During peak time: You often get games that are fun and challenging. (absolute garbage does still happen occasionally, but can be excused). Game can actually shine and there are absolutely amazing moments.
Off peak:G ame is basically dead. Game after game the teams are completely lopsided. Lots of new players try the game and just get completely (and possibly permamently) turned off because what they see is objectively bad
You cannot let new players think this is the game.
Other problem is that I recently got a friend to try the game and I had to spend like an hour explaining things to him, warning him to avoid stupid jebaits, how things work, what can be useful, what is a complete waste of time. Today people in low tier would literally just run past unguarded enemy rally points, like, physically run over it without a clue. Why aren’t new players taught about THE core mechanic of Enlisted? Why is the damn sniper squad still the starting default? etc
I’m with you on this one, i have 3 friends today playing on BR1 and spend half of the matches explaining them things. Tutorial is non existant for a new player, and no one can spend 1 hour watching 20 videos on how to do things in the game in order to make at least 1k points.
They are killing the game softly (with his words).
Because its not fortnight, not cod, not battlefield ect its more than kill the enemy and more than 15 min a match, add in grind over a dozen classes and you would need a weekend to learn the basics
Because at it’s best it’s one of the most fun games out there and it deserves more players.
It’s just completely hamstrung by the awful way matches are put together. The game sucks ass if one team is at least minimally capable and other does nothing and it’s about time matchmaking got some real work put into it. It doesn’t even have to be strict skill based system, just making sure you don’t have full team with gear vs complete greenhorns would go a long way
And if you make the mistake of playing outside short few hours of the day, you’ll be getting that horrific experience. A LOT of quite fresh players seem to be getting that experience… I’m not surprised many of them don’t want to stick around
Just because a game deserves more players doesn’t mean it will get them when the devs are doing lazy things with the game. I tried to get a friend into the game and outside of me explaining things to them and playing a few games they said that it was not a good game. We played at what seemed to be peak hours, and that didn’t change much for how they perceived the game.
A game that needs to be played at a certain time or you’ll be in a lopsided match is also an effect of a game on life support. They can’t even jump on the wagon of the steam sale to boost player counts because its already free to play. Also, this game has a bad reputation because everyone knows War Thunder and Gaijins tactics when it comes to free to play games. Couple that with poor decisions that the devs have made so far with marketing of squad control over AI squad mates but a bad AI system, “Large scale” battles but weapons/equipment/vehicles that feel weak, Lacking basic features, Weird restrictions on F2P players, Taglines of it being an MMO game but the only thing that is MMO-like is the massive grind for ANYTHING unless you open your wallet, and well just that, you want something then open your wallet and you have a recipe for no player growth.
Like I’ve always said
Officials put anti-intellectual groups and normal people together to poison each other
This can make some players who are good at killing anti-intellectual groups and robots feel full of self-superiority
But it infects normal people who want a normal team game with parasites
And make anti-intellectual groups cry because of normal people’s thinking ability
Then the official will destroy more game content, fairness and environment in order to protect anti-intellectual groups.
Any player with intelligence is quite wary of this kind of game
Only people who believe this game has a future that can be improved will continue to pay the electricity bill for this piece of garbage.
There has to be a way of making the gameplay “somewhat” good all the time and not just on certain peak hours, especially since there are different peak ours around the world. Both my kids quit playing a year ago because of horrible game play, and most of the time I play I experience horrible game play, either in my favor or against. My game play has gone down from 25 to 30 games a day to just the minimum to obtain the daily Enlisted objectives, and since I have had eye trouble the past week, my game play has dropped to 4 or 5 games and to be honest, I am not really missing it. I’ve spend entirely to much money to ever just walk away, but the fun for the most part seems to have departed the game quite a while ago, and DF has no answer to fixing it. I live in the Philippines, and if I want good game play I have to start playing after midnight, and I don’t want to have to play in the wee hours of the morning just to find a semi competitive game.
Noob question here, what are the peak hours?
I live in W-europe and have no clue.
I play on any server, any time of day/night and every battle I join seems a full lobby and massive warfare.
Was surprised a while ago, I believe it was @robihr who posted a graph showing very high peaks and very low valleys in online player count.
Since the game has players all over the world I would assume the ammount of players to be an average all around the clock, unless the game is super popular in particular timezones.
evening in europe… somewhere between 17:00-22:00 is where you will get most players.
maybe it would if it had asian servers, but you have 2 servers in europe and 1 in US. that means that most players will be focused on those timezones. evening in europe means that that most people came from jobs/school and can play the game and also you have people who play in morning/noon in US.
when it is evening in US, it is middle of the night in europe, so you wont be seeing peak there.
I hate to continue to be the negative person on this post because it would be great if all games could grow and live. But if DF really cared about the game and wanted it to grow, then they would have started to fix the real problems years ago. They are not the only game in the war game space. As much as people hate on the new Battlefield you have more people playing that then this because the faults with that game are smaller than this game. Similar to COD even though that is more of an arena shooter then massive battle people would rather play that because they already know what to expect with it.
I’m sorry to hear that especially with the game in the state that it is in. But greedy companies like Gaijin do this all the time, because to them it’s just income not a gaming experience. They put out the bare minimum as possible to get players to fork over as much money as possible and then the players feel bad because they’ve spent so much that they don’t want to leave. Not saying you need to leave or anything, please do want is best for yourself regardless. Just in general because you’ve spent so much, you feel like you don’t want that money to “go to waste”.
It’s a great psychological trick that companies are using these days. Also please don’t misunderstand I’m not immune to it either I’ve spent money on other games that I wish I hadn’t. But now that I’ve seen it a few times I recognize it and keep my wallet closed until they show me that the game or project is worth spending on.
More aggressive matchmaker coupled with hard decisions. In my experience most bad matches come from the fact that one faction simply has more players queueing and that results in onesided snoozefests where the overpopulated faction completely curbstomps whatever dregs and bots the matchmaker scraped up to put into the opposing team. Or the fact that some games one team is already weak and other team gets a 4-stack to run rampant. Fixing that will require stepping on some toes but would most probably be better for everyone long term
I think that fixing all of the bugs would greatly improve the game experience, and would help to retain new players. However, it would do nothing to improve the matchmaking issue.
I think theres more to it than that…Its the “pace” the game has evolved into.
All these things accelerate the game play, Bad AI (like lambs to the slaughter), Bottlenecks/small objectives and dozens of other small things that all add up.
I have been playing another game that has reminded me how much of a difference more effective AI makes, in both immersion and pace.
When new players they see paywalls at every occasion it’s not a good sight to be behold it will make them leave the game. They also don’t understand how crucial are rally points to win the game.
No gameplay changes can fix the fact that often you just get a team that will not do ANYTHING of use in terms of winning a match.
And devs really shouldn’t try to balance the game for 1v19 matches, when the game already gets crazy good when teams are reasonably even. Just improve the matchmaker already (and have actually useful introduction to the game for new players - but you can do two things at the same time)
