It took me a while to decide wether I do or I do not give enough about DB at the moment to write this post. But I’m going to write it because I spend so much time with this game and I really enjoyed it and maybe my point of view can be interesting for others. I’ll start with a little backstory, followed by my view of the current state of DB and I’ll end with what I think will make DB attractive again.
MY clan (Creed) started with an free to play online shooter game over 6 years ago. We were the top clan in this game and had a really healthy and active community. But the game was taken over by hackers and developers abondend it at one point. Without a game the clan lost its purpose and a lot of members went inactive or joined other clans with all the drame that comes with it. Creed was in a really bad state and close to die. But we had still a good core of players and we moved to DB.
DB was the best thing that could happen to use at this point. We never went really cometitive, but we met a lot of new people, recuited some really awesome guys and our clan came back to life. We played some scrim games ( and sucked at it) we played in some tournaments ( and even sucked more at it) but we had a good time and we enjoyed every single minute. Even if we never made it anywhere near to the top teams, we devolped some skill and we got some players who can give quite a lot of poeple a hard time in the enemy team. I had a lot of fun during this time with DB
But enough of the past, what is DB at the moment for me.
DB has become a sidekick for me ( at its best). Why is this so?
- The lack new content during the last year made a lot of poeple leave the game. It got harder to get games with clanmates and it fells that a lot of good players left the game. It’s hard to find games with good players in pub matches. If you see a good player it’s normaly one of the guys who is around DB since forever. There are little to no new faces at the higher skill range. That brings me to the next point.
- The skill gap. You have a core of insanly skilled poeple who are doing the cups,dbn games and ranked teams together. And you have tons of newbews joining a free to play shooter game that has a decent steam review. Good players (not pros) seems to be rare or inactive. In ranked games you end up with new players who are good in pub games, but who have little to no idea about the unique gamestyle of DB (Spawntimes, pushing in waves as a team, attack the enemy at their spawn, merc choice for a good team composition,…unique and fantastic) and they fail horrible when they meat a good team who knows about it. 2 good players can easily dominate a team of pub game heros.
- The skill gap is for me the main reason why ranked doesn’t work. Everyone starts somewhere in the silver ranks. People with far over 1000 hours are in teams with players who have around 50 hours. It is incredible frustraiting for everyone. Experienced players are mad about newbies because they dont know what to do and when, Newbies get mad because they get slauthered. You win a couple of games and you lose your progress within the next games because of team compositions. It’s a pain in the ass for everyone.
- The new maps are nice and I like that new content is released, but it doesn’t change much for me. Games are the same, but in a different scenery. No real reason to get active again.
What I wish that will happen with DB in the future:
The potential of DB is huge. The unique playstyle has the potential to make it the best free to play shooter game on the market. But unfortunatly most fo the DB players don’t even know about its uniqueness. They play the game on the 8v8 servers like they would on every other shooter game. They never get near the level of understanding the mechanisms of DB because they leave the game before the experince it ( mostly after they touched ranked and played a couple of games until the frustration kicks in).
That’s why I would wish that the developers would focus on what DB, its maps, mercs, movment and gamplay is designed for: 5v5 stopwatch matches!
In my opinion all the 8v8, 7v7, 6v6 servers should be removed and no more execution gamemode. Objective games only designed for warmup or practice games and all the other games focused on 5v5 stopwatch. People will learn a lot faster what db is about.
For the diversity of the game the release of a SDK would do everything. The community would do fantastic stuff to the game. SD developed out of people doing something like this if I remember right…developers should know about the potential.
And please, no more concrete trinkets or similar stuff. The possibilities of monetization of DB are endless and developers are trying to sell concrete locks that you can put on your gun…Custom skins, clan tags, private/clan servers, thousands of nice shiny items, a working crafting system,… there are thousands of better ways to monetization for DB…bot not concrete blocks…
tl;dr
Love the game, it’s a sidekick now, focus on 5v5