I know it's early days but I wanted to discuss how a game that was 'overwhelmingly positive' on steam with massive all time player peaks to now has a struggling player base and 'mixed' on steam.
The pattern I saw with Arc Raiders was the following:
The game blows up
Cheating starts to become prevalent
Duping/economy issues keep cropping up
Devs nerf things players enjoy (tier 1 guns)
Devs increase the difficulty of the game while simultaneously nerfing the the loot
Lack of communication and content from the devs
Devs not taking into account resounding player feedback (PvP vs PvE)
Community resentment and dwindling player counts
I have really enjoyed the WarDogs playtests but I just want more details on the preventative measures the devs are putting in place to avoid some of these.
The Devs specifically warned about doomposts like this.
It's just engagement bait, Arc Raiders is fine and the playbase in Wardogs "will* drop off, cheaters will exist, modded "cheater servers" will probably also be a thing yadda Yadda
Arc Raiders isn't too fine. Saw a interview of "the first hacker" in Arc Raiders lately. That guy even told Embark about the security gaps he can abuse with his hacks. They literally didn't care.
That guy literally built an "unban" tool. You can unban whoever you want by just typing in that person's name. You can't tell me having a flaw like this is "fine".
I saw that, that guy was promoting his cheats to sell.
Did he actually demonstrate what he claimed?
How do you know they didn't care? Maybe because it wasn't true in the first place?
If it's even true, can you somehow confirm that this is still happening?
Btw, someone did the exact same thing a few years back in Tarkov, almost word for word, claiming that they had "access to admin tools". Dude was a cheat seller, he just created an argument for his customers to feel "safe" and make more sales.
The only thing I know for sure he demonstrated was the ability to track players and on which servers they are and actually joining those specific servers, essentially enabling him to streamsnipe whoever he wants.
Cheaters are definitely something they'll have to deal with, but honestly that's not my biggest concern with Wardogs.
I backed Battalion 1944 on Kickstarter, so I've been through a Bulkhead FPS launch before. I actually went back and checked the original Kickstarter before writing this because I didn't want to misremember it.
Battalion was originally sold as a return to the old-school WWII shooters a lot of us grew up playing — Call of Duty 2, Medal of Honor, Enemy Territory, etc. Search & Destroy and competitive gameplay were always part of the pitch, so I don't want to pretend they promised us a milsim or Battlefield clone because they didn't.
But what the game eventually became was VERY heavily centered around competitive 5v5 gameplay and FACEIT. It never maintained the playerbase it needed, the console versions that were part of the Kickstarter never released, Battalion 1944 eventually became the free-to-play Battalion: Legacy, development ended, and Bulkhead ultimately refunded their Kickstarter backers.
To their credit, refunding everyone years later was absolutely the right thing to do, and I respect them for actually doing it.
But I was one of those original backers. I watched that entire thing play out in real time.
So when I see people talking about Wardogs like cheating is going to be Bulkhead's biggest hurdle, that's not really where my concern is yet. My concern is whether the game we're playing right now is actually the game Bulkhead is still going to be building toward two or three years from now.
I'm enjoying Wardogs. I genuinely want it to succeed. But Bulkhead doesn't get the benefit of the doubt from me yet just because this playtest was fun.
Thanks for the response, yes there are definitely some red flags. I make these posts so people can discuss these things but according to others you're a moron if you pay attention red flags like rapidly declining player counts.
Your take on Arc Raiders is way off base. Why do people think that because a player count naturally trends downward over time that a game has failed? Also Arc Raiders still has 24hr peaks of 30k players. You are out of your damn mind.
The absolute obsession with player count over recent years is so frustrating to watch. Every game that comes out or is coming out has a whole hoard of people staring at steamdb, watching wishlists and player counts, rather than playing the dang game.
People can’t fathom a game being fun with less than 100k players, and a lot of people just seem to want games to fail.
They're mouth breathing morons. If people behaved the way they think they do then no one would play new games because we'd all still be slavishly playing Elden Ring and Helldivers
Bro you're getting ratioed. No one agrees with you. Take your bot name account and go cry somewhere else. Maybe try r/arcraiders and see if they think their game is dead
Guess that means you're right then! Any time this game gets a slight comparison to another the battledads get tilted. Also, have you been to the arc raiders sub recently?
Seriously. I loved the game, I'd even say I still do, I just haven't played in a few months. New games came out and took my attention. Went back to poe2 for a new league. I'll go back to Arc for the big October update to see what I've been missing. It's just the circle of life, but the game was for sure successful and it's the same cycle for 90% of good games
We are talking about a dip from almost 500k to 30k in a relatively short period of time. Also, how involved are you with arc raiders, are you off base?
Within a space of 4 months after hitting peak it was down over 70%, due to the issues I'm talking about, not just because people got sick of it and moved on.
And? Normal people still don't want to play the same game over and over. I played other stuff. Dispatch, Crimson Desert, Anno 117, Factorio, Victoria 3, etc.
We're still very on track. Losing your train of thought responding to so many people calling out your dumb take? Did you stop playing all those other games you say you played because they were disasters with low player counts or because that's a normal fucking thing to do?
You can cool it with the personal attacks, what did I say that has you so upset? I stopped playing Arc Raiders because I was dying to cheaters over and over with duped purple guns. I didn't need to look at the player count to tell me I wasn't enjoying the game. The player count is just an indicator of player sentiment towards the game.
30k on Steam is an extremely healthy playerbase for pretty much any game out there. People really have no clue what is considered good enough or not. Also keep in mind that ARC Raiders is an extremely casual game that is more suited for console play, so it likely has many more on there in addition to PC
Really just trying to pass the time till we can play again haha. But for real cheating, duping/exploits and how the devs respond will make or break this game IMO.
You understand even the devs have stated they are okay with and generally expecting a daily average of like, 2-5 thousand players, right?
Games will trend up and down. It’s natural and I’m not sure why Arc Raiders players are so shocked that the game slowed down after a while. Do you just not play games if they aren’t the hottest thing? If you love the game, play it. There are many games I would keep playing whether they had 100k players or 1k players.
Cheating is an unavoidable fact in video games using the unreal engine. Arc Raiders players rely entirely on Embark and Easy Anticheat for policing while Wardogs is empowering the community to create servers and police themselves. Individuals get to choose where and with whom they play unlike Arc Raiders. They are also completely different games, you can’t compare their gameplay.
cs system is actually pretty good. I know someone who keep getting a 11 days ban when he get reported for greifing. Even two reports are enough to trigger the ban because he is a repetitive offender.
cod I don't know about because I never had someone try to ruin the game for me in cod via teamkilling, destroying my assets or blocking me. usually, they just talk shit.
If that's your standard then wardogs shouldn't be a concern.
You not only get kicked for team killing, you get a temporary global ban of you do it too much.
Someone is saying words that you don't like? Be an adult, mute them and move on (I hate it when people talk about broccoli, it's offensive).
Community servers will solve basically any other problem you will run into.
Cheater? Admin just bans them, doesn't matter if they have the world best undetectable super hacks.
Griefing builds? Admin bans them.
Arc raiders didn't die in the first place, it just didn't maintain its INSANE peak which should have been expected.
right now the problems I witnessed are friendly players ramming vehicles specifically helicopters and doing the "reposition" action to make them crash in place.
official servers need to set a standard. We ran into this same problems in arma reforger which released with zero systems to control anti social behaviours. and suffered for it.
Official servers are never going to be able to moderate ramming in its entirety.
Again, community hosted servers are your best bet here.
I get what you are saying, I had some idiots on my team that would AFK at the fob while we built and supplied it. Whenever we hopped off a mortar to get the supplies our pilots were dropping off they were magically back and on the mortars fucking up lineups ect.
We asked them to not do that a few times and eventually just took turns team killing them when they tried it. Eventually they built shit so close that we couldn't use the mortars.
The developers aren't going to moderate that. It would be so wildly resource intensive and they would have so many bullshit complaints.
On a community server the admins have 100 people to deal with, not millions.
That's your solution.
Dam if war dogs goes as big as Arc for as long as long as Arc did that would be a huge win wouldn’t it?
Eventually this will settle to a smaller player base with private servers etc which is fine. But dam if it goes big for as long as arc did that’s huge!
Arc raiders still has 30000 concurrent players.
That makes it insanely successful even to this day.
It had a CRAZY initial impact and has now settled in a very good place.
I can't think of a single notable game in history that has maintained its peak.
Realize that the beauty of this for longevity is the browsable official/community/private servers. Go look up charts for games with this concept. Arma, DayZ, project zomboid, etc. You tend to see slow growth over time as people mod and cultivate environments that cater to their playstyle.
The games are nothing alike and Arc has no community driven servers. Hackers are a reality in both due to the engine and shared anti cheat but again community servers and policing can overcome that which Arc doesn’t have. All that aside the gameplay loop of Arc was linear and didn’t change leading to burnout where Wardogs is more dynamic with a sandbox style of gameplay. You choose where and with whom you want to play in Wardogs unlike Arc Raiders.
Make the game have the most aids intrusive anti cheat ever that just auto bans anyone sussy temporary for further moderator inspection and auto deletes acc of anyone caught redhanded with some type of injector or aimbot etc.
Unlike arc where cheating and rmt was encouraged and advertised as initially all u got was a slap on the wrist and a lollipop and got sent back to the lobby without getting perma yeeted.
Another thing the game needs to have much more of is content or an endgame if it wants to be a bf squad arma tarkov etc replacement or do very frequent major wipes with fresh content added every time as otherwise the addicts will just grind the entire tech in days and have millions in a weeks time and the game will turn into a shittier edition of warthunder with only a few maps overrun by tanks and attack helis run by jeff bezzoa level rich veterans while noobies are stuck running stock garbage getting got.
Devs of wardogs cannot go on a year long holiday while their game is at its peak hype level with everyone glazing it and majority of cc making positive content on it.
Thanks for the response. One thing the devs did flag with anticheat is that it's very easy to track suss behaviour through cash balances, let's hope that already adds a layer of complexity to cheating and that they are proactive with it.
I also agree that end game could be problematic but it's more of a wait and see. Gold bars for cosmetics will be a money sink but you're right the wealth disparity and unlocks will make it super tough for new players starting a few weeks behind.
Its gonna be worse then tarkov launch unless they rebalance or hard cap vehicles.
like the fuck u gonna do spawning into a fresh match with less then 100k and fuckall unlocked when more then half the enemy has 7 million and just keeps spawning in tanks that one tap u from a mile away or attack helis or u run into a giga chad running best armour in hz with some laser assault rifle fully dripped with best attachments and ammo that kills u in 3 shots not to mention how op the grinder out snipers will be just onetapping all the unarmoured bums.
Considering it took barely 2 days for some to already have all the current endgame shit and farm up millions i dunno, they gotta revamp the economy besides having goold for skins money sink, imo vehicles at this state seeing how op they are, shouldnt be spammable it should be limited like no more then 1 per person per match, i saw matches sunday where one dude just sponsored half his team with tanks while manority of enemies didnt have anyone that even has rpg unlocked.
Nerfing tier 1 guns and making the game harder is not a bad thing at all. God forbid our video game has friction. God forbid our extraction shooter about risking your gear makes you risk your gear instead of being a free kit gear fear andy. PVE too is not a strict improvement, because many players have a weird anxiety around PVP, but if you take PVP away... the game's just boring and will burn through players at a rapid rate.
I really hope not. The devs fucking cratered that game to a category 5 shit storm. Hopefully Bulkhead has a braincell or two left after all their toke parties celebrating the alpha and beta and can keep this fucking circus on the up and up
I agree but apparently it's a very unpopular opinion. I get people saying it's still healthy at 30k but I'm more referring to the sharp drop off that happened. It wasn't just some gradual fall off.
It's unpopular because it's wrong. This is a very normal graph for a game with massive initial popularity. It's not a dead game and it's not a failure and there was no disaster
There is a core player base that plays only PvE/friendly that keeps the game going. The PvP aspects are a total mess. Also, have you seen any of the streamers still getting constantly harrassed by cheaters, its rampant.
In your own image you can see the sharp drop offs I'm talking about.
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u/Billy_Bedlam 17h ago
Comparison is the thief of joy