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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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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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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Seems like a success for limited promotion unlike the recent Ghostbusters Flop
yet your on the battleborn forum? go away troll
Rather than get into namecalling, just flag posts that you find troublesome, please.
~500 peak players on PC is success? Now Im interested in hearing your definition of trainwreck
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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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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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Friends, I hope that one day you get the chance to make a game and release it to the world.
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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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.
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.
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
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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Not to be disagreeing with you but I do not understand what you mean by superbly written, would you care to elaborate for me?
Well, it wouldn’t be the first time people have disagreed about the quality of art, so if you don’t agree I won’t mind a bit. But I do think the writing in Battleborn is really excellent. It’s memorable and unique, and regularly has me laughing. The Borderlands series is distinctive for a very quirky kind of humour and Battleborn has its own version of this too… There are too many great quotes to repeat here. One of the things I like best is that each episode of the story has so much dialogue, which allows for great replayability. The player interactions / call outs are also très amusant and suggestive of a wider character than is permitted in the framework of say a PvP match. I basically bought the game because someone mentioned how much the writing delivers and I wasn’t disappointed.
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Thanks for clarifying but in my personal run with the game the story mode wasn’t my type of cookie to eat a lot of. I did enjoy some of the quirky jokes because it reminded me of Borderlands a lot but most of the jokes to me anyways never really held up to the standard I saw in Borderlands 2 with your interactions between different people.
The main issue I have had with this story mode is how it seems like it’s very episodic and can be played in really any order and you pretty much have an idea of how things work. Some people may like not feeling locked into a path but in my experience I always enjoyed a story more when it has more flavor to it. Nothing more mehh about it than mission 1 being on this planet than you jump across to a new planet for mission 2, 3, 4, ect.
However don’t get me wrong I have had great fun with this game due to the fact that the combat and helix trees were able to hold me in enough with things to play around with that the lack of story for me wasn’t an issue. This was one case where I was happy to not be locked into a path because there are so many fun ways to play any character. In this regard it reminds me a lot of Borderlands and I personally feel does it a bit better.
I think the biggest problem with this game right now is not everyone wants to play PvP when all the marketing material they DID do before release was all hyping the story stuff but now that was back in May and there has been no new “story” type content where we are having more and more new characters which only helps the PvP crowd more than anyone else.
Yes, this is a totally subjective issue but I know where you’re coming from. I can see how not everyone likes the idea of an episodic, not wholly connected story. In general, I myself prefer a linear narrative, though I’m interested in different ways of telling stories so don’t feel wedded to it. Battleborn’s episodes are linked by concept and theme (both of which I think are very strong), rather than progression, which certainly makes for a different kind of game than Borderlands 2. It does focus more on replayability (though I’ve replayed Bl2 many times and it still makes me laugh, I tune out some of the experience and narrative now). The large number of characters makes episodes into a kind of template, which you can use to replay in radically different ways.
So I understand if story mode isn’t everyone’s cup of tea, but that’s because of what it is, rather than that it was done badly. I see that if people were seeking a Borderlands-type story - which the marketing, in my opinion lacking a lot, did suggest - it would be a disappointment. But I personally feel the writers are to be commended for what they’ve created here, which isn’t something I say lightly.