Splash Damage, any plans to talk to the game's top players?
I can imagine the ego’s all clashing now, cos apparently if you can aim in a game that automatically makes you number 1 game designer
On a slightly related note, does anyone know how the Russian version is doing? Apparently that was being helmed by Cooller of international topless gaming fame.
- RU version is still offline.
- Ru players still play EU version (need VPN to add Dirtybomb in steam, then VPN is not needed)
- Cooller is still attached to the project, but there is no activity currently.
- RU version is THE SAME as EU version (unlike it was 2 years ago)
Well, competitive experience within the game or genre isn´t making your opinion worth more (in SD`s eyes) I think. Sorry to say that but that´s at least what the past has shown. Hundreds of people, who played thousands of hours of objective based, stopwatch games (at the time of the alpha) were asking for multiple gameplay and mapdesign elements with clear explanations and a truly deep understanding of the effects those will have on the game especially in the meta and tactical aspect. Even tho the potential harm to the gameplay we know today was potentially 0, they have been ignored. All of them, and the only halfway understandable response was, and still is, that they want the game to become as different from ET or ET:QW as possible. That is enough. That is enough to not adapt what those games did right in therms of tactical and strategical options and instead give us aimpunch - something that most of the people who notice it and can put it into a frame within the game dislike. Sadly our 0,02$ are really just 0,02$ 
I’ll add some points to this.
Personally I talk to lots of ‘pro/top’ players already, if they’re not you or the people you want I’m sorry for that but I can’t talk to everybody 
Secondly, when people make posts like this they tend to use the word ‘community’ a lot, “talk to the community more” for example. This is actually incredibly hard to do because this idealized community doesn’t exist. There is no one single voice, one shared opinion, not even in the smaller competitive scene. You actually all disagree with each other more than you think and the only time elements of a consensus seem to appear is when a smaller number of individuals lobby others endlessly over a few weeks. If we were to go on ‘community’ opinion that feedback would probably need to be anonymous via a survey, forums simply involve too much bias and arguing.
Lastly, I played in ‘top’ clans in Tribes 2, Tribes Ascend, Call of Duty 1 and ETQW…do I have to be in one for Dirty Bomb as well to understand weapon mechanics? 
Yeah… Can´t blame you guys on the fact that it´s hard to grasp what the “community” really wants, since there is no representative for that…
However, I can think of certain changes in gameplay or mapdesign, that no one (or almost) had an issue with, many accepted and many wanted. I am not following DB too much anymore, but isn´t aimpunch a good example? While we all agree that it´s a good way to balance snipers in most other cases people
a) either don´t notice it and are mostly neutral about it,
b) few to none actually like it (outside of the sniper nerf) and
c) the rest dislikes it for multiple reasons that are explained in detail in various posts and videos.
It´s those kind of situations that are frustrating, where most of us in fact pull at the same string or at least no one pulls on the other side and it´s still not having any effects. Considering that in those cases there is also a vast amount of reasonable argumentation it really feels devastating for a community (or a part of it to be precise) to get “washed” off with statements that are being repeated over and over agai, usually feel very disconnected from the actual argumentation and give next to no true insight on why certain adaptations are (not) being made.
It´s at least good to know that you try talking to other players, as well as that you have a interesting background yourself
[QUOTE=onYn;537144]Yeah… Can´t blame you guys on the fact that it´s hard to grasp what the “community” really wants, since there is no representative for that…
However, I can think of certain changes in gameplay or mapdesign, that no one (or almost) had an issue with some accepted and the majority wanted. I am not following DB too much anymore, but isn´t aimpunch a good example? While we all agree that it´s a good way to balance snipers in most other cases people
a) either don´t notice it and are mostly neutral about it,
b) few to none actually like it (outside of the sniper nerf) and
c) the rest dislikes it for multiple reasons that are explained in detail in various posts and videos.
It´s those kind of situations that are frustrating, where most of us in fact pull at the same string or at least no one pulls on the other side and it´s still not having any effects. Considering that in those cases there is also a vast amount of reasonable argumentation it really feels devastating for a community (or a part of it to be precise) to get “washed” off with statements that are basically being repeated over and over again and sometimes feel very disconnected from the actual argumentation.
But good to know that you try talking to other players, as well as that you have a interesting background yourself :)[/QUOTE]
I would say in those cases that:
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It was something we felt strongly, as the designers, that we wanted our game to have
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The consensus you believe was there across all of the community was actually across the users in your ‘sphere’ that are vocal. People are twice as likely to post to say they dislike something as they are to post saying it was fine/improved the game
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Just because it went out in one version doesn’t mean it wont be balanced and tweaked umpteen times after that, but that can take some time to do. You have to bear in mind the process here, a patch goes out, it’s played and we get the immediate feedback, it’s played for another week and then we get the ‘people are used to it now feedback’, if we want to change it we make the changes, test them internally for a week so we ‘get used to it’, put it into QA, they test the build, the next patch eventually comes out. When you iterate 2-3 times that can be a fairly long process before you arrive at the point where most people are happy
To go back to point one a second you have to understand something. We have to make the game for all our players, we can’t just focus on one section, that doesn’t make economic sense.
If we focused entirely on competitive play with every tweak and update we’d be serving maybe 500 players (100 teams on DirtyCups for the league, five players each, that seems a fair estimate). That is less than 1% of all players that log in each day, less than 0.25% of the unique users that play each week. If that was all we’d focus on this game wouldn’t be able to support itself.
Not to say that some of those suggestions aren’t good for all players, they can be, but it doesn’t mean they all are.
None of this means that we don’t care about the competitive scene or their feedback, we do, because a large number of us have been competitive players in the past. What it means is we can’t always make it our top priority and we have to balance it against what is best for the whole game.
[QUOTE=Anti;537143]
Secondly, when people make posts like this they tend to use the word ‘community’ a lot, “talk to the community more” for example. This is actually incredibly hard to do because this idealized community doesn’t exist. There is no one single voice, one shared opinion, not even in the smaller competitive scene. [/QUOTE]
Are you serious? The top teams(A few of them doesn’t even play DB anymore) posted a thread months ago on the VIP forum. As a single voice the stuff they would like to see added and or changed. When we talk about “community” here we are talking about the players that wants to play this game as a team against other teams. Not the random 8v8 explosion fiesta you see on most pub servers.
Not much has been done with that. So please don’t use that as an excuse, it makes SD look silly in my opinion. The comp scene is extremely frustrated by the lack of action, its been nothing but words from SD and yet you keep throwing phrases around like “soon” or yes we will add that. We need to see action soon. HALF the compotent players I know and talked to both in scrims/pugs and twitch are all saying they are just waiting for Overwatch. You gotta move quick if you don’t want the scene to die before it even begins. Sure its all fine and dandy if you want DB to be a public, casual game, which is the opposite of what you claimed DB would be, a competitive team based shooter.
Game has been in beta since 2012. Not a lot has been changed except minor tweaks to maps (well bridge got a lot worse when you removed the escort phase). The constant tiny weapon tweaks and other back end stuff that noone will even notice. Oh yes we got the steam integration, wupti doo. We need weapons to be sorted, we need custom lobbies and we need a way to record our matches so cheaters can be dealt with, instead of some feel good band aid anticheat.
[QUOTE=47__;537146]Are you serious? The top teams(quiet a few of which doesn’t play DB anymore) posted a thread months ago on the VIP forum. As a single voice the stuff they would like to see added and or changed.
Not much has been done with that. So please don’t use that as an excuse, it makes SD look silly in my opinion.[/QUOTE]
As Anti stated, comp is just roughly 1% of the total playerbase. Changing everything for the 1% is a stupid decision.
Yeah, I kind of understand that absolutely, and really appreciate the time you take to write to a troublesome individual like myself ;).
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While very frustrating it is of course very understandable, after all it´s your jobs to do such things. However, when something the community as well as the designers feel strongly about and the designers stick with what they decided at SOME point it has to deliver, don´t you think so?
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That´s obviously going to occur quiet often. But I have actually taken my time off from DB and came back a couple of times over the past years and regardless of which people are currently playing and posting on those froums - the consensus seems to remain the same.
I would like to go into the “make a game for everyone” a little bit.
Forgive me the question, but why cant you focus on various sections? CS, a game that in itself is much less flexible does the same with casual game modes a MM and a competitive mode. DB already has various game modes and adding a competitive stopwatch mode that is just slightly different from what we already have is not going to cost too many resources. Even if the initial additional attracted player base may be not worth the resources that would be needed to set up such a mode up (what I doubt since the required changes are really tiny) there is (I believe) a certain mechanic behind the competitive scene of a game. And that is, that it attracts interesting characters that not only play the game but are much more likely to produce content (stream, youtube, guides, homepages, etc.) that promotes your game for free, generates long therm motivation for people who follow them and also helps out with sale of cosmetic items etc… This will occur probably anyways, but a competitive mode can potentially boost this process up and with the required resources being relatively tiny - why not. I would really like to know that there is a possibility for something like that to happen at least.
I think that people generally are in a competitive mindset when playing games, especially in FPS. It´s a game where you are supposed to straight up kill your enemy, who would play this without a competitive drive at all? Maybe not diehard competitive and trying to become pros, but overall people appreciate the chance to compete against each others and because of that will enjoy a competitive environment. The “1%” that is supposed to be interested in competitive is a statistically debatable number since DB doesn´t support enough players to support proper statistical analysis and on top of that only shows the ammount of people who put the maximum effort into it with setting up teams, organizing trainings, scrims, tournaments etc… But there are also a lot of people outside of those 1% who are not invested as much in the competitive scene itself but play the game with a competitive mindset and appreciate the competition, what I think should be supported with proper gamedesign. CS:GO mm and even Leauge (even tho no FPS) ranked show that quiet nicely. Also in therms of difficult and complex game mechanics games (in addition to CS and Mobas) like PoE and DS have shown that such settings can benefit a game massively as long as they are introduced to the customer properly. Because of that I struggle to understand how minor changes towards a more competitive environment are supposed to ruin the game and leave it with a tiny fraction of the original player base.
At this point I wonder, how do you even wage competitive game elements that you remove from the game because they may frighten the overall playerbase? It is hard to tell if they are a problem for casual anyways, how many people exactly are interested in the general (not 1%) competitive environment and how individual player groups benefit a game with there content production and player acquisition.
For me the argument of making the game more playerfriendly to generate a larger playerbase seems like a unreasonable fear, or is there any empiric data I don´t know about? On top of that, a person who plays a game in a competitive setting is going to be more invested with the game and by that is MUCH more likely to invest money for things like a merc with an ideal loadout and cosmetic, don´t you think?
GOD I AM SO SORRY THAT I HAVE WRITTEN SO MUCH. I am off to the gym and will leave anything you reply commented and how it is, since, I am probably wrong anyways since I am just an amateur ^^
[QUOTE=onYn;537148]Yeah, I kind of understand that absolutely, and really appreciate the time you take to write to a troublesome individual like myself 
[/Quote]
No problem, at least it’s a somewhat rational discussion 
I’m not sure what sort of mode or changes you’re suggesting here as being competitive specific, are you talking about weapons that differ from one to the other? Or game rules? If it’s the former even small ‘tweaks’ to weapons essentially duplicates every gun and makes that path from pubber to comp player a lot harder to cross. It’s not something we’d do (it’d be somewhat simple but a pain to manage).
If you’re talking more modes and features then yes, we try to spend time on both sides of the pub/comp divide.
To the initial point I think we can focus on various sections and to some extent we do, we just can’t always turn around those changes that fast with our relatively small team.
You have to bear in mind when you compare DB to CS what their feature set and comp scene was like when they hit open beta and then where it ended up, they had to build many of those features in later. To illustrate, when that game launched it was quite a slow burner seeing fairly normal ‘churn’ in player numbers for a new game:
But Valve being Valve they stuck with it and kept adding new features, for comp and for pub players, and a year later it started to really click with players once they’d finished a lot of that work, then numbers and interest jumped up:
I’m by no means saying that is what will happen to DB (although I’d love it if it did!) 
What it shows though is that it can take a lot of time to get that balance and those extra features right before it finally clicks and I’m pretty sure you can only really achieve that kind of growth when you have the community playing the game and helping find solutions to those issues.
Sorry if OnYn touched on this (his post is too long). (EDIT: looks like OnYn did, but man please make your posts shorter :D)
What’s wrong with basing the whole game on the “top 1%”?
Imo that top 1% is the most hardcore and will be playing the most, streaming the most, testing the most, taking it upon themselves to push the game onto their friends, organizing competitions,… So why not listen to them? Seems like it would improve the longevity of the game.
I’m not in the 1%, but they did get me to play CS:GO (watching the streams, competitions & one friend that kept trying to introduce me to it). Let the pro handle the balancing, let the casuals play in the sandpit with their hats & weapon skins.
[QUOTE=stealth6;537150]Sorry if OnYn touched on this (his post is too long). (EDIT: looks like OnYn did, but man please make your posts shorter :D)
What’s wrong with basing the whole game on the “top 1%”?
Imo that top 1% is the most hardcore and will be playing the most, streaming the most, testing the most, taking it upon themselves to push the game onto their friends, organizing competitions,… So why not listen to them? Seems like it would improve the longevity of the game.
I’m not in the 1%, but they did get me to play CS:GO (watching the streams, competitions & one friend that kept trying to introduce me to it). Let the pro handle the balancing, let the casuals play in the sandpit with their hats & weapon skins.[/QUOTE]
It’s an interesting idea in theory but personally I’ve not see any evidence (in the numbers that I have access to at least) that says those players are actually more active or vocal advocates than non-clan players. Sure there are a few clan players that do a great amount of things like streaming (outcider, adeto, inferno, Bitey, kudo spring to mind) or running events, but they tend to be a fraction of a fraction.
If we only did what Bitey suggested the meta would be crazy!
And first impressions are very important, in terms of building a player base. So perhaps you should talk to the newbies more! 
I mean an own game mode, that is in therms of gun play&balance based on the “casual” stopwatch mode. But it should support competitive features that make the game more tactical and team play oriented and also support maps that are bigger and offer way more tactical options, and actually require the player to have some map knowledge in order to play them properly. Basically unlike what we have right now with the over protectively polished game towards new players so that they don´t hurt themselves at any time in the game with more emphasis on individual rather then team play.