Yeah, we totally don’t need any bugs fixed - lets just slap VS mode right on top of this crap. The phrase ‘polishing a turd’ comes to mind.
Seriously, something we’ve been discussing with a couple of guys: how does FS plan to maintain their 10 year world domination plan? What exactly does put this game up there next to the other successful multiplayer giants that managed to survive for 10 years like WoW, Minecraft, TF and - you guessed it! - Left 4 freakin’ Dead 2?
Somehow I dont think it would be moar grinding, cosmetics, new maps, new modes or anything else in isolation. I think it is quality that distinguishes eternal classics from momentary pastimes. In the gamedev case it is both quality of the code itself and quality of player experience. None of the two was improved since BBB. Can this be even acknowledged?
Then what do we get in the end? Lets take L4D2 because it clearly was the single most important source of inspiration for the core gameplay of VT:
It was released one year after its prequel;
It had all 4 of the relevant core game modes already in it;
It got smooth gameplay;
It has no levels, no hero power, no cosmetics, no grinding, no chests.
It quickly got dedicated servers and modding support.
What’s the result? Well, as of October 2019 there are more than 3 times as many people playing L4D2 than VT2, the former hangs about 95% positive feedback, and the numbers aren’t improving for FS
What does FS do 1.5 years after release? Tweaking sounds and fonts (and failing). Way to go, mates.
Apart things that we all know, like bugs or crafting, the problem is that the game is “hostile” both toward new and end game players.
New players must fight a boring and cryptic game. Reach lv35 seems just frustrating. There are a lot of “secret”, hidden ability, values… We don’t know our HP! And yep… As said, we all know what crafting is.
Moreover none plays the lowest difficulties. So they are forced to play legend, even if they still aren’t ready.
But end players play the worst part.
legend still is where we must farm… But it depends too much to which players you find. It can be boring… or frustrating, if we meet players described above (but it’s not their fault). It’s too random as mod to farm;
cataclysm is fun… But it hasn’t reward. I understand that players must play it for the challenge and not to farm… I agree, but at least we could have an emperor vault regardless books. In this way legend would still be the best play to farm… And the end game players could have fun and progress in the game at the same time;
cata Fortunes of War and last weaves are the worst part. They are boring and frustrating and unfair. There are so many enemies that you just haven’t the “numbers” to deal with them… Indeed what is the strategy? Kite, kite, kite and kite again. I helped more groups… And they all were tired of that s**t… They were playing them just for the portrait, but they were bored and frustrated (and they all used the same, boring, strategy).
Moreover weaves systems doesn’t work. If I have a group that reached an higher weave than me… Or I must play their weaves without reward… Or they must repeat the already done weaves for me (again without reward).
All they need, is relatively small group of experience players that would be willing to beta test patches before releasing em live. It would not be hard to get the ppl and would avoid all these blunders on live.
The ridiculous stuff that comes in most patches is nearly always something that can be seen very quickly, one doesn’t need 10 hours of testing to see that font is terrible, stomping sounds are irritating and pointless, added attribute range on red items is just trolling and so on…
Perhaps the one reason why this has been pushed to live regardless is the small playerbase and even smaller pool of players willing to test things out properly.
Either way, I believe that at least the most glaring issues could have been avoided that way. There is enough of dedicated people out there who would be willing to help (myself included).
I would go further and assume that fixing things in this sane manner (with subsequent betas), having everything relatively under control could be better for the dev team as well.
Being distracted and pressured to put out fires as they have already moved on to other topics on their lists is never a good thing and further degrades the quality of the game and their work.
what happened to the beta branch? early in this game there used to be a beta branch for testing. the last one i remember is the one with the blightstormer visual like a year ago
What’s the use of a beta testing environment filled with beta testers if you don’t listen to those same testers? No, scratch that. The real question is: What’s the use of beta testing some content if you aren’t even sure that the majority of players will like it. Do you get me? They’ve spent a soooo much time working on weaves, hell, they’ve practically worked on it for 9 months. Let me quote myself:
At this point I’m starting to sound like a broken record. And I’m also starting to believe that nobody would make decisions like this on account of being incompetent. I think that Fat Shark went for the money on this one, not the hard way but the easy way, and they’ve failed. You know, there’s still a viable way of earning money while keeping your loyal player base happy. It might not be a short term investment but a long term one, and you could still earn some nice $$.
Since it has come to the time when their fixes need fixes, I think we can all agree that testing their bugfix patches separately by us (because it looks like FS does not allow their employees to run their own game) won’t do anyone any harm. Not like there are people opposed to bugfixes, it looks like a safe bet in this respect.
I think what @Angerblaze is saying, is that we gave extensive feedback during the BETA’s for WoM, and you might as well have picked your favourite tree and had a conversation with that for all the good it did.
they spend way too much time on crap that doesn’t matter
-the keep
-fonts
they make us waste tons of time on stupidity
-open chest animation and multi-clicks
-run through keep to portal
the things that do matter they make random
-crafting system
the things we don’t want (a large majority) they invest tons of time into
-weaves
-pvp
with a smallish community they split us
-cata paywall
and the things we do want we wait a long time for
-new maps
-bug fixes
and maybe if they did a better job of doing what we want and less effort on giving us what we don’t want they would have more sales of dlc and game and not need to rely on micro transactions coming soon.
the games isn’t dying but it’s not healthy. either.
players enjoy the gameplay but resent the bugs, the stupid time waster parts of the game, not being able to get weapons they want with crafting, etc. so they leave. they see new stuff, remember they liked the game, come back, try it, remember why they left in the first place, and go away again.
I’m there. I uninstalled the game. I am on forums reading (rarely post) even for a game I’m not playing because I’m assuredly interested, but not invested. I check here less and less as time goes by. eventually I’ll just stop if they haven’t fixed it before I lose hope/interest. I suspect its the same for most of who walked away. we could be lured back but its a window of opportunity to do so and the window does close over time.
which is why I said the game is unhealthy. it doesn’t lure us back. the numbers say not. so without returning players this game will eventually die. that what fs should be thinking of - what can it do to get all these players back?
Right now, I would say it pretty much is dying … since even ppl with 1-2k hours are telling me that they can’t be bothered to play this in this current state.
If that is not dying then I don’t know what is. When hardcore ppl like this are dropping it.
I am still playing, but it’s not like before, I’m just pissed half of the time about some bug, stupid new mechanic or completely unbalanced class / weapon.
This is pretty much critical state imo. The game won’t be bale to take much more screw ups at this point I think.
Unfortunately everything keeps going as always, breaking new stuff like font instead of fixing the critical issues, adding stuff that does not need to be added like initial spawn sounds for flamer and gunner or super obnoxious stomping sound for beastmen, and so on.
And to top it all off, we can’t even get answer to questions like " Guys… can you finally after a frickin year, at least add the night/geheimnisnacht lighting to the base game after the event ? " no … it’s top secret we can’t talk about that … wtf.
It really looks like as someone mentioned before, like someone is intentionally driving this game into the ground so it can be bought for cheap or something.
This is the “buy the fu*king dip” situation on market of games but buy enough so you can just come and make decisions and fix it.
But yeah, let’s hope season 2 is done better weave wise, and that lohner’s shop will give some incentive to play the hardest difficulties. (I’m not so annoyed about minor bugs, but balance needs to be touched on, and cataclysm needs to be more rewarding).
Could also be great to get new options of play career or hero wise as it’s slowly becomes an incentive that should bring people back around characters they don’t like.
Issue with few non meta builds is that they suck, they suck hard. So it’s not fun to play for most ppl. I challenge anyone to try solo cata with FK Executioner/Blunder… it’s such a no-go. While if you take WHC you can sure do many maps. The difference is incredible.
You might say solo cata, wtf are you talking about, well that is very simple benchmark, where you see immediately how capable the hero is, when not talking about pure tank. Not saying it’s perfect but, it’s great way to test if you can hold on your own or if you just get steam rolled the second there is some pressure on you. And if that is the case then the hero sucks.
It’s all out of whack and big part of the balance mess was the 2.O thing, with stagger, extra levels etc. Result is exactly as predicted, there is few strong options and rest kinda sucks a**. Even tho something like FK Exec/Blunder would be super fun to play if weapons were balanced properly, ult got tweaked a bit etc.
This stuff needs quite a bit of work, I doubt it’s all getting fixed for S2 : (
Yea tha’t all I’m doing for past 2 weeks, playing Footknight. Finished like one map and that was Cata without anything extra.
It’s not in a balanced state, but 2.0 talents were, I think, a big step up from before in terms of providing different gameplay options (but that are not balanced yet, which is unfortunate, but it was not really balanced before as well).
Yep, it won’t be magical, but at least, if the “high difficulty” is better made, it will be more fun.
Yea, there is more options now, the game is more complicated, yes, but that should not get released till it’s finished. This current version is hardly a beta. It has no place on official realm at all, yet we have it there.
1.6 wasn’t perfect ofc, but it was 100x better than this, in terms of balance, and they threw it out of the window. In 1.6 I could play solo with kinda any hero and any setup and it would be doable and fun, with some exceptions like shields… that sucked.
Now… now it’s like get some OP crap or it’s nightmare, the FK exec/blunder is my example of this… like I’m pissed that I can’t get any frickin temp hp, I’m pissed that trash mobs have better attack range and attack speed then my exec… i am pissed about the stupid running attacks that keep being initiated from like meter away and are like guided missiles, I’m pissed about not being able to shoot frickin specials with blunder, not being able to get any ammo back… I’m pissed about EXECUTIONER not doing crap to bosses while being slow as f… making it horrible feeling weapon… and so on…
It’s just nightmare.
Or take WHC, scream ult and trash everything on one hit super fast attack speed, very high boss dmg, high mobility & dodge, one shot every special, +damage for whole team, lalalala, relatively easy to get temp, sounds perfectly balanced to me.
Or take BW and burn the whole fu*king chaos pat, or double triple chaos pat in Cata Fow making it much much much easier to do now…
And I even heard that the BW super armour burn is intentional, I really hope that was a joke.
I think the game really “breaks” in the highest difficulties, where all the minor bugs becomes major issues. If it weren’t for the last 20 weaves, we wouldn’t probably get so much hate for the current system.
Back to legend, it’s seriously far from a mess or a “beta” (at least not more than before).
But the highest difficulties did not balance challenge vs pace very well.
Trying to get back for a nostalgic v1 vibe in the case of Cataclysm despite the vastly different gameplay and speed. (so hordes do slow down way too much when you don’t have a battle wizard or some of heavy cleave weaponry)
Or trying to get some sort of “automated leveling” difficulty in the case of last weaves, despite winds that are WAAAAY harder than others.
Deep rock galactic did otherwise, and some of the highest maps are somewhat randomly harsh and unbeatable, but at the very least, you know it’s a random modifier, so you just start again with some others. And it’s rewarding, a lot, with hundreds of cosmetics, some being “a bit differents”, but at least, it rewards you for tackling highest difficulties, and it’s rather important.
This is probably what winds should have been. A weird mix between random winds, with added mutators, that actually gives you rewards (and at this time, I really don’t care if the rewards are orange lighted weapons, or green lighted weapons as long as there’s some kind of incentive, no matter how small or interesting).
but buy enough so you can just come and make decisions and fix it.
