Ok guys, time to get my rant on!
Let’s for a moment forget about all the bugs, lack of content, cheaters and questionable design choices and take a deeper look into what must be one of the biggest issues Dirty Bomb has… Getting players in to fun, fair and full matches. Dirty Bomb currently offers one of the worst user experiences, not only in the free to play space but in first person shooters to date. Horrible menu performance, bad flow, unbalanced matches, tons of waiting around and so much more all stand in the way of getting a half decent match. To be honest, if I saw things improving, even slowly, this post would not be needed but the previous update (Phoenix Update) just goes to show how little Splash Damage and Nexon understand the needs and desires of their audience, as well as demonstrating just how “behind the times” they are…
We are now months into OPEN BETA and you have already scared away MILLIONS of players and I am willing to bet the initial experience a player receives is one of the main reasons. Just to be clear, I think its safe to say that many of us here on the forums still see the huge amount of potential Dirty Bomb has and barring cheaters, bugs, lack of content and a few strange design decisions/traits the game is really bloody good! Yet you hardly ever put your best foot forward and present the game in a way that would communicate this to the vast majority of people that install and try Dirty Bomb.
Here are just some of the reasons why…
COMMUNITY RUN SERVERS & SERVER BROWSER!
Basically give the community the ability to run their own servers OR move away from the server browser being the main way a player would play the game. The whole reason for a server browser is to allow players to find a place to play with a community, custom rule sets, map restrictions and/or active admins. You take them options away and you really take away the main reason to have a server browser in the first place because there are much better ways to get players into games. Alternatives include a “Spawn Public Lobby” option to allow players to build games and see if people join or a Call of Duty style skill based lobby system. You really don’t need to re-invent the wheel here…
PLAYING WITH FRIENDS - WANTED!
So right now the only option we have when it comes to playing with friends is joining a half empty lobby and crossing our fingers that we get on the same team or joining into the Match Making (but obviously only once we have already been playing for 10-20 hours to get to the required level) and then we get smashed by 5 man stacks or hackers and if that is not the case we get a 50/50 chance we are going to spawn camping some poor level 5s for a full 15 min. Simply NOT FUN! This has got to be one of the only team based first person shooters I have ever seen where its a huge hassle to play with friends… That point alone blows my mind…
PLAYING WITH FRIENDS - NOT WANTED!
Let’s say that I manage to get into a match and things are going not to bad. 10 of us was in the lobby so the game has attempted to balance the match and then during the game a friend joins on me. My friend is as good as I am but the teams have been balanced to make it harder for me anyway and then he gets placed on the enemy team and I get smashed… Slow claps all around here. I would love to see the ability to remain ONLINE on Steam but be OFFLINE on Dirty Bomb because trying to play or record and having people keep joining on you is a pain in the ass.
STEAM NAMES!
Kinda like the previous one but more then likely only something that affects “popular” players. Because my steam name has to be my in-game name and you can see the names of the people in the server browser players constantly join to play with you, ask questions and generally just bug you. I should not have to change my steam name every few days to deal with this. Especially when recording…
LACK OF MM INCENTIVE!
Simple really… With the current state of MM in Dirty Bomb no one wants to risk playing MM and until you make a big push on getting people to try and play MM we are not going to get MM working correctly. This really is a catch 22 and we have yet to see anything done about this and it is a massive shame.
DOWN TIME!
Most games out their allow their players to, within a couple of minutes, boot up the game and be in the middle of the battlefield. Dirty Bomb on the other hand feels the need to make its players wait constantly. Ain’t Nobody Got Time For Dat…
START OF A MATCH!
Ironically after mentioning the crazy amounts of down time previously, one of the other biggest issues is what seems to be a rush to get a match started once in a map. So everything else has gone fine up until now, you got into a game and its 7vs7 and its starting. Then you quickly realize that your first spawn is often 2vs6 or something silly due to people not being fully loaded into the game or having the horrible return to lobby bug that requires you to lock in a second time. Especially in Stopwatch this is a massive balance concern because often we can see the first objective taken just because one team was not ready.
GAME START PLAYER LIMITS!
So in the public servers there is no limit on player numbers… BIG MISTAKE! Again, especially on Stopwatch but also in Execution and Objective. For instance, a match ends goes back to lobby and its left on 2vs2 when the game starts and there is nothing we can do about it. People start joining in at random and it slowly fills but the second half is normally a decent half meaning that the balance of the first and second halves are completely out of whack! In my opinion a stopwatch match should not start till there is a minimum of 4 players on each team.
PLAYING A FULL ROUND!
So due to the number of reasons a player has to leave a lobby after a match, the fact that quick match and server browser do not prioritize lobby joins and knowing that players on a losing team are much more likely to abandon a match. It can be very hard to actually play a FULL match. Every now and again you get a good streak of matches where people don’t leave after the match and you go in to the next match with full teams but still many new players will be leaving to open cases, change settings and stuff so most importantly, newer players are even less likely to play full matches. This is a huge problem really because only after playing full matches can you really start to understand the flow of a map, not feel like you joined into a hell hole and generally learn the game better.
RAGE QUITTERS!
Sure it may seem like there is little you can do to combat slots opening up on servers midway though a match that may mean people connecting to the server get dropped into an unwinnable match. However fixing the balance, giving better rewards and getting people that are not into objective based gameplay out of the modes are all things that can help. First off, look at why people are rage quitting. There is a good chance its because there are some of the better players in the community on the enemy team, maybe their team comp is simply horrible for the mission at hand or they could even be getting frustrated with bugs and stuff. These are all things that once improved, should have a large effect on the number of people leaving in the middle of matches.
SOLO QUEUE!
I am someone that wants a fair game and the current matchmaking system rarely provides that. It is obvious that the current system does not take into consideration that friends are likely to be playing better as a team and are more than likely in a situation where they have decent VoIP like Team Speak or Mumble. This makes a huge difference and I can safely say you could take some of the best Dirty Bomb players in the community right now without communication and put them in a match with only decent teams with communication and there is a good chance the team will win, so why is this not a factor? For these reasons I really want to see a Solo/Duel queue option for MM added to ensure much more fair matches.
UI/UX!
The current user interface is sluggish, poorly laid out and fairly boring. We have had much better versions in the past and using the current UI is not a good experience at all. There are so many better ways of doing much of what the UI/UX does and none of them seem like rocket science. There is no need to sync the cards every time you do something, just sync them on opening crates and initial login. There is no reason when trying to look though my cards or set my mercs in the lobby that the game should have to sync with the servers to see my cards. Do it on an authentication basis if you feel the need to check the load outs. Let me see my Mercs and skins again like you did in the closed beta (for those screaming NDA, you can see plenty of videos on these forums showing it). Basically this needs to be made much snappier and prettier then it currently is if you want to reduce the frustrations around it.
CURRENT LOBBY SYSTEM!
The Phoenix Update really did just make the lobby system so much worse without doing anything that I would personally class as an improvement. We can no longer see what our teams Mercs are going to be. We don’t get time to react to Map selection so we can pick the right Mercs and even the team balancing in my eyes is awful.
WHAT IS BALANCE!
Dirty Bomb for the most part has no issue with sticking the best players in the game together with the worst players in the game. This is something that has not really been a thing, apart from in fringe cases for the vast majority of games for a long time. Especially in something so team focused and class focused. Even games like Call of Duty have gone down the road of skill balanced matches and other games that don’t are often designed in a way where the gap between lower and higher skilled players is reduced or beat it out by pure player numbers. Kinda like Team Fortress 2 having the classes that are more effective in lower skilled players hands while remaining not as strong as the harder to use classes in good players hands and the pure player numbers of games like Battlefield.
What I am getting at here is TEAM balance and PLAYER balance are two completely different things and unless you build your game around “catch up” mechanics, team balance is NOT what you really want to be going for. It is not fun for the 12 players getting smashed by the 2 top players in their server and its not fun for them 2 players who feel they are being dragged down by their team or feel like their impact is negated by not being able to cover all rolls. THIS is the BIGGEST mistake in Dirty Bomb currently and there really is no excuse in my eyes why at this point in open beta, its not been properly addressed.
The majority of people on this forum are the reason why new players leave and you have failed to separate us from the new players in a way that does not force them into a brick wall of a difficulty spike once they hit level 5. You have also not provided the “vets” a place to play with people of their own skill level without us going completely out of our way and attempt to build system to compensate for your lack of action here. For a while we have had player numbers high enough to work in more complex systems and we can see via steamdb and steamcharts that them numbers are soon going to be too low to work with.
TEACHING YOUR PLAYER BASE!
You know for a fraction of the money you have spent on the latest round of Streamer/YouTuber promotion you could have pulled in people like myself who could have worked with you guys to develop video tutorials and teach your player base what to do in a non intrusive manner. You could have likely paid 3-4 members of staff for a full year to develop a full fledged tutorial that actually allows players to learn the game better and in a pressure free environment. There is nowhere for new players to learn this game currently and it shows in game. I mean, seriously… There is nothing worse in gaming then jumping into a new game and feeling lost. Again this is something that players over the years stopped tolerating! Accessibility does not have to be simplifications, it just needs to be be subtlety designed into everything you do and I have yet to see this happen with Dirty Bomb.
It seems they use the same system like dirty bomb. Rainbow six pub matches gonna be even p2p, comp is dedicated like in DB; battlefront wont have any, overwatch will have same system as dirty bomb, CoD same p2p until the end of time. I guess game companies dont like third party server hosting. Probably has to do, that most fps games are multiplatform.