Bad Lead Designer


(derpyMoonMoon) #1

Okay so before I start this, I ask for whoever responds to this to not say I’m being salty or complaining, I simply want to hear the community’s point of view on this. I watched the stream on twitch today, with Exedore, the Lead Game Designer. I do not want him to feel bad about this, it just seems that leading a team isn’t his strong suit and he should find another position in Dirty Bomb that is more suited to his abilities. If you haven’t watched it, please do before commenting. I will cite specific quotes.

Regarding drop boosters for the Rogue en Vogue event, they obviously aren’t working. This is a quote from Exedore:
(44:04) “If people are thinking they’re not working, and I said that I’d come into the office today and check if they are working, they are working. It’s not like they’ve completely failed. The biggest problem with how we’ve messaged what they do is that we’ve never said what the base rate is, as in what it is with 0 boosters.”
He thinks that we are complaining that those of us with 0 boosters are complaining that we aren’t getting a drop, but it’s those of us with 5-10 boosters that are complaining. I have had 5 boosters all week, and haven’t gotten a single card. I have several friends that have all 10 boosters and haven’t gotten a single drop.

Let’s get into the math with this one. I’m a little rusty, so please correct me if I’m wrong on any of this.
Let’s say for the sake of the argument (and really small percentages that I don’t want to deal with), that without boosters, your case drop chance is 0%, and, as confirmed, all 10 are about 30%. This gives each booster an increase of 3% to the drop chance.
Now let’s say you have 5 boosters (the amount I’ve had all week), and play 10 games (the amount I play every day, at least). You have an 85% chance of not getting a card each match, so for two attempts, 0.85*0.85 (or 0.85^2), which is about 0.72. Three attempts, 0.85^3, 0.61. So, therefore, 0.85^10, not getting a loadout in a day, is about 20%. Not unheard of, at all. Now multiply that by 5, the amount of days I’ve played with 5 boosters. 0.85^50 is 0.00029… This has a 0.03% chance of happening, cobalts have a 0.1% chance. Am I getting cobalts once a week? I wish. Take this, multiply it by how many players you have complaining about the drop rate, and yes, you guessed it, you have an obviously flawed system that you refuse to admit is broken. This isn’t RNGeesus looking down on you, this is the devs fault, and blaming this on a salty community is just complacent and smug.

(45:48) Shoe. “When can we buy multiple equipment cases?”
Exedore “So I’m not actually sure if we ever want to do that. I know it would be a while because I know a lot of people put their credits into buying equipment cases, but I look at that as more as a problem of you don’t have other things to put credits into, and it’s because people don’t really like the trade up and trade in system”
This is just idiotic in my opinion. We want more lead loadouts to trade up for better cards, not hoping for a rare cobalt straight out of the box and never using the trade up system. I buy a lot of cases from the store when I need a few more to trade up to a new silver, gold, etc, just so I can have enough. I know RNG hates me, I’m not going to hope I suddenly get a cobalt for 1k credits.

(40:35) Shoe. “When are Phantom and Thunder seeing updates…?” (I’m leaving out the Fletcher nerf bit)
Exedore “… I think we’re better off with Thunder than we are with Phantom, Phantom is still, the ideas are still, a bit, there’s a lot of different ones, we have just got to pick the strongest and move forward with that”
I can’t believe you guys are still in just the planning stage, the community has been asking this since his nerf a week after his release… This is just shameful, but it’s more towards the devs than it is Exedore specifically.

(1:02:38) Shoe. “Extra sights for all guns to give us selection, so having them arranged to be equipped like trinkets would be amazing”
Exedore “So sights, yes it would be amazing, we’ve been very nervous about that due to the way, the way the progression and monetization work in the game, because I feel that that’s getting dangerously close to pay to win territory”
He doesn’t even know what pay to win means. If they made them available with credits, it would work perfectly fine, and most people don’t use ADS often so it won’t hurt new players much at all. Besides, it’s just as much of an advantage, actually far less in my opinion, than the augments on cards. This would be a huge step forward for SD to give us CUSTOMIZABLE sights instead of simply editing the current sights that are already on the weapons. I mean, almost every FPS out there has customizable weapons, at least give us customizable sights. I can’t even play the Grandeur with the way the sights are at the moment, but that’s a conversation for another thread.

I apologize for the wall of text. I also do not mean to sound salty, pretentious, or greedy or anything like that, I just think that Dirty Bomb would do a lot better with a different Lead Designer, and I gave examples to back up my argument. So please, make your own argument and express your own opinion here. I also know that the forums are full of people filled with hate in their hearts, so please, if you just want to say how stupid I am and contribute absolutely nothing else to the conversation, please leave. I would like to have a civilized and mature discussion with active members of the community.


(PastrySama) #2

@stayfreshshoe @RazielWarmonic I need backup.


(doxjq) #3

“So sights, yes it would be amazing, we’ve been very nervous about that due to the way, the way the progression and monetization work in the game, because I feel that that’s getting dangerously close to pay to win territory”

Wtf. That is so far from the truth. One could argue that having to progress through loadout cards to get to bronze when you first start is the same. If they were available for in game credits it’s exactly the same as the loadout system. Heck they could even make an entirely new case full of sights instead of loadouts so they could be unlocked via cases if they didn’t want people paying for them.

Besides, it’s a sight, a personal preference customisation, not a blatant advantage that everyone has to have. Some people like iron sights and wouldn’t use red dot sights, some people hate red dot sights and would prefer some kind of other sight, etc.


(Sinee) #4

I’m sure this will be closed, but I have to agree. This was one of the guys that ~doesn’t like jump sniping~ and had it removed because I guess they found it too hard for them to counter…

http://i.imgur.com/EWiwmSW.gif


(Merci1ess) #5

Exedore and Smooth are both lead designers… I think? Or perhaps Smooth is just a designer. Correct me if I’m wrong. Either way, yeah, I agree. They are both bad. I say both because Smooth mentioned one really idiotic reason for a nerf on snipers. I don’t even wanna get into that. Alot of people were complaining about having too much credits they don’t know what to do with. Asking them to come out with new interesting features to spend their credits in. What they come up with is an absolutely ridiculous credit dumping patch with a huge chance of you getting jack shit in the end and ending up with 0 credits. The worst part? Shit doesn’t even work properly.

It’s kinda scary when you have people complaining about the drop boosters problem and he comes up on stream and tells everybody that everything’s fine. It’s as if it was a straight up scam and a credit sink.


(Sinee) #6

@Merciless I hope no one continues to participate in the event. Some people are spending 100,000 credits and getting nothing because the boosters are so expensive and don’t do jack shit.

The event skins are fuckin’ ugly anyway. They’re certainly not nice enough to be worth the weeks of playtime grinding it takes to accumulate 100,000 credits. I hope those of you who’ve said you’ve spent upwards of 50,000 realize this and spare yourself the trouble.


(Merci1ess) #7

[quote=“Mercy;168052”]@Merciless I hope no one continues to participate in the event. Some people are spending 100,000 credits and getting nothing because the boosters are so expensive and don’t do jack @$!#.

The event skins are @$!#’ ugly anyway. They’re certainly not nice enough to be worth the weeks of playtime grinding it takes to accumulate 100,000 credits. I hope those of you who’ve said you’ve spent upwards of 50,000 realize this and spare yourself the trouble.[/quote]

It’s like a Korean MMO. It’s so fuckin’ grindy and yet… They give you what you’ve spent your time grinding for hours. They reward you for it. On DB, the chances of you getting what you want is not even certain after the hours of grinding. This is retarded. I haven’t gotten the cobalt card for Vassili that I wanted since day 1 yet after 700 hours.


(Havik_Gaming) #8

@Mercy I agree, the best part about the event is the release of Aimee. I will be getting the two most expensive trinkets (Firewall and the blue one) as i like them and buy one “event” equipment case per week (as i only bought one the first week and i got an event card, which might be trade-able once trading comes out, if ever,) since i can get all of that just buy saving cycles from playing the game. Once the whole "15$ for Aimee and the ‘special’ obsidian case came out i knew all the cool stuff in the event would be payed for (such as the skull trinket,) since most people already had the credits to buy Aimee so really it was just a 15$ obsidian card that more than likely would have bad abilities one them or bad weapons. Don’t get me wrong i don’t care if people want to shell out some cash for some cosmetic items that’s fine, just don’t make it seem like it is worth more than it is.

Honestly they should do away with the whole RNG of event cases after matches (as in its like 0.1% chance to get one, or less since we don’t have the base numbers) make it have a 10% chance to drop with no way of boosting it. Then people wouldn’t complain about the low percent.

And don’t even get me started one the Phantom buff, i mean i wasn’t here for the release of phantom but its been how long since his nerf, more then long enough to create an idea for a buff for him.

Besides these few things, i do agree with what he said, i just think the RNG should be changed a bit, and the community has made tons of ideas that would help Phantom which the devs could use and they are quite balanced to.


(Mrarauzz) #9

I felt bad for shoe the dude tried acting like an alpha so hard. Straight up took the questions away from him what an arse lol.


(derpyMoonMoon) #10

The part that really irritates me is that the community has brought up sooo many ideas to improve him, and I honestly thought that they were working on it, but I guess believing in the devs was a wrong choice on my part.


(SereneFlight) #11

I’ve been joking around how there’s that one guy in SD who has these stupid ideas and everybody listens to his stupidity… … I think we found the guy xP


(eclipsedHouse) #12

“were we told to not talk about this” followed by misdirection about drop rate for folks with no boosters (which isn’t the issue) followed by “massive dead sea amount of salt”…what a clown show.


(D'@athi) #13

Ehm, you are really thinkink about more than one person @ Splash Damage caring about Dirty Bomb full-time? Don’t make me laugh, thx.


(Sinee) #14

I had to double check to see if he said “massive dead sea amounts of salt” about the players complaining.

For some reason, he thinks that just because they didn’t communicate the base % chance, that everyone’s just salty. For fucking real? The fact of the matter is that even people with 10 boosters who have paid thousands and thousands of credits are not getting jack shit, right?

What the fuck even dude. I am so glad I’m having nothing to do with this event but I feel bad for the people that are.


(FerfyDerf) #15

I had to double check to see if he said “massive dead sea amounts of salt” about the players complaining.

For some reason, he thinks that just because they didn’t communicate the base % chance, that everyone’s just salty. For @$!# real? The fact of the matter is that even people with 10 boosters who have paid thousands and thousands of credits are not getting jack @$!#, right?

What the @$!# even dude.[/quote]

Yeah, that is the primary issue. A seeming lack of understanding that boosted players aren’t receiving drops. Any chance you can help us convey that, @RazielWarmonic ? Thanks for any awareness you’ve already brought onto this despite your recent sickness.


(Szakalot) #16

how i read OP :

’ exedore is a bad lead game designer’

‘cuzz… where is my drop?!’


(derpyMoonMoon) #17

[quote=“Szakalot;168104”]how i read OP :

’ exedore is a bad lead game designer’

‘cuzz… where is my drop?!’[/quote]

It’s not the fact that RNG is broken, it’s that he refuses to admit it and won’t do anything about it, or really anything that’s broken with this game.


(n-x) #18

Except for the drop booster part I actually really liked what he was saying. He really had a non-bullshitting, non-sugarcoating approach.

About multiple equipment cases: As far as I understood it, he doesnt want to waste time and resources on this because he is not happy with the system. What I took away from his statement is, that they want another way you can spend your credits to get the loadouts you want instead of buying 100s of cases and than trade them up.

About Phantom/Thunder: They learned their lesson from releasing mercs too early. I guess they want to make sure that when they patch Phantom, that this time they get it right, instead of several trial and error buffs that would make people salty again.

About sights: Yeah, this one was a bit strange, because his only perspective on them was to buy them with real money.

But I think that he also said a lot of stuff I find myself totally agreeing with. That they have to put more emphasis on teamplay on giving players the feeling to belong to a group.

He just isnt a good marketing person. Several time he said that some stuff in the game is plainly bad or even shit. The chemistry between him and shoe. wasnt the best either. Shoe. tried to keep stuff light and funny. And he seemed a bit annoyed by it. Exedore just doesnt fit for that format. Sometimes he appeared bored and that he feels he is wasting his time.


(Icecoal) #19

I don’t think op is in any position to judge exedore , let alone suggest a better position. But I do agree that he acted like a politician, much blabla but in the end nothing really has been said about the issue lol


(MarsRover) #20

[quote=“Kelben;168106”]Except for the drop booster part I actually really liked what he was saying. He really had a non-bullshitting, non-sugarcoating approach.
[/quote]

Same here. I was only listening while playing DB, so I can’t tell how he said it, if he was bored or annoyed by shoe, but what he said made sense, was informative and I had a good time listening to him. This was the best DB stream I ever watched, I hope he’ll be back sometime in the future.

But the booster part was painful. You can’t just lie, willingly or unwillingly, about something and then say “nah it was just miscommunication everything works as intended”. Even if it “only” made a bunch of people waste their virtual currency in a video game.