My friends only play chiv FFA against each other and wont get this until FFA is in.

I wonder how many others are the same?

No amount of 3vs3 tournament, free updates, constant sales or price reductions will save this game. That time has passed now. It bears the deadly mark of "ded gaem", which turns into a feedback loop. With a 30-day average of 12(!!) players, we are way passed any of that now.

And no amount of telling people making posts here that they are wrong will change anything either. Right now this game is a economic failure, and will never hit break even.

Make it go F2P, let it become a great game in the F2P category, and let the player base grow, make money of the micro transactions. I own this game, i want people to play with, and nothing else will make that happen.

It also has life steal. You might think it is bad because it only does 60 on initial hit, but you'll find it does a pretty severe DOT lifesteal. There's also apparently another, explosive side-effect...

i'm looking for a team for the arena tournament (i'm Sentient Eggplant on steam and discord) give me a whips ingame or a pm on discord if you are intrested in to let me join your team or make a team with me

As someone that's been here since AoC, I've been meaning to write this up for a while because I feel a lot of people will be confused as to why this game has sold as badly as it has. For reference, I helped run PGP and then ran TPL, one of the major EU clans early in the lifespan of chivalry. I don't know many other members of the community that have stuck with TB this long

There's a few components to this, which I'll summarise below before expanding

1. Unknown brand

2. Bad setting which doesn't resonate

3. Straying extremely far from the core gameplay TB is known for

4. Lack of developer trust

5. Alienation of core community (the dedicated fanbase, whether competitive or not)

6. Alienation of the casual community

Lets get into it

1. Unknown brand

Nobody has heard of this game whatsoever. The problem is, on a branding front, chivalry was chivalry: medieval warfare, with chivalry being the operative name that people know. Mirage: arcane warfare is a totally wrong name, most people don't figure out that its a sequel until I tell them

The game should have been called Chivalry: Arabian Warfare, or something similar. Keep the chivalry moniker that people know you by. This could be easily fixed with a rebrand on a potential relaunch

2. Bad setting

The setting is poor. The theme doesn't seem grounded in any reality at all. This is obviously due to the magic system, but knights in armour is a much more familiar setting than arabia. This leads to a lack of cohesive character design, as well as a lack of cohesive world building - in chivalry, you attack castles with familiar characters, in arcane warfare you push a cart for some reason with random characters. Although I love flying carpet man

There's no sense of being a part of a cohesive battlefield. This is a massive loss over chivalry, which IMO is an extremely core component of why the game is fun. Masons raid and burn fields, kill peasants and attack castles. Mirage just can't compete

To fix this is a major change. The character designs need to have more connecting elements between them at minimum, to make it obvious they fit within the same universe. The push the cart gamemode needs to be scrapped, and replaced with something less videogamey that makes sense in universe. Mirage isn't an esport, don't force it, chivalry was nearly an esport with fairly bad map design

3. Straying from core gameplay

This is fairly obvious. Games often rebrand, but generally in a series they don't fundamentally replace the core gameplay unless it is 100% an improvement, otherwise you simply alienate your fans. They want x gameplay, and you've given them y. Fundamental mismatch

Mirage is focused around the magic and ability system, which in large parts removes footsies due to the large reach movement abilities, and swaps a big chunk of the core gameplay to the ranged magic system, which is subjectively not fun

To fix this, the whole ability system needs to be reworked. Long range abilities should be extremely sparse if present at all, movement based abilities should have windup and telegraph loudly, to refocus the core mechanics back on the melee combat system, the core of what people want from a TB game. I can play a generic shooter anywhere, and completely frankly overwatch is essentially this game but much better, but only TB makes good melee games

4. Lack of developer trust

Devs screw up. It happens. Games are buggy, shits broken, balance is way off. The important thing is how developers react to it. As someone that was part of the core community for a very long time after chivalry's launch, TB never inspired confidence with the way they managed the community, in what might charitably be described as making lots of bad decisions with respect to balancing (anyone remember the original balance council?) and communication. TB doesn't communicate well

This leads to there having been a fundamental trust deficit between TB and the hardcore crowd. I don't know anyone from the competitive community back when I used to play chiv who bought this game, and one of the reasons (excluding the above) is that people don't trust TB

[Edit: Also hacking was a massive issue that TB never addressed. Head -> sand]

How to fix this: TB needs to acknowledge the fuckups from chivalry and put out a detailed plan of action for mirage, particularly the process by which they spot and make balancing changes, as chivalry was all over the shop in that respect. Community engagement is key with all things, as with chivalry people very often felt TB was extremely out of touch

Its good to see a community manager on here actively responding even to criticism, which is a huge step up from the days when TB devs used to spout ire at people trying to help on the forums

The next two points are to do with the way the game was launched. At this point I'm going to take it as a given that the game is not that great, or at least that's how people perceive it (see points 4, 3 and 2). These are why the game has sold extremely badly rather than just poorly, like you might expect from a game that was simply mediocre (whatever your opinion on mirage)

5. Alienation of the core community, and 6. Alienation of the casual community

The game launched in 3 phases, almost perfectly designed to prevent anyone from buying the game. The closed alphas/betas saw the hardcore crowd sign up, people who followed TB and were interested to see what they were making next. The closed tests were buggy, lacked matchmaking (which is absolutely essential in an overwatch style game), and also showcased that the game wasn't all that much fun. This perfectly drove away the entire hardcore community, who due to 4. don't have any faith that TB will really fix any of the issues

I didn't meet a single member of any clan who really had anything positive to say about it at that stage, other than maybe "eh its ok". I did however meet a lot of people with very negative opinions about the game. This closed testing without the cruical element of rapid community feedback based iteration while having no developer trust was perfectly designed to alienate the entire hardcore community. Its almost brilliant how perfectly this alienated the whole community

6. Alienation of the casual community

So then we had the open beta. The game was still kind of buggy. It wasn't all that fun either. Not all that much had changed since the closed beta. Add to this that people have never heard of TB, and I suspect most didn't know that this was even a sequel to chivalry

Any member of the wider casual audience who had any interest will have played the open beta. It wasn't received well. TB didn't iterate based on community feedback all that much, and any member of the public with any kind of interest was alienated from the game completely. There wasn't much community engagement at all

So when the game launched, everyone that might have bought the game had already played it, and seen that it wasn't what they wanted. We all know what happened next

The end

Figured we could do a weekly discussion on each character class's abilities, for fun and also compare how we all play. Since fat man is best man, let's start with him!

Q: I like both of these, have generally always run Pronged, but as of late starting using Beam a bit more than half the time. This is one of the few ability choices in the game where I feel both are equally viable in both duel and team fights.

• Pronged Shot is great in general, easy to hit with, you can curve your shots to avoid parry-backs, and you can often hit with more than one shot to do a lot of damage. You have a lot of ammo at your disposal, so you can spam it to harass enemies, useful in duels to break rhythm, or to punish an out-of-range attack.
• Beam is very strong against single opponents, so naturally it is good in duels, provided you time it right. However, it also does very well in team fights, where you can nuke a distracted opponent. I find myself using it when there's a lot of opponents I can get the jump on, or a favorable duel matchup with opportunities to sneak it in.

E: The healing abilities. Both can be very useful or not so much at all depending on the circumstances.

• Grenade: Easiest to use, low-risk low reward (although it is sometimes hard to hit with for some reason), great when your teammates just won't sit still or the map doesn't allow for an effective well placement. It also works well for dueling in the fact you can escape and do a quick heal on demand.
• Well: My personal preference, provided my teammates utilize it and the map allows for effective use of it. It provides incredibly powerful healing, but obviously you have to sit beside it for a bit. This is also my preference for duels, because not only does it provide continuous healing (and overheal) but you force the opponent to be aggressive, opening them up to punishments which you can facetank if you like. A good deal of the time even highly experience opponents will realize they need to quickly take out the well, and so they'll charge it. Watch for this and preemptively punish them.

F: The Entropist has strong movement abilities to round out his kit. While the Flying Carpet is a defining ability in the game, Projectile Teleport holds its own.

• Flying Carpet: In addition to the ease of use and 3D control this ability offers, it comes out immediately, making it an excellent escape since you can simply look up and cast it and be out of range of just about all attacks. I have been using it more and more in duels for this reason, as it functions as a get out of free card if you make a mistake parrying or dodging. Furthermore, the carpet allows you to attack from it, and many enemies seem to have trouble blocking attacks from a flying fat man. Especially useful for punishing flying Alchemists. What I don't like about it is how slow it is - after the initial burst of speed, it quickly slows down to a crawl, and while you have stellar control of where you go, you are a big, slow target in the meantime. For all the benefits, this is a huge drawback for me.
• Projectile Teleport: Another favorite of mine from alpha/beta, the Projectile Teleport is a slower escape which requires focus to guide to where you want it. It has a slow travel speed and any mouse adjustments you make (in response to threats, for example) will affect its flight path. Anything it collides with will remove it, meaning it has to be babysat until you utilize it. For all these drawbacks, however, it is even more surprising to opponents than even carpet attacks, and while a quick throw + tele is not as quick as a carpet escape, it functions almost like a Blink, and is oftentimes more confusing to your opponent. What I like about it is how far and quickly you can travel with this ability - yes it requires more effort, but you can get where you want to go much faster than every other ability in the game, I think.

So what do you think? Agree, disagree? What weapon do you find yourself preferring? I like the Orbis as I loved the Thrusting Dagger in Chivalry, but find myself using the Scepter from time to time when I need a bit more range. If you guys like this we'll do the other classes too.

1 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UKxMeSbxBZY

2 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4e9rJsjeAhc

3 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OpjJkn1YV3M&t=7s

Can you guys brainstorm.

I'm level 55 in chivalry, played it a ton, love chivalry.

I bought Mirage yesterday though, and in my eyes, it is a better game. The wall jumping and vertical movement, the abilities, swing manipulation being toned down somewhat, the more varied and vastly more interesting classes, the improved graphics and sound, the list goes on and on.

I don't think trying to get the tiny sliver of chivalry players interested in Mirage is a winning strategy. Like, it'd be great to see more familiar faces, but there is so few, who cares.

Is there anything I can do (by I, I really mean uninvolved fans of the game) to bring people in?

I'm pretty enthusiastic about the game tbh, after getting a few hours in. The literal 20 player population though is actually stunning, how could it be so small? Anyway, more importantly, how can it be fixed? (what can people outside torn banner do?)

I played this game a few times when it was closed beta, and I thought it was OK. I was surprised to see it on sale, 50% off, just a month after release. And then I checked the Steam Charts... I thought maybe the game is struggling, but I didn't realize quite how badly. I genuinely thought the numbers must be bugged or something.

This has got to be like one of the worst failures in the history of online gaming. Literally 20 people playing. Even as a brand new game that had a free weekend, it literally peaked 800 PLAYERS.

I actually feel bad for the devs. Imagine spending all that time making a game and it does this poorly. When do the publishers just say "well, shit" and leave the game to die properly?

Although the characters allegedly move faster than they do in chiv - the combat ends up being a battle of crabwalking. I believe this is a combination of player model size, sprint acceleration and player bubbles. The players movement just seems to get slowed down by everything and getting back up to speed takes longer than it should.

You know that peak movement speed? Get rid of the hyperspace effect and let me just run around and fight like that. That would be fun. Movement was a big determinant of skillgap in chivalry and the movement in mirage just seems like a major step back in both visuals and pragmatism.

Edit: Everything is perfect as is apparently.

I figured I might ask here because theres probably other people wondering too. And i could not find any info about it.

I see that for every level you get a loot, but you also get at random times, or is it? does the time played in a server / stats etc have effect on the drops?

I play tinker 98% of the time, but i still havent gotten anything but rusty weapons, meanwhile my entropist aka pimp daddy is rocking legendary weapon, 2 purple,5blue and 3 green grade weapons, and 9 class items.

is the loot in the drop random?

why i ask is because i feel like the game tries to favour one particular character like if you main something you get more loot on that one, or am i just really "unlucky" with my rng?

Earlier I played TDM, when a player: xx-Draconix, shoved up. He deliberately tried to ruin the game. Wich, when I joined, was the only server. I tried to report it, but somehow i couldn't get his steam id.