So lets talk about player retention in this mod...

[Lindsey]

There are concentrated efforts afoot to get stuff back on track, unfortunately real life issues such as jobs/family (and time) are obstacles everyone on the team is facing. Many of us no longer have the dedication of time we had back in high school

Rest assured we want to make things easier for new players to understand and keep them around (tutorials that Mace has mentioned is a big part of that and updated library information), we're just experiencing a bit of a developer winter storm which has happened time to time over the last 15 years at various points.

 

[Tylenol]

I mean, just look at the community, basically the only players that play anymore are the dudes who downloaded this mod and play for a week and quit after getting destroyed without any idea how they are, and the tryhard dudes who've been playing forever, there's no in between.

Can't agree with you there. From a beginners perspective, it sure might look like it but I've been playing roughly a year now and I know more than a couple individuals who started around the same time I did. Though now it's probably a pretty bad time to make assumptions about the current player base, with the current patch and all

 

[Dorito]

Long time since I've wrote this now . I love u devs n I love u most of the community. Most.

Fuckin fix the sabering already tho.

 

[President Bossk]

I completely disagree with these statements though. You CAN cater to casuals and hardcore players. Like I've said before, look at JKA. Anybody can pick up that game and swing a saber and fucking LOVE it, and thats why its related as a great starwars game. But then the people who wanted to become 'hardcore' at JKA and actually get good, DID. JKA was a game where half the map was occupied by the hardcore jedi masters who used skill and techniques to win their duels, and were really good at what they did, and the other half of the map was occupied by the dudes who were swinging sabers and just chatting and having fun.

The game worked for casuals and hardcore.

Base JKA is for scrubs

 

[Juvia]

stop posting walls of text, no one read them and so has to guess what you said

 

[jewbacca]

no one read

I do

 

[Manyo]

I do

you must be one of those no ones

 

[Based Dark]

For me I stopped playing when:
1: I stopped finding the random shit funny.
2: I spent most of a week doing nothing but trying to learn mb2 dueling before giving up after doing a 1v1 vs a arc around 100 times in a row and getting about 1 kill and 100 deaths.

I had a similiar problem with CSGO. Now I only play surf maps in CSGO.

 

[Darth Gravy]

I can't help but feel like theres an easy solution to the player retention issue. New players overwhelmed and can't git gud without waiting 5 minutes a go. Duel mode does not help you with non-Jedi classes and against gunners.

When I'm new at a game, typically I don't choose to play survival of the fittest. I play TDM, DM and get more lives and less down time to increase my skills.

Theres not enough meat on MBII's bones to make siege fun without being an old schooler that knows the tricks. Suffering through no lifers on survival of the fittest is not a fun game loop. I died, wait 5 minutes. Also the RP community would be a huge boon in population to this game, but this is a Counter-strike hardcore community. Now you can see the # of people that are actually attracted to that sort of game.

For all the flaws of Battlefront 2 (It's literally garbage imo) it's still more attractive than playing MBII. Why? I can get in a game and stay engaged in it. Instant gratification. I die I respawn. Even in Heroes vs Villains, I die I respawn. Survival of the fittest was great back in the hay days of MBII because it was an insanely popular gametype of the hardcore. It's dying now and its time to change up the gameplay a bit. Objective based TDM would be much more popular with new players. SOTF moved to battle royale games. It's just a change in video game demographics. I think the MBII community is clinging to old dogma. In the end it will die because it couldn't/wouldn't change up the formula. This mod could have new life with new gametypes and gameplay options, but watching the MBII scene for so long this was inevitable.

Saber combat redesigns are irritating and annoying. Back in the day when you got good (B17 era) they just nerfed the class. When people mastered Jedi, they nerfed them to the ground and buffed the gunners. At least back then you had new content coming out pretty steadily that could keep you engaged and the balance was somewhat decent.

I've been over MBII for awhile and theres nothing in the patch notes that draws me in anymore. Festive seasonal crap, new models, saber tweaks don't do anything for me.

 

[WaceMindu]

Conquest mode that's being worked upon is your answer, it's as Battlefront 2-esque as it can get.
I don't really agree with the view that because kids supposedly have the attention span of an oyster, they should be given fast-food gaming as a result. MB2 has always been a demanding game, and that's what makes it so unique and durable throughout its ups and downs.
Players who will remain are those we want to see, rest can go fuck off.

I'd just wait until the next big upgrade, this is a pretty bad patch overall.

 

[Darth Gravy]

Conquest mode that's being worked upon is your answer, it's as Battlefront 2-esque as it can get.
I don't really agree with the view that because kids supposedly have the attention span of an oyster, they should be given fast-food gaming as a result. MB2 has always been a demanding game, and that's what makes it so unique and durable throughout its ups and downs.
Players who will remain are those we want to see, rest can go fuck off.

I'd just wait until the next big upgrade, this is a pretty bad patch overall.

This elitist attitude is a major issue, really. There is a population issue. If you're happy playing a mod that's dwindled down to 20 people, have at it.

You can continue to cater to the extreme fringes of the gaming population, at the expense of a wider audience. Star Wars has a built in fanbase. The mod has some real depth in it's gameplay. It's the lack of options and the dogmatic approach to development that is been leading to its demise, and its a slow and painful death.

TIL TDM/DM is fast-food gaming.

Players who will remain are those we want to see, rest can go fuck off.

That's really kind of disgusting. This community has been a toxic 9 year old army for YEARS. The folks that are left have to be in their thirties and still act like 12 year-olds on xbox live. This community needs a wider audience and more diversity, not more of the same people it's attracted over the years. Some of the stuff was funny, 8 years ago. At this point it's just annoying. The edgelord's have taken over the game.

The best community was the one where edgelords were the exception and not the rule. Now having to break through that boundary is just another hindrance for average players.

I could get possible 20+ people playing again alone, but theres nothing to sell. Nothing exciting to share. No real features worth talking about. MBII is about the same as when I left it. Conquest mode does sound like a step in the right direction though.

 

[WaceMindu]

I mainly meant that I wouldn't lower the bar just so that we can get new players because they supposedly have a shorter attention span nowadays or some kind of argument of the sort.
Tutorials are coming, new modes are coming, I'm not too anxious for the future developments at the moment.
Adding TDM/DM has been discussed before and it appeared the mod team never really had these modes in mind.
I personally think it wouldn't really hurt the mod by now to just have that freedom, and that it could be rather fun to play for a while in order to relax, but I don't think it'd be truly enjoyable in the long run. I'd rather wait for Conquest/Siege modes if I wanted something other than the default game mode.

I don't know, Counter Strike does it and I don't see it struggling. Barely anyone plays TDM/DM there and most people, new players included, are more than happy with playing Competitive regardless of the fact they have to sit there and wait for minutes before they respawn.
Some games are fundamentally designed around a single game mode : I'm not sure whether MB2 is that or not, whether it could have become something different earlier. There's so much a small dev team can do on their free time too, I can understand they'd rather want to polish their initial idea even if that's at the cost of catering to a wider audience.

I don't really understand why you took my "Players who will remain are those we want to see, rest can go fuck off" this way,but I'm sorry that I put it this harshly.
I wasn't hinting at in-game interactions at all, rather that we can still attract new players as long as they accept the skill ceiling and are willing to face the challenge.
I love my Quake or good FPS for TDM/DM as much as the other guy though, it's not inherent to the game mode, but rather to the game's basic design.

The community is harsh overall, and probably turns a fair number of people off. It's damageable but a lot of very popular games (which often have this very high skill ceiling, hence elitist attitude) have notoriously toxic communities and still do rather fine. I don't mean it is to be ignored though.
Though I have to admit, I like having this one remaining online space where everything can still go just like older times, back when the Internet was still wild - but then that really makes me sound like an old fart

 

[Darth Gravy]

I mainly meant that I wouldn't lower the bar just so that we can get new players because they supposedly have a shorter attention span nowadays or some kind of argument of the sort.
Tutorials are coming, new modes are coming, I'm not too anxious for the future developments at the moment.
Adding TDM/DM has been discussed before and it appeared the mod team never really had these modes in mind.
I personally think it wouldn't really hurt the mod by now to just have that freedom, and that it could be rather fun to play for a while in order to relax, but I don't think it'd be truly enjoyable in the long run. I'd rather wait for Conquest/Siege modes if I wanted something other than the default game mode.

I don't know, Counter Strike does it and I don't see it struggling. Barely anyone plays TDM/DM there and most people, new players included, are more than happy with playing Competitive regardless of the fact they have to sit there and wait for minutes before they respawn.
Some games are fundamentally designed around a single game mode : I'm not sure whether MB2 is that or not, whether it could have become something different earlier. There's so much a small dev team can do on their free time too, I can understand they'd rather want to polish their initial idea even if that's at the cost of catering to a wider audience.

I don't really understand why you took my "Players who will remain are those we want to see, rest can go fuck off" this way,but I'm sorry that I put it this harshly.
I wasn't hinting at in-game interactions at all, rather that we can still attract new players as long as they accept the skill ceiling and are willing to face the challenge.
I love my Quake or good FPS for TDM/DM as much as the other guy though, it's not inherent to the game mode, but rather to the game's basic design.

The community is harsh overall, and probably turns a fair number of people off. It's damageable but a lot of very popular games (which often have this very high skill ceiling, hence elitist attitude) have notoriously toxic communities and still do rather fine. I don't mean it is to be ignored though.
Though I have to admit, I like having this one remaining online space where everything can still go just like older times, back when the Internet was still wild - but then that really makes me sound like an old fart

I appreciate you clarifying the post and I jumped to some conclusions about where you're coming from. I'm interested in your experiences and when you joined the mod and some of the things you've seen over the years. The thing that stands out to me is the rigidness of the old team and the mod.

The mod has always been dogmatic with what it was trying to accomplish and that worked when JKA was still thriving and the community was still strong. I just feel that the team was never willing to change with the times. Some of that mentality has stuck. This mod never reached critical mass because of these choices. They hated RPers, they hated casuals. They were rebelling against the entire community in a way. They had some success, but then they could have opened up the gates to the wider community and drawn them in. This mod has never been about uniting the masses or reaching a larger audience. It's about having a private sandbox for themselves.

This mod could have rivaled JA+. If it were made more open back in the day, Siege-mode would be thriving today.

You would think that with the full source code available we'd really be in a golden era, but it just hasn't happened. MBII is in my opinion the best damn mod for JKA ever. The only problem is its so damn limited in what you can do with it. The success that other mods have had is that they were modifications but you controlled the server and the implementation. The classes and class balance is amazing and the maps are great, but DOTF siege just gets boring. Even when we had map rotation the gametype got boring.

This mod was my childhood, but I just can't seem to get into it anymore. I do think I would enjoy TDM/DM a lot more than siege at this point. Deathmatch could really be interesting and engaging for quick bouts that turn into long game sessions. Maybe I'll pick it up and try to give a true review, these are just my experiences and thoughts when I pop in from time to time. Nothing quite draws me in like it used to.

 

[MaceMadunusus]

This mod could have rivaled JA+. If it were made more open back in the day, Siege-mode would be thriving today.

MB2 has dwarfed JA+ for pretty much the entirety of the time I have been a dev. I'm not exactly sure what you're trying to say with this.

I also don't see what is so bad about focusing on a specific group of people. We have limited resources. We can't be expected to make and balance things so that they work in every scenario or game mode. We aren't much different than niche games like rainbow 6 siege, counter strike, or even things like dark souls and warframe. You talk about other mods success because they had so much control for the user, but where is that success? Basically all other mods for JKA are dead and ours is alive. There is nothing wrong with focusing on a specific audience and that is partially why we have lasted as long as we have and why a lot of those games have lasted as long as they have. Those games i mentioned earlier all focus on specific audiences and are widely successful. I don't have proof of this statement but as far as I am aware, we are the longest living star wars mod in existence. I'm not sure this would have happened without a dedicated niche fanbase.

Now, we definitely want to make getting into the game easier with new game modes that allow faster play, adding tutorials, and additional user interface changes that make things easier to understand. That is something we have committed to and will continue working towards.

 

[SeV]

MB2 has dwarfed JA+ for pretty much the entirety of the time I have been a dev. I'm not exactly sure what you're trying to say with this.

I also don't see what is so bad about focusing on a specific group of people. We have limited resources. We can't be expected to make and balance things so that they work in every scenario or game mode. We aren't much different than niche games like rainbow 6 siege, counter strike, or even things like dark souls and warframe. You talk about other mods success because they had so much control for the user, but where is that success? Basically all other mods for JKA are dead and ours is alive. There is nothing wrong with focusing on a specific audience and that is partially why we have lasted as long as we have and why a lot of those games have lasted as long as they have. Those games i mentioned earlier all focus on specific audiences and are widely successful. I don't have proof of this statement but as far as I am aware, we are the longest living star wars mod in existence. I'm not sure this would have happened without a dedicated niche fanbase.

Now, we definitely want to make getting into the game easier with new game modes that allow faster play, adding tutorials, and additional user interface changes that make things easier to understand. That is something we have committed to and will continue working towards.

The artificial constraints you've put on MBII have limited it rather than contributing to its success. Also, how is Counter-strike a niche game? It's one of the most popular and successful games of all time e-sports wise and CS allows you to mod it and has many game modes etc and a very large casual player-base that does not play its competitive modes. You can't claim that CS got such success because it limited itself to competitive, because it did not force people to only play fixed formats as you do with MBII. It allowed and still allows for modding and fun gamemodes. If CS killed its casual fun community the way you people killed off the MBII FA RP community, it would not be a big e-sports thing today, I'm pretty sure. I know you're not gonna change your mind, because over the past many years you've stubbornly clung to a mistaken game design philosophy and you will continue to be deluded in this manner. I think that culling the wings of players because you cannot balance flight is just wrong, and having casual fun + competitive modes as in CS, is not a mutually exclusive thing but rather a mutually beneficial thing because the two things feed into each other, just like having the RP Communities around fed into MBII's normal playerbase.

 

[Tylenol]

If CS killed its casual fun community the way you people killed off the MBII FA RP community, it would not be a big e-sports thing today,

>Implying that roleplayers are the reason CS:GO is an e-sport and not the billions that Valve had spent on advertising, constant updates and polish.

 

[MaceMadunusus]

>Implying that roleplayers are the reason CS:GO is an e-sport and not the billions that Valve had spent on advertising, constant updates and polish.

Fucking thank you. 90% or more of the success of games like CSGO is dumping a ton of money and resources into it after seeing the success of DOTA, not shit like people allowing modding when especially for the longest time you could just use a free Source SDK mod and CSGO required a purchase. Modding stuff in CSGO is just a cherry on top and always has been, and you could do it in better places for a long time until valve decided to stop updating the SDK.

Valve released an update for battle royale which is a highly competitive game mode and centers a lot of things around CSGO's general design philosophy and gets a 200k concurrent player bump.

The updates and resources dumped into CSGO that focus on their strength by far out weight the benefits of anything else. Its just plain misinformation to say otherwise.

Constant updates and focusing on specific player bases is what allowed Rainbow Six Siege and Warframe to more than triple their playerbase in recent years.

 

[SeV]

I thought it was obvious so I didn't mention it. You cannot possibly so stupid as to think that my MBII example was meant literally, it was obviously mutatis mutandis. Both of you completely missed my point. CSGO did not shut down its non-competitive servers but allowed them to exist on the side. I also think we should focus on MBII's strength, which is open mode and to a lesser extent the dueling system. But that is different from shutting down and not allowing anything outside of open/duel mode to exist.

 

[Tylenol]

Your point still doesn't stick together though. CS:GO('s competitive scene) grew because of casual community made maps/game modes? How do you even know that and on what basis?

 

[SeV]

Your point still doesn't stick together though. CS:GO('s competitive scene) grew because of casual community made maps/game modes? How do you even know that and on what basis?

You still don't understand my point. I don't know why you keep equivocating the complete removal of an option with focusing on your strengths. The reason why I used CS as an example was just to point out that casual feeds into competitive in much the same way the MBII RP option used to feed into the normal playerbase, and to say, what if valve completely removed all casual servers and you could only play matchmaking because that's the way the game is intended to be played. That would clearly be a loss not a gain, and it's two different thing we're talking about here. I am all for focusing on MBII's strengths, but that does not mean shutting down anything that isn't MBII's strength and forcing players to play a specific way. It is disingenuous to suggest those two things are the same. Focusing on your strength does not mean culling everything that doesn't fall in line with it. A tree with more branches is clearly better than just a trunk even though the trunk is more substantial than any one branch. It's bullshit to conflate focusing on your strength with removal of everything else.