Recent: Stockholm-servers not beeing playable for many ppl over here in Europe, so CMM and Ranked beeing a no-go, if you really wanted to “try-hard”.
Recent: Warping people (low-fpsers/lagswitchers/packetlossers/?) and highpingers killing the server’s gameplay/performance.
Recent: Ev-repair-stuff.
Recent: Bad performance, menu and Ingame-wise.
Recent: Changing stuff back and forth every few months because whatever.
Recent: …
Yes, they made a nice game. And if we were in 2016 and if it was designwise in the actual state, it would be “ok”. Beta, but ok, and a nice step forward from the alpha we were given as a closed-beta.
But pretending this to be a “final” 1.0, releasing it, and then going into their holidays, that’s another “recent” thing, right. Tells me much about their priorities concerning this game, and what we won’t even dare to expect anymore.
Then? I play lots of free2play games : Path of Exile, RIFT, Warframe… And they aren’t full of bugs, they aren’t laggy and they aren’t loosing players continually.
SD proven with DB they are unable to make a proper game.
I’m a big supporter of SD as they make games with my favourite gameplay (Objective/Stopwatch), but sadly this is already the second time they show that they should strengthen their technical competence (first Brink, now DB). I suspect DB might actually be the swan song of its type, because even now reviewers say the game is not unique enough to challenge other MP FPS games. I really hope that they can fix the current issues with the servers.
Also, the team behind Warframe won some best marketing awards, so they could give SD a master class.
For the type of players DB is geared towards, DB is great, and there really aren’t any other games like it. Sure there are people who look at TF2 and DB and go “what’s the difference?”, but those people aren’t the target audience anyways.
The main issue with DB is the lack of advertising. Everyone knows about all these other PVP titles, but DB has always been some small name they heard once to most people. SD has a great game here, they just never invested in it properly
Not any advertising would have solved technical problems. The only thing advertising would have helped with was about the CMM and ranked, nothing else. And at this point, how could you ever advertise a game full of annoying bugs.
And to be honest, I don’t even think DB is perfectly geared to the players who are the most interested. Just looking at which mercs are the most often banned and which are never picked will just make you understand that SD made a mistake by trying to please two very different kind of gamers population. A product for everyone is a product for no one.
Regardless of how many issues a game has, you can’t get anywhere without a population. CMM was a fix for one of these issues, lack of advertising and by extension, lack of a large playerbase, was what killed it.
Besides, bugs don’t generally ruin a game. DB has its laggy UI, whatever demonic entity the EV is, and its occasional bad server days, but people don’t mind sticking through that if they expect it to get better, just look at other games that have gone through similar issues.
Ultimately a large playerbase would have encouraged SD to invest more in the game, meaning these bugs would have eventually been fixed. A lack of advertising means a lack of players, which means the game becomes less profitable, and eventually spending money trying to fix the game is no longer worth it. So yes, the lack of advertising, and by extension low playerbase, lead us to where we are now.
Besides, everyone is different, everyone has things they dislike. In a large game like DB, that’s only natural. Just look to reviews, the vast majority from people who actually played the game love it. Most of the exceptions are people complaining about SD’s practices or things like P2W (lol). A few people banning a merc doesn’t reflect on the vast majority of players who simply enjoy what the game is and aren’t vocal about it.
If you really feel the game has so many underlying issues beyond the bugs, despite the vast amount of people who enjoyed it, maybe you don’t perfectly fit with who the game is for? I hate snipers but I don’t blame them for “ruining DB”, they just aren’t my thing, and that’s fine.
This isn’t me excusing SD or saying DB is perfect, it’s a reminder that while there are so many long time players who love to rant about what’s wrong with the game and why everyone hates it or whatever, there are so many other players happily enjoying themselves. Hell, I know I do.
Look at the community from a year ago, most of the angry veterans you see here now were happy playing the game as it was. Considering it’s really not too different from how it used to be, what’s stopping everyone from having fun now?
If they really wanted to make more money, they could have done much more by improving their marketing strategy first. Maybe instead of selling 15 bucks a one time rng case which can make people feels like being screwed, they just could have let people choose their prefered loadout ? Or instead of releasing only one loadout for obsidian operative, you could let people choose whichever card they want, and even sell a all-loadout pack for that merc skin.
I agree that more players = more money. Hell, maybe if more people played, the CMM and ranked would have been a real success and the game would be greater. But SD just failed and shot themselves in the foot by limiting what players could afford, which is even more stupid when you don’t have a large population and you’re selling only skins that don’t affect gameplay in anyway.
And i’m not even talking about false advertisement (looking at you, Aimee Obsidian Operative)
By the vast majority, you mean those who only play objective mode on 7v7 servers, which stated by SD is just not the core of Dirty Bomb ?
But let’s take this seriously into consideration for a moment and let’s think about it. What would happen if this was the only game mode available ? Because you know, apparently when game modes aren’t enough popular, they are deleted. How long a FPS game could live without any competitive set up ? Think about Overwatch, Paladins, R6S, CS:GO without any competition.
You, and the vast majority of players may enjoy a said way of playing Dirty Bomb, but it’s still note sane for the game itself, and actually, I firmly believe that only this minority who play the game mostly or exclusively on its competitive mode are those who are the best suited to know what’s wrong and what would be good for the game.
I don’t know, can’t talk for others but as for me, it is a mix of boredom and disappointment. I still play from time to time with friends, but that’s all.
@STARRYSOCK As one of those “angry veterans” I can tell you that it doesn’t take more than a cursory glance at gameplay from the first year of Open Beta to see how the game has drastically changed. It went from a game with heavy emphasis on gun-play to one more centered around abilities, becoming a bizarre hybrid between something like CS:GO and Overwatch.
They started with a clear vision and concept behind the gameplay but, as we’ve seen, following their shift towards appealing to the casual playerbase they’ve deviated so far from the original design that it’s hardly the same game. Sure, it retained some aspect of what it was; however if I was to compare the way playing Dirty Bomb feels then to playing it now, I could not with a clear conscience tell you that it’s even remotely the same.
Where once you had a focus on gun-play, positioning, parkour, and communication–you now have a more heavy focus on ability and explosives spam—not to mention a lot of Merc-stacking and hard-counter style abilities; with the former being more specific, and more prevalent, in public matches. The addition of Mercs such as Guardian and Turtle—whose designs were either altered to, or were inherently by designed to, address the ailments caused by this shift—in their current states are essentially band-aid fixes to an issue that is purely symptomatic of the larger problem; they departed from their original vision and, in their failed attempt to please everyone, created a game that ultimately targets no one.
That’s not to say the game can’t still be fun—I personally still enjoy playing it—but I would never delude myself into believing that the game hasn’t departed from the original vision.
I’d personally say Dirty Bomb first began to fail when Splash Damage chose to lose sight of what they originally touted this game as–a skill-based, first person, competitive shooter with heavy emphasis on movement and gun-play. The reason so many veterans became so infuriated they left is precisely because of this—Splash Damage essentially showed them a game that had promise, and could thrive even as a niche market, in the competitive scene only to quickly abandon the core principles that attracted their initial playerbase. Now that’s not to say its entirely unprecedented—the direction they took, that is—as they made bad choices in who they used to market the product via digital media content creators (i.e. YouTubers, Twitch streamers, etc.). These blunders ultimately resulted in a large influx to the casual playerbase—who ultimately the game was never designed to be heavily catering to—forcing them to deviate from what could be considered the “heart-and-soul” of Dirty Bomb’s core gameplay as a result. One should expect such actions to infuriate these veterans–who were arguably under the reasonable assumption, at the time, of this game catering more to the competitive end of the community by design–as many of them began playing before this shift towards the casual-end of the spectrum started to surface.
That’s not to say there isn’t something to be found that one can love in this game anymore, not in the least, but you should expect that if part of a community was essentially baited-and-switched–not literally but essentially–that they’d be up in arms over the matter. Now I get that those who weren’t around back then, and who don’t have friends who played extensively during the alphas and closed betas up til recently, won’t be privy to this–but that doesn’t mean it can be dismissed or that one can discount the legitimacy of the complaints of these veterans; after all, they were sold a concept in the alphas and closed betas only to then be delivered the exact opposite product shortly following its release to public exposure—a literal bait-and-switch scenario, by definition, as they were promised one thing but given something completely different upon delivery.
These veterans have every right to be upset and I can not only sympathize with, but agree with their complaints as well. I started at the beginning of Open Beta, before this shift towards being a more casual shooter began to surface, and saw how they continued to disenfranchise their competitive community repeatedly. Now don’t misunderstand me I don’t hate the game—on the contrary actually, I still love and enjoy playing it—but even I won’t excuse Splash Damage on these kinds of blunders. Splash Damaged messed up in a big way, and when presented a chance to address it with the release of 1.0 the instead “stuck their heads in the sand” and ran away—at least that is the impression given based on what we know currently.
Their decisions are what has ultimately condemned this game to eventually fade into obscurity–being remembered as a game that could’ve been something more but fell flat-on-its-face in the end—all as a result of the developers hubris, delusions, lack of foresight, and inability to even admit to their various blunders. They consistently refused to acknowledge the negative impacts their blunders were having, instead opting to deflect or outright ignore the issue when pressed on the matter and, while I will still be playing Dirty Bomb until it closes its doors, I will naturally be hesitant to touch future products they release as a result of the impression their actions have left.
TL;DR - I would like to point out that, while I am still hoping they can salvage this debacle, there is the bitter reality that sometimes a developer can commit a blunder so detrimental that they reach a “point-of-no-return” in regards to recovery. It may very well be that we’ve long-since passed that point, however I choose to leave it up to the passage of time to give us the answer to that.
@STARRYSOCK It may be a more casual game now but that doesn’t change what it was originally marketed as, so @Ptiloui is completely justified in their disdain for the current state of Dirty Bomb. It can still be fun and enjoyable for some and still have those underlying problems, especially because it’s more a problem of “what was promised vs. what was delivered” in the grand scheme—it’s more a matter of how Dirty Bomb was marketed and whom its initial target consumers were prior to this shift—so such reactions should be expected.
What you’re seeing in these “angry veterans” is what happens when a now-disenfranchised chunk of the community is vocal in their disdain towards a product that decidedly ceased to cater to its intended market, having shunted them to the sidelines in the process. I’ll admit that this is something that does sometimes occur, sometimes changes of focus are necessary to survive against the competition, but you can’t fault the consumer for being noticeably irate when it happens at the cost of such disenfranchisement.
It’s all about targeting. Heck, if they did not take 4 years to release community servers, they certainly would have managed to retain half of the closed alpha community who more or less stopped playing even before the game was released on steam. What their development lacked was a first target : those veterans (I mean, we mostly were long time W:ET/ET:QW/whatever surrounding Quake games veterans) could have pulled the game forward and pull a casual community in their footsteps.
And no CMM, no ranked was needed in the first place if they’d have done the things correctly : give your original target what they want (bling and useless stuff was not expected from them either), let them shake the opinion themselves, this would have provided a fair audience for such a narrow placed game (nowadays at least). Chivalry did this and implemented stuff for casual / money giving whales in a second step. This worked pretty well in my view. CMM and ranked were plain examples they mislead themselves on the wrong first core audience for their game, and even how big the game could potentially become. A regular day peak at 10k players over a year was pretty much impossible already. Even Valve did this with cs:go : matchmaking and trading were added almost 2 years after the initial release…
Dirty bomb was capable of holding a fair steam top 100, which is incredibly hard to achieve for niche fps nowadays, if they pulled the strings the right way. No CMM, no ranked, no carnival cosmetic stuff was needed to reach that. Just pure content, gameplay balance and logic, stay focused on what the game should be, actual proper work on servers, all of this should have been the priority.
I even got kicked out with no rumorse of the pts because I kept repeatedly saying this (I got offline for professional reasons for a month, this gave them an opportunity to bail me out). But yes, DB is still my biggest time waster on pc currently…
I’m not sure which first year of open beta you played, because I was there too. Gunplay and movement really aren’t any less of a major focus than they were. I mean, sparks and fletcher were there back in 2015 too.
Some abilities were changed to make them more balance, but very few of them were done to make things more casual. Fletcher lost his massive AoE, Sparks lost her massive amount of health regen, etc. The new mercs really aren’t different. Why can’t a fast FPS game have a merc with a shield? It wouldn’t be a new thing. Hell, it wouldn’t be new to DB either, turtle has been around for a while. You may not like Guardian or Turtle, but that doesn’t mean they don’t belong in the game or were never planned to be a part of it
Again, this isn’t me trying to justify some of the shit SD has pulled. I’m still pissed that they decided to remove ranked, but there’s really nothing stopping you from still enjoying the game. We’ve all been here for a very long time, it’s natural everyone will get sick of it eventually.
Besides, there are very few things competitive players agree on, just look at some of the posts here or on reddit. Melee, snipers, shotguns, medics, spread, matchmaking, phantom, aimpunch, etc. Most of the time we can all agree on an issue, but actually deciding on what we want to do about it? You can’t just say “listen to the veterans” because they all have different views on what the game should be, it’s more complicated than just doing what your community asks. Once more, not saying SD treated community feedback properly, but considering how many vastly different opinions we all have, I’m not surprised SD took their feedback from more places than just us.
Like hell, don’t forget I am a DB veteran just like you guys, who played comp just like you guys. That should be evidence enough that we can’t agree on everything lol
The whole $15 for a RNG special edition loadout case still pisses me off.
I bought every single one of them ( Only three anyway, I think? ) because, well, I’ve put well over 1,000 hours into this game. It’s only fair tbh.
KE21 Proxy, B45 Javelin and T102 Guardian.
Soooo… I got crazy fucking lucky, yet I still don’t feel good about any of those purchases cause I know plenty of people who got shit and that sucks. I hate it so much that they got boned. Sure, some asshole is going to come in and chime, “well, they knew what they were getting into, they shouldn’t have bought in” or whatev bullshit… just don’t. I donate money to my local animal shelter, good journalism organizations ( is Alex Jones permabanned from life yet? ) and Second Life. This is how I want to give money to SD; I should at least be able to feel good about it.
Come on SD, would it really have killed you to let players pick what loadout they want? That bullshit is emblematic of what is wrong with SD. Tbh, I wouldn’t be surprised if Shoe left in frustration over just how oblivious SD’s suits seem to be.
@STARRYSOCK while I can’t personally confirm, before I started playing, SD apparently collaborated closely with Dirty Bomb’s best players over issues like balance, players like Inf3rno and Kudochop. Then they stopped. It probably would’ve been worthwhile to restart that whole process, I dunno, two years ago maybe?
They still wanted Feedback from “high skill” players and certain Streamers about Balance and Stuff. it all got ignores, some Weapon balance got used (or SD had it in vision too). In the closed Beta and early open Beta stages they ignored all Feedback about Mercs/Maps/Abilities or it took them Months and Months to change stuff like jump Sniping.
In Mid 2017 i believe Shoe actually had Exedore and Co at a Point where they had to say: yea Contact certain Players for Feedback and Co
shortly afterwards they invited some Community Member to the HQ and after that everything went back to good old: yes give us Feedback and Ideas and we will gladly ignore them.
Even the PTS was just a Joke and thats coming from Guys like Oksi (newb) and Co. SD doesn’t give a Damn about what the Players think or want.
RNG Special Event Skins for Example. I got a shitty BR16 Loadout for Javelin, I mean why should i have gotten the new Weapon for paying 15 Bucks? same with Turtle. i got them for Guardian and Hunter tho.
See this is something I don’t personally understand. I see a lot of people saying “Dirty Bomb has descended into explosive spam hell,” but I don’t really see how it has changed so much in that aspect. Out of all the mercs that have been added since the Open Beta a total of one of them has a had an explosive ability: Javelin. If you wanna get super technical and broad, you could say that Stoker has one since his does have an ability that does damage in an AoE on impact, but I could say that about Aimee too. I know that people didn’t start complaining until after Javelin’s release, but in that aspect, I just don’t get it.
Reading through all the patch notes I could find, only 3 mercs ever got straight up buffed, explosive wise. Arty got his damage radius buffed in the Redeye update, Proxy got a cooldown reduction, and Nader’s damage radius got slightly increased. All other times explosives got buffed, they got nerfed in other ways, like when Proxy, Fragger and Nader got instagibs taken away, but got their damages buffed. Fletcher gets targeted a lot when it comes to explosive spam, but he’s gotten nothing but nerfs over the years, Sticky Bomb wise.
Javelin, of course, just exists, which pisses everyone off, but she’s gotten consistently nerfed since her introduction too. Even her stupid rocket acceleration thing got taken away after a little over a month of its introduction.
Now, I’m not trying to say that everyone is stupid and is just complaining out of their asses, I’m honestly just trying to figure out why people keep saying this despite the consistent nerfing of most explosives. My guess is the gunplay has gotten worse, and that’s why everyone keeps saying that explosive spam is everywhere, when it gets nerfed more often than not.
Merc-stacking has been around since the beginning, I don’t really get how it’s a problem now. We’ve always had the ability to have 5 Fraggers, 2 Auras, and a Skyhammer, we’ve always had the ability to have 8 Naders, and I could go on. I hate merc-stacking just as much as the next guy, but I’m not saying that the game has suddenly changed because of it.
Hard-counter playstyles is something I can accept as a newer problem. Hunter and Phantom are basically the “Someone needs to get rid of that Turtle, Rhino, Aura, Guardian defense,” go-tos, and Guardian’s mere existence nerfs most explosive-based mercs. I don’t necessarily have a huge problem with these hard-counter mercs, but that’s probably because I’ve played a shitton of Overwatch and I’m used to it. Honestly, just limiting merc stacking could really get rid of the band-aid fixes that these hard-counters are.
I honestly feel like I’m just ignorant to this whole concept, and I missed some key events during my DB Hiatus, and I just accepted the new Dirty Bomb when I came back, without even realizing it changed. But I see a lot of people quickly agreeing with the “no more gunplay, all about explosive spam” concept, even though I rarely see anyone backing that idea up, besides people just saying “Uhhhh, Javelin is broken and Guardian is her band-aid fix.”
She has a pretty decent selection of guns and good HP as well. Also she can revive multiple people at once from a short distance. The shield, while being a counter ability, only has a small area of effect. She replaced Sawbonez as my medic of choice for a while, but I’m thinking about swapping him back in because Guardian can only revive but not heal.
The key to what you quoted from me is the fact I state it as not just explosive spam but ability spam; we see Mercs whose sole purpose now is to function as a hard-counter via abilities exclusive to them in the game. They added abilities which countered certain gameplay elements so harshly that they had to take away focus from refining gun-play to balance them, ultimately resulting in several seemingly random changes to guns. It’s almost as if they failed to have any real plan or development roadmap. If you were to ask me it’s more of a complaint, using hyperbole relating to the abilities to call attention to it, as to how they lost sight of everything outside the abilities due to a lack of foresight on the impact they would have; which led to heavier emphasis on balancing of abilities and less time given to properly keeping the guns balanced and functional, which led to gun-play suffering as a result.
For instance, the aim-punch issue that occurred with high RPM guns (e.g. Hochfir, Thunder’s LMG, etc.) where it would stack due to an issue with the time before reset of the value; this issue had data backing it that went back at least a year before the update was implemented. This is something that would give the impression that they’re focus had been elsewhere, such as on abilities, which would mean gun performance would be hit-and-miss as a consequence. Such impressions being prevalent would likely influence gameplay decisions on the part of players, especially as certain guns became very impractical for a majority of the playerbase prior to the aim-punch fix. This would snowball due to SD’s tendency to buff guns, purely because they’re underused, where it was completely unnecessary (i.e. the Dreiss AR’s repeated buffs & nerfs over DB’s lifespan).
Personally I view it more as being intended as a wake-up call to SD that failed in the end–one that ultimately failed–because, as you stated, it is very clearly hyperbole. That being said, it is hyperbole with a purpose behind it; SD’s track record over DB’s history had always shown a tendency to follow the voices that screamed loudest, as opposed to what was actually good for the game, so such a tactic being adopted is feasible. At the end of the day though a lot of this is purely conjecture, as I can’t speak to the thoughts of everyone individually, but for me that has always been my analysis of the subject.
What you said overall makes sense (thank you for explaining it to me, honestly), but I am still kinda struggling to understand what mercs exactly can spam abilities to hard counter others. I already listed Hunter, Phantom, and Guardian, and the only other true hard counter I can think of is Redeye towards Phantom, but even then he had been around since the Alpha/Closed Beta (one or the other, I don’t really know, wasn’t there for either), so we already knew he was gonna be able to do that.
I think I have a bit of a different stance on what “spam” actually is. Most mercs don’t have abilities that they have more than one use of before needing a cooldown (Sawbonez, Arty, Fletcher, etc.), besides Medics and their methods of reviving, but I know that people don’t just have problems with those mercs. I think we both need to agree on what “spam” is in Dirty Bomb before we can go on with this debate, because I could cut out a lot of mercs from the “spam pool”, per se, before we even have a go at it.
I’m not referring to the nature of the abilities, but rather the effect such abundance of high-impact abilities has had on the meta and gameplay. It’s considered ability spam because a significant enough part of a matches outcome revolves around proper timing and utilization of abilities in conjunction with standard elements of a team-based objective shooter. With such high-impact abilities it only further amplifies the potential impact proper use or misuse of such abilities will have; it detracts from focus on gun-play and becomes something more like Overwatch, a game that pretty much now boils down to “the team that better utilizes their Ultimates wins”. I’m ultimately referring to the impact the over-abundant presence of such abilities in the game has had—a gaming experience that feels noticeably different and places heavier emphasis on abilities, serving as a sharp contrast to its prior focus centralized on gun-play; ultimately having heavy impact and implications upon the meta in any match they are present for, thus resulting in a very different type of game.
That’s not to say some of the existing abilities didn’t need to be toned down, they did need tweaks, but there is now such an abundance of abilities with high-impact returns that the meta almost revolves around them as a result. It’s why in 5v5 formats Thunder is a common ban choice, along with Aura and Turtle to name a few; their abilities, in the format the game is balanced around, forces the meta to be built around them due to the impact they have. It forces players to immediately take a squad member specifically to serve for counter-play to their ability, or constantly be focused on before any progress can be made.
The game always tried to tout itself as a competitive shooter so the continuous addition of such abilities, whose mere presence forces a shift in meta centered around them, is naturally reacted to harshly by a competitive community. A few here and there was manageable, but now there is practically one in each Merc category. It’s excessive and if anything is what I refer to when I am saying spam; I’m not referring to the abilities themselves, but how the sheer quantity of such elements in the game as a whole has shifted the underlying gameplay to compensate for their existence.
