Thank you for providing an awesome game like Dirty Bomb to us. This game has hooked me like no other FPS game over the last years and I spend hundreds of hours on it. I love the gameplay, the idea, the game mechanics and many other little nice details of the game.
But I’m not writting this to tell you how beautful your game is, I’m writting this because Dirty Bomb is about to fail. I’m not going to tell you what to do, because I am not in the position to do that, but I want to share my point of few from an active player, because I still think there is hope for DB.
Let’s start with some facts:
DBs average player base has droped below two thousand, losing around 10% of their players each month. The future of Dirty Bomb will be decided within the next 2-3 months. If there is no improvment within this time DB will be dead sooner or later and has missed the opportunity to become an outstanding game.
Here is a Quote from a conversation I had with one of my clanmates recently:
2,000 concurrent players is considered the minimum healthy population for a F2P game. When it dips below 1,000 is when people start considering the game to be niche.
That period when the population is fluctuating between 2k and 1k is where you see game companies start freaking out. They go either one of 2 ways.
1 - Studio makes a final push on content releases to get people back in, maybe alter gameplay design to best suit whatever loyal demographic who are still hanging on.
2 - Studio re-evaluate their income stream and do whatever they can to sustain staff and servers at this level.
And I think this is pretty accurate the state where DB is heading towards now.
I can’t give you the perfect solution for what you guys have to do to gain players back, but I will try to point out some major flaws and some ways to fix it.
- Matchmaking.
Matchmaking for the casual games is horrible. No autobalance, low Levels getting stomped by high levels,….This scares away many new players and should be the top priority to be fixed. No one is going to stay for a game which doesn’t allow them to have a good game within their skilllevel. I know matchmaking is in the planing and if you guys need any ideas, take a look at reddit or this forum. There are good discussions about it with fantastic ideas how to improve it.
2.Ranked/competitive games.
This should be the 2nd priority. Veteran players want to have a challenge. They want to see who can dominate and the want games at a maximum skillevel. Ranked games went from broken to removed to completly broken and back to broken within the last months. There was no improvment at all. If you want to have a good competitive scene at Db take your time and take a look at the dbnation pug/scrim games which are played every day. The way they work could be a solution fort he broken ranked system right now. Make everything more transparent. Give people a lobby to set up games and let them see who they are going to face in game. The current system with the low levels (Level min should be more around 15-20 instead of 7 in this ranked mode) and high levels playing against eachother makes it a lottery unless you are absolute beast and you can dominate a server alone.
3.Announced updates.
Sometimes I have the feeling that you just put in some bug fixes to your update announcement to make it look more epic. But when I join a game after the update and I get the same bug into the first two minutes of a new game which should be fixed with the latest update, than it is even worse than having a bug which shouldn’t be fixed. In the last update you wrote the C4 can’t fall through the texture while planting anymore. First thing that happens when I plant….the C4 falls through the texture. You write the „One or more players failed to join the Lobby in time“ bug is gone for the ranked matches, but in the first ranked game this is exactly what happend to me. I mean the message is gone, but the result ist he same. Do you mean that by fixing it?
So please, if you do updates, make sure you only announce stuff that is really fixed. I am not going to talk about the new fps drops, not gaining Xp for blowing stuff up and other new bugs which accured after the last update. I’m sure you know about it and you are trying to improve the quality of your updates, because it is really needed and right now they feel like a waste of time.
4.Crafting, shitty price management, nothing to pay for.
Db received so much hate fort he new crafting system, and that has some good reasons. I’m not going to repeat all the countless rants about it from the youtubers or veteran players, but with the new system you took basicly away any reason to grind credits and to play for something. With the bad matchmaking in casual games and the broken competitive system there aren’t much reasons left to stay. Gold and Silver cards are a absoulte waste of time and credits. Bronze is fine, cobalt incredible expensive but if someone wants rare bling he can go for it. I hope you will reconsider this system and tweak it to make it work better for all players. But what needs to be tweaked for sure are the prices in DB. For a cobalt you need 45 weapon kits. 10 weaponkits are 8$. Makes it 36$ to get the weapon you want….this ridiculous, but the price management is constanlty nuts in db. Cases, boosters, mercs, everthing is nowhere near to a reasonable amount of money someone would spend on it. I’m close to Level 50 now and there is absolutly no reason why I should spend money for anything in the game. I have the best perks for all my loadouts and I’m not willing to pay 35$ on cases which gives me the chance to get them in another colour. There are countless ways to make money for you guys with little transactions in the range between 1-3$. Add a customization of loadout cards, sell clantags or allow clans to use their own trinkets or whatever, people would pay for little nice additions.
5.Streams and forum activity.
Honetsly the Nexon streams are without passion that it makes them hard to watch. I can see shitty gameplay, no db news and people lurking for raffle stuff, but I never get the feeling that they really care about the game or adress some of the issues DB has. They are pretty pointless and makes me feel that Nexon is one oft he main reasons DB is about to fail. More or less the same for the forum. Good topics get ignored, ideas pass unnoticed and no one seems to take care of the bug section which gives me the feeling that Devs don’t care about the game anymore. How about you make a list for all known bugs, and let the community add what they have noticed. Give out loadouts or cases if someone finds a new bug and/or can replicate it. Get the community involed more. Start polls for ideas, make surveys for new products, content and whatever. Show more activty.
That’s basicly everything which is on my mind right now. I’m pretty sure I missed some stuff and there are other good ways to improve DB, but I just didn’t want to sit here and watching Db fail without saying what I think could help to make DB better again. Since I’m pretty sure no one will read all the stuff I typed (I’m not sure if I would read it either) I can typ P.enis here. I love the game and I hope all the attempts you guys are planing to bring it back on track will be a success.
Cheers
-Ricky
If this was not true to some degree some of those suggestions would have been done a long time ago I think.