The game has mixed reviews for a reason#573

The games recent reviews dropped back down to mixed again and it is important to not ignore that. We all can see that the game is slowly dying. If you normalize the player count graph it is in constant decline. The player peak and decline for the FFA update looked like any other char update, so it did not help. The game is underperfoming and we have seen layoffs because of that. We are now told that next season might be less chars, which means longer stretches between char updates and thus much lower dips in player count. And despite all these warning signs, the community likes to cope by saying, that this is expected because its a niche genre and a niche game. But i do not agree.
If this was a great game held back by beeing niche it wold have overwhelmingly positive reviews, like all other great niche games. But it does not. This game was sitting on mixed reviews for the bigger part of is life time. This is not the sign of a great game being held back by beeing niche. this is the sign of a mediocre game being held back by not being as great as it could.
it is very important that the devs and the community acknowledges that so things can change for the better. If everyone keeps coping the game will just slowly die.
So far all the mayor criticism that could be seen on nolt is also reflected in the negative reviews:
questionable balance, lack of endlag, bad match making, shaky servers, overcentralizing mechanics like FH, grabs being too good, ledge intangebility abuse, missing char based ranked etc.
if all this criticism keeps getting ignored, the game has no future. Its admirable that the devs want to make their own game without compromise, but i think its time to realize that this vision is only shared by a much too small player base. So please, correct corse. Look at all those negative reviews. You have all the information you need, why your game is failing so do something about it.

It’s amazing how you can make up things without any actual points and say “btw mixed reviews” to justify yourself without having to think critically about anything you’re saying, huh? Like the recent reviews literally don’t even have text in them.

Yeah sure… Increasing endlag and nerfing grab and floorhug will make the player count go up… You live in a dream if you really think that.
Btw they tried having bad floorhug during beta. I was playing at that time, it was so bad and made the game so defensive I hope they never nerf floorhug again.

RoA2 is just following the same path than most competitive games without enough solo content follows. Only fps can work with being only multiplayer. And even for most fps it still doesn’t work too well to not have solo content.

@Songbird
I read the reviews, your clearly did not.

@CandidCrocodile088
During the beta they they had a build with massively nerfed CC, not FH. I guess you don’t even know the difference?

The nolt board is not the place for this

Ain’t you the guy who said thought the devs were dumb for not adding DLSS4 frame-insertion? Like, AI frame-guessies on a fast-paced platform fighter? I feel like you come from somewhere where things work differently and overapply your knowledge elsewhere a bit.

Anyway, to tackle this, here’s a screenshot of some negative reviews. They have little useful information other than playtime, but you can kinda just tell that these are people who are new to the game and got upset after playing Ranked and losing. Going into their reviews, the guy on top also negatively reviewed AFQM, that the $7 game “should be free”, while the guy at the bottom has given a negative review to every competitive game they’ve put a lot of time into as they quit (with Deadlock, a game full of newcomers, being their game of choice atm).

With what I know about RoA2, I think I can translate these into “It frustrates me when I’m fighting against sweats” (at least for the bottom 3. Person #1 might have had a more pure salt reaction to a loss).

Going back through the past 30 days of negative reviews, I’ll categorize them into different categories for the sake of having data on hand. Some reviews are in multiple categories if they listed multiple things. It also be more precise, but I don’t care atm:

Total: 49

<3 hours (seperate pool, but I think I counted a couple outside): 16
RoA better (<2 hours): 5
Unbalanced: 1
Controls: 1
Optimization: 1
Aether account: 1
?: 1
Lost online: 1

RoA better (featureset/casual): 1
Non-RoA (featureset/casual): 2
RoA better (competitive/mechanics/general): 4
Salt (Kept playing): 5
Salt (quit): 1
Salt (Etc): 2
Floorhugging: 2
UI: 2
Optimization: 2
Dan (the man with no salary) is greedy: 4
Bugs: 2
-Person with bad internet: 1

And a collection of one-offs:
-“Everything” (500+ hours)
-Balance (Too strong)
-Balance (Too weak)
-Unbalanced between characters
-Recoveries (too weak)
-Recoveries (too strong)
-idk
-Low player count
-No bots in online lobbies (holy shit, 5.7 hours per day since the review)
-“.” (4.7 hours per day since review…)
-AI Generated
-“The same two fighters every match”
-Couldn’t find the 2v2 mode
-Combos too strong

Out of all of these reviews, most of the things you listed don’t particularly rank that high. The biggest categories by far are:

1: New players got filtered by something (by far the biggest category
2: Player from RoA who doesn’t like RoA2 (cannot meaningfully solve this problem without getting rid of the reasons why people play this game instead of RoA
3: Salt after losing online (Actual number is higher than what the chart says, but I gave most the benefit of the doubt when they mentioned something else)

These make up over 31 of the negative reviews. Of the suggestions you mentioned, the matchmaking suggestion is the only one that would have a direct impact on the categories listed above. All of the others would be either be highly contentious or aren’t too relevant.

Questionable balance: Say what exactly you mean by this. Because many Rivals 1 vets have a disdain towards the power levels in this game being lower, while many people coming from Ult will say that the power level feels overwhelming. You’re not gonna play the SuperPosition of every single “balance” complaint here. Many of the people who you are speaking for disagree with you.

Lack of endlag: Rivals 1 players commonly complain about the game feeling “sluggish” due to how this game has more end lag on so many things than in RoA. While, again, it’s players from Ult who are used to a game where you have to really work around how many offensive options put you into end lag. Many of the people who you are speaking for disagree with you.

Bad matchmaking: Sorta true, but this is also a hard problem to solve. The actual problem is the demographic makeup of the community, in terms of people who like to sweat. It’s not a balanced ecosystem, and you’d need to hard-code a pretty intricate maze of logic if you want to improve the new-player experience of some without others getting swept straight into new cracks. I don’t blame the devs for taking baby steps here tbh.

Shaky servers: Please show me evidence of the servers being at fault since, like, the Absa update. I’ve had no problems with online that doesn’t show up as a non-specific connection issue on my network monitoring software. No numbers for me (or for the devs, it seems?) seem to show off the servers being a major cause of connection issues.

Overcentralizing mechanics like FH: Not complained a lot this patch, specifically, but this would affect people who have general complaints/salt. That said, I implore everyone who dislikes floorhug to come together and bring a list of changes that they’d bring to adjust for floorhug’s removal. The mechanic is quite entangled with the many gameplay decisions made with this game, and if the removal of the mechanic still ends up leading to a game that many of the anti-flug crowd dislike, then its removal would end up being a hollow victory.

I know it’s the devs’ job for making these changes, but many people absolutely have contractory ideals of what kind of game they’d be playing after. Again, many of the people who you are speaking for disagree with you.

Grabs being too good: Yes. Let’s nerf one of the biggest things that newer players can lean on vs platfighter vets. That’s sure to get them to like the game even more.

Ledge intangebility abuse: I see very few complaints about this. What exactly are you even asking for here?

Missing char based ranked: Not many complaints about this, which is why it’s been pretty low-priority for the dev team.

(Side note: I’ve had no problems with online that doesn’t show up as a non-specific connection issue on my network monitoring software. Please show me evidence of the servers being at fault in the past year, I’d love to figure out what’s affecting people)

I implore everyone who dislikes floorhug to come together and bring a list of changes that they’d bring to adjust for floorhug’s removal

I’ve said since day 1 that I don’t think this mechanic needs to be removed, I just think it needs to have an appropriate level of commitment compared to its power. Shield locks you into a committal state that restricts your options and you have to be actionable to do it. Floorhug can be done nearly any time with no preemption or commitment required. You see someone whiff a laggy move or get stuck in a laggy state, think “ah, I’ll punish them with this tilt and–wait, why are they hitting me back? Why am I dying for that?” Once you know it, you can try to play around it, but that doesn’t make it any more enjoyable or fun to experience. That also leads into the “grabs are overcentralizing” thing. Nobody is asking for grabs to be nerfed (though I wouldn’t be opposed to certain throws being adjusted to not always combo at any%, even confirming into kills), we’re pointing out that they’re the center of the game’s meta because they beat nearly every defensive option. Yeah, grabs beat shields in every game, but what matters here is that grabs beat floorhug. That means they’re the only reliable way to get punishes, start combos, open up defensive opponents, win neutral, and, most importantly, put your opponent into the air, where floorhug doesn’t work. We’re pointing out that at any level except the tippy top 0.5%, the game boils down to grab VS floorhug, and it’s not dishonest to say that a lot of people have dropped the game because that’s not fun. They see the cool, interesting stuff that can be done when the opponent doesn’t hold down, try it, realize it doesn’t work, realize the only way they can reliably do anything is to play footsies, toss projectiles, and grab, and decide they aren’t having enough fun to justify continuing to play, and it’s all because their opponent can just hold down at any point, without any legible commitment. Pretending that’s not a valid complaint, especially when a huge number of people from all skill levels have brought this up as a point of discontent with the game’s design since its launch, is dishonest.

Btw, speaking of cherrypicking, I think it’s interesting that this discussion is coming up after an unusually low positive:negative score ratio in specifically the last 30 days following an update that is largely considered good when the actual update happened around 38 days ago. Because if we just include that extra week (meaning we get all of the reviews for the current patch), then we’re back out of mixed (for now).

Even this is flawed methodology for an overall heartbeat check, but if you just want a heartbeat on what fresh reviews of the game are like, must we avoid the ones that are most directly reacting to direction the game is heading in? Or maybe the fact that the Steam number turned yellow the entire point here.

Like, can we just call a duck a duck and say that you’re upset that the devs disagree with your thoughts on what an ideal platform fighter is? And that you perhaps find it vindicating when the indicator number is the same as bad games, thus validating your viewpoints on the matter? I assure you that the path to avoiding “mixed” has little to do with the direction you want the devs to take the game in. There might be a direction change that works, but you won’t be any more than loosely aligned with it. Your experience with the game won’t get better through anything but iterative development, or through your own efforts. And dooming about everything every time you interact with the game actively harms both paths.

@IntelligentNitrogen904 Making a version of this game without flug would take hella time and resources, if you don’t want high level players to be able to hella exploit mechanics as they’d otherwise be. This was attempted earlier on when the game’s systems and tuning weren’t all as interconnected. Right now, a public beta branch would absolutely be a worse game than what we’re currently running with, but most players won’t have optimized the strategies for this build. It would take quite a while before the majority start to experience the reality of what no-flug RoA2 is actually like, so it won’t really be an objective measurement either way. It’d be a waste of dev resources (which are at a premium atm), and both sides would use the build to validate their existing ideas about the mechanic.

I wanna mention that workshop will have rollback support, so we’re absolutely going to get ws mods that remove floorhug and attempt to balance the game around that. I think supporting the development of mods like these will end up being the best path towards giving the whole community (including myself) a better understanding of what this would be like in practice.

@DimNetball090
I think replying to everything you wrote is kinda pointless. But i still care about the game. do i agree with all design decision? no i don’t. But that would be fine. if the game was thriving i could write it off as a me issue. But that is not the case. the game is underperfoming according to dans own words. There have been layoffs, we will get less content etc. And the recent reviews simply show that the current course might not be the right one.
the community becoming an echo chamber will not help in the long run, so it is important to remind people that the game maybe has deeper issues that need to be fixed. if you don’t agree with that, its totally fine. But don’t come crying when it will be dead.

grab is dumb, and combo into dumb moves. lame gameplay

You cant collect clowns here, try steam forums again

@DimNetball090
They had the time and resources when they made a million dollars on Kickstarter. They just simply chose not to listen to people who invested in the sequel they were supposed to make. There’s actually no excuse for the direction they stubbornly took the game in now.

Just waiting for the inevitable mod that removes both FH and CC, maybe then people will realise that there’s meant to be a lot more to Rivals than the floorslop dash-dance grab simulator we have now. Either that or people to Workshop the new to franchise characters into R1.

maybe then people will realise that there’s meant to be a lot more to Rivals than the floorslop dash-dance grab simulator we have now.

Do you realize nerfing CC and FH will push people to dashdance even more and to not interact?

Have you played Rivals 1?

Also I said remove them, not nerf. Even if nerfed, they still encourage lame, uninteractive, thoughtless gameplay.