My two cents are similar. Battleborn has a lot going on and personally I find that a big draw.
The problem arises when on release there’s only 6 pvp maps and 8 campaign missions. Maybe half of the missions are actually fun and story and lore are barely looked at…outside the first and last mission.
Anyhoo I’m getting distracted by my rambunctious 3 year old so I’m loosing my train of thought. Bleh. I’ll come back later
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Sure, there are a lot of things I could say, but it really boils down to a few major things.
Gearbox is losing against time.
Battleborn never seemed to have done anything right at the right time -going so far as the release date. Going against Overwatch actually isn’t the primary issue. The issue is that Battleborn, although a meatier game than Overwatch by a significant margin, wasn’t meaty enough based on what I just posted before. Battleborn needed to be a much, much better game from the get go, which I believe Gearbox could have done if they spent more time in the area that would have ensured a much bigger player base on Day 1, which is PvE.
By today, Gearbox does not have a good PvE crowd to rely on as a cushion. They don’t get to reap any rewards they didn’t invest in.
Because Battleborn was merely a very good game and not a very great game, Overwatch was able to do much more damage than it otherwise could have. Battleborn began struggling but it was still possible to minimize the damage. They went with a 55% discount, an attempt to bring in more players, in which I was a part of. What they failed to do, in my opinion, is to put work in keeping the players they already have on PvP and PvE.
At this point, Battleborn needed to be desperate to hold onto the community and player base they worked so hard to attract. Each and every one of them was earned by sweat and blood. However, I don’t think they held this mentality. At the 55% discount mark, Battleborn needed to permanently increase XP gains, credit gain, amount of drops per boss, and legendary drop rate chance. Players now can earn their credits and loot packs faster to keep them interested for a much longer duration. However, Gearbox was running the ship in a manner that the game was successful when it was clearly declining. It’s a very bad followthrough in an otherwise great discount sale.
Game continues to struggle through early June, with Alani very OP, balance patches are slow to implement, gear acquisition is slow since drop rates are crap, loot pack drop rates were also crap, credits were time consuming to farm, matchmaking was a disaster on the PvP front, PvE was also affected by the lower population… and what happens then…
Microtransactions.
Who the hell asked for this?
Maybe the better question is: Why are the people in charge still operating like the game is in a healthy state? Hate to be the bearer of bad news, but Battleborn is not doing well.
The whole justification that a separate team did the marketplace function and blah blah blah, look, it’s not relevant to me whatsoever. The game is in turmoil, stop treating it like it isn’t. It makes you look both tone-deaf and insane. Anything implemented that would not revive the player base is pretty much irrelevant. Players don’t have others to play with consistently, and the publishers also have no one to milk.
Somewhere in between they permanently increased legendary drop chance. A good move, perhaps a bit late.
Then Lootpocalypse came sometime in late July, if I recall, and it was the best thing ever. Coincided with Humble Bundle, if I recall. This is probably the only thing Battleborn did right with flying colours.
In August, GBX decides to reward more XP for finishing matches and missions as a means to reduce quitting and surrendering. It’s not that it’s wrong, but it’s not the correct reward to boost. What GBX needed to boost is the acquisition of credits, the only tangible reward in the game.
Then XP boosters… which costs real money to get, which also doesn’t provide any incentives for people to come back.
Did I happen to forget that Battleborn was giving us more skins and taunts at a progressively more expensive price this entire time? The microtransactions were ever so diligent to arrive on time, and yet the fixes, patches, new campaigns and stuff that will improve the player base were nowhere to be seen or heard.
I know GBX is forced to be tight-lipped with a lot of their stuff, in which I understand, but the overall perception of it when the game is struggling is hardly ideal.
Pendles was released somewhere in there, but who cares. He didn’t do much to improve the player base.
Ernest was actually a very cool character, but with the player base at about 700 on PC at the time people’s enthusiasm were greatly dampened. But Hardcore Spotlight, UPR discount pack was good, it got some people playing again.
Battleplan September 1st 2016… no events… not even a band-aid solution to retain the player base… And DLC and other PvP modes are scheduled for October 13th 2016…
Now at 300ish players on Steam as of writing and we’re going to facing a 6 week of “Content-Less”, in the context of no new content, Battleborn.
I’m trying really hard to pray that Battleborn won’t look like a desolate graveyard by then.
How many of the things I have mentioned so far actually helped boost the player base? I only saw 2. 3 if you include Pendles.
In the span of 4 months, only 3 things managed to boost the population in a noticeable way. Is this why there are only 300 players on Steam?
What’s going to happen when Paladins, Lawbreakers, and Paragon come out in full swing? What about the other AAA titles coming this holiday season? What if some massive publisher discount comes again soon? How is Battleborn going to compete against all these outside factors?
Time had been very unkind to Battleborn indeed.
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I actually have been likening it quite a bit to dark souls. Dark souls throws you in the game, and expects you to learn, and for some reason it took off there. Battleborn is a hard game. It is VERY hard. You have to invest a lot of time in
A. The game. You need to learn all the maps, the mechanics, why accelerators, health stations, etc are necessary.
B. The Heroes. You need to invest at least five hours in each hero to really get the feel for how they should be played.
C. The Gear. It makes no sense at first, and you more likely than not will see -8 reload speed and just think “That’s NOTHING!” Hours of gameplay are needed to see the benefit of all the different stats.
Anyway, I don’t remember where I was going with this, but I agree with you, I think.
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The main falling point on the PC was terrible optimization.
And it took them too long to fix the performance issues because they wanted to keep patches released at the same time across platforms.
When people are running i7’s with 980s and can’t play a match cause of odd bugs that drop the FPS to neglible for no reason, you definitely ARE NOT keeping players.
Along with poor optimization of Echelon and the other two maps where those without an NVidia card just can’t play them.
They can’t hold onto new players on PC cause it’s a shitstorm for them to try to get into the game.
Existing veterans, from my experience, only care about wins and will steam roll new players for the sake of their ego, or something, rather than okay lightly and let the new guys figure it out, to keep them hooked.
The only thing saving this sunk ship on PC, and to clear the water off the slowly sinking ship of console is to just keep doing what they are doing…
Making the game better. Optimized better, more content, making sure the DLC is phenomenal, adding a legit PvP tutorial…
And then repackage it at the end as the “DEFINITIVE EDITION!!!” And hope 2K will actually frigging advertise the game in a way that would set it apart from Overwatch from the get-go.
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From a thread about lore, said by Jythri himself:
“With the exception of launch week, we’ve been pretty stable at twice as many players playing multiplayer over the story missions. I’ve actually been pleasantly surprised that our story missions have been played as much as they have.”
As you can see, there are more people playing PVP. Even more importantly, they did not intend for players to spend so much time in PVE. It appears very clearly that at the very least, it started out as a side thing. PVP was expected to be the main part of the game according to… a dev himself.
Their goal was clearly not a PVE focus. They would never have released a PVE focused game expecting people playing PVE to be comparatively rare.
I understand that you don’t love PVP, and find PVE at least compelling (obviously besides Archive lol), but the majority of the community prefer PVP
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First good observations!
Don’t know squat about Dark Souls.
What I do know is this:
BB’s PVE is not that hard in general, but it is intricate for many characters.
GBX put most of it’s effort into the PVP, hoping the PVE would serve as a “tutorial”.
PVE is nothing like PVP in BB so players get familiarized with PVE, switch to PVP and get stomped.
It’s worse with the population low like it is now because pre-mades roam the wastelands looking for PUGs to stomp. When they stomp, new players leave. This is what happened with the Humble bundle. A large influx of players and then a big drop off. Why, no one likes waiting in long lines to get gang-slammed by a group hardcore of veterans.
If you stay in PVE for too long you find that at CL100 you stop gaining much. Once you level 15 your favorite characters there is almost nothing new. No more XP, very little $ and what $ you get doesn’t buy much.
GBX is great at story. They are great at Characters. RPG-FPS and they are in their sweet spot.
Play to your strengths GBX. Beef up the PVE. More story, more levels. You have almost 300,000 owners of this game on PC. Give them a reason to return. No more magic acts, no more Randy Pitchford sing-a-longs.
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Still doesn’t change the fact there are 300 players on Steam.
Whether GBX didn’t expect such interest in PvE or not, or only wanted PvP, the game is at a situation that no one is envious of. Why did Gearbox not anticipate there being a PvE market? If they didn’t want a PvE market, then don’t make any PvE content so no one would be making any demands for PvE.
Did Gearbox forget that they are good at PvE elements or that they are really good at making PvE games? Now that there is this unexpected PvE market, Gearbox still didn’t capitalize on it -especially as the game began its unenviable trek downwards.
If PvE is nothing but an afterthought, then it’s not the PvEers that are affecting the PvP experience. After all, PvP is the priority, according to Randy, so why are the PvP numbers so abysmal? Don’t look at me for answers, I’m just a PvEer, I don’t matter, a completely irrelevant factor in the equation.
Jokes aside, now you have 300 players on Steam because neither side of the isle are satisfied. Slightly less than 2 weeks ago, we still about 600 to 700.
It’s why I said before that “Content-Less” Battleborn is going to be a really tough time. I just didn’t think the numbers would plummet this quickly.
Also, I was predominantly a PvPer in WoW, because that was the path that gave me more rewards faster. I like PvP, to be honest, but not when there is nothing for me at the end of the tunnel.
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I can’t argue with what you are saying.
But I LOOOOVE BB’s PVP SOOOOO MUCH!
And it bothers me to no end that Overwatch didn’t even ATTEMPT to have a story.
Even if there were 20 story missions, if they were all I had to play, even with so many characters, I don’t think I’d still be playing the game.
BUT - weirdly, before playing BB, when all GBX had out in this vein were the 3 Borderlands titles, I don’t know if I’d have felt the same way.
I put THOUSANDS of hours into PVP-less Borderlands.
But…Borderlands story was in obviously like a million watt floodlight to the candle that is Battleborn’s story mode.
So I dunno.
I’m super addicted to Battleborn PVP now.
Thanks for responding, everyone, I’ll try to respond to the rest of you soon!
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When you add your talking points to the mountain I already created… the situation looks more grim.
Hardly something to be envious of.
Maybe that’s why I was playing Street Fighter…
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I honestly have no idea how Battleborn might be sold to a wider public. I bought it for the most shallow of reasons: my GF and I wandered in EB Games, and as she stood in front of the pre-order stands, she said to me “Look, this elf girl has a mohawk. And she’s kind of a babe!”
270+ PVP matches as Mellka later, here I still am.
I don’t really have gamer friends offline (just serious-minded academic colleagues who think I’m frivolous), and when I explain Battleborn to them, I still just run with “it’s a game that lets me play as a sexy mohawked elf.” Not a bad tagline, I think
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And I bought it because, “That girl uses 5 swords!”
And it was at 55% discount.
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Battleborn is not hard. Steep learning curve? Just a bit steeper than “drop in and shoot stuff” because you also have to think what happens around - and it’s PVP. In PVE you literally just drop in and shoot stuff, and it’s easy.
These games are very different in the core, it’s just some details may seems similar, but they are kind of general. Many games have “different playstyles”, “gear that improves your character”, etc.
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The point about better (and more) story missions would have brought in a higher number of the BL2 crowd is very well taken.
I bought this game because of BL2…
I had never played PvP.
But once I got in the game I tried it and liked it. I still suck at it but so what.
Getting more people to play is where the total effort should be in the future the way I see it. ENTICE new players and retain old players. Bring up the numbers! It’s really all that matters now.
Everything else is entirely secondary and almost irrelevant.
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The fifty ton elephant that has destroyed more camel backs than it could count is the player base.
Everything falls apart if this number (325, as of writing) doesn’t go up.
If nothing is done, it will continue to free fall.
But a lot of people avoid this issue like the plague. They don’t want to talk about it. Or they do, but powerless to stop this downward spiral trend.
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The sad truth is, unless you’re already good - very good at PVP (which generally equates to people with a lot of spare gaming time), or you have a lot of time to GET good, or you can be comfortable with losing a LOT in the time you can devote to it, OR you can somehow content yourself with what is not nearly enough story to truly keep large numbers of non-diehard PVE-ers interested beyond the short term, this game is not for you.
And, as we sadly know, the people who meet the requirements I described above are in the vast minority.
If they had gone pure PVP, I wonder if this would be different?
And if they had gone pure PVE, I may never have experienced these last amazing 425 hours.
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No man can serve two masters.
Video games, however, may be exempt from that rule.
Ideally, Battleborn would have served both demands adequately, both isles should be co-existing in harmony. I’m not saying we aren’t doing it now, but clearly that’s not the problem…
Battleborn faced the 50 ton elephant in the room, casualties high beyond belief, and when push comes to shove one side would have to be sacrificed in order to ensure survival. Whoever is abandoned would fracture the community base regardless, but the damage may, in theory, be mitigated somewhat. No guarantees, of course.
Now you have 325 players on Steam as of writing…
And PS4’s Capture and Meltdown are rumoured to be ghost towns. PC was way ahead of PS4 on that department.
Battleborn does have the potential to serve 2 masters, I believe that, but not with the game that came on release.
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So can you (or anyone) think of any realistic solutions that Gearbox couid implement to draw new players in, in large numbers?
Would introducing a glut of new PVE maps or PVP maps or modes help?
I’m at a loss for solutions…
I already suggested short term solutions as we tread on this “Content-Less” Battleborn, the context meaning the lack of the massive content patch and campaign DLC, by having weekly events that offer tangible rewards.
Double Credits, Double XP, Double XP and Credits, Increased Drop amount, Increase Drop Rate and Amount, Discount Faction Packs with a different faction every weekend or entire week, do something to make people want to play PvP or PvE more because there is a direct reward that feels substantial. These are all the short term solutions that wouldn’t take too long or costly to implement week to week.
What Gearbox should NOT do is not even make an attempt to do anything, like the current Battleplan.
It doesn’t even look like there is a Hardcore Spotlight either.
Maybe it’s possible to create a minimum 3, maximum 5, man raid mission. It’s going to be a small map (like real small, minimal traveling) that contains 2 mini bosses with some trash in between, which should only take 10 to 12 minutes altogether. The final 10 to 12mins is to fight the main encounter, which is a somewhat challenging boss but drops a high number of loot. Basically, a competent group could spend 20 to 22 minutes to get a lot of credits and gear instead of slogging through poor paced missions like, wait for it, The Archive.
If anyone played Ruby Sanctum in Wrath of the Lich King, you would know what I’m talking about.
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Can confirm.
Our regular team is going to sit in Meltdown next time we play and discover how long it takes to get a game. None of this “jumping to Incursion after twenty minutes” business. We may not end up getting a game, but it’s the principle of the thing!
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The plague has officially infected the other platforms.
Maybe I’m merely late to the party.