Multiplayer...

[Havamal]

Greetings Mechwarriors,

Please;
Expressing one's criticism or opinion in a respectful manner is appreciated as it helps inform the entities of community interests as they make decisions going forward, even when the respectfully phrased criticism or opinion reflects an unhappy feeling. However, it's not the same behavior as consistently posting the same negativity repeatedly in the same thread or especially across threads. Thats what would lead to such being either opinion spamming, or trolling others depending.

Also:
Community members are welcome and encouraged to express respectfully phrased criticism and negative opinions, but not to make it personal or wage a campaign in doing so.
Sometimes the how of a message is the problem, not the why of it. In this case there are community members that I would encourage to please consider the how of communication in posts moving forward.
If your perspective on this issue has been heard and documented please take a break on it for now, as excessive hammering on it by some has crossed over into opinion spamming as expressed above.

Second, this is indeed a moderated forum. As such Please do not attempt to self moderate other community members engagement of this community in any way.
Please share personal perspectives constructively contributing to the topic and if you see something that could be afoul of the Rules of Conduct please do NOT reply to it, rather use the Report feature and allow Forum Staff to de-escalate it so that regular civil discussion can continue without derailment.

• Please don't focus on others, please focus on one's own perspective.
• Please do not post dismissiveness of others rather than points of discussion.
• Please post topically towards discussion and not at each other personally.
• Please post with civility and respectfully even in critique and disagreement.
• Please agree to disagree.

Posts disregarding the above going forward will experience Jump Drive malfunctions to the Far country to be used as nesting materials by the locals.

Thank you.

 

[Havamal]

@Zakhodit , I see introspection in a post above about the OP topic line.

If anyone was to ask my opinion, creating an OP post is kind of an art.
Making the topic all about negatives without a clear subject line to discuss unfortunately reads as an invititation (though it isnt) to others to come in and either agree wholesale, or to share their reasons why they feel these negatives are not chief concerns from their own perspective or to flat out agree/disagree with the vague hyperbole of the current subject line without adding to the discussion the OP intended.

I recommend a complete refocusing of the OP "question" to something constructive, and concise. Then we can all try to keep on topic and not derail each other with personal focused refutation or dismissiveness that leads to derailment.
To edit the OP tag line, go to thread tools in the top right, edit thread.

 

[RealCadaver]

Reddit forums are awash with threads about "Finished campaign, bored now" Posts. This is the death of any single player game. Death is too strong a word. I should not have titled this thread the way I did.

From a certain point of view stating that the game will "die without MP" is more true than stating "The Game is fine because replay." Can you name a single player game from the 90's that has a huge following and tens of thousands of players? I can't. Can you name a MP game from the 90's that has a huge following and tens of thousands of players?

Starcraft. Oh, yeah that also had a single player campaign. So are you going to tell me that if Starcraft didn't have MP that anyone would be playing it now? Or that there would be a starcraft 2? Sure, you can say that but its obviously not true.

The Mechwarrior games were all single player. I get that. But Battletech wasn't It was a table top war game and if you really wanted to play you needed a friend. I mean, you can play CLUE with your self, but that's not very fun. This video game was designed with the spirit of the table top game. It will eventually go away without multiplayer.

As all single player games do.

Some multiplayer games stick around for a long time.

Starcraft is not really an equivalent though, different genre, owned by a company that can afford to throw money away on it (remember, if it can't be monetized it won't be supported) to keep a baseline "hype" until they got around to a sequel.

For counterpoint, I could easily argue that Solitaire is very successful despite no multi-player, in both electronic and physical form, has been around for what, a century, no sign of it "dying".

On a personal level, I still play Civ III, came out 15 years ago, still play it. I still play the original X-Com (actually looks OK on my Surface Pro 2). That came out in 94.

Companies re-release old SP only games all the time, due to their popularity and they know they can monetize it, again.

As long as it's technically possible to play (i.e. systems are easily available that will run the software in question) BT won't die out, MP or not.

That being said, I'm sure they will address MP issues at an appropriate level, based on metrics. To do otherwise would be foolish.

 

[Shameless]

I really never cared that this game has multiplayer, I backed it for the campaign and single player, and for my money I'd rather they give us a few extra side campaigns over multiplayer.

 

[MajorPrankster]

I think that I will wait for more than a month into the distribution of the game before making strong judgement calls on it's longevity.
The gaming world has a long history of trying to kill the things it loves by claiming they are dead before they really get a chance to blossom.

Been playing the TT on and off for 30 years, with all sorts of changes during that time.
Still fun.

I can wait for them to bring out the best in the nice mecha battle platform they have created.

 

[Havamal]

I can wait for them to bring out the best in the nice mecha battle platform they have created.

"Mechs", not "Mecha"

 

[Bassoonist]

Starcraft is not really an equivalent though, different genre, owned by a company that can afford to throw money away on it (remember, if it can't be monetized it won't be supported) to keep a baseline "hype" until they got around to a sequel.

You forget that Blizzard wasn't rolling in the money when they published Starcraft. Blizzard didn't become obscenely rich until after the release of WoW six years later. I don't know how to check this, but I suspect each Blizzard studio back then wasn't much larger than HBS is now. Additionally, the two games have more similarities to each other than differences, especially when compared to their peers in the current game market. They're both deep strategy games awash in a sea of MOBA's, first-person shooters, and pocket games for your phone.

I think one lesson HBS can learn from Blizzard's success is that multi-player in Warcraft and Starcraft helped maintain interest in all of Blizzard's IP's during the lull between releases. Unfortunately for HBS modern gamers expect much more functionality. We don't have same patience that gamers in the 1990's had when they built up the infrastructure to continue playing Warcraft and Starcraft against each other. MOBA's and services like X-Box Live raised our expectations such that anything more than a few mouse clicks to connect us with another person online is considered onerous. We also expect incentives like leaderboards and rewards for continued play to keep us coming back.

HBS is also hindered by the fact that the story elements in the single-player campaign railroads us into essentially the same experience in every play-through. (How many times have you been asked to make the same burger in this game?) The strength of single-player in strategy games like the Civ franchise lie in their ability to make each new game feel different through the use of variables like leaders, maps, and difficulty levels. After you finish the BattleTech campaign there are very few variables; you're left with just a handful of missions to play through that are only differentiated by a limited number of maps and the OpFor. There are also no new goals to incentivize us to continue playing. I think it's neither premature nor hyperbolic to predict that after the second or third play-through almost all gamers will move onto something else.

I really love BattleTech. I played table top in the 1990's. I plan on buying the new box sets that will come out this year for my sons. I played every iteration of MechWarrior. I love how HBS molded BattleTech into this wonderful game. I want this game to grow and live forever. I just don't see how that can happen if the only revenue stream for BattleTech is a new single-player DLC that comes out once or twice a year.

Perhaps therein lies the true problem, i.e., our expectation that BattleTech will grow and live forever. Like a great meal, perhaps we should just be satisfied with the phenomenal plate that was put in front of us and accept the fact that we've completely consumed it.

 

[RealCadaver]

You forget that Blizzard wasn't rolling in the money when they published Starcraft. Blizzard didn't become obscenely rich until after the release of WoW six years later. I don't know how to check this, but I suspect each Blizzard studio back then wasn't much larger than HBS is now. Additionally, the two games have more similarities to each other than differences, especially when compared to their peers in the current game market. They're both deep strategy games awash in a sea of MOBA's, first-person shooters, and pocket games for your phone.

I think one lesson HBS can learn from Blizzard's success is that multi-player in Warcraft and Starcraft helped maintain interest in all of Blizzard's IP's during the lull between releases. Unfortunately for HBS modern gamers expect much more functionality. We don't have same patience that gamers in the 1990's had when they built up the infrastructure to continue playing Warcraft and Starcraft against each other. MOBA's and services like X-Box Live raised our expectations such that anything more than a few mouse clicks to connect us with another person online is considered onerous. We also expect incentives like leaderboards and rewards for continued play to keep us coming back.

HBS is also hindered by the fact that the story elements in the single-player campaign railroads us into essentially the same experience in every play-through. (How many times have you been asked to make the same burger in this game?) The strength of single-player in strategy games like the Civ franchise lie in their ability to make each new game feel different through the use of variables like leaders, maps, and difficulty levels. After you finish the BattleTech campaign there are very few variables; you're left with just a handful of missions to play through that are only differentiated by a limited number of maps and the OpFor. There are also no new goals to incentivize us to continue playing. I think it's neither premature nor hyperbolic to predict that after the second or third play-through almost all gamers will move onto something else.

I really love BattleTech. I played table top in the 1990's. I plan on buying the new box sets that will come out this year for my sons. I played every iteration of MechWarrior. I love how HBS molded BattleTech into this wonderful game. I want this game to grow and live forever. I just don't see how that can happen if the only revenue stream for BattleTech is a new single-player DLC that comes out once or twice a year.

Perhaps therein lies the true problem, i.e., our expectation that BattleTech will grow and live forever. Like a great meal, perhaps we should just be satisfied with the phenomenal plate that was put in front of us and accept the fact that we've completely consumed it.

Blizzard was buying companies in 1998 (when Starcraft was released), they had started Battlenet about a year before that, which means they already had a tested working multi-player platform to leverage for Starcraft. They were not being bought (as HBS was just recently). Compared to HBS, they had significantly more money and resources. Additionally, Starcraft is a real-time game, not turn based. Turn based games do not lend themselves to online multi-player easily. If they did it would be the genre of choice, and it's not. People are not that patient (at large).

I think a lot of people want BT to become "mainstream", it won't (unless they invest 100s of millions in advertising). It's a niche game. The fact it has sold so well speaks to the excellent job done by HBS and the marketing channels. Better to compare this game to Panzer General, the best selling PC wargame (which sold about 250k at the time) of all time when it was released, but still niche compared to other games.

The current game really is excellent and I too would like it to continue.... for all time... but online MP is probably not the answer to that equation, at this point in time.

 

[Slayer_TNT]

2) StarCraft does get points for having a fully fleshed out SP campaign... but can you seriously argue that the game's shelf life (by which I mean developer support) was in any way informed by the campaign? Because I posit to you that all updates & content have been focused on the eSports side of things, with the SP aspect collecting dust post-launch.

That is absolutely correct. The main response from several of us was tot he assertion that you can't do both a good MP and SP game at the same time, which clearly you can. Speaking to longevity you are correct that it's longevity is entirely due to eSports and MP. However Starcraft has several elements that Battltech does not which lend themselves to engaging, mass market multiplayer:

1) SC is fast paced and requires serious multitasking. It keeps the player engaged,t here is no down time, and having partners matters as they may be able to catch and cover things that you miss in the frenzy.

2) The three factions are utterly unique in their play styles and capability, and very, very well balanced. In Battletech we all work with the same gear, at least until the Clans show up, then their stuff is so vastly superior that ti isn't really balanced. At any rate they are just better versions of the same tech the IS and SLDF had before, so the different flavors and combinations aren't there.

3) Watching a Starcraft Match is like watching 3 hockey games at the same time on the same ice with ferrets in the players' pants. That's what makes it a solid and enduring eSport. Battletech is like watching a chess match with 4 pieces. Not really a good candidate.

4) RTS dies out because it was overdone and because after StarCraft II there was nowhere to go. Blizzard killed it with that game and nothing else compares, so there's nowhere to go with it, and it doesn't deliver the monetization opportunities that MOBA, MMO, or FPS Arena games do, so it got dropped by the big publishers.

Games like Battletech live on because of their mods. New content spawned by a group of volunteers that produce way more than the developer can on their budget. The Bethesda games and XCOM are good examples and they still generate new sales even years after release because the Mods are a draw. I think that, in conjunction with new Campaigns and storyline are a more viable path to longevity for this game.

 

[Morfanos]

Given the amount of money involved, they'll have to perform metrics before greenlighting anything particularly robust, just as they would with any other potential game facet that they were considering advancing. Realistically, they aren't going to take a "build it and they will come" position on faith. If we're talking more modest alterations, they do have a job opening post for a 'Multiplayer Network Engineer' on their homepage, which suggests that they at least want to improve stability issues (the position has been posted for a long while, though).

...

Again, this is a good argument. You'll have to keep in mind that I'm never dismissing what you say, I'm simply giving you a better picture.

You talk of performing metrics before greenlighting and that's problematic on the base that a more robust multiplayer has already been approved from the start, but it's missing because of a lack of time(like most project).

It's not a question of metrics, it's a question delivering the product you told your "investors" you would make.

As for the metrics themselves, I would be very curious to know what data could be useful to them right now seeing how difficult it is to play the MP.

The original window of opportunity to get the word of mouth going about how "good is this game MP" is already closing.

Those are just the steam numbers but when the game was released, 23k people were playing this game, a month later, it was down 11k and now halfway into June, it's down to 6.5k. That's 16.5k potential MP players that will most likely never come back because they've moved on. Also, while I still believe it's possible to have a good SP and MP experience in a single product, that 6.5k players isn't a good sign for the longevity argument of the SP so far at least.

Please understand I'm not saying the game is dead or anything but timing is important if you want people to continue using your product in the long run and in this case, they're quite literally letting the MP part die by inaction(at least from the information available to us, maybe they've been working on it this whole and it will be fixed by the end of the month, who knows) and the sad part here is that I'm sure it's really not what they meant to do, it's just a byproduct of releasing the game before it was done.

 

[Woolfe]

Haven't read all 13 pages of this.

But like many, I bought for the SP experience. MP was a bonus.

I have played 1 MP game against a good friend of mine, and it's likely that it will only be close friends that I play against.

I am not averse to MP, and I think the Solaris concept was a good idea, and hope that it can be realised, but I always wanted the SP experience over the MP.

Also. I don't think the system is properly balanced yet. If I did play, I would probably only play stock mechs in order to avoid the "Uber" mechs that take advantage of imbalances in weapon systems.

 

[Larsenex]

I am rather upset thst they wasted development time on MP at all.

^^ This. I would rather they give us more single player content, advance the timeline to include the Helm Memory core so we can enjoy some losttech prior to 3049 and maybe give us an option to have far larger maps if the players computer can handle it (see Enormous maps in Civ VI and ludicrous maps in Gal civ III). Again its a shame they wasted resources on MP.

 

[Jade_Rook]

I don't think that resources used on MP were a waste. I am almost exclusively a single player gamer. I played one round of multiplayer in the beta and haven't touched it in the full release.

However, I still want to see the multiplayer side of this game succeed. I love seeing all of the tournaments going on!

I want the multiplayer side to thrive because that will help bring in more players. I'm not really the one to comment on how to do that, but I want to see the community grow.

 

[Prussian Havoc]

I don't think that resources used on MP were a waste. I am almost exclusively a single player gamer. I played one round of multiplayer in the beta and haven't touched it in the full release.

However, I still want to see the multiplayer side of this game succeed. I love seeing all of the tournaments going on!

I want the multiplayer side to thrive because that will help bring in more players. I'm not really the one to comment on how to do that, but I want to see the community grow.

Thank you.

I share your hope to see our community grow.

One way to do that is to participate in one of the as yet still open tournaments posted to our forum's Pinned Bulletin for Collective MP Tournament Links.

At the moment, registration for @T3rrortrooper's Jerome Blake Memorial Tourney remains opens, though only a pair of slots remain vacant.

Or better yet, join myself, @T3rrortrooper and those who have already hosted a Tournament and run your own tournament.

A single-night's 4-participant Tournament, maybe a weekend's 8-participant Tournament, or perhaps even a larger multi-week Tournament, all such tournaments are possible, especially given such great resources as the Challonge Brackets and Tournaments website.

I've enjoyed my preparation and participation in BATTLETECH tournaments and look forward to many more.

I hope Good @Jade_Rook that if the opportunity ever presents, you'll consider joining me in the lists for a tournament at some point in the future. As ever, good luck and good gaming Good Sir. :bow:

 

[President Jyrgunkarrd]

I'm always happy to discuss .

1-It's not so much a dying genre than a genre dominated by just a few games that to have the market all to themselves. I would have to check the numbers but I wouldn't be surprise to see them be higher than the TBS genre(what BattleTech is). It's not that different from what the multiplayer first person landscapde was looking like just a few years ago(before Siege, PUBG and Overwatch), you either had the good old Counter-Strike, Battlefield or CoD, that was it. The same could be said for other genres. Another example of a popular RTS with both good MP and SP would be the Company of Heroes series.

2-Back to StarCraft, I don't know how old you are or when you first played it but for me, it was a day 1 thing. And yes, the support was amazing. Brood was phenomenal for the single player. Even today, I have people telling me the bought the HD remake they release not too long ago to replay that SP. If we go to SC2, in single player alone, you have the equivalent in game time and original story of 3 separate games. Each races campaign is as huge if not bigger than most games single player campaign. True, they didn't release that in one release, as each new campaign was an seen as a expansions(much more expensive than DLCs but cheaper than a full game). They also didn't stop there, they also went further with a more DLC type expansion for one of the game characters. Basically, for more than 6 years, they've worked on improving and adding to the single player side. As for the multiplayer, well, I don't think I need to talk about that part, SC2 still huge as an esport so that should speak for itself. We're in 2018 so we're now going on 8 years of amazing SP and MP for SC2.

I'm not exactly sure why you would describe either Broodwars (SC1) or the 2 additional campaigns and the one DLCs we got for SC2 as :

No; it is a dead genre, largely replaced by MOBAs. There is StarCraft 2, and there is nothing else. When was the last time a CoH game was published? Anything else that's been released in the last couple of years (the most recent DoW game, for example) has just been a flash in the pan.

This is the problem with having a genre that is so intrinsically tied into high skill ceiling multiplayer competition: most people realize they will never even approach the ceiling, and that the game is no fun playing at that level anyway, so they stop playing.


Brood War was ages ago, man. C&C, Total A, KKND... that was an era of RTS glut, before APM was refined into a science by professional players & before eSports. That genie left the bottle, and now those days are gone.

You have a point with Blizzard giving SC 2 a proper send-off with the Nova DLC, but even then - it's a send-off. That signaled the end of the game's development. They basically just gave-up on MP balance and stripped it of content in order to tighten-up the experience as much as they could, and now Blizzard is off to do different things with stuff like Heroes of the Storm, and presumably a substantive future thing with WoW (y'know, those exclusively MP titles that are making them all of the money in the entire universe, while absorbing just a fraction of the costs & human resources of building a SP experience?).


EDIT: I always feel like I am having to play the part of Elrond when I get into these discussions / arguments.

'I was there, Gandalf. I was there 15 years ago, when the strength of DotA's Ventrilo community failed...'

 

[Morfanos]

No; it is a dead genre, largely replaced by MOBAs

At this point, I think we need to agree that both "dead" and "rts genre" have a different meaning for the two of us.

To me, a moba is just a sub genre of the RTS type. Just like DOOM(arena), Arma(simulation), CoD(run and gun), BattleField(a bit of everything) and Siege(tactical) are all very different sub genres of the FPS type of games.

If I look at it from your point of view, I completely agree with what you said.

 

[Vorkaal]

Ruined two games to random mid game disconnects, very nail biting close game that could have easily gone either way. Not only is the multiplayer system so bare-boned (not even basic stat tracking), it sometimes doesn't even work from such connection problems. And it's clearly not a server load problem, there are barely any games being played. What if this game was a multiplayer hit with a huge playerbase, and in addition to these connection problems players suffer from server overload problems?

Just so disappointing.

And those disconnects weren't even disconnects. My opponent was able to type to me in the game chat interface and I saw what he said. And when he moved his Jenner through the 'game disconnect' error, I was able to see the Jenner move.

Can we get some help to multiplayer so it doesn't lose connection so easily, or you know maybe have the option to reconnect to game option that practically every multiplayer game has these days?

 

[Pewpew!]

While I haven't had many in-game disconnects lately, it's getting really annoying not being able to join lobbys or people to join into mine. Restarting the game after every match is just gross.

 

[Mojo Amok]

Those are just the steam numbers but when the game was released, 23k people were playing this game, a month later, it was down 11k and now halfway into June, it's down to 6.5k. That's 16.5k potential MP players that will most likely never come back because they've moved on. Also, while I still believe it's possible to have a good SP and MP experience in a single product, that 6.5k players isn't a good sign for the longevity argument of the SP so far at least.

Please understand I'm not saying the game is dead or anything but timing is important if you want people to continue using your product in the long run and in this case, they're quite literally letting the MP part die by inaction(at least from the information available to us, maybe they've been working on it this whole and it will be fixed by the end of the month, who knows) and the sad part here is that I'm sure it's really not what they meant to do, it's just a byproduct of releasing the game before it was done.

I'm not comfortable with the "never come back because they've moved on/6.5k players isn't a good sign for the longevity argument of the SP" point - if things really were that bleak for games that had dips in player counts, the vast majority of developers and game franchises would be dead in the water (cRPG's, in particular, would be hopeless given how long it takes to create a story versus how long it takes to play it). Outside of sandbox games - especially strategy sandbox games like Paradox Grand Strategy titles or Civ - dips in player counts like that is just standard operating procedure. So long as players are stopping to play with a sentiment of "that was fun and I'm looking forward to the next content drop," everything is fine from a business perspective. Most games aren't even designed to be played endlessly, nor are the players who purchase them expecting that - they just offer a value proposition of X amount of entertainment as measured in time or intensity for Y dollars.

That ties into how we would define a game being "dead" or "alive." If the bar is set to where constant high player counts are required for a game to qualify as being healthy, then the only hope for any franchise would a few specific avenues (one of which would be creating a wildly successful MP experience). While it's fine if someone wants to use that sort of definition system for whatever reason, it's not really a good representation of the economic health of a specific game/series/franchise.

To your larger point, maybe it was a missed opportunity to where the creation of a vibrant MP community could have been enacted with some further tweaks and polishing. But conversely, maybe it wasn't - I'm not sure either way if that investment would have paid off or not. Most suspicious is that there aren't particularly equivalent titles from a structure/match length standpoint that are MP hits. With something like Battlefleet Gothic: Armada, I'm fairly sure that they were really close to having a solid and persistent MP community but were undone by a few problems (bugs and balancing). With Battletech, I'm not so sure. Maybe.

 

[Morfanos]

I'm not comfortable with the "never come back because they've moved on/6.5k players isn't a good sign for the longevity argument of the SP" point...

I'll be honest with you, I'm not sure I'm comfortable when something I said is being misquoted or paraphrased into something it never meant. What I said, without cutting anything important before, in between, or after, was:

... That's 16.5k potential MP players that will most likely never come back because they've moved on. Also, while I still believe it's possible to have a good SP and MP experience in a single product, that 6.5k players isn't a good sign for the longevity argument of the SP so far at least...

I never said what you "said" I did, "potential MP players that will most likely never come back because they've moved on", is not at all the same as what you "..." used.

First of all, "potential MP payers that will most likely never come back" literally means multiplayer players, not single player players. It should never have been stitched with the other part.

I know very well that a single player can be picked up at any point and be still very enjoyable, years after release but that's not the case with multiplayer titles, at least not if there's no more community left to play with and that's exactly what my comment meant.

You can pick up a single player title and enjoy it at its full potential even if you're the last person alive on this planet.

You cannot do that with multiplayer and it is the current problem. Again, only according to the steam numbers, this game lost 75% of its player base. That's a lot of potential MP players, emphasis on potential, that never got the chance go even try the MP because of what I described in length in a post above, that is, that it's barely playable in its current form.

As for the second part of the quote, it was meant for the game over all, which by all means, also includes MP. Like I said above, to survive, a MP games needs players. Right now, since the MP cannot be counted on to keep those players engaged, that role falls onto the SP part of the game and as of the last 24h on steam, the 4.5K peak players is not a good sign for that longevity.

A single player game, just like a book, can be used and enjoyed centuries later, as long as they're still someone/something that can understand the language. For that reason, if taken as a SP title only, a drop in the players base can possibly have no effect what so ever, on the longevity of the product. The same cannot be said for a multiplayer game.

PS:English isn't my native language nor one that I use at all on a daily basis so it is quite possible that a misunderstanding might arise from that, if it is the case with what you quoted, I apologize for that misunderstanding.