UW please learn from your mistakes so that your next game is more successful
Wingflier
Join Date: 2013-03-07 Member: 183769Members
Join Date: 2013-03-07 Member: 183769Members
The biggest mistake you made, as a company, was not adding matchmaking from day 1 of release. This is such a wonderful game, and I'm sure that if everybody who bought it gave it a fair chance, it would have a playerbase 20 times larger than it does now. So why doesn't it?
Because most players have quit: Not because of performance reasons. Not because they disliked the gameplay. Not because the graphics weren't good enough. They quit because most games are a one-sided stomp, where new players, who have no idea what they're doing, die over and over again until they get sick of the game and quit. The community can spew their "get better scrubs, we don't want bad players" attitudes all they want, but the fact of the matter is that most people don't have the time, nor the patience, to devote to getting slaughtered for dozens of hours before the game actually becomes "fun". Even if you are a good player, there is no guarantee your team will be good, because as I said, even after over half a million dollars worth of DLC work being put into the game, there is still no skill-balancing system in place.
If you think about how you spent your resources on this game, you'll realize how much money you have squandered. Perhaps 1% of your playerbase is female, and wanted female models. 100% of your playerbase wants balanced games, where both sides have an equal chance, and which aren't over within the first 5 minutes.
Yes, faction balance is important, but it is not as important as matchmaking. You can not tell me that other FPS games such a CoD or Counter-Strike are balanced in terms of all the weapons being viable, all strategies being equally strong, etc. However, the difference is that those games have a skill-distribution system. So even with their massive game design balancing flaws, it doesn't matter, because to the players, having intense, even matches, is vastly more important than having perfect game balance.
Ask yourself, how often do you have super close NS2 games? What percent of the time? Now what percent of the time is the game over within 10 minutes?
Name a single popular FPS on the market right now that doesn't have matchmaking or some kind of built-in player balancing system. I bet you can't. Now look at the most popular RTS, BY FAR, on the market right now: Starcraft 2. It also boasts a spectacular matchmaking system as well.
I'm sorry this post is so inflammatory, I'm just very upset. NS2, in terms of the gameplay, is such a f*cking wonderful game. It does *SO* many things right, and it merges two genres in a way that I've never seen before. I have loved the FPS/RTS genre all the way back since Battlezone 1 and Urban Assault, yet every company that has tried it in the successive 15 years has failed miserably in some fundamental way. Your major mistake was not realizing such a simple truth: That most people are not going to continue playing a game, regardless of how good the design, when the player skill, and game outcomes, are so horribly skewed. Why continue to play NS2 when a person can just as easily get their FPS fix from a dozen other superior-balanced, albeit inferior in terms of innovation, games?
The unfortunate truth is that it's probably already too late for NS2. Chances are that within a year, it will have only a fraction of its already tiny playerbase, and will be relegated to the bargain bin. Please learn from your mistakes for your next game. And for god's sake, if you make an NS3, start the game out RIGHT.
Because most players have quit: Not because of performance reasons. Not because they disliked the gameplay. Not because the graphics weren't good enough. They quit because most games are a one-sided stomp, where new players, who have no idea what they're doing, die over and over again until they get sick of the game and quit. The community can spew their "get better scrubs, we don't want bad players" attitudes all they want, but the fact of the matter is that most people don't have the time, nor the patience, to devote to getting slaughtered for dozens of hours before the game actually becomes "fun". Even if you are a good player, there is no guarantee your team will be good, because as I said, even after over half a million dollars worth of DLC work being put into the game, there is still no skill-balancing system in place.
If you think about how you spent your resources on this game, you'll realize how much money you have squandered. Perhaps 1% of your playerbase is female, and wanted female models. 100% of your playerbase wants balanced games, where both sides have an equal chance, and which aren't over within the first 5 minutes.
Yes, faction balance is important, but it is not as important as matchmaking. You can not tell me that other FPS games such a CoD or Counter-Strike are balanced in terms of all the weapons being viable, all strategies being equally strong, etc. However, the difference is that those games have a skill-distribution system. So even with their massive game design balancing flaws, it doesn't matter, because to the players, having intense, even matches, is vastly more important than having perfect game balance.
Ask yourself, how often do you have super close NS2 games? What percent of the time? Now what percent of the time is the game over within 10 minutes?
Name a single popular FPS on the market right now that doesn't have matchmaking or some kind of built-in player balancing system. I bet you can't. Now look at the most popular RTS, BY FAR, on the market right now: Starcraft 2. It also boasts a spectacular matchmaking system as well.
I'm sorry this post is so inflammatory, I'm just very upset. NS2, in terms of the gameplay, is such a f*cking wonderful game. It does *SO* many things right, and it merges two genres in a way that I've never seen before. I have loved the FPS/RTS genre all the way back since Battlezone 1 and Urban Assault, yet every company that has tried it in the successive 15 years has failed miserably in some fundamental way. Your major mistake was not realizing such a simple truth: That most people are not going to continue playing a game, regardless of how good the design, when the player skill, and game outcomes, are so horribly skewed. Why continue to play NS2 when a person can just as easily get their FPS fix from a dozen other superior-balanced, albeit inferior in terms of innovation, games?
The unfortunate truth is that it's probably already too late for NS2. Chances are that within a year, it will have only a fraction of its already tiny playerbase, and will be relegated to the bargain bin. Please learn from your mistakes for your next game. And for god's sake, if you make an NS3, start the game out RIGHT.
Comments
Reinforcement could have secured them a lot more money if they structured it correctly in the beginning.
Meh plenty of mistakes have been made, hopefully they take the lessons learned from here and apply them moving forward.
Chivalry?
Battlefield games also curb-stomp their matchmaking a tad, so one can have many stacked games in a row too. (not really an example however)
Last points, I would have loved games so stacked they ended in 5 mins, the ones I get drag on for ages with people leaving left and right, with quicker games people would hopefully change teams more
You are saying kinda correct things, but just kinda being rude, so my guess is some disagrees coming your (and my) way.
I don't particularly enjoy playing with rookies, but they do even join the one few servers that are not rookie servers. And I do not particularly enjoy playing with or against a team were there is one person with so much higher skill level than anyone else on the server. So I would like some kind of matchmaking thing.
Performance patches they've made were a little to late. Most of their niche audience had already tried the game by then. It's not easy to convince people to return when their first experience was so full of low FPS. Even now, after all those patches, it expected to have 30 FPS during late game big fights (that is, if you are lucky).
TL;DR Balance, tutorials, matchmaking were all secondary problems, performance trumps all of those, and that was lacking for a long time.
Currently popular? Nope, but there isn't a currently popular FPS on the market afaik that isn't shit so it's a moot point. Historically, UT2k4 would be a good example. It was certainly popular for a reasonably long time, and the closest thing to balancing it had were mods and were far from ubiquitous.
It's also a good example of a mod driven game. Matchmaking only works when potential game modes are strictly limited. That doesn't necessarily limit you to one mode, when last I looked at SC2 (and this was in beta) it had 1v1, 2v2 and 4v4 matchmaking modes. What SC2 failed absolutely at is proper matching for custom maps. Their game finding system and how horribly it crippled the map development scene stands as proof that you cannot use built in matchmaking in a mod driven game.
UWE's stated intent for NS2 was to make it mod driven in a similar manner as Unreal Tournament, which would stand as a definitive explanation of why they did NOT focus on matchmaking. I don't exactly think they were too successful in making NS2 into that sort of game however.
The best tutorial out there is on youtube and even those videos are outdated by now. It seems the game has changed so much that commanders are afraid to command because they became unfamiliar with the builds and changes. Although, not so much recently.
With stacked teams and very little commanders, the game begins to show a few of it's problems. I also don't know how matchmaking would even work with this game to begin with and DON'T compare SC2 matchmaking with NS2... don't even go there. There's a HUGE difference between the two games not to mention that matchmaking is incredibly easier with starcraft.
If you really, truly, want better games you should make your own team or play with friends.
For instance, I play on only two servers (YO clan and HBZ), and often see regulars idling in RR for 1-2mn just to get the teams balanced. Of course there are stacked games here and there, but more often than not, if there are enough regulars, you will get balanced games.
Bought this game with 3 other friends and I am the only one that played past the first week (and now have well over 300 hours). Something clicked for me and I was able to have small successes early but my friends didn't and never reached that point where the game starts to become rewarding.
It's too bad. They have missed out on one of the better game experiences I've had in the last 3 years but anytime I mention NS2 they look at me like I'm insane.
My favorite memories of the game are the epic encounters trying to kill or save a hive, stop an exo train, or my favorite the gorge/hydra rush early game. Unfortunately for my friends it was such a stomp most of the time their only memory is the kill/respawn sequences and being yelled at for being greens.
Starcraft 2 got a patch that overhauled the whole battle net 2.0, including that custom map matchmaking. google: "starcraft 2 arcade"
1. Performance
2. Tutorials, lack thereof
3. Balance changes and content changes at the same time.
IMO the match making complaint is bs. Balance the teams yourself, teach the newbies instead of being so wrapped up in winning. Who cares if you lose in 5 minutes. 5 minutes of teach is better than 5 minutes of yelling go here or there.
To the OP, name one current FPS that is as dynamic and complex as NS2 (which is an FPS/RTS hybrid)? There is no comparison. How do you quantify skill in NS2? Kills? K:D? I can be a gorge and build stuff and support units well... then again I can be a shit gorge and have the same K:D ratio, with the same amount of game hours.
You don't master everything in one week. You have to listen, read and train. It needs patience. Those things like reading and listening aren't the cup of tea of natural born gamer. In fact the Internet generation (and also the TV generation) aren't those who read the most and are usually the ones that fails at school (many scientific study on that topic).
NS2 can't be properly managed. ENSL does. You are more criticizing the player behavior than the game itself. Granted; the game could be a little better with a in-game interface for many things (More tutorial on specific matter or session (ex: shooting ducks)). But that is not a prerequisite for it.
It is tremendously amazing to see how these generations pretend to live in technology world and don't use it. There are many ways to do it. ENSL is one. How do you think they did 50 years ago for organizing competitions ??? ... Yes paper, pen, charts, ladder and a little bit of patience.
Both databases can be used to "balance" teams.
All you need is shine (adminmod) and choose one of the 5 possible random options.
And im forcing the random very often if i see stacked teams again and again.
So yes, there are admins out there using this mechanism.
I think the biggest mistake from UWE isnt a missing matchmaking system.
We had some free weekends and steam sales.
And what happen on these steamsales?
1hr rookies fight against ENSL premium league players with over 1000 hrs of gameplay on poor rubberbanding servers.
Im sure these new players thought:
"Cheaters everywhere"
"fuk this rubberbanding from hell"
A simple solution would be: real rookie servers and a serverbrowser that show the real serverperfomance, not the one from that second you click on update list.
We had this dicussion here very often and i dont talk about permanent rookie servers.
But during 2 weeks after steamsale/free weekend these players need a place to learn the game without getting slaughtered.
I think thats the main reason why the game losing all the possible new players after 2-3 weeks.
But im sure, UWE doing the same mistake again on next steamsale.
I smell another cool Badge program coming.
You're very wrong, it was and still is simply performance; people (including tons of old players) came in expecting nonstop framerates of 300 frames per second (even I did) but that was far from what happened; it's come a long way in terms of improvements but this was the biggest downfall
It essentially made the game -inaccessible- to tons and tons of players, if I click on NS2 in steam and see how many of my friends OWN the game compared to who PLAYS the game it's a complete landslide of a difference
Matchmaking is NOT a requirement what so ever, but when done properly it does give people more incentive to play and get better; a game which fails at this for example is CSGO(3rd parties do it better and charge monthly fees), and a game which excels at this is halo 2, or league of legends. The minority from what 'I'VE SEEN' will play and strive to get better no matter what because the era they came from was simply non-stop hardcore fps games, it's like comparing high school kids from the 70s to high school kids now, kids back then were tougher
Tutorials isn't really a big one imo, but the game needed one of those start in a boxed in corridor and have the game tell you to preform certain actions and give you a checkmark when it's complete
As for the free weekends they should have been done when the build felt stable, for example after everything feels stable, wait two weeks for any further issues, if nothing excessive is present then book and free weekend and don't update until it happens, the people(newcomers) who don't play will see the new stuff as new anyway, even if we've had it for a few weeks
Anyway they still fall under my top development teams because of community interaction, simply nice people, and hard working; plus they made one of the best games to come out in the recent five year span. maybe even further
I hope their next game is nothing short of awesome and with all the experience they've gained I hope they make it twice as good
edit: on that note I'm also excited for the matching system
There have been some performance issues along the way, I agree. However, on the game's launch, the performance was pretty solid for the vast majority of people. Any time there is a new game, there is bound to be some performance issues because of all the different setups and configurations that it is impossible to test for. NS2's performance issues were not bad enough to prevent most people with computers which met the requirements (which honestly aren't that high by today's standards) from playing the game.
You are wrong about DotA 2 as well, and it really makes me wonder whether you have done any research on this at all. DotA 2 has a matchmaking system, a fairly sophisticated one by the way. However, recent algorithm changes to the matchmaking system have caused such a backlash in the community that huge swaths of people are actually leaving the game.
http://dev.dota2.com/showthread.php?t=107929
http://dev.dota2.com/showthread.php?t=96561
http://dev.dota2.com/showthread.php?t=107821
http://dev.dota2.com/showthread.php?t=105279
http://dev.dota2.com/showthread.php?t=108363
Yet, even with its massive MM problems, it still has 400k concurrent players at any given time. The fact that it *has* shitty matchmaking is better than no matchmaking at all.
Your theory is self-refuting. If it really were performance that were preventing your friends from enjoying the game (and everyone else for that matter), then when they fixed the performance issues, those players would have returned and continued playing. The reason people actually don't come back, is because the game is full of team-stacking and one-sided stomps, not to mention the problem of joining mid-game with few resources, which is another problem MM would have addressed.
An Elo system does not work based on individual performances inside of matches, but based on wins and losses over a large period of time (as well as considering how many matches a person has played). While you may bash a system like this as unreliable, it works perfectly fine for 5v5 games such as League of Legends and Counter-Strike without taking into account any of the factors you are referring to.
I completely agree. Using MM does not mean "playing competitively", it means being matched with people of an (average) equal skill level, or at least having balanced teams. Learning to play the game is much more enjoyable and effective when doing it in close games, not one-sided stomps which don't teach anything except that the game balance sucks.
LOL, yes let's use pen and paper to organize our matches. Let's use ENSL which I waited on yesterday for 4 hours for a match to start (it never did by the way). The rest of your argument is simply filled with banter and logical fallacies. Pen and paper matchmaking LOL.
I guess its just me, I'd prefer a (good) server browser anyday, so I pick the server with best ping and good amount of player
yeah, I don't like matchmaking either. Beside the benefit to chose a server you like (ping, map, playercount, etc), if you can choose the server you are playing on you can have favorite servers and something like a server community can develop. while on a strict match making system you are more like in an anonymous blob.
And playing with people you know is defiantly more fun than playing with strangers.
Also I realize the playerbase is small, my point was that it wouldn't be so small if MM (or equivalent) had been here from the very beginning. It's probably already too late for NS2, but hopefully not for their next game.
I think the biggest lesson to be learned is not to release your game until it's truly ready to be released. If you need another year of beta, then keep it in beta until it is actually complete.
The neglect to GUI basics and lack of interactive tutorial before you can play has cost a lot of the player base.
It would be great if after the next batch of minor fixes, steam could advertise to owners of the game to come and try it again.
I can't tell you how much this applies to another game that recently came out that has this problem... cough payday 2 cough
not saying that it's great now, but it's definitely better.
Sorry, NS2 is the king of bugs/unpreparedness/bad performance/not being ready for release. No argument to be had.
It wasent UWE's fault, they clearly put out a news article that said it was a build for testing purposes quickly, it was the people's fault for not reading
http://unknownworlds.com/ns2/build-252-is-now-live-on-steam/
It's not a mistake they put a test patch before F2P weekend. It's the worst mistake, that they organized it just 'right before' Reinforcement F2P. And that testing patch was a failure, and they had no time to fix it. (Rubber-banding, Mouse lags, Server lags, in some cases worse fps)