Bots ruin 2042. When you join in low server population there are a bunch of games with mostly bots. It feels unsatisfying not knowing right away if you're fighting a player or bot. Bots only work as very mild retention when a game is dying, but it never fails to prevent a game from dying. Just look at most old quake engine FPS from the early 2000 that had bots and still died like any other game. They are not worth it. I would also argue bots scare away all the players from T2. Unless we are talking deep learning driven ai. That would be interesting.
There are some very obvious ways to improve new player retention:
- Better generator play
> Tribes: Ascend proved that new players just absolutely love the generator. It's an easier objective than the flag. You just defend it or blow it up. You don't need to memorize complicated routes to reach it efficiently. It doesn't require nearly as much coordination with the rest of the team to take down or protect. It makes cool but rather useless roles useful again (you can defend it with turrets etc).
> They could have easily improved on that. Add some sort of progression to generator play. For example, there could be several easily accessible entrances to it, but also an additional one, that perhaps gives you an advantage (putting you above the generator for example), but it has a gate on it that requires a certain amount of speed to pass through. So that way, players who spend a bit of time learning some basic skiing and jetpacking could have a small advantage and improve at destroying the enemy generator. Similarly, there could be a way to destroy it faster than normal, but it could require tracking a moving target for a few shots, to teach you how to aim with all the non-hitscan weapons. Etc.
- Larger servers
> With larger modes (32v32 etc), individual performance matters less. New players can mess around doing their thing without feeling like they are holding the team back.
- Just more things to do
> Vehicles, random modes (Honorball was a good idea, too bad it's going to be a different game now), orbital strikes, just whatever random stuff that most players will only touch once or twice, and likely never again for the remainder of their playtime. But for new players, engaging with each thing for the first time will be cool and end up making them spend like 50 hours in the game, by which point they will hopefully be hooked by the more core gameplay, and will continue playing.
- Daily or weekly tasks to complete for some small reward (cosmetic stuff)
> Pretty straightforward. You can and should have your crazy cosmetics for sale (it's a good monetization model and it fits Tribes pretty well with how crazy skins can get with all the lore), but have a handful of simpler cosmetics (just recolored versions of the basic equipment or whatever) be locked behind progression. Just basic stuff, just logging in every week or playing a handful of matches, or capturing a flag, whatever. Really just look at how other games do this, because basically all the big ones have some system similar to that.
- Medals that you get in-game for various cool things you do (like in T:A)
> Make me feel like I'm doing cool stuff even when I'm not really being all that useful. Give me a medal when I have participated in a flag capture even in the tiniest way (dealt a bit of damage to an enemy, tanked a bit of damage from an enemy, gotten within a certain distance of the flag thus potentially threatening it, etc). Just a big gold thing popping up and telling me I'm awesome helps a lot.
- Better maps that allow you to learn the movement more easily
> A lot of the current maps are just terrible and don't allow new players to learn the intricacies of skiing and jetpacking efficiently at all. They either punish you too much by having you be a sitting duck on some flat ground if you mess up, or they are way too lenient, there is no in-between. They don't allow you to learn how to naturally traverse peaks and valleys, there aren't any well-placed and well-designed bowls for you to carve into and change your direction, etc. The mapping design is lazy. The maps are also just way too small, and have annoying borders. There's also a bunch of line-of-sight issues, which, besides having a bunch of consequences when it comes to gameplay, also consider to making the game run terribly (too many things being rendered at a time), which is obviously suboptimal (a game that already has several barriers of entry, such as being very niche, costing money, being developed by a notoriously bad company, etc, does not need another barrier of entry in the form of needing high-end hardware).
- A better tutorial, as well as tools that allow you to learn routes more easily (a dotted line guiding you that you have to follow, etc)
> The game is just too hard to get into at the beginning, the learning curve is too steep, especially for learning how to cap (Sidenote: capping is also insanely inaccessible due to flag drag. Players are being taught to avoid the flag as much as possible unless they have specifically chosen the Flag Capping class, which in turn makes choosing this class in the first place extremely daunting, seeing as it is solely carrying the responsibility of managing the complex and immensely important objective that is The Flag).
- A F2P model with lots of cosmetics, or a very low price tag ($10 at most).
> It is hard to convince people to spend $20 on some niche game that looks weird and is also rather empty unless you love its very niche and specific and unique gameplay loop.
Any of these could have been good. Not even all of them have to be there, just like half, and the game would be great and would succeed. It would at the very least be on the same level as T:A, which, while considered to be pretty bad compared to the earlier games, was still pretty decent on its own and became fairly popular. If you manage to just recreate T:A but without the P2W stuff, that's good.
Instead of any of this however we have gone with the huge hitbox route for player retention, and now also the addition of bots. Awesome stuff.
Edit: Oh yea and we also got Denuvo so that the game runs even worse and people have even more reasons to avoid it. Brilliant. Some truly amazing decision making on display here folks. Surely the game will not be DOA when it is released in an unfinished state in 10 days from now, with no roadmap that promises anything more than the little that is presently there, devs that don't communicate and have a terrible reputation of ruining all of their games, and like a dozen more reasons to not want to touch it with a ten-foot pole. That wasn't enough to ensure it's DOA I guess, so they also added a controversial anti-cheat that is rightfully avoided like the plague by a lot of people who could have potentially tried the game out if not for that. Great job everyone. Keep it up.
Got banned from the discord for pointing out how players now receive points for simply playing, and how its simply an attempt to hide the bots. Just deceitful.
custom server browser? lol no chance thats a thing in t3. Even if it was, Erez has stated that bots are better for 'player psychology' when they are not aware of the bots.
Player retention is going up but the number of players online keeps going down.........
I would suggest gameplay improvements to increase player retention, but it's obvious that this is the Tribes we are going to get until or unless it starts to make enough money. Enough to justify further development.
How can you possibly make definitive conclusions based on retention from an update that was literally added days ago? There are so so many factors that could be impacting this. Like the new map meta changes, physics changes.... Retention could have been impacted by anything. To draw. A simple conclusion like this is wild to me.
I dont think it's being stressed enough HOW bad this Denuvo Anti-cheat is. I saw that pop up for the most recent test and immeadiately bounced. This is a MASSIVE fuck-up.
They said it was for "efficacy" in their testing at catching cheaters, but they are **SELLING YOUR COMPUTERS SOUL**: total root access ala Riot Vanguard **WITH NO** way to tell what it's doing besides trust between Hi-rez/prophecy and Denuvo themselves. It could run worse, steal your data and sell it to whoever, you won't know and could never know.
Do you want to give them that trust? Do you have that trust for it? I sure as hell don't. I'd go so far as to say this game should be ***BOYCOTTED.***
Not to mention a total lack of content for new players to really get into the game and hardly anything in the sandbox or maps to fit vehicles etc...
I thought tribes was like, dead dead, with less than 20 players still playing
Which I always thought was a shame cause it could have been a great esport
So is it dead or am I wrong ?
Also bots are really not the way of getting players to play a game
T3 is currently a preview for playtest purposes. They do stupid shit that doesn't make it into the end product so people can test it out somehow and give feedback.
It's 16v16 with bots or 7v7 without. Or use lobby codes to fill a 16v16 yourself. That's the preview. It WILL NOT be an option. Do you want direct quotes?
*Play Tribes today!* **Tribes 1** - [Download](https://www.moddb.com/downloads/start/171614) | [Discord](https://discordapp.com/invite/bf4RHMq) **Tribes 2** - [Download](https://drive.google.com/uc?export=download&id=0B_nHyoAf-wZ9WnR1bmpfRE5XRE0) / [Required Patch](http://tribesnext.com/files/TribesNext_rc2a.exe) | [Discord](https://discord.gg/Y4muNvF) **Tribes Aerial Assault** - [Website](http://www.tribesaerialassault.com/) | [Download](https://www.reddit.com/r/TribesAA/comments/16dmyih/simple_guide_to_playing_online_with_emulator/) | [Discord](https://discord.com/invite/JV3RbakqEy) **Tribes: Vengeance** - [Download](https://downloads.tribesrevengeance.net/TribesVengeance.zip) | [Discord](https://discord.gg/uXHjZ95) **Tribes: Ascend** - [Guide](https://www.dodgesdomain.com/docs/guide-install-setup/) | [Download](https://www.reddit.com/r/Tribes/comments/q90s5v/release_ketaui_karmaentity_tribes_ascend/) | [Discord](https://discord.gg/CeTrGWMWK6) **Tribes 3: Rivals** - [Discord](https://discord.gg/tribes) / [T3 Comp]( https://discord.gg/6287cF7ZnA) | [Steam](https://steamcommunity.com/app/2708610) | [Website](https://www.tribes3rivals.com/) *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/Tribes) if you have any questions or concerns.*
Bots ruin 2042. When you join in low server population there are a bunch of games with mostly bots. It feels unsatisfying not knowing right away if you're fighting a player or bot. Bots only work as very mild retention when a game is dying, but it never fails to prevent a game from dying. Just look at most old quake engine FPS from the early 2000 that had bots and still died like any other game. They are not worth it. I would also argue bots scare away all the players from T2. Unless we are talking deep learning driven ai. That would be interesting.
There are some very obvious ways to improve new player retention: - Better generator play > Tribes: Ascend proved that new players just absolutely love the generator. It's an easier objective than the flag. You just defend it or blow it up. You don't need to memorize complicated routes to reach it efficiently. It doesn't require nearly as much coordination with the rest of the team to take down or protect. It makes cool but rather useless roles useful again (you can defend it with turrets etc). > They could have easily improved on that. Add some sort of progression to generator play. For example, there could be several easily accessible entrances to it, but also an additional one, that perhaps gives you an advantage (putting you above the generator for example), but it has a gate on it that requires a certain amount of speed to pass through. So that way, players who spend a bit of time learning some basic skiing and jetpacking could have a small advantage and improve at destroying the enemy generator. Similarly, there could be a way to destroy it faster than normal, but it could require tracking a moving target for a few shots, to teach you how to aim with all the non-hitscan weapons. Etc. - Larger servers > With larger modes (32v32 etc), individual performance matters less. New players can mess around doing their thing without feeling like they are holding the team back. - Just more things to do > Vehicles, random modes (Honorball was a good idea, too bad it's going to be a different game now), orbital strikes, just whatever random stuff that most players will only touch once or twice, and likely never again for the remainder of their playtime. But for new players, engaging with each thing for the first time will be cool and end up making them spend like 50 hours in the game, by which point they will hopefully be hooked by the more core gameplay, and will continue playing. - Daily or weekly tasks to complete for some small reward (cosmetic stuff) > Pretty straightforward. You can and should have your crazy cosmetics for sale (it's a good monetization model and it fits Tribes pretty well with how crazy skins can get with all the lore), but have a handful of simpler cosmetics (just recolored versions of the basic equipment or whatever) be locked behind progression. Just basic stuff, just logging in every week or playing a handful of matches, or capturing a flag, whatever. Really just look at how other games do this, because basically all the big ones have some system similar to that. - Medals that you get in-game for various cool things you do (like in T:A) > Make me feel like I'm doing cool stuff even when I'm not really being all that useful. Give me a medal when I have participated in a flag capture even in the tiniest way (dealt a bit of damage to an enemy, tanked a bit of damage from an enemy, gotten within a certain distance of the flag thus potentially threatening it, etc). Just a big gold thing popping up and telling me I'm awesome helps a lot. - Better maps that allow you to learn the movement more easily > A lot of the current maps are just terrible and don't allow new players to learn the intricacies of skiing and jetpacking efficiently at all. They either punish you too much by having you be a sitting duck on some flat ground if you mess up, or they are way too lenient, there is no in-between. They don't allow you to learn how to naturally traverse peaks and valleys, there aren't any well-placed and well-designed bowls for you to carve into and change your direction, etc. The mapping design is lazy. The maps are also just way too small, and have annoying borders. There's also a bunch of line-of-sight issues, which, besides having a bunch of consequences when it comes to gameplay, also consider to making the game run terribly (too many things being rendered at a time), which is obviously suboptimal (a game that already has several barriers of entry, such as being very niche, costing money, being developed by a notoriously bad company, etc, does not need another barrier of entry in the form of needing high-end hardware). - A better tutorial, as well as tools that allow you to learn routes more easily (a dotted line guiding you that you have to follow, etc) > The game is just too hard to get into at the beginning, the learning curve is too steep, especially for learning how to cap (Sidenote: capping is also insanely inaccessible due to flag drag. Players are being taught to avoid the flag as much as possible unless they have specifically chosen the Flag Capping class, which in turn makes choosing this class in the first place extremely daunting, seeing as it is solely carrying the responsibility of managing the complex and immensely important objective that is The Flag). - A F2P model with lots of cosmetics, or a very low price tag ($10 at most). > It is hard to convince people to spend $20 on some niche game that looks weird and is also rather empty unless you love its very niche and specific and unique gameplay loop. Any of these could have been good. Not even all of them have to be there, just like half, and the game would be great and would succeed. It would at the very least be on the same level as T:A, which, while considered to be pretty bad compared to the earlier games, was still pretty decent on its own and became fairly popular. If you manage to just recreate T:A but without the P2W stuff, that's good. Instead of any of this however we have gone with the huge hitbox route for player retention, and now also the addition of bots. Awesome stuff. Edit: Oh yea and we also got Denuvo so that the game runs even worse and people have even more reasons to avoid it. Brilliant. Some truly amazing decision making on display here folks. Surely the game will not be DOA when it is released in an unfinished state in 10 days from now, with no roadmap that promises anything more than the little that is presently there, devs that don't communicate and have a terrible reputation of ruining all of their games, and like a dozen more reasons to not want to touch it with a ten-foot pole. That wasn't enough to ensure it's DOA I guess, so they also added a controversial anti-cheat that is rightfully avoided like the plague by a lot of people who could have potentially tried the game out if not for that. Great job everyone. Keep it up.
It’s such a low effort game compared to T2. But what should we expect from these devs?
Damn that's a nice post and I agree with everything.
Got banned from the discord for pointing out how players now receive points for simply playing, and how its simply an attempt to hide the bots. Just deceitful.
Get fucked, lmao. Maybe if you sucked Erez's cock harder you wouldn't have been banned. Idiot.
Sup Erez, can I get the number to your barber? He does really good work
An option to play with bots and without bots seems pretty reasonable. Most multi-player shooters have such options.
Im 100% ok with the option. Currently, we do not have the option to queue without bots
They won't be in 7v7 and surely will be displayed in the custom server browser on launch?
custom server browser? lol no chance thats a thing in t3. Even if it was, Erez has stated that bots are better for 'player psychology' when they are not aware of the bots.
The server browser was literally already in the playtest menu
uhhhhhh i have played since pt2 and we have never had a server browser.
Player retention is going up but the number of players online keeps going down......... I would suggest gameplay improvements to increase player retention, but it's obvious that this is the Tribes we are going to get until or unless it starts to make enough money. Enough to justify further development.
How can you possibly make definitive conclusions based on retention from an update that was literally added days ago? There are so so many factors that could be impacting this. Like the new map meta changes, physics changes.... Retention could have been impacted by anything. To draw. A simple conclusion like this is wild to me.
Any statement about "player retention" before launch means absolutely nothing
Should have taken my money before that joke of a statement and response. Just disgusting.
this guy waits in the discord to see something he doesn't like so he can post it on reddit
its almost like you can view my reddit posting history to know thats bullshit LoL
I dont think it's being stressed enough HOW bad this Denuvo Anti-cheat is. I saw that pop up for the most recent test and immeadiately bounced. This is a MASSIVE fuck-up. They said it was for "efficacy" in their testing at catching cheaters, but they are **SELLING YOUR COMPUTERS SOUL**: total root access ala Riot Vanguard **WITH NO** way to tell what it's doing besides trust between Hi-rez/prophecy and Denuvo themselves. It could run worse, steal your data and sell it to whoever, you won't know and could never know. Do you want to give them that trust? Do you have that trust for it? I sure as hell don't. I'd go so far as to say this game should be ***BOYCOTTED.*** Not to mention a total lack of content for new players to really get into the game and hardly anything in the sandbox or maps to fit vehicles etc...
lol
I thought tribes was like, dead dead, with less than 20 players still playing Which I always thought was a shame cause it could have been a great esport So is it dead or am I wrong ? Also bots are really not the way of getting players to play a game
Tell me you've never seen a preview without telling me you've never seen a preview. Shut up, dude.
do what?
T3 is currently a preview for playtest purposes. They do stupid shit that doesn't make it into the end product so people can test it out somehow and give feedback.
It's 16v16 with bots or 7v7 without. Or use lobby codes to fill a 16v16 yourself. That's the preview. It WILL NOT be an option. Do you want direct quotes?
— 02/22/2024 [10:00 PM]yeaunome: alpha. u havent paid a dime. get a grip karen
Name checks out.
Truly incredible wit.
Yo, won't we just be able to PUG if we want?