As an original Legendary Founder of MechWarrior Online, I highly recommend people think VERY CAREFULLY before giving Pirahna ANY money. I've been in MWO since Closed Beta nearly three years ago, and I can honestly say the whole experience has been pretty terrible from the beginning. The engine itself has promise, but it has not advanced hardly at all since Closed Beta (and in some ways, I think you could argue some things have gotten worse).
The only thing to do in MWO is endless arena combat/capture the flag modes, with no bigger objective or progress that lastsa at all. That means no PvE, no single player (or AI of any kind), no persistent effects (Community Warfare, which is basically a large area-of-control map, has been promised for literally years, with the timeframe continually slipping and its scope seemingly smaller than when first announced - if it happens, it's now a glorified map that shows control, and that's about it). They release a new map every so often, and consistently release new mechs, the best of which (called hero mechs) for significant amounts of real money only, and the most consistent thing on the website are recurring grab deals (including $500 limited edition gold mechs).
They've also routinely mislead customers (or outright lied depending on prespective), badly, badly handled communications with the customer base, become very strict/unforgiving on their forums (which, to their credit, are burning down on a daily basis because of all these things, so I don't doubt it's a challenge), and in general just have not had in any way a good communications base with their customers. They also seem to not respect their founders at all, as the game has progressively shifted focus (introduction of 3PV and simpler control schemes) since the beginning.
Don't take my word for it. Check out the comments for #auniverstoexplore on Twitter or take a look at the massive MWO thread over at RSI -
https://forums.robertsspaceindustries.com/discussion/108193/mwo-a-game-discussion ... or check out reddit. Or anywhere, really, and you'll find MANY unsatisfied customers.
I consider myself a fair person, and I loved the heck out of MechWarrior 2 back in the day and was hoping for a similar experience for MWO. I'll also say that there can be some limited fun to be had in MWO, and I enjoyed several months of the beta before realizing it was going nowhere and giving up on it. The base engine isn't bad, but unless you want meaningless arena combat with constantly and wildly changing weapon/mech balance, that's all there is (honestly, Arena Commander already has more to do than a game in development for 3 years+). I get the impression Piranha is just is going for the most minimally viable product (either by choice to go that route and concentrate on cash grabs, or because of lack of resources to get quality development staff). They consistently seem to go the lazy way out and focus on marketing instead of focusing on quality. One example - a space map for MWO has a promo video showing tons of jump jetting action (which makes you think it's probably low-g), but the map itself has normal gravity; it seems they didn't want to bother.
Another game, MechWarrior Tactics, also published by Infinite Games (which just lost MechWarrior Online today as apparently Piranha assumed direct control), went offline during a server move late last month. An update was promised in 72 hours and still hasn't happened (and it's been around two weeks). Many speculate it may be completely dead (and there was a big Founders program for that too, which I also backed for, tho' not as much).
At any rate, this is just my opinion. But I felt it was necessary to warn people. I'm certainly going to watch out of curiosity, but it would take a LOT to get me to give this company another dime, ever.
I'm a backer of Star Citizen and couldn't be more pleased because I see the progress through the great communication, frequent text and video updates, and how far the playable bits have come since the beginning. My experience with Piranha is, if anything, the complete opposite of that. Buyer beware.
Just my two cents based on primarily my own experiences, but also the experiences of others I've read about. I'm never going to tell someone what to do or back, and there's risk in any project. I also normally don't post something as negative as this, but having wasted 100's of dollars on a company that, well let's be frank, that I think is disingenuous at best, I feel strongly about this one.
