Before you boo me into obliviation, let me show you the reactions of my 2 closest friends about this news.
Noticed anything?
The same practices was made by Crossout’s competitor, Robocraft (RC). The other Custom Vehicle Combat (CVC) games developed by FreeJam (FJ) that won indie game awards in 2014 and 2015. When RC “came out of beta” in 2017, they nuked their massive battle of 10vs10 into a tiny tiny game of 5vs5 , which vaporized a massive chunk of their players. The rest is history as RC (and their stupid british dev, FJ) officially died in 9th Jan, 2025.
So what have this competitor of Crossout done to doom itself?
Check the following statements made by the first comment of my friends:
Adds mech legs
Adds CC (Camera Control)
Dumbs down game
Tries to do 5vs5
Die
Notice any patterns? There’s 4 , already:
- RC added mech legs (then later sprinter legs a.k.a. mech legs but faster with slightly less hp),
- RC added Camera Control (and relative tilt) that has the same effect as “bind steering to camera” in Crossout (and the relative tilt makes hovercraft tilt itself in relation to your camera), so that players who play hovers, mech walkers and helicopters (the robot in RC does not have an energy cap and every gun can fire straight up, so RC actually is customed to ground to air combat, unlike Crossout) can be played like First-person Shooting (FpS) games, without a care of where they’re moving to,
- RC makes the game much easier to play , by replacing their control tower (which you have to destroy to refresh it into ally) with stale flat bases. They also removed the entire in-game economy by making everything free once unlocked with a price, making grinding and inventory management unnecessary.
- RC reduced their team size from a massive chaotic but spectacular 10vs10 to 5vs5, and also reduced the entire map scale so that traveling from ally base to enemy’s takes less than 30 seconds instead of taking minutes. This change along with removing their Tier system [similar to PS system in Crossout, but more definitive into 10 tiers of 2000cpu (i.e. part limit, but different part cost different cpu value), and anything above up to 20000cpu is Megabot i.e. Leviathan of Crossout], vaporized a huge chunk of the player count.
And the result? Losing players update after update, and eventually no one bothered buying anything that speeds up the progress, and the game bled dry to less than 1000 players per day for years, before hitting the breaking point that killed the game itself, its sequel (RC2. yes, it existed, but worse than RC iyam), and FJ studio.
Crossout is repeating these 4 patterns (mech walker legs, bind steering to camera, aim assist, and now 6vs6 on pc) at an alarming rate.
Why reducing the game to 6vs6 from 8vs8 doesn’t help?
“But Ichiro, doesn’t reducing the team size to 6vs6 helps the matchmaking? You keep telling us that the PS difference of each lobby shouldn’t exceed △1000PS per lobby, wouldn’t reduce the team size help the situation?”
Say what? “reduce team size help improve matchmaking”?
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAAAAAAAAA, HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAAAAAAHAHAHAHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!
Some of you redditors, like Madus, already FAFO: reducing the team size DOES NOT HELP ONE BIT. Players on PC already have to deal with enemies twice their PS, but now with 2 less meat shields.
CVC is bound to be a chaotic gerne, and Crossout’s weapons and cabins means you’re not necessarily better off sticking to your team or doing solo (I would argue some parts actually encourages you to go solo like Outcast), it goes down to how you build your vehicle around. Since everyone have their preferred playstyle, matches can vary depending on how people are put together. That’s why party stacks can be extremely oppressive, because they could each bring a vehicle with a dedicated role to max out teamwork, or uses 4 stacks of a single weapon and focus fire on command.
One of the few ways to flatten such advantages is, make these teamwork less relevant in a team. And that’s where 8vs8 (or even bigger team size, like 12vs12 in TF2) comes in. The bigger the standard team size, the smaller the impact a 4-stack party could make. Staying PC game as 8vs8, or even, crank it the other way and make it 10vs10, will diminish the advantage of a dedicate 4-men stack (be it clan stack or else).
The same goes for underperforming teammates: the mistake of losing 1/12 or 1/10 members is always less punishing than those of losing 1/6 or even 1/4. And if you think “less teammate means less deadweight”? More teammate means more meat-shield for you, genius. The more meat-shield your enemies has to go through, the more time you have to neutralize them one after another before they finally gets you.
“Ichiro, we don’t have enough players to increase the team size! You said it yourself when people keeps bringing up about removing bots, so how do we keep that same 8vs8 (or even goes 10vs10) as you suggested?”
It’s easy, dawg:
Re-implement the old matchmaking system that prioritize keeping the PS slope below △1000PS per lobby by re-utilize bots.
Multiple rants myself and other redditors have made regarding the absurd PS slope. Players will be forced to fight against opponents literally double their size (in terms of powerscore, at least) because the current matchmaking system focus on removing as many bots as possible. And multiple posts have shown that bots are also used in these massive gapped yet crammed lobbies. These posts has showed that Targem has the technology to use ai bots to fill the lobby in a way that smooth out the PS slope, just like how FJ uses ai bots to fill the empty RC lobby (by the time I quit, RC have only 2 and sometimes only 1 human players on each team, where the remaining 4 teammates of both sides, are bots). Bots are very predictable, so most of the time you just strip their guns and you can move onto the next.
Crossout has been using this previous matchmaking system before Supercharged update, and it was working just fine. All we have to do is to bring it back.
The thing is, Targem should stop making changes that simplify the gameplay experience of Crossout, because the more simple Crossout gets, the closer it is to the overabundant competitors with adjacent gameplay, and the less appealing it gets. Why would I play Crossout if it’s reduce to nothing more than Marvel Rival with shit-boxes? Or, if I really like metal vehicle over heroines’ asses, Why don’t I play World of Tanks / War Thunder?
I hope this 6vs6 change is only temporary, and Targem should really start reverting these changes such as aim assist and cam-steer.
