While our current tutorial map is fun, it's not doing its job.
It doesn't really prepare players for an actual match and is missing out on important mechanisms completely.
- New players don't know how the KO system works. Hence they don't care when they have the ball and an opponent comes close to them. As a result they get knocked out all the time and are frustrated.
- They have no concept of how keeping works. But somehow they all think that standing in the goal with an open shield should be it. This of course is completely wrong, because the shield only prevents that you catch the ball, but it doesn't make you bigger in any way.
- They don't know how to receive a pass, they zig zag and jump around randomly, so passes miss them.
- They don't know that you can shoot with the pass button (or quickshot button) when they are close to the goal, without risking to be knocked out.
The new tutorial will happen right on the pitch and fake actual gameplay. It will give you hints or warnings when you do typical things wrong. I played with so many new players, they all do the same things wrong, so it's quite obvious.
Afterwards new players should be much more aware of the mentioned 4 things and also be much better at catching. At the same time I have to make sure they can actually beat the tutorial, because you wont be allowed to play matches without it.
The old tutorial was played by 35000 players and 28400 got a match license. Not everyone needs to be able to finish it, but those who finish it should have a better time in matches afterwards.
[B]More Stats[/B]
Small changes can have a huge impact on the overall player numbers. We have a daily influx of about 500-1000 new players. Now we have to focus on making sure those players stay and don't leave after one or two matches by explaining the game better in the tutorial and by adding more extrinsic motivation.
Of all new players about 40-50% play at least one or two matches online.
20-25% play more than 2 matches.
About 5% have played more than 10 matches in their first day and about 0.5-1% get really hooked with 20-50 matches on their first day.
We have pretty concrete ideas that should all contribute to improving those numbers. Let me sum them up:
- The new tutorial should make sure they have a better understanding and more fun and less frustration in their first 2 matches. So we can expect them to play maybe twice the amount of matches or even more?
- After the match you will have a "find new match" button right in UDK, without going back to the launcher, so you can get into a flow and are less likely to stop playing. This should also increase the amount of matches played per user.
- Right now the Level number is just a number but gives you nothing. Level-Up-Rewards shall give a greater extrinsic motivation to "play a few more matches".
- Ranked: all players beyond Level 6 will be able to play ranked, the biggest extrinsic motivation. Playing just normal matches all the time seems pointless and many players keep asking for ranked. This should get players hooked for real.
- Clubs: Creating a club with your friends (instead of parties) and ranking up with your club against other clubs should make Supraball a social environment you want to keep coming back to.
With every feature added, I will compare the stats before and after.
Before free2play we had about 20-80 matches per day.
Now we have about 1000 matches per day during the weekend and 700 on a weekday.
Let's have a look again at those numbers in one month from now, when some of the mentioned features are released.
Also when all of those things are done, we will be able to actually release the game - it's still early access right now, which might also be a not so small factor. We'll see. The release can be expected in the first half of 2018.
The next update in 1-2 weeks will bring the new tutorial and the level up rewards. In the update in about 4 weeks you can expect the return of ranked!
[B]Ranked[/B]
A question for you regarding Ranked play: Are you willing to queue for 15 minutes and keep the queue running in the background? Or do you want to get into a practice match where you wait with others until it's filled? In ranked there will be no bots; only humans. And we try to keep the rank difference as small as possible. All of those things increase the waiting time; so the instant start that we have in normal matches thanks to bots and substituting will not work there. Let us know in the comments what you think.
Fixed 5v5 matches in Europe!
We only noticed late at night, that EU 5v5 matchmaking didn't seem to be working for nearly 2 days!
We will need to implement some mechanism that reports those problems to us when they happen again, because we had no idea.
Sorry for the inconveniences; have fun!
22 September Update - Instant bot/player substitution, FPS optimisations, Quicker kick-off after goals, easier entry for new players and many other things.
- Bots now immediately replace a leaving player in normal matchmaking.
- Make matches restart faster after goals
- Tutorial now automatically closes after getting the match license - to not overwhelm new players with advanced stuff
- Lowered shader complexity in first person view and when you're close to the ball
- Fix not seeing yourself on the end podium
- Fixed that bots can have a negative skill so that they were unable to pass and super slow
- Removed XP display in practice
- Preventing switching team in tutorial, breaking the game
- Crowdfunding backers now can equip the backer gun
- When humans sub for bots, the keeper bot will be replaced last
- Improve launcher handling of server ping problems
- Enabled VAC on all matchmaking servers
- Fixed bots dashing forward before match start (proper lineup in intro now)
- Fixed lobby match being stuck looking for substitute
- Remove invalid notifications from practice menu
- Fixed notifications after getting match licence
- Fixed first-time-welcome menu always being shown if steam cloud was disabled
- Added minimise button to popup windows
- Fixed crash when steam inventory unavailable
- Fixed config error in default server settings
- Minor text corrections
~~
- Low FPS with great graphic cards seems to have been fixed by a Windows 10 update (if you still have that problem, please contact us)
Dev Blog 15 September 2017
News on the next update, our next features, and when ranked play will arrive.
Well it's been an interesting couple of weeks. We peaked at 600 simultaneous players (5k daily total), and have stabilised at around 200 simultaneous (2.5k daily total). So that means between a third to a half of the people who tried the game stayed. For comparison, this new level is about 15 times more players than we had in the week leading up to F2P. A lot of our time in the past weeks has been fixing master server problems that only emerge when 600 people try to play at the same time.
There's a lot of topics to talk about, but right now I'm going to focus on current/future development, otherwise this will be way too long.
We've got a hitlist of development requirements that have been made apparent by the recent influx of new players. The big items are related to player retention. We mean that in a few different ways.
Make it easier to keep playing.
Provide early extrinsic motivation for playing more matches, to make it more likely players will find the intrinsic fun of the game.
Allow newer players to develop their skills with similar-level players.
Provide motivation for players to continue once they have reached an understanding of the game's core mechanics.
So, to answer the question "When is ranked coming?", the answer is after we've done the following things:
One-more-match screen in-game, so you don't have to leave the game to requeue for matchmaking.
Level-up rewards and item exchanging. Aka get stuff for levelling up, and trade multiple common items for better items.
Add skill filters in matchmaking. Ranked would suck really badly if multi-year-veterans played with 2-week-rookies.
And then... we can tackle ranked play. We have said that we want to have a certain number of people at level X (replace X with whichever number seems about right experience-wise) before we release ranked matchmaking. Ranked will not have bots to fill in the gaps, so we need to be sure there will be enough players for everyone to get matches quickly. With our part-time team, definite dates are extremely hard to give, but we'll probably be starting the work in 4-6 weeks. We will be able to reuse a lot of the existing logic from our previous ranked system, but since that was active, matchmaking has completely changed, so it's not just a case of flipping a switch. If it were, we would probably have done so already.
We've also got a bug-fix update coming soon. We're testing this internally at the moment. Expect the update to go public around the middle of next week. Some of the more interesting changes are:
Shader optimizations. This should help those on lower-end hardware.
Make bots sub instantly, instead of waiting a minute. This is a much bigger change than it sounds. We had to completely rewrite how bots substitutions are done (~3500 lines of code changes).
Enabling VAC on matchmaking servers. There were a few reports of cheaters. This should help.
Make the restart after goals quicker (about 5 seconds faster), which should make games flow better.
Adjust the ping limit system so people are not preventing from joining matchmaking. Aka the "we're struggling to find a server for you" problem.
Fix bug where player is not shown on podium.
Enable access to backer gun (thank-you backers!).
-James
Things you didn't know you can do in Supraball
For beginners it's hard to be aware of all the things you can actually pull off. Get a taste in this compilation video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JV2VKmD0k3o
2. September Update
- Fix friend inviting
- Reduce delay before matches start
Dev Blog 2. Sept. - First thoughts on the F2P launch and why we're not advertising yet...
Well, we finally did it. Valve gave us a little panic right at the end, but we switched over at the time we had planned.
The impressions from new players is good so far. Our recent steam review score has already gone from Mixed to Mostly Positive and there are matches being played constantly. We currently have about ten times as many players as before. I know some were expecting an immediate influx of thousands of players, but what we have is actually desirable in the very short term. Let me explain...
There were several question marks over how well our matchmaking system would hold up, and the answer was "could be better". Had we seen thousands of players, this would have left a very bad first impression. With the relatively gentle increase we actually see, we have the opportunity to identify and fix problems before we start trying to make some real noise. As I've mentioned before, we are limited in the scope of the testing we can do, and we knew that the burst of activity would highlight where we went wrong.
Here are some of the issues we have seen in the last couple of days and are fixing/have fixed:
- Matchmaking queue timer getting reset each time a new player joined.
- Players taking a long time to join matches making the system think they had left. Apparently we underestimated how long a slow pc takes to start the game.
- Ghost servers in Australia causing matchmaking to fail for Oceania region. Somehow some year-old servers which are out of our control were still running and were flagged as matchmaking servers.
- Problems purchasing keys/chests. This is being investigated by Valve.
- Routing in South America means our chosen data centre is not able to serve many players with low enough latency.
- Dynamic servers starting more slowly than people are prepared to wait.
We don't have any officially planned work right now, we are just reacting to issues as quickly as we can. Once the firefighting period is over, we will be trying to increase our visibility, and start getting back to our regularly scheduled development process.
--James
Free2Play Now!
The day has finally come. We're free2play and with that we hope to fix the issue of not having enough players.
Looking at our Steam reviews, empty servers are the one big complaint.
We are however still in early access. The game has still features missing and bugs to be fixed.
Our business model doesn't involve any pay2win incase you were worried. All the money you can pay is for cosmetic stuff that makes you look awesome.
We hope everything goes well. For now we are technically prepared for a few thousand concurrent players. If it happens to go beyond that we might run into technical trouble that would require us to rework our server system.
All ranks and ranked stats have been reset. The first official Ranked season will start soon. We'll announce it in maybe a few weeks.
To thank everyone who has been with us up until this point, everyone who played before the F2P change will receive a fancy and very exclusive hat.
Have fun!
30. August Update
- Improved launcher detecting new item purchases
- Added manual refresh button on chest window for when automatic detection of new items fails
- Added chest count notification on chest button
- Added back button to outfit selection window
- Added clear notifications button to profile window
- Fixed image for yellow sixpack outfit
