Yo. I’m Wyrin (D4rkPassenger45 on Xbox,) and I’ve played a decent amount of Bleeding Edge since the open Beta. I just wanted to take some time to write down my thoughts and opinions regarding the game in a more comprehensive manner to hopefully spark further discussion and possibly have more of our community’s ideas be addressed by the developers in future updates. I’ll try to make this as organized as possible but I’ll probably be jumping around a bit here and there. I’ll label my points as accurately as possible and include a TL;DR version at the end of my post. Lastly before I get started, I just wanted to link my twitter where I’ve been uploading clips from my Xbox if anyone is interested in seeing some sick plays. https://twitter.com/DGWyrin
Thanks ahead of time for reading!
Bugs-
I don’t find it too worthwhile to spend a lot of time talking about bugs in the game as the developers have been very vocal about their efforts to get feedback from players about glitches in the game and I’m sure they’ll be rolling out more patches to fix any still present as soon as they can.
As far as my experience goes, there aren’t too many game braking bugs in the game, but there are a few that get in the way from time to time. Most often I run into players that I last hit teleporting back to life immediately after their death animation. It seems to happen more often with characters with self-heal which may have something to do with it. It usually doesn’t get too in the way because you can usually finish them off right after since they are still one hit, but there has been an incredibly frustrating time where a Nid came back to life and managed to dodge his way to a Zero Cool where they turned on me and I died well after a kill I was sure I secured. It is a little annoying having to double check that my target is dead after I hear the ding go off. Otherwise most glitches are fairly forgettable and nothing I stress too much about.
Mods-
For the mods in the game I think there is a pretty good balance on most of the character for some room to experiment with different strategies and play-styles. I will say a few of them do seem either under or overpowered, but I’m sure changes like that will be easier to address over time. Most importantly I don’t think there should be any mods that you HAVE to take on a character for it to be worth taking, but there really aren’t many good examples of that outside Zero Cool’s Stamina mods. I do hope that some more are added over time to give existing characters even more interesting tools to try out. I will probably outline ideas like that more specifically in a different post, as there are plenty of things I personally would like to see in the game, but I’d like to focus more on what is already in it and what actually seems possible within the scope of the developers’ vision.
That being said, I definitely think that players should get a little bit more credit when getting duplicate mods or recycling mods they don’t want to use. I believe the natural Mod Currency progression is pretty fair as you can get most of the ones you would want to use by the time you get a character to level 10, but it still doesn’t seem right to only be getting 50 credits when recycling mods. I’m at a point now where it seems to be taking longer and longer to get any new mods to try out, let alone if I need 3 specific ones for a full build. I also don’t think you should get default mods as dupes but I’m not really sure how or if they could control that and it is mostly more tedious than anything really. But it does suck hitting like Level 11 on Maeve and unlocking a default mod.
Currency-
While I’m talking about currency I guess I should go into one of my biggest problems with the game and that’s the credit progression system. It honestly feels like it takes wayyyy too long to unlock much of anything. With almost 2 full days of play time put into the game I still really only have a board, a trail, and two recolor skins. I honestly wouldn’t mind so much if there were at least micro transactions so I could spend 10 bucks to get some cosmetics if I wanted to, but with no other way to earn credits besides playing game after game, it seems really daunting to save up for much of anything. Especially knowing there are going to be new Skins, Boards, and Emotes coming out that will likely cost much more than the ones already in the game, I don’t see how I’m realistically supposed to play enough to get a skin for every character I like playing when I get an average of like 15 credits per game.
There has to be more of a reward for winning and preforming well. It doesn’t see much worth trying when I get 10 credits from a loss and maybe 2-5 more for a winning game where I had the highest damage, kills, and final blows. If there isn’t going to be more of a reward for simply playing, there should at least be some version of daily or weekly quests you can complete to earn more. Like 500 credits for turning in 50 power cells in a day or something. That way you can incentivize players to play the game correctly by rewarding them for doing so. You could get more people to heal if there way like a weekly quest to heal for 100k damage. Small things like that make a big difference in my opinion. I don’t like playing Makutu but I would do it if I could earn something for doing so. And at the same time it wouldn’t be feeling so lame getting so few credits after a match when you have another way to get them. Or like I previously said just let me buy them, I don’t mind supporting a good game developer at all as long as the micro transactions aren’t overtly greedy.
Ranked-
And speaking of incentive, I’m honestly losing most of mine to keep playing. It doesn’t really feel like I’m doing much of anything, or like the amount of time I put into the game matters at all when its seemingly random every time I get into a game. There HAS to be a ranked mode in this game, it doesn’t have to be anything super extensive, just a mode that I can play where the amount of competitiveness I’m attempting to achieve is shared by everyone on both teams. I know the game is supposed to be fun but I get into plenty of games where it seems like my team legitimately has no concern about winning whatsoever, which is pretty disheartening in a game like this.
I want to be able to have some sort of rank that shows how much work I’ve put into the game, and that I actually care about playing with a well-rounded, communicative team. Like every other game in the MOBA genre, I should be able to queue up with people of the same skill level as me that are also trying their hardest to win. Honestly the only time I’ve been having a good time playing this game after the burnout started to set in is when I’m grouped up with a team of 4 and we’re all talking and playing together. Which obviously is the way the game is supposed to be played, but rarely do I ever get the chance to when only 10 percent of the randoms I run into on Xbox live ever bother to use a mic, or even listen thru their TV for that matter.
TL;DR-
I feel like this has already run a bit long so I plan on breaking up the rest of my thoughts into future posts where I’ll outline some more ideas a little more thoroughly. I’ll also be in the comments looking to talk to anybody that has some more to add to the conversation. Basically though my main points are…
- WE NEED RANKED
- Bugs happen, NBD
- Need a better currency system: Challenges and/or Micro Transactions
- Add more mods/patch existing mods soon
- WE NEED RANKED
- Incentivize proper gameplay
- More credit for recycling mods
- Please ranked
- I didn’t mention it but I am disappointed by how long it took Mekko to come out, it gives the impression that it’s going to be significantly longer before we see another character after. That, in my opinion, is one of the most important aspects of keeping hero based games alive.