Metal Gear Online is a unique, multi-faceted, multiplayer experience. Although it has it's share of flaws.
Metal Gear Online quickly shows casuals the exit door the moment they start playing. Its certainly not nice to first time MGO players either. The learning curve is ridiculously high for a shooting game, and newbies will have to endure lots of frustration before they can start enjoying the game.
There are tons of gameplay mechanics in MGO, and it will take you at least 5 or so hours to grasp them completely. This allows for a highly diverse experience. Unfortunately, some of them are broken, unnecessary, and unbalanced. Some of them are enough to drive away new users.
Magazines:
Users place magazines as traps on the map, and if the player enters a certain radius of the trap, he will be forced to look at them for a small amount of time. Something that was intended to be funny, turned out to be rage inducing, after finding falling into one almost guarantees your demise. You can't do anything to escape it, and even after taking gunfire, you're still sitting there spanking the monkey. They are also extremely difficult to spot if placed correctly, unless you use the "sixth sense" skill.
Headshots:
MGO's original intent was to emphasize sneaking, by making gunfire very weak, taking 7 or higher body shots in order to kill an opponent, with the exception of headshots. Headshots make shooting anywhere but the head a complete waste of time. Headshots almost always kill with one shot, or completely drain your health bar. fast shooting weapons are preferred 10 fold over any other weapon because of headshots. They are also obscenely easy to perform, the head hitboxes are huge, giving a large amount of lenience for poor aim. One very popular techique is using weapons with very little recoil, keeping the weapon at head height, and side swiping the weapon with no knowledge of the enemy's presence.
Spawn Camping:
Now most people take to blaming the users instead of the game on this practice. This is not a very valid argument though. The fact is, spawn camping gives you a huge advantage over the opposing team, and it's only natural that a team would take advantage of this exploit. It's too simple on the smaller vanilla maps, given that in "Urban Ultimatum" for instance, the spawns are extremely close in proximity.
Maps: Metal Gear Online released with a very modest map selection. The expansion released with 3 more maps, helping the issue. Though they should have been released with the game. I don't have an issue with buying the maps. They deserve the money, and it's not exactly expensive for just 11 dollars or so. It's just the adoption rate is less than comforting, and I find myself in able to play with friends, and have a lack of servers running them. In other words, Midtown Maelstrom is the MGO equivalent to Karkand in BF2.
Grinding: I find that skill grinding is one of the most frivolous and stupid features that was implemented into MGO. This isn't an MMO, there shouldn't be base advantages that veterans have over newbies. Not to mention servers dedicated to monotonous skill grinding. The skill's themselves are very good, just the grinding is not necessary at all. Which brings us to the topic of-
Ranks: This is primarily a user issue, but nonetheless a very prevalent one. Unfortunately many users have sought value in a superficial emblem, and deliberately try to achieve the Foxhound rank, and are willing to exploit every gameplay mechanic to do so. Once they reach a certain skill level, they create a new character, and join beginners servers to rape all of the new users. They leave games before losing, sometimes causing everyone to lag out. They team stack in order to insure victory in public servers. They do this and that, to the extent that they ruin everyone's fun.
Lag:
Now lag is usually a legitimate complaint for every online game ever, but in MGO, the lag is terrible, and a strong portion of it is related to poor network coding. One complaint I have with MGO, is that most packets are client side and not server side. This means that instead of the more traditional method of having to lead your target in the event that your connection is poor, the bullets actually take longer to register once they've hit the target. This essentially rewards the lagger, instead of punishing them. If you've played Metal Gear online for more than five minutes, you've experienced one of these:
Kill for Kill - Bullet detection lags and the other player manages to land a headshot.
Behind Cover Death - Bullet detection lags and you die after your safe from gunfire
Teleporting Ragdoll - Grenade throws player, victim client lags, Grenader client assumes position, Victim client sends correct packet, victim pulls a houdini and kills you in prone.
Teleporting Roll - Roller lags, client assumes he rolled before he could make the jump, roller client sends packet, observer client recieves packet, roller teleports and kills you.
Counter CQC - Victim tries to CQC after you CQC, lagger CQC packet registers late, takes precedence over your CQC, and now you're in a chokehold.
Holographic Ragdoll - Client assumes ragdoll postition, you shoot ragdoll, nothing happens, you assume he's dead, and the ragdoll is actually somewhere else.
Extended choke
Just to name some of them.
All of these are results of lag, and poor network code, Konami seems to be rather inept at writing exception code. However these will hopefully be addressed in patches.
Before playing the game, you need to be aware of all of these things before you decide to play. It's not a mystery that when you introduce more gameplay mechanics, more bugs and balancing issues occur. This game is great, and has the potential to be perfect. It just needs quite a bit of repairing.
Thanks for reading, and I hope this review was helpful.