Why did the game's population die off so quickly?

[PhamTrinli]

I just checked the store page and the game was only just released 2.5 months ago.

I haven't found any major technical issues with the game and it feels fun to play (other than a few jerks doing jerk stuff with their bases) - so *why* did the game's population die off so quickly?

[Fynnpire]

Raiding becomes a grind quite quickly, resulting in most of the player base preferring to build over raiding. Which leads to less raids, less raids removes a lot of the reward for building. Domino effect.
Combine this with hardly any content and you've got this neglected mess.

[Polar Test 53]

i would have to say about 40 hours in. on average you'll have done pretty much everything you can besides looking for some outstanding bases in the social tab.
this leads to less raids. less raids leads to less builders which lowers the raider count even more.

lack of content and lack of advertising to gain new players. the AmA was a total letdown IMO as well. alot of it was. thats not a problem thats a skill issue or a no not happening as well as half of it was used up on totally useless questions that no ones ever heard of like, yes the acid cube bug is indeed a bug. altho i still wish it'll come back as a mod one day.
there is some QOL that is needed that people have been complaining about since launch.

this one makes me chuckle but there were also alot of people who complained that the hardest difficulty was too hard. dont see these people anymore so im assuming they are all gone. they mainly talked about killboxes in brutal which is where they should be.

but there are now killboxes popping up in all difficulty levels since people have found ways to cheat the difficulty rating system. or i guess its working as intended according to BHVR. even though they said killboxes are only in brutal but ive been shown some nasty ones that can be in normal. and this is probably also leading to a loss of new players.
as well as alot of crashes just dont hear about them as much since the people who have been crashing alot all left.

just a few things that added all together make for a much larger issue

[PhamTrinli]

Originally posted by Fynnpire:

Raiding becomes a grind quite quickly, resulting in most of the player base preferring to build over raiding. Which leads to less raids, less raids removes a lot of the reward for building. Domino effect.
Combine this with hardly any content and you've got this neglected mess.

Also, I've been noticing lately that, at least at the top-end of the difficulty, most people who are building bases are more concerned with building death traps rather than enjoyable levels. In terms of level design there is a difference between a death trap and an actual level. It's easy to make an impossible or near-impossible death trap. It takes time and thought to make an actual level that still ends up being difficult yet fun/enjoyable to run/explore.

These people don't seem to understand the whole point of base building is to create a fun and enjoyable experience - not to see how impossible you can make it by just building every brick of your base out of traps.

[Sairek Ceareste]

Price too high for too little content,

Too little content

Everyone wants to build, but only a couple want to raid, meaning less raiders for builders, which is not fun, meaning more grind for builders, who don't want to raid to build, which leads to more drop off. Raiding in particular is pretty boring. There's a clear raider meta and not a lot of options anyway, which means the solution to most raids is always going to be the same one, not that there is a lot of options to choose from anyway.

Bugs on release gave bad first impressions. Especially the constant crashing.




I think the game can recover if they implement more content, because the game has been poorly advertised and hasn't reached a lot of people. The foundation is good, but is plagued by critical problems. Raiding needs to be more fun, and more than just shoehorning people to build. The building is far more interesting than the raiding aspect and the bi-weekly content updates aren't helping anyone. Builders are getting more mods but those mods are pretty uninspired to even raid against.

Content wise, it feels like the game should have been on the stove for at least a year longer. It's like ordering a full course meal, but one portion of your dish has finished first and rather waiting to server it all at once properly the portions are getting served as they're being done, and we're waiting for the rest to finish eating, despite paying a decent sum of money for the entire meal. Most people however have already begun walking out of the restaurant because there are more appetizing courses that are full and ready to be served as soon as they pay, rather than sitting around waiting for the rest of the meal to arrive after they've already paid.

[RustyTheRed]

I spent dozens of hours making fun, challenging and aesthetically pleasing outposts. They were getting kills and accolades, and some raiders messaged me over Steam with compliments. Towards the end of their lifespan, they were getting no raids in the 24 hour window. Then the outposts were booted to Social play, where they never got played again.

It's just major "What's the point?" energy. All that time and effort building and testing outposts, wasted. Meanwhile, other builders are cranking out dime a dozen killboxes, which decent builders have to raid to afford to build decent outposts.

There's no "cream rises to the top" mechanics in place. Good builders aren't rewarded for their efforts, so they left. Then the raiders left because there were no good outposts to raid.

It's all in the name of Fairness and Freedom, but at the end of the day, it's just a game. And games need to be fun. Fun outposts should get priority, for the benefit of the builders who invested the time to make them, and for the benefit of the raiders, who are sick of lazy outposts.

[PhamTrinli]

Seems like some long-term design flaws in the game play loop then. Unfortunate. The minute-to-minute game play is good at first and the concept is really cool too.

[RustyTheRed]

Originally posted by PhamTrinli:

Seems like some long-term design flaws in the game play loop then. Unfortunate. The minute-to-minute game play is good at first and the concept is really cool too.

I agree. It's a damn shame imo.
When there was plenty of players, it was great fun. I had 200+ raids on my first outpost, shortly after launch. I looked forward to watching the replays and adjusting my outpost after work. Like you said, it is a cool concept.

[Iron Predator]

I dont understand why we aren't allowed to refresh P10 bases anymore infinitely as a reward for getting there. That alone makes it so we will eventually stop seeing created maps altogether because social raiding have literally 0 incentive to even try to raid them.

[Ghost]

The community brought up complaints about design choices that made the game unenjoyable. The developers ignored those complaints then doubled down on their design choices because the internal group of testers found the game more enjoyable that way. Now we're here.

[「AMOEBA」]

Maintaining bases is a grind
Raiding is a grind
Base Build meta was solved in the free beta
Not enough content to support this game
Myriad of bugs plagued the game on launch

A lot of critical issues with how the game was designed and they were all brought up during the beta but of course, in typical BHVR fashion, none of it was listened to.

This game needed a 3-6 month delay to fix the major issues this game had with sustainability and content but it didn't get that and now we seeing the consequences.

[Snoot Boops]

Originally posted by PhamTrinli:

Originally posted by Fynnpire:

Raiding becomes a grind quite quickly, resulting in most of the player base preferring to build over raiding. Which leads to less raids, less raids removes a lot of the reward for building. Domino effect.
Combine this with hardly any content and you've got this neglected mess.

Also, I've been noticing lately that, at least at the top-end of the difficulty, most people who are building bases are more concerned with building death traps rather than enjoyable levels. In terms of level design there is a difference between a death trap and an actual level. It's easy to make an impossible or near-impossible death trap. It takes time and thought to make an actual level that still ends up being difficult yet fun/enjoyable to run/explore.

These people don't seem to understand the whole point of base building is to create a fun and enjoyable experience - not to see how impossible you can make it by just building every brick of your base out of traps.

there isn't very much of a grind. it's advisable to max out your weapons and suit skills that are catered to your play style and everything else really becomes optional. but from a completion standpoint and wanting to max everything out, you'll need to get to level 68 in the game before that becomes a reality. leveling up your "advisors" comes with just playing the game and serve 0 purpose other than extending the time any boosts you use with them last for. if you don't use boosts from them, then leveling them up at all serves 0 purpose at all other than for the 5 level gains you get from them = 500 cells from the floating test tube baby gone wrong.

and yes, people are a*sholes with their base design and make it as humanly hard for the average person as they possibly can. i get a kick out of speed running them and leaving with 0 deaths and no rating cause f'em. even if they manage to get a couple kills out of me i still wont rate kill boxes. it takes the fun out of the game for almost everyone.

[[59er]ʕ•ᴥ•ʔDungeonmaster]

Repost...


- Bug patches are being released way too slowly, many bugs that have been actively ruining the players experience have been in the game since its release and it's been more than a month now. Usually developers prioritize fixing exploits and bugfixes, especially soon after release. Not BHVR.

- Not enough new content to keep players hooked. A lot of people tried this game in the open or closed beta, and there's basically nothing different about the full version and the beta versions. People who already experienced the game for free don't have anything new to experience in the full paid release.

- Lack of proper marketing. They did a streamer event and paid for a game awards ad and such, but that's still clearly not enough.

- The roadmap tells us that any new substantial content will be released in two months from now. The trap mods they've been releasing so far aren't interesting enough to get players to return to the game. ( 2months later now and its still garbage upgrades)

- An unfun meta has formed and the developers are fine with it, as evident with their recent blog post. Despite what a handful of pros might think, just because killboxes are technically possible doesn't mean they're fun to raid over and over again. Variety is the spice of life and all that. In fact, making fun levels in general is punished by the game itself. The game asks you to make unfun, hard levels.

- Almost every player retention/player reward system in this game is done poorly, in fact most systems in the game are.
Accolades and prestige are done poorly and lead to people losing their good outposts or having to refill them daily due to circumstances outside of their control.
Difficulty calculation is done poorly and is very buggy, you can gain rank for adding a mod then delete the trap and still keep the extra difficulty. Normals can be as hard as brutals, brutals can be as simple as normals.
Rank is done especially poorly and not just me but many others here have gone in detail as to why it's actively harming the game.

The game feels early access despite not being labelled as such.

Edit:

Tldr.:

They didnt care about community
Bad reward system for builders made them spam deathtraps
didnt fix gamebreaking bugs like the suit glitch
enconomy system is boring
no endgame

[ShadowBane]

For me it has just turned into “same old this, same old that”. I genuinely believe in this game, but it needs more updates, more content, and more reasons to play. Building bases has turned into a guessing game. Is this going to be fun or frustrating?

I used to watch all the runs on my bases to see what worked and what didn’t. I would change the base over and over to make the base more fun for the people raiding it. By the end I was happy with the bases I maxed out, but now I don’t see the point in it anymore. The bases are maxed out and locked away with no incentive to be played on social.

[Metadigital]

The big thing is that the game wasn't designed to encourage fun base design, and so there weren't many fun bases because they were unrewarding, and so raiders stopped playing because it wasn't fun.

To have a game where you offload level design onto the players, you have to have systems that ensure that your levels are going to have decent design. They could have learned from popular games like Mario Maker how to do this, but they didn't. They could have listened to players who warned their game was going to fail, but they didn't. They could have looked at their own internal data and made adjustments, but they didn't.

[Ratsplat]

The major update should be happening around the time the Steam Summer Sale hits I believe. But who knows how well that will even help. Assuming they even put the game on sale...