Why Are We Not Retaining Players?

(wolvie) #1

So I saw this awhile ago and wanted to make a post about it, but never got around to it. Well here it is.

So Steam Database says that Dirty Bomb has had:

168,361 ± 10,149 players in last 2 weeks

That number suggest this games is well off. No, that number suggests that this game is BEAUTIFUL and running healthy. Then we pop down and Steam Database says the average play time of these 168,000 players:

Playtime in last 2 weeks: 4.6h (average) 51m (median)

Playtime total: 9.8h (average) 1.1h (median)

Now that just $hit all over our beautiful healthy game. My question to you is why are we retaining some of these players. If we were retaining these players we would start to see an increase in concurrent players which has been a stalemate of 4000~ players over that past couple of months.

(doxjq) #2

There’s a huge list of reasons, but these reasons probably exist in other games too, so it’s hard to say exactly why.

Skill gap. Like Quake, I think the skill gap between noobs and good players just making it increasingly hard for newer players to get into the game, more so than other FPS titles. I’ve seen this first hand when I try to get friends into the game. Some have stuck at it, others just haven’t. Ultimately I like to have them on my team so I can show them the ropes, but since public servers don’t allow you to pair up (without purposely stacking teams) it’s just impossible some times to help them out. There’s literally no way to play with your friends unless you sit there stacking teams, and then people call you out for it and try to shuffle once the game starts any way.

Insta-kicking anyone who is clearly new certainly doesn’t help. Admittedly I myself can be a bit of a dick to people in game, but it’s usually people who should know better (level 10-20 or higher, 100+ hours in game). I won’t go out of my way to kick someone who is clearly new and doesn’t know better (I’ve actually been going out of my way to friend new players in recent weeks to help them make progress and hopefully stick at the game), but this happens all too often. So it wouldn’t surprise me if new people tried the game once or twice, got kicked from both games, and just said to hell with it and stopped playing.

Lack of new content & bug fixes. I’ve had a couple of friends quit the game last August/September or so, who came back within the last few weeks only to be incredibly disappointed with the lack of progress the game has made. A couple of new maps, a few new mercs, and some bugs that still exist 6 months later. It’s just getting to the stage where people are just getting sick of it, and those of us who love Dirty Bomb will keep supporting it but those who don’t enjoy it as much yet just can’t see reason to stick at it, and it’s hard to blame them.

Overwatch beta. The free open beta would have caused a serious drop in numbers. Even just within my Dirty Bomb friends group I think maybe more than half of them didn’t touch Dirty Bomb at all while that was open to the public.

Kicked for security violation. I’m sorry but this has been happening since I started playing the game in July and I know far too many people who have completely quit the game because of this bug. I’m not talking rage quitting one game, I mean they uninstalled and have never been back. This crap needs to be sorted as soon as possible.

The direction the game is heading. That, and the lack of competitive play support. Again coming from Quake, I know lots of people who are only interested in FPS titles that have a strong competitive community, and as much as they love Dirty Bomb they’ve all just diverted back to CS:GO. Many of these players haven’t given up on the idea of Dirty Bomb in the future, but they’re just waiting for things to pick up.

Being able to team up with your friends. Honestly, I think if this game had 5v5 public matchmaking where you can play with 4 of your friends on the same team and NOT have to deal with shuffle team votes every freaking 30 seconds, you’d see more people playing more often. I understand the frustration of being stomped, but as I said earlier in the post, this game has no way for you to team up with your friends and play as a team, unless you play ranked, but ranked is so dead that is impossible. It needs to be a public thing.

SHUFFLE TEAMS. For the love of god, remove this already, or at least limit the amount of times this vote can be called to one or two max. EVERY. SINGLE. GAME for the last 3 months probably involved 2 or 3 shuffle team votes. When we’re on voice comms the amount of rage this induces and the amount of rage quits it causes, it’s just beyond retarded now.

Again, I want to reiterate the point about being able to play in the same team as your friends. I don’t know why this isn’t a thing in public matches yet, but this is definitely an important factor for retaining new players in my opinion. It should be very high priority.

(InfernoKun) #3

I think lack of maps and not being able to party up with a friend for pubs are 2 of the big things. You can read some of the steam reviews and a lot of them have some gripes in common(I know most of them are not worthwhile reviews). Some mention balancing, performance issues, lack of content, etc. Just a few things SD needs to work out so people can have a worry-free experience. Overall I really hope the game gets to a point it obtains higher player retention.

(Cuck) #4

[quote=“Dox;178683”]There’s a huge list of reasons, but these reasons probably exist in other games too, so it’s hard to say exactly why.

Skill gap. Like Quake, I think the skill gap between noobs and good players just making it increasingly hard for newer players to get into the game, more so than other FPS titles. I’ve seen this first hand when I try to get friends into the game. Some have stuck at it, others just haven’t. Ultimately I like to have them on my team so I can show them the ropes, but since public servers don’t allow you to pair up (without purposely stacking teams) it’s just impossible some times to help them out. There’s literally no way to play with your friends unless you sit there stacking teams, and then people call you out for it and try to shuffle once the game starts any way.

Insta-kicking anyone who is clearly new certainly doesn’t help. Admittedly I myself can be a bit of a dick to people in game, but it’s usually people who should know better (level 10-20 or higher, 100+ hours in game). I won’t go out of my way to kick someone who is clearly new and doesn’t know better (I’ve actually been going out of my way to friend new players in recent weeks to help them make progress and hopefully stick at the game), but this happens all too often. So it wouldn’t surprise me if new people tried the game once or twice, got kicked from both games, and just said to hell with it and stopped playing.

Lack of new content & bug fixes. I’ve had a couple of friends quit the game last August/September or so, who came back within the last few weeks only to be incredibly disappointed with the lack of progress the game has made. A couple of new maps, a few new mercs, and some bugs that still exist 6 months later. It’s just getting to the stage where people are just getting sick of it, and those of us who love Dirty Bomb will keep supporting it but those who don’t enjoy it as much yet just can’t see reason to stick at it, and it’s hard to blame them.

Overwatch beta. The free open beta would have caused a serious drop in numbers. Even just within my Dirty Bomb friends group I think maybe more than half of them didn’t touch Dirty Bomb at all while that was open to the public.

Kicked for security violation. I’m sorry but this has been happening since I started playing the game in July and I know far too many people who have completely quit the game because of this bug. I’m not talking rage quitting one game, I mean they uninstalled and have never been back. This crap needs to be sorted as soon as possible.

The direction the game is heading. That, and the lack of competitive play support. Again coming from Quake, I know lots of people who are only interested in FPS titles that have a strong competitive community, and as much as they love Dirty Bomb they’ve all just diverted back to CS:GO. Many of these players haven’t given up on the idea of Dirty Bomb in the future, but they’re just waiting for things to pick up.

Being able to team up with your friends. Honestly, I think if this game had 5v5 public matchmaking where you can play with 4 of your friends on the same team and NOT have to deal with shuffle team votes every freaking 30 seconds, you’d see more people playing more often. I understand the frustration of being stomped, but as I said earlier in the post, this game has no way for you to team up with your friends and play as a team, unless you play ranked, but ranked is so dead that is impossible. It needs to be a public thing.

SHUFFLE TEAMS. For the love of god, remove this already, or at least limit the amount of times this vote can be called to one or two max. EVERY. SINGLE. GAME for the last 3 months probably involved 2 or 3 shuffle team votes. When we’re on voice comms the amount of rage this induces and the amount of rage quits it causes, it’s just beyond retarded now.

Again, I want to reiterate the point about being able to play in the same team as your friends. I don’t know why this isn’t a thing in public matches yet, but this is definitely an important factor for retaining new players in my opinion. It should be very high priority.

[/quote]

im sorry guys i always kick noobs out of my game. wont happen again.

(doxjq) #5

You’re going to get that in every game though tbh, people who aren’t as good and people who just kick everyone who is worse than they are. But kicking brand new players is just silly. It’s frustrating to have them on your team, but everyone starts somewhere. Most of the new players respond to voice comm commands, but if you sit there typing at them they ignore it - they’re probably too busy trying to figure the game out to concentrate on the chat as well.

(surrealchemist) #6

I played a bunch this whole weekend and I had some really awesome games, but a lot of them were just plain bad. Or some of them would have been OK but people on my team or the other team just didn’t want to have fun or play fair.

Execution is the worst, I see some higher level people on there that all get on one team and go game after game of shutouts playing together. They win and then the game puts them on the same team together (or maybe they switch, I don’t know). Sometimes the mode is fun when its actually even, but mainly I only play it for getting the credits and doing missions.

Stopwatch seems to be the other mode where more bad games happen. I had some really great matches today where the clock was run down till the very limit but the other team squeaked it out by defending the whole time after thinking they wouldn’t be able to win. Then another game I was on a team that was mixed with some 6-10 level people and a couple of us 15+ levels, and one guy who was level 97. 2 people left on the apposing team and it was all sub level 10s left for the most part. Someone on my team which had the advantage called a vote to shuffle and it doesn’t pass of course, it gets pointed out in chat that its like 7 v 4 or whatever and nobody would switch so I ended up switching myself because I know what its like being on the other end. Its kind of pathetic that someone like a level 97 guy would rather sit and snipe new players than even the teams.

Then later I had another game which was not too badly matched but the team wasn’t working well together, and some guy starts complaining and saying how bad we all are. There just are some really toxic players that are always around that I keep running into. I had one game of plain old objective where my team was all under level 10 and started out bad bad we started rallying eventually and almost had the EV delivered to the point on bridge. It was obvious they were still learning the game and didn’t know the map, tricks, and objectives yet. I try to help out and coach them, but its really disappointing when the match ends and some guy on the apposing team starts saying how bad my team was. I mean maybe that makes some people want to get better, but for me if I encounter a lot of that I just don’t want to play.

So hopefully future matchmaking helps this issue, and penalties for leaving early would be nice too. I don’t like people sitting on servers pub stomping and being jerks about it in a game that I really like. Maybe there is a way to get some community involvement and have people actively counter that kind of crap in game when it happens.

Sorry for the long post, I just had such night and day experiences all within the past 48 hours playing this game and had to vent.

(Sytry) #7

[quote=“wolvie;29133”]So I saw this awhile ago and wanted to make a post about it, but never got around to it. Well here it is.

So Steam Database says that Dirty Bomb has had:

168,361 ± 10,149 players in last 2 weeks

That number suggest this games is well off. No, that number suggests that this game is BEAUTIFUL and running healthy. Then we pop down and Steam Database says the average play time of these 168,000 players:

Playtime in last 2 weeks: 4.6h (average) 51m (median)

Playtime total: 9.8h (average) 1.1h (median)

Now that just $hit all over our beautiful healthy game. My question to you is why are we retaining some of these players. If we were retaining these players we would start to see an increase in concurrent players which has been a stalemate of 4000~ players over that past couple of months.
[/quote]

Lvl unbalance is reason no one want to stay against lvl 54 vs lvl 10 and aimbot is still actieve despite having anti cheat on it. I doubt you get “headshot” on very close range in a room.

(ClemClem7) #8

Cheater are not an issue in this game, there is way less cheaters in this game than a lot of others. When you have a lot of playtime, you can distinct experienced players and cheaters.
Servers with maximum levels exist because of the difference of experience.
For me the problem in this game is the lack of marketing. Players think this game is just a little game and they think they have seen everything after a few hours. It must be more help to new players (currency system, F2P system, teamplay…)
This game lacks of competitive scene. The way this game is designed for.

(asparagusMist) #9

overall the game is pretty fun.

some changes though need to be made.hacking needs to be handled better.

ranked games and not being able to invite more players has basically killed that off.for eg last night me and two others wanted a ranked game.basically killed that idea off.old system we could of done it.

maps. dome just remove it. basically 90 percent of players like good maps and just play underground and chapel.so remove dome add more chappel servers.

snipers.make a 1 sniper per team.also make objective points worth alot more than kills. so many people still play this game like its tdm.your kd means shit ! its team game for objectives.reward it so.

(SaulWolfden) #10

[quote=“Sytry;178736”][quote=“wolvie;29133”]So I saw this awhile ago and wanted to make a post about it, but never got around to it. Well here it is.

So Steam Database says that Dirty Bomb has had:

168,361 ± 10,149 players in last 2 weeks

That number suggest this games is well off. No, that number suggests that this game is BEAUTIFUL and running healthy. Then we pop down and Steam Database says the average play time of these 168,000 players:

Playtime in last 2 weeks: 4.6h (average) 51m (median)

Playtime total: 9.8h (average) 1.1h (median)

Now that just $hit all over our beautiful healthy game. My question to you is why are we retaining some of these players. If we were retaining these players we would start to see an increase in concurrent players which has been a stalemate of 4000~ players over that past couple of months.
[/quote]

Lvl unbalance is reason no one want to stay against lvl 54 vs lvl 10 and aimbot is still actieve despite having anti cheat on it. I doubt you get “headshot” on very close range in a room. [/quote]

Has gotten headshots with the PDP, MOA, and GSR in close quarters

Honestly, I think anyone below level 5 should be forced to ONLY play on maximum level 5 servers until they reach level 6, at least they’re more likely to play against people around their own skill level while initially leveling up. Also would like to see maximum level 10 servers for a similar reason (though at level 6 people don’t have to play on them). More obvious min level 20 servers and having min level 30 servers may help as well.

(nokiII) #11

Bad player retention mostly stems from a bad new player experience.
Hopefully the new tutorial will help with that, but it is actually even more basic than this.
If you start up a game for the first time and instantly encounter a laggy, unresponsive main menu, you’re already pissed off and might be biased against the game from the very start.

If people actually make it past this point and play a few matches and get to level 6, most of them will have another bad “new player experience”, namely the fucking huge skillgap that exists in this game. You’ve the same problem with ET, Quake, Reflex, toxikk, UT and other low TTK shooters. The longer the game is out, the better the average player gets and the higher the skillgap becomes on a normal pub match. Pair that with very few skill gap closers like shotguns and mines and you get yourself a long term disaster at hand.

(BerylRdm) #12

Yeah, that’s why:

This.

We will get public MM anyway, so let’s wait. Maybe this will fix the problem, maybe not.

(B_Montiel) #13

Bad audience targeting and the associated marketing behind it.

There is something really bad behind the way they’re still building the game right now.
Dirty bomb has not a casual gaming spirit and it will never compete against overwatch or whatever game that allow people to have a interesting experience after 2 hours of playing the game.
So the audience should be mainly experienced, generally like fast fpses. In my opinion, this is the audience they should target with the highest priority.

BUT, to retain this audience you will require proper game content with a pretty much flawless state of gameplay. Right now, we still have performance issues even with what can be regarded as OP rigs to make UE3 run. There’s still some significant bugs. Pretty much all the maps have massive flaws. Still no step forward made to communities/clans. We have not received clear and obvious progress on those fields for too long. And they clearly failed to retain this audience. I’d be curious to know the proportion of founders who still spend more than 2 hours a week in dirty bomb.

Instead, we receive promotional events and stuff that try to reach an audience that will somehow struggle to enjoy the game : casual players. By the way, I know little vets or even founders of this game that clearly give a damn about cosmetic stuff. So the current marketing tries to grab a wrong audience while the ones they should mostly aim are getting bored or won’t even try the game because of its flaws.

Even valve does not work that way. For Dota 2 and more remarkably for Cs:go, they spent months or even years to obtain a rock solid gameplay for hardcore players before starting the fancy commercial stuff. (Hardcore players were clearly aimed in the first place, dota 2 being the moba hardcore approach compared to LoL, same for cs:go, where getting the cs hardcore scene seal of approval will guarantee the success). The casual scene generally follow if the recipe smells good for the hardcore scene. In a smaller scale, chivalry more or less followed the same process, and this was pretty successful for such a small development team and budget.

(Sytry) #14

[quote=“B. Montiel;178770”]Bad audience targeting and the associated marketing behind it.

There is something really bad behind the way they’re still building the game right now.
Dirty bomb has not a casual gaming spirit and it will never compete against overwatch or whatever game that allow people to have a interesting experience after 2 hours of playing the game.
So the audience should be mainly experienced, generally like fast fpses. In my opinion, this is the audience they should target with the highest priority.

BUT, to retain this audience you will require proper game content with a pretty much flawless state of gameplay. Right now, we still have performance issues even with what can be regarded as OP rigs to make UE3 run. There’s still some significant bugs. Pretty much all the maps have massive flaws. Still no step forward made to communities/clans. We have not received clear and obvious progress on those fields for too long. And they clearly failed to retain this audience. I’d be curious to know the proportion of founders who still spend more than 2 hours a week in dirty bomb.

Instead, we receive promotional events and stuff that try to reach an audience that will somehow struggle to enjoy the game : casual players. By the way, I know little vets or even founders of this game that clearly give a damn about cosmetic stuff. So the current marketing tries to grab a wrong audience while the ones they should mostly aim are getting bored or won’t even try the game because of its flaws.

Even valve does not work that way. For Dota 2 and more remarkably for Cs:go, they spent months or even years to obtain a rock solid gameplay for hardcore players before starting the fancy commercial stuff. (Hardcore players were clearly aimed in the first place, dota 2 being the moba hardcore approach compared to LoL, same for cs:go, where getting the cs hardcore scene seal of approval will guarantee the success). The casual scene generally follow if the recipe smells good for the hardcore scene. In a smaller scale, chivalry more or less followed the same process, and this was pretty successful for such a small development team and budget.[/quote]

Valve keep they customers “happy” by selling skinned weapons and cases on low price.

(B_Montiel) #15

[quote=“Sytry;178772”]
Valve keep they customers “happy” by selling skinned weapons and cases on low price. [/quote]

FYI, volvo started selling items more than a year after the release of Cs:go and dota 2 items appeared after 6 months of beta. They never start releasing carnival stuff before handing out a near flawless gameplay. For a good reason.

(watsyurdeal) #16

Dox pretty much nailed most of it.

I’m hoping the next update will address most of the problems, a training ground, a mandatory tutorial, auto shuffles based on player count per team, things like that. :smiley:

Though personally I don’t want more content, just fixes to what we already have. We don’t need public matchmaking, the very concept of that is absolutely retarded, we already have Ranked we don’t need anything else. We instead need public server tools so we can host servers for communities. There is no reason we can not have that, ZERO good excuses.

(Dysfnal) #17

Enjoy playing with my freinds, even though we always lose when we pair up, I usually try to switch teams when ours has the advantage.

I was playing pub objective, or stopwatch Idr, but we were getting stomped and spawncamped by the entire enemy team, then some level 67 guy switched, giving us a sliver of a chance, but he still took the loss. Just thought I might throw that out there.

(doxjq) #18

Swinging a little off topic, does anyone know if the new MM system will actually let you queue with friends? I thought I remembered reading something about it, but god knows if I can find it.

@Amerika might have some idea. I’d be interested to hear his feedback on this subject any way!

(KattiValk) #19

I’ve seen Level 1 Vaselines (the fact I can say that in plural is pretty sad) get dominated in unrestricted games. Players come on hoping to have a good time, but they aren’t good enough to survive in a lobby where there are several good players. We tend to party crash lobbies and sort of turn the greens into cannon fodder. Max level 10 servers may be necessary and possibly mandatory.

Getting flattened in DB is punishing (or at least I’m pretty sure it is). To run out of spawn with all your hopes for a good game and then get a face full of death to wait for 10 seconds and then go at it again, only this time to watch in horror as you’re the first to die as I tear through your entire team with a very simple flank none of you checked for. Soon enough, you’ve been spawn camped and face spawn nades that obliterate half your team before they even know what’s happening as soon as their spawn protection ends and you repeat this process game after game for an hour or so, then get fed up and uninstall.

We still haven’t shown how easy it is to get top tier cards either. Players see Cobalts and get cases with hilarious % drop rates and they cry because they haven’t found the trade up button nor do they read the tiny little text that says Bronze is exactly like Gold.

The tutorial is being overhauled which is good, but SD needs to hold the hands of new players. They may never fully understand how good a veteran is right off the bat, but they need to know as much as possible about this game. The new assault course thing for instance, had better showcase every single universal character move you can do and be repeatable with times to beat so players can learn with repetition.

(nokiII) #20

@Dox Yes with up to 5 friends (a 6 man party). Exedore said it on the dev stream