#7

Man you missed the premades we ran yesterday 5 melee’s and 4 melee 1 miko.

Absolutely crushed every game. It was great.

#8

I guess I missed my point a little bit. There’s 5 people, grouping up, having a good time, picking random/fun characters, and then there’s a specific, often CC-heavy, purposeful team that tries to crush everything.

I think I’m more afraid of the long CC that coordination provides vs. simply having a coordinated premade.

#9

[quote=“hexhammer, post:7, topic:1541038, full:true”]Absolutely crushed every game. It was great.
[/quote]

I think that’s part of the problem people have with premades. The chance of a curb-stomp, even with a terrible/sub-optimal comp is a lot higher than in a normal group (hell, in a random group, I highly doubt you’ll ever actually have a well and true curb-stomp unless someone in one of the groups quits).

I think it’s less median outcome that people get concerned about and more mean or extreme outcome.

#10

The real problem is the one OP pointed out.
It’s not really relevant that many of you beat premade teams.
What OP was pointing out is that NEW players (that we kind of need more of) are likely to run up against said premades, get stomped and just walk away.

On PC, 147,000 people bought the game.
Currently only 571 are playing.

That’s a whole lot of people who have paid money for the game not playing.
Even F2P can’t fix the problem of noob stomping.

People don’t want to play a game that is not fun.
Things that make a game NOT fun:

  1. getting crushed,
  2. waiting a long time to get crushed,
  3. games with a high learning curve etc.
#11

And in particular to being crushed, I’ll harp on the CC part of it. Being stun locked, losing all player agency, and then dying…having no counter, and then no one to bail you out because you’re on an uncoordinated team, that will make people quit.

1 Like
#13

Pre-mades can be very hard.

I think the problem is less that “pre-mades are naturally harder than PUGs” it’s that the type of difficulty players experience is more annoying, especially if you’re new.

If you’re up against a strong PUG, you might lose, you might lose badly but it feels more random (for lack of a better word).

Maybe the other team has one really strong person who steamrolls, maybe your team has a couple of people feeding, maybe on average they kill faster and more effectively than you do. This is unpleasant, but comprehensible.

Good, competitive pre-mades (which isn’t all pre-mades) out play you, and make you feel terrible for it. They are better at keeping you (a new player) from doing anything to make it feel like a “fair fight”. They shut you down earlier and more often.

It’s not death but a bad death that I think people have trouble with.

There are two solutions that I can see, one is a bandaid the other takes a lot of work.

1. Scale the ELO for players in groups of 3 or more. I don’t think you can just put those players in their own queue because on the PC that would result in infinite queue times instantly. The math absolutely doesn’t work. That being said, you can take a compromise and add a natural handicap to pre-made groups. Coordination is worth something, make it reflect in their ELO.

(Downside - The way ELO is currently arranged, the ranges are so wide that this could still put a veteran team up against a new group, but not against worse than average players)

2. Add in-game tutorials for PVP I’ve said this a number of times, but I think that players need better onboarding into Battleborn’s PVP. Instead of letting a CR two that has only played three PVE game jump into the queue and get crushed, there should be some fun, guided tutorials that help players learn the modes before unlocking public queues.

These could be story driven, they would teach basic mechanics, they would provide checklists of tasks that need to be completed before public queues open.

If you wanted to go whole hog (and raise queue times), you might even have a beginners queue for people under CR 15. A place for new players to have the same experience as those who bought the game at launch, playing against people who haven’t already mastered the games steep learning curve.

Also, @Tokesy97 is right… There are a ton of people who want to help, check out Battle School. I for one am happy to help if I’m online, PSN: Timocracy.

2 Likes
#14

@Tokesy97,

This is very helpful and I point people in this direction every chance I get.
Unfortunately, only a small part of the community comes here.
Most people I have spoken to and reviews that I have read simply walk away.

The ones who do come here are often dismissed by people who say “I can do it, you must suck” or “you need to git gud”.
New people won’t come here and say, "hey guys, I suck. Please help me"
They say “this character suck, that character is waay to OP” etc.
Because that is their perspective.

This game has a tough learning curve, PVP is even tougher.
We need to find a way to be proactive and more supportive.

#16

I disagree with this pretty strongly.

If a new player comes and asks for tips, they are overwhelmingly met with support, people offering advice on how to improve their play.

The thread “Why Do I Suck So Badly” (or similar) is only one example of this.

There are threads where people offer their prognosis on why the “game sucks, and must be changed,” that are met with less support, but that’s because people disagree with their viewpoint.

If someone wants to learn to play, it’s rare that I see the usual “git gud” chorus that other games are famous for. It’s much more often that I see real, legitimate attempts at help.

#17

Not disagreeing, I just wanted to point something out.

I don’t know what game mode you were playing, but that team would get absolutely steamrolled by a Toby on meltdown or incursion. Their only forms of ranged attacks aren’t nearly enough to break his force field without taking some serious damage in retaliation (and in the case of Gali, she’ll lose her ranged attacks before she gets a chance to do any real damage at all). All Toby has to do is pick a good spot to set up with a quick escape when Attikus looks like he is about to pounce.

#18

Yeah I was going to say I would love playing against a team like that. A competent ghalt, marquis, Toby, thorn, any of them would have a field day against that squad.

1 Like
#19

I run in a premade often and we usually mess around unless we are going against other premades that we recognize.

I agree this is a problem though bc I’m not sure many people do this.

1 Like
#20

They really won’t. One bad match isn’t going to make people quit, and there aren’t nearly as many premades as people make it out to be.

#21

Even when I play duo I’m probably just going to win.

The ability to just have one dude drop damage or a stun on the person you are chasing is enough to wreck kids.

Honestly, you’d have a better time in pubs if people just communicated. But ya don’t so ya won’t.

#22

I think you’ve misinterpreted the numbers you’ve used. 147000 is the total number of players who bought the game. 571 is the number currently playing the game at that moment. Those numbers aren’t comparable. You could compare the peaks of people playing at once from launch to now (12000 to 600 I believe) or you could compare the number of active players over a course of time to how many people bought it (147000 to 20000 I believe).

You are still correct that pc numbers have drastically dropped, but I suggest comparing apples to apples.

Now if you excuse me, my one year old just pooped in the tube
-_-

1 Like
#23

What I said was

"On PC, 147,000 people bought the game.
Currently only 571 are playing.

That’s a whole lot of people who have paid money for the game not playing."

I am not comparing, I am inferring from a population (those who bought) to a point in time (those who are currently playing).

I apolgize if that wasn’t clear.

#24

[quote=“jYorkElder, post:23, topic:1541038, full:true”](those who are currently playing).
[/quote]

Part of the problem is that “currently playing” is vague and can be interpreted in multiple ways based upon how you interpret each word. “Playing currently” could mean actively participating in a game at a specific moment in time (which means that the number you list and even intend it to represent is actually inflated somewhat by the people who go afk in lobby but are still counted), but it could also mean taking part in a game on a regular or semi-regular basis (which means that the number you listed is incredibly low; the number of unique steam accounts that have played BB in the last 2 weeks is ~26k).

It’s even worse when you put all of this together without context. Many of the people who bought the game played it intensely for the first month, stopped playing, and moved on to other games (Overwatch deserves special mention here, especially given Overwatch’s beta/release dates that Blizzard basically custom tuned to screw over BB), which is actually an expected behavior in the world of video games. As such, saying that people bought the game and are no longer playing it without context is equally bad.

How you present and label a set of data is just as important as the set of data itself. If you present things out of context and make inaccurate comparisons (e.g. comparing total purchases to a snapshot of people who have the game running at that moment as a marker of a game’s health), you can make even good numbers look bad.

However, I’m not saying that the numbers look good. The numbers aren’t good, but they’re definitely not as bad as most people are suggesting.

As to the OP, I, personally, disagree with the idea that the success or failure of the game rides entirely upon PvP. Yes, it’s a major game mode, but, based on some polls I’ve seen (admittedly, small numbers), roughly half of the people playing the game do so primarily for PvE (and there are more people that are pure PvP than are pure PvE). Furthermore, PvE is the one thing that BB has that none of its competitors (Overwatch and TF2 on the “team based FPS” front; LoL and DotA on the “MOBA” front) have paid the slightest bit of attention to.

BB needs to play up its strengths and push the PvE to the forefront. The competition for PvP is significantly larger and significantly better funded and marketed; it’s pretty much automatically a losing proposition. PvE though…

#25

Somewhere between 20,000 to 30,000 of the ~147,000 people who bought the game are still playing. They are not all playing at once of course, so we only see little snapshots of how many people are playing at that moment (which is the number most people use). As I type there are 462 people playing which isn’t too bad when you consider the time of the day (a lot of people are either sleeping, at work, at school, etc). It’s not a great number. I wish it was higher. Anyway, just wanted to help and make sure people were using the right numbers.

1 Like
#26

The idea of premades playing only premades is a awful idea because of the player base and rare 5 man premades. I mostly play with 4-5 people and we don’t decide who we fight we don’t just say that we will wreck those scrubs but my god everyone seems to think that’s what all premades do…

#27

Which is why I think more CC restrictions might be an easier fix. [quote=“sbspalding, post:13, topic:1541038”]
It’s not death but a bad death that I think people have trouble with.
[/quote]

said it right here.

#28

The roflstomp might not be the result of some malicious intentions, and frankly motivation doesn’t really matter. NBA pro team vs. JV high school team. The NBA players can only throw it so much…