JPB’s Dirty Bomb Feedback
I first played DB when it was named ‘Extraction’ on the Nexon launcher 2 years ago, it was a fun game and the only thing holding me back from playing during that time was the lack of players. Fast forward to the first closed beta tests of Dirty Bomb (the temporary tests) when all mercs were enabled it was an incredibly fun game, the merc variety was great the gameplay was fast paced and challenging.
Since this time DB has had many mercs and features removed, this really doesn’t seem to make sense given the fact that everything was in working order beforehand. We had a working stats pages (you see the ‘coming soon’ for in depth stats at the end of the game, that used to work), we had a page that tracked our total badge collection and of course mercs currently not in the game were released and working just fine. There are still a plethora of features completely missing from the game and some aspects of the game are completely broken and have been for months on end.
I’ve currently stopped playing DB, I was playing competitive matches with a team and played in many tournaments and scrims. However with the lack of features in this game it’s become increasingly frustrating to stick with it and has led to my lack of enjoyment and thus lack of playing. I’ll list out the issues I have with the game in the vain hope that it could help the game.
The Mercs:
I understand mercs are being staggered to incentivise player purchases, however the current release rate is extremely slow. At the beginning of the permanent closed beta we were receiving a new merc once every 2 weeks. This pacing was great, kept the game fresh and in turn actually helped to incentivise more merc purchases. Current merc releases have slowed down to a crawl and it’s incredibly easy to save up enough credits to purchase the merc before it’s released. Right now I sit on 99k credits with minimal playtime since the phantom patch, just waiting hoping for Redeye.
The thing that really bothers me regarding merc releases is that they aren’t ‘releases’, they are RE-releases. The mercs you have put back into the game were already playable and working in previous iterations. The fact that mercs can be put back into the game with game breaking/kit destroying bugs just isn’t acceptable. Sparks was released with the ability to kill instead of revive downed team mates, incredibly over the top EV/side objective damage, incredibly wonky revive hit detection and in rare cases the ability to turn team mates invisible upon revive. These bugs have been patched however it took around a month to do so all the while the merc was banned from competitive play. Phantom is of course the most recent merc and players have been vocal about his issues, on paper he looked ridiculous and in game he turned out to be a ridiculous pub stomp machine that was no fun to play against. Not an OP merc for winning the game, just OP for ruining the enemy’s enjoyment; fortunately you patched him but even then you messed up melee.
The Balance:
First thing to bring up with balance are the broken augments, there are lists available on the Nexon forums (probably on the SD forums too but I haven’t checked there). Fix them or remove them I don’t care. I actually like the balance of the game, I especially liked how you dealt with fragger, for those who played competitive 5v5 in the early days of beta they know how strong the old fragger was and SD reacted well to this situation. I would say though that the majority of weapons in the game effectively feel the same but have very slight stat changes that don’t set them apart from one another. The SMG-9 is basically a slightly worse Crotzni, the differences are very negligible. The Timik is a slightly better (in terms of DPS) M4 but has much higher recoil so in turn everyone sticks with the M4, the stats differences are so minor for most weapons it’s hard to really differentiate, the aug and br-16 are the same way and the FE-LIX was made a pure downgrade to the MOA. Try to give each weapon more of a niche beyond a 0.X DPS stats change/accuracy change.
Other than the above I don’t have a strong opinion regarding balance, Newb’s feedback is probably the best I have seen and you should endeavour to listen to him and other top players when balancing the game, here’s a link to one of his feedback posts:
http://forums.warchest.com/showthread.php/44823-sick6-newb-s-feedback-post-Is-it-that-time-again
Bugs/Broken Features:
I don’t know the list of all the bugs in the game but there are of course many and that’s to be expected but some have simply been around for far too long! First off, matchmaking your competitive playlist is broken, it doesn’t work. Notice I’m not even talking about imbalanced matches/cheaters here, I am simply talking about the fact that 70% of matchmaking queues result in lobbies that won’t even start, here’s an example:
This happens all the time and is one of the main reasons I never play MM, the game simply doesn’t let me.
Beyond MM there are still machine gun bugs where if you die inside the MG and get revived you have no option but to ‘k out’ as you can no longer shoot/move. There are still ‘slenderman’ bugs where characters get stretched and distorted yet can still shoot. There are still plenty of instances where you can’t walk over ledges or down stairs, this occurred in a recent tournament match where 2 of my team were stuck at the top of a ramp for 10 seconds, this delayed our drug sample capture time and allowed the enemies to respawn and regain control of the site effectively costing us the game. Server browser still reports full servers that are empty upon joining. The current mute option STILL doesn’t block player chat despite devs stating that this is how it should function, as such there is no way to block players who are insulting or spam via chat. There’s probably more to add that I am completely missing but as you can see some of these are extremely detrimental to the game.
Lack of Anti-Cheat:
I understand you’re working on it but it’s seriously far too slow. I would usually say that I have no real worries about the blatant cheaters because they are easy to spot and ban. However considering the fact that ‘Kokole’ one of the most prolific and widely reported hackers during closed beta managed to reach lvl 30 by terrorising public servers I can’t even be confident in the most obvious cheaters receiving bans. Having to manually report cheaters to Nexon support staff is such a woefully poor anti-cheat especially given the current spectator system that shows hits as misses and misses as hits. I don’t want to have to police your game, the player base should be vigilant yes, however they shouldn’t have to become internet detectives to try and get another player banned. The
real issue with a lack of anti-cheat is that so many players could be subtly cheating and you have no way to tell. It leads to a community filled with suspicion (and rightfully so) and for me ruins the enjoyment of competitive as you can never be sure if you’re playing on an even field.
We need this ASAP, why is it taking so long to get something so key, especially for a competitive shooter! It will never be perfect I understand this but it can be a whole lot better than it currently is.
No Demos/Replays:
This is an issue that compliments the anti-cheat complaint above, demos would make it a lot easier for the community to detect cheaters. However, the main reason I would like to see demo implementation is to enable players to make top quality frag movies. I expand on why a demo system is needed in this forum post:
http://forums.dirtybomb.nexon.net/discussion/10789/demo-system
Right now if you want to make a frag video you can only do so with footage you record whilst playing (via shadowplay/fraps/raptr) this means you capture your gameplay HUD, gameplay graphics settings and colour settings. It also means you can’t capture any footage beyond 60 fps @50mb/sec (shadowplay/raptr’s limit), this is decent quality however for truly great footage you need to have lossless quality with a movie config and an FPS of your choosing, e.g. 200FPS to allow for perfect slow motion.
Beyond simple graphical improvements to videos you are able to share clips much easier due to much lower file sizes and it also means that clips from a variety of people no longer feature different HUDs/configs, frame rates or resolutions. If there is a demo smoothing/dolly camera set up then you can record your own cinematics from the game. Right now the only way to create gameplay relevant cinematics is to set up and record your own in a private server with friends. This is incredibly time consuming and given the game’s spectator system purely based on trial and error and extremely limiting. My entry to the epic kills contest utilised this time consuming method and can be seen here:
This post explains the method utilised for the cinematics:
As you can see it’s very time consuming and unless you really love the game and have 3 friends willing to help you out by giving up their weekends to record stuff you’re not going to be able to make anything with semi-decent cinematics. Nexon sort of proved my point given their own ‘highlight reel’ attempts here:
Until we have a demo system I will be very surprised if we see any montages produced that include anywhere near the number of cinematics/scenes that I used (if any). People can have their opinions on what it is they prefer to watch and I completely understand if you just want to see gameplay clips cut one after the other however for any editors or content creators who go beyond let’s plays/fragshows DB is severely lacking and they will move on to new games.
The Cosmetics/Loadout System:
I really don’t enjoy the RNG loadout system, a lot of the skins are boring and bland and mostly boil down to re-colours. I currently have the best loadout card for every merc in at least bronze. I have no trouble getting the loadouts I want but the process of getting to them is exceptionally dull, it takes far too long to open a crate and get your card (even while skipping), try opening about 30 of these things in one go, incredibly boring especially when all you get is lead. The inventory is poor, why can’t you filter by merc? Seems very simple to me especially when this is already working in the store when you buy bronze loadouts. I see constant cries from the community for steam marketplace implementation and the ability to trade loadout cards; this simply would not work. The vast majority of cards are simply worse than the definitive best card. Only this top card would sell for any value and many players would then see the true worth of their useless cards in comparison to the agreed upon competitive best. This is kind of a moot point, the system at least works and people can efficiently play as a completely free player without any worry of being behind a paying player. The system just isn’t very rewarding, it’s a long ass RNG grind and the pinnacle of skins right now (cobalt) are blue re-colours. Blue re-colours are frankly ridiculous in a game where your allies have a blue tint, many times I have to double take a blue enemy who has a cobalt skin, really crazy that this was a choice that was made for a competitive shooter. If you look at your work on the founders skins, now those are skins to be proud of; they not only change your camouflage colour but also the clothing and look of the merc, they are great and should be what you look to when designing the rarest skins. Go beyond boring re-colours, you’ve proven you can do it well so why settle for the current cobalt designs?
Other Points:
The optimisation is poor, my PC specs are well above the recommended yet I cannot reach 60 FPS on highest settings, with my current low quality config I struggle to maintain 150 FPS and often drop to 70/80. Now these settings will be different for every player however I know that in comparison to CSGO, TF2, DOTA2, Heroes Of The Storm, Loadout and other titles DB performs far worse. I understand the need to clamp down on configs, particularly the removal of smoke and leaves but muzzle flash/blood splatter are completely unnecessary and only serve to obstruct your play. Stopping flat textures has also proven to be a problem for me, especially on maps like trainyard.
I am colour-blind and given the mercs camouflage colour is predominantly green/brown mercs effectively completely blend in to the surrounding map, on Trainyard in particular I find myself unable to see enemies unless they begin moving across the screen, this messes with my reaction time and as such my enjoyment of the game. I understand that the majority of players won’t have this issue but I don’t think that the visibility of an enemy simply due to colours should be a determining factor of a gun fight, if you consider Quake and it’s bright skins and miplevel settings you could always have a perfectly visible target, for me in DB this is currently impossible on certain maps so I have to play with an inherent disadvantage.
We still don’t have private servers that we can rent out, this would be perfect for team practices or for setting up custom server settings, to put it simply it should be in the game. I don’t consider it a priority just another point on the list.
The progress or lack thereof:
This post essentially mirrors my own opinion:
I am at a loss for words as to how slow the development is going. Since I started playing I have only seen aspects of the game removed. I cannot remember if execution was playable during the extraction beta but I do know it’s featured in the induction video along with team death match:
Extraction is not a mode I enjoy, in DB it’s basically a poor man’s CS, if I wanted that style of play I would play CS. Focus on what makes the game great, I don’t understand what’s going on at SD but there’s really just no progress being made, in 2 years you haven’t textured dome yet, you removed most of the mercs and added in blue re-colours as the top level of skins. The main thing that has progressed is the in game store (figures). I really think you should look intro streamlining your community, having the Nexon forums, warchest forums and of course (the useless) steam forums is spreading your feedback quite thin, I haven’t been in a game with 2 different official forums before it’s really bizarre and confusing to me as a user let alone for you guys as a developer.
Final thoughts:
This is obviously a large amount of text, I enjoyed the game enough to play for around 460 hours, got to lvl 39, competed in tourneys, made a montage and now posted this. Hopefully this can help your game out, currently it feels that this game is destined to fail and with Overwatch looming I struggle to see a bright future for DB, it really is time to act and get this game at an acceptable state however it could already be too late.
TL : DR
- First played the game 2 years ago, since this time I have only seen features/mercs break/be removed.
- Merc re-releases taking too long and when they do get put back into the game they are bugged.
- Balance should be more in line with the requests of the best players in the community, they propose well thought out changes that serve to improve the game at all levels, it’s foolish not to act in line with these players.
- Bugs/Broken features are left unfixed for far too long, MM still won’t work.
- We don’t have anti-cheat still!
- Lack of demos/replays, cripples current anti-cheat efforts and stops the creation of high quality content for the game.
- Loadout RNG is un-enjoyable but works, cobalt skins are awful blue re-colours in a game where allies are tinted blue; fix it.
- Poor optimisation, constant config clamping, not enough effort put into visibility (muzzle flash/blood splatter)
- Lack of progress in general with the game, very slow going and Overwatch is coming soon, regardless of it’s competency as a first person shooter there is undoubtedly a player base overlap, people will move over to that game from yours and currently you’re making it very easy for them to do so.