Random fun question, what old feature do you miss the most from past versions of DB?
My favourite was probably that bug that made ammo stations give out an extra clip of ammo. Even though it wasn’t really a feature and it didn’t last long, it really made me use ammo stations more instead of always going for ammo packs. Plus it’s just more fun when you’re not running out of ammo as often
Not really intended either, but I also liked some of the old tricks you used to be able to do with mines. Placing them inside debris to hide them on chapel/underground/etc, sticking them to the wall at eye level in the last terminal objs so they were harder to see, etc. Some of them were admittedly a bit much, like being able to place mines inside the cores in bridge so they couldn’t be shot, but it made placing mines a lot more strategic
Prefer the longer/alternative versions of most maps.
Also liked it when we had hack objectives and other non-standardised map specific objectives.
Both of which I believe were removed/shortened to make the game more casual friendly.
Something I wish we’d had, but never did, is the SMART movement from Brink, which then everyone and their dog copied. Yes we can wall jump, but sliding between cover and mantling ledges would have been cool.
I still really wish we had gotten old maps as options in community servers. A lot of them weren’t the most balanced, but they were usually pretty fun, and at the very least different. I’ve mentioned it before, but the new map level designs just feel boring and generic to me. There aren’t a lot of really unique areas anymore, stuff like the awkward defender dropdown onto the OBJ wall in terminal or the area around the EV in bridge. Now it’s all just wide open rooms with super smooth curved walls, where every area is exposed to at least 3 other vantage points like every other modern pvp level. Not that the new levels are bad necessarily, but I do feel that they don’t really have much unique design to set them apart
Honestly tho I just wish there weren’t as many invisible walls everywhere. In the older versions of maps it felt like you could jump onto a lot of places the devs never really intended if you were good enough, but in a lot of the redux versions they blocked most of them up with invisible walls, so most of the trickjumps you can do are just all the same old boring intended ones. I wish they had encouraged more high skill trickjumps instead of locking them off
For me, one of my favourite features that got the axe was the MVP Screen after the completion of a match. I really enjoyed seeing the achievements of the players from the match I’d just finished. We had a few funny ones in there, like “Best Rhino” and “Best Bushwhacker”, but there were also some more rewarding ones such as:
Most Accurate - based on Headshot Accuracy
Most Ammo Given
Most Kills
Most Objectives - based on XP earned through Objective play.
This way, rather than focusing exclusively on kills/deaths as a performance metric, other roles in the team could be recognised, such as those who supported your team through heals, revives and resupplies, or those who played the objective at the expense of putting themselves into the line of fire. Because in a game like Dirty Bomb, you can be topping the scoreboard with a K/D of 45-15, but still lose the game for losing sight of the objective.
Unfortunately, the MVP Screen or “Hall of Fame” was tied into Matchmaking, so when we made the hard decision to remove Casual Matchmaking in favour of Quick Join and Server Browsing, the feature had to go.
Mine are not features per se but bugs that were fixed:
Back in the day you could rapidly throw out ammo packs en mass by continuously switching between the ammo packs and one of your weapons.
The impact of Arty’s airstrike would obliterate any healing stations in a wide radius. An absolute necessity for spots that were practically invincible otherwise.
What was the factor behind the removal of Casual Matchmaking anyways?
From my experience it consistently did its job. You could play with your friends on the same team. You got to play a map from start to finish. The queue times wasn’t that bad, everytime I queued CM I think I was able to get a game within 10 min, which is way better than the 3+ hours straight I’ve spent in the ranked queue. I never had any issues with balance either. It wasn’t worse than the regular games in the server browser in any way, with the only problem being leavers, and even then someone usually joined in mid game.
Even though I still mostly used the server browser to play Stopwatch during the time CM was out. CM was still the go-to when I played with my friends. I wanted it for SW (not exclusively though) but it was perfect for objective. If only it was like in Overwatch where you stay in the lobby between games and play the same map back to back while switching sides. I’m sad it was removed so quickly and I only had positive experiences with It.
I miss the fire rate and accuracy of the burst rifles. Sure, nerf the damage 1 point, 2 points, 3 points, I don’t care. But why destroy the feel of them so utterly that even the sound was broken.
I also believe the br nerfs was a bigger nerf to Arty and Kira than it was to the gun meta.
I assumed it was a shrinking playerbase. <10 minutes is an awful long time to wait for a casual match, especially when the server browser is instant. The matches were more balanced sure, but they weren’t that much more balanced that I’d wait several minutes for them. And they weren’t free from balance issues either, only now you couldn’t switch teams/vote shuffle
Also once the match ended, you didn’t get to stay in the same server, which is one of my favourite parts of DB. Playing a bunch of matches with the same people, and you could actually fight against your friends too, which you can’t do in CMM.
I liked the UI, wish some of it made it into server browser matches, but CMM itself felt kinda lacking in some areas and unnecessary in most others, but I imagine if DB had more players it would have kept getting improved
Honestly though when you look at how much of a meme stark arty/thunder used to be especially in ranked, I don’t really miss the old BRs. Imo their difficulty didn’t justify the crazy damage/range/accuracy they had.
I think the stark is still good at least, maybe not quite up to par with the other ARs, but it’s still way better at range than most other guns. The BR though, euhg. I just can’t use it anymore, it was already awkward enough on fragger and skybro before but now it just seems so painful
This was something of a difficult decision for us at the time. Basically, community sentiment wasn’t happy with matchmaking in the state that it was. The core complains were long times to get into a match and poor player balance when you were finally put into a match.
Matchmaking considered a set of criteria, such as:
Your MMR “Skill Rating” vs other players currently searching
Your ping
Your matchmaking preferences (map selection, etc.)
The Matchmaker would start off with tight limits on the first two, and if it couldn’t find enough players, would gradually widen the criteria until a viable game was found.
Absolutely. When CMM first launched, the wait times were relatively short, but over time, as players started to diverge from each other in terms of skill rating, the Matchmaker would take longer and longer to find a match - and you’d risk having to wait 2 minutes or more to find a match. In the higher echelons of Ranked Matchmaking, you’d be looking at 30 minutes or more. This amount of time to find a match wasn’t acceptable to us.
Another area where the Matchmaker struggled was to do with players in different regions that were playing outside their region’s peak playtime. If you were an EU West player who decided to play at 3AM in your local time, you’d fail to find players with a low enough ping, therefore, you’d have to wait the maximum amount of time before the Matchmaker had loosened the ping criteria to 100ms+ and then you might get matched with a US East server.
From our experience, having Matchmaking that “just works” is incredibly hard. If you look at other games that rely on Matchmaking such as Apex Legends and Overwatch - you’ll see that they’ve all had their problems with Matchmaking. You need thousands, or tens-of-thousands of CCU (concurrent users) in order to have enough players searching for a match at the same time to find enough at your skill level in your region. If those games are all having difficulties with their significantly-larger player bases, then you can probably imagine the difficulties we had by comparison.
The mathematical model of using a large dataset to make a workable balanced match is not a sound approach to the solution. Of course a large data set will yield a more accurate balance but given DB’s playerbase (yoda yoda yoda), it is better to think laterally, than vertically.
Consider balancing the same volume of grains of wheat, versus balancing potatoes. There are definitively more grains of wheat than there are potatoes of the same volume so you know you can get a better balance with grains of wheat. Also consider the length of arm you are using from the weighing scale. A small potato with a big arm lever can balance a heavy one.
I know you guys can do it. You’re just asking the wrong questions.
EDIT: This could be a bit off topic, but for old school players, they can relate very well with this video; there’s a lot of things here that I miss.
