Post by thegentleman on May 7, 2015 16:22:06 GMT -5
Now that it's May and I'm absolutely certain my playtime for AW is over (not even the M1 Irons or a reworked Pytaek seem to be doing enough to pique my interest), I figured it might be interesting to do a run-down of the good and bad of AW as a series entry, and am looking forward to reading some of what you guys think the "legacy" of AW will be when it's judged a few years down the road.
So I guess I'm saying that now that things seem all said and done for the playerbase (at least on this board), what did you guys learn?
1.
Exo movement - Mixed opinions
I think AW made the right call in terms of doing something to shake up the movement mechanics. The strafing and boosting in AW was pretty neat, and I'll admit that once I got over the initial learning curve, it was something I felt really added something to the game. However, over time, the nature of what I've called "jumpy jumpy horseshit" began to wear thin with me. Tracking someone only to have them double-jump up and down like an idiot over and over again really took me out of the moment, and I can't say how many times I'd double-jumped up to a ledge only to not mantle it and fall back down to where I was. We've also mentioned that with the exo mechanics, the maps really should have been larger. On the whole, AW did increase the skill gap through movement when it came to one-on-one duels, but all of the other chaos that resulted from spawns and giving up any semblance of map control made it a bit of a wash.
2.
Exo abilities - wasted potential
This just seemed utterly dumb to me and baffling that it hadn't had more tweaking over the life cycle. People used overclock. Shield was a gimmick, stim was useless, trophy system was situational and actually not terribly useful now that scooting away from grenades was easier than ever before, mute wasn't ever necessary considering the gimped footstep sounds, and cloak was useless to anyone not fighting the most braindead of players. In addition, you had not one, but TWO perks that would have theoretically boosted the effectiveness of the abilities (Overcharge, which I don't think anyone has ever argued has been worth the point slot, and fast hands, which allowed you to use most of the abilities lightning-fast so they'd die out two seconds later). I think this element seemed the most game-changing to me on paper, but was gimped for multiplayer so hard that it became a non-issue.
3.
Loot drops - good
I'll admit: I liked the excitement of getting a good gun. This above all else kept me playing for longer. I wouldn't mind if a loot / gun customization thing for BO3 returned. I think there are issues of fairness / equity in the early stages, as newcomers are getting rolled by people with Obsidian Steeds and RIPs, which seems kind of baffling for a game trying to reach out to more players. However, most people who played for longer than a month had access to at least one or two "OP" guns. Over the course of the lifecycle, I didn't ever get an RIP, Loophole, or Inferno, but I did have a lot of A++ top tier guns that gave me a palpable advantage (IMR Impact, Hole Puncher, Ameli Heavy). Just speaking personally, it was nice to always have something to look forward to. This is only marred a bit by...
4.
Balance - perhaps the worst in the series.
I think SHG's inexperience showed the most here. As I understood it before, SHG were mostly a singleplayer studio. And the AW single player was great, I think. But in single player, nobody really gives a shit about gun balance, because your idiot bad guys die just as well to statistically inferior guns as they do to anything else. AW had the absolute highest amount of dumb perks, worthless guns, and awful variants. SHG rode the struggle bus for months trying to figure out what to do with the MK-14 and the EPM3 despite almost all of the community having a better idea of what to do with them. SHG still doesn't know how to make those guns work right. They buried their heads in the sand with the ASM-1 for months, never realizing that after that first buff they created a gun with the highest damage, longest range, biggest magazine, and best accuracy in one fell swoop. That's bush-league stuff that should have never happened.
But the variant balancing was by far the dumbest, where about 60% of the weapons have no reason to exist or be used by anyone. Example: we're going to make this gun take one more bullet to kill at range, but we gave you a 10% faster sprint-out time. It's really like they paid an intern to tweak random numbers. Where was the person to say, "You give up this benefit, but you're rewarded with this instead." There was no synergy here at all. Maybe increase the long-range bullets to kill by 1, but in return your sprint-out time is reduced by 30% and your hipfire tightened by 10%. Boom: instant niche. Maybe we reduce recoil by 15% and add 3 bullets to the mag, but in return, your sprint-out and swap times are increased. I especially liked the ones where the damage was decreased to increase the range at which you would be doing less damage. Woo.
Now, we all know that SHG couldn't balance to save their lives, but here's what I learned.
January through March is a pretty critical time for the CoD life cycle. The first DLC usually comes out around then, and the initial honeymoon period starts to wear off. I think being pro-active to improvements FOR EVERYONE, not just DLC holders, is essential during this time. Committing to balancing patches is one absolutely bullshit-proof way that a company says that it cares about the community. When people think there are elements of the game that are broken, allocating resources to cowboy outfits will just serve to piss me off. I definitely stopped playing AW earlier than I would have (and as a result, bought less DLC and microtransactions than I did in Ghosts) because I didn't want to pay for dessert when it seemed like my dinner was incomplete.
5.
Condrey as a community manager - series low, maybe tied with Tina.
Tina doesn't know what she's doing. Like that time the patch got pushed out in Ghosts / MW3 and Tina said, "No, no, it really did happen, guys. The changes are subtle!" Until the community literally had to give IW a set of directions for what to test, with people saying, "Seriously, just go home: please. Try this on your home console." But at least Tina's usually polite, even if she understands next to nothing about the nuts and bolts of the game. She may as well not be there at all. I remember the Ghandi guy on the MW3 boards was actually really informative and did his best to provide people with info about patches, details, fixes, etc.
Condrey, on the other hand, was nauseating to me from the standpoint of a consumer. He had no concrete information to ever provide, and in some attempt to build an enigma or stoke a mystery, would provide the barest details of an idea/change, with no elaboration, and no timeline. Basically, his entire job seemed to be trolling Twitter kids. I got tired of seeing people ask questions like, "Are you going to implement a trading system for the guns? Or are we stuck with what we have?" and then seeing Condrey post "Yes." After a while, I got the sense that he thought he was too much of a cool surfer bro to deal with these questions, or that deep down he thought it was stupid that people cared about this at all. But hey, when it comes time to buy a purple reskin of an armor set we already have, look who's on Twitter telling us what cool shit AW has!
I hope Condrey is an effective CEO for SHG's sake, but I wouldn't let him go anywhere near the public for the next go-around. I am not going to miss the three years of his absence.
I mean, compare this to Vahn. BO3 isn't even out and already Vahn is talking about how they've changed gameplay mechanics and some of the internal logic they use in determining what's balanced / broken / off. I want a guy like that adjusting the gears and levers inside of a game. I want a MP designer / community manager who actually does care about the product. A person who's a perpetual student of how to make things better. Example: Vahn/3arc saying, "Hey: nobody ever uses the ACOG or long-range optics. How do we make them better?"
6.
All in all
I appreciate what AW was trying to do, but the inexperience was evident. AW was basically SHG coming in and trying to reinvent the multiplayer wheel, perpetually learning on their feet as they went along. BOIII, hopefully, is going to be built on the foundation of what worked and what didn't about BOII, which most people have agreed is a series highlight thus far.
So I guess I'm saying that now that things seem all said and done for the playerbase (at least on this board), what did you guys learn?
1.
Exo movement - Mixed opinions
I think AW made the right call in terms of doing something to shake up the movement mechanics. The strafing and boosting in AW was pretty neat, and I'll admit that once I got over the initial learning curve, it was something I felt really added something to the game. However, over time, the nature of what I've called "jumpy jumpy horseshit" began to wear thin with me. Tracking someone only to have them double-jump up and down like an idiot over and over again really took me out of the moment, and I can't say how many times I'd double-jumped up to a ledge only to not mantle it and fall back down to where I was. We've also mentioned that with the exo mechanics, the maps really should have been larger. On the whole, AW did increase the skill gap through movement when it came to one-on-one duels, but all of the other chaos that resulted from spawns and giving up any semblance of map control made it a bit of a wash.
2.
Exo abilities - wasted potential
This just seemed utterly dumb to me and baffling that it hadn't had more tweaking over the life cycle. People used overclock. Shield was a gimmick, stim was useless, trophy system was situational and actually not terribly useful now that scooting away from grenades was easier than ever before, mute wasn't ever necessary considering the gimped footstep sounds, and cloak was useless to anyone not fighting the most braindead of players. In addition, you had not one, but TWO perks that would have theoretically boosted the effectiveness of the abilities (Overcharge, which I don't think anyone has ever argued has been worth the point slot, and fast hands, which allowed you to use most of the abilities lightning-fast so they'd die out two seconds later). I think this element seemed the most game-changing to me on paper, but was gimped for multiplayer so hard that it became a non-issue.
3.
Loot drops - good
I'll admit: I liked the excitement of getting a good gun. This above all else kept me playing for longer. I wouldn't mind if a loot / gun customization thing for BO3 returned. I think there are issues of fairness / equity in the early stages, as newcomers are getting rolled by people with Obsidian Steeds and RIPs, which seems kind of baffling for a game trying to reach out to more players. However, most people who played for longer than a month had access to at least one or two "OP" guns. Over the course of the lifecycle, I didn't ever get an RIP, Loophole, or Inferno, but I did have a lot of A++ top tier guns that gave me a palpable advantage (IMR Impact, Hole Puncher, Ameli Heavy). Just speaking personally, it was nice to always have something to look forward to. This is only marred a bit by...
4.
Balance - perhaps the worst in the series.
I think SHG's inexperience showed the most here. As I understood it before, SHG were mostly a singleplayer studio. And the AW single player was great, I think. But in single player, nobody really gives a shit about gun balance, because your idiot bad guys die just as well to statistically inferior guns as they do to anything else. AW had the absolute highest amount of dumb perks, worthless guns, and awful variants. SHG rode the struggle bus for months trying to figure out what to do with the MK-14 and the EPM3 despite almost all of the community having a better idea of what to do with them. SHG still doesn't know how to make those guns work right. They buried their heads in the sand with the ASM-1 for months, never realizing that after that first buff they created a gun with the highest damage, longest range, biggest magazine, and best accuracy in one fell swoop. That's bush-league stuff that should have never happened.
But the variant balancing was by far the dumbest, where about 60% of the weapons have no reason to exist or be used by anyone. Example: we're going to make this gun take one more bullet to kill at range, but we gave you a 10% faster sprint-out time. It's really like they paid an intern to tweak random numbers. Where was the person to say, "You give up this benefit, but you're rewarded with this instead." There was no synergy here at all. Maybe increase the long-range bullets to kill by 1, but in return your sprint-out time is reduced by 30% and your hipfire tightened by 10%. Boom: instant niche. Maybe we reduce recoil by 15% and add 3 bullets to the mag, but in return, your sprint-out and swap times are increased. I especially liked the ones where the damage was decreased to increase the range at which you would be doing less damage. Woo.
Now, we all know that SHG couldn't balance to save their lives, but here's what I learned.
January through March is a pretty critical time for the CoD life cycle. The first DLC usually comes out around then, and the initial honeymoon period starts to wear off. I think being pro-active to improvements FOR EVERYONE, not just DLC holders, is essential during this time. Committing to balancing patches is one absolutely bullshit-proof way that a company says that it cares about the community. When people think there are elements of the game that are broken, allocating resources to cowboy outfits will just serve to piss me off. I definitely stopped playing AW earlier than I would have (and as a result, bought less DLC and microtransactions than I did in Ghosts) because I didn't want to pay for dessert when it seemed like my dinner was incomplete.
5.
Condrey as a community manager - series low, maybe tied with Tina.
Tina doesn't know what she's doing. Like that time the patch got pushed out in Ghosts / MW3 and Tina said, "No, no, it really did happen, guys. The changes are subtle!" Until the community literally had to give IW a set of directions for what to test, with people saying, "Seriously, just go home: please. Try this on your home console." But at least Tina's usually polite, even if she understands next to nothing about the nuts and bolts of the game. She may as well not be there at all. I remember the Ghandi guy on the MW3 boards was actually really informative and did his best to provide people with info about patches, details, fixes, etc.
Condrey, on the other hand, was nauseating to me from the standpoint of a consumer. He had no concrete information to ever provide, and in some attempt to build an enigma or stoke a mystery, would provide the barest details of an idea/change, with no elaboration, and no timeline. Basically, his entire job seemed to be trolling Twitter kids. I got tired of seeing people ask questions like, "Are you going to implement a trading system for the guns? Or are we stuck with what we have?" and then seeing Condrey post "Yes." After a while, I got the sense that he thought he was too much of a cool surfer bro to deal with these questions, or that deep down he thought it was stupid that people cared about this at all. But hey, when it comes time to buy a purple reskin of an armor set we already have, look who's on Twitter telling us what cool shit AW has!
I hope Condrey is an effective CEO for SHG's sake, but I wouldn't let him go anywhere near the public for the next go-around. I am not going to miss the three years of his absence.
I mean, compare this to Vahn. BO3 isn't even out and already Vahn is talking about how they've changed gameplay mechanics and some of the internal logic they use in determining what's balanced / broken / off. I want a guy like that adjusting the gears and levers inside of a game. I want a MP designer / community manager who actually does care about the product. A person who's a perpetual student of how to make things better. Example: Vahn/3arc saying, "Hey: nobody ever uses the ACOG or long-range optics. How do we make them better?"
6.
All in all
I appreciate what AW was trying to do, but the inexperience was evident. AW was basically SHG coming in and trying to reinvent the multiplayer wheel, perpetually learning on their feet as they went along. BOIII, hopefully, is going to be built on the foundation of what worked and what didn't about BOII, which most people have agreed is a series highlight thus far.