Their game sense is irrelevant. They play and that's what matters when you're measuring popularity of a class.
Fair, I had honestly typed that portion in the five minutes I had to type that out before I went to work. A far more fair thing to say is that the Assault Class in MWO tends to exist as a crutch (And a pretty poor one at that) for the slowest hands in the west. Sure, there are good assault pilots and good assault mechs, but they are not the norm.
You assert that increasing agility would be good for the genre but without reasoning why that is the case. Titanfall had similar mech action but with higher mobility, it did OK the first go around, then poor-to-middling in the sequel. At the same time, WoT had groundbreaking success (tank sims were dead prior) with vehicles that ranged from spritely to glacial.
Read. My. Posts. I've explained the first point; The game's mechanics, as they are, feel sluggish, dated, and most importantly,
limited. Unlike your continued insistence would imply, a Battlemech IS NOT A TANK. It's not a 20th century tracked vehicle with a turret, it is a several story tall bipedal machine with two legs, two ankles, two feet, a hip, a torso, two arms, and sometimes elbows and hands. I stopped playing MWO because it does next to nothing about the point of a Battlemech AS NOT BEING A TANK. Increasing agility and feedback to movement instead of just stomping and static arms like MWO currently has would make the game at the very least look much better (As for Titanfall, both games were newcomers in an arena dominated by Call of Duty, Battlefield, and rarely Halo, and both were released around the same time as other major titles. More of a victim of poor release schedules. Respawn themselves made note that releasing Titanfall 2 at the end of 2016 was a mistake. Also, WoT is still incredibly popular in pretty much every non-US country-US servers notably have the second lowest amount of players at 9mil, while Russia and Europe are at 40~ and 22~ million each. Info here;
http://wot-news.com/stat/server/ru/norm/en. Considering I'm American, I... Honestly don't care about WoT, and server demographics seem to correlate with that.)
Increased agility and advanced movement options is the arena shooter's space; there's no reason to go that direction unless you're looking for similar fast-paced action and vertical expansion in terms of combat. MWO going that direction would be a bit odd, considering the fanbase already focuses on the heavier, less agile end of the spectrum and probably wouldn't bring it much more in the way of success. Especially not because part of its appeal is being casual-friendly for mechdads who don't have the time or inclination to devote eight hours a week to developing or maintaining their skills.
Uh... I mean, faster-paced movement and more options aren't just an Arena shooter thing, unless Mirror's Edge, Bioshock Infinite, and Dead Space are all secretly multiplayer arena shooters. Considering I have no idea what you really mean when you say "Arena", you should problably read this;
https://levelskip.com/first-person-shooters/What-is-an-Arena-Shooter. I don't think what that is describing fits any of what I've said, and it's why I am
extremely confused by your insistence on thinking I want an Arena game. Heavier mechs are also kind of a symptom of the whole 'LOLalpha' meta MWO seems to have nowadays; they are the only things that can tank a ridiculous alpha strike, and also dish one out. Mechdads like them because they are ironically so much more forgiving to getting hit once and move at the same speed as aformentioned mechdad's reaction times. All in all, I'm really not concerned with how they view the game.
Although the last thing I would ever call MWO is 'casual friendly'. Most of the friends I have who tried refused to play past five matches due to being utterly curbstomped because the game has a much steeper skill and knowledge curve than even frigging Fortnite if you are jumping in blind and solo. Most mechdads at least have a history of knowing how to basically play a Mechwarrior game because they were playing MW3 when I was still in diapers, so I'm not super surprised they at least know how to move.
Look, bottom line because I don't really feel like turning this into any more of a tit-for-tat debate than it already is;
- I don't actually *want* Mechwarrior Online to be changed. If anything *were* to be taken from MWO, it'd be the art style and cockpits. That's it. Scaling, basic gunplay, customization, all of that would be flushed down the crapper and rebuilt.
- I don't want the game to actually *be* Titanfall and I never did. When I bring up Titanfall, I specifically mean, as in completely, explicitly ONLY mean, how the mechs move and CAN move. This means I just want mechs to be able to SPRINT, PUNCH, STRAFE, and... That's really it unless they have jump jets. Titanfall did VERY well at immersion regarding how much more 'animated' the Titans are, and I use it as an example due to that fact. It's not wanting to copy the gameplay style; It's taking the idea of mechs that move in a so much more lively way, as, again, Mechs have been described as doing multiple times in the lore of the game. I absolutely hate the rigid 'Arms right in front in an L, static legs' thing all the mechs in MWO do-MW5's apparent lax arm positions manages to look better and the mechs look they actually have better weight to them, so that's at least a step in the right direction.
- This is all hypothetical; As you said, Mech Games aren't exactly popular or 'mainstream', and what I want to have happen certainly never will in my lifetime unless someone makes a random new franchise that hits it.
And in hindsight, all the changes I'd want would basically make the game like a hybrid between Mechassault and Mechwarrior in terms of overall gameplay. And I absolutely love that idea.
