Announcements and discussions regarding Huwhyte KF2 HoE+ and CD servers

KF3 is delayed indefinitely

https://forums.tripwireinteractive.com/index.php?threads/an-update-regarding-killing-floor-3.2341496/

LMAO! Nobody could have predicted this! Except...

Why this happened? Because the ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥, starting with their community managers, but not limited to them, and with full approval and support from Alan "the backstabber" Wilson, have been deleting all the negative feedback and banning the vets critical of their recent efforts.

It had to come down to mass preorder cancels for them to notice that they have a problem. I predicted this fallout 1.5 years ago, when they first announced the new installment.

They surrounded themselves with a group of bootlickers and yes-men who for the life of them never understood why they themselves play this game and almost never actually stick around, so this group is basically non-existent a revolving door type of group. Sometimes a TWI community manager would start a conversation with some low retention type of casual with 70 hours in about their positive feedback, only to discover that by the end of the convo the first casual has left for other games and they are talking to a newly spawned in casual who will inevitably move to other games in the next 5 minutes.

A few cases from their recent history.

1. Objective mode and new boss fight in KF2.

Here's what KF2 game director, David "the ♥♥♥♥♥♥" Amata, had to say about it:

https://steamproxy.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3440022382

By the time they've introduced it their game was mostly played by high retention players only and every casual has moved on. There's just no such a universe in the multiverse where these people request objective mode and boss fight above all.

Nobody plays objective mode and nobody will. This game retains players not because of any objectives. At best it's a cherry on top, a nice to have very small and insignificant feature or game mode.

New boss is even more retarded. Nobody cares about new bosses to the point that CDCP doesn't have a boss fight at all and spawns a slasher instead of a boss, LMAO.

I used to mod bosses on Huwhyte oldschool HoE+ servers, in attempts to make the fights more interesting, only to find that nobody cares about it and just gave up and run vanilla bosses. Every vet considers boss fights obsolete, uninteresting, not worth time playing.

Not to mention that all their novel bosses starting with "Abomination" are simply retarded and not fun to fight against at all.

The result? They spent a ton of time developing the whole new game mode and a boss and nobody cares about it. The "objective mode" is the least played after another failed "VS" mode and except for prime time there's NOBODY in the whole world who plays objective mode most of the time.

How did it come to this? How come TWI wasted resources on implementing a game feature that nobody cares about?

This is because they have no idea what makes their game good. They don't play it themselves. They should have hired community managers who play their own main cash cow game, but they didn't. They should have tasked their community managers to collect and assess all the critical and negative feedback, but they didn't. Their community managers hate gamers and ban them left and right for nonsense reasons. They should have directly talked to their players, but they didn't. They abstain from it. Last time Alan Wilson did it was in 2018. David Amata never did it. Bryan Wynia never did it.

2. Weekly modes in KF2. At one point they asked their playerbase for feedback on what new weeklies do they want to see, here:

https://forums.tripwireinteractive.com/index.php?threads/killing-floor-2-potential-weeklies-for-the-future-your-input-requested.2337287

Note all the enthusiastic retarded casuals cheering this thread and making suggestions. Most, if not all of these ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ moved on to other games. All the negative feedback from this thread was deleted. Meanwhile TWI have been working introducing new weekly game modes until KF2 end-of-life. Nobody plays them. Most of the effort put into developing weekly modes is wasted.

How do I know that the negative feedback was deleted? Because I advised them not to do that and my message was deleted by TWI community manager "Yoshiro" and then I was banned later without any explanation in the ban message, no doubt, for "summary offense" LMAO, which likely included references to prior offenses, such as messages deleted.

https://steamproxy.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3440085509

What did I tell them?

I told them that nobody plays weeklies and this is going to be a waste of time. Instead, they should work on improving the core gameplay of the survival mode, which is their #1 seller. This feedback was deleted.

In the end, they spent years of effort developing weeklies. In my negative feedback I shared with them my gut feeling about weeklies. Since then I've been collecting stats though. Now I know with certainty that nobody plays their weeklies. For years I've been measuring their game modes popularity during prime time and posting here in this blog until about half a year ago, when for whatever reason (tamarifags reporting?) it stopped working and I can't post tables here anymore.

Here's how it looks like:

https://steamproxy.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3440088737

As you can see they had been spending years of effort on a game mode that is played by 2.5-7% of their player base. 7% is an outlier, mostly it hovers around 3.3%. They probably tried to entice players to play weeklies more, which is why there are so many empty weekly servers, but they are much more empty than survival servers.

If anything, the fan-made mods and modded experience commands much higher share of their players, as all the most popular servers are modded. Which brings me to the next point.

3. Their garbage vanilla game experience, which they have ruined themselves, keeps bleeding players all these years despite all their weeklies, objective modes and other nonsense. Their updates to the game sucked since early 2019, nobody likes them. It's a running joke to run into a ♥♥♥♥♥♥ who praises TWI for updating the game for that long. You can immediately tell that it's a retarded player opinion, most likely a console player.

These updates brought us:
* bloated game size from 30 GB to 97 GB;
* cause microstutters (e.g. player join during a wave);
* scifi garbage toy guns nobody asked for, e.g. a shrink gun;
* officialized community maps which we already had access to via workshop and of better quality;
* break the mods with each update because the ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ know nothing about the #1 developer rule "don't break the userland".

The updates just dilute the initial quality of the game and produce technical debt. Any fan opinion if they praise updates should be dismissed from the start, that person likely is either a console player (for whom new maps matter) or a complete irredeemable ♥♥♥♥♥♥.

I've offered them to cooperate and develop a game mode that actually works and retain players, here:

https://forums.tripwireinteractive.com/index.php?threads/dear-tripwire-please-consider-a-new-kf2-difficulty-proposal.2339466/

Unlike their garbage vanilla, despite all the DDoS and DoS attacks and Tamari's smear campaigns, the popularity of my servers grows with time rather consistently:

https://steamproxy.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3233082448

Of course, they thought that they know better and don't need anyone's advice.

All these cases, in different ways, prove that TWI don't know what they are doing, they don't know what makes any game in this franchise good and how to appeal to their core playerbase.

Now, in their statement about the game delay, they say that now want to maintain the core game experience their fans love.

Well, I say it's a bit too late for that. They are way past the point of no return.

They've irredeemably lost their core playerbase. The fans just aren't going to play this garbage. I quote from one of my previous posts here:

Anyway, it's just attempts to reanimate a corpse at this point. No matter the quality content, I will never play as an ugly lesbian shooting toy scifi guns at lifeless cyborgs in a DEIfied woke game from a woke studio who backstabbed and fired their President and CEO over a mere tweet agreeing with a Texas Heartbeat Act. Not to mention their despicable war on Christmas and total years long disrespect towards the modders and hardcore players in this game.

Even if they detach characters from perks, the characters will still remain DEI garbage ugly characters. I will never play this stuff. Even if someone gifts this to me, I will decline, as I don't accept bovinae excrement as gifts. It's insulting.

Counterintuitively, I suggest they double down on their changes. It's too late to turn back and will def demoralize Bryan Wynia. You don't want your game director to work on it in a demoralized state.

Screw the fans anyway, TWI alienated them long time ago. KF3 is a different game that has almost nothing to do with KF anyway. Why bother with "core gameplay" when you already spent years drifting away form it consciously?

Let Wynia make his doom clone. It may not be a failure. Doom 2016 and Eternal are somewhat successful games. The core fanbase is lost anyway, it's pretty much impossible to roll everything back at this point. And TWI, even if suddenly felt a change of mind, don't even know what their core playerbase wants.

Let Wynia keep his vision. Making a half ass product won't please anyone. It works for EFT. Nikita just doesn't give a ♥♥♥♥ about any fan feedback, although, of course, he can afford it. His only guidance is his strive for perfection and playing the game himself with his friends, so he knows everything first hand.

https://steamproxy.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3440153197

As for us, the core KF fanbase, we'll be fine with KF1/2. Maybe Alex and John get together at some point and recreate the classic on a modern engine. They will do good if they collaborate with fans. But if not, they will surely still make a better game than KF3 can ever be.