PART 1: Part 2 in comments:
Hello fellas,
so i had nothing to do at work last week, so i took the time to write down some thought about Dirty Bomb…there is no tl;dr sorry!
About me:
My nickname is „balu“, i am 27 years old and i live in germany. I have a degree in marketing&sales and at the moment i’m writing my bachelor thesis in „media engineering“. After a break i just recently got back into DB, which i kind of enjoy. As i really want the game to be more popular, i want to share my personal thoughts about the current state and future of the game as a feedback to the development team. Also i will try to explain some progression steps about developing to all the people who share their opinions on social media and have the feeling to be unheard (i.e. asking for new content).
Develeopment team:
A development team is a group of people with different jobs that work on the same project. Just as in every other job you need an education to be able to work in your job. As an example which everyone is familiar with:“i don’t think anyone wanted their music teacher in school take over the math classes“. Therefor the different jobs are done in different time periods, because not everyone who works in the same company works in the same job, it’s just the same project. This is the reason why alot of updates have new trinkets, but not new mercs. There are different people working on different tasks. The artist working on skins is not able to work on server performance or client optimisation. So the next time an update is coming bear in mind to not complain about the content you GET, but about the content you DIDNT GET.
Incorrect: I dont want another $#!&§ trinket, i want more maps
Correct: These trinkets are awesome, now all i want is more maps
Acceptable: I don’t like this new trinket, also i want new maps
-Criticism and feedback is always welcome, just don’t be rude about it
Development goals:
The main goal is to earn the most amount of money with the possibilities your team has. Especially in a video game, the developers are very passionate and put their heart into the project and want to make it as enjoying as possible. But there are restrictions. Most of the people who take their time to write feedback or complain about the game are the people who also play the game very often. Additionally these are also often the people who are very skilled in the game and play in teams or just competitive (Ranked/Ladders). So the question for a lot of players is: why doesn’t a development team just implement the belongings of the best players in the game, as they know best about balancing and stuff that a game needs to be successful?
Yes this is a very good way to look into the development, but it’s not everything. The larger a game population gets, the lower the competitive/professional scene gets in contrast to the overall population. The players that play competitive tend to play and grind alot. Also they spend alot of time into the game resulting in them having everything they need (i.e. people sitting on 1.000.000 Credits in DB, will not spend 10€ to buy the new merc, but use their Credits instead). And these people are simply just a small part of the existing playerbase (maybe 1-10%).
As the main goal is to get money with ingame sales, the development of a games draws into the attention of the other 90% of the players, lets just call them „casuals“.
Casuals are those players, who spend some of their free time on playing video games. Most of the time they play a bunch of different games and do not care alot about their performance, they just want to have fun (with friends). In fact, these people do not have the time to grind for mercs and still want to play them, resulting in spending money on buying mercs. (I.E. few years back i would’ve just grinded for new champions/heroes, but the other day i just spend 20€ on a game by a different publisher, just because i didnt have the time any more to grind for a hero that i wanted to play). And this basically is the concept of every modern Free-to-play game. You have the possibility to get everything you need for free to compete with the best players, but you will have to spend alot of time unless you invest some of your money. You can also find this system in games that are not „f2p“, but their focus is in selling cosmetics like weapon or champion skins.
How to achieve the goal:
So this is the actual hard part. In the time of Live-Streaming you need a competitive scene for people to recognize your game, therefor you have to make changes the professional/competitive scene wants, to make them stay with the game. On the other hand, you need to make changes so that the playerbase that comes and wants to play themself, also use their money to support the development and buy all different types of content. And in my opinion this is something were the DB-Development team did alot of bad decisions in.
So first of all i want to start about loadout cards.
After almost every game you get a case which contains a random loadout card. Eventhough it’s a lead-card most of the time, these cases are awesome, because they are free and if you have enough luck you can get some nice loadout cards with cool skins. Furthermore you can buy Bronze-loadout cards for 17500 Credits in the store, whos only difference to higher value loadout cards are only in the cosmetic skin, which is a super cool deal
So what if i want a Cobalt Phoenix Card with a Kek-10 and the 3 Perks i like best in a set? I have either the possibility to try and craft one, with a super high cost to a chance of 1:18 or reduce the RNG by a factor with Weapon Kits which again cost money. And even then there is a chance i get one of the cards that doesnt have the perks i want. Even worse are the high chanced crates in the store, which contain like 50 different types of cards, which are extremely overpriced for the chance to not even get something you actually want to have. There is actually a chance to NEVER get a card you would love to have, because it’s based on RNG. This feels to be pretty underwhelming and depressing for me and I don’t have this special feeling that I really want this one specific card so much, that I would even pay 100 € for it.
Ideas to fix loadout cards:
1.:
Loadout cards have a skin, primary gun, secondary gun and a mele weapon
Additionally every Loadout card has 3 slots for perks
You can choose 3 perks individually through a perk-library
- It’s important to balance out the perkz, because i.e. noone would use the perk that reduces the time of mounted MGs overheating
2.:
Loadout cards have a skin
Every merc has a xp-progression level. (XP-Gained with every merc is saved, so the levels could easily be added on every already existing steam acc.)
Additionally every Loadout card has 3 slots for perks
You can choose 3 perks individually through a perk-library (could add perk slots unlocking on levels also)
Different weapons unlock on different merc-levels (i.e. 1,5,10)
-XP- Boosters could be added to the store
3.:
Delete Loadout cards
Give every merc 3 perk slots (Choose 3 from a perk-library)
Add merc skins
Add weapon skins
Add a currency (i.e. DBCoins) give people who spend money on the store the amount of currency they lost throughout this change (they already payed for it, just let them buy the new skins)
Idea 1 is in my opinion the best treatment, since it is as close to the current system as possible, while still fixing the actual problem. It results in way less RNG in getting loadout cards and also adds more variety to the gameplay and perk-choice depending on enemy’s picks and maps.
New features:
Back in 2015 when i first heard about Dirty Bomb and got to play in the closed beta, the devs said that dedicated servers will come in the future. I think this is one of the most important things for the competitive scene and also for public-casuals who want to create their own clan with a personal clanserver. Therefor dedicated gameservers are something DB will need and most importantly the servers owners need the ability to put custom settings. The most important settings that come to my mind will be listed at the end. Also to get the money flowing in for DB, it would be super smart, to make DB-dedicated servers exclusively buyable in the DB-Store for a fair price.
Fragmovies and montages have always been a big thing for content creators, thus a replay system, which features like bullet/objective-tracing and camera pathing would be awesome to implement into the game.
Especially for new players and ranked matchmaking a lobby feature telling which assigned merc-roles are missing in the loadouts would be a good thing to add. (The other day i played a ranked-chapel game without an engineer.)
Casual-Matchmaking: Has been discussed alot of times. Queue up with up to 4 friends for a 5on5 game with ranked settings. Nothing more to add to this
Spawntimers: In Wolfenstein:ET the spawn times for both teams were created as the match started, so it was always random and your team could have a bad spawn in contrast to the enemies. In DB both teams spawn at the exact same time, which is very balanced and fair, but doesnt bring much of counterplay. As a new idea it could be fun if every 3rd spawnwave takes 5 more seconds and the start of the long spawn could be a random thing and a-sync to the enemy. You would have to find out which wave the long spawn is to be successfull in spawn killing, which now is a very easy thing.
Enemy health bars: ATM you can just chase down an enemy because you know he is down to very low hp, if the health bars would be turned off, you could actually bait an enemy into a trap by running away early.
Fixes:
-Moving and repairing a tank at the same time results in weird camera warps
-Add an option that disables the explanation of the map-objective before every single game
-Smaller or transparent objective icons
-As long as Casual-MM is not a thing, let friends not be put into different teams on public servers, unless they want to.
-The idea is that friends (using a voice-chat system) don’t have an advantage of randoms together, because DB has an ingame VoIP feature. This VoIP-System should be fixed, because it is literally impossible to understand what other people say, because of the quality and the volume (increased volume is more important, since the quality might be caused by client-microphones)
-Bigger visual information if another teammate is already repairing or an engineer took over
-Filtering the servers in the server browser doesnt work properly. (i.e.: EU – Min LvL 10 , will not show the min lvl 10 servers eventhough the servers start with the exact same string)
-After literally every game in public servers, 90% of the people will leave the lobby. I guess this is the reason because its faster to join a new game, than waiting for the next match to start. (Reduce the time for a next match to start and for choosing your mercs)
Another possibility could be the fact, people want to check on their mission progression or if they got new missions, this is already accessible throughout the lobby, but its really not obvious how. This could be more visible.
-Add more Min-Level 20 Servers, so people are able to play against people that are not new to the game (Less hacking accusations and more fun for new players, because they dont get stomped, resulting in more new players spending more time into the game). Also FF should be ON in these servers to get people used to ranked games at some point.
