My friend introduced me to this game a week ago and I’ve been having quite a lot of fun with it. However, there is one massive problem that has rapidly been reducing my enjoyment. This is the fact that massively unbalanced teams are quite common and the game has no system in place to deal with this occurrence.
Imbalanced teams are without fail THE biggest challenge to solve for every single team pvp game, particularly those that require strong teamwork. That said, a bad team in Dirty Bomb is a lot more punishing than in most games due to the reward structure. Earning experience, quest progress, and (I think) credits is significantly easier when on a balanced or superior team. So far I’ve found being on a superior/balanced/inferior team to reward XP in a 3:2:1 ratio, which is incredibly steep.
To make matters worse, in competitive you are stuck on your team for far too long. It seems the standard way players deal with this is to flame each other or go AFK, both of which create an incredibly toxic experience. In quick match you can leave a bad team, but the catch is the longer you wait the more time you’ve wasted. As leaving results in no experience or chance at a case, you are strongly encouraged to immediately leave any match where your team appears suspect. This only exacerbates the problem as a bad team has little hope of better players joining and rescuing them.
Fortunately, this is a problem that can be solved, but it will take a lot of work. Here are some suggestions I have on how to go about this:
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Create an internal metric that tracks and quantifies player skill. Perhaps in each match the game would track a player’s points per minute and then scale the resulting value up or down based upon the quality of the competition. Only the past 10 games or so would be considered, otherwise players with a long history of mediocrity wouldn’t be properly rated when they finally became good.
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Do not allow players to switch teams unless they are switching to a team that is short 2 or more players.
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Implement an AFK manager that detects AFKs and either moves them to spectate or kicks them after ~30 seconds of inactivity. Players moved to spectate should not occupy a server spot (to ensure both teams can have even numbers). When the AFK player returns they can rejoin their original team if a slot in the server is free. Ending a match AFK would be considered the same as having left the match, and no rewards would be given.
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Allow players to queue for quick match in groups if they so desire. When placed into a match these players would be preferentially placed on the same team, but only if balance allows for it. Otherwise they’d be put into a match together but split up between the teams.
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Try to create modes/maps that allow a stacked team to win quickly. Currently playing Stopwatch or as attackers in Objective mode is horrendous when on an inferior team. Players have to spend far too long on a hopeless team before the match ends. Compare to this as playing defenders in Objective mode on an inferior team - the stacked team will quickly overrun your defenses and the match will swiftly come to a merciful end.
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In the meanwhile, have the game detect and end severely stacked matches early. I cannot stress enough how important it is for this to be out of players hands, as I’ve never seen allowing players to vote for a scramble or surrender work as intended. Perhaps if one team holds a 2:1 points per minute advantage for 3+ minutes AND the inferior team has made no progress on the objective in this time, the match is declared a victory for the superior team and ended. If necessary, the case drop rate and credits awarded can be scaled to time played to prevent exploiting this system for farming (if this would be possible; I don’t fully understand the mechanics of the rewards system).
Well that turned into quite the wall of text. Thank you to anyone who took the time to read all that. Please let me know what you think about my suggestions and feel free to share your own ideas.