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Introducing: Chapter 4.5 - Community Health
With Community Health, DICE should try and fix the game and certain community aspects that have been going wrong since the release of the game.
As I am not a DICE employee, I can't know whats going on in the background in terms of development and plans for the game, but I think it's fair to offer the DICE team a common ground for the problems that currently plague the game. The outcome of Community Health should be a better working game, but also a happier community.
I will try to determine in short what exactly is wrong with the game. Then we will look at why its wrong. At the end of each topic, I will present you how to fix the problems we pinpointed.
Disclaimer: All the problems, derivations and solutions presented are my opinion. Feel free to discuss the points made!
In short: What is wrong?
To discuss solutions, we have to determine what is wrong. In the following, I will try to break down the key aspects of what is wrong with Battlefield V:
Tides of War:
I think that it's safe to say that many players were excited for Tides of War when it was introduced the first time. I understood Tides of War like a free battlepass, which sounds really good as the game industry more and more pushed the idea of battlepasses into games, especially free to play games.
But there are clearly two problems with Tides of War. Rewards and Progression.
Tides of War - Rewards:
My problem with the Tides of War rewards is that first and foremost, we always get the same rewards for the same guns. Let's compare chapter 3 and chapter 4.
We always get the same skins for the following same weapons:
Sturmgewehr 1-5, STEN, KE-7, STG 44, Lee-Enfield, MP40, Bren
Just compare the rewards of chapter 3 and chapter 4 with the following videos of my friend u/CrafterofSwords:
Chapter 3 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EhU5ZUKnKnY
Chapter 4 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tD3bMf1l0C4
Battlefield V has so many iconic weapons by now, but DICE can't manage to introduce skins for many of them.
Another issue is the outfits we are getting with the rewards. Why are the last two rewards of a chapter COMPLETE rewards, while the outfits around level 20 are separated into upper body and leg customization?
The only reason I can imagine, why the DICE team puts together the rewards like this is to fill the ToW reward list unnecessary. This comes with a psychological trick! Imagine having only the pants and the helmet unlocked. You are only missing out on the torso. The plan behind this is to create an urgency to either spend even more time with the game to unlock it or to purchase the ToW booster.
I also am not happy with the EXP ToW lock which locks you into only getting max 10.000 EXP per round (unsure, I think that was in chapter 3, might be changed)
How to fix - Tides of War - Rewards:
- Create universal skins for Tides of War Rewards. Take for an example Rainbow Six universal skin system. I am sure that you guys have the skins you show us ready for all weapons. Why not creating a universal skin which can be applied to all weapons?
- Make all outfit parts unlockable at once and don't try to divide them and put them into separate progression levels. (Seen in the picture above)
- Remove the EXP cap for Tides of War EXP. You are wasting good players time and effort in each game with capping the EXP. It creates a feeling of not appreciating the time of the game.
\"Once unlocked, the Universal Weapons Skins can be equipped on ANY weapons.\" -Rainbow Six Siege
The problem with the fix I suggested is, of course, the lack of cosmetics in the progression. You could either reduce the number of levels from 40 to 20 and make the EXP need for each level much higher. This won't render the ToW booster completely useless and you make effort viable. Each reward will feel more "premium" as the rewards just feel more complete.
Tides of War - Missions:
The problem with Tides of War missions are that some of them were locked to LTM or certain game modes in general. I won't make a separate fix section for this, as the fix is really easy:
Don't make missions based on game modes.
Monetization:
I know you guys at DICE have heard it thousands of times, but the graphic you showed us is clearly misleading when looking at the current state of the game.
This picture shows us that you could buy the same cosmetics with company coins
Conspiracy theory right now: I think that DICE wanted to introduce a system which was the same to Rainbow Six Siege system, but they scrapped it. The reason for it was that DICE scraped many customization options because of the backlash of the reveal trailer. The original plan was to offer the cosmetics for a more grindy amount of Company Coins, the shortcut for it was Battlefield Currency. DICE is pretty generous with the Company Coins, but doesn't give us options to use them properly.
How to fix - Monetization:
- Make epic cosmetics purchasable with Company Coins.
- Release all of the cosmetics you have and change how the armoury works. The armoury should present us with a handful of cosmetics we can get for a discounted price. We know that you have plenty of cosmetics, but yet you are not ready to release them. Give people a reason to buy Boins, because right now players have saved more than tens of thousands of company coins which they cant spend.
- Elite skins right now are IMO priced fair for what they are and can remain Boins only.
- Make all the weapon and vehicle specializations for free. No Company Coins for spending into specializations. Company Coins should be only for cosmetics (same as Rainbow Six Siege).
This skin is buyable with a fair amount of R6 Credits or more grindy in-game currency
Many of my suggestions are copied from Rainbow Six Siege again and I want to remind you that Battlefield V is priced as a full-price game (~50€). It is unreasonable to me why DICE decided to go that way. Now, DICE you might say that you won't generate any additional income as many players could buy the stuff without spending even one additional dime, so I would maybe suggest a compromise, which I found interesting.
What about releasing all the cosmetics you have right now, only purchasable with Boins. The armoury features a daily rotation of some epic cosmetics we can buy for a limited time with company coins. I know that some people might be sceptical of this system, but to be honest they want to make money. If people miss the rotation or don't have enough company coins, they will have an urge to buy into Boins.
Game-Breaking Bugs:
Right now, Battlefield V has plenty of really weird bugs. I feel like that this chapter was not ready at all to be released. As I am not a developer at DICE, I can't say what went wrong and how to fix this mess, but right now the community is furious. Some can't even play the game properly.
Recently there was a great report by Jason Schreier mentioning the hell that Q&A departments have to go through and I really hope that you guys are OK at DICE, because the recent bugs can't be overlooked at all and I do wonder what happened...
I would advise all players to read this report:
https://kotaku.com/the-human-cost-of-call-of-duty-black-ops-4-1835859016
Game-Breaking Bugs - Suggestions:
- Take your time with the bugs and initiate something like Operation Health.
- FPS drops and crashed should be top priority right now. The game is for me unplayable.
- Maybe bring back CTE?
- Compensate players that couldn't play the game.
Cheating:
Many players reported that cheating seems to be a big problem in Battlefield V. I haven't experienced any hackers or cheaters in my games, but I've seen multiple YouTube videos of big YouTubers that complain about the game anti-cheat system. There are also hackers that haven't been banned at all, still cheating since the game released. To give you guys an example:
The Cheating Problem in Battlefield 5 - AKA-Art
Cheating Is Destroying Battlefield 5 - Rogue-9
CHEATING IS RUINING BATTLEFIELD 5... When Will This Issue Be Addressed? - Westie
And a recent example once again: Cheating in Battlefield 5 is getting out of control - AKA-Art
Seeing videos of cheaters on Reddit may discourage many players from playing the game, because they don't want to be bothered with this kind of annoyance. DICE, I know that Anti-Cheat is something that can't be spoken about open, because of good reasons, but maybe it's time to introduce new Anti-Cheat systems like Battle-Eye, Easy-Anticheat etc.
I know that this is easier spoken than done, but maybe its worth to think about.
Communication:
I have this feeling for a long time, that DICE provides us with something that is called "non-answers". It's always the same:
Soon(TM), we can't speak about that right now etc.
I think that all parties would profit, if you guys could tell us why you guys are doing certain things. If you don't want to talk about the development of Battlefield V, that is fine. But don't tell us that we are the "Best Community in the world" and don't develop a live-service game that relies on community interaction. And I am not talking about your blog posts. Huge but right now, but I haven't visited this subreddit a long time and there might be some change with communication.
(If there was, you can ignore the text written above)
I also want you to choose your place of communication. It's safe to say that Twitter is the worst spot for communication with the community. Please think about using only one central place of communication.
Also shoutout to PartWelsh. I think the recent communication about the bugs in Chapter 4 on Twitter was great. But already said, I would recommend a better place for communication.
Battlefield The Issue Nobody Talks About - BattleNonSense
/thread
I hope that some of you guys will read this and I really want to see how you guys feel with my points made.
EDIT: Formatting and grammar correction - bear with me.
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