With the recent changes made to Dirty Bomb’s progression system, there seems to have been a consistent issue with the progression. While at first leveling up took a giant amount of time and the missions were usually short, being completed in a match or two. Now the progression has changed.
Instead of leveling up taking almost 12 hours ,according to SD, it is now significantly shorter, but it still takes a long time to level up. Also, the new contracts now take way more time to complete. While the old missions refreshed every few hours and could be completed relatively fast if you played well enough, these new contracts are daily and take incredibly long to finish. Some of them require you to play (at minimum) 30 minutes to finish. While that doesn’t seem bad, as that is roughly three games (if the games are the average 10 minutes). However there are missions that require 2 hours of in-match time to complete, which is extremely long and tedious. It sucks all the fun out of playing, as now a player isn’t playing long amounts of time because of the gameplay or just having fun, they are now playing longer because the game is telling them to play longer.
This is a terrible way to increase player retention in the long run. For starters, a new player just joining the game isn’t going to earn as much EXP as a more experienced player, meaning the missions that say “Gain 36,000 COMBAT exp” will stay on their mission list for days at a time. If anything, it discourages new players from playing, as they then feel like they aren’t being rewarded for the matches they play, even with the overall increased credit earn rate. There is nothing to keep new players around.
There are no more short term goals a player can set for themselves to complete. Missions were the only real option players had, and apparently SD saw that players would do the missions and leave, which was probably due to the lack of things to do after you finished your missions. Leveling up takes a long time, getting credits for mercs takes a long time. The 2 main progression objectives were extreme time sinks. Players were not even rewarded that much for completing them either. The gameplay, while fantastic, isn’t enough to carry the game. Some players will keep playing, but others will want some sort of reward for the time they invest.
What is worse is that what is there to earn doesn’t have any real value. Loadout cards have no value, as any shmuck who unboxes a crate has a chance to get a high value card or anyone who joined during the GEN 1 even can craft a older gen card, effectively devaluing old player’s cards. Levels used to have meaning, but with the new inflated levels there is no more honor or prestige to having a triple digit level. The numbers have no meaning to them anymore. They are also so high that you can’t even judge a player on them. While yes players would single out about high levels and low levels, they at least game people a reference to a players skill so they could better prepare for an encounter. Now you can’t even tell, is the 346 level dude better than the 442? Players have no more reference for anything.
Side Complaint- The missions now are super basic and have no real distinction anymore. At least the “Have X merc in squad” pushed players to maybe consider a character they haven’t played before.
What I’m trying to say is, this recent update ruined player progression for the worse. There are no short term goals that player can play for, no sense of reward for progressing, and nothing to distinguish a player from another newbie. For a game that is going into 1.0 fairly soon, the current state of progression will greatly hurt the incoming new players and their experience with the game, and no tutorial is going to fix that.
I have my own ideas on how to solve this issue, or for the most part alleviate the blatant grind that the game is currently.
For one, I would bring back the old missions and give them a tweak here or there. I would also change up the contract system. Contracts aren’t inherently flawed, but their current implementation is. I would turn the contracts into their own entity. Every day, a player could select between 3 different contracts. The player would then choose what he wanted and have that 24 hour period to complete it. These contracts could be more specific and varied, as they wouldn’t be forcing a player to do X or Y. They could be “Get x kills as Stoker” or " Play x games on Dockyard". Since these contracts are PLAYER chosen, it will feel more rewarding as it is a goal the PLAYER set for themselves, instead of like the GAME told them to do something. You could even let them reroll their selection with the tokens. With this system, you would now have short-term missions that a player could complete in a short session, medium goals in the contracts for players willing to play longer and also catering to their preferred merc, and the long term goal of buying a new merc or leveling up.
Now my idea isn’t a fix all, as there is still the issue for the unrewarding level up rewards and the lack of prestige a player feels, but it is a step in the right direction for a new, enhanced system that would both encourage new players to stick around and older players to have more to do instead of just logging in and leaving.
Would like to hear some player feedback and ideas, I really wanted to get this off my chest as it has been something I’ve been meaning to mention in detail.