Install Steam
login
|
language
简体中文 (Simplified Chinese)
繁體中文 (Traditional Chinese)
日本語 (Japanese)
한국어 (Korean)
ไทย (Thai)
Български (Bulgarian)
Čeština (Czech)
Dansk (Danish)
Deutsch (German)
Español - España (Spanish - Spain)
Español - Latinoamérica (Spanish - Latin America)
Ελληνικά (Greek)
Français (French)
Italiano (Italian)
Bahasa Indonesia (Indonesian)
Magyar (Hungarian)
Nederlands (Dutch)
Norsk (Norwegian)
Polski (Polish)
Português (Portuguese - Portugal)
Português - Brasil (Portuguese - Brazil)
Română (Romanian)
Русский (Russian)
Suomi (Finnish)
Svenska (Swedish)
Türkçe (Turkish)
Tiếng Việt (Vietnamese)
Українська (Ukrainian)
Report a translation problem
Discussions Rules and Guidelines
8 
Report this post
Too many changes of direction it lost its way as to what it was trying to be, trying to please everyone and not knowing who the target market was.
Not getting to a finished state quick enough to advertise properly and get new players in.
A better MM to keep players in balanced matches rather than selling MM out in favour of quicker queues.
Allowing groups to queue against solo players and actively refusing to recognise that would ultimately piss new players off after being seal clubbed repeatedly.
Making it too easy with an arcade feel
Cluttered UI
Adding Crews
Lane sizes
Ridiculous story mode
Too much focus on skins and hangers
Non optimised code meaning low fps
Lack of meaningful use if MMR resulting in steam roller games
Bad matchmaking when mixing MMR
Lack of advertising
Lack of listening to the community
Lastly, the lack of any single direction for the game
I see this said a lot regarding games in general, but usually artists aren't involved with gameplay!
A lot of people mentioned matchmaking. Successful games like PUBG didn't even start out with matchmaking. If you suck, it sucks to be you. They throw you into the shark pool on day 0 and expect you to get better if you want to compete. This allowed groups to thrive and play the game together. If you're with a good group and you're feeding off each other and getting better together, you win a lot.
This is why the majority of PUBG games are 4 man squads, then duos, and the least number of players play solo, which is trending downwards now. The logic is simple: solo players are harder to retain anyway, so they rely on groups to draw in and retain players. By making it a group-based social game, they could draw in massive amounts of people.
Instead of doing that, this game actually tried a variety of ways to reduce the impact of groups on the game, when its gameplay is entirely dependent on your teammates. At first, they just made it impossible for groups to find games. Later, they split groups. Both solutions are obviously not very good for group retention.
You're right of course, just take it as a compliment. Lol.
There seemed to be some communication errors between Devs and community. Community would ask for something and most of the time it was given, but in very strange or half made ways. This pertained mostly to the map and gamemode design though. If the devs were able to concentrate more on Last Stand and make that a proper horde mode I think this game could have elevated its player base very quickly.
On the note of communication errors it is also my belief that the devs had a great disjoint between their internal builds and the live builds. It once took them THREE (possibly more) patches to introduce a balance change that had been listed in all previous patch notes. In another patch I personally went in and wrote down all the new loadout options the devs had not put in patchnotes for that update. Another shocking incident is when the entire FS community was having a visual bug with a specific ship. When the bug was reported, the Devs stated "We cannot reproduce the bug". I think this stemmed from a lack of understanding of their own game. There was another bug testing incident in which boosts could be multiplied to insane levels with the Equalizer's boost gate. Players tested this and reported that only certain ships interacted that way. When devs tested it they stated that it worked for all ships with boosts. The devs then demonstrated their methods and they were indeed getting the same results, but they didn't interpret it that way.
The next part is map design, this is somewhat more of a recent thing with the episodic updates but essentially, it felt like they were just throwing things at a wall and hoped that they stuck. The Awakening gamemode was probably the closest to a fully functioning and nearly perfectly balanced gamemode but the devs went back on some changes that were considered positive in the Discovery gamemode. Notably the lanes were shorter and it was even easier to access the core. Another player I was talking to described it pretty well and I hold this belief too, they said "The devs don't try to break their game." Meaning they test it to make sure it works in their vision, but they don't account for player ingenuity or a certain ship being able to do something very well on a specific map.
TL;DR
The Devs and Community had way too much of a disjoint on what they wanted and what was delivered. The Devs were not organized enough to push out updates consistent with their patchnotes. And (referring to the episodic updates), the Devs put too much time in to quantity over quality.
This:
Along with the sudden and sharp change in direction from the strategic, thinking mans game to a more fast paced shooter esc game which jettisoned alot of the older playerbase.
Hell I used to advertise this game on other forums because I belived in it so much back when FS had a website, the games future looked bright and everyone was complaining about the Colossus flak eating FPS :) because I wanted others to play it and see how EPIC FS was.
don't believe me?
https://w3dhub.com/forum/topic/414903-free-gameskeys/?tab=comments#comment-610254
(Forum is for a pretty cool FPS Command and Conquer game mod - check it out - also free stuff - not sure how many links still work but hey! Free stuff is cool)
We were even going to try and get a clan going (fell though when ECG started their anti teaming up era :( )
I can't help but wonder how it might have turned out if ECG had stuck to their guns and built their original idea for FS and hadn't changed course....
...My money is on that it would have been AWESOME!
-Lack of listening to the community. (Always doing the opposite we ask you. That´s awesome...)
-Making it too easy with an arcade feel. (And adding a lot of nosense episodes when community claims old conquest as a choice. Dunno why, but they don´t listen)
-Too many changes of direction. (And reworks, and more reworks and...)
-Adding Crews. (Copy after copy of existing crews. Nosense)
Now my list:
And that´s a big problem, Millenia. This is a MOBA. We love your designs, but they dont work on a broken game.
Seems that you´re all designers. Awesome ships, skins, maps... but no playability, no listen to community, no communication, nothing about keep new players, don´t care about bugs like jump bug or effects breacking the game ...
Next time, try to make a visual novel or something like that. Not MOBA.
- Keep players with nothing to do while waiting a match
. Minigames, credits for wait... are you serious? New players must wait 30 min queues? LOL. You will never keep a soul.
-Keep players unconnected.
No chat, no lobby where captains can meet, no firing range to fight other players/test ships while waiting matches...
-Lack of stuff to sell.
No loadouts, personalization, colours, stickers... Did you think that you can feed a whole studio only selling skins and gamemodes that no one plays?
-Don´t care about bugs.
A whole month playing without effects info, totally breaking the game.And is only one example.
Remember that old jump bug? How many time without fix?
- Lack of communication.
Right now, there are a lot of threads regarding issues with the new mode, breaking playability (again). No one on ECG team say a word. For god shake, it only takes 2 minutes to reply!!!
-Lack of imagination.
All game modes are variations of the same or boring games againist dumb bots. The only objetive to progress is to get new ships. That´s all....
2 lanes, fixed weapons that can be controlled across the map, resource generators on 2 lanes and a central one, living mining stations with annoying effects/small ships, a Paragon that can take control of allied small ships, bring back little storms on mines to make sensors worth, planets to attack, space stations to destroy, special players as commanders, space stations with modules configured by players on pre-game... NOTHING NEW/DIFFERENT, no imagination my friends...
-No clan/team work.
No competitions, objetives... and...plus... MMR ...split.... don´t have words. Do you remember when on this 5vs5 game you can only play with 2 friends? LOL
-Unfullfilled promisses.
We will rework firing range (old post bumped some days ago, and closed.)
We are working on provide detailed info about ships/weapons/loadouts etc (reddit post from... 2016? i don´t remember. Never happened)
And more...
I know a lot of players will not agree, but i think it would have been better if they followed the path of games like Warframe. A game with hundreds (maybe thousands of stuff/parts/pets/mods/materials/costumes to grind/trade/build/manufacture/personalize)... Even experienced players (+-1000 hours here) have always a lot of new stuff to get.
And that means MONEY.
ECG needs money, they are not here just for fun
Offer and demmand law. EGC, you dont offer nothing to buy. So you don´t get income meanwhile we do nothing waiting matches... THIS IS YOUR WORST MISTAKE!!!
Sellng skins? that only work on very special games like TF2 and CS:GO as far as i know... anyways, you dont have a market. Skins will not feed your studio.
LOL, im starting to dl Warframe again 2 years before stop playing. I´m bored of killing stupid bots (well, they are not as stupid as FS ones), but as an old player i have parts/pets/cosmethics/weapons/mods that must cost a real fortune!
Let´s play market.
fake news. free to play players can fight in the new gamemodes
You seem to not understand something. The artists arent involved in gameplay was the point, and they work independantly to the pace of the designers. Sugarrush was implying that artists and designers were the same thing but their work don't overlap.
It's like asking an accountant to do the work of a chemical engineer in a pharmaseutical compoany, which is rediculous.
Conquest 2.0 and Phase 2
These updates ruined all depth present in game-play, game-modes and invalidated all strategy and tactics required to shine in conquest (FS' bread and butter)
Gameplay depth was destroyed, it ruined the game for current players and offered nothing for new players after the initial glitz wore off.
There were lots of other huge failures (poor performance for years, no basic features, poor communication) but no other failure effected every bracket of the player-base and potential players to the degree these updates did
Imagine if Battlefield removed Conquest and changed TTKs to <1second to ruin depth
That would kill the game for established players and no new player would stick around
Conversely; Artists cost money
If their work isn't critical to the immediate and intermediate goals (improving the depth and QOL) then it's money questionably spent
The fancy new missile smoke trails and lane assets the art team created were beautiful but contributed nothing to depth and QOL
When they redesign the HUD or drop pod animation 2-3 times and it still sucks you're effectively burning cash when it could go towards depth and QOL (or not running out of money so soon)
+1
Maybe my bad english, (sorry if i dont understood you @Millenia) that´s exactly the point i try to express.
What´s the point expending hours of work making new art and animations for new crew, crew that is the same crew with same statistics we already have?
Meanwhile, game is still broken.
PS. Your work is beautiful, designers.And i love your maps, ships, and crew (read me on off topic forum talking about alien franchise and crew). But as i say, playability comes first on a MOBA and i think ECG priorized design. That´s a big mistake.
ECG team will rock on a walking simulator or a visual novel... but this is MOBA
>Hey tax season is over, so let's fire the accountants
It doesn't work like that. The artists will always be at the company regardless unless the company is hiring them out to a 3rd party (which isn't the case for ECG I'm guessing), so it would be useless to let the artists twiddle their thumbs doing nothing since they are on the payroll.
People here seem to think that artists are a liquifiable asset to seamlessly transfer over to game design or coding, which is wrong.