This weekend promises a wealth of watershed moments for Mechwarrior Online, as efforts to promote
the upcoming "Community Warfare" updates get in full swing, with
faction events designed to get players into the mindset of the update in
advance continue continue. At the same
time, Clan Mechs have finally become available for purchase with in-game
currency, placing game changing new content in the hands of a brand new player
base, and a leaderboard challenge with the largest MC prize in MWO history attached
to it has arrived, and promises some pretty serious payouts to a considerable
number of MWO players. All of these factors constitute "reasons
to play MWO again," and each of
them on their own has an interesting impact on gameplay. In fact, the Kit Fox release alone prompted
me to move MWO back into my daily
game rotation again, as I find myself grinding XP and working to recover the 25
million (give or take) C-Bills that I spent purchasing and customizing each of
my variants (those Clan ECM parts aren't cheap). The fact that this is happening in the late
summer, during the game release doldrum that happens each year, is also a
welcome shift. Any of these things, in
and of themselves, would be worth talking about. But what I want to talk about is the way that
all of these things are stacked together, and what that says about what MWO's developers are doing right, and
what they're still fumbling through.
See, all of these faction events and mini-tournaments and
Mech releases all move towards the same goal: they're meant to get players back
into the action, to give players new short-term goals or, in the case of Clan
mechs, long term goals that allow them to engage with MWO beyond its Bungie-esque "thirty seconds of fun." MWO,
and free-to-play games in general, thrive on that notion of short term and long
term goal parallelism. Neverwinter, for example, has built an
entire framework around it: short term goals are highlighted and brightly
advertised, while long term goals are concealed in multi-layered menus that,
come late game, players are encouraged to delve into to make achieving a number
of ever-expanding short term goals that much easier. In fact Cryptic, for all its poor decision
making and inept economic management, has actually done a great job of
presenting players with a consistently expanding list of reasons to play,
consistently adding content to a core game without disregarding any particular
element of their player base.
Mechwarrior Online
has had quite a bit of trouble doing the same, however. During its ostensible pre-release period MWO's devs would dole out content
evenly, releasing Mechs according to a well publicized, consistently
distributed schedule that players could set their watch by. Each month a new chassis would arrive. Every two or three months, a new map would
come out. The new maps and the new mechs
let players exercise both short (check out the new map!) and long (max out the
new Mechs!) term goals. Pacing those
injections consistently let players know that they wouldn't suddenly have the
rug pulled out from under them on any given front. If Piranha Games said they were going to do
something, they ended up doing it. If
they said they weren't going to do something, they didn't do it.
But a number of large scale content releases, first in the
form of the much anticipated Pheonix Mech releases, then in the form of the
massively successful Clan Mech releases, broke this pace, and began to break
the rule of "consistent, reliable content expansion" that Piranha
worked out with their customers over the course of months. Suddenly, months would go by without new content
injections, as access to content already in the game for in-game and real-world
currency became the new game milestones.
New map content slowed to a near stand-still, and casual, low investment
players, the bulk of the player base, began to feel abandoned as whales (users
who purchase massive amounts of content in free-mium services), critical to
Piranha's business model, in turn began
to dominate the player base. Paired with
a mess of a user-interface roll-out and serious technical issues, most notably
and reliably frame rate drops with higher end video cards, it became easy,
especially as a casual player, to feel forgotten by Piranha Games.
Which obviously isn't the case. As a tiny, cashed strapped company, Piranha
isn't really going to forget about any of their players, especially when you
consider just how small their consistent player base is. MWO
is filled with a number of rotating familiar faces. Stick around long enough and you'll notice
the same handful of names popping up in most of your matches, depending on your
time zone and work schedule, many of whom aren't bootstrapping in $250 Clan Mech
packages that gave them early access to monstrosities like Dire Wolves. And community events like the ones they're
pushing now are actually a great way to reward loyalty and encourage retention:
giving players a chance to earn content that usually costs real-world money with
a little elbow grease is a fantastic way to make disenchanted players feel like
they have short term goals again and, while investing in those short term
goals, present them with some new long-term goals as well.
What's problematic about the way this release is shaking
down, and indeed what's problematic about Piranha Games in general, is just how
these events are scheduled and promoted.
See, Piranha Games lost their community manager, the man who made sure
we knew just what was going on with their product, back in February, as the
Clan Mech rollout really started gaining momentum, as the ire for the raw cost
of Clan Mech packages started to cause a massive schism between Piranha's
whales and its dedicated casual players.
While I can't say I knew Garth Erlam's work terribly well beforehand,
his relative invisibility is something of a good sign: a corporate
representative does his job best when he generates positive corporate branding
and keeps his name out of the media.
It's only when we negative associations begin to emerge that we seek out
individuals to attach them to; think of Bobby Kotick from Activision, and how
thoroughly vilified he was compared to the more innocuous John Ricitiello. Both worked in the same industry, but Kotick
is known as an infamous asshole, whereas you'd be hard pressed to meet someone
who knows just who Ricitiello is, even within the gaming community. Heck, I had to Google the proper spelling of
his name to write this, and I was alarmed to find out he was no longer in his
position at EA. If Bobby Kotick ever
quit his job, there would be a god damn parade, with streamers, blocking up
Internet traffic for days.
But Erlam's absence is now quite apparent in both how
Piranha communicates information to its fans and engages with the release of
new content and the scheduling of community events. The Faction events that began emerging each
weekend are announced at the very last minute, making it difficult to
anticipate or account for a period of increased excitement for a particular
title. This particular event coincides
with a big job interview, another major content release in another game I've
been playing, and another short-term promotional event in Dawngate, which was promoted for about a week and a half before it
began. The end result: while I've put
more time into MWO than I would've
without these events, I've had to alter how I'm investing that time in an
unexpected and unpleasant way, and I find myself, by merit of adjacent time
commitments, participating in MWO
less than I might've if I'd known about the faction specific event was coming a
week or two ago. Would advanced notice
have helped alleviate that issue? I
genuinely don't know. This weekend is so
crowded, and life is back to being so complicated that I really can't say for
sure.
What I can say for sure is that MWO's lack of community organization illustrates just how
problematic lacking or poor communication between developers and fans can prove
for a small company. Piranha has a
product people want. People have wanted
it for a while, they've been going apeshit over it for a while too, but
developers have been slow in actually delivering on promises of giant robot
combat. Until now. But even as this robot combat approaches a
golden age, a sort of massive metagame that will allow players to establish new
and sexy short term and long term goals, MWO
continues to lose players. I've written
about MWO quite a bit here, but even
my interest is stuttering, not because I don't think MWO is a great game (it's an amazing game) but because I don't know
what the future holds for MWO. Will the UI receive a much needed second
overall? Will the hardware compatibility
and optimization issues that plague the game ever be addressed? Are these even on PGI's radar? What's going on with Community Warfare,
beyond sale events? I want to know, and
advanced knowledge helps me get excited about things. Direct communication lets me learn things, as
a player, that help me get psyched up for more Mech time. But here I am, left with scraps, saving up my
C-bills, waiting for each of the Clan Mechs that genuinely interest me to
release, in turn. This week it was the
Kit Fox. Soon, the Storm Crow will be
out. Then, the Timber Wolf. And what will keep me playing after
that? PGI is yet to show me, but I'm hoping
to find out soon.
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