[quote=“wolvie;29133”]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]
Overwatch.
The shuffle abuse is real, especially on weekends. Cautiously excited about casual matchmaking.
[quote=“MidnightButterSweats;178824”][quote=“wolvie;29133”]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]
Overwatch.[/quote]
Overwatch has nothing to do with it. DB always had a player retention problem, even before the OW closed beta started.
[quote=“Dox;178803”]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![/quote]
Yup, you can queue with 5 other friends for a full 6 man team on a pub if you want.
Also, as far as those numbers go they go up and down and swing drastically based on what’s going on in DB at the time and also how much downtime there was during a week. Those numbers have swung from 150,000 unique to 300,000 unique in just a few days because of things that happened for events/releases and days where there was massive downtime dropping off the most recent two weeks. The game isn’t CS:GO size but it’s also not tiny and is doing well considering it’s status and lack of a large competitive pool…which will hopefully be remedied with the announced future changes.
My biggest fear is that they don’t make the matchmaking flexible enough.
I understand the people screaming for skill balance, I really do, it isn’t fun being stomped. But it is public after all, not ranked or competitive, so there needs to be flexibility or some point in time where it just pairs anyone and everyone together IF there isn’t enough players at the time.
If it’s going to be so strict that I can sit there waiting 20 minutes for a public game, then GG. Even 10 minutes for a public game is too much. The way it is now we have about 20 servers running (yes, the Australian playerbase is much smaller than USA and EU) and we can find games instantly. Splitting the player base by skill down here seriously limits our games, so I’m concerned us higher skilled players will be stuck with long queue times for pub games, which shouldn’t be the case.
tl;dr - matchmaking by skill needs to be flexible if there isn’t enough players on, to prevent higher skilled players having really long queue times.
One thing I seriously hope is taken on board is that the size of the party shouldn’t matter, at least for pub games. I know why it has been done for ranked, but this is different.
If we make a team of 6, please don’t make it so we can only play against other parties of 6. Our player base is too small to match people up by skill and equal party size. As far as I’m concerned, team or solo queue, in pub games it shouldn’t matter. Match us up by skill if you want but please let that be the only factor. We simply won’t be able to play with our friends over here in Australia if it takes party size AND skill into consideration, quote me on that one.
I saw one of Ragnak’s videos where he changed teams when their team started dominating or when people left and I started doing that as well. Even with my average skills I could help the balance significantly, maybe not carry the team to victory but helped them avoid being slaughtered at spawn at least.
Then again I really don’t care about winning too much, all I want is to have fun.
I think balance wouldn’t be so much of an issue if more people did this instead. Maybe the problem is over competitiveness
Some games go way out of their way to help noobs though. Call of Duty is notorious for allowing people to enable Aim Assist/Target Assist on Multiplayer for example.
I can confirm the option exists in Multiplayer and turning it on and off does a world of difference.
Features like that can help Noobs along this game, and while it is controversial, the No. 1 brand in the shooter category has it on Multiplayer.
Aim assist with a mouse is a goddamn joke, there’s a reason you can’t use it on PC in COD, unless you’re using a controller. It’s way too good
Hey! What if DB had like a Basic Merc - One who doesn’t have any perks, and only one Lead Loadout Card and he gets like an AA-12 auto shotgun (unique primary! large Hitscan Box hooray!), Caulden Secondary, 130 HP, slightly quicker than Fragger, a hitbox similar in size to Proxy, One Frag Grenade, and nothing else?
Like a Mini-Fragger intended for DB Babies?
They can even use that “Scrub” actor model they had in the trailer… “This is Scrub. He’s the Merc for you greenhorns just learning the game!”
Yeah, some of you guys can say “Use Fragger then!” or “AA-12 is OP!” but Fragger actually is not easy for everyone, particularly because firefights in DB are more frantic and most new players don’t learn/stick around if they are having to respawn over and over again. And shotguns aren’t that good really for all situations in DB, but can allow new players to “have their fun for a bit while learning”.
Just a thought.
[quote=“Weekendwarrior;179043”]
I think balance wouldn’t be so much of an issue if more people did this instead. Maybe the problem is over competitiveness[/quote]
First, thumbs up for #switching4balance cause.
Second, naah, it’s the free-win sh!tter mentality to be honest. Ya’know, those guys on winning side bottomscoring and getting carried goin’ “ez gg” in chat after a 6v3 game or some other massive stomp.
You got couple of those in losing team, if they haven’t ragequit already, and they’ll whine but still do exact same when they happen to be on winning side. Never-ending cycle.
On the topic too; pretty much what B.Montiel said about creating the game gameplay-first, focusing on that and more competitive oriented players in mind, letting casuals follow after naturally.
Some kind of timeline is sorely needed.
SD is just extremely slow at pretty much every single aspect of game design and is falling victim to Star Citizen feature creep. Instead of releasing a good stable core game and building upon that, there is always something new being added. There are more than enough mercs, by half, for a competitive game. There are enough maps. There are enough game modes. There are also bugs that have been ignored and are coming up on a year since being reported that have still not been fixed.
I think that there are some fundamental flaws with the development teams vision for the game and the direction that DB is being taken, so I have adopted a wait and see approach to this game since there are other FPS’s that have been and will be released this month to occupy my time.
People keep nattering on about how it’s a small team to do all this stuff. Well they need some focus instead of badly implementing “events” that thus far have done nothing but piss off the community. Every. Single. One.
Sorry, but here’s the truth that needs to be said.
In all games there are people who love a game and will solely dedicate their time to that single game. These are the dedicated veterans. People who post frequently on the forums/reddit and want the best for the game. The thing is those people are extremely biased to their game and sometimes their behavior hurts it more than helps. They refuse to acknowledge that a huge majority of people who play games just get bored and move on or just find the game stale and boring. The mentality I’ve seen on this forum regarding players who don’t see this game as “The One” is basically “f*ck you you don’t know what a good game is” example being two people flagging a post because the person dared to say a certain new game that is blowing up all over reddit and imgur because it’s so much fun. You WILL lose a good amount of players to that game so shut up and stop denying it. A lot of you are acting like it’s only this game that is going to lose players to it and for some reason take offense to it.
This game has changed and evolved a lot since launch. People moving on to other games they find more interesting is inevitable. When someone moves on and forgets about a game usually the only thing that pulls them back to a game is friends and big patches. If a game promotes solo/duo play and playing against friends… good luck getting those players back. You all can sit there and pretend duo/solo que isn’t one of the of the major things ruining the player base on a team based game, but guess what? You’re wrong.
Now the thing you all dont want to hear. Currently the biggest threat to every game is Overwatch. For the first few months Overwatch will completely dominate twitch, youtube and every gaming media outlet. Blizzard is hitting the nail on the head and it won’t matter what fixes are made to your beloved game if they do these fixes while people are still binge playing Overwatch it will be completely overshadowed. To give you an example of how massive the OW following is 9.7 million people played overwatch during its open beta. I haven’t had a single friend who actually played it tell me “it just wasn’t my thing”. All of them are preordering. I have had a couple friends who are too stubborn to even try it because they proudly say their excuse of “it looks like a shitty tf2 remake”.
I really hope for the sake of this game they don’t do any BIG patches for a couple months. If you want to steal players back you need to wait for the OW hype to die down. There’s no need to even argue that the gameplay is what is causing people to leave. It’s a solid game with its own unique style. It’s just this game is aimed at a certain audience while Blizzard aimed their crosshair at all audiences and succeeded. Now go ahead and spam the disagree button.
That’s exactly the problem with the current situation. They’re still trying to grab a probably a way too wide audience for their game. But the comparison stops here. That’s David vs Goliath. Wolfenstein Enemy Territory got released in the meantime where the original counter strike got his fame. And both games had their success. Considering the small team SD was and still is, w:et was a great success and dirty bomb is already successful. They just need to concentrate more on what they know best : making good objective based fast fps. And doing carnival stuff with an unfinished product is not the way from my point of view.
The biggest weakness for Goliath is that he’s highly moba oriented thus making it horribly casual for long time fps fans. I’ve yet to hear a friend who actually played quake3/UTs/w:et/urban terror/first bfs/first cods/tf2(2007 to 2010) say : “Overwatch is worth the try”. This might convince me. I certainly won’t say it’s a bad game, but I feel totally out of this.
The RNG system is not worth supporting at all. People who do support with $ end up with nothing but regret and disappointment
It is IMO this games biggest failure and its the main reason I wont be playing it anymore after the 24th
Heh, that list is pretty much all me. I’m a tournament and league vet/champion in almost all of those games (many on LAN). I don’t like OW. Less reliance on aim and baseline movement abilities and more reliance on pushing buttons to do simulated cool things and simplifying mechanics down so the gaming experience is controller compatible.
That’s my review on OW and most of my friends who are in the same experience boat as me feel the same. Many play though because it’s the hyped up thing to do right now and everyone has dreams of that LoL/Dota2 cash that might happen.
I’m one of those few I suppose. After watching my roomie play it nonstop during the beta, I went from very excited about it/considering playing, to very let down. The maps are far worse than anything in DB or TF2, there are already too many characters creating a vertical learning curve, the ultimate abilities are either far too powerful or far too useless, and the game in general is just a generic MMO FPS with nothing special about it. If it was free, I might consider playing it. If Blizzard’s track record of balancing games and releasing steady patches was anything but completely awful, I might consider buying it. But as it stands, I don’t see OW retaining players after 2 months. In part to both gameplay that will go stale quickly, and to Blizzard’s inability to patch and balance games correctly.
I’m also taking into consideration the sheer fact that Blizzard is guaranteed to charge players for new characters/an ‘expansion pack’ of new maps and new characters. No thanks.
But the hype for OW is strong, so for those next few months, it’ll be tough or impossible to bring players back to other games.