Metal Gear Online needs major work

[Administrator]

By many accounts, Metal Gear Solid 5 is unfinished. A final mission that actually brought closure to the game's convoluted plot was left on the cutting room floor, and many players felt that the entirety of chapter two, when compared to the confident execution of chapter one, seemed like a rush job. Metal Gear Online feels a bit like that too.
When you first sign in, you'll be assigned the avatar you created at the beginning of Metal Gear Solid 5's single-player campaign. You can then choose one of three classes for that character: Scout (a sniper class recommended for beginners), Infiltrator and Enforcer. You won't be able to change this at a later date. Levelling is also tied to each character, not your player ID, so if you want to re-roll with a different avatar, or if you want to play as a woman (you can't change the gender of your starting character), you'll have to start again from scratch once a second character slot is unlocked at level 6. Gear is all cosmetic, and it'll take a little while for players to customise everything to their liking. Some items start at 30GP and some are as pricey as 10,000, while changing the colour of an item costs 500GP. To give you some idea of pacing, after a standard match, some players were reporting getting between 10 and 20 GP, but playing via auto-matchmaking I was receiving 50GP per game.
On launch day, there were numerous reports that players were struggling to get into a single game, but playing on Xbox One I had no trouble with matchmaking, consistently joining a game less than a minute after launching the auto-match feature. I did have major issues with getting unceremoniously booted from the server though, or worse, getting booted from a match and immediately thrown back into MGO's big, empty hub world after the host disconnected. Having no dedicated servers or host migration is a frankly ridiculous problem to be having with an online game in 2015. Hosts can boot any player at any point without a vote, and if a player is booted mid-match, they lose all XP from it. Until Konami sorts this, only the very patient or players who were around for previous iterations of MGO will stick with this version for long. The simple fact that it's Metal Gear is the only reason I can see why a lot of players wouldn't have logged off in the first five minutes and never looked back.
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