Dear Devs, please focus on game health and general lore for a couple of chapters
Yes, another of these threads, but, please, hear me out.
A lot of people are rightfully unhappy with the state of the game:
Bugs, performance issues, general mechanics issues (dc penalty while servers are unstable etc), unbalanced maps etc.
On top of that, a good number of people feel as if you ran out of ideas for killers and cosmetics, or simply don't want to put work into things (see e.g. the mess with the 'never stop slashing' legion cosmetic that could have been so awesome, yet you claim you can't make it awesome because apparently certain mechanics that are used on other killers cannot be used here?).
Sure, the new maps look nifty, but people feel as if you do this just to show off to investors and trick them into overlooking people leaving the game because of the heap of issues.
So, please, whatever you have planned in terms of new killers, put that on the bench for a bit and focus on game health first and foremost.
And then on expanding the map pools and the existing characters' lore (1).
Thank you
(1) but please, (personal opinion) don't have this whole 'entity cult' thing weasel into every characters lore. It's honestly boring and takes something away. bigger ain't always better
Comments
Simply put, they can't. A game like this needs new things to stay relevant, especially with a lack of game-modes. Overwatch hasn't gotten a new character in several months, and just look at it - compared to how huge it used to be, it's not anywhere near that. People, especially new or casual players, need new things to stay interested in the game.
I'm not against the idea of a few balance and bugfix updates, but BHVR is a company, and companies need to make money. DLC's, new content is one of, if not their main, way of making money. Not everyone buys skins or the Rift's, but more people'll buy the character's that come out, especially if their from a licensed property.
TLDR; They need to make new content for the sake of both making sure the game doesn't get stale and monetization. As great as a few of these updates will be, until the demand for new content stops - which it never will - we won't get a pure bugfixing update other then the mid-chapter.
I think a fair amount of the community concerns have been addressed well recently - Mainly bugs and unbalanced maps.
That being said, I think it's time for performance issues to be addressed. I do think it will be a major challenge, especially through lines and lines of spaghetti code accumulated throughout the years.
Lastly, while I would like to see the devs be more iterative on perk changes, I can see why they might not like this. Especially when there are 10+ threads posted about every perk change people don't like.
Why I said to expand on the lore and map pools. It's a personal opinion, but I'd say having a chapter dedicated to expanding a pool and the lore to go with it and its characters would work as well as whole new characters.
They’re already dedicating the midchapter patches in particular to rebalancing existing characters and they do bug fixes every patch.
P.S. DC bans should stay in place, anybody who gets lengthy bans from it got them because they disconnected multiple times in a short time span. Nobody gets more than five minutes from a oneoff connection hiccup.
Well, there's the issue that BHVR still wouldn't make a single cent on that. Maps and lore don't cost anything. Resources cost money, all that stuff. I'm not saying your ideas are bad, they aren't, but they're not realistic.
For now, the Mid-Chapter's will have to do. And (most of the time) I feel like they do a decent enough job.
Also the Never Stop Slashing Legion skin would require that they write new code in for Legion, since the skin changing mechanic is not part of the existing character. That would require coding time, testing time, and possibly introduce new bugs into the game for the sake of making a singular skin have additional functionality.
How exactly does making maps and writing lore not cost anything?
The skinchanging is not bond to a character, but a skin-texture. You can literally take the base-code used for oni and fill in the blanks. The code here is not that complex.
Because we don't have to buy them. As long as you have the game, they're free. People who don't buy the Halloween DLC can still play on Haddonfield. The lore that comes within the rifts, or in general, doesn't need to be bought at all to be seen, and I believe you can always check a character's backstory from the store themselves. But making them does cost money.
If they suddenly locked lore and maps behind paywalls, they'd get a ton of backlash, and it'd cause a ton of issues. What happens if one single player doesn't have the map, but the rest do?
you could argue that a badly designed killer also doesn't make money.
I'm absolutely not asking for maps behind paywalls, but I dare say when the maps are improved in terms of balance and lore, on top of the game health, it's more likely for people to buy the existing killer chapters.
Fair enough, I misunderstood you. People will always buy killers, even if they're terrible, because it's something new. Maybe not the most hardcore of people, but casual players? Sure.
All we can hope for, in terms of maps, that the current reworks are good enough.
I can't really argue about lore, as there's a huge group of people that don't give a crap about it, and just as many that do. The lore in my opinion is... Decent. It could be better, but it's not terrible.
New content is the lifeblood of the game for older members of the community