There are so many things that could easily improve the experience for all players and especially new players. Just going to list in no order:
- Change the merc unlock rotation to be different for each player.
DB’s at its best when a diverse set of mercs are played. But new players never see that. Noobie servers consist almost entirely of the same 5 mercs because everyone is on the same rotation. Also, merc stacking beyond 2 results in increasingly negative gameplay experience.
Due to the way rotation is set up right now, that 3x phantom or 4x proxy game is the majority of the new player experience. Change would fix that and make the game better for everyone to boot.
Counter argument is having a 3 merc rotation helps people learn the characters & lowers the new player learning curve. Maybe, but it isn’t worth it. MOBA’s are obviously more knowledge dependent here than DB. It’s especially not worth the cost to player-merc identity (critical for locking new players in). It’s hard to identify with a merc that the entire rest of the lobby is playing.
- Improve the autobalance features.
Things, like:
-Have the game know which team is winning (most combined score by X, and so forth). As players join, add high level players to the losing team. You don’t have to prevent them from switching, but doing that by default would improve a lot of games.
-Add incentives for switching to an outnumbered team. When 1 team is up 2 players, the player that switches should get some kind of reward. Doesn’t have to be much, (obviously you would get some weird behavior if you set it too high) but anything would help.
-Lower the shuffle vote threshold for extremely one sided games.
It should be a bit easier to get a shuffle when one team has 3x the points of the other at the 10 minute mark. Even a difference of 1 less yes threshold could go a long way.
-Increase the shuffle vote threshold after a shuffle.
It should be harder or even impossible to get a shuffle 30 seconds after a previous shuffle vote.
- Increase teamplay incentives in casual play.
XP for a rez and ammo & EV repair could be increased, at least slightly. Being the only medic or ammo giver or engineer should be extremely rewarding in terms of score and credit generation. Right now, it’s only extremely rewarding if you are Aura or Jav.
- Change the Stopwatch victory condition timer, at least for nonranked.
If an attacker can’t push the objective for 8 minutes, 99% of the time it’s because they are getting stomped and the game should end. Especially now that stopwatch is the only casual mode you are getting a lot of 15 minute spawn camps.
Casual Stopwatch should have objective mode like cut offs as a mercy rule. With a timer a bit more generous than objective: 7 minutes per objective instead of 5.
- Add a Stopwatch victory condition element to the UI.
Seriously, there ought to be some easy to read indicator of how far attacking team 1 got. The 2x delivery system is already sort of confusing for new players. 2x delivery with nothing but memory to tell you whether first attackers delivered once twice or never makes it even harder to understand the basic rules of the game.
- Add recruit a friend.
Message a friend on steam a special link and get them to play. Whenever they level up you both get bonus 500 gold.
- Make the new player experience extremely rewarding. Practically give stuff away for the first 5 hours.
Players taking 10+ hours to unlock their 2nd character or first bronze card is way too little reward to engage totally new players. Newbies probably aren’t dominating the scoreboard in their first few hours, so virtually every successful F2P game compensates by giving them lots of cool new toys in that time.
- Make the normal player experience more rewarding.
Lead cards are not even worth watching the unlock screen for. Frankly, they shouldn’t probably even be in the game as anything other than stepping stone for total noobies. Stingyness in a F2P model just doesn’t pay for itself in the end.
It’s ok for cobolts and gold to be extremely hard to get. But the game should be more generous overall, with special focus on engaging players at each step of the learning curve.
Giving a free 1x crafting kit with each arsenal crate for instance would go a long way to engaging new and intermediate players with the crafting system, which right now they have to pretty much ignore because spending gold on characters is so much more valuable.
Giving noobies 1 “free” bronze craft per 8 play hours is not going to break your F2P model.
- Add tutorials for each merc.
The game is really complicated. It takes a while to understand things like long jumping, the engineer building / planting bonus, let alone the strengths and weaknesses of each weapon or how to use each merc.
A short 5 minute max tutorial for each merc that also explains the strengths and some tips for their default gun would go very far. Then you can make completing the tutorial award an iron card for that guy and voila, way less skyhammers that don’t know about giving ammo.
- Add a gun range with moving targets.
Like Overwatch has. A place to test out every merc and weapon, test out jumping and what not, can help players get excited for unlocking stuff later. Testing weapons is especially important, as the differences between them are fairly subtle, and there is no in game info about those differences whatsoever. As a new player, I felt like all the SMGs beside Blishlok for instance were basically the same, and that that was a major weakness in the game. I was wrong about that, but it took me 10+ hours to realize it.
A 1 sentence description of weapon strengths and weaknesses somewhere, anywhere would help this.
Map specific
- Nerf defense on bridge point 1 slightly. Especially the middle path that involves going over the ramp is extremely vulnerable to crossfire. Changing that geometry to be slightly more attacker friendly could be good.
11.1) Allow the generator on point 2 bridge to be repaired. Point 2 is interesting, but lately it feels almost trivialized by explosives.
11.2) Make getting the 1st objective out of point 3 slightly easier (maybe move it slightly closer to the door). Then make returning the objective in point 3 slightly easier faster.
- Make point 1 on underground more open to air support. It should be possible for instance to use kira/sky/arty on the aura station that hides in the corner behind the med bay. Right now airsupport toons are weak throughout underground, and especially on point 1. The windows mechanic is also pretty unintuitive if you are new. Better to have clearly open and clearly enclosed spaces.
12.1) Consider nerfing the elevator sound effect.
I’m not 100% confident on this, but it’s very easy to hold the upper side level as defenders, and slaughter the enemies in the elevator as they try to retake it. Lowering the sound effect radius of the little elevator noise could help make it slightly harder for defenders to lockdown the spawn on point 1.
12.2) Slightly slow the time it takes to capture the 2nd ‘point’ on Underground.
The intermediate zone is really interesting and contrasts very well with the rest of the map. But it often ends very quickly, sometimes after only 2 or so spawn waves. I would consider making it slightly easier for defenders to hold this 2nd ‘point’, probably by adjusting the spawns or spawn switch mechanics slightly.
12.3) Nerf the barrier on point 3, and make attacking from the gas room easier.
Right now attacking from the gas room is very hard, because once you drop down into the main room it is very hard to retreat. Meanwhile, the barrier generator is extremely powerful.
Together these things tend to overemphasize the barrier room.
Barrier should be slightly less powerful, and the right approach should be slightly more powerful for attackers.
I don’t have any ideas for other maps
- Remove the boost via plant and disarm exploit.
Having widely known ‘hacks’ like this cheapens the perception of the game. If player A and player B are planting and disarming as fast as possible for 2 minute straight they are 99% likely abusing the game. Adding a very generous diminishing return to planting/disarming would fix this without affecting normal play.
- Add an XP bonus for partying with friends.
Players who play games together have more fun and are more likely to stay playing that game.
- Add a mute system for toxic players.
People who rage at others & especially noobies make a lot of people stop playing. A report system that mutes the top 1% most toxic people or whatever could be enough of a threat to keep people from getting told to drink bleach quite so often. Obviously this would have to be disabled in ranked.
Idk there’s tons of other stuff. Mostly, DB needs to look at what very successful F2P games are doing. Hearthstone, Paladins, Dota2, and Heroes of the Storm all add valuable insight into a successful F2P model. Most of the issues with DB are non-gameplay & stem from the Nexon influenced F2P strategy. Nexon’s shortsighted and greedy F2P tendencies have sunk many games.
