Events + Population issues

Discussion
#1

Welcome to one more of my -every now and then- threads where i try to discuss issues that i find are the most problematic, at the time.

Today we are dealing with events and the more generalized population issue that this game has on my platform (pc).

As far as events are concerned, i dont know about the previous ones, but this last Dronapocalypse has been hands down the best event i have played in this game. I played both solo and in group and all of the times it was FUN.

It was so fun and such a refreshing experience for me in the game that i stoped playing randoms and farmed my scrap from the event for most of the weeks it was running!

Arena was ok, mostly decent if you had a team, and this last one thats running now (knights of something) is one of the worst things i have played in this game.

Why bring this up? Because the game not being FUN in a more simplistic-different way is one of the important issues it has from my perspective.

Devs, pick two or three of these simple mini modes-events, throw in some fun rewards+scrap and rotate them, there is absolutely no reason to invest time and efford in mini clan wars and that thing thats running now.

No need for bases, no need for advanced tactics, just some simple go-kill-the-levi fun is more than enough.

Right now the only things we have aside raids-randoms-clan wars standard, is bedlam (niche and if i recall correctly no rewards),story (another lets do it to get it over with borefest), and events which most of them are meh.

Make simple, different and fast fun events the norm!
No thank you, we dont want a three bases random match with bad premade vehicles, we have our own crappy ones if we want one, and another mini clan wars doesnt cut it, normal clan wars is frustrating enough.

As far as pop issues are concerned, lets face it, the population is slowly but steadily decreasing, us who play pretty much daily for a long time now dont even need to look at steamcharts to understand that we see the same faces and less of them as time goes by.
Yes, adding content has given the game some boost but its only periodical and does not solve the issue.

Imo the issue can be separated into 3 major categories:

1)New player experience.

2)Grind to become competitive.

3)Overall monetary policy.

My suggestions regarding these come as follows:

  1. While the new player experience has drasticaly improved with the powerscore adjustments, its still far from being good.
    The moment you step above 2,5k ps you get to deal with the blue fusion masters that love to sealclub, nobody in their right mind is going to deal with that.
    The solution: 2 separate queues below 4k powerscore, one for those below 30 engineer level and one for those above.
    Now new players get to try their blue weapons in a more fair environment, and sealclubers get to play with eachother.
    The downside of that is that maybe new players will experience more bot games, but its much more preferable to play vs a couple more bots than with instadeath sealclubing machines that you have no chance against.
    You can even put a choice for the new players to chose if they want to participate in the experienced players queue with the proper warnings.

  2. Raids have been nerfed a while ago, relics take several months even for uranium farming clans. And there is no way to test which relic you like before you invest all this time and efford into getting it!
    Im not an advocate for the game to become a casual fest but we could at least have a limited testing mode for the players that want to see what to invest into!
    Players could be given a limited (for example) 10 exhibition testing tries with no rewards to join a testers queue and see how the things they want to buy-craft can work!
    And if someone want to extend those 10 trials then they have to spend some recources, just enough to make it so that people are not infinitely investing into testing mode to play.
    Plus Overall resource income has to be increased by around 10-15% both with premium and without. You cant expect new players to sit and study market+ farm 8 hours a day to make an epic or legendary weapon in a semi-decent time even with premium.

  3. Remove crosscrowns. As simple as that. Makes the game look like a cheap mobile game cash-grab and damages the trust between the customer-company. Trying to “hide” what is being paid is just another reason for any serious consumer to ditch the product.
    Pack prices need heavy readjustment. Asking someone to give a full AAA games price to get a pack is rediculus.
    Yes, there are sales and cheaper packs, some of them are worth the price, some really dont, imo overall pack price-gold offered should drop around 25%. Focus on giving more items on packs, less gold. More sales, less gold inflation to come from those sales.

Add more small rewards which make the player feel that they get something meaningfull for “free”. Remember the engineer boxes that gave blue untradable items? Bring them back, make the fusion helping item (cant remember the name right now)be a very low cost craft.
If you dont like the blue item reward, give some resources straight up, make players feel appreciated for playing the game but not giving them a middle finger every time they level because they get something they will probably not use.

You could even be giving small rewards for badges, and similar unlocks, make the players want to play the game because the game appreciates the time they invest in it.

While these suggestions revolve around things that should (or shouldnt) be in the game since years ago, its still very salvageable if they are properly implemented.

Thats it from me, thanks for reading!

3 Likes
#2

that’s cause they haven’t added new gamemodes in fact they can’d really good game modes like repairs and battle royale cause of exploiters. I like the storm warning type modes and battle royale had it all except no one would be willing to play it after it was out.

#3

Why would you be farming scrap in the first place? Doing a full weeks of dailies gets you an easy 2K+ of scrap.

Arena was a dumpster fire from the very start. It had an even smaller format than clan wars and the maps were too small for the majority of weapons to be viable. Seeing someone using a long range weapon or drones was an indication that you were going to lose that round no matter what unless the enemy had an equally stupid enemy on their team.

Knights was actually fun when you didn’t care about grinding out points. Events like it simply need to not be massively grindy.

The steam charts do not include any players not playing through steam and they’re a minority of players.

screenshot-220513-144504(25;9;47)
screenshot-220513-144504(25;9;47)1920Ă—1080 219 KB

This is how many players tried the knights brawl out at least once.

1: The MMing considers engineers level already. It can break down but that happens only after long enough time in the queue. New players will still experience bot filled games either way and that’s because there is not a steady stream of new players.

2:

A: No testing slots. Unless the resource cost to renew those slots is expensive enough, that could be an infinite cycle and the exhibition already exists anyway.

B: Increasing resource income will cause new players whose primary income is going to be selling resources will only cause them to have a tougher time getting over the initial hump. The grind is frontloaded with new players needing to get over the initial hump to get to where the grind steadily lessens. Don’t make that harder. New players shouldn’t be aiming for epics and legendaries from the start anyway.

3:

A: Yes, crosscrowns should be removed. This would let the customization parts be bought with coins again and that’d massively help with the current inflation.

B: Yes, packs in general are to expensive but that is not how to fix them. Lower prices alone would be enough, making them more focused towards giving items over coins will reduce how many coins are imputed into the games and force players to buy coins directly more often to make up for that. Coins are technically an infinite supply but in practice they are not since taxes, gold sinks, and the rarity of methods of getting them for free (BP levels, dev compensation, and crates that give coins.) leads to them being a finite supply. More items but less coins coming in will lead to a potential deflation issue given a long enough time and enough of the supply being reduced. To reduce inflation more gold sinks need to be added as well, not just a reduction in supply.

While the reintroduction of the miners crate would be great, the rest are all tactics of a game that throws stuff at you and that will be deceptive since after a soonish point to when it starts that won’t happen anymore. It’s equivalent to throwing someone everything they need without telling them how it works or how to get it.

Hell, making rare stabilizers cheap to craft would wreck balance at the top because fusion just got even cheaper. There’s already an increase in necessity of fusion but it’s kept in check by rare stabilizers not being craftable.

Repair was broken because repairs in a game that’s about killing parts are broken by default. Can’t degun someone if they can just regenerate after you did so. Exploiters were not a problem.

BR is a sh!t mode because of the extreme randomness when I bothered to try out the mode years ago I have matches that resulted in me being alive halfway into the game without having seen a single weapon that I could use while I was swimming in repairs. BRs as a genre do not interest me. Exploiters are not the problem.

Storm warning was a great brawl but it was cut because the devs didn’t like that players weren’t mindlessly shooting each other. Nothing to do with exploits, just players being smart and waiting until the best possible moment to backstab each other.

#4

I know its been a long time but i dont quite log into forums that much, so now that im here i will attempt to answer:

This is off topic.
I usually dont bother with weeklies, dailies etc, i dont like the games i play for fun dictating how i play them because they give me extra “rewards”… And please dont respond to that, i merely answered your already off topic question.

Like i said in my initial post, simple-not grindy, events that you participate for fun and thats what keeps you…
Kinghts and similar events are just toned down random matches…
For example the “football” event that is running currently is very interesting, not so much my cup of tea but i enjoy it far more than most of the other events.
That battlepass addition to the event is disqusting by the way.

I see those event images posted a lot when people are talking about population, those images say nothing other than that someone logged in and played said event once for 5 mins and never logged again.
If we were talking about the total amount of accounts registered to crossout that pic could give us an idea but nothing beyond that.
It has nothing to do with steady player numbers, players who are invested in the game.
Steamcharts is the closest thing we have for that, all the rest is hypothetical, and up until this battlepass (which was the first good one in a while) numbers were constantly dropping. Now things are better but far from where they could be.

1 Well, if the problem is the new player base, then we simply refer to the rest of the issues…

2

A: Thats why i mentioned recource cost after a limited number of tries, it can be easily balanced to not make it used constantly, just for testing purposes.

B: Increasing the resource income will make it easier for players to craft the items they want, it will generaly make it easier-faster for them to access all aspects of early game. This will keep more of them invested with all the desired consequences.
The fresh player that joins the game is looking to craft the items desired asap, not get invested in some gold/recource sell grind.
Blue and special items are crafted fast and those are the items that new players desire.
The average new player joins the game to CRAFT, RIDE, DESTROY, not to play stock market with recourses, at least in my mind.
The sooner he sees his effords pay off the more invested he will become invested in the game.
I dont understand the logic you are presenting, and by that logic by decreasing recource income even further, newer players lifes become easier? And how exactly the grind lessesns? Maybe im missing something here.

3:
A: Nothing to say, we agree.

B: Im not sure i agree on adding more gold sinks, depending on what they are, but generaly it seems we agree you mostly analyzed it firther.

I wrote “if you dont like the blue item reward”. It means that its either that come back or something else, not flood the player with rewards at every step. Just a couple of small things for new players and everyone else.
I have fully fused 9 spider legs, all my cabins, utilities and wheels that i mostly use are fused, even fused legendaries like triple fortune. And im not even mentioning the free fuzed battlepass items.
You know how many stabilizers i have used for all that? Around 5-6 maaaybe 7. Fuzion events happen regularly enough to cover most of the demand.
I think making new and old players feel a little more appreciated is a big thing in the long run and if there is so much worry about releasing the supply of stabilizers, just add more cost to it. I believe the market would survive that eventually, it is already limited and so strickt that im sure they will find a way to compensate.

#5

I was informed that a legal issue with the console platforms necessitated the the creation of Crosscrowns. They probably don’t need to go away, and can’t for the sake of console players, but they could be more honest with them and cut out the shenanigan with them, I think. I don’t like the exchange rate scam they do there, and won’t touch them for that reason alone. The decor seems over priced anyway at nearly double what the Battle Pass the content came from cost in the first place. IDK what they’re thinking. Those prices are bonkers, IMO.

My latest theory on what troubles this game is that they do not plan ahead, and fly by the seat of their pants, making it up as they go along. This has predictably resulted in the game having this sprawling nonsensical architecture, with many various useless features, like Adventure Mode. I wish they would do something more interesting with that, and don’t understand why they haven’t. Prestige Crates are another useless feature. Less than useless actually, because it always feels like an insult to get one, because they are so dmn worthless.

Planning; I think they need to outline their annual ambitions and are not doing so. The way they release material seems sporadic and inconsistent to me, like they have no idea what they are going to do in even the very near future.