The Merge - lesson in utter incompetence

i am back from 3 day ban (well mute), so i havent been able to give feedback about the merge and after this post i wouldnt be surprised if am given new mute cause of shitty moderation.

if you are active member of community, then you would know that i was one of the biggest proponents for merge and i still believe if done properly it would have been excellent for the game. but what happened over the weekend has left me flabbergasted by sheer incompetence shown by DF and gaijin. they failed on so many points that i cant defend the way they implemented the merge.

so lets start by points.

1. Communication

communication has been shit from day 1 since they announced the merge. they literally dropped the news about merge without any specific information. there were numerous questions asked and only few were vaguely answered in follow up Q&A devblogs. lot of information that was communicated at start is simply not relevant to the implemented merge.

to this list we can add first testing with completely different MM from what was announced in middle of hard grind event. then add to this launching every subsequent testing without any prior announcement and lasting one day and implementing live launch with no prior announcement (no i dont count 12 hour announcement about maintenance to be one)

we had almost year of no information about almost anything specific inside the merge, just to be overwhelmed with 4 fast test servers inside a month and live (bad) implementation soon after. ffs everyone was focused on worst problems inside the test servers cause of limited testing time that nobody had time to even evaluate every new implemented stuff. not to mention ignoring negative feedback on those test servers by majority of players and continuing implementing that in production.

also show of failure to communicate is no guides and tutorials for new UI to rest of the playerbase.

no this is not acceptable communication towards players and customers.

2. Planning

i am almost 100% certain that at the start of the year there was absolute no plan and analysis on how to approach this merge. they had so much data available about players with which they could have run simulations and analysis on every possible MM algorithm, but they either didnt do it or if they did they didnt inform the players.
few simulations could have given you options which you could have presented to the players on best way forward with minimum backlash. there was extensive feedback about numerous topics about merge, but simply it was not taken.
to me it seems like most of the year DF/gaijin didnt do jack shit and then in last quarter they hurried implementation of bad plan cause of EOY goals.

3. Tech tree

simply it is failure. i think that most people didnt even notice grind in tech tree cause they were so focused on conversion and MM. people were complaining about 10 tier tech tree cause they were afraid of grind implications, just for it to be compressed to 5 tiers after feedback, but it contained same number of weapons as 10 tier tech counterpart. tiers werent the problem, but xp required per weapon/vehicle and total grind amount. and that is information that we didnt know before first test server that was held in middle of heavy grind event (so i didnt even check it out, as well as many other people).
people were celebrating that they dont need to do multiple grind of same weapon, but they didnt notice that in most cases grind to the same weapon postmerge is 2-20 times more expensive then in previous campaigns, negating one of the biggest advantage of merge and that is reduction of grind.
if you include everything in all campaigns alongside multiple same grind, you will get to absolute number that is much bigger than post merge, but you must take into account that you could get all end game gear for half the xp (alongside low/mid tier gear).

4. Economy

i will not go deep into economy cause i have not analyzed it, nor do i have premerge data. i will just make observation that everyone will have significantly less income (xp and silver/orders) cause of more human players per side.

problems that i found in economy is mostly on soldier side. getting squad of max stat soldiers is impossible in new economy. every soldier is 10 times more expensive making RNG lottery for max stat soldier impossible even for richest of players. this is simply one of the things that needs to be fixed either by having a way to increase stat to max or by significantly reducing cost of the soldier.

5. Matchmaking

whether you were for BR/balance or for HA, everyone agrees that new MM is atrocious. ffs every player that was on those 4 test servers was unified in opinion that 2 queue MM is terrible. promise of increasing number of queues if player number increases is utterly stupid. even at the cost of increasing number of bots there needed to be at least 3 queues.

6. Squads, uniforms and customization

this is shitshow that was completely avoidable. there is problem with customization, there is problem with uniforms, there is problem with people having hundreds of squads, there is problem with equipping them, there is problem with removing equipment from them, there is problem with BR, there is problem with veterans fielding 2 KT vs newbies that will be only able to field 1 KT etc.

they could have easily implemented idea of generic squads (e.g assaulters 1, assaulters 2 etc.) that were connected to their counterparts in campaigns. how would that work? if you ended up on normandy you would have uniforms from assaulter 1 squad in normandy or if you ended up in tunisia you would have uniforms from assaulters 1 squad in tunisia. they could have default unequipped all squads and saved their campaign equipment as presets.

simply no problem with hundreds of squads, no problem with loads of weapons that you dont know where they ended up, no problem with customization (unless someone requested refund), no problem from ahistorical squads in different battlefields, no problem with loadouts. IIRC i made similar suggestion as feedback in one of the news topics.

7. New perk/soldier system
in middle of merge you introduced game changing mechanism with absolutely no information. i understand that there is no better time to introduce this with change in game mechanism, but problem is that players had almost no time to take closer look cause they were overwhelmed with numerous changes in the game on test server alongside hard grind events.

8. Testing

does DF know what is the goal of testing? it is to collect bug reports and feedback. if feedback is negative or there are numerous bug reports you either go back to planning board or you postpone the live implementation. if feedback is positive and there are negligible bugs you go around with implementation.

is corporate forcing this update for EOY goals or are devs incompetent? or is it combination of both? ffs you DONT LAUNCH OVERWHELMINGLY NEGATIVE FEEDBACK VERSION OF TEST BUILD INTO LIVE PRODUCTION. if this happened in any dev job that i had i would be fired alongside my company having to pay massive penalty.

TL;DR
this has been show of utter incompetence from the side of DF/gaijin. from lack of information provided during most of the year, to going contrary to previously provided information, to making short stealth tests, to ignoring community feedback then to abruptly launching unfinished implementation that has overwhelmingly negative feedback.

26 Likes

yeah i forgot few things

so i will add here

9. BR counterparts

on merge pershing and super pershing should have been added to the grind. allied tanks are now in weird spot with tanks where they cant counter KT.

10. Campaigns

instead of adding shit reverse versions of maps with no effort, they should have introduced new map pack or “campaign in new form”. this would have dealt with problem of KT in stalingrad or similar stuff.

3 Likes

I’m starting to think we need item levels or something, EACH item (including things like grenades and backpacks, pistols) gets item level and your matchmaking ranking is calculated by summing all your gear score up then dividing by number of squads you have equipped. Vehicles probably need way bigger score than a single rifle. Soldier level and type also need a score i think?
You definitely feel a difference between fighting unleveled Assaulter Is and max rank Assaulter IVs as well as when you fight some dude who brought a few unupgraded guns vs someone decked top to bottom in best gear

3 Likes

ive posted 1 month ago that items need BRs too, even if its only pouches, it makes a big difference:
small grenade pouches offer 2 grenades, large offer 3. the difference isnt only 1 grenade more, its statistically speaking MULTIPLE grenades more because people can freely spam 3 grenades with large pouches, but if large pouches had a higher BR, many people wouldnt even touch the small pouches and play something else instead, reducing the prevalence of grenade spam by a significant amount, significantly more than just the theoretical 1 grenade difference. but im not surprised concepts like this go unnoticed.

running countless test runs doesnt help, especially since reading thousands of comments will never produce clear results, it only produces random effects and background noise data flood.
thats what the “we need moooar test runs” nerds dont get. what matters is core competence at the center of decision making and that is clearly the lacking factor.

3 Likes

backpacks yes, grenades maybe, pistols no.

nah… i am against this. this was discussed few times on forum. here is latest topic that i remember

i think that upgraded vs unupgraded guns are ok. there doesnt need to be perfect balance down to the same performance. for soldiers there could be discussion.

contrary to what you think more tests help if previous one received overwhelmingly negative feedback. they need to fix major problems before launching another test server or even live update. there was almost no change between second, third and fourth test server (except few BR tiers for some weapons). it was more or less the same if they had only 2 test servers or 1000 test servers if they didnt make any major changes.

2 Likes

Plus I think they didnt even decrease prices for customization.

2 Likes

there were simply too many problems with current implementation of squads that i cant remember them all.

1 Like

you literally say yourself they did multiple test runs and overall basically no improvement. thats exactly what ive been saying for months since the second test run. for everyone with experience in that context its obv that DF doesnt know how to process information, so it wont matter if they do 2, 4 or 10 test runs. the only difference is increase in background noise and LOTS of costs for waiting and working, even with dozens of unpaid workers.

the fast merge is the best things that could happen, because now there fire is under the booty and people are forced to be logical and come up with quick & good results.

1 Like

there are people with experience in testing, just not with DF testing. their way of testing/implementation goes against every industry standard.

btw month hasnt even passed since second test…

idk if it is the best thing to happen when game losses significant chunk of playerbase cause of badly implemented merge. this could have gone much more painlessly

1 Like

couldnt agree more. if you have to pull a teeth, better do it quick and be done with it. after the fact, you can try to fix the hole you made.

also now at least we have the real thing in our faces. there is no more information blackout. it is what it is. there wont be another “oh noes, this was not BR, this was research tree”…

btw, if you have a screenshot of the proposed first draft and what we have now, you will find some astonishing similarities. was that 8 months ago or something?

it was gonna come out badly whatever the time it took. its the way goes. better be quick and be done with the suffering. i actually requested a blindfold cosmetic before merge so we could equip our soldiers accordingly to the events.

1 Like

7 days mute here, because I point out other people stupidity in a screenshot…

considering vagueness of their information anything we got with BR MM and tech tree would be similar to draft 8-10 months ago. there were numerous specific questions that were avoided in subsequent Q&A.

titanic 11_1

titanic d gif_1

titanic 3 gif

5 Likes

yes

The current BR system is a complete failure because it doesn’t take into account that Enlisted is a game based on multiple weapon combinations.

A large number of players who were mid-grinding were suddenly thrown into level 3, 4, and 5 battles.

In order to escape the level 5 battle, they even had to abandon the few weapons they had accumulated.

It’s even worse for players who purchased premium squads and vehicles, as they won’t have any room to play in battles 3, 4, and 5. Everything turned into a battle for the sweat lords.

I don’t think that’s what players want.

The BR system fails, and the worst part is that it only counts 1 weapon.

You can even consider that you were thrown into a BR5 with only 1 grenade, which is absolutely ridiculous.

My solutions example here~


At least they should consider the number of player weapons based on the existing BR, such as still a queue of 3, 4, 5, but players with fewer weapons entering BR3 more often, which has absolutely no conflict with the current BR