Why this game ended like this

[Vinnc3nt]

Lately I've seen a couple of posts of people wandering why this game is so dead when, if you play, you can see it's actually a really polished and fun game.

I'm a player that stuck a lot of time with this game so let me explain you what happened. It's mostly because of 3 issues this game had:
-MMR System
-PVE/PVP discussion
-No chat ingame

The MMR system is the dinamic difficulty system this game uses. In paper is quite good and interesting (you get more difficult matches the more you win and the difficulty lowers if you lose), but in reality doesn't work on the long way.

The people that play the most this game find out that theres a moment (when you reach 35-40 points of MMR) that the game is insanely hard and not fun. So people that play the most was trap in really hardcore matches and eventually got frustated.

The PVP system consisted in a 5th guy (this game is 4 people teams against the machine but sometimes a 5th person can appear to fight against that team, like an invasion from dark souls of sorts) attacking the main team. The problem is that you couldn't choose if you wanted to do PVP or PVE, sometimes you were invaded sometimes not.

The chat issue: the game is pretty fun but a lot of times missions had cryptic objectives and some new people didn't know what to do. Since the game has no way of comunicating, those matches ended really bad.

So, when you get all this problems together you had a game were, if you had played a lot, you couldn't invite new friends to play with you, because you had a high MMR and then you newbie friend was forced to endure a demential difficulty right from the start if he wanted to play with you, half the time also being kicked in the ass by the invader.

And if you played solo, half the matches ended in failure because you couldn't talk to your team.

We as comunity ask the developers to modify this concepts so the game was fun again. But they told us there was no intention of changing these systems because they were "part of their vision" (not kidding, they really said it that way).
The thing is that, this vision frustrated so much players that player base started to decrease and decrease.

Developers refused to budge and started to ignore those post and only answer positive post (I can safely say that because i remember answering a post about this issues that had been there for a week and no response from the developers but 5min later a new post telling how awesome was a new character design was and, i'm not kidding, in less than 5min a developer was responding that post), so number went so far to 50 people playing.

At that moment we begged developers to change their mind but their prefer to sink the ship that change course and avoid the iceberg.
It was incredible to see that, with 50 people left, they were putting new skins and making very cheerful videos about it in youtube, like nothing was happening.

So eventually, people drop to the 10-20 there are now (always on steam i mean).

Actually, yesterday a played a again with 2 friends, a veteran one and a newbie one. And, wtf, we got an invader (also the match was in very hard difficulty because we had high MMR) and the newbie and all the team were kinda destroyed all the way so the friend we got to try the game did not really enjoyed.

Thats the end of this sad story.
In the end, I'm just sad that it ended like this. The game is really good but this issues (there's more but this is the principal stuff) ruined the experience and the MMR impedes us to bring new people to the game.

I still do not understand why they refused to change things even when the game was losing people, i mean, there was a point that they had nothing to lose to try...

If any developers read this, know that, i believe, that if you made the changes we asked about this systems I'm quite sure the game would get people again.
Thats all.

(I edited the last part because i didn't want to be that harsh and i realize that there are things i might not know about why some things happened and also i didn't want people to believe i despise the game, i actually I like it).

[InnCognito]

I really thought the game's concept was REALLY cool and amazing. But I had to dip out when they didn't allow all characters to be unlocked right away or anything with preventing an antagonist from randomly dropping in and ruining a person's day.

other than that. its a pretty slick game if you ask me. but I guess Im not budging if they aint budging.

[Spicy Messiah]

The point about MMR is pretty accurate. I'm at 44ish and it's a surprising jump up in difficulty. I get zero'd by common Wardogs in groups of three or more quite a bit, and if the team is not careful they can do very poorly. That being said, the MMR seems to average out based on the players in the lobby, and games with ranks 5-6 tend to be in the 30s at most.

As for antagonists, yeah, I felt the same way at first. Some antagonist combos can be just annoying deal breakers, like Harec with an easter egg gun, or most Rak combos. Just this cheesy annoying unbalanced monster making you suffer through a respawn simulator. But then there's matches where I just completely stomp them over and over again and we win hard, and get much more for our efforts. So you get the highs and lows with the antagonist system. I think I understand why they wanted to include it (because it's dynamic difficulty they can't emulate) but really it's also bad for learning players.

Lately, I can go between 4-9 games without an antagonist. And those that have one, I lose perhaps half, if that. It's nowhere near as bad as it was a few years ago.

And much agreed on chat. Using the command system helps a bit, but proper chat would be better. All in all though, I still really like the game despite its flaws, and still play it.

[InnCognito]

Yeah I can't argue with that! Thumbs up!

I felt as though I would rather have a game that is 4-player max co-op with AI to fill the spots in and it stay PVE. If they had added a second mode which is 4v4 it may have worked out.

Game shoulda been put on the steam store at 14 bucks, all characters unlocked and left at that.

over-all its not a bad game. but with the current system I wont pick it up and play it and neither will my friends. Sad thing is, this game is Literally inches away from being a Triple A title.

[²×ÐøµßLe§†ÆkKeÐײ]

Originally posted by InnCognito:

I really thought the game's concept was REALLY cool and amazing. But I had to dip out when they didn't allow all characters to be unlocked right away or anything with preventing an antagonist from randomly dropping in and ruining a person's day.

other than that. its a pretty slick game if you ask me. but I guess Im not budging if they aint budging.

takes about a month playing just your 5 daily matches to unlock EVERYTHING. for free. done it on multiple different accounts.

and as for the mmr, from my experience (not implying that i do this ) players usually group up and purposely throw mmr to negate that ♥♥♥♥♥♥ 35-40 insane spike