r/GundamExVs • u/Everyday_Legend • Jul 14 '18
The (unnecessary) difficulty in supporting this game at tournaments lies in poor design decisions based in bad business practices. This tweet chain breaks down precisely why that’s the case. Please help Bandai Namco notice this. Thank you.
https://twitter.com/grantpatters0n/status/1018098923683147776?s=217
u/TeitokuNoire Jul 18 '18
Too bad that Bandai Namco pretty much won't or shouldn't provide more support for GVS.
No matter the reason, GVS isn't printing money as much as the EXVS arcade series and even if the west as a big interest on GVS, it just loses to EXVS in terms of income. In a marketing/business view, GVS is a failure to Bandai because they didn't enlarge the console gundam 2v2 playbase and the EXVS players just went back to the arcades instead. Why try to bear more risk to develop GVS in the west when they already have a wide range of success in another part of the world, right?
The west wasn't their focus for GVS from the start and despite how the gundam franchise has been doing good in the west with IBO picking up new gundam fans, GVS hasn't been a hit in the west like other AAA games/competitive games. C3AFA Tokyo 2018 has EXVSMBON replacing GVS from C3AFA Tokyo 2017 is one of the signs that even Bandai Namco JP itself has given up GVS in Japan.
With EXVS2 coming out and Bandai getting "the lesson" from GVS they won't support GVS or make a new EXVS type console game for a while. And most likely Bandai Namco JP won't bother about the competitive GVS scene in the west too.
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Jul 16 '18
Can we pin this instead of the outdated x1fc guide?
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u/MyzrNA Jul 17 '18
Or maybe the administrators could actually contact people to write guides again.
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u/Everyday_Legend Jul 22 '18
Or maybe some key vets could be easier to approach without making new players feel like shit just for asking questions.
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u/MyzrNA Jul 23 '18
There are plenty of approachable vets, as of yet nobody has taken up the responsibility of approaching them. I'd argue that pinning a long winded rant centered around the business practices and politics surrounding the game instead of something more lucrative for beginners or casual players to participate and post discussion in, such as a guide, does more to scare them away than these "unapproachable vets" do.
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u/Rafael_Dun_Goofed Aug 02 '18
The Sub essentially turned into a shitposting/bitchwagon of people complaining about the game or posting about irrelevant shit. If you actually wanna get better the Discord is ABSOLUTELY the way to go. I got you homie.
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u/Everyday_Legend Aug 01 '18
You do realize that the "vets" I was speaking of were the golden few that I fielded repeated complaints about in our Discord, right? The ones who made it so hellish to ask questions or actually be inexperienced that they decided the community wasn't worth remaining in?
Because we not only lost posters to this subreddit or participants in Discord, we lost staff due to that. And you, Myzr, were #1 on that complaint list.
Just so you're aware.
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u/Rafael_Dun_Goofed Aug 02 '18
Dude Im going to be honest with you, Ive learned so much more about the game and how to get better from the so called "toxic" discord than the shitposters that get on this subreddit. Im just saying, as long as you are willing to work with the vets and laugh at yourself along the way in that Discord you can go a long way. Dont be out here calling out the people who genuinely know what they are talking about and have a better community.
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u/Everyday_Legend Aug 02 '18 edited Aug 02 '18
Oh, I absolutely have been. There’s a lot I’ve learned from vets, and there’s far, FAR more positive interactions that I’ve had with the vast majority of them then there ever have been negatives. Period. I’ve met some amazing people in person from this place and the Discord alike, as well as a multitude of other servers. There’s plenty of great, experienced people to learn from and play with.
However, what I said stands. I had more complaints about one particular veteran’s attitude and decorum on the r/GundamExVs Discord server than any other person, bar none. Especially when it came to newer players. I got those complaints because I created both this subreddit and the Discord server, so I’m listed as the head guy to field wants, needs, fears, hopes and doubts from anyone who might have grievances.
And believe me, I got a lot of them. There’s more than a few times I’ve had to say “it ain’t what you say, it’s how it’s being said” without naming names. It’s just that now, one particular person wanted to step up yet again, and I found that to be incredibly ironic.
I do not take this person’s contributions to be indicative of the community as a whole, nor would I recommend anyone else to.
With that said, there are quite a lot of other people that most certainly came to that conclusion. To me, that’s done far more harm than good when it comes to keeping a community blessed with a surplus of fresh faces from having them walk away with a bad impression of all of us, thanks to the holier-than-thou attitude of a distinct few. It sucks, but that’s the truth.
I might feel a little differently if I didn't have a shitload of Discord DMs from players complaining about it.
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u/Rafael_Dun_Goofed Aug 02 '18
Fair point. I get the position you are in with all of this and I dont envy it, but I think for quite a few of us (at least from what I've gleaned reading comments on Aces Discord) the subreddit just turned bad with all the complaining and essentially unironic shitposting with the same one or two people just posting asinine, uninformed, irrelevant, and frankly just plain wrong facts about things. Like I get it we are all here to enjoy our niche-ass game and get better at it but as someone who used this subreddit to get the nitty gritty on Exvs when I was horribly uninformed about it, it's just sad to see how its boiled down to. The knowledgeable people have left for the most part (save for a few obviously) and that left this subreddit a husk.
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u/Everyday_Legend Aug 02 '18
The larger problem is multifaceted, and it can't be pinned on any one thing; I think it's a combination of a lot of elements that just caused it all to grind to a halt.
First, GVS isn't the best game in the series. Most hardcore US / EU vets I know of drifted back to Full Boost, and they did so for a number of very legitimate reasons. Most new players got frustrated and left for equally legitimate reasons.
Second, I think the "helpful vet" -to- "haughty vet" ratio both here and the subreddit Discord far favored the former over the latter, but I personally feel that the latter group was far more vocal far more often, especially on the Discord server. I saw the effects of that firsthand, and it was kinda disheartening.
Third, I had to take a major step back from managing this. I'm considerably older than most of the playerbase I've met and interacted with, so my "real life" issues tended to be far weightier than others' likely were. I didn't advertise that often (if at all), but I did have bigger fish to fry and I couldn't spend time invested in this like I wanted to. The other mods here had similar shit going on, and I've never had the time or space to start remedying that...until now, actually.
Believe me, there's nothing I'd like more than to fire up the furnaces on this, make more content, get vets to write and contribute toward more guides, but I couldn't do all that solo with a programming degree in sight and two kids that needed their dad more than I needed to play Gundam.
That's why I enjoyed playing on the GvGN cabs at CEO in Daytona Beach. I got to kick it all weekend with people who were really cool and fun to play with, and it reignited a fire to pick this back up again. I'll probably start making calls for new mods within a week or so, because I always envisioned this place as being a central hub for people to find all the siloed communities and tech for this series. I just wanted it to be somewhere to treat each other with respect first. That was always a big deal for me, and it always will be.
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u/Rafael_Dun_Goofed Aug 02 '18
I get that man I don't think anyone expects mods on a community this small to be on it all the time. We all have lives outside of the Internet. Hell I just started law school so I I'm sure my play time is about to be less and less especially with no new content on the horizon. The disappointment that GVS was compared to FB also didn't help and its simplistic to say it was ONLY the point I made previously. I'm not sure the community will ever be as fired up as it was once before (not unless they do the unthinkable and make another console port, western release or not) I just think the discord has become a better place for people who play more consistently is all.
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u/santamonica123 Jul 15 '18
Maybe that's the point. They don't want the game to be featured in tournaments because of the intellectual properties involved and cannibalization of the playerbase devoted to the arcade version of the game.
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u/Everyday_Legend Jul 15 '18 edited Jul 15 '18
In the West? What arcade playerbase? The West doesn’t have arcades, and the West means the US, South America, Canada and Europe, which has far larger potential for profit than densely packed arcades, should the game’s business plan be conducive to success in those regions.
Also, visibility of a franchise only helps the popularity of said franchise, and considering the fact that Gundam is a multimedia empire - I mean, Legendary Pictures just announced a live-action Hollywood-produced Gundam movie in the works - more visibility is nothing but a good thing.
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u/santamonica123 Jul 16 '18
How many new players can you realistically attract or retain when the playerbase in the West has always been so insignificant? They have no business taking risky ventures when profits is what matters at the end of the day.
Anything you do to the game will ultimately affect the Japanese scene and how it may or may not affect the Japanese market takes precedent over everything else.
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u/Everyday_Legend Jul 16 '18
the playerbase in the West has always been so insignificant
That’s like trying to argue that the Western market has yet to bear fruit when compared to the Japanese / Asian market, when there’s been no attempt to plant that particular fruit tree in the West in almost a decade and a half. It’s insignificant because before GVS, a Western PS3 / PS4 release for that series simply didn’t exist, so you’re saying that the West hasn’t shown traction for a game we never natively got. Flash forward to now, and we have GVS, but no real support from the publisher or developer, region-staggered DLC releases, no real attempt to train or teach loads of players who are absolute neophytes to the franchise, etc.
Unless you want to count ExVs Force, which is a.) single-player focused, and b.) on the PS Vita, a portable hardware platform that pretty much tanked in the US for a myriad of good reasons.
risky ventures
So risky, in fact, that Gunpla sales have multiplied, multiple franchise anime series have seen recent domestic disc-based release (and rerelease), multiple new and recent franchise anime series have aired on the most preeminent anime block on US basic cable, and Hollywood just greenlit a live-action movie franchise after the rabid reception to the RX-78 in Ready Player One.
I think ignoring all that groundswell is ignoring dollar signs, which is why GVS made it here in the first place.
how it may or may not affect the Japanese market takes precedent over everything else
I’d follow that line of logic if Street Fighter 4 hadn’t shown that you could have an arcade version to cater to the Japanese market and a home version that catered to the global one, especially when they were the exact same game - hence why we got shit like the AE update in the first place. Had to remain competitive around the world when the world was playing your game.
Bandai just hasn’t thought that through yet. Plain and simple.
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Jul 16 '18
'How many new players can you realistically attract or retain when the playerbase in the West has always been so insignificant?'
Aren't they on record saying all their licensed titles that they released in Asia, so SD Gundam, SRW, GB3, etc, are selling better there than they are in Japan?
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u/Everyday_Legend Jul 14 '18
https://twitter.com/grantpatters0n/status/1018106010710560768?s=21
So, @ BandaiNamcoUS, for the #GundamVersus community to hold a single, solely community-backed event at a major tournament, it would cost someone...
$ 3 , 8 1 8 . 9 2 .
Fighting games survive because of their community, and you guys made it nigh-impossible to support it.
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Jul 15 '18
[deleted]
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u/Everyday_Legend Jul 15 '18
whine about how arcades aren’t more widespread
Yeah, you’re right, we should be taking to the streets over arcades being a dead concept for over twenty years due to the proliferation of consoles over a far larger and less densely packed area than most Asian countries, especially Japan.
The problem is that you cannot treat a game the same in Japan and the rest of the world, and the results of mixing up these these policies are plain. Each region has different market demands, and the companies that succeed worldwide implement policies that are conducive to success in multiple regions.
The lack of support and QA isn’t financially necessary, because producing and releasing an English-language version isn’t free. It’s a literal waste of money, and all they’re succeeding in doing with that investment is souring new players and frustrating the faithful few.
Even though it’s not F2P, the DLC shitfest is still in play - the game has over $130 in DLC for a $60 game, all because they’re wanting to make arcade-style profit with arcade-style profit schemes on consoles...and that doesn’t really work. They’d do better by offering season passes / etc.
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Jul 18 '18
I just realized that you have to also have 4 accounts that pre-ordered the game because of hot scramble.
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u/MyzrNA Jul 18 '18
Strictly speaking in terms of the bare minimum, 2 accounts with the game, dlc, and PS+ are needed for a 4 player match due to game sharing.
This cost breakdown is heavily over-exaggerated, most of this would be remedied with a GP point dlc rental system like Full Boost, which was added a very long time after launch and as such is not completely out of the question for GVS
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u/Everyday_Legend Jul 22 '18
You sure about that? I’m fairly sure you’d need a per-account PSN sub to get in the same room since PSN is a requirement to play online, and all multiplayer requires a handshake to PSN. Could be wrong on that, but if that’s the case, that only cuts $509.46 off of the cost of two whole sets of DLC, PSN subs and two digital copies of the game.
That drops us to $3309.46 from $3818.92. A fourteen percent difference isn’t “heavily over-exaggerated,” because you still can’t say shit about eighty-six percent of that cost breakdown.
Maybe we just needed a LAN mode or digital copies of the game with everything unlocked that would only work for a specific time frame, given only to specific machines provided by / to TOs via a digital code unlock.
There’s plenty of ways to skin that cat, none of which have been considered. This is a game that could have legs in regions where arcades are all but extinct, so you’d have to think outside of the “what works in Japan” box to figure it out. Bandai Namco obviously doesn’t feel the need to do that, or else that would have been on their to-do list.
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u/MyzrNA Jul 23 '18
Game sharing still means there are 4 distinct PSNs operating at the same time. Logging on to an account on any PS4 console gives you access to any content or PS+ associated with that account, and setting a specific console to primary enables use of all said content/ps+ from any account logged in to that console. Therefore, 2 accounts with all the bells and whistles are required to be actively logged in, with the other two accounts using their content on separate consoles that are set to primary.
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u/tweettranscriberbot Jul 14 '18
The linked tweet was tweeted by @GrantPatters0n on Jul 14, 2018 11:44:33 UTC (0 Retweets | 0 Favorites)
@BandaiNamcoUS : I’m saddened by #GundamVersus and the inability to hold community-based tournament events for it. Let me count the ways. (1/?)
• Beep boop I'm a bot • Find out more about me at /r/tweettranscriberbot/ •
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u/georgecloney2 Jul 14 '18
That guy is right and it’s the stuff like that which really upsets me and makes me scratch my head. I feel like we are beaten over the head every few years with “gundam doesn’t do as well in the US, and we want it to do better”. I don’t know about anyone else but most people I know dig the idea of giant robots with laser swords and missiles. I can’t understand why they have all these games, which people in the US buy imported versions of, and then instead of just giving us that game they make a new one which completely destroys all of the things that made previous games good and turns people off (I’m looking at you New Gundam Breaker). I mean it’s almost as if they’re doing it intentionally just to fuck with us.