What the hell Gearbox?

Battleborn Battleborn General Discussion
#1

You guys have made some questionable and frankly counter productive decisions in the past and although I doubt this will even get a proper look, someone has to try and play devil’s advocate otherwise this game is going to keep struggling.

  • Bring back Minion Kills to Incursion

This should even NEED explaining, it doesn’t make sense to replace minion kills with sentry kills.
People who are just starting out may be lucky to even get a kill against an experienced team, that doesn’t mean that they aren’t being useful. Killing minions is an essential part to the game, who killed the sentry is not important.
This is a team game, everyone should know they are pulling their weight.

  • Change the picking system back

I figure you implemented this so people don’t pick at the last second but it’s borked. If I am on the screen to confirm my pick and someone else confirms theirs, it reverts back to the previous screen. Game’s limitations or not, you have a highlighting system. Make the random default to whoever you have highlighted, please, for the love on MInrec.

  • Bring back CP

Not so people can look how good I am, not so I can scare the opponents into giving up. So that I can judge how easy I am going to go on them. There’s no reason you can’t just have fun with the newbies, let them try out new stuff but only punish them to teach them that isn’t working. Not everyone is so egotistical they want to win they’ll crush anybody.
I just want to play and to play we need players, anyone chasing off the newbies can go to hell.
I know you’re trying, the tutorial is a good idea but one day I’d love to see coaching implemented. Sometimes it can more fun to watch a game then play one.

  • Let us talk to the enemy team

Granted not all of them speak my language but still, I see beginners on the enemy side I want to talk with them.
Give them tips, try and help them improve. I’ve seen a Toby just sit there and fire uncharged railgun blasts at me. If I had the chance I would’ve told him that his shield increases velocity (and dmg if specced) and you got fully charge to make the most out of it. But no, I just gotta hope they don’t get too discouraged and quit. It can have negative side effects, but you take the good with the bad. Have some faith in your community because I think you’ll find a majority are rather supportive of new players,

  • Organize your gear screen

I understand this is a lot harder to implement, but it is currently a cluster-sexual intercourse. Why not have little drop downs that have things like “Shield item” and from there you search the secondary stat, “Shard Gen”. It would help make loadouts a lot easier, just click the base item you want and the second stat and rarity. Done, no scrolling through a rainbow eyesore.

To let you know just how much I love this game, I have to play using my mobiles internet because my home internet isn’t satisfactory. I rarely get to play on local servers, I really enjoy this game for it’s incredible design and original elements so you should be proud of what you have created, despite what a majority might think.
That doesn’t mean you guys haven’t screwed up.
I see this game having a future, I didn’t always think was possible.
But with things like ops, you could one day sell the campaign and allow people to play the multiplayer for free.
I dunno, I’m spit balling, but I do have faith that Battleborn can stick it out despite it’s reception.
People don’t take to new things well, this is one of those cases.
But they also don’t know what they’re missing and I put so much effort in just to be able to play this game.
If one day it does die, I will look back fondly and be proud I had the time I did with it but with GBX continuously putting their foot in their mouth, I only hope that comes later than sooner.

PS. Good job with the solo que, it’s a good idea. Looking forward to duo que, sad we have to wait till Valentine’s day.

2 Likes
#2
  1. The goal is to kill the sentry. The problem with reverting back to minion kills is we’d get situations where nobody bothered attacking the sentry because minions count too.

if a newbie is contributing by killing minions then that means they are leveling up and can contribute by attacking people and the sentry.

  1. agreed on that. whats the point of highlighting if it doesn’t default to that?

  2. you can see their command rank in the stats screen, that’s enough to see if someone is new.

  3. You CAN talk in open chat in some modes. When you can’t, just send them a private message if you want. But for stuff like that toby situation, that’s their own fault for not reading the descriptions.

  4. What I want is an option to multiselect to sell off more than one thing at a time. As is I wind up just buying more bank space because I don’t want to sit there slowly selling one thing at a time. As is you can just sort by type, which is solid.

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#3

Just because it’s “their own fault” doesn’t negate my/our desire to help them, and there’s no need to write them off just because they’ve made a mistake or missed something. I’ve wanted to talk to people during matches for the same reason. I know there are good reasons that cross-team chat is disabled, but there are some good reasons to enable it as well. And sending PMs is not the best answer - it’s a huge hassle compared to speaking during a match (so much so that while I’d be happy to help someone during a match, I generally won’t try to catch up with them afterwards or offline or whatever), it won’t “help” the person until after they’ve failed miserably, it won’t prevent the feeling of failure that surely contributes to some new players quitting early on, and it doesn’t give the person a chance to use the remainder of the match to practice the correct use of the skill/ability/etc.

Battleborn can have a high learning curve when you’re just starting out - 30 heroes with unique play-styles is a lot to learn, and some people make mistakes. But I agree with the OP - there have been many situations where I’ve genuinely wanted to help a player that was obviously new/inexperienced and struggling with something.

The bottom line is that we want to keep as much of our community as possible. It does no good for Gearbox to have a free weekend or discounted purchase price or whatever if it doesn’t help bring in long-term players. A lot of people will know within an hour or two of playing a game whether or not they want to continue. That’s the critical time for new players, when minor successes in a match or two will likely spell the difference between quitting and wanting to keep going. I suppose the question is whether the negatives of global chat outweigh the positives. I’m sure Gearbox thinks so, because we’ve seen that they can turn it on and off at will (Chaos Rumble), so they must believe it’s better if it’s disabled. Maybe that was true in the beginning, when there were lots of people playing, but at this point, I’d have to assume that people who just want to troll have mostly moved on - either as part of the general player decline, or because they’ve learned that they can’t use global chat to troll because there’s no global chat. If we assume that most remaining folk are decent folk, then it might make sense at this point to re-enable global chat so that we can help turn new players into community members.

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#4

No, there is no need for that. Just look at all the other games that have this. Toxic levels are super high. Even tho you are in the minority who want to help others - it’s still not worth it.

+the player can get tips from his own team and most of the time they do.
+players learn from their mistakes. We all were newbies from the start of BB and somehow we managed to understand the basic things without anyone (from an enemy team) giving us tips and tricks.

10 Likes
#5

agreed to first part, but the second is not basically true, many of my enemies landed on my friendlist, mostly after a respectful “GG” and a friendly conversation, I do play with many of my “opponents” regurlarly and we learn from each other. yes there are morons out there, but most of the people I met were very nice.

#6

While this is true, at least in part and most of the time, I know I would appreciate it (and I’m sure many other would as well). As people have said, the game has a HUGE learning curve. Even if a post-game PM doesn’t help in that match, it keeps them from making the same rookie mistake in the next game (and gives them a permanent record of the advice!). I’ve been playing intensively since November, I’m CR 109, and I still have no idea what the benefit of Montana’s L2 button is… It spins his gun, but does this add to accuracy? To cool down time? It doesn’t appear anywhere in the character description, and no one has ever told me “Hey, use your L2 to spin your gun and your accuracy will be better, noob!”

If those of us who are dedicated players want new people to stick around, form teams, and build a rich comp scene, experience and advice needs to be passed down the chain. I never would have even known about these forums if I hadn’t had a bug in my titles, because no one ever said “Your gear build sucks! Go to the forums and check out builds, loser!” :grin:

You’ve got hard earned wisdom, please share it!

Brainstorm!!! @GBX, please allow high-level characters to join low-level players in the dojo in “sensei mode!” Same BB selected, full voice chat, so they can coach new players in a low-stress format. Thx!

#7

I agree but your job is to push minions to the sentry, not solo it.
So who cares who actually “got the kill”, it doesn’t make a difference. Chances are they didn’t do it alone and if they did, well, then that’s usually the result of backdooring. A strat I personally look down upon.

When people enter this game expecting a shooter, they act accordingly. They chase kills, go behind lines, thinking that is the only way for them to do something of value for their team. Ironically, their putting the team in a position to be down a person, creating an opening. Sticking together, keeping minions off, learning when, how and where to run all the while suppressing the enemy can take a while to catch on to.

Minions never counted to the scoreboard, they just kept track of who has got the last hit on how many minions. While, we can see the score on the top of the screen at all times AND who gets the kill when it happens, defeats the purpose of replacing a more fundamental score that did matter because it was about sharing xp around.

Carrys like Rath can be so heavily suppressed they end up fodder for anyone with a gun, that doesn’t mean he can’t come around late game and pull his weight. But if the expectation is he HAS to get kills or HAS to take down the sentry, then I think the bars a bit high. The player should focus on ducking in and out of waves, timing your abilities for when you push. But the game is basically saying that if they don’t get kills or assists or kill the sentry, they aren’t being good enough, which is simply not true. I want the game to encourage good behavior, killing minions > soloing sentry. I know it’s the “goal”, but by that logic, I should just pick Pendles everytime.

I imagine the biggest issue as to why CR was removed is because of players who would purposely ditch because they dont want to lose due to inexperianced team mates. If that is still happening now, then that is just pathetic
Sometimes I get sick of seeming to only go against 5 stacks, but in the end I just feel bad for those people who honestly try so hard to win through such an excessive manner. The thing is though, that the community is so small, I see them around often. Always in the same group, always playing the same characters. I’m not the only one, people know each other, they know those people who leave because the team didn’t surrender. They know the people who backdoor, they remember.

I’m glad a lot of those people don’t play anymore, even with the game desperate for players, they probably drove more people away than they ever could’ve brought in. But this community is real something special, because it’s like a filter of virtue. Who is this patient? Seriously, this should be a testament to how lucky GBX is, they truly have some die hard fans. So I have to say you’re wrong when you say I’m the minority, I think you’d find a majority of players would see the logic in helping new players get on their feet because it simply means more players.

This game will have it’s toxic players but it is not a toxic community and I’d like the ability to talk with the enemy for lots of different reasons. Sometimes I just want to adore someones skills, sometimes I want to help, sometimes I want apologize. The fact is, I can’t… If it’s because the devs don’t trust the game won’t turn to harsh bickering, then I don’t think they are in deep enough in this community. I know people who take beginners under their wing, people so dedicated to bringing more life to this game they spend their free time teaching others how to play. That is pretty incredible, I had great times during Chaos Rumble, yes, I had some guy claim my team mate was the reason the game was quote “failing” after he taunted him, but like I said, those people don’t last long. Not with everyone calling them out for being a dick and not wanting to play with them.

#8

This is off-topic, but Montana’s gun has a spin-up time of around a second before bullets start firing, and then another little bit before the gun reaches peak firing speed. Holding the right button allows you to keep the gun spinning at full speed while not firing, or to pre-prime the gun if you think you’ll need it in a few seconds. Both of these are also tied to managing heat buildup - firing the gun produces heat, but spinning the gun doesn’t. So, using the right mouse button methodically can help reduce “dead” time and manage heat without affecting combat momentum. In my experience, most people find the firing delay and heat buildup so insignificant that they ignore the right mouse button, but I’m sure it has its uses in the higher echelons of competitive play. I’m not a big Montana player, though.

1 Like
#9

Yeah… I find the right mouse button “attack” just bad (the most useless one in this game perhaps?). If you hold it, you can’t even walk at a normal speed and why would you do that if you are not attacking anyway?

#10

Corners. You can also use it to keep your minigun speed up when switching between targets (especially useful to help manage your heat if it’s up at the top and hailstorm is on cooldown).

#11

You can organize your gear. On XBox I think you press the menu button and you can choose to organize by a number of methods. Depending on what load out I’m constructing I may have it sorted by Rarity or by Shard Cost. I usually just leave it organized by gear types, which also organizes it by Rarity with in its type.

#12

Don’t forget, more heat = more damage.

#13

All I’m going to say is: as a Kelvin main I would really like to know how many minions I’ve killed.

2 Likes
#14

I can’t believe they ditched it either. It’s nice to see who actually makes some effort during the game, and not flagging off shard hawking. It’s also just a nice stat to see when your mucking about with different BB to see how effective you are, mainly versus bots or even private. Not essential to the game, but a nice stat to have none the less.

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#15

Bring back CP, what’s CP?

#16

Sorry, I meant, Command Rank.

#17

Ironically you can still see the other teams ranks by checking the scoreboard. Odd that you can. Maybe in certain modes the CR should be on view? In bot battle obviously it doesn’t matter as your against the AI, but I get the feeling the game has changed a lot recently, and when you play PvP there’s now a high chance of meeting pre-mades anyway, so rank has no meaning. Most of the games I’ve played recently in Incursion, or Quickmatch have resulted in facing pre-mades of high level and skill. But based on that fact, new players entering Quickmatch may put off more experienced players who will drop out.

Maybe there should be an in depth vote/discussion thread about what the community thinks?

1 Like
#18

I only agree with bringing back Minion Kills. Why is sentry kill a stat? I’d like to know who’s pushing and who’s not. There’s not a real argument you can make for sentry kills.

#19

It made people quit very often and drew out matchmaking times, which we all know is an issue. I love the decision

The goal is to escorts minions to the sentry to kill it.

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#20

If this were true, the game would end when you escort your minions to the final sentry zone…

I find in most games, the sentries get killed by minions, meaning no one gets the kill. Given that Sentry Kills is a tiebreaker, it doesn’t make much sense to count a tiebreaker that doesn’t necessarily reflect the course of the match.