Not necessary on purpose but it can be a result of many different things:
Matchmaking over different regions, which can be split further down between sub-regions. This one I’m sure play a role as I’ve played multiple times of serve which had a lot of people from a specific country - you can tell it by their nicknames.
Matchmaking by some sort of player stats that we don’t see
Overly aggressive push for low waiting times
Matchmaking by “friends” - the more people play in groups the harder it is to balance games
alpha HNG was in 2011 if i recall correcly. atleast my first account and prints i have on my external hdd are from 2011.
made my main acount in 2013 or so atleast judging by the helmet they gave us 2 years ago…i didnt play much from 2011 to 2013 since i was playing another game on tournaments/esl go4 matches to earn money prices.
i was part of it. i played the game nonstop till the first alpha test of this game and never played it again.
i still have some unique items there from alpha times, and or the gold shovel from a top 10 event.
RTS was unique to that game, so unique , that most players played staged
hng was always broken. and will always be.not sure why people still play it today.
my brother joined a few months after me, and the first couple of matches were against either bots/low level players as him. when i was playing at the same time against human players with the same gear levels as i did.
coincidence or not. this did happen.
we never played on the same games tho, he rarely plays the game because of his work/personal life.
he is by far the best player i ever saw with bolt action rifles… since cod1…
You don’t get on a server full of Czech, Polish, Russian or German players without matchmaking… They said they don’t use skill based matchmaking 6 month ago and stats base doesn’t mean skill based. It can be based on played time, spend silve/bronze, premium or not and etc. ton of possibilities to do different things and see how those matches go.
That’s just propability, if they ghetto nations into matches i would laugh.
Most people complain of empty matches and they activly make it worse for lols?
They said no skill matchmaking, no campaign level matchmaking, and many other thing here in replies. Idk why would this make and exception.
People complained low lvl players should not get rekt by maxed level veterans. Nah it fine, balanced, they said.
Give us skill based matchmaking. Nah, it’s causal, it’s not happening any time soon they said.
And yet they make Ivan play with Boris, and keep them from playing with Hans.
I’m just beyond this, all i’ve said is from my best knowledge and experience. This wouldn’t suprise me though.
But simplest explanation is often the best, and with casual shooters long waiting queue time are a “no no”, so they keep it short. I would prefer two matchmaking options, quick and long.
It’s built in the core of the campaign system. By it’s very nature the game is actively splitting the playerbase between 4 (8 if you count each faction) different queues. You can very easily see this when you go from Normandy to Tunisia, and suddenly games are filled with AI squads. They aren’t testing anything, what do they even have to gain by testing AI squads? They’d have more than enough data from the player squad AI., and if they REALLY needed to test AI squads, theyd let people have more bots in custom matches. They do it to fill matches ASAP and not have long queues. And youre crazy if you think HLL or BF are in different categories, theyre very similar games with varying levels of action and tactical gameplay.
Armored Warfare, the game that has the exact same monetization model as both War Thunder and WoT, which further proves my point that those games havent ever had to bother changing their model because they haven’t had any competition that does anything different.
It absolutely matters. Game developers can put whatever “beta” tag on a game they want, but the truth of the matter is that Enlisted released in April of 2021 for PC and October of 2021 for (old gen) Consoles. You very rarely get second chances in the games industry, just look at No Man’s Sky and how many people still think it’s terrible. Every player that leaves the game because they feel the grind is excessive is a player that more than likely will never return.
So 4 campaigns and 100 people per campaign to have 5 matches going in parallel on a single region. It’s just 400 people is all what they need. Do you feel like this is a difficult amount of players to find?
Many Americans play Normandy. If you are an American, guess what happens when you join Tunisia in your server region? I play Tunisia last few weeks occasionally and it has players in EU, sometimes more than in Normandy. But guess what, its just my personal experience and I’m not presenting it as a fact.
A minuscule portion of player base plays custom matches. There are different AIs in this game, not all of them are those that just follow you around. Some are those who lead squads.
No I’m not crazy. On the gamedesign level they are very different games. This is like comparing PUBG to Apex Legends, the similarity is only of the surface level. If you don’t understand those differences, I can explain them.
This is like saying “Look at Amazon, of course they are successful, they have no competition!”. They where lucky to be doing what they where doing and that thing was a right thing to do at the end. But nobody knew that. WT didn’t start few years ago, it simply outlived a lot of other f2p games through a decade of it’s development. The way the game is monetized is one of the reasons it is still alive.
Well, first of all, No Mans Sky is still a terrible game, it’s just got more content over time. There is no surprise that it’s not selling well by word of mouth and Sony keeps dumping money into it’s marketing, every year. That’s why we still hear about it.
For F2P games it’s normal to have multiple marketing cycles, I’m surprised you don’t know that. Who cares when did WoW or WT cameout? These games are still developed and are nothing like what they where at the start.
I don’t know if this is going to be a surprise for you but player leave literally every game. There is no way to please everyone and nobody is even trying to do that. There is no way you can design your f2p game in such a way that people won’t find some justification for why they won’t play it anymore.
We still have people bitching about being bombed, after dozen patches.
5 matches in parallel, with average match being 15 minuts, equals one match per 3 min.
Matchmaking is rarely longer than 1 min, thats what they aim for as people don’t like to wait 3 min, i know, crazy, but that how game stats works.
So it’s 1200 people.
Then, you didn’t factor in:
-uneven distribution of players per side, we get more than 2:1 sometimes,
-uneven distribution of players per campaign,
-people randomly leaving, so someone fills in.
-uneven distribution of players in time, less people playing at later hours
I don’t want to do math here, but it’s not as simple as “400 people”, and it’s constant stream of players every minute. I guess looking at steam stats for multiplayer games would be easier.
Then You get 4 campaigns on top of that, and more coming soon.
As for bot controlled squads, they are in every game, what more testing they need bro?
They are hiding them on purpose, giving player names, so people don’t notice they play pve half the time. It’s not bad, just dishonest, some of us prefer pve.
You speak about a lot of things like You know everything about it, but just based on this i don’t care to explain rest.
Your are correct, but I’ve talked about guaranteed 10 vs 10 player matches, did you miss that point? Make it 1-2k and it’s still going to be on low bar for a fps f2p game. It ain’t that hard in 2021. To put it in perspective, HnG had 6 million registered accounts in a first year of steam release. Even if retention is as low as 0.1% it’s still 6k users. That’s twice as many to equal as typical Squad pop.
It’s a hypothesis, they can be testing match dynamics. Not the AI itself. Don’t ask me, I’m not a dev. Just pointing out that there could be more things out there than someone just lying to you.
Well, do you want people to see that they play worse than bots? I do agree that it looks dodgy but I’m not jumping to conclusion as to why it’s done, just because it “feels right”.
No, I don’t know everything but neither do I present my experiences or ideas as facts.
And feel free to not explain. After reading this:
I have to explain to you first that matchmaking by low ping will naturally pull people from the same subnet. With the way how servers are hosted nowadays, this is perfectly normal.
What the hell, do you literally think 400 players is a healthy amount for a game like Enlisted? What? Post Scriptum has more than 400 active players lmfao.
PUBG and Apex Legends are in the same genre of games, theyre battle royals. They are, quite literally, competing with one another. What, you think Battlefield and Call of Duty don’t compete with each other because one has tanks and the other doesn’t? I don’t need you to explain anything to me, I have absolutely know what I’m talking about here, I have a degree in it.
This is what we call “first to market” and it doesn’t by any means imply the product is good. I’d love to hear about these other F2P games that were direct competitors to War Thunder that actually tried something different.
Thank you for proving my point.
No shit, the point that has been brought up multiple times is that the game is designed in a way that actively frustrates and drives players away. The entire monetization model is based around creating a frustrating experience that is solved by purchasing Premium time.
Thats just how networking any multiplyer game would be. There is no intenet to make games have less players.
This is just bad for balance, and more people leving means more people will leave still.
Point is matches are half empty i half campaigns, no 0.1% of 6 million can change that.
If they have magic buttton to make them not, but have soma magic testing it makes no sense. (button is longer mm time, but it will drive players off game)
Bots were mainly used to hide low playerbase in other titles, also to make new players feel good that they play good. So i assume is same here, unless its some magic reason again.
Rest assured, everyone, that the grind/economy in Enlisted is currently still way more forgiving than in that despair pit called War Thunder.
The main difference I can see where Enlisted is less forgiving is that, with the latest economy changes, it (oddly) sets a steep path for new players at the very beginning, with silver scarcity being the main bottleneck that makes it hard to fill up early squads, while later down the campaign(s) you are likely to eventually have more than enough, even without elite BP. This is weird, because it looks like the opposite of the usual F2P strategy.
WT entangles fresh meat with APPARENTLY relaxed and forgiving economy up to tier 3, then it starts pulling the rope until in late game it becomes unbearable, with even premium account being not enough anymore to break even with the absurd currency sinks, and the grind reaching metaphysical levels, where unlocking a new toy is just the beginning of the suffering, as you’re given heavily handicapped vehicles lacking essential weapons and systems to be competitive, and you’re supposed to either pay or spend, quite literally, DOZENS of matches being basically target practice for others, before becoming able to fight on reasonably even terms.
If Enlisted economy was anything like WT, you’d be still getting sub-equipped stock squads, but in addition you’d have to buy equipment for each squad individually without the ability to swap among them; low-star weapons would only deal 50% damage and have 300% spread; medikit slot would be unavailable until unlocking a specific upgrade; stock soldiers would be running at 60% speed until upgraded; and after every single match you would be forced to pay bronze to replenish your ammo and heal your wounded soldiers, with high level weapons and soldiers being so expensive that you would more often than not net a NEGATIVE outcome from playing, or else wait DAYS OR WEEKS for said soldiers to heal for free before being allowed to play them again (only for them to be wounded again, and so on).
TLDR: Enlisted > War Thunder. If we can solve the problem of silver scarcity for beginners, the rest of the economy and the grind are manageable.
No. I never made such statement. What I’ve pointed is just how many players you need for a single match. Just 20. If 20% of people are replaced by bots, it’s not a big issue, nether if even 50% are bots, as long as amount of players roughly equal. Let’s take a look at Hell Let Loose, which you think is a competitor of this game. A typical match requires 100 people. If 20% of players are missing, match is playable, at 50% missing it’s not playable. You would need smaller maps for that. So full experience in Enlisted, requires 5 times less players compared to HLL. This is not taking into account the length of the match and matchmaking.
There are many games in the same genre and while they might be competing on the market, in terms of trying to make a sale to the same people. They don’t necessary “touch” the same people. People who like HLL are likely to enjoy Squad, if setting doesn’t bother them, but are less likely to enjoy COD, for obvious reasons, such as that tempo of gameplay and focus on a completely different game mechanics. Of course there will be overlap but it won’t be large. There is a number of cases where you have an “internal” split inside of the same game. Like Hardcore mode in BF had historically very little overlap with a regular mode, in terms of player base. What it means is that player wise, these are different pools. When those two pools are around two different games, some monetization changes, have little to no impact on another pool. Large pool of players won’t stop playing Enlisted and start playing Vangard just because monetization there is done by cosmetics.
The closest “competitor” to Enlisted would be Heroes and Generals: both f2p, both have progression system, both will have weapon customization, both are set in WW2, both are kind of focused on authenticity more than fluidity of gameplay, the gun play is similar too. But even here we don’t have a complete conversion where all of the H&G players just came here (or went back) just because monetization is different.
War Thunder was first to market for aircombat, World of Warplanes was released a year later. But ground combat was several years behind the World of Tanks. So there is bit of mix who was there first. Neither of them had a big overlap in player base. The games are just too different in their core.
“Direct competitor” - so in this case, other f2p games are not competitors because they are not “aircraft/tank” games? The direct competitor would Armored Warfare. There was some World Of Warships game too, already dead as far as I know. Indirect would be even DCS and IL-2. But neither of them are f2p games with progression and neither of them are making even 1/100 of revenue that Gaijin and Wargaming does.
Like, is your point that those monetization systems just don’t work because they only work for some niche games? Maybe. But isn’t this exactly the point of devs here? They can’t go with purely skin monetization in a niche game. It just won’t have the same amount of players like Fortnite and therefore won’t make any significant revenue by selling skins.
In which way? I’ve played it multiple times after major patches. When shills on youtube kept saying how much better it became. Failing to mention that some day 1 bugs where still not fixed. The game was still the same gameplay wise. Same broken loop, just stretched with more content.
So do you have some concrete suggestions that would align with a current market? Beside “just sell skins”, that one is a bit too naive.
There’s never going to be a mass exodus from Enlisted because of the grind, it’s a slow trickle of players leaving the game out of frustration or apathy because they hit the grind wall and become disinterested. They look around and see similar games like Hell Let Loose and decide to move on. If there aren’t any other options, as is the case with War Thunder, they begrudgingly continue playing (or move on to non-similar games). But there are alternatives to Enlisted, there are tons of them, and that “large pool” you’re talking about starts to disappear very quickly. And the grind of Enlisted is the root cause of that.
No, I’ve in fact said that both in my video and in this thread. I’m in no way advocating for the complete removal of Premium. I’m saying to shift the monetization away from exclusively Premium. Enlisted has more than enough of a playerbase to sustain itself through Premium, Battle Pass, and cosmetic purchases, especially considering the audience of the game highly values historical aspects like decals, emblems, and uniforms and would be willing to pay for customization. It’s not “naïve” to say “sell cosmetics”. That’s EXACTLY how modern F2P games are designed and monetized, go look at ANY modern F2P game. Halo Infinite, Fortnite, Warzone, Apex Legends, Splitgate, Valorant, etc etc etc. The list goes on and on. The “Pay us for your time” model is outdated and, outside of mobile gaming, has been proven to not be as profitable as cosmetic microtransactions.
One made huge profit by creating a product with the lowest access denominator, others are following and creating trend and trend is not normality, they dis as fast as they are born. Which of these games is actually profitable? Fortnite obviously, but let’s read something about monetization in Apex Legends:
Quote “While that answer might not be what all players wanted to hear, it’s hard to argue against. The high rarity items in Apex are designed to keep players spending until they get them, and anyone who opts not to go that route will have to commit a huge chunk of time to make progress towards one.”
I don’t play it so can’t confirm or deny, but this doesn’t sounds like a game making profit of cosmetics.
