[quote=“Ardez;62095”][quote=“singular;62051”]http://i.imgur.com/wXWI9jQ.png
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Just saw this. This image is slightly misleading, because at the same time as the case login event was Markiplier uploading a video about Dirty Bomb to youtube. For those who don’t know Markiplier is a youtube personality that has millions of subscribers. The type of crowd youtubers like that generally attract tend to jump games which means they were falsely inflated numbers to begin with. The case event coincidentally happened at the same time.[/quote]
Here’s my takeaway on this chart:
I played both Nosgoth and Hawken in the past. Hawken died a slow death and Nosgoth has two feet in the grave. The interesting thing is both of these games reached a similar peak player count after going open beta, however, they both lost players at a far more gradual pace. Yes, naturally F2P games lose players after opening, but the fact that DB has lost nearly 50% of it’s players in 3 weeks is deeply concerning.
And the game isn’t losing just players who hopped on and tried it. It’s losing it’s dedicated player base that it built in alpha and closed beta. Changes have been made that many competitive players have disagreed with, pushing them out. I warned this would happen if SD continued to sit on the fence with balancing the game for both casuals and the hardcore. When you do this, nobody is happy.
On top of that, the game has been essentially the same for 2 years now. The mercs we are getting now, Phantom aside, are the exact same as they were before they were “removed for balance”. They even still come with bugs that are over a year old! Look at Phantom and his cloak not activating after trying to repair the EV. Or Red Eye and his smoke making it impossible to shock paddle downed teammates. Or his IR refusing to activate under certain circumstances. So obviously, very little work has been put into the mercs. We still have the same five maps for Objective and Stopwatch.
The changes tacked onto the Red Eye patch would take most quality game developers 2 days to work on. The same holds true for most patches. So this begs the question: What has Splash Damage been working on for two years? My guess is very little content and more “backend” stuff. This, coincidentally, is what killed Hawken. The developers were terrible at their job and ended up coding the game very poorly, leading to no time to work on new content, which led to Hawken’s developers going bankrupt. This was all revealed when Reloaded Games bought Hawken and began tearing it apart to salvage the title.
You really can’t argue Splash Damage is competent when they chose to build a game on Unreal Engine 3, which is known for having a wide variety of hacks, and then choosing to not implement anticheat into a “competitive” shooter. Many have argued that Unreal Engine 3 is so hackable, anticheat won’t do anything, but my experience in Hawken and Nosgoth disagrees with that statement.
And then you have Splash Damage’s QA team. They allowed a very broken Phantom to make it through QA. They allowed the melee “fix” to get through. They allowed Red Eye to get through with multiple bugs and now we have the ability to teleport via the console. It’s obvious Splash Damage has absolutely no QA to speak of.
Add all this in with a lead developer who refuses to bend on certain issues that really irk people, and it’s hard to say the numbers are artificially inflated due to a Youtuber, or it’s the typical F2P player drop.
Splash Damage has a fantastic idea for a FPS. Dirty Bomb is by no means bad, however it draws heavy inspiration from ET and Brink, so it’s not exactly hard to create a good game on your third try, not to say Brink or ET were bad. Where Splash Damage fails is managing and improving their game. At this point, they will need to dig deep and pull a miracle out of their ass to turn this around. They would need a massive content patch featuring anticheat, fixing all the nagging issues such as melee, muzzle flash etc and new maps. I don’t think Execution will be the savior SD is hoping for, so I would hope for a handful of Objective/Stopwatch maps as well as a double merc release.
SD said few times ago that they play internaly every merks before release. How very obvious bug can pass QA then? it got worst when these exact bugs were already here before.
