Banditman, on 10 May 2013 - 10:21 AM, said:

Social to me is the interface for interacting with other players. My Friends, my Guild, chat, everything. It may also touch on what I consider the only reason to play this game: Community Warfare. Without that important feature all you have here is Counterstrike with mechs, and no means for anyone else to create a true metagame. Not something I am interested in sticking around for.



Here are features that absolutely must be a part of MWO:



1. Robust chat. This means configurable, tabbed chat windows. I want a tab for Guild (private), Guild (public), Group and Faction. I want the ability to join other channels (and create those tabs) that might exist, such as "New Player", "Recruitment" and "Events". I want a tab specifically for private messages. I would say PGI dropped the ball on this, but I'm not sure they ever had the ball to begin with on this topic. Here's the ball. Run with it.



2. Robust Guild function. While I think that the guild features of EVE are probably a bit much for this game, a good education in what EVE provides would be a great basis to cull ideas from. At a minimum, I need the ability to create my own ranks, assign various access rights to them and move players into and out of these ranks easily. I need to be able to send some sort of message to individuals, ranks or the guild as a whole. I'd like my Guild's mechs to share a common paint scheme. I'd like them to have custom decals. I'd like a tag for all guild members, though I have to believe after dropping against some PGI 8 mans, something of this nature is already in the works. I'd It would be a lot easier to know what features we need here if we knew more about how Community Warfare was going to work.



3. In game messaging. No, not chat. Let's say I want to talk to a Mercenary corp about a contract, but their leader or diplomatic contact isn't online. I want to be able to leave him a message. In game.



4. End of match results, in the front end. I want to be able to review the results of the last drop in the front end. In fact, I want those results to be hotlinked. If I finish a match, and want to message one of the guys (or girls, no judging!) I just played against, I click his name and select from a context menu: "Chat, Message, Invite to Group, Invite to Guild, See Stats, Ignore" There are probably other things that belong in that context menu.



5. Etc. Without knowing a lot more about how the community will interface with the actual metagame (Community Warfare), it's hard to say what else we're going to need. Probably about 10,000 things that we can't even imagine right now. If you really want our help in guiding development, we need to know a lot more than we currently do.





PGI wants this game to succeed, I believe that. Most of this community wants the same thing. Unfortunately, it's very hard right now for the community to help PGI see the missing parts, because we don't see any of the parts. Make no mistake. I don't consider what we have right now "MWO". Until Community Warfare exists, we have nothing but a mech sim.



I believe we all want a great game, and I think there are probably a lot of great ideas that the community can either help evolve or even conceive. We can't take those steps until we are more informed.

