After making big waves in the Battlefield community with changes to the game’s “time to kill”, DICE has decided that they’ll be rolling all of those changes right back.
It was only a week ago that DICE rolled out a patch which lowered the impact of assault rifles, submachine guns, light machineguns, semi-auto rifles and self-loading rifles. The intention was to keep players alive a little longer, reducing overall player churn.
“Although not extremely vocal within our deeply engaged community, we see from our game data that the wider player base is dying too fast leading to faster churn – meaning players may be getting frustrated with dying too fast that they choose not to log back in and learn how to become more proficient at Battlefield V,” DICE said at the time.
But the experiment hasn’t worked. So in a post earlier this morning, DICE has revealed that they’re rolling all of the changes back.
“Our intent with the TTK changes was to see if we could evolve the Battlefield V experience and make it more enjoyable for new players, whilst also making sure the Battlefield vets have a choice with a more “core” experience suiting their preferred play-style,” DICE said.
“Clearly we didn’t get it right. Veteran players didn’t ask for the change, but as game developers, we took it upon ourselves to make those changes based on extensive data and deliberation.”
The developer noted that “we have a challenge bringing new players into Battlefield 5“, although it’s a problem facing all of DICE’s games “for a long time”. But in the interim, the TTK changes will be reverted just before midnight December 15 AEDT (or early December 16 for our New Zealand friends). The “Conquest Core” playlist is also being removed from the game.
The reaction has been relatively positive:
Thank you @Battlefield , this will be the best decision for the community & glad this has been reverted pic.twitter.com/kRe2IqwI0K
— Sean Lee #NotMyTTK (@Sean_Lee93) December 17, 2018
Fantastic news. And to gain new players or help them into the game make tutorials or videos or training maps. With this you don’t have to make changes nobody wants and it doesn’t split the community. And everybody is fine with it
— offended by everything (@EssKaDu) December 17, 2018
I gave the new ttk quite a fair chance. (No one & dones) & i just couldnt get behind it. Them reverting ttk restores my hope for this game.
— Doesnt clip as much. (@Bc2acolyte) December 17, 2018
But having pleased the hardcore and vocal elements of the Battlefield fanbase, DICE now faces a familiar problem. Having reverted the Battlefield V TTK values to their original launch state, what will DICE do to fix the player churn that was the core reason cited for the changes in the first place?
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