Hello everyone, this post will be up on the Community’s Forums, and Reddit. This is not a fact nor matter of truth, merely an objective opinion is achieving much desired and agreed upon Community changes. You are welcome to post your own feedback, be it negative and positive, but are heavily encouraged to upvote this in order to attempt to push for change. I am not right, nor am I a sole voice, But I think it’s enough to say this major update fell short.
Partisans are a cool concept, and while in theory they will add new things, they simply add another Glorified Assaulter Treatment. This was the same experience Medics provided, although both have their own gimmicks. This backed by the reused asset implementations from their exclusive campaigns, coupled by a rather uninteresting map, and failure to deliver QoL changes that were promised has me here. Thanks for reading my intro.
A Community Focus
All of these changes / requests in this specific thread is aimed at Community QoL, while Enlisted is F2P, many of these features are modern and cost effective procedures other games have, that take significantly less time to develop and add then you can expect. The idea behind this is to offer a Community driven approach of improvements, building up to a beneficial Public Relations and Financial Relationship for Darkfow. As it stands the lack of proper P.R is terrible. Updates come out of the blue, days sometimes before the launch, while an inconsistency on updates, outside of well known and reputable moderation and content creators, leaves a massive hole in transparency and community damage. Knowing even something as simple as a consistently updated “Road Map” or “Current Devlog” greatly increases publicity and community relations. Hence I fully believe I speak for the masses when I say Darkflow NEEDS a P.R team outside of a select few Content Creators. P.R is everything! When your community is Silenced you get communities like Foxhole that just ignore the Developers, leave the game, or go on strike. It’s no doubt that Enlisted has been struggling for a while compared to what it’s sister games are excelling at. A lack of modernized Sponsorships, Publicity, and Interactions, has left the game on a backburner many have left for greener pastures.
Community Maps
This is an extremely subjective view, but I do believe the very slow and painful process of making maps has strongly damaged Enlisted. This is not only because many maps fall short of the expectation of more grander updates, but evidently this splits the Enlisted Developers across the board. Enlisted has a very unique and large Mod and Map Building Community, I believe accepting community map submissions would offer a much better way to expand the map pool with a fresh rotating set of community maps. Of course theres the need to vet and modify these maps, but having seen games such as Team Fortress 2, Unturned, and even Minecraft with realms take a approach to Player Content, it’s a very effective and new strategy. In addition the other two F2P games have found great value in monopolizing these Player Maps with their own themed cosmetics, ideas, and approaches.
There is no reason to Shove off the Modding and Mapping Community, Mods such as Big Action, have shown the capabilities, dedication, and effort they have put. By having them submit maps, you offer them the reward of previewing their work outside of custom games, while offering a stable alternate approach to a Map Pool. These maps would act as excellent seasonal and rotational maps for each Campaign.
Community Feedback Review
It’s not unknown that the Developers do not interact through the Community much at all, while many communities rectify this issue with monthly to bi/tri monthly QNAs, or videos, we lack even the basis of interaction. My suggestion going forward is to add a dedication location for suggestions off the Forums, via Discord. While Enlisted does indeed have its own Forums, many especially Steam based players barely even interact with the Website outside the store. Even a simple 30 question QNA or 1 Hour post your question we pick can greatly help community interaction. Games like Foxhole, and Hell Divers 2, have utilized this approach to greatly improve relations, popularity, and community engagement. Players that feel they have no voice or say, will leave, nobody says they need to be heard for every idea, but when there is no face and updates go in the opposite direction, you consistently see a downfall like WoW did.
Improved Sponsorships
I’m going to say this as its controversial to some, but the idea of Sponsorships does not need to always fit into the bill of the wallet. While some streamers and creators will look for paid sponsorships, a lot of people will represent a game just because they enjoy it. Enlisted is not a well known or high velocity game, I only got back into it because of a Million Subscriber YTer going out of their way to do a 4 person review. And frankly they went “Eh it’s not good but I enjoy it. So I recommend it.” This was premerge but still. Offering simple rewards to content creators and codes for new players (similar to the language promos) can greatly help boost revenue and popularity. People look for reviews, not ads these days. Many ads find themselves blocked or downright ignored, which is why many communities, especially Indie, turn to that helping hand for just a bit of publicity. My suggestion is to offer EVERY Nation a basic starting kit, regardless of language. This offers a New Player the best chance of staying, and getting engaged. Because each faction IS different.
Booster Choosing
This was teased, and I won’t drill long on it, but as it stands Boosters are influenced by two concepts. Time, and Battles. While this in theory sounds great, many Players find themselves in unevenly balanced Player-to-Bot ratio teams, causing many to waste their Boosters. After all if you gave a bad game, why should you lose that extra xp for a extra 300 cause you lost? The concept here is to MAINTAIN the Time, and Battle conditions of Boosters, but allow players to Activate them at the End of Battles in addition to the current before. Players who activate them before, can stack them, while those who activate them after, can not. An easy loophole prevention, that encourages playing with your interest of winning, but doesn’t punish a bad game or player. After all, we all have bad days, bad games, bad plays.
Map Lock ins and Outs
Another teased and supposedly confirmed feature. Map Lock ins and Outs simply offers players the abilities to cut out maps and locations they’d like to avoid. While preferences leaning towards certain maps.
Match Making Improvements
Many games run on two systems that merge into each other. This system references Closed Que and Open Que. As Enlisted stands it’s purely a Open Que game. This means that should the match criteria be met, it will no longer attempt to prioritize players only adding Bots unless a Players present.
Closed Que Is the most common use of system by all modernized platforms and games. From League of Legends which has a Skill based Closed Que, to Call of Duty, Halo, Heroes of the Storm, Dota, so forth. These games are very successful in their approach as a Closed Que prioritizes the set criteria. So in a MMR based game it will attempt To match based on that. In a Player game it’ll try to match players. So forth. Enlisted NEEDS to strongly move to a 1 Minute at the minimum Closed que. You may argue waiting 2 minutes Total is long, but most games have a waiting time from 1-8 minutes per que with average games lasting 12-30 minutes, having a 1 minute Closed Que that prioritizes matching players over Bots, into a Open Que, would greatly Improved match making. Bot’s shouldn’t be 40% of the lobby to as high as 70% of The Team. It creates Stomp matches which tend to create frustration, lack of engagement, and disinterest on both sides.