Anthem - EA’s next PR disaster after BF 5

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robobobo said:
The developers stated the gun leveling issue was a scaling mishap for a function that would buff lower-level characters who joined a higher-level character, so your newbie friend wouldn't get splatted like a bug if the two of you played together. Which makes sense and all, who wants to not be able to play with their friends if they aren't the same level? Except like all of the other fuckups, this too is something that should have been tested at some point but clearly wasn't.
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I can understand that it's inconvenient if someone who's high-level wants to play with a newbie, but scaling damage to make the newbie viable in high-level play means that leveling literally has no meaning and any incentive to grind will also be taken away, even if the standard weapon doesn't end up more powerful than the high-tier gun. If all I can look forward to is a really meagre boost to my DPS, why even bother trying to get some good loot? Either I melt faces like there's no tomorrow where I once got my ass kicked or there's no point in getting the "better" weapon.

If they can't implement any mechanic to give low-level players something meaningful to do in a group with high-level players, maybe they should abondon that whole "make a group with large differences in the character level" thing.

That's where creative gamedesign would have come in handy.

Edit: Also this perfectly exposes how creatively bankrupt these devs truly are. Apparently, their best idea to differentiate weapons of different levels is to change a few numbers and make them do more damage.
How about going crazy with secondary effects, special abilities and so on?

The coolest fucking thing in old-school shooters always was picking up some signature weapon, like the BFG in Doom. Bioware already blew their load with the missile-spam weapon (which looks neat tbh) but maybe they could have allowed high-level characters to add more special features to their guns (such as a machinegun that uses a different ammo, has improved accuracy and so on).
Warhammer Vermintide did this pretty well. Weapons come in different tiers, the higher the tier, the more effects it can have, so there's guns that have reduced reload times, higher precision, armor piercing, larger magazines and so on.

A similar system would lead seasoned characters to breeze through encounters while new players would have to struggle a little more.
I am not a big fan of scaling health of enemies in games anyway. The difficulty should increase by the enemy having special tactics and abilities, not by them just absorbing ridiculous amounts of damage.
 
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RomanesEuntDomus said:
If they can't implement any mechanic to give low-level players something meaningful to do in a group with high-level players, maybe they should abondon that whole "make a group with large differences in the character level" thing.
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Fuck your game design the marketing team just did a focus group with 50 plebs off the street and you're going to make changes to the game to appeal to the dumbest of those plebs or you're out of a job.
 
User names must be unique said:
Fuck your game design the marketing team just did a focus group with 50 plebs off the street and you're going to make changes to the game to appeal to the dumbest of those plebs or you're out of a job.
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Who needs focus groups when you can have Anita come to your studio to give a few advices?
 
Emperor Julian said:
At this stage, we have to ask what do we need to do to get rid of EA?
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You'd have to find a way to strip them of their football licenses (as in both futbol and handegg) because as long as they have whales purchasing each new installment of Madden and FIFA and UT packs by the truckload then they'll have enough money to stay afloat.
 
Annie said:
I cannot believe they don't have player-owned or dedicated servers on PC for BFV, I recall you could buy a server on the EA website for BF4 at some point, which always seemed super consumer-friendly to me.
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Unless I'm misunderstanding this is a terrible thing. Black Ops did the same only-one-dedicated-server-provider thing and it set off a huge shitstorm: inflated prices, reduced control over your server, and the very real possibility that you could be banned from hosting a server entirely. If EA's themselves offering the servers now, not only are you moving one step closer to vertical integration but you're effectively paying for EA's uptime. This is so utterly absurd, so far beyond the pale that if it were any publisher other than the big three I'd be 100% certain I'd read the post wrong BUT, nothing can be put past EA et al anymore.
 
Dick Justice said:
Unless I'm misunderstanding this is a terrible thing. Black Ops did the same only-one-dedicated-server-provider thing and it set off a huge shitstorm: inflated prices, reduced control over your server, and the very real possibility that you could be banned from hosting a server entirely. If EA's themselves offering the servers now, not only are you moving one step closer to vertical integration but you're effectively paying for EA's uptime. This is so utterly absurd, so far beyond the pale that if it were any publisher other than the big three I'd be 100% certain I'd read the post wrong BUT, nothing can be put past EA et al anymore.
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IIRC there was more than one provider for BF4 servers (you could buy/set up your own outside the EA ecosystem). The only purpose of allowing people to buy servers at the time was allowing the technologically impaired to set up games following their rules (you could do some really stupid shit, or make the server capacity super low/invite only sniper duel friends) as EA's official servers were basically just Large Conquest/Conquest/TDM games. It was $25 a month, but other groups selling servers did it much cheaper.
 
Redditors who already bought the game are planning a boycott. How will EA recover?
691416
 
Oh Shit I'm Sorry said:
What if instead of just a week they stopped playing forever? ?
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I'm sure EA would approve. Less people screaming at their community managers means less overtime and if people stop caring altogether they can drop support on the title faster than the projected six months and move on to their next abortion.
 
I'm all for hopping on the "fuck plebbit" bandwagon, but in this case the hyperbole just isn't accurate. All these major AAA MP games are made now to have the longest tail possible, to be games where you can endlessly nickel-and-dime your customers over dlc, season passes, micro-transactions, etc. Basically everything that makes games like Siege abhorrent. To do that you need a healthy player population that can 1. keep the game active both from within and without (videos, mods, guides, comics, forum threads, etc.) and 2. peer-pressure their friends into buying it. Without that, you don't have much of a business model game. Anyone remember Lawbreakers?

And of course there's simply the bad publicity angle on a game that's already getting plenty.
 
Dick Justice said:
I'm all for hopping on the "fuck plebbit" bandwagon, but in this case the hyperbole just isn't accurate. All these major AAA MP games are made now to have the longest tail possible, to be games where you can endlessly nickel-and-dime your customers over dlc, season passes, micro-transactions, etc. Basically everything that makes games like Siege abhorrent. To do that you need a healthy player population that can 1. keep the game active both from within and without (videos, mods, guides, comics, forum threads, etc.) and 2. peer-pressure their friends into buying it. Without that, you don't have much of a business model game. Anyone remember Lawbreakers?

And of course there's simply the bad publicity angle on a game that's already getting plenty.
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Maybe, but boycotting in the name of "bring that bug back because we like it!!!" is the behavior of a spoilt exceptional. If they cared about balancing like they supposedly did pre-patch then they'd have shut the fuck up by now, or at least started focusing on other issues. Instead they think they're entitled to Crazy Eddie's bonkers drop rates because their launch experience was suboptimal with a game that had every sign of shipping with problems of every kind.
 
Fagnacious D said:
I suppose if the servers are empty it'd be harder for anyone to play with other people cooperative?
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The problem with their big brain idea is that - like Pargon said - they're playing into EA's game: if the playerbase is close to 0 then EA will stop supporting the game (patch and post-launch content) and move the small dev team to another game.
They could also continue to tell others not to buy it
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Exactly but they're Reddit.
 
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