#FEEDBACK: Difficulty, Newcomer Retention, and Winrates in SUPERVIVE

47 messages · Page 1 of 1 (latest)

grand sleet
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A Note Before Starting

This post is not about armory. If the discussion shifts toward that topic, I will ask for the thread to be closed. I’m open to healthy conversation, but please respect the intended focus here.

My Perspective

I typically rank in the top 1% in competitive games — Master+ in League of Legends, Immortal in Valorant, Diamond/Master in Lost Ark PvP etc. So, I generally appreciate difficulty, depth, and a high skill ceiling.

However, I’m lucky to have real-life friends who are more casual players — they enjoy games, but they don’t grind or "sweat." Their perspective gives me a less biased, more holistic view of what SUPERVIVE is like for newer or less-skilled players.

The Problem

At first, my friends had a blast. We played together in lower MMR, and they were winning and enjoying the chaos. But as soon as they played alone — and started losing — the tone changed.

They didn’t immediately say "this game is too hard." Instead, they started blaming characters (“Shrike is broken”), bad teammates, lack of supports, and so on. These issues didn’t come up while they were winning — only after their winrate dropped below 10%.

They wanted to try fun builds, but often didn’t even get the chance. They'd get stomped too quickly. The result? They stopped playing so much, now they login for the dailies maybe and if I poke them enough they come and play.

more below

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The Core Truth

Winning in SUPERVIVE is incredibly fun. Losing is outright miserable.

Early on, when you don’t realize you're playing against bots and you’re dropping 10 kills, it’s euphoric. But once the training wheels come off and you hit "real" MMR, the winrate nosedives — and for many, that’s the end of the experience.

This is a battle royale problem in general, but it’s far worse here due to the smaller playerbase and 12-team structure. In League, even with a high skill ceiling, matchmaking usually brings most players to ~50% winrate. If you play 6 games, you’ll likely win 3.

In SUPERVIVE, what’s the winrate once you're out of newbie MMR? 3%? 5%? That’s brutal. Imagine playing 10–20 games and never placing in the top 5 — even once.

That’s soul-crushing for the average player.
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Not Everyone Is Built to “Just Improve”**

We're playing video games. Most people don’t want to power through loss after loss, especially when the game doesn’t offer anything fun outside of victory. Other games use engagement-based matchmaking (EBMM) and bots to ease that pain. Even Fortnite and PUBG — which also have 100-player formats — inject bots or casual elements to keep things fun.

I'm not saying SUPERVIVE needs to add bots — though it's something to consider. But the fun needs to be there even if you’re losing. Currently, that’s missing for most newcomers.

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Mechanics That Work vs. Mechanics That Hurt

Shrike is a common complaint among new players. If the community widely dislikes her at lower levels, there needs to be a rethink — whether that’s rebalancing or something else.

SUPERVIVE seems to be falling into the trap of many “player-first” development cycles: feedback becomes dominated by hardcore, high-skill players, and changes end up catering to the top 1%(atleast they used to, not so much anymore, which I dont think its bad).

We saw this with the Resurgence and spike tech — a good change for lower-skilled players, initially hated by vets. When “casual-friendly” updates receive strong negative pushback, it often means they’re hitting the right nerve — making the game better for the majority.

Unfun to Experience

Skysharks: Fun to use, miserable to be chased by. They feel oppressive when you don’t know how to deal with them.

Dunks in the Abyss: Dying instantly to a dunk feels cheap. It’s more frustrating than fun when you're on the receiving end.

TL;DR (Too Long; Didn’t Read)

SUPERVIVE is too punishing for new players.

Winning is extremely fun. Losing feels awful.

Most people don’t have the will to push through 20 games with <5% winrate.

Fortnite and similar games offer ways to have fun even without winning — including bots, power items, and alternate objectives.

Recent changes (glider, res beacon) are great steps in the right direction.

More needs to be done to ensure players — especially newer and lower-skilled ones — can enjoy the game even when they aren’t winning.

Victory doesn’t have to mean skill-exclusive. Until the playerbase grows, some path to a win — or at least a fun session — must exist for everyone.

stark shuttle
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They need to make the onboarding better. Highly agree on the game being too punishing for new players

On booting up a new account you can't use armor evolutions, you can't use the third and fourth consumable slots, YOU CAN'T UPGRADE YOUR SKILL TO THE FOURTH LEVEL, you can't do finishers to execute enemies, you can't play arena

Playing the game for the first time doesn't feel that great because of how limited you are. Most egregious one being the skill one and execute since both of those are essential to fights, eg. full heal and unlocking new mechanics

I'm a bit leaning towards disagree on bots BUT I do know why it is needed simply for the reasons you stated. People win = more fun and more fun = people stay and bots do that a lot

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Dunks need to go or at least offer some alternative to make every hunter in the game have some sort of dunk. The fact that Brall escaped a year straight of patches and just pure nerfs and he still sits COMFORTABLY at the top 5 Hunters of all time in every single patch simply because of his kit and his dunk is some insane levels of balancing that should not exist in this game

grand sleet
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I have to say that theorycraft did great advances in this areas, the game is less overwhelming than before, open beta onboarding didnt have tutorials, nothing was explained and basically systems were way more unnecesarilly complex, like having to cook the food. Nowadays is better in that sense

grand sleet
# stark shuttle They need to make the onboarding better. Highly agree on the game being too puni...

Bots are indeed cuestionable, I dont really enjoy playing vs bots particularly, its not that I am saying that supervive needs more bots, just that other games have those systems so their fun perception is better, if fortnite had 10k players on BR ranked without bots most ppl would alt f4 after being smoked from a mountain without anything to do against. So if we dont have that many amount of bots to preserve player experience and perception, the game needs other mechanisms to make ppl win, or enjoy the gaming session even without winning

coarse prawn
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IMO the game has always been a blast with friend, but the instant you start playing solo the game becomes extremely miserable. Some people continue playing other games even through bad team mates, rng, ect. but in supervive ive noticed that you cant even play the game that you expect when you play solo. When on a team im expecting to role up as a team and battle other teams, not farm into looking for rez beacon every 2 minutes. For me personally, this really really kills the game.

grand sleet
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when the games start being killed early because your friends are not good enough, and the experience ends up being a run to ress beacon simulator it stops being that fun

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if you manage to get a group of 3 friends that are good enough to power through medium mmr lobbies yes

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or if you carry your friends

coarse prawn
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imo thiers like no reason to play this game solo becuase its just not fun on average

grand sleet
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there are twice of ppl playing solo than on duo, and more on duo than full parties

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something like that explained a dev the other day

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its modern gaming, majority of the modern gamers play solo

ionic field
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I've seen other battle royales resolve this by adding smaller objectives within a match aside from winning the whole thing

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so you can still feel like you won something

grand sleet
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maybe hidden bots, like really hidden, some sort of system that let you jump back to the game, side objetives that let you do smth idk, something, maybe put sabrina carpenter dancing on top of the heart (for legal reasons this is an exaggeration)

strange cosmos
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Tldr answers to this post:

  • We need MMR that is strict, so that players face other players of their own or similar skill level. (Solve for this and most casual issues would go away, but this can't currently be solved with our low population)
  • We should not be balancing the game around the new player experience, changing how shrike functions for example because someone who hasn't learned not to play to shrike's win condition sets precedence for this game to essentially be balanced by reddit (God forbid)
  • win rates being much lower in a battle Royale is super normal
  • no other battle Royale had a problem with victory being skill-exclusive, "everyone should be a winner" philosophy does not make sense
  • part of gaming is getting better at games, better onboarding would help with this
grand sleet
proud gale
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+GM glider

stiff stirrup
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The only thing I'll say is fuck EBMM. I don't get why anyone would like a system that decides whether you should win or lose

grand sleet
stiff stirrup
grand sleet
stiff stirrup
grand sleet
sharp lantern
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There's a lot of mechanics that are just not explained to players and actively hold people back (as in they feel their character is weak when they have missing knowledge of how to utilize their character) and you wouldn't know about it unless you went out of your way to engage with content that explained the game to you. For example, I originally didn't know that Ghost had damage falloff after like the 5th bullet and you would have to stop shooting for a bit for your damage to stay 45-37 instead of suddenly dropping to 22 on shots. It's unintuitive because it's a shooter and you would think you'd have to empty your whole magazine and only stop shooting to reload when it is safe. Players aren't really looking at the Ghost magazine in the left corner either. Many players hold down Zeph's LMB to two charges because they think it will hit harder when you only need to hold it down once and they hardly ever need the distance gained with a second charge. The characters have so many hidden quirks/tools that a player that isn't familiar with games and messing around in training room in their own time would frankly never learn to pick up and they'd only really understand their character superficially.

Creators are filling a lot of the gaps for new players learning the game and you would only seek out creators if you already have a vested interest in the game. If you would want to keep the players that put down the game because X Character feels weak or X Character feels strong then the devs really need to put those resources in the game versus hoping people will seek out external help to play the game better.

fathom copper
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I think in an ideal world a noob stomper character shouldn't exist

sharp lantern
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Shrike is less of a problem once Ghost players know that they have to release their LMB after every 5 shots so they move way faster and are harder to hit. Otherwise people will see Ghost's kit and think I'm a mid ranger that has omnivamp naturally in my kit, why am I, a skirmisher losing to Shrike in the mid-range.

fathom copper
sharp lantern
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I'm not diminishing the complaints I am more saying that there would be less complaints if there was more clarity for every single character

fathom copper
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If they want this game to feel like rock paper scissors simulator then you should show what everyone choose right at the start. My guesses are they do not

fathom copper
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They intend for these techs to be a part of the game but they rely on the community to explain them to people

sharp lantern
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If someone picked up Supervive and had no knowledge of micro/macro play in other games then they would never be able to truly experiment in training room and find out that Zeph doesn't do extra damage with two extra bars

sharp lantern
sharp lantern
fathom copper
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Tool tips are pretty bad sometimes

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Like wukong doesnt straight up tell you he has ranged LMB

trim sorrel
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Well the egregious thing is that the full descriptive text isn't shown when you hover over the ability in the main menu, you for some reason have to press alt to show the entire description. Also the tutorial is completely outdated which is another issue despite completely changing the game and trying to obtain new players and is absolutely mental considering there isn't imo anything hyping this specific moba like there is with league (Faker/SKT T1).

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That in turn inherently creates a smaller population of players and creates huge disparities of skill and due to how fast paced/snowbally supervive is, that leads to plenty of stomping.