.

 

[HydroSqueegee]

ill carry a premium account for the duration i play. i could piss 10 a month away on worse things.

 

[child of wonder]

Starting to get sick of playing "LRM Warrior Online." Came out of the cave on the Wooded map to see an Atlas standing 270 meters out. I put the pedal to the metal to close within 180 meters while he stands stationary and begins launching LRMs at me. I didn't even make it to 200 meters before my fresh Catapult's center torso was cored out from a few LRM volleys, despite twisting my torso left and right in between my shots to try to spread the damage.

LRMs need to come back down in damage. Every match is now a fireworks show of endless LRMs.

 

[HydroSqueegee]

Starting to get sick of playing "LRM Warrior Online." Came out of the cave on the Wooded map to see an Atlas standing 270 meters out. I put the pedal to the metal to close within 180 meters while he stands stationary and begins launching LRMs at me. I didn't even make it to 200 meters before my fresh Catapult's center torso was cored out from a few LRM volleys, despite twisting my torso left and right in between my shots to try to spread the damage.

LRMs need to come back down in damage. Every match is now a fireworks show of endless LRMs.

AMS much?

I dunno. LRMs are a mixed bag. People are going to wrech shit with them once clan LRMs hit the scene and the minimum range is erased. The way they work now is iffy... i can launch an LRM10 at someone, all the missiles hit, but they all hit every single hit box. no clustering of 5 point damage that balanced things out in TT. There is no concentration of damage. its too spread out. The damage needs to be lowered with clusters of missiles hitting the same location with a chance that some spread too far and miss.

when them clan LRMS hit its going to be basically SRM-20s on everything.

 

[child of wonder]

AMS much?

I dunno. LRMs are a mixed bag. People are going to wrech shit with them once clan LRMs hit the scene and the minimum range is erased. The way they work now is iffy... i can launch an LRM10 at someone, all the missiles hit, but they all hit every single hit box. no clustering of 5 point damage that balanced things out in TT. There is no concentration of damage. its too spread out. The damage needs to be lowered with clusters of missiles hitting the same location with a chance that some spread too far and miss.

when them clan LRMS hit its going to be basically SRM-20s on everything.

My K2 with a Gauss Rifle and AC/20 has no room for AMS!

LRMs have crossed the line from being support weapons to damage juggernauts that totally dominate the battlefield. The damage should come back down to 1.7x and the spread should be greater.

 

[HydroSqueegee]

cant wait for tomorrows patch. Wanna try a Cicada and Endo before the wipe. Double heat sinks will make my 4 LLaser cat a lot better to run. My 8Q will squeeze 4 PPCs with ease too i bet.

 

[lupi]

They stay near someone else that does. LRM generally a mediocre weapon unless you find someone without or out of ammo.

 

[child of wonder]

cant wait for tomorrows patch. Wanna try a Cicada and Endo before the wipe. Double heat sinks will make my 4 LLaser cat a lot better to run. My 8Q will squeeze 4 PPCs with ease too i bet.

They probably won't.

Just for giggles I loaded up an Atlas with 2 LLs, 2 MLs, and 38 heat sinks. Even that didn't allow me to fire as often as I wanted without shutdown worries.

 

[zokudu]

I became really unhappy with this game a few months ago or so. Didn't realize I could get a refund, my founders package refund is processing now. I don't think the game is bad but it is not the $120 good that I thought it was when I upped my package.

 

[Rifter]

Starting to get sick of playing "LRM Warrior Online." Came out of the cave on the Wooded map to see an Atlas standing 270 meters out. I put the pedal to the metal to close within 180 meters while he stands stationary and begins launching LRMs at me. I didn't even make it to 200 meters before my fresh Catapult's center torso was cored out from a few LRM volleys, despite twisting my torso left and right in between my shots to try to spread the damage.

LRMs need to come back down in damage. Every match is now a fireworks show of endless LRMs.

LRM's arnt all they are cracked up to be. Sure they are effective if you can get in posistion to use them effectivly but they are also VERY expensive, i think you arew going to see alot less of them when open beta hits and its not mostly founders with premium time playing.

I built as close to a archer as i can with current mechs, a Awesome 8R with 2 LRM20's, 2 ML, and 2 streak2's to keep the lights away, and TAG in the head. I take 10 tons of LRM ammo.

Rearm cost alone on that mech if i live long enough to run the LRM tubes dry cost me 80-95k depending on if i blow the 2 tons of streak ammo to. Thats JUST ammo.

That means that even on a win without premium time active if i take ANY armor damage im in the hole for the match.

I dont think to many people will run what i like to call "RED"(mechs that are not finacially sustainable on a win) mechs after the game goes live, people are going to want to make money not lose money.

 

[Rifter]

I became really unhappy with this game a few months ago or so. Didn't realize I could get a refund, my founders package refund is processing now. I don't think the game is bad but it is not the $120 good that I thought it was when I upped my package.

I agree, game started to go downhill when they atarted to prioritize taking live money for MC over finishing the game. You finish the game then release it then start taking money. You DONT half finish the game realize you completly screwed your timeline and are out of cash and try and release a half finished game for a quick cashgrab to then try and finish the game.

If you go read the FAQ and are not in beta to be in the know about it you are going to see things like persistant world community warfare, DX 11(i know planned but not in game yet, and new engine patch broke game for alot of playerbase), joystick support(is not functional, AT ALL), staying close to TT rules(which they really arnt if you get down to it, which is fine, just dont say you are), able to form merc units, Pilot skills/leveling(is a joke).

And then you are going to download the client at open beta and get a game with:

4 maps
Deathmatch only
no lobbies
no voip
no social aspect
no factions/merc units

Then you are going to compare that to what the FAQ says and be like WTF.

Im all for them delaying the game till hell freezes over if thats what it takes to finish it, but i think releasing a half finished game is not the answer, and will taint alot of peoples view of the game and you are not going to bring many of them back after you do finish the game...

 

[DrunkenSano]

cant wait for tomorrows patch. Wanna try a Cicada and Endo before the wipe. Double heat sinks will make my 4 LLaser cat a lot better to run. My 8Q will squeeze 4 PPCs with ease too i bet.

There is no patch and Open Beta has been pushed back.