okay mym community - you win
since the recent boycott of brutal bases it has gotten to the point where even attempting to create a "fair" and "balanced" brutal base is pointless because players just avoid playing them.
sometimes i feel like i'm the last custodian on earth performing brutal raids.
so fine. you win.
i'm no longer making fun and interesting 4500 capacity brutal bases.
now i'm making 4500 capacity normal bases with bomb ejectors on the forbidden tombs to punish greed and some sort of dumb cheese strategy to ensure at least 1-3 kills per raider.
🤷🏻♂️oh well. sorry not sorry.
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It's not the community's fault. It's BHVR's.
BHVR announced seasonal cosmetics as a reward for rank, but players can lose rank progress, so immediately the willingness to play Brutal bases dropped. That was easily predictable.
Looking past difficulty at just the size, the reward for playing a large base doesn't necessarily make up for the amount of time that may be sunk into it. The raider has no idea beforehand if it'll be fun. There are no tags to help Raiders identify an Outpost they'll enjoy. The only bonus a large base provides is more Tombs, but there's no guarantee the Builder hasn't blocked off the Tombs (and the number of Tombs that dump nothing but Parts on me makes me want to cry). Builders are likely to go after large bases for the freedom they provide when building, but Raiders aren't incentivized to raid them.
I doubt the majority of the community is happy about the direction things have taken. Players would rather challenge themselves than be bored. Players would rather spend a lot of time in a base they'll enjoy than play a lot of short uninteresting bases, but they need to grind for materials and more bases = more materials. By BHVR's design, players are actively discouraged from taking chances and are instead encouraged to play it safe. Players did seem to be playing Brutal bases before the announcement; BHVR changed the course of the game for the worse by bringing attention to rank.
tldr: BHVR has pushed the entire community away from Brutal bases, first as Raiders and consequently as Builders, and now that includes you. The community lost. BHVR won.
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Its no boycott. Its just that players can´t afford to die to often due to the rank system. I´ve reached gold 1 and dying only once on an outpost means that i´ve lost rank points.
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"My efforts as one person aren't enough to make up for the community-wide problem which is a result of faulty difficulty calculations, therefore I'm going to make more problems instead."
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"problems" is an incorrect term.
i'm giving the community what they want. short bases with lots of vaults that are accessible. limited traps and the only way you'll die is if you aren't good at the game.
as an example:
i currently have an active base that is 20 armored+bloodlust warmongers set to rush down a 1 block path as soon as you take the genmat.
heavy swords and grenade users will be fine. crossbow users tha can aim will be fine. others will probably die.
so the entire base is 3 bomb traps and 20 warmongers on a straight and narrow path. so fun.
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The ranking system is an aberration and causes much of the bad behaviour. Now the raider start to rage quit the base as soon as they have 2 die, even if the base doesn't use bad mechanics.
It forces everyone to become 'cost-effective' at the price of fun.
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i'll say this. ever since i stopped making bases brutal and swapped to normal cheese builds i've been getting a ton more new players that have no clue what they're doing because they skipped the tutorial and a couple of high ranked speed runners that have long since forgotten the basics of the game. so both die and my 4500 capacity base is growing. once i hit prestige 9 i'll turn it back into a fun brutal base.
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No, but he´s right. The Rank system is horrible. It punishes failure very hard and only slightly rewards success.
For example, i have 2 active bases. 1 normal and 1 dangerous. The normal one got 10 kills in 2 rais and +11 rank points. The dangerous one got 0 kills in 1 raid and -30 rank points.
Same goes for raiders, if i die even once = instantly -9 rank points (had even one, where i died 4 times and it hit me with -90 points). If i complete a maze without dying = +44 rank points.
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I agree with being punished too harshly in the ranking. I think there should be a minimum that you gain from completing a raid regardless of how many times you die. Obviously, you get more if you die less or not all, but losing points when you finish something simply sucks. I'd enjoy this game more if "ranking" was an opt in thing and they had seasonal cosmetics tied to gaining experience like so many other reward systems. On the earning points side, the grind is ridiculous and you earn less and less the higher you get.
Difficulty of outposts isn't properly reflected by the normal, dangerous, brutal scale and I tend to avoid the size of the outpost over the "difficulty". I'd be more likely to try a small brutal map over a large normal. I noticed my large dangerous is perpetually stuck at 3 and I stopped putting in the resources to reactivate it because there is no traffic. My small outposts have had no problems.
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I play almost exclusively brutal bases. The key I've found is always having the suit advisor buff level 3 active when raiding. Knowing exactly how long the harvester path is, the 2 most common traps, the exact number of traps and guards is huge! The thing I'm usually looking for is a base that isn't too long (preferably 150 meters or less), most common trap type being either impaler or bolt, and lots of guards. I also look at the total number of traps. Preferably 80 or less. I also pay attention to the thumbnail of the base. If I see paint marks showing paths to tombs or a lot of effort put into the aesthetics then those are good signs too.
I've also found that if there isn't anything you like then you can just enter/exit build on one of your own bases and it will reset the dungeons. Clearing dungeons using this method usually doesn't take too long. If I manage to enter a dungeon that obviously isn't worth the effort then I'll take the -30 hit to rank and abandon. Clearing a dungeon with no deaths on brutal is like +160 rank at gold. I can abandon 5 raids if I need to and still be profitable. Though honestly, using the info from suit advisor really lowers the amount of times I need to abandon a raid. Play however you want to of course, but I've found this to work quite well.
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All i can say is 👍🏻
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this is exactly why i feel the block mechanic is too heavy handed. someone else posted in another thread and i agree that i'm pretty sure all these people saying "I don't get enough raids" probably have really big block lists and don't realize that blocking a builder means they can't raid that player's bases either so they're lowering their ability to interact with an already limited player base. suit advisor boost is ALWAYS on for me, it's invaluable. i also don't like long maps and prefer at maximum 250 length but i will agressively target brutals under 100 as i can normally slip in and out before anything has the opportunity to kill me. i hate mazes so very much i avoid them like the plague. and i pray that the next patch fixes the 0 length displayed bug. thanks for using the advisor to your bennefit and promoting others doing the same, this is how we SHOULD be handling content we don't want to be in.
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i agree that any player who powers through a rough dungeon shouldn't be penalized for conquering their challenge.
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It's astounding how often I see videos where players practiaclly stand before a trap - ignore it and it fires them in the back 5 sec later.... they see the atleast 3 boltthrowers pointed at them - they jump through the opening into the traps what they don't even need to do and don't even shield...
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i've started painting the cubes around my traps as a big "look! look!" to those players that struggle with the most obvious of traps.
in my defense for when i do it - i'm probably just bored and my mental is going "let's see if we can deflect everything". or something dumb like "imma ricochet this to get a kill"
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Honestly I think people neglect that a large chunk of brutal bases are built on "Large" burial sites, and the levels are just long. Like, I could play three different levels at Dangerous difficulty for the time it takes to run one Brutal base. I'd get better GenMat, a more diverse play experience, and if I have to stop in the middle, I don't lose everything. Like, your 30 minute adventure isn't for everyone.
I do run Brutal bases but usually as a change of pace where I know what I'm getting into is long-form content. Outside of that, I tend to avoid Large burial sites at all difficulties.
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there is a section of people who hunt tombs and prefer large maps because they have 3 of them. I target maps that are under 100M agressively, prefer to run things under 200. my average run is 2-4 minutes in a brutal and i don't see me running 2 dangerous in that same timeframe or 3 normals.
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For sure for sure. It depends on the normals / dangerous levels obviously, and I respect the synthite grind, it's a mood. I just never do brutals in 2-4 minutes - it's usually 10-20 minutes, and in that time I can definitely do two to three dangerous bases.
But it's not actually even about that for me - for me, large bases mean that if I screw up and I die, I am gonna have to walk back all that way to pick up where I died. The longer the base is, the more painful that is. And don't even get me started on mazes, which happen far more often on large maps. Killboxes are more fun than mazes, and I find killboxes to be boring.
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i can relate. i don't find killboxes boring myself but they're less fun than a clever base with room to play. mazes are just time wasters. if i spent 10 minutes on a raid i feel like i'm not getting the value for my time. the exception to that being if i learn a new skill or somehow get to refine one.
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But that's exactly the problem you and perhaps many more see it like this others may perhaps like mazes.
I just don't get why everybody seems to think that an outpost has to be either a maze or a killbox.
You can use both concepts in one design and then it doesn't get overboard or boring. Make a few (short) corridors with nice trap designs and a well designed killroom (or more). And yes long labyrinthine corridor designs completly without traps are boring and sry stupid, it doesn't do the builder one bit of good it just annoys the raider.
There are many maps where i ask myself what was the intention of the builder - just to brainf... s.o. or didn't he or she have the cap points to trap everything as intended? In an rank 9 or 10 i would tend to the first in maps with lower ranking i would tend to the second. But if then there are other things like meanly trapped tombs (e.g. bomblayer) or nasty corrosive cube combos maybe the builder is just a griefer?
And why do Rank 1 small maps get equipped directly with high cap traps which means much less traps per map than low cap traps? 750 cap 300-400 used on blocks and the rest for high cap traps is just bad usage of resources. 350- 450 points for traps are 7-9 bolttrowers and even more impalers without mod, but only 5-7 flamethrowers or any other 70 cap trap. That's just for unmoded traps if you put mods on them then there are even less traps in such a setup.
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rank 1 small maps use expensive traps because boltshot and impaler are basically worthless against co-op. they don't really have any other options, it's fire and plasma for co-op, piston and fire for speed runners, and bombs to try to get kills from panic. guards are a joke unless theres 12-20 in a room.
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