I tried to send this to badman, but his inbox is full:
Hi SD guys,
As you can see, Brink is experiencing a minor resurgence on the Xbox recently. It’s not huge, but it’s something. There are a few clans now with 4 or more members, and a lot of new players. Also, our RiF clan, Pho7on’s “shhh” clan, and a few others have over 10 members.
One way to make this game much better for the rest of us who still like to play Brink and have been loyal to SD and the game would be to give us one last hurrah update on Xbox. This is what I would request, based on my knowledge of what might not be too resource-consuming to change on your end:
[ol]
[li]Increase ALL of the pub standard bots back up to the highest level possible. If some newbie wants to play vs easy bots, then they can make their own private game. Currently, if a game devolves into an 8 vs 2-4 player match, it’s over. The bots in Pub Standard are not good-enough to help out a team of 4 human players vs 8 human players and the team of 4 gets slaughtered almost every time. Then, the next round is 8 vs 1 as the other players leave.[/li][LIST=1]
[li]If it wouldn’t take too much effort to change, can the Pub Standard bots be even better? I don’t mean “make their AI better” which I presume would take a lot of effort, but perhaps just make them tougher to kill by raising bot HP to 25-50% or improve their aim by 10-25%.[/li][/ol]
[li]Between Pub Standard matches, keep the pre-game lobby up and don’t advance into the game until one of the following occurs:[/li][ol]
[li]All 16 spots are filled up with human players.[/li][li]50% or more of both teams’ human players Ready-Up. It has to be both teams though, so if it’s 8 vs 2, the team with the 2 players doesn’t have to ready-up until they get more people to join, or some of the 8 players switch sides. If one team has no human players, then the other team with human players can just ready-up and play without waiting for human opponents.[/li][li]A set time limit is reached in the lobby. So, maybe after 3 minutes of waiting, the game just advances.[/li][/ol]
[li]In Pub-standard, auto-balance the teams in the pre-game lobby. I think you have an auto-balancing function in the game already, but I have never used it as I play mostly Pub Standard or Co-Op vs hard AI bots. Here’s what I would like to see though with Auto Balancing:[/li][ol]
[li]Do not break up Xbox-Live parties except when they first join a mostly-full new game, then let them play together later if possible once the current match is complete.[/li][li]If there are 3 solo players and a party of 5 on one team, and the other team has 1-3 players, balance the teams by sending over the solo players, but only during the pre-game lobbies. No need to punish a winning player by sending him over to the losing team mid-match.[/li][li]Do not let people switch sides during the game if it would unbalance the teams by 2 or more players.[/li][/ol]
[li]Please please please give us the most-recent gun-balancing tweaks you gave to the PC players, as referenced here: http://www.splashdamage.com/content/new-brink-updates-released-xbox-360-ps3-and-pc[/li][ol]
[li]Please.[/li][li]If you have already, then it’s strange that we all still can totally pwn noobs with the Carb-9, which is by far the best weapon in the game.[/li][/ol]
[/LIST]
I really don’t know how hard it is to get an update through Microsoft QC. I work for a company that makes iPad games. We have to deal with Apple’s stringent QC dept and they have rejected a few of our games and updates upon initial upload, but then we just make the fixes required and usually get them sent back up the same day. Why is it so hard to get an update though MS?
Thanks for your time. I wish you guys good luck on your next project.
Or was Neph genuinely trying to say nothing much at all?