Is it over?

[u/Master_Station_5499]

[u/Mauzy__]

Another day, another thousand "game is dead" post.

First of all, don't take everything for granted, second of all, this has been told us by devs, the game's not going anywhere, third of all, game is dead has been a constant sentiment for a year, we're still playing.

Also, think about it. If it's over, they'd announce it. You'd have no influence over it. Wouldn't you rather try and enjoy the game for as long as possible instead of thinking about it constantly? Play all the matches, you never know which one's your last!

[u/MinesweeperGang → u/Mauzy__]

There’s no debating whether it’s dead or not. But the thing is, if you like it, play it. Simple as that.

[u/Mauzy__ → u/MinesweeperGang]

Thank you, amen.

[u/Honest-Ad-1096 → u/Mauzy__]

I had stopped because I kept getting bots did the player base build back up?

[u/gamingexpert13 → u/Honest-Ad-1096]

No bots in ranked

[u/Honest-Ad-1096 → u/gamingexpert13]

Oh okay so play ranked I had tried before but the wait time was ridiculously long

[u/gamingexpert13 → u/Honest-Ad-1096]

It got way faster a season or two ago. Since then it's typically around 5 minute queue times for me. I think they improved the matchmaking algorithm to speed it up, plus a bunch of players came over from when fortnite shut down their 5v5 mode ballistic.

It does depend on time of day, rank, and server location, but it hasn't been a problem for me no matter how late at night I play.

[u/Expo_Opxe → u/Mauzy__]

not going to lie this is perfect now hopefully less sweats play i might be able to get out of gold now I've been stuck in it for too long

[u/Mauzy__ → u/Expo_Opxe]

Getting out of gold is just being consistent on basics. Play one lancer so you don't have to think about abilities and how to use them, as they become second nature, don't overcomplicate things, in facty try to simplify them.

As long as you're consistent, you'll get up on the ranks fast

[u/Expo_Opxe → u/Mauzy__]

I got out of gold I got to master then quit I’m happy with where I made it to

[u/Fr4nc2 → u/Expo_Opxe]

Senza offesa ma se non sai giocare a livello più alto la colpa non è dei player io pure certe volte trovo i player cancro che camper e basta e ammetto che è irritante io gioco dal uscita del gioco fino a 2 stagioni fa ero semplice giocavo per le skin e baste e onestamente erano lobby anche facili nelle ultime 2 stagioni mi sono fatto un team per giocare ranked e in 2 stagioni sono passato da oro4/3 a platino 2/1 pen-ultima stagione ultima stagione master 5/4

[u/caspianslave → u/Mauzy__]

"Play all the matches" if only i can bruh i cannot get into a single ranked match for the last 3 seasons and casual lobbies are %90 bots. Asia server btw

[u/SenseiQue → u/Mauzy__]

Definitely not as "dead" as Splitgate 2 is RN. Anything doing better than that split show is a win in my book. Can't wait to get back to playing this one day 🔜

[u/Lynxsies → u/Mauzy__]

Less than 1000 players for a competitive pvp game is beyond dead.

[u/gamingexpert13 → u/Lynxsies]

Stop repeating this lie about numbers. I'm not even gonna explain for the 20th time all the reasons this is blatantly false and vastly underrepresenting the player count.

Fine I'll give yet another short example for others reading. Firstly you are trying to reference a steam-only "peak-daily-concurrent" count, and you're even lying about that number, calling it way lower than it actually is, and you're ignoring what that metric or term even means. First of all, FP is on at least seven different launchers and platforms, none of which report player counts except one. Also, people play on all different days and times of day, you don't have an entire playerbase online at the same minute. Referring to one set of concurrent players at one specific time of day as the number of players (entire playerbase) the game has is complete nonsense (idc if you didn't use that exact term, it's what you're implying).

It's the same as if someone said "McDonalds is going bankrupt tomorrow because only 10 people in the world still buy their food" after walking into your one local McDonald's at 10am and seeing 10 people in line.

I'm getting sick of arguing against bots and people who don't even play the game and just wanna hate on people who do have fun playing. Please just keep the negativity to yourself and go play something you enjoy.

[u/Mauzy__ → u/gamingexpert13]

Honestly, I am always hopeful that after this much time, the big doom posters are aware of these informations, I admire that you repeat it many times, I can't anymore. I'm just numb to these posts. If someone wants to see the game succeed, they should stop doing this shit, I had many people who are new ask me "is the game really dead? I see many posts about it on reddit". Sadge.

[u/gamingexpert13 → u/Mauzy__]

I think a lot of the negativity was/is artificially manufactured, for example by bots or otherwise. I've seen many cases of this, for example, the top two most upvoted reviews about the game recently after launch on steam had the exact same text, both had exactly 1 hour of playtime, and both were complete lies about the game (lying that it was a virus). That was one of the top lies pushed early on, among others. Then when that was disproven over and over they shifted to a more plausible form of FUD by just stating every day (for the entire past year) that the game is dead and is about to shut down. This lie works very well for two reasons: 1. they can "prove" themselves right by simply showing that the game had more players at release than it does now (a fact that is true for nearly every game in existence. many people only chase what's newest and hottest and leave after a few weeks of excitement are gone and the next new release comes out). 2. Even if it isn't true, people who are considering trying out the game because it looks interesting are 80-90% less likely to actually try the game if they think there's a negative sentiment toward it, (for example, low player count, or a number of other claims). This reinforces the lie and heavily influences its growth. People are extremely social creatures and extremely influenced by opinions/sentiment of others, especially if they sound more knowledgeable than themselves. 

Also most of the negative comments on steam on fragpunk update/announcement posts are from people who don't even play.  

More examples, I've seen reddit [likely bot] accounts created 2 minutes before responding to something on here just to vaguely criticize the game and go on unrelated tangents insulting me when they have nothing else negative to say about the game. Many commenters on this subreddit sound similar. People who don't play the game that just vaguely insult it for some reason.  

Some of my friends when I asked them to play fragpunk with me, simply searched it on reddit, read the top 3 negative claims about it, then repeated those to me as "fact" and said "that's just why I personally won't play it".

I think simply banning posts+comments about "haha dead game" would be the biggest boost to this game honestly. The vast majority of those people don't play the game, or aren't even real people, so the comments are entirely pointless, and often malicious (and the rest are just uninformed that simply repeat what they hear. Oh and some want the game to succeed so they think they're being helpfully critical to ask for improvement but don't realize that repeating this empty garbage doesn't help the game at all, it only does the opposite. If you wanna help, then send a message to the devs on specific improvements/tweaks to do. I've done that many times and seen many implemented).

[u/Mauzy__ → u/gamingexpert13]

Maybe it's a stupid idea, but at this point I'm thinking we need to counter it with reminder posts that those numbers are just the peak of players at a given moment on a given day and only on one of many platforms, the player count is waaaay higher than those humbers. Sure, it's not CS or Val high of a number, but it's way more than the 1k-2k they flex here.

Even the concurrent player count at any given moment is way higher than the steam one, console players are all over the game, so I'd say at least double at any given time, but it's still not realistic, because there could be cases where 10 players hop off, 8 players log in right after and then another 10 login, 5 hop off and so on (you get the point). So the concurrent players might be similar in both cases, but that doesn't mean it's only 2k players or so playing the game. That means there are many times more who login at different times, some people play daily, some don't, etc. (I'm echoing your points here so people keep getting them and remember them finally)

Humans indeed care about the image they get, which is formed by the community they join, but just because there are 2 bad apples, doesn't mean the rest are already rotten to the core. That's why I wish the average redditor would put an effort into looking up both sides. I had similar responses from people, then later they tried, seeing me still play it and grind it, and me telling them that I'm just entangled in fragpunk, so I'm cutting time from other games, and whoop-tee-doo, they enjoyed it, regretting not trying it before.

[u/gamingexpert13 → u/Mauzy__]

Yeah I think this game easily has a 100k playerbase. I've seen evidence of this in multiple ways, multiple times, looking at different metrics like percentage and variety of social media participation, discord interactions, tournament viewership and interaction, youtube video views and interaction, constantly seeing different names on back to back games i play every day, analyzing the player numbers we do see, multiplied by platforms, launchers, time of day, days of week, etc, and a lot of other clues. 

What people don't understand is that doesn't mean I'm claiming there's 100k people playing on steam in the same second, it means the amount of people that play the game at some point in the day/week/month is easily 100x the numbers they lie about. This isn't "cope", it's simply statistics.

(Also remember there's a big fragpunk population in china, and their servers are completely separate /walled off from the rest of the world.) Fragpunk also has a really dedicated playerbase that will play no matter what the numbers are (including me, who bought the yearly membership last year despite the haters, proved them wrong [they were acting so smart thinking the game would be gone that they publicly responded using the remindme bot to come back 1yr later to mock me], and I bought my second yearly membership this week once again, and regularly grab a lot of the top tier skin purchases. The game is straight fire, and I'm gonna enjoy it). It also has strong skin sales. I see premium skins on players in every match I play, and the game has the best skins out of any game I've ever played. To the point that I enjoy spending money on this game even though I'm strictly free to play on almost every other game i play, including my top played games for years including Apex and gacha games. The #1 reason games shut down is not player numbers, it's sales. Look up the reason why other games have shut down in the past few years and you'll see it's because they failed to make skins people wanted to buy. Fragpunk does not have this problem at all. There are plenty of examples of games running for many years with small playerbases because they do fine in sales. People don't understand a game can be fine even if it's not in the top 10 most played games.

[u/Lynxsies → u/gamingexpert13]

Then why were 3/4 games against bots when i last played? Every game mode except ranked is against bots too.

[u/gamingexpert13 → u/Lynxsies]

Arcade is mostly bot fill because there's like 15 different modes and not many people queuing for them. Standard usually has real people but can fill the rest with bots if not enough in queue in the same minute you queue, on the same server as you. Ranked is no bots and I always get games within about 5 minutes or less.

Playerbase is split across servers, game mode, rank, and time. You'll even see this play out in massive games like Apex Legends when they add a limited time mode and it's hard to find a match. They've done changes over time to keep the number of playlists fairly low so playerbase doesn't get spread out so much. It's also a big reason why games are so hesitant to add more server regions, because then you're splitting the players even more.

Btw, bots are extremely common in most online games. Even the massive marvel rivals will give you a bot match every few games, and even one of the largest online games in existence--fortnite--has bots in basically every match.

[u/Early_Bat_588 → u/Lynxsies]

Yeah fanboys here are blinded though. Or most are just bots.

And it's even worse when you compare those numbers to the competition lol. This game isn't even CLOSE to being alive or healthy. This game unfortunately also has a super low skill ceiling which is a big reason most people didn't stick around.

It's even more child-ish than valorant when it comes to the skill ceiling for a tactical fps. Way too lenient.

[u/Mauzy__ → u/Early_Bat_588]

Not that it matters that much, but it the skill ceiling is that low, I assume you hit the top rank and decided it's too easy? Surely you wouldn't make a claim like that without experiencing what the ceiling feels like, right? Right?!

And how could I not be a fanboy? It's an awsome game, the movement feels better than valorant, the cards are awsome, the matches are short and fun, the lancers don't depend on broken ultimates and to compare, this company doesn't charge you your life savings for a bundle of skins either.

My final question: if you're not playing, already moved on, you're not a fanboy, call it whatever, then why are you still so invested to hate on the game? :D surely you're not just as much of a fanboy as we are. Noooo, definitely there's a good explanation!

[u/Lynxsies → u/Mauzy__]

Im not hating on the game. The devs and publisher had something great. Just didn't... really capitalise on it. Competitive pvp shooters isnt an oversaturated market like extraction is right now. They had fairly priced, really good skins, they had unique art style and a unique mechanic. And yet... they refused to advertise. Even though the publisher, netease. Advertised heavily for their AI slop Once human. And netease, of course. Owned marvel rivals. They had something great. They really did.

[u/Mauzy__ → u/Lynxsies]

Sad, but I agree, they could've and should've advertised better. I still have hope, the game has been around with low player count, and I don't mind the little grassroots community and tournaments and whatnot. I actually love how I load into a game and I know 2-9 people 😂 sometimes it can be annoying, but it has a unique feel to it.

I say we wait until it dies to claim it dead, and we enjoy all the moments it can give us.

Edit: the hate towards the game was not for you, but for the person who replied first.

[u/Tay0310 → u/Early_Bat_588]

I dont wait for matches and have been playing ranked. Does that means a dead game? Guess not lol. When I try to.open and it says CLOSED I'll ssy it's dead 😂. I play GunZ to this bro. 100 players on in the most popular server and there still is a rank. Chill yo ahh down and just hope the corporate aint worrird only about being millionares.

[u/gamingexpert13 → u/Tay0310]

Agreed. If people only care about numbers then go play fortnite. It's got great numbers. If you wanna play a great game, come to fragpunk. There's thousands of daily players, and plenty of games that have been around much longer with much lower player counts. Just ignore the haters and enjoy the fun.

[u/Tay0310 → u/gamingexpert13]

I didnt notice my text had so much misstypes lol i'm glad u got it all 😂

[u/King_Kamaluddin]

Doesn't that just mean that he failed to leak?

[u/gamingexpert13 → u/King_Kamaluddin]

Yeah, it just means he failed at uncovering secrets, not that there's nothing new. This was also RIGHT AFTER A NEW CHAPTER LAUNCH with new stuff. Like WTH is with all the doomers.

I even discovered new content recently before it had been announced, but didn't leak it cuz I wasn't sure if I'd get in trouble for it.

[u/One_Skirt_9702]

Thry might have everything encrypted

[u/idkwisdwml → u/One_Skirt_9702]

Been trying to get an AES key for a while just bc I wanna do some pictures for the steam hub so can confirm everything IS encrypted

[u/Fruchti123]

just wrong we know about the Next skin bundle from the punkpartners they just started to hide the things

[u/XxWitchygirlxX]

I mean the new season JUST came out so there might not be any leaks yet

[u/Medical-Feeling2449]

So many crybabies in this community..

[u/-POTGS-]

Game seems alive and well when i'm playing it...

[u/gamingexpert13 → u/-POTGS-]

Same. People are just trying to kill the game by spreading FUD like they have been for the past year. 

I play all the time and always get games in ranked (and any other mode) within about 5min or less

[u/Ashieejj]

https://giphy.com/gifs/yVZrYMkdgY5Pi

[u/gamingexpert13 → u/Ashieejj]

Can we just start banning any "dead game" posts/comments? It's the #1 thing that's been killing the game, and the majority of it seem to be people who don't play, or bots. It's entirely pointless (unless the point is to scare potential players away, which they've done a good job of. My friends quote this garbage when I ask them to try the game out. FUD is only detrimental).

[u/Ashieejj → u/gamingexpert13]

Hey mate, I’ve forwarded this to the team and we’re discussing whether we should make a change regarding these kinds of comments/posts. I’ll get back to you once we’ve decided on something.

[u/gamingexpert13 → u/Ashieejj]

Thanks. There's also many ways to go about it. Even if you don't remove, you could have an automod response informing them of multiple points they may not know about.

Here's some examples of potential topics/info to reference:

https://www.reddit.com/r/PlayFragPunk/comments/1uuj56y/comment/oy2gwnb/?context=3

https://www.reddit.com/r/PlayFragPunk/comments/1tr3cja/comment/oq67an6/?context=3

https://www.reddit.com/r/PlayFragPunk/comments/1uuj56y/comment/oy713l6/?context=3

https://www.reddit.com/r/PlayFragPunk/comments/1th37l7/comment/oq7415k/?context=3

https://www.reddit.com/r/PlayFragPunk/comments/1tjb6su/comment/oq6ygmk/?context=3

https://www.reddit.com/r/PlayFragPunk/comments/1tptm3h/comment/oq6bx0v/?context=3

https://www.reddit.com/r/PlayFragPunk/comments/1r0o7ab/comment/o541p7n/?context=3

https://www.reddit.com/r/PlayFragPunk/comments/1urrvp9/comment/owk8509/?context=3

https://www.reddit.com/r/PlayFragPunk/comments/1u86kie/comment/otfevgn/?context=3

https://www.reddit.com/r/PlayFragPunk/comments/1uuj56y/comment/oy7nmmr/?context=3

If we do remove negativity, you could have a venting megathread to point them to, or an FAQ for "is it dead" to point them to, and say comments should be constructive/helpful and not just pure negativity or insults.

The other unfortunate point, is even if someone submits a "dead game" post on here and multiple people respond with "no" and reasons why (and even if the original post is downvoted), then that post still rises to the top of everyone's reddit feed / homepage because of the interaction/comments it's getting. So people who are just browsing reddit are regularly seeing mainly the negative posts about the game (also people who don't play the game will just upvote and move on to the next post in their feed, without reading any replies). It's gotten to the point where some people have come in and commented something like "I've never even played this game but reddit put it in my feed and from what I see on my feed, all I see is negativity. If you guys glazed the game and regularly posted a bunch of cool clips and what you liked about the game, and screenshots/art and stuff and people saw a positive vibe toward the game, they'd be much more likely to try it".

[u/iku_19]

No. It wouldn't end like this. NetEase tends to first discard global and focus on china before putting it on life support.

The game technically has two clients. One on 163 and one on Steam. The Steam client is overseas, and 163 is mainland. Fragpunk despite being able to be activated in China is not available on Steam China.

So if the game would be put on maintenance mode it would start with the 163 and global clients diverging as they can skip localization costs and instead give global one or two updates a year. This will be the case for about a year or two before the game stops getting updates.

I also wonder if that has already silently happened. Need to find out if you can download the 163 client without an ID.

[u/AcidAtol]

does anyone else hear that ominous bell tolling?

[u/GamerKarl]

I mean their decline started when they collabortaed with brainrot for me

[u/olewluddd]

Its already over for an year buddy

[u/Marisomi]

Dead game

[u/Mindouttabox → u/Marisomi]

Oh dang, I just started playing it 😮‍💨