Mechwarrior Online
was, for a long time, an exemplar of how to alienate a loyal player base. A general lack of transparency, insane,
apparently exploitative business decisions, mixed with content gating, that
most pernicious of video game sins, leading to a structure that actually
showcased that most fundamental of complaints against freemium games: the play
to win structure. Mitigated by an
unappreciative corporate structure that misled its players and prevented any
kind of long term forecasting, MWO
was a great game run by a group of people who seemed to be hellbent on
exploiting, and as a result alienating, their core community until only a few
thousand hardcore fans remained.
Since its release a year ago, MWO has had its ups and downs.
New content had, until recently, slowed to a trickle, as Clan mechs,
dumped in a massive single release and then slowly bled out to the general population,
occupied the space of the once progressive update structure that PGI had
employed in the past. But then something
incredible happened. PGI took control of
its company back from Infinite Games Publishing, its publisher and one time
partner and, at around the same time, some key changes began to occur. New material began to trickle out. Player events, giving out free stuff to
players who sank real time into the game over weekends and holidays. New content began to emerge, including mechs
once postulated to be long lost to the charnel house of development hell. Most recently, a large scale content update
was revealed, which included some serious changes to the game overall, the galaxy
map, which the postulated Community Warfare meta-game will be played on, and a
second wave of Clan mechs, including the vaunted Mad Dog, a storied mid-weight
LRM boat sorely missed from the game in its current era of LRM heavy play, and
the first Clan light and medium mechs to top 100 kph without speed tweak. This
alone would've been something to celebrate for the player base, but there's
more: PGI also revealed a loyalty rewards program for their players, giving
some pretty solid freebies out to people just for playing their game regularly over
the last year, and giving a bevy of free hero mechs out to new players, based
on how much they'd invested in the game over their time with it. Players who shelled out almost three hundred
dollars on Clan mechs would get exclusive content, and people who invested in
earlier, less ambitious programs (like the Pheonix mech funding) would still
get exclusive content, well worth their while.
Paired with some minor tweaks to the bonuses Founder mechs received, it
was a perfect storm: PGI actually made a real conciliatory gesture to their
core player base, the people they'd been slowly bleeding out over the last
year, and mixed it in with a big sale and a major double experience event.
It's impossible to say just how effective this has been for
PGI, or how effective it will be over the months to come. Companies don't tend to publicize statistics
like player migration or attrition, or when they do it's always with spin in
mind. MWO is also small enough that buzz, as a means of measuring impact,
is going to be negligible regardless of the outcome: gaming press won't get
perks for covering a game the size of MWO
from a company the size of PGI, so even if it is the only horse in a given
fight, and even if it is doing some incredible stuff to restore the faith of
its users, it seems unlikely that it'll appear on say, the IGN home-page any
time soon (which, hilariously, consists almost entirely by Destiny news, ranging in granularity from actual reviews to server
outage notices to raid wait times, showcasing just how severely a player base
can be abused by a developer and still come back for more, if said developer
has the fiscal clout to push around gaming media).
Still, the friends I have who decided to stop playing MWO (mostly as a direct result of the
Clan mech package announcement, and the batshit prices associated with it) seem
to be genuinely excited by the announcement.
One of them reinstalled the game the moment I sent him the link, the
other had a thirty minute conversation with me about Clan mech builds after a
six month silence. One of my buddies
logged in to make sure he could get his reward for playing 100 games by running
through a few with me. I've seen faces
return to the game that haven't been online in months.
And the quality of games has been improving. Where teams
were once hilariously mismatched, I've been playing through solid, well
balanced matches where people play their roles, and move as a team. Perhaps this is a by-product of the double
experience weekend, a trick that PGI has used before to great effect which, to
be fair, is a great low cost way to get people to play more and try new mechs.
But I'd like to think that it's a direct result of PGI's announcement. Video games, especially free to play
multiplayer games, are a fundamentally social medium. A developer who acts anti-socially, the way,
say, Beamdog has to astute complaints about their netcode failing across the
board, by suppressing speech and waiting for people to stop trying to use their
game as advertised, is far too commonplace and acceptable. In the era of pre-order bonuses, day-one DLC,
and Season Pass packages for people who want to play "the real game,"
actually sitting down and thanking your fans for keeping your game alive for
nearly a quarter decade is something to be celebrated. PGI has made a number of missteps in the
past, and while my experience with MWO
is still mitigated by some technical issues (I experience framerates the like
of which I haven't seen since Tribes, while running a game in an eight year old
engine) I do really love their game, and I want to see it continue to
thrive. Moves like this loyalty reward
program, and the recent flurry of faction-related play-based rewards, are all steps in the right direction. I hope it works for MWO, I really do. With
Community Warfare coming down the pipe, and hope still strong for another UI
overhaul, there's plenty to be optimistic about. I say, cautiously, that this could be the
first step down a road to video-game redemption. I'll keep my fingers crossed for you, PGI.
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