How does Gearbox plan to improve the player population?

Battleborn Battleborn General Discussion
#28

It’s more or less a double edged sword, you can get new players or retain the ones you have. I say it like that because if Gearbox tried to do both I assure you they will break something else in the process.

If we get new players the old ones who are still here ideally are going to still be here so retention isn’t THAT big of an issue. New players are going to see all the cool looking characters then realize the characters are end game tier which means they have to play stupid amounts of games before they can really have fun. That’s a terrible thing to throw on people who you expect to BUY your game as well.

Then you can go F2P and there lies the bigger problem, if the game keeps the same state it is currently in and goes F2P you will get an influx of players…for a month if that. Then we would go back to the same problem we are currently in. Evolve is a game that tanked as a buy to play game and with that it went F2P it did well F2P for a time until the same crap that made the buy to play players leave made the F2P people leave also.

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#29

I can’t recall any game suddenly becoming so much popular so long after it’s release that numbers suddenly rise to the extent some people are hoping for. Aye, WoW and other like minded games have peaks and troughs, but that’s usually because there’s a number of people who return for the new content and then leave again. Same goes for any game. The problem is, new player numbers rarely make much of a difference. Either get it right at the beginning or close to the beginning and you stand a chance.

This game is never going to become super popular now. That ship has sailed. Maybe making it a F2P would boost numbers, but even mediocre F2P games suffer in the end if the important parts of the game suck. I know i wouldn’t waste the HDD space required for this even if it was free.

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#30

Thanks! recovery of muscle tears takes me a little longer because I am a strict Vegan.

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#31

What’s driving many players away is the matchmaking. Many newcomers are discouraged from constantly losing against higher rank players. Many level 100"s get bored of easy matches against beginners. My 2 friends and I stopped playing because of this matter. All the opponents we were getting lately were players on level 50 and below with very noobish skill levels.

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#32

they need to kill trying to match a team at equal skills levels and start trying to match two teams at equal skill levels. I quit because it was taking 5 or more minutes on PS4 to find a game and then it was usually a face-smashing. I attribute this to me being on the low end of ELO, so it matches me with other ELOs then slowly spread the acceptable matchmaking range for the other team to find a game.

This experience happens to everybody and drives away new/poor players. Which isn’t good for overall population. Apparently the match-makng was hardwired in to something and was the single biggest cause of this games death spiral. If heads were going on the chopping block after the debacle that is Battleborn I’d look at the matchmaking design team.

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#33

Actually it’s much more. https://steamdb.info/app/394230/ says it’s over 250k owners on PC only, and each of both consoles have even more. So we’re at about million or more copies sold.

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#34

Seems like a success for limited promotion unlike the recent Ghostbusters Flop

#36

yet your on the battleborn forum? go away troll

#37

Rather than get into namecalling, just flag posts that you find troublesome, please.

#38

and the guy who decided to tweet “come at me bro” @overwatch…

#39

~500 peak players on PC is success? Now Im interested in hearing your definition of trainwreck

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#40

The trouble is, I’ve never heard of a train wreck that I can have a huge amount of fun participating in. Battleborn has low numbers; I’m sorry about that, because it does affect matchmaking, but even more than that there are a lot of people who’ll never get to have fun with it like I have. The people I know are put off playing not because of anything about the game itself, but because they’ve heard all these assertions about how the game is dead and unplayable and the servers will be shut down tomorrow. None of this is true from my experience.

In my experience Battleborn is flawed, but it is also a superbly written, generically ambitious, regularly fun game. That matters more to me. It’s still perfectly playable and I do so every day. Who enjoys a train wreck?

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#41

I do. I don’t play the top-down moba’s because I like being immersed in the world I am playing. Games like LOL just look stupid. Like playing an RTS without an army to command. I’ve played a few of them and I don’t care for them. They are something for the casuals to play I guess.

Battleborn is the only game like this for now. And what’s sad is millions of casuals are off playing trash tier games like LoL, TF2, etc. Overwatch I actually respect though, even if it’s completely different.

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#42

Friends, I hope that one day you get the chance to make a game and release it to the world.

#43

Making a game is still worlds away from marketing one though. Games have live or died on hype alone.

Still, the way this is bleeding players does make one suspect there’s a persisting quality issue that’s driving people away, people have the game but aren’t playing any longer.

Improving player population at this stage is a difficult task. Seeing there’s already a large pool of people who have game but have since abandoned it. You’d need something to signal to people out there, a credible reason to look at Battleborn again. Probably some very radical changes, something newsworthy that the game press would actually consider worth talking about. Because its very hard to get someone’s attention again, after you’ve lost it.

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#44

Gearbox should be looking at other free to play games that have huge populations and rake in the money.

Battleborn is still a new game, and an amazing one.

I just can’t comprehend that it could die. How many games of this caliber ever die?

Team Fortress 2 is literal cancer, and 500k people play that garbage a day.

There has to be a way.

#45

I agree with @hungrypot. The game has a quite impressive game owners base (probably more than one million among all systems), but they don’t play. They won’t come back if the game goes f2p.

But, well, if f2p would bring a good amount of active players it’d help matchmaking and queue times and those game owners might come back.

#46

I owned this game but returned it a couple of weeks ago, at least until they’ve fixed these issues with the servers in Australia/New Zealand

#47

Tbh the only problem I have with the game is the matchmaking and the arbitrary pricing of skins (and that you can’t earn platinum in the game at all despite BB not being a f2p game).
I had to quit PvP because 1) I’m tired I can only get matches on Incursion (I like Meltdown and even Capture a lot) and 80% of those are on Overgrowth 2) the wait times get longer and longer because of dwindling population even on PS4 3) uneven matches where you either get crushed or do crush (for me it’s rather the former because I mostly solo queue).

I love the game and I’d never play any other MOBA because I think the character designs and communities of those are pretty horrible. So I really hope Gearbox/2K can sell their soul to the devil or something to save the game.

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#48

Not to be disagreeing with you but I do not understand what you mean by superbly written, would you care to elaborate for me?