Multiplayer...

[Zakhodit]

Before anyone disagrees with me, let me make some acknowledgements and present some numbers.

First off, hats off to all of the guys (and gals?) in the Unofficial HBS Discord channel. They have made it a great place to find people to play multiplayer. The tournaments they organize and the community there is fantastic. If your first go around in multiplayer left a bad taste in your mouth, I encourage you to join us on the discord and give it a second try.
https://discord.gg/k4rgbsq

And now some grim numbers.

Looking at steam data: 6,023 players logged into BATTLETECH today. Now if I compare that to some Steam multiplayer achievements such has "Good Start" which only requires that you win one Multiplayer match; only 2.5% of steam players have that achievement. Which means only around 150 of the players online today have tried multiplayer long enough to win one time.

Worse, "Rookie" which is the achievement of merely playing 5 multiplayer matches, has been unlocked by only 0.6%. Or 36 of the people who were online today. So once someone wins, they are done with multiplayer. Some apparently give up entirely before trying 5 times.

The achievement "Eck's gonna give it two you" which is a viral achievement in which you must play Eck himself, or someone who has played Eck, or someone who has played someone who has played Eck has been unlocked by 1.1% of steam players. Or ~66 of the players who logged in today.

If you play one multiplayer match you are almost guaranteed to get "Eck's gonna give it to you." Hell, you don't even have to stick around for the whole match as you get the achievement the instant the game starts. You can just Esc out and achievement is earned.

Which brings us to the next issue. All of these numbers aside, the multiplayer experience is abysmal. Connecting to a match is never as easy as pressing the Join button. You may try three or four times before you restart your client in the hopes the Word of Blake is appeased and COMSTAR lets the connection through. Once in the match, Your opponent can just bail. Which doesn't count as a match for any achievements. I had a hard time even getting the "Lose Ten Matches" achievement because I had to have the match COMPLETE. COMSTAR or an impatient opponent canceled that show before I could lose with honor.

And this is heartbreaking to me. The longevity of BATTLETECH has always been a multiplayer experience. I've never known anyone who plays TT alone in their Mother's basement. Once the single player content has been played out, what are the other 5,700ish players who logged in today going to do?

They are going to play another game.

This community can keep the small fire of multiplayer alive but unless HBS improves multiplayer, it's going to go away. And HBS isn't going to do that. These tiny numbers are not going to convince HBS to put any time into improvements for multiplayer. Any promise of a Solaris VII experience is empty. Gone because less than HALF of ONE percent of players continue to play each other. I mean why bother to keep the servers up? The hassle they cause and the money spent on them isn't worth it from a business standpoint.

This game had potential. It could have revitalized the multiplayer experience of Battletech.

Now the best hope is that they add a direct client connection so that the few of us who enjoy playing online can continue to do so once they shut down the servers.

 

[Camicon Dachass]

I was never interested in the multiplayer aspect of BATTLETECH. PvP games in general, really. 162 hours logged, and not once have I even clicked on the Multiplayer button.

 

[Green Knight]

Multiplayer = not one tiny bit interested. Didn't even contemplate logging in.

I bought this for single player + campaign. And it delivered.

Sorry.

 

[arcana75]

Bought it for the campaign. Not for the MP. Played the beta for the skirmish, didn't bother with the MP beta. I think most of the players of this game played it for the tactical single player goodness that it offers.

It's pretty much the same story for most of the good tactical games out there, eg XCOM, the General series, C&C, Civilisation, GalCiv, etc. Most players don't buy these games really for a nifty online experience, but rather a challenging session with AI at our own pace and time.

Now here's the thing. MP could be dead, it could even have been dead even before the game launched. But is the game dead? I think the game is successful despite it. If anything this outcome is good because it shows HBS that they should devote their resources to a strong SP game, than divide it across SP and MP. IIRC the same debate happened in the old forums when HBS put out the MP beta. I was there during the earlier kickstarter/backerkit days and I think the same debate happened when one of the stretch goals was skirmish mode then later skirmish mode with online.

 

[Stuckenschmidt]

MP is not my thing either. I wanted stompy robot action with a campaign and random contracts. I got what I wanted and am happy with it. Guess I will fly around in the Periphery for a long time and see, whether ComStar will send me a HPG priority message concerning DLCs someday.

This being said, if your MP experience is not how you`d like it to be or how it should be, then I am of course sorry. Maybe HBS finds a way to improve on that and make our fellow MP Mechpilots happy too.

 

[Marc_Hicks]

I do plan to dip my toe into MP, if only to take on my friends from my TT days. However, at the moment I am very much buried in the Single Player Campaign.....which has made this game worth every penny I paid all by itself .

 

[Dmon]

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

 

[Junker Egge]

I don't like multi-player either. No matter how good the experience may be, I just don't care.

 

[Tegual]

As others have said i don't plan on ever using multiplayer at all and in fact wish multiplayer had been left out so they could focus on the single player and campaign + more features. Also achievements mean nothing so realistically apart from the ones that come easily from playing single player i won't ever get the others and while i may be in a minority linking achievements in a game (unless it is a online focused game) to multiplayer is kinda annoying.

Basically multiplayer is a dead feature for me and so are multiplayer achievements.

 

[GUNNM]

I tried to play a MP game against a random person once. He couldn't select his premade lance so we both quit trying. Havent come back to it since.

Might try it against a friend at one point.

I think that the reason why games like battletech and Xcom is good SP games but not as popular MP games is simply that in a campaign with your own team and insta-death you get invested. You get stories to tell and you learn the quirks of your soldiers. Like Behemoth that saved that one mission with 2 back to back headshots on assault mechs with her AC20!

Then you come to MP with much worse soldiers, no stories and restrictions on what you can bring to the fight. It will still be fun, but not as fun.

Maybe if they took a page from Shogun 2 and create an online campaign. Imagine creating a merc company with limited resources and you stick with that selection for the MP campaign. The reward would be much less than in SP. After a few matches you have enough to customize your mechs a bit. A pilot might level up. You take on other companies in random games. That could be fun and create similar stories and comittment as SP.

 

[macd21]

Yeah, I don’t think multiplayer is important at all.

 

[Dezimus]

I feel your pain, Zakhodit.
Since 1998 I played BT competitively. We have never had not only the official competitive league, but even video game with ladder. Almost all multiplayer behavior was created by community themselves - leagues (ST, VL, MWA, NBT-HC, NBT-C), mods (HardCore for MW4), even games (MegaMek). Yes, this is a testament to a very strong community, but why does no one ever want to help us?
Campaign is really simple (i mean REALLY), I went through it like a hot knife through butter. It is somewhat enjoyable, but it does not give any challenge. Yes, it could be improved in the future and AI could be able to compete moderately. But that is it.
I put so much hope on BATTLETECH. Global map, capture of planets, units, role-playing - all this naive stuff. But competitive players received exactly what they always received. Multiplayer as inconvenient as possible, the connection is extremely unstable. Overcome!

 

[Eelectrica]

I'll never be in an MP match.
Quite happy to to play the SP campaign.
Honestly MP in this game is about as important to me as MP in X-Com, which is to say not at all.

 

[UberMunchkin]

To echo the rest of the thread here, I didn't buy this game for the multiplayer aspect and honestly it doesn't interest me at all. I'm in this the for expanded PvE Content and more campaigns, I want to see the game move through the multiple ages of Battletech and would love to play out the conflicts and contests that take place in the Inner Sphere and would really like a Clan Invasion campaign.

My plan is to play the campaign through a few more times with some rules applied to what I can field and how I play and then wait for some DLC and expansions. I don't have any plans to even try the multiplayer.

 

[Dmon]

why does no one ever want to help us?

My personal take on this is based on a combination of my few experienced playing online with people and with my general observations about MP games.

Firstly in my few experiences of playing online games I have generally found interaction with other players to be unpleasant and their attitude to be that of the keyboard warrior. Gloat when they win, tantrum when they lose.

Secondly MP games tend to be story/lore light in the extreme, look at MWO as the perfect example, take one of the most story rich IPs in all of Sci-fi and build a really dumb deathmatch FPS out of it, literally the only lore associated with the game is published on their website... not actually even in the game itself.

As a result, I personally tend to view MP and those who want it as pretty much "the enemy" of what I think makes a good game.

 

[Prince of Scars]

I have to echo what seems to be the common sentiment so far in this thread and say that I had zero interest in MP from the onset. In part because of all the issues you describe (like having to wait in the matchmaking queue, or to have opponents just dropping from the match for whatever reason), but primarily because I am fortunate enough to have an existent BattleTech Table Top community in my area. So if I want to play a game against somebody else, I have opponents that I know are cool and I will not have to deal with any sort of shenanigans when playing them.

 

[WandererRTF]

And this is heartbreaking to me. The longevity of BATTLETECH has always been a multiplayer experience.

True in a sense, however that has also relied on system where no one is trying to get a ahead of others (i.e. cheesing or abusing game system) but instead generally playing for fun. My online PvP experiences - prior to BT - have generally not been such. Too much competitiveness doesn't fit every one. For typical skirmish battles that is - campaigns are a different story but then again they would be more like PvE than PvP.

This community can keep the small fire of multiplayer alive but unless HBS improves multiplayer, it's going to go away. And HBS isn't going to do that. These tiny numbers are not going to convince HBS to put any time into improvements for multiplayer. Any promise of a Solaris VII experience is empty. Gone because less than HALF of ONE percent of players continue to play each other. I mean why bother to keep the servers up? The hassle they cause and the money spent on them isn't worth it from a business standpoint.

This game had potential. It could have revitalized the multiplayer experience of Battletech.

Kind of. Problem again is that reading through the occasional MP topics in forum which discusses 'best setups' and what is 'most overkill' for MP are shall we say even somewhat repulsive for me. I mean in a sense that i would even want to try the MP. For TT the random mech assignments were really the best thing since outside of campaign you never knew before the game what exactly you would be controlling - you needed to adapt and overcome, not try to create the most cheese oozing setups possible.



To clarify my case... I used to play fair bit of PvP games back in the day when you could only play with small groups - where you really knew personally every one playing. When such things went much wider (including MMORPGs or MUDs) where PvP essentially stood for 'here be trolls' I stopped then and there. Because with so many cheesing, abusing game system or outright cheating it was no longer fun. Only things i have played online since then have been Mass Effect 3 MP style PvE setups. Well apart from some PvP games with systems where again you know against whom you are playing... So there is a bit of a hurdle

That being said i might give it a shot at some point

 

[Doma]

Not that big of a surprise tbh.

I don't play there games for the MP. Much in the same way that I have played every Total War game since the original Shogun, but I have touched MP maybe 5 times.

 

[theCarthaginian]

I purchased Battletech as a DELIBERATE ESCAPE from online multiplayer. I had no knowledge that multiplayer would be a component of the game, nor any expectation of the feature. I don't care about achievements (as seen by my lack of 'all support weapon' or 'maximum armor' achievements) and wouldn't play multiplayer just to get them.

Multiplayer is nothing to me.
The game itself is enjoyable enough.

 

[TaurianMerc]

I'm another who purchased this game solely for the single player story. I only really play games that have story to them and never venture into the MP side of things because i want to do things at my own pace.
And like others have said, if i want to play against another person there already is this really fantastic, engaging, fun and sociable MP Battletech game you can play on the tabletop. Crack open a few jars of drink and you can make an evening disappear while chatting and having a laugh with your mates. No better way to do MP, online stuff will never match it.

i may be in a minority linking achievements in a game (unless it is a online focused game) to multiplayer is kinda annoying

I'm in that minority too then. Nothing I hate more than a single player, story driven game with a poorly tacked on MP game that the publishers demand because MP "is where it's at" and half the achievements are MP related (not that I am in any way looking at you Mass Effect ). Really drives the completionist in me absolutely bollocking mad.