Hello bajtársak and fellow forum dwellers!
Most free to play games suffer from disparity between teams, the issue is not unique to Enlisted, but it is unquestionably the biggest one in this game.
This can range from frustrating (one faction losing 9 out of 10 matches) to outright unenjoyable or unplayable (attacker team getting stuck at first objective and slaughtered or defender losing in less than 10 minutes).
Bad matches disencourage people from playing the game, unbalanced matches are the number one reason for deserting. This isn’t just the playerbase´s problem, it’s in Darkflow´s best interest to solve it.
Attempts were made, but they only superficially touched the issue (reinforcements and capture time disparity which only got abused) and did not attempt to solve the root of the cause.
Today I will attempt to discuss these root causes and offer some kind of solution to them.
- The victory bonus
A juicy 50% boost to everything gained in the battle, oh and this is cumulative with other factors.
victory bonus and battle hero doubles all silver, research points and squad upgrade points earned in battle. If the player also has premium time, all of this triples, but players with boosters and multiple premium squads can potentially get even more.
The catch is that only half of the players get it, it’s not hard to see that this will promote only playing for the winning side. The more one faction starts to win, the more popular it gets while a faction that keeps losing will only be less and less popular. It’s a snowball effect.
This is obviously the worst mechanic of the entire game and has to go.
Victory bonus only promotes playing for the winning side and farming as many XP as possible with vehicles.
Replace it with the “good teammate” award that any player can access if they build at least one rally and actively play the objectives. This way, the game rewards playing for victory even more and excludes players that selfishly kept cycling vehicles or farmed XP using some exploit in the corner of the map.
- Clans and squads of players
Unlike the victory bonus, the mechanic itself isn’t bad, everyone likes to play with friends. It’s the way players use it that makes it problematic. Teams are 10 vs 10, with many casuals, usually about 80-75% of players are casuals which is fine, but if 4 tryhards are stacking one side then the match will turn into a one sided stomp, ruining the fun of 16 other people.
Even the clans that honorably fight for the losing side, they just usually end up stomping the enemy, a nice gesture but has no effect, victory farmers just desert the match and join a new one in which they can continue farming.
Ultimately clans cause more havoc than good, thus no more than 2 players should be allowed to queue into normal matches so people can still play with friends.
For clans and bigger groups, playing custom games would still be an option (anyone with a premium account can set up a private custom match by the way).
In exchange the limit of player squads should be increased from 4 to 10 and a new clans vs clans game mode introduced (please for the love of it, do NOT drop poor randoms into that, only clans).
- Events, equipment and veterans farming new players
A very relevant problem, BR alone didn’t completely solve this issue.
This issue is most relevant during events when many players are trying to complete the tasks as quickly as possible.
The solution is fairly simple, playing higher BRs should reward players a bit more so it’s not worth it to farm newbies and the amount of score you need to collect to complete an event task should decrease with BRs.
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BR1 20.000 score to unlock stage
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BR2 17.500 score to unlock stage and 5% reward gained in battle multiplier
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BR3 15.000 score to unlock stage and 10% reward gained in battle multiplier
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BR4 12.500 score to unlock stage and 20% reward gained in battle multiplier
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BR5 10.000 score to unlock stage and 25% reward gained in battle multiplier
This would encourage veterans not to farm lower BRs and new players would get interested in speeding up progression by buying premium squads and premium time.
BR4 has 10% higher than BR3 on purpose since it’s not too popular since BR5 is much stronger than BR4 while BR4 isn’t much stronger than BR3.
Increasing rewards have been long demanded anyway.
Would this stop noobs from playing high BR though? well not all of them, but it’s their choice to get farmed. It probably won’t be worth it for most players but if some can do well with worse guns then they have my respect and I won´t stop them.
Be careful with tasks such as “kill 25 enemies with bolt-action rifles” the problem with such tasks that high BRs don’t have bolt-actions so most veterans will flood low BR to farm the task, pistol kill and melee kill tasks have a similar but less potent effect.
I recommend changing bolt-action and semi-auto rifle kills tasks to include both types at the same time “kill 25 enemies with bolt-action or semi-auto rifles”
Event rewards and new tech tree unlocks (even Battle Pass rewards) are very important because an interesting gear can temporarily increase a faction´s playerbase, but this is a double edged sword since they can get too popular.
This can be mitigated by carefully planning new tech tree additions and BR changes.
A buff or BR change to equipment can do more good than a copy pasted addition to the TT.
I’m sure that Germany and USSR players would be much more satisfied with BR4 drum ppsh41 and MKb(42) than with an 8th Panzer IV or T-34.
Players should be able to choose which event squad they want first because event squads can be terrible overkills that change entire faction trends, like we saw before the merge in both Tunisia and Normandy campaigns.
- Equipment disparity
This issue has to be taken more seriously.
When players complain that “USSR doesn’t have a BR2 semi-auto rifle” or “Germany doesn’t have a 100 round BR5 MG” or “Japan doesn’t have a decent attacker aircraft”, they do so because the lack of such equipment causes them trouble when completing tasks. Sure many of these are rants, no question about, but I often found that at least half of these people do have a point. We regularly have machine gunner or machine gun kills tasks and semi-auto rifle kills tasks.
I haven’t seen aircraft kills tasks in a while but they are a thing too.
These players are either stuck with mediocre equipment or are forced to switch faction or BR.
M1 Carbine or SKS to USSR and 100 round MG42 for Germany would be little to no effort to add but would please many people.
Factions don’t need to be 100% equal, but BR5 US always gets stacked during events because everyone wants to farm with P-47, it’s not the only offender, just the prime example and a major contributor to balance issues which could be avoided if equipment quality on each BR was better regulated.
- Overall BR of Players should be roughly equal
This is predominantly a BR2-3 issue, the team with more BR3 players usually wins since BR3 infantry weapons and tanks are much more powerful than BR2, this could be solved by making both sides have roughly equal number of players of the same BRs.
Thank you for your attention!
