RE: The Future of Dirty Bomb

(Xenithos) #1

Since they have disabled comments on their announcements page, reply here your many thoughts and feelings towards the current news. Try to keep things somewhat constructive.

The link in question

I’ll be posting my own feedback below this:

(NocTurtleBOI) #2

I hope they release the source code so we can get some sick mods…

(Your worst knifemare.) #3

Hope they still plan on balancing weapons and mercs.

(Xenithos) #4

Open letter to Splash Damage - Thanks for developing this awesome game. To those of you who had a heart for Dirty Bomb and did your best, you have my utmost gratitude in making a game that I’ve mostly happily spent 3,000 hours of my life in. From a business standpoint I completely understand why you have made the decision that you have made. With that in mind, these news and the efforts made by you seem rather pitiful in the last 6 months, and what you’re leaving us with has no chance of surviving or even being enjoyed by prospective players. And I want to put out some points for your future games.

Most important feedback concerning Dirty Bomb: There’s very little desire for most people to play a game that has no future developmental progress, especially when the said game exists more out of the community than the developers going forward. Your failure to release an SDK, source code, or anything else the community could actually use such as more server tools, or even allowing players to truly customize things as promised (such as the mythical 3rd gen cards or customizable cards) completely shoots down any possible changes for the greater of Dirty Bomb. Everything you said you worked hard to put in the game for future players is also reliant on the game also having updates or more players. STEAM TRADING you even limited to cards from future events. We can’t trade any special edition cards, we can’t trade loadouts, and ranked cards/founder etc are locked as well. That’s what everyone wanted that system for in the first place! Not to mention that cobalt and gold percentages for weapon cases are so low that only a handful of players likely have cobalt grade weapons, that also didn’t come with the proposed weapon polishing system (that was also promised) so they could have a cobalt scarred piece of junk. This is without a doubt a complete failure not only to provide tools for players to continue the game let alone enjoy a true progression, but a failure as a dev team to even come through on basic proposals or listen to community feedback.

Feedback for future games: The point of any game in beta or alpha is to listen to community feedback and make the right changes. Community feedback before casual matchmaking, during ranked, and during many other events is that THOSE PROPOSED CHANGES WOULD FAIL AND WERE A WASTE OF DEVELOPMENT TIME. AND THEY WERE RIGHT. You went against the community and have left us a game that despite on paper looks balanced, isn’t. Kira and Sparks are a shadow of what they could be. Even during the Rogue En Vogue you had many players saying this was stacked to become Proxy because she was and still is one of the most played mercs. You haven’t developed any obsidians for so many of the other mercs! And you sold Obsidians to people with promises of being able to change that loadout’s features and weapons (most prominently Aimee and the new Aura).

To me, you’ve left your game to die intentionally. And that’s not the worst part. The worst part is the people that stood by you as you repeatedly bashed “your baby” into oblivion now feel like fools. And are fools. I’m one of them. I sincerely hope that your public reputation isn’t damaged by this, as Dirty Bomb is still one of the best games I’ve ever played, but I personally won’t be trusting you enough to touch anything you make until community feedback improves exponentially.

You’ve joined a long line of failed shooters, and it truly is your fault, despite OW or any other shooter claims you can make. Lawbreakers, Dirty Bomb, Hawken, Ghost in the Shell Stand alone complex FPS thing, many more. You made a game with incredibly lovable characters, and as promised, incredibly hard to master, and then you killed it. It’s not the player’s fault. I just have to say that.

I’m not going to rant about anything else, but I am going to give some personal callout Thanks to certain Developers, if they’ve read nothing else I hope they read these:

  • Exedore and Drunk - You guys made my day many times leading up to today’s news. Thank you. I’m glad your office let you keep your beard so long drunk!
  • Moobabes - You seem awesome, and your responses show much more strength to be a community Manager than Splash Damage seems to realize. I hope you have a bright future ahead of you.
  • Shoe - To be honest bro I don’t know what your true feelings are to the community of Dirty Bomb or towards Splash Damage, both seem to have beaten you up a fair bit, but some community feedback, stop putting your face in your videos! <3
  • Smooth - it’s continually obvious behind the scenes that you have worked your butt off. Keep moving forward!
  • To the stocked up fridge - May you continue to give these thirsty people their needed sustenance.
  • To Nexon Affiliates (and Nexon) with Splash Damage during your ownership of DB. - You knew what you were doing, and you knew what SD was doing. Thanks for your splendid community feedback! I look forward to playing more mobile maplestory when I get some time! (Lawbreakers never once blamed you guys, and I think that’s something. And man, it took you guys way too long to make Maplestory mobile! :stuck_out_tongue: )
  • and to everyone that’s worked on DB, period. - You guys did your jobs, and whether or not any of the community can be mad at you, I’m still thankful. Thanks guys.
  • To anyone that’s read this far - you are impressive. Stay cool whoever you are.

Special thanks to a few of the different player friends of mine both on and off forums, just being here is a thank you and glad you were a part of DB:

  • Djiesse - You’re not on my friends list, but you deserve huge points for your work here in the DB community! Thanks for all your help!
  • Coctus - It’s been fun man. May your sense of humor never waver!
  • Pumpkin - We’ll be buds forever. Onwards to some other game!
  • Nail - You are one awesome grouchy dude. Never even met you, but I respect your opinion a ton.
  • Sammz - Ha, you’re not going to read this. But for real, what’s up with the Trump stuff?
  • xSniperGirlx - What are we going to do now?
  • Zorla - I wish you the best, from your internet fiancee. (never letting that go).
  • Tom Shanks - Jeez dude, wtf is this game right?
  • EnigmaPlatypus - Welp. This sucks. Let’s talk some more.
  • To both of the Meerkats - You guys crack me up, and your opinions both are often rational and well placed. I look forward to playing some games with you guys, whether thats still DB or something else.
  • Starrysock - You’re an impressively lovable furry. Huh.
  • MuddyGrenade - Stay awesome dude!
  • Xyfurion - DB is toast. Hope your future is still bright and that we remain friends.
  • Amerika, and other moderators (all of them) - You guys withstood something saltier than the dead sea. Applause! Encore! Okay, maybe not Encore. Specifically to Amerika. You are one freaking impressive player. Your aim alone rivals professional players in other games, and you have such a rich history in gaming and IT. I wish you true continued success regardless of if you read this or not.
  • To my old guildmates and Sovrahaka/StepOne - You guys deserved some kind of mention here. Stay happy.
  • There are probably a couple 100 more, such as szkalot, milkandbread, badmin, sniff, cuddlesworth, Ardez, MissMurder, Watsyurdeal, Kandyrew, Adam, Bananaslug, Jostabeere, SereneFlight, TheStrangerous, HonourBound and many MANY others! I’ll never forget this group of internet weirdos.

To last but certainly not least! Maisy - Dave. You’re freaking awesome dude. If you’re still working for Splash Damage I wish you the best. And if you ever want to do more DB or OW just say the word. I’ll heal you. You have to be one of the better choices that SD has made in the last year!

I’ll probably be weaning myself off of DB, and will only be returning to this forums for news and responding in this thread. I hope to be a Taco Bell exploiter soon!

(Xenithos) #5

Their FAQs and response seem to lead to a negative answer here. My hope is that too, but it’s unlikely.

(mrdisco) #6

There’s not much to discuss. Feedback now is pretty much useless. They didn’t heard back then; They will not listen now.

I’m glad they broke the silence about the current state of affairs but they haven’t earned my respect as a consumer back. For now, I don’t have any respect for their work or their reputation as a company, to be honest (Just to be clear, I’m not making character judgments about the staff).

I won’t pester them about South America servers that will never come by. I’m not inclined to track any projects made by them, either.

(Moobabe) #7

Hey guys,

Sorry comments are disabled - I didn’t realise it would do that when I tried to pin it to announcements.

Xenithos Let me go through your post:

Thank you for your post, first of all. This hasn’t been an easy decision for the company to make, and lots of people in the building are a little down about it. We haven’t done a great job communicating, there have been reasons for it, but even so, we should have done better.

SDK Releasing an SDK isn’t possible. I’m hazy on the details - but I think there’s proprietary stuff in there that isn’t ours (and the engine at large isn’t ours to share either).

Steam Trading We are planning to do one final bug fix build for the game

Obsidians The development of Obsidians comes from us and our decisions, I won’t apologise for that! Our artists are a passionate bunch and they get inspired to create things. We’ll never be able to make everyone happy with what Mecs we picked.

Leaving the game to die This is too harsh. I understand the frustration the community has felt towards the title, sure. I understand that some decisions weren’t popular, some balance changes, some Mercs etc etc - but no one left Dirty Bomb to die.

Failure Failure is relative. I don’t want to disparage the other games on your list - they all took enormous amounts of skill and effort to make - but Dirty Bomb has had over 40 million owners, and been live for almost 7 years. Could it have been more successful? Of course. Are we proud of what we achieved? You bet.

Devs Thanks for your messages man - I’ll pass this on to the relevant people tomorrow :slight_smile: (Zorla doesn’t work with us though!)

Thanks for your honest feedback though :slight_smile:

(Xenithos) #8

Hey thanks for the reply Moobs! And I agree that we should be proud of what has been achieved, and I mean no disrespect to any of the games I’ve played. Every one of them I’ve enjoyed playing.

A few points that I guess could be more specific: When I say leaving the game to die, the reason I said that was because we can’t improve upon the game, it’s locked to your creation. Which means any real balance changes or things that would improve the game or bring people into it are beyond our doing. In this way it is left to die, as if it cannot grow and will not have more updates, then it will slowly but surely decline. I guess the wording is a bit harsh. You have had many achievements after all!

I’m happy with having Obsidians, I’m not happy about how they were sold (locked to a loadout that we cannot change) and that there were so few of them made near the end!

I look forward to news regarding Steam Trading in your bug fix build of the game, and what else would fall under “bug fix build” whether that’s more balancing or enabling more features for the game.
I feel really sorry that Dirty Bomb has come to this, but wish those at Splash Damage the best of luck.
I’m also sincerely sorry if anything I said has come across over-bitter or disrespectful of the time and effort that’s been put into development of this game. Thanks for reading Moobs!

(Xenithos) #9

Feedback is never useless. However ranting or unproductive talks about things that cannot change are (not pointing at you or anyone else). It looks like they are in fact listening as well. And personally I respect the crap out of them as a company for trying so hard, even if this project has failed and their community feedback for this project took a complete nosedive in the end.

(mrdisco) #10

Not sure what your point is. Don’t expect me to treat them as beer buddies. We are not.

They let me down as a consumer and that`'s that. Trust is hard to earn and easy to lose.

(Xenithos) #11

Sure! I was simply disagreeing with your feedback comment. That’s all mate. See you around.

(binderr) #12

well this was bound to happen, will still play as long as servers stay up. hope SD bring us more great games in the future, I look forward to it.

(Meetrock) #13

I haven’t even finished 1 year playing DB (I started 25th December 2017). I honestly doubt I’d enjoy any other multiplayer game again.

(Boory Marks) #14

A few years ago, I could never imagine Dirty Bomb cease development, but after recent events, it was inevitable. I feel so disheartened to see the game go out like this, but it seems the devs had no choice. I definitely haven’t been playing recently, but I was hoping to go back to a fresh Dirty Bomb, or at least fresher. At least I can still play the game, should I choose to, I guess, but I still feel so let down. Thanks to the Dev team for developing one of my favourite games though, I’ll miss it.

(Floris) #15

Sorry to hear that, but thanks to SD for finally breaking the radio silence. I loved playing DB and I really appreciated how open SD was regarding its development during the first few years, even though the last few months have been tough on both the community and surely the people working on the game as well. I’m looking forward to hearing about your next class based team based fast paced FPS project (you don’t have to call me out of bed for any other type of game :wink: ).

(Meetrock) #16

This should be a real thing, I mean a real type of game that people should make.

(geefunkster) #17

I haven’t been playing as long as many, just over a year, but I honestly wish I’d played it sooner so I’d had more time with it while well populated.

I’ve been playing online shooters for a long time now, starting with Quake 2, Delta Force and UT99. I’ve played a ton of them and just like the best of those, Dirty Bomb has something truly special to offer. In such a saturated market the devs should take great pride in that alone.

As far as feedback goes? Well, for what it’s worth:

What I personally enjoy in Dirty Bomb is the tight gunplay, high ttk, fast pace, movement and parkour, team play and high skill ceiling. I really couldn’t care less for the merc abilities and also feel they caused most of the balancing issues etc.

Abilities like Fletcher’s nades I think work ok as they require a lot of manual input and besides direct sticks on squishy mercs doesn’t reap kills. All of the airstrike mercs, turrets, rockets etc just feel like “Wait for cooldown. Hit Q. Get kills. Repeat.”

Lastly for feedback: The recent radio silence from devs has certainly diminished some community positivity that you could have carried forward into future projects.

All the above said, Dirty Bomb has given me over a thousand hours of great gameplay without spending a penny. For that and their hard work on the game, I want to thank the developers and wish them all well in the future.

Cheers

g24

(HadronZodiac) #18

This is just a list of small changes that would be nice to include, go ahead and share your ideas, or as usual explain why im a terrible player

Aimee - SNITCH - Contrail reduced by half and hp changed to 30

Arty - Arty Designator - 24 cooldown (cuz im weird like that)

Aura - Aura Station - HPS increased by 7.5%, but when a player takes damage health recieved is reduced by 15% for 3 seconds (timer resets every time damage is taken). When aura station is damage this applies to everyone in aura

Bushwhacker - Turret - Cooldown reduced by 5%, DPS reduced by 5%, range reduced by 5%, turret HP reduced by 8%

Fragger - Merc - 140 hp, speed reduced by 5
Frag Grenade - Blast increased to 4.2m and damage increased to 200

Nader - Grenade Launcher - Grenade damage (in blast) reduced by 10% and direct hits only do 80 damage, grenade blast radius reduced by 10%. Cooldown reduced to 7 seconds

Phantom - Cloak - 100% Invisible past 10m. Noise increased by 5%. Damage makes phantom +5% visible for 1 second. Visibility before 10m is 5%

Proxy - Mine - Blast radius reduced by 10%. Hitbox (and model) increased by 4% and health reduced by 4%

Rhino - Minigun - DPS reduced by 9%, max spread reduced by 19%, spread rate reduced by 3%, heat rate increased by 5%

Skyhammer - Airstrike designator - works under an EV (as its just a waste of time, and no it isnt useful for taking out rest of ev, it does less than 100ev damage for 21 second cooldown. no.)

Thunder - Concussion Grenade- Slow effect reduced by 5%, concuss blast radius increased by 5%. cooldown reduced to 18 seconds

Vasilli - HB Sensor - Health reduced to 20

Guardian - Skyshield - Deploy time reduced to .2 seconds, AOE increased by 9%, hp reduced to 80, hitbox (and model) increase by 9%

Hunter - EMP cooldown to 13 seconds, emp exp reduced to 110, normal spot lifetime to 4.5 seconds and exp increase to 50 exp, hitbox increased by 5% (dont let this cause the arrow to collide with more stuff it shouldnt devs >:c)

Although certain changes are small, drastic changes could completely throw stuff off instead of improving things

BR16 -
Damage - 15
RPM - 554
RPM within burst increased by 8%

Stark AR -
Damage - 16
RPM - 516

K21 -
Damage - 16
RPM - 507
Reload - 3 seconds
Clip - 60
Spread reduced by 10%

Empire-9
Spread reduced by 10%

(Your worst knifemare.) #19

I’ll definately miss the game when it finally goes down, but for now I’ll enjoy it as much as possible.

PS. 7 years of development is impressive considering the game wasn’t that popular and the only other FPS game I can think of that went longer is Truck Flapper 2.

PSS. Rest in piece Sparps obsidian.

(boerhae) #20

I’m sticking around until the last server goes dark. It’s crazy to hear this, although most of us could guess that it was on the way. I remember why I stayed playing: I joined on the last day of the Containment War event and ended up getting a SE card drop AND a cobalt drop from an equipment case that were the SAME card for Phoenix on the SAME day. I felt lucky as hell and I couldn’t stop playing. I still remember derping around on Market. I met so many cool players over these 3~ years, many of them are still here. It feels like last week everyone was screaming for Turtle’s release.

I know next to nothing about game development so I can’t really critique that. I loved shoe. and the dev videos. Damn I still remember telling Pinflux his hat was cool and seeing MassE in game and freaking out. I still really respect them for the memorial they left on Vault for Loe, and I was so hyped when they got the new Tutorial Videos… Wish there could’ve been more stuff like that. There was also the many versions of Dome, and the Terminal rework. I can still remember when Dockyard came out and there was no art on anything, and we got asked what we should name the boat.

I can’t list all the cool players, there are too many.

It sucks that some things never came to be, like an EV rework or more Rogue en Vogue-style events, but overall this was (and is) a great experience.

Big thanks to all the mods around here, new and old. @Kirays and @Eox and @Faraleth and @DarkangelUK and even @RazielWarmonic and @MissMurder from forever ago. ALSO huge thanks @moobabe for being here and on Reddit throughout this messy post-1.0 era. Also @STARRYSOCK who was like my best friend on here. And there are so many more like @BooryDarthNader and #SpanishInquisition (Is that not the right name? It doesn’t show up) for their awesome art, and others. There were also so many great edits like the ones @Dagasawr and others made. Plus the gameplay on YouTube. There were those awesome merc concepts that were cool to read through as well, lots of cool stuff there. I’m mad we’re not gonna get that Cultist Kira skin, it was awesome.

I know the game isn’t really dead since it still has players, but this is still really sad.

A question for anyone who might know: Even though development is stopping, will the DB universe go with it? I mean, I wasn’t around for Tempo, but I know it was related in ways. There’s a whole lot, as can be seen in this fantastic edit here, and it would suck for that to go to waste. There were comics in the past and everything. I SERIOUSLY hope SD doesn’t plan on throwing that out.

:coaly: Thank you SD and the community for this amazing experience!!