TL;DR: There is a lot of stuff wrong with this game which will kill it in the long run and I want to help the developers save it.
First of all, I want to put this disclaimer here: I do really like this game and wish for it to succeed.
However
With the current state of progression, monetization, etc, I honestly doubt this game will be able to last more than a year once it hits OBT, if left in its current state. In this post I will lay out what the problems I think Enlisted has and how to fix them. While it is a mere opinion, I have done a lot of research around this topic so I hope the discussion about this thread can stay civil and as objective as possible. To keep this thread as compact as possible, I will also try to keep specific examples to a minimum. Those examples could be giving in responses, or in seperate threads.
Let’s start with the first issue: Winrates.
My view on the issue:
A lot of German players complain about having inferior weapons, but at the same time, Soviet players complain about having lower winrates. So Germany, despite having weapons worse than the Soviets, still win more matches on average. I believe this to origionate from what I call nationality bias. When a new player comes into a WW2-oriented game, they are most likely to pick the nation they are most familiar to. Generally, that means American players will pick USA, Brittish players will pick Brittain, and so on. However, when that choice is not available, they will instead pick the nation which they fought against in WW2, aka Germany. This is because most western players have next to no affinity with the Soviet Union. They are unfamiliar with the weapons, vehicles, etc. Because Germany and the Soviet Union are the only two nations in the game, it pretty much results in the Russian players playing for the Soviets while the rest of the entire world plays Germany, leading to a massive issue in playerbase. Why is this an issue, you might ask? Because if a match does not get filled to its 10 vs 10 capacity, the remaining slots get replaced by AI-controlled squads. The same applies to the 25 vs 25 lone soldier gamemode, but instead of AI squads there are individual AI soldiers. No matter how you look at it, a real player is superior to an AI, leading to higher winrates for Germany.How to fix it:
I personally think that no matter how much you nerf Germany or buff the Soviets, the only thing you will achieve is to piss off the German playerbase, leading to a lower overall player count instead of getting a higher player count for Russia. The only way to get around this is by introducing familiar vehicles or weapons from other nations for the Soviets. These weapons and vehicles were in fact used in WW2 under the lend-lease program as well, so historical accuracy will still be a thing. If this issue is not fixed, it will make issue 2 even worse:
Issue 2: Player retention
*My view on the issue:
As it stands, new players are very unlikely to keep playing the game. The last wipe has been a while ago now and most players have a lot of competitive gear. Now imagine being a new player, having nothing more than 2 squads with 4 soldiers, armed with a bolt-action rifle, a single medkit and maybe a grenade. They have no clue how to play the game and face squads with automatic weapons, perk advantages (+35% health included), 3 more soldiers, more equipment and experience. This does not lead to a good experience. On top of that, these new players need to keep doing just that for up to months before they get the equipment needed to compete. This makes the game extremely unfriendly for new players, making it very likely for them to stay, preventing playerbase growth. Even if they wanted to buy their way in, premium squads cost half that of an AAA game and you would most likely have to get one per campaign, per nation, to compete there. Furthermore, nothing is preventing Darkflow to also add other premium squads or other paid items that could arguably be pay-to-win.How to fix this:
Darkflow initially planned on making this game pay-to-play, where you bought each campaign seperately with Enlisted as a whole acting as a launcher to play what essentailly would be seperate games. However, they swapped to a free-to-play model after a community vote. Currently, with the closed beta test, you already have to pay 30 euro’s (or other currency equivalent) to enter the Moscow campaign, with no access given to other campaigns, even if they were available. This is the minimum price of entry, with potential other premium items driving up the effective price of the game/campaign. I propose to keep the pay-to-play system by making it so from this day forward, whenever a new campaign is added, you need to pay 30 euro’s (or equivalent) to be able to play that campaign while at the same time either reducing the strength of the squad that comes along with these packs, or removing them outright. In addition to that, the progression system would require a big rework as well, seen in the next point:
Issue 3: Progression
My view on the issue:
Currently the progression is split into multiple subcatagories. Squads get upgrade points which you use to improve that squad, as well as its relevant soldier and weapon. The biggest time consumer is soldier progression. Upgrading soldiers to max, rank 5, requires you to level 3 rank 4 soldiers, which require 3 rank 3 soldiers etc for a total of 81 rank 1 soldiers. Each soldier has to be leveled, with each level taking around 15 minutes of in-game time. Because of how the system works there are 179 levels to be leveled for one maxed out rank 5 soldier, which takes roughly 45 hours. You need up to 21 rank 5 soldiers for full squads, meaning you need 945 hours of active playtime in matches to reach this. This is a requirement for competitive play as rank 5 soldiers get more and better perks, ranging from 35% more health to 24% faster weapon reloads giving them an edge in every battle.Another issue with this is that those rank 5 soldiers also have better AI-control than rank 1 soldiers. They are smarter and do things unleveled AI can not. This massive time investment will scare away a lot of casual players that do not want to commit to a game to that extend.
Weapon progression is the other side of the coin, with it being purely RNG based. An upgraded SMG has +20% firerate and +20% damage, leading to a 44% increase in DPS. To get this upgrade, you are required to disassemble copies of the gun, which rewards you with a random ammount of spare parts within a range. These copies of the gun are obtained through RNG via the loot boxes, meaning some players might never receive any spare guns of the type they want to upgrade.
Once you gathered enough spare parts, you can upgrade a single copy of that weapon. However, on later upgrades, there is a 20%, 30% or even 40% chance of the upgrade to fail. You can reduce the upgrade cost and increase the ammount of spare parts you get per gun via squad upgrades, but there is no way to guarantee your upgrade will succeed. The result of this is that there will be a <0.01% of the players that will always get the lowest ammount of spare parts for their guns, AND fail EVERY upgrade that they can fail, on top of NEVER getting any extra copies of the gun they want outside of the guaranteed drops. This means some players will be outright unable to improve their guns because RNG simply does not allow them to do so.
How to fix this:
Honestly the entire progression system needs a massive overhaul to be fixed. There is so much wrong with it that I can not possibly write up a proper replacement for it.
Because of these issues, there will never be enough players in the game to allow for it to grow in popularity. Without growth, there won’t be enough money comming in for Darkflow and Gaijin, leading to more monetization that will further drive away the playerbase, leading to an unevitable death of the game in its entirety. Do keep in mind that Gaijin has an history of making their F2P progression systems take absurd ammounts of time and as annoying as possible to incentivice players into spending as much money as possible.
I hope that we as a playerbase can discuss this in a civilized way and give it the attention required for Darkflow and Gaijin to pick up on it and change what needs to be changed for the better.
