Opinion: Normals & Community Growth.
Hello!
Hope you're all having a great time running up to the holidays. Thank you for Decayed Hope. I was reloading the Steam store page constantly to purchase it but to my surprise it was free. Nice.
On to business.
Normals need to be focused in on to grow the community. They are the starting point of the majority, their first experience. The hook. Where newbies are going to be won or lost, and boy do some of the normal maps just huck that track up.
Normals seem to be the most done maps. Part of this is because they are the most efficient method of gaining seasonal progress (by almost double) but mostly because that’s where new players are. This is encouraging more experienced players to squeeze their maps into normal and dangerous. I equate this to smurfing in a way.
There are still issues with maps being downgradeable on some occasions. Brutals end up in dangerous, dangerous ending up in normal, and some rare normals being so rancidly kill hungry they should really be brutal. General problems aside, normal needs to be a ground of absolute steralized sanctity to allow new players a safe place to learn, play, and earn basic equipment without being kerbstomped.
There’s lots of ways to do this, but the first quick and dirty fix I propose is ban mods from normal. You put a mod on something? Instantly dangerous. Why? Well, here’s someone going through a normal map I made.
I chose this one because they did my map successfully yesterday. They already know the map. Their problem is they’re still learning.
What is the counter to what I built? Literally one grenade. But what if you don’t have the $$$ for nades? What if you only have two shots with the Volt Lancer? What if you haven’t earned the Sledgeblade, or Arc Barrier, or learned to shoot stuff in the legs with the Plasmabow? This map becomes incredibly obnoxious. It's obnoxious because of the mods on these stealthy skull headed bony ass beaches. Mods that typically need counters, which new players wont have unlocked yet.
o7 Have an awesome Christmas!
Comments
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Another issue is it's basically impossible to downrank. I killed myself 18 times and yet...ranked up?
This is surely just pushing people who aren't that good into shizzle they don't want to deal with?
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I don't know if I agree with no mods on normals. I agree that normal should be the place for new players to learn the game. But I think the game does a pretty good job of doing that now. If an outpost gets too many kills then it bumps up to dangerous. And it doesn't take very many kills to do that. It's hard to keep a outpost at normal if get gets higher than 2 kills per raid on average. I've had outposts that average sub 1 kill per raid bump up on occasion.
Now the one thing that I do think needs to be addressed in the dynamic difficulty system is how easy it is to game it. If you make an outpost that by default is normal but in practice is actually deadly, then as soon as it gets bumped up to dangerous the builder can just go and delete 2 guards and replace the exact same guards and boom... back to normal. So as long as the builder is willing to periodically reset their outpost then they can easily maintain an outpost in normal that belongs in dangerous.
With all that said, I wouldn't throw a fit if they made it so mods/augments are by default dangerous. That would negate things like spontaneous and guard armor which can be frustrating to new players.
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How do you figure this pushes people to difficulties they are not ready for? Regardless of you level, 1 or 500, you can run whatever difficulty you want. There is no MMR or SBMM. You don’t get tougher bases as a Master rank than you do as a Bronze.
When the game came out, you could lose up to 30 rank points per raid if you died too much. People started abandoning bases after a couple deaths since they couldn’t make progress anymore. Now, you get rewarded for finishing a base, no matter how many tries it took you. The fewer deaths, the more points, but it was a real kick in the teeth to spend all that time and get nothing or even negative points.
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I'm not sure that was true of the previous season. As I ranked up I noticed a far higher saturation of BS bases the higher into master I went. It could be that as the season drew towards the end people had their rewards and there were mostly only hardcore people left.
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As far as I know, rank has nothing to do with what outposts you get.
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