Comment on Game developers desperate for you to join their Discord "server"
supersquirrel@sopuli.xyz 2 weeks ago
It is so infuriating espeically when any attempt to interact with the community around the game is met by the developer or community members saying “Ha! Silly you! The only place to socialize about this is Discord!”.
I have hated the fact that Discord was eating all the communities I love from the beginning, but this long into it what I find so frustrating is how game developers who rely on Discord for feedback and to get a sense of where their community is at pretend that the subset of people who use their Discord is representative of the people who buy and play their game and it just isn’t.
Battlebit is a great example of a multiplayer game that only listened to its most active members on Discord who wanted a rush style arcade high intensity flavor to the combat and facilitating those players lead to the entire rest of the game becoming unbalanced. When backlash started to happened, the devs again only listened to the smg rush style players who were constantly vocalizing in the Discord and making highlight clips from it and stuff so the solution was to further nerf sniper players because that was the class SMG rush style players hated the most.
The game is dead now and I can’t think of a clearer example of how Discord can be a major liability to a game community rather than a boon.
beetus@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
I’m pretty sure the game died because the devs vanished
supersquirrel@sopuli.xyz 2 weeks ago
I think that is how people active on the discord perceived it from their perspective, but it was not at all how I experienced it die as an initial huge fan of the game.
beetus@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Thanks. I don’t really participate on game discords and enjoyed playing battlebit. I saw very communicative devs early on and then nothing from them. I guess I assumed wrong
supersquirrel@sopuli.xyz 2 weeks ago
Ok I am bitter, I loved playing the support class and building fortifications and that part of the gameplay felt like it was so ignored by the developers that players on your team would start getting toxic with you if you built them.
To be fair often there was no point, a smg rush player could spawn in with c4 and eliminate the whole fort within 30 seconds of spawning in. I wasn’t roleplaying it or anything, the fortifications I built were always practical but the way the basic gunplay was balanced severely penalized moving slow and carefully in basically every respect except having a smg and moving a tiny bit slower than the enemy who would also have an smg.
I say that to give context, I think Battlebit could definitely come back in popularity, the biggest issue in my opinion is the lack of focus on mod support and it makes me question the longterm goals of the developers here compared to say Easy Red 2 or Operation Harsh Doorstop. If Battlebit had focused on allowing easy modded community servers to pop up, their inability to balance the gameplay to support a variety of playstyles could have been mitigated by the community, but they just kept making the wrong decisions in my opinion.
The sniper nerfs were enraging too because yeah, everyone hates snipers in a battlefield game but it isn’t that people hate the sniper class it is that people hate when most of their team is roleplaying being a sniper 3000m from the battlefield occasionally making a crazy long shot. Because this is the easy meme to make fun of the battlefield sniper role, the developers nerfed that ability of the sniper class HARD with Halo sniper rifle like bullet trails and very obvious scope glint.
The facepalm thing about it for me was that when snipers would play this role… it was infuriating to be on their team BECAUSE they are contributing nothing to winning the objectives or really even to supporting the other players flanks and backing them up. So… why nerf it? Snipers are extremely important in a well balanced Battlefield game because they allow you to project power from an advantageous position over long distances or they allow you to project power into a space without physically having to be in it.
When a sniper “pushes” an objective their role isn’t to actually BE IN the circle capping the objective unless they are very close or there aren’t enough close range class players to capture the objective. Their role is to get a good angle on the objective and any relevant terrain around it, so that they can ensure their team is able to secure and hold the objective.
It was very clear that the developers didn’t seem to understand or value this role in the gameplay of their Battlefield-like, which ok that is one thing but they also clearly didn’t have a good system to get consistent feedback from a broad section of their playerbase so that they could correct course when they blundered like they kept doing.
It is a shame because what people really wanted was an approachable, low graphics requirement, large social Battlefield game and it isn’t like the game ever had to be perfectly balanced competitively to fit that role. The balance just went sooooo far out of whack it became less interesting and fun for a lot of the playerbase, and the core part that was being listened to didn’t notice until the lights were being turned out…
A community server with a mod that fixed these issues could have easily saved the community around this game even if the developers “abandoned” the game for awhile ughh.
I don’t think Battlebit is dead though, I would be surprised if development totally stopped as there just aren’t a lot of good alternatives. Well there is Easy Red 2. Yeah nevermind, just go play Easy Red 2 instead it is better in every single way basically.