So I have played Combat Arms for years and have always enjoyed it. I’ve only been playing Dirty Bomb for a few months and am already losing interest. Acquiring new characters can only keep are interested for so long. I think this game is missing the social FPS aspect that combat arms had. Moreover, I think it is missing the clan aspect that made combat arms really fun. Maybe it is unrealistic to add clans and clan chat but I know that clans, clan levels and clan matches made combat arms incredibly fun. Comp matches are sort of like clan wars in combat arms but you are not choosing your opponents. If you could see the other groups that wanted to play and choose which ones you wanted to play to have a fun match, that may make competitive matches more enjoyable. Right now, the only difference between comp and stopwatch is amount of players and a rank badge that does not really mean anything.
Clans/Social FPS?
Maybe one day something like this will eventually get added, but that is probably really, really far down the road. The Developers already have a lot on their plate.
Agreed, as a former Wolfenstein player I also miss communities.
I used to play DB also daily and for hours but losing interest for the game because its just brainless slaughtering all the time, people barely ever talk to each other.
Every now and then there’s some random epic guys but its rare.
Which is wrong. It should be one of their top design decisions from the beginning.
I used to play a crappy F2P counterstrike clone that rode the Unity + web 2.0 hype. 3 years since the game ceased development, clans from that game still refused to die out. The game’s main page was essentially a shooter game facebook for clans and it did well because of the community it fostered. Despite the bugs, glitches, hacks and copy pasted netcode people stuck with it.
We arranged international tournaments where players formed national teams and represented their countries. Clan vs clan challenges and the drama that came with it were weekly affairs. We talked and QQ’d over them etc. It was great.
Many developers believe that these things should originate from the community’s own initiative. But I bet that crappy game did so well because it had in-game features facilitating the process. Clans were represented in-game and had features built in that made community interaction easier.
Dirty Bomb has deep gameplay mechanics. Simply letting people loose on the servers hoping most of them will one day ‘get it’ is unrealistic. Clans even the very most casual versions of them are the ones that gathers, educate and motivate others to play the game and stay on.
SD wants better retention rate for Dirty Bomb …? make Steam groups obsolete. Employ it in-game. Let people search, recruit, administrate their members from within. Contact and battle other groups internally without the need for external tools. Allow groups to fight for rankings on multiple leaderboards. Wins per week, number of members, average player level, etc etc
People stick with a game beyond first impressions for the community. I find it odd for game developers to ignore something that they already know and leave it to chance. When it really should be incorporated in-game.
this really should be a top priority.
I’ve seen and played a lot of games that had a clan system from the very beginning of the open beta.
I miss community servers. They added a sense of belonging if you found a tight knit one, and players would get better together as they had a reason to play and try and one up their opponents.
Now it’s all random joes and I don’t care who they are. It was the same with TF2 after the Uber Update killed community traffic. There’s zero reason to get better in a casual setting when the people you fight are people you don’t know and 9 times out of 10 won’t even be a challenge.