Mercurysteam's Hangout
BARRACKS => Gameplay Feedback => Topic started by: baconman1912 on July 07, 2018, 08:35:57 AM
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After playing at least a week of this game, I've decided to post my thoughts and feedback here. To start off I've played a lot of pretty good free2play games in my time ( Warframe, LET IT DIE, and Paladins) so I think I can speak from a good bit of experience as well as doing research here and online about this game and the community that follows it.
I am dumbfounded to see just how many god awful decisions were made in this games current development.
First off just in case anyone still has the delusions that this is a "Free2Play" game the facts are clear. It would only be free if you didn't have to buy the campaigns to truly play the game for any amount of enjoyment. Hell the shitshow that is Destiny 2 is more enjoyable then this! (and I HATE that game...)
Don't get me wrong some of the missions are kind of neat, but the shear number of issues I've had to deal with playing said missions are whats wrong with this potentially good game.
Second off, Let's talk about the ingame economy and the progression system. I don't know why you need 3 forms of currency, Gold, Faction Points and, Tokens... At first I thought hey maybe it could be OK, you know build them up over time like any reasonable economy usually works...BUT!
It just seems like system that only really works on paper. Price vs Cost, I understand the affinity system is "supposed to" help elevate this, and I wish it did but it doesn't. Rather it doesn't help in a way that really works to the effect it should. Here's an example, Lets say you've reached the level to unlock Doldren, But you have already spent your begining amount of gold 44K at a usual reward of 1K to 2K is insane especially when your almost NEVER going to be the only one picking gold. All you senior players can try to defend it all you want but it is what it is... A TRAP! THEY WANT YOU TO PAY FOR CHARACTERS!! They have no intention of you earning gold to get these characters, if they did after level 10 instead of getting 2K for leveling up You'd be getting at least 10K. You don't that's the proof right there, the devs are relying on the mob mentality of there devoted fans to silence anyone who speaks out about it. Look at some of the posts on here and even this post, you'll see it fairly commonly.
Due to the way the reward system is progress is very slow or nearly mythical, making you basically fight for scraps and the very rare chance at getting a chance of getting a new weapon. The very fact that you can play for 30+ minutes and walk away empty handed is disgusting game design.
For some BONKERS reason it's still like that?! WHY? WHO THOUGHT THAT WAS A GOOD IDEA?! MORE IMPORTANTLY WHY IS THAT GUY STILL EMPLOYED?
Alright now that that's out of my system lets move on...
I personally like the idea of the Antagonist system, thou I certainly think its very unbalanced. (and contrary to popular belief it can be balanced!) Demons Souls started the invasion idea and I personally would love to see it in more games, especially shooters like this. The CQC system is neat but not at all complex, you can try the whole grab dodge thing but punch spamming works almost better 9/10 percent of the time.
Alright here is how I think a lot of these issues can be fixed...
- For rewards just give everyone all the things the choice way of doing things is just stupid and undefendable.
- For the antagonist system first put it back in beta to work on it, I'm not saying remove it i'm saying make the AI antagonist well its being worked on. Then instead of it being just one person make it a three man squad with some added buff or debuff depended on the Raiders level.
- Make the payout of gold after level 10 go from just 2K to something like 10K, 20K, 10K in an alternating order.
- Let people spend "FACTION POINTS" on new weapons, instead of forcing people to play the same mission a thousand and 1 times!
- add voice or text chat, I know people think this community is toxic but it's more like a swamp. A little cooperation goes a long way.
- Finally, offer a 20 or so offer that gives people access to all the current and future campaigns! Focus more on trying to sell us cosmetics and more interesting content!
That concludes my thoughts!
(Realistically I don't expect this to make much difference, I know full well some hates coming my way like a barbed wire prostate exam. But hey at least I said it and that's what really matters!)
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Your concerns aren't bad or anything, but they seem pretty common for newer players who think they are bashing their head against a brick wall to progress.
First and foremost, buying gold does NOT appear to be a common practice at all. Maybe some people do it, but hardly anyone I've talked to or played with does that, and I've been around for a while, as far as the game's lifespan is concerned.
Characters used to cost twice as much as they do now, and gold acquisition used to be WAYYYYYYYYYYYY slower, with only 1 mission in the game giving more than 7k gold, 10k with an antag (Weapons from the Past. Which is now inexplicably lower rewards than every other mission in the game). I picked up every character up to that point before the Hades update that cut their costs, including Ginebra, who took weeks or months to grind up 360k gold for. Now, the most expensive characters are 180k which will only take a day or two of playing to reach, if that, depending on how long you play at a time. I'm sorry but I don't consider that all that long of a grind to get a character, or some sort of nefarious "trap" to make gold buying a common practice. Character cost and the grind to afford them used to be the #1 complaint about the game, but that complaint virtually vanished with all the Hades updates.
I too play/played many good F2P (sad that LET IT DIE eventually became a pile of crap :( ), and I'd say picking up the most expensive characters, with dedicated farming, takes less time than it does to grind for all the parts of, let's say, Nidus or Gara from Warframe. I don't factor in build time like most that complain about Warframe's grind, I just know that it took way longer than a couple of days of mindless grinding the same missions to get certain frames. Ivara took WEEKS to finally get, because RNG. Equinox, Knux, and Hema.... Hema forced me to drop my moon clan down to mountain. Comparing the grind between games is totally fair, and I'd say that the grind is not that bad now.
The gold grind on this might seem slow at first, but it is predictable at least and the only RNG in the game is blueprint drops, which will eventually just happen and aren't something to stress over, and card drawing, which is somewhat controlled by the affinity system. The card rolling can definitely be better, but it's not that bad in the long run.
My recommendation to you is to group up with other players. Playing this game with a pre-made group is significantly more fun than solo queuing. It will frustrate you less, and have lower chance of getting into a party with bad ping, disconnecting players, etc.
Level up rewards could definitely be improved. The end game right now is a lot of gold grinding because weapons cost so much to build. Getting blueprints truly isn't a problem, it's affording them all! It really doesn't take that long though to grind up for what you really want to use, it's just that there's a fair amount of characters, weapons and cards to obtain now that yes, it will take time to get *all* of it, but that's true with any of the other games you mentioned or any other game ever. I've got thousands of hours into Warframe and still don't have anything... used to, but fell behind during Plains.
Voice/text chat is one of those no-brainers, not sure why they haven't added it yet since it's very common criticism.
And finally, pretty sure everyone agrees that the blueprint competition reward that enables players to walk away from a 30 minute mission with NO REWARDS should be #1 priority on things to change. It's awful and was the first thing that put a sour taste in my mouth the first time I played this game, had a bad review posted up for months until I saw some really positive changes for the better with the Hades update. The devs do listen and have come a LONG way since launch, just gotta remember the game is still in infancy, and they are an indie dev team working on a very high production value multi-platform project. I'm willing to bet we will see a lot of major improvements when the 4th campaign drops, just like they did with Hades.
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everything so right draco, but surely a lot of these changes could be avoided from the beginning since make the possibility to spend some time without rewards should be everything except acceptable by the players... in the warframe model all the rewards are shared and not divided; i think this choice could be done immediately with one less problem to think on in the future (now) and a better liking index. so it's comprehensible the frustration many players feel (first of all the newbies). there are some serious problems in the game like the balance at high levels (i saw the live of brentwoody on twitch who is level 402 or more) in which the player (TheBrentWoody) demonstrated a lot of skills, playing like antag, with harec in many matches (and here nothing wrong), but when he went with alicia, he could fly by a part of a map to the other and 1shot the enemy team dropping explosives during the flies. "Amazing" he said at the end of that eyesore. "Frustrating" i should say, and now this important problem (the balance) can't be fix for first cause the reward problem has the priority (rightly!). all this to say i understand they are indie, so the changes need time, but a lot of their work could be avoided if they had achieved some choices didn't make sense... also add the possibility to add friends in game should be a good thing cause find someone to play with already in game is easier (my thought).
P.S. i saw you also used the word "frustration" in your post. i think "frustration" and "game" couldn't be in the same phrase...
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Level doesn't have a lot to do with the one shoting for the smoking daisy. People don't use that gun. the "Sassy" card does the super speedy floating. The daisy will just one shot people if you can hit with it, that's not elvel based. Sassy (rare) can be got by anyone at lvl 101, and the common card is only slighhtly worse at level 50.
But yeah, I don't often play Alicia antag, but I was showing that card's effectiveness. Heh.
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But I will second that nothing in the game really balances well. But it couldn't ever really be balanced with the type of disparities between characters. Sure I am pretty good at Harec, but Harec's dps is trash in comparison to Konstantin. (And his survivability.) Harec is good at killing things in one shot, which, fortunately, works in Antag, but as soon as the gun stops killing in one shot due to health inflation on mobs it is useless, seeing that you can only shoot once every couple of seconds with reload accounted for.
The Smoking Daisy is pretty bad at the game, because unless you crit the "Daisy Drop" won't kill Hades/Wardogs (at a certain mmr.) But it will mop up players real quick, because our health is a quarter of theirs. I don't understand the concept that our weapons are supposed to mow through 400 health on some characters, but others take drastically longer to do the same, and that when put in a vs situation our guns will outright destroy other players. It just seems odd.
I love this game, though. As my level should say, I've invested a lot of time in it, and I know how to counter act most things, but some of them relies on squad cohesion that isn't always available. I haven't faced a Sassy wielding Alicia, and I can see it being rough to deal with, especially with certain characters.
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- add voice or text chat, I know people think this community is toxic but it's more like a swamp. A little cooperation goes a long way.
I agree with this 1000% AT L E A S T text chat. My god. I would love nothing more than to help people with objectives and what they're supposed to be focusing on.
Also I cannot tell if this community is toxic or not because there isn't any in-game medium to even be toxic on LOL. But for some reason voice chat is possible in-game (not party chat) on ps4?
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Well Draco some of the things you said have given me some food for thought, the blueprints don't seem that expensive. what kind of prices we talking here? Also I understand there an indie dev team but there are some things you shouldn't defend, the issues that are easy fixes are just that easy to fix.
From what i've seen they've been here since the beta. Well I personally don't think giving them a pass for being lazy, thry do have limits but some of the issues are well within them.
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Found yet another issue... SOFT BANNING YOU FOR LEAVING A MISSION... That, That is complete horse shit! You can't defend that you shouldn't, this dev team is really really? WHAT WORD DO I EVEN USE?!
The game looks like a mix between Anarchy Reigns and Metal Gear, But the Dev team seems to have no idea or seemingly no idea what is and is not reasonable... How can anyone defend that i'm even more concerned?!
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you shouldn't leave missions, cause this isn't good for the quality of the game of the other players you play with. you can't pretend nothing in this way.
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The punishment for leaving was apparently added due to player feedback, just one more thing they changed due to the players. Any new player quickly gets frustrated at anyone randomly dropping out of a match, so people naturally want to see punishment for such behavior. I still think it needs to be tweaked to tell the difference between a lag disconnect and a true "I went to the menu and pressed exit game or just turned the game off" because a lot of people do have connection issues and that seems easy to account for..... but this is not the first multiplayer game to punish leavers.
At max forge level, which is currently hit at lv 150, forge rank 25, rare BP's cost 72k to craft, common 36k. When considering how much it'll cost to max every gun in the game, that's a lot, but I just build the stuff I know I want to play with first, and I'll get around to other stuff later. That said, they DO need to add a way to test characters and weapons in the game before you spend the time getting it, like solo mode would be perfect for seeing if you want to try something out.
Like Woody said, level isn't really as big of a deal as many people make it out to be. It's more of a measure of how many matches someone has played, how much time they've invested. There's no actual gameplay benefits beyond level 150 currently, and even the passives up to that point are pretty minor when you do the math. Forge levels are the biggest benefit to making something stronger, but you have no way of knowing if that level 200 player is using a gun at rank 0 or rank 25. I've still got some 0's, 10's, etc. because again, the gold cost to build everything to max level is the high-level struggle. I just don't have a problem with such a grind because if there's something I'm really wanting, I can focus farm for it in just a few hours, or a day or two TOPS. There's virtually nothing that takes longer than a couple of days to farm for, there's just enough content, now, that getting it all will take some time.... and that's just the nature of games like this to get people to play more. I play warframe way less now than I did before I hit MR 23. Except Raiders has the difficult gameplay, friend interaction, and pvp that Warframe doesn't have, so even though I still technically have everything in Raiders, it's still fun to play thanks to the mechanics.
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Damn Draco that sounds expensive!
From what I've played losing a player tends to be pretty beneficial, more rewards and the missions are not really that difficult. With a potental 3 hour soft ban, I can't see why they needed to go that far?
The fact that the player base it self made that possible is disturbing. I ended up leaving because of a minor medical condition, so I tend to have nurse's show up at varying times so I can never tell when they'll show up. I ended up leaving so I didn't end up wasting lives and possibly making it fail.
Played almost all except one of the missions so I can say only really 1 is kind of tricky. Again of this issues are no excuse to defend the game on, you can easily find proof that most if not all the biggest issues are small ones that have simply been left to rot. They can be easily fixed, that;s a fact not a statement a fact. They can fix them... but they simply choose not to.
Also tooeasy. The game quality doesn't go down, hell I've seen no real different's in anything except better rewards... I think you mean sometimes it can vary but most of the time it's been fine.
So far what I've seen and looked into makes me suspicious of this game and more importantly the Developers themselves. I think I may Drop the game for at least a month, it just looks more and more like a blatant bus crash waiting to happen. (I would not be at all surprised if some absolutely horrible information could come out about the dev team and nothing would really change...)
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3 hours? The temp bans last a few minutes >_>
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Yeah, I’ve been disconnected like 5 times and those have all resulted in like 5 minute bans, not hours long.