I’ve spent more time with Mechwarrior Online now, enough
time to actually buy a second Mech and max out two pilot trees, and at this
point, I’m a little less concerned than I was about the impact of real world
money on Mechwarrior Online’s play. Not that
it isn’t really, really obvious. People
with Founder’s Mechs, specifically Founders’ Atlases, have a tremendous
advantage on the battlefield, and easily railroad smaller, less equipped Mechs. But the time required to get these Mechs isn’t
actually as severe as I saw it initially.
While it’s a pain in the ass to grind C-Bills, the game is paced so
quickly, with fights rarely lasting over ten minutes, usually ending within
seven, that in an hour with a little luck or skill you can rack up half a
million C-Bills easily. That means an
Atlas can, at least in theory, be purchased with only 18 hours of play. Which, when I see it written out, still seems
pretty extreme, but is far from unattainable.
The impact of MC is alleviated to a greater extent by the
power of Light Mechs. Because while it
takes eighteen hours to get an Atlas, a Jenner, Raven or Commando is just six
hours, tops, away. And those annoying
little fuckers have been ripping me up on the battlefield in a way that Atlases
could only dream of.
See, there are a few ways to go in Mechwarrior. You can select a reasonably agile brawler, a
heavy hitting slow Mech, an indirect fire medium Mech that moves in and out of
the edges of the fight, or a tiny, annoying as shit light Mech that runs in and
out of combat, narrowly evading damage and slowly shredding your enemies. The most successful players, thanks to an
incredibly powerful ECM system present in the game now, are the quickest, the
smartest and the swiftest. The last left
alive, the ones with the highest kill count and damage count, the ones who seem
to decide a fight or lose it, all seem to be light Mech players.
See, there’s a function called ECM which makes it impossible
to target enemies. That’s an issue if
you’re trying to get information on where to focus fire, or if you’re trying to
get a missile lock (which is arguably the easiest way to take down a light Mech
on open ground – the little fuckers are quick, but their light armor gets
ripped to shreds by missile volleys quickly).
That means that small Mechs that approach their targets quickly with
ECMs can disrupt targeting and make missiles useless as a weapon. The biggest weakness that light Mechs have is
one of the aspects of the game they excel at countering. And the heavier Mechs turn more sluggishly,
making it tougher for them to land hits on tiny targets like Ravens and
Commandos. That means that,
theoretically, a skilled light Mech pilot in a one on one fight could take down
an assault Mech without taking any damage.
If they’re lucky, and quick.
This should seem a bit insane to anyone reading, since the
cost of these lighter Mechs is next to nothing, and their armament is, when you
come down to it, pretty unimpressive. In
fact, the way that ECM currently works is a bit of a balance issue: one or two
Mechs with ECM suites can render entire portions of the enemy team useless and,
thanks for their agility, evade damage for a long, long time, long enough to
trash the entire fight. A Mech that costs
a fifth of another Mech shouldn’t be capable of fucking up an entire fight just
by staying parked next to a set of heavier Mechs.
Thus the issue of monetary creep has been replaced by the
issue of design imbalance: right now light Mechs with ECMs can make up an
entire combat force and pull off a pretty solid action against an enemy
team. In fact, in a point capture
mission they could end up winning easily.
The Mechs that are meant to be the combat mainstays of the game have
trouble catching and killing these nimble little fuckers, as their speed makes
ballistic weapons less useful and their countermeasures prevent missile targeting. So we’re left with energy weapons, lasers,
used to shred light Mechs that make missteps at close range and long range
fights between blinds Mechwarriors using heavier direct-fire weapons.
I have a feeling this will form a sort of trend in
Mechwarrior Online as it continues: a design balance issue will present itself
and, eventually, be replaced by another issue.
In this case the issue of potential feature creep that favors “whales,”
the customers who spend tremendous amounts of money in free to play games, are
being overshadowed by the very real design issues brought up by ECM. While strategies exist to counter ECM
(including a literal setting for ECM called “COUNTER” which shuts down the
intensely annoying feature) a few minutes on a battlefield makes it clear that
a number of players either don’t know or don’t care to figure out just how to
utilize these features to help their teammates.
The end result is frustrating.
But at least it isn’t an issue that represents an endemic
trend favoring players who use real world money to purchase in game
benefits. These players nearly all use
shitty little low maintenance Mechs with at most moderately customized
loadouts. Even if the game is in
tatters, it’s not because of some perfidious influx of capital: it’s because
feature creep is still sorting itself out in this build.
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