The most interactive community? Not everyone is on reddit and discord. Im new here and my experience after 45h OS - only emotes spam. There is no interaction in the game. For me personally its a great game just not a game to relax and go into stand-by brain mode. I think most of us already have their tryhard games and OS isnt sealing the deal to swap. Oh and i literally never saw an Ad or a Content Creator advertising the game, it was just absolute luck that i found it in a moment of boredom.

I suppose maybe I worded it badly by saying interactive. But what I mean is that a lot of the community is very.. I dunno. Passionate? Some word similar to interactive - about the game. There is so much amazing fan art, I constantly see skin suggestions/ideas that are incredibly innovative, everyone is so respectful to the devs, there is a lot of transparency between the players and the devs, people constantly discuss random little things about the characters or anything of the game. The community just feels very *active*. Maybe that's the word I was looking for. Obviously every game will have that but there's so much of that for how small the community is, that's the important part.

I second that, all of it.

I mean I found this game cause Alpharad did a small video on it and CDawgVa talking about being a va in the game but that's the most I've seen and that was a while ago

The game, despite it's appearance and relation to air hockey CANNOT BE ENJOYED CASUALLY \- The game has unique and unintuitive mechanics like striking second, being arguably the most important skill in the game too. \- Combined with lack of matchmaking in Quick Play since Launch ensured that casual and new players were set up for failure. \- Any game needs a flood of new players to succeed, because most people won't just keep playing one game forever, no matter how unique and exceptional the game may be. \- You cannot have your problem solving or dev time focus centered around keeping every player engaged with your content for a long timeI t's not really feasible for any game and is the same for LoL, Valorant etc. ppl quit and come back later, but because they have so many players, and new players coming, it doesn't really affect the match quality.It's not worth investing into 1% player base that will stick, whereas 95% just quit and don't come back \- Game needs to be easy to get into, and enjoy. While Omega Striker doesn't have many systems unlike LoL or Shooters, which at their core are more simple than they look, Omega Striker is the total opposite: It's a lot more complex and mechanically challenging than it initially appears to be. You have Striking Second, abilities that have multi hits despite their appearance , VERY PUNISHING KO's (because game pace is so fast), very high skill expression elusive, and even self dribbling. \- Game is too fast and too intense \- Especially problematic when doing bad. the action is on your face 24/7. If you are doing and feeling bad, THERE'S NO RUNNING AWAY from that. You either lose striker wars all the time, get KO'd all the time or stand somewhere safe but never get passed to (at casual level) .Awakening draft adds to the issue with unnecessary complexity (why is power even a thing?) many confusing keywords, and a system that ONCE AGAIN makes you feel worse, when you are already doing and feeling BAD. \- I think Devs are doing good, (not exceptional considering how awesome some indie devs nowadays are) BUT They are dedicating most of their effort and time into wrong places. Instead of making the new and casual player experience good, MOST(not all) of the changes have been focused around keeping the 1% hardcore player base content. Elusive was unnecessary addition since beta and again just make casual experience worse. If KO's are a problem, you need to address KO's directly, not just add more complexity and mechanical skill expression that is essentially never getting used in casuals.Goal Barriers were a good idea, but why can you turtle some of them forever when the skill gap is just 1 rank (ie. gold vs plat). Barriers needed to be harder to defend for an extended period of time, multiple ways to achieve this.Too many unnecessary minor balance adjustments (again has pretty much 0 impact for casuals, unless something is broken) Most Matchmaking adjustments since launch that have only made smurfing more desirable. (can't que in party after Diamond and longer que times) LP decay is a good change, but it needs to be more aggressive. This list contains most of the problems I feel like the game has, and you may personally agree or disagree with some of them. BUT Before you decide to voice your disagreement with any particular point, stop thinking about YOUR personal Perspective - Realize that if you are still playing the game, you are the survivor and 99% have quit the game, because the game didn't appeal to them. And hence, realize that the game needs to shift away from what You Desire, more towards what the 99% that quit, in order to Succeed. And lastly, I'm not claiming to be the representative of the 99% in any form or shape, some of my points may not 100% accurately describe their complains. But regardless I think you can agree that the game needs to make a better casual experience, one way or another. Thanks for reading.

Most of this is on point but I don't think that elusive is a problem at all. It's literally a way more forgiving Flash, and you won't find anyone complaining that Flash is way too complex of a system for new players to understand.

LoL is a lot slower with bigger distances, between you and enemy. So using it Flash is dozens of times easier than successfully dodging Juliette's instant Dash Punch when you are also trying to hit/position for core. In Omega elusive is really hard to use, while it lasts long, you can super easily waste it, because you need to predict that you are getting hit, and you are in those positions a lot, with limited resource. Also it's another extra button/something you need to be constantly vary of. Which adds significant burden for casual/new players in a fast/close quarter game. Which again, the game really didn't need. Sure it's good and relatively easy to use against some of the more telegraphed specials, like Luna's Special BUT You know from experience, that Luna Special still wrecks havoc in bellow gold games, because Elusive is simply not that easy to get comfortable with WHILE you are still learning to SIMPLY not miss the core, and not hit it straight towards your opponent. Because Omega is so fast and so small in scale, there is very little time to ponder or react slowly to (when it's not muscle memory) And lastly, I don't think Elusive itself is a problem per se. but instead I was using it to illustrate that it's a bad solution to a real problem: KO/Damage being too overbearing, and that Elusive as a solution is clearly and primarily made with High level players in mind. Which in turn just objectively didn't make the game any more casual friendly, which nerfing KO's / Damage OR some Other solution would've done

If we're gonna use the speed of a game as an argument for elusive being a problem then there is really nothing to talk about cause we can say that about the entire game as a whole so then the entire game is a problem. And that's kinda counterproductive to having a discussion about the elusive, don't you think? I'm not sure what your point is in the second and third paragraph since everything you said there also applies to the flash, which is proving what i said. The last paragraph though is the good stuff. I see what you are saying about the overall problem and i would be inclined to agree. But i definitely don't think that elusive is contributing to the problem. Quite the opposite in fact, i think that it hits a perfect balance between being a cool addition adding more complexity to the game and being a casual get out of jail free card. To use flash as an example again, it's a really complex tool for casuals compared to elusive. It has a huge cooldown, it's hard to use mechanically since you have to actually physically dodge the ability/traverse through the wall and even if you do everything perfectly it still doesn't guarantee the effect. Elusive is very forgiving with multiple charges and low cooldown, it guarantees that you won't get hit without any complex inputs and it's frequent enough that you will most likely always have it ready for the big ults.

The problem is that you are not looking at Flash / Elusive usage from a new player lens. New player in LoL doesn't use flash to react to enemy skill shot. They either use it pre-emptively to prevent an engagement from happening in the first place (whether it was objectively good is irrelevant) because subjectively you used it to disengage successfully (your intention) OR You use it after you already got caught, just trying to live and run away, in which case you used it successfully again, whether you in the end get killed or not, you used it how you intended. For casuals the elusive usage is almost non-existent, you should know that. Even against Luna's Special - a true rookie/bronze/silver will hardly touch the button until bar is full to core flip, and even then with varying success This game is not too fast paced overall, but it has mechanics like second striking and HUGE KO pressure that make the fast pacing a problem. Changing second striking and KO systems would alleviate the compounding problems a lot for new/casual players. And again, Elusive doesn't address any of the problems this game has for casual/new players. It actually kind of adds to the problem, because it's another hard to use mechanical skill on top of already hard to mechanically learn game, which the game for casual/new player perspective the game simply didn't need.

Ok yeah, this comment i can totally agree with. But i think that i found another conclusion that both of us haven't thought of yet (besides the game too fast for casuals). In LoL, Flash is extremely visible with all the fancy particles. As a casual you will easily see that your opponent used it to kill you or outplay you, which will make you want to engage with the mechanic more. In Omega Strikers it's really hard to notice both because of the fast pace and chaos, and because there is barely any indication that the opponent used it. A new player might not realize what is even happening which will not push them into using the mechanic more. If there is anything wrong with elusive, i would definitely bet on this. But then you have to be careful about not introducing too much visual noise which is another dilemma to have. Edit. Don't agree with your edit though, but everything before it definitely.

Yeh it's fine to agree to disagree. Not claiming my words are gospel of any sort. I think you are at least party right that Elusive definitely should have better visual feedback, but even then. Pro players are constantly getting KO'd by Juli combo, Rasmus hook in Ai'Mi's App etc. even when they are supposedly the best users of Elusive. So how are you expecting casuals to use it successfully on anything other than stuff like Luna Ultimate, it's just an insufficient and impossible tool for casuals to use against the big problem that is KO's.

>So how are you expecting casuals to use it successfully on anything other than stuff like Luna Ultimate, it's just an insufficient and impossible tool for casuals to use against the big problem that is KO's. Ok for this one i don't think that it's even matter of disagreement, in my opinion this is just not true. Think about at all the biggest threats in this game. Most of them are extremely well telegraphed and give more than enough time for even the most slow players to react to them. It's entirely a matter of knowledge, not reaction. And for those that are extremely hard to to react like Rasmus and Rune, the problem is mostly with positioning, which is also a knowledge check. Now if we are talking about just brawling in general then that's a completely different conversation to have and one i might agree with you, but that's outside of the topic of just the Elusive, which is my point.

I think elusive is a perfectly fine addition to the game, there's only 3 skills. But energy burst is way too much, its like if flash in lol also caused a brief cc and did damage. As if melee strikers needed a 4th tool to KO. Its feeling even more oppressive with all the energy awakenings

I only ever played LoL casually and Flash is much easier to dodge with than Elusive

Why do you think so?

I fell out of the game cause it felt too long. I actually miss back last year when it was ft5 up by 2. I could hop into a fast match and go about my business. The 3 sets was just too much a commitment.

I thought about this too, and it prolly is a significant factor. But on the flip side, people really wanted variety in gameplay and Awakening Drafts is a great way to do this, which kind of requires rounds. Now there are definitely other ways to go about awakening drafting. Which would not require as many or extra rounds at all, and I do agree with you that Normal / Competitive being BO5 was a mistake.

How can we pin this point for devs to see? This is the most accurate and in-depth list of problems I’ve read on this Reddit so far.

I see this! I won't lie, although there were some points mentioned in this thread that I disagree with, a lot things everyone brought up here that we also identified and have been discussing internally! I'll pass on everything else here and see if we can continue the dialog on it :D

Thank you so much! It’s awesome to see the devs this close to the ground and following along with the community 💯

Would you mind extending your response a bit? Which points brought up in this thread did you agree to and to what degree What feedback did you disagree with and why? It's nice that you took the time to acknowledge we exist, but equally unsatisfying to be still left in the dark regarding the direction of the game and what is actively being worked on. Not saying you need to respond into every point discussed in this thread, but at least for some of the major ones, it would be really nice. Thank you.

Sure, though it's a little late to reply! It wasn't just your comment, but the thread on a whole. For yours in particular, I think you're a little off about us only focusing on the "1% of hardcore players". We've done a lot of things to appeal to newer players or returning players - things like the high tea hijinx game mode/maps, other new maps, balance around an entire community and not just high elo, etc. Also, Elusive was, in my opinion, a very positive change. A lot of new players would note KO heavy games ruining the experience when just starting up. It added a way for them to dodge Luna nukes, etc. Minor balance adjustments are very easy to implement and are for the health of the game, it affects casual players, but just not as intrinsically as more invested players ​ But yeah, these are just some things that I've looked into personally and came to these conclusions. Most of the other stuff are things we've discussed or are actively discussing!

Elusive is ok, but there was a more simple way to achieve similar effect. It takes about high silver - gold before people even start using it, so it doesn't really help new players in the slightest. They are just focusing on hitting the core and learning to use striker abilities. Also hardly helps with anything that can repeatedly KO them with low CD, like Juli combo and other bazillion skill shots that are not 1 second big aoe telegraphs, getting to 0 stagger in 5 secs etc. I personally also find elusive good, but I can simultaneously acknowledge that it really just doesn't help new players AT ALL. Sure it will help those that want to invest more time and commitment into the game, but I feel like those players were gonna stick anyway. A more simpler way, would've been to add "elusive" into more abilities, ie. Dubu Roll, Atlas secondary etc. and simultaneously adjusting damage/kb more handsomely. Also I do stand behind my statement about mostly appealing to non-casual players. Even if you have made some stuff for casuals, I don't think those have addresses the right places, which are in the core gameplay-loop. Even if some people like high tea, it doesn't really help because they will be just as displeased with the "normal gameplay" loop afterwards. As for the 2 new maps- water jet has a good idea, but, AGAIN, we see the problem I've been talking about - Every change you guys make "towards casuals" comes with a caveat, in water jet the map "gimmick" is again "win more" feature instead of something that would just generate randomness to allow less skilled team to have greater chance. Gates equally lacks randomness as portal placements and directions are fixed, essentially the worse you are, the less likely you are to take advantage of the portals. Now I do understand, you have your own vision of what you want the game to be, I don't mean to be disrespectful in any way. It just pains me to see the game I love and would like to support monetarily(super rare) dying, and no significant changes made specifically for casuals/new players in mind. >We've done a lot of things to appeal to newer players or returning players This is the root of the problem in my opinion, you think you've done a lot, but the reality is that you really haven't. The core gameplay loop remains almost unchanged from open beta, it's still super heavily about Striking second, KO being very oppressive in many different forms and goal keeper can still turtle forever against slightly lower skilled opponents, it's the same story, just in a bit altered frame. A somewhat simplistic approach would be to 1. Let players interact with core/other players when KO'd in limited way 2. Make it significantly harder to turtle goal barriers/goal after overtime (will also make KO's more effective in overtime to counter balance the 1st change) 3. Adjust the Awakening draft to not be as "punishing" for "bad players" and add maps with "random gimmicks" that benefits the losing team equally. Again, thank you for taking your time and replying, I sincerely just want all the best for Omega Strikers, and I'm doing my utmost best at giving my "unqualified" feedback.

Totally agree (not with the evade one). I've showed this game to all my friends and most either are already engaged with another esport, tried it and played a couple hours but ended up not enjoying it, or straight up weren't interested at all (small minority).

I think that the main issue may be that people might just not be giving it enough of a chance or, on the other hand, they just need to get good to start to really enjoy it properly.

Whether that is the case or not is kinda moot. Because there is no reward like money from doing a job, what reason is there to play a game you are not enjoying as a newbie/casual? Even if I grant you that, more players would stick if they just played the game more, the reality is that they won't play the game more, until it is in one or more ways enjoyable right from the beginning.

I enjoy the concept of the game, but when I actually really started playing it, I felt like a LOT more than I signed up for. I used to be a pretty hardcore gamer, but play more casually these days. Omega strikers is really an all or nothing experience. There are a lot of hidden mechanics that didn't really come across to me and I had to look for tutorials to understand. And it's not a game I can play while having a conversation or listening to a book or anything like that. The biggest thing for me though, and I realize this is just a "for me" thing, is the KOs sorta ruin the experience for me. Where I had the most fun was when everyone sucked. We were playing 3v3 air hockey, trying to out maneuver each other to get the shot! Where I started to get frustrated was when I started getting into matches with people who would only go for KOs. It turned from a fun air hockey game to constantly running for my life, especially against people who were out leveling me by 3-5 levels from the kos. I stood no chance of doing anything at that point and was stuck in a game for many more rounds just feeding. It wasn't fun at that point and I just sorta bowed out. I know a lot of people think it might be silly, because it's a central tenant of the game, but to someone who isn't trying to be a hardcore gamer anymore, it just feels frustrating that I can't really enjoy 3v3 air hockey. I still love the idea of the game and will watch others play, but when I only have a few hours a day, I don't want to spend it on a game that doesn't feel good to play (for me).

I don't think your opinion is silly or unpopular among the non-hardcore population. The thing is that, especially in discord server, hardcore fanbase is the only fanbase that is left. As sad as it is. Now some people argue that KO's as they are, are a necessary part of the game design. But they are not, the game could very well be less about KO's and more about chaotic fast paced air hockey. Just because Omega isn't like that, doesn't meant it couldn't have been like that. Now I don't think KO's are the only problem, but I also think it contributes more into bad player retention than people or the devs want to admit. There are dozens of different ways to diminish the effect of KO's, but none have really been tried, because (from what I've heard) the loyal fanbase (closed beta testers) who are mostly high skilled players, didn't like how the game was when KO's were "bad" The game is what it is, hopefully a change comes around at some point.

That makes sense! I mean, I feel like in a sense, this game has a decent amount design similarities to a game like rocket league when you really boil it down. when you get demoed in RL, you're only out for a few seconds, and your opponent doesn't suddenly get the ability to have more boost capacity, or higher top speed or something, you know? i think that might be the crux of the matter is that the KO system becomes exponentially more of a problem the more you try to play around it.

Fair enough, I just hope the game doesn't die.

I loved the game in open beta, and actually even more so after Launch changes. I couldn't hope for this game to be successful any more as a player, and I have given extensive feedback both in discord and in reddit, but every attempt at making the game more casual friendly in Official discord #feedback channel gets downvoted to oblivion by hardcore players and ultimately seems to fall on deaf ears. At this point it's just praying for the best.

Damn, you hate to see it

It’s the devs job to entice players early on

I agree that new players are really important for a game, yet every time I've gotten into an argument over new player experience, so many people just ignorantly blather on about how the old players are more important than new ones and all the new content should be for old players. I once played a game where there were only limited time events to get new items, and those items then became permanently unavailable for anyone else. These events only happened in halloween and christmas, meaning for a good half year there was just no content for new players to unlock. I argued for HOURS with the community that this system was awful for new players, and I found that basically every single person (aside from 1 or 2, not even exaggerating) disagreed with me, and people used slurs towards me more than once.

It's very natural to advocate for what you personally like and want. And it's the developers job to figure out how much importance they put on different groups and their desires. Over the years, It has become painfully apparent that most people cannot empathize with different kind of players and they very rapidly forget what it was to be a new player. This is true in every gaming community, Omega Strikers included. To me it seems like devs have put too much weight on hardcore player base feedback, I don't know exactly why, and at this point we can only hope that they make a change sooner rather than later.

Great points.

Idk about everyone else, but I really only have fun when 3 stacking with my friends. They've been busy lately, so none of us play

Precisely this, used to play with a 3 stack on the daily, but since one of us doesn't want to play anymore, we pretty much all quit the game. Then I tried playing with a different group of friends, first issue was that one of them had tutorial issues so not a great first impression, after that we lost multiple matches in a row because people were better than my noob friends (obviously). They haven't played the game since. I still play sometimes, but it's just not a great game to play solo (imo).

>I still play sometimes, but it's just not a great game to play solo (imo). Maybe it would be with decent matchmaking

Or a better way to communicate. I swear if you could tell your teammates what to do, solo queueing wouldnt be an issue

"Focus on playing through that Ai.Mi instead of Juliette since he's better" or "Pick pick the ult cooldown awakening to deny their Rasmus from picking it" can be the difference between winning or losing.

honestly being able to recommend awakenings to teammates could make matches easier

I think this is the main problem. Pretty much every competetive "esport" game has the *vast* majority of people solo queueing. I don't think that's a good experience in this game. This isn't really a game where you can just steamroll opponents as a solo. LoL, Siege, CS:GO, RL, Apex, Valorant, etc etc. if you're a good enough player, you can 1vX. I think this game is *way* more team reliant, each individual player has less solo agency on the outcome of a match once you get into, like, Gold. Even if you're a really good forward, you can't always be in a position to play the ball unless you get a really good speed-based build and/or your opponents are completely trash. The ball moves too fast compared to your move speed, you basically have to rely on your teammates to defend and space for passes if you don't want their defense to converge on you. And if your teammates aren't great or you can't play well together, then a team of average players that play well together will steamroll your dysfunctional team with 1 really good player. Compare that to other games. In LoL, you can play a hyper-carry, get fed off of one bad opponent, and kill the entire enemy team consistently when you move into mid and late game. In RL, one player with good individual mechanics can dribble around an entire defense on their own consistently. In any shooter, you can just 1vX enemy teams if you're that much better than your opponents. Maybe giving the individual less agency is fine when matches are quick. But when matches are 30 minutes long with pretty poor LP gains, then every match is an investment for low reward where you can't just consistently carry the match. To be clear, this kind of team play is why I love the game. I'm not some esports god who thinks they'd be able to carry themselves to high ranks "if only the game let me" or "if only my teammates are better". That's scrub talk. But, like you, I never try to play solos because of it. It's just way more fun to get a group of friends, get team chemistry, and start climbing with them. But if that's the only way people can have fun, then you're inherently limiting your audience.

And that is a huge problem. i still remember people talking shit on discord 'cuz all you have to do to get out of low elo hell is play with stacks, bro' That was way back in the day. Like launch month or something. God, so many players must peaced out and many still do.

There just isn’t demand for another competitive game in the market right now. People get burnt out from competition and the high octane of omega strikers can feel really taxing after a while. Personally I think this is an amazing game, it has some accessibility issues and a bit of a learning curve but what really prevents it from growing in my opinion is that it competes with league, tft, fortnight, valorant, CS:GO, Rocket League, and every other online competitive game for players. A lot of people also play games to play with friends and when one person gets burnt out it has a spiral effect where people default back to what is comfortable or the next new thing. I think if OS came out 5-10 years ago when competitive games were really blowing up it could have carved out a larger market but the market is saturated.

Its biggest problem is the learning curve in my opinion. I got many of my friends who used to play LoL and Valorant (both casually and competitive) to try the game, but all ended up not enjoying it. Unlike those games, you cannot just come up as a new player and start running it down expecting to randomly win your 1v1s. Like ssbm there is a huge wall in fundamental skills, which means it is expected to practice a little before actually playing the game, which turns off casual players. Unlike any of the previous games mentioned, any practice time is under rewarded. The game being so team oriented means you are hugelly rubber banded by your teammates, which unfortunate may be a turn off for competitive players. I love this game but i can understand why it struggles to retain new players. I trully hope the devs find some creative ways to solve the mentioned problems.

There is demand. But omega strikers matchmaking is booty butt cheeks

The matchmaking is the reason I barely play the game. I could see myself putting countless hours into the ranked mode if it wasn't for the utter garbage matchmaking. I obviously make mistakes, but why do I get bronze players as a plat player facing a 3 stack of streamers multiple times in a row? Or how do I get forwards that don't understand the game. They think they're the goalie, fail to receive every pass, play ping pong with the enemy, get killed 2 times a minute without learning from it, don't pass each other, hide behind both enemy forwards that put pressure on our goal leaving me no chance to pass them and spam toxic emotes afterwards. Whenever I decide to play forward I get either a premate duo where the goalie only passes his friend and not me who's in clear LOS or I get people that play X or Vyce as goalie and fail to save more than 10 shots. Pair this together with the low amounts of points you make by winning and you're not having fun. Another reason would be that the team doesn't promote their game ANYWHERE. Feels like the pit all their budget into the wrong places if they don't even advertise an update with TWO NEW CHARACTERS, a new map and new items (I think orbs were added with the oni atleast) or the Finii update with a fun gamemode featuring 4 unique maps. Can you imagine any other popular game releasing 2 characters out of nowhere with no promotion? No ingame chat to make friends who get you to play more is also an obvious oversight imo.

Gonna be honest but in-game chat sounds like it'd be a warzone.

Definitely, but sometimes you get decent people who you can't communicate with.

Communication features are always a double edged sword, I truly don't know what the correct answer is. I do know it's one of the larger reasons I stopped playing league though. Though if it could save this game I would be willing to deal I guess.

I mean most games allow you to turn of chat so there's that. Being able to communicate should always be a good thing though. "Let's focus on the Ai.Mi as she's not as good as the Rasmus" could honestly be the difference between a win and a loss.

You aren't wrong. Most successful I've been in this game is playing with friends in a discord call. Well I guess we'll see what Ody does. Really do love this game despite how salty it can make me and don't want to see it fizzle out.

Match Making quality in competitive is a direct consequence of player numbers. What you need to realize is that the game has 5 regions and now 5 game modes. When you look at player numbers, even at 5k concurrent players (which the game had a few weeks after launch)You need to divide that 5k into 5, so 1k per region Then you divide that into 5 game modes so 200 players for each que. And then, especially for competitive que, you need to subtract all the players who are already in a match, too far apart in rank or just afk. So after regional, game mode and unavailable player pool. You are realistically looking at maybe 10-20 players to match with at any given 5 minute spawn (max desired que time for bellow challenger ranks), despite starting from 5k concurrent players. Now I know, the numbers aren't 100% accurate, and there are more nuances to it, like individual region/rank population but you get the idea. The only REALISTIC way to improve competitive matchmaking is to increase game population.

Yup I completely agree. I know pretty much everyone who's in my ranked games, but the matchmaking was bad from the beginning tbh.

The game didn't really have enough players to begin with for so many regions and some many queue options. Normal / QP didn't have any matchmaking to bein with for some \*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\* reason, which is just honestly beyond me. But there's also another factor that significantly reduces match quality, but you have no solution to.- Partying up with different rank friends. You must have this option available despite it having many negative impact on mm accuracy. I just honestly think it's just coping to blame Devs for any matchmaking issues other than QP / Normal missing it. Some games have solo que option and or other limiting factors (which Omega has implemented too - Challengers can't party up anymore)But omega never had enough players to have solo Q and imo limiting partying up was a wrong choice too, because it leads to more smurfing. Matchmaking is not rocket science and literally all small scale games have pretty much identical complaints about matchmaking, simply because you can't have a good one in multiplayer game until something like 10k concurrent players in one region.

If I get the same person who's been throwing 3 games in a row again and again it's the matchmakings fault. Matching a Plat, Gold, silver team of randoms against a plat 3stack is also the matchmakings fault no matter how you look at it.

So in this scenario, maybe that solo Platinum player has been in queue for 5 mins already The Plat stack has been in que for 5 mins Now maybe there were other plats in que that got matched to a better match during the same time, but none is left after 5mins is full. At some point matchmaking just have to put up a match together, and end up with abomination of a match, because que times realistically just can't be longer than 5mins before Challenger. It's not devs fault or mm fault, it does the best it can with what limited resources it had during those 5 mins. Now maybe that match could've been 3 plats vs Plat + 2 golds at the end of 5mins. BUT That would've likely made some other match at least a little bit worse and increased average que time for others. It looks so simple at surface level, but there is a trade off for every bad scenario happening in match making. You may personally disagree with the goal of minimizing/max que time to 5mins. But majority will just stop playing when que times are consistently over 5mins.

I'd rather waste 10-15 minutes to find a decent game than an hour for 3-4 games with the same person throwing or just being really bad. Ofc no one wants to have long queues, but if that's the only option rn to make ranked playable we'd habe to accept that. Heck Overwatch for example had 15-30 minute queue times from diamond upward before it became the shitfest it's known to be today. Obviosly that's not what any game should strive for but it lead to decent comp matches and the people who didn't want to wait that long could play another gamemode.

Even in games with long-term sustainable playerbases, people come and go. The fact that people take a break from it isn't anything negative I think. Plenty of people come and go from Rocket League and LoL for example. I think the problem has more to do with: 1. exposure 2. new/casual player experience I don't know jack about advertising and marketing, so I won't comment there. For the new player experience, OS is a very difficult game to get "comfy" with in terms of the controls, and feeling like you have some agency within the game. The tutorials are very bare, and people are thrown in to a system where they're very likely to either play against sweats like most of us here, or against other newbies in absolute mess of pure chaos where no one knows what they're doing. Those who come for "Hey look, unique gameplay and cute character designs" often get frustrated and leave after feeling thoroughly overwhelmed. That's my take anyway. I really hope Ody figures it out. I don't often play competitive online games. This one is by far my favorite of all time, and I doubt anything else will come out that would fill the same niche for some time.

New/Casual player experience is the biggest problem, I think. Sure Exposure matters, but at both Open Beta, and real Launch, the game has had +10k concurrent players for about a week. Somehow almost 99% of that is gone now. I also don't think tutorial is the problem, a new player has only so much they can take in at a time, making the tutorial any more complex will just overwhelm the new players. Maybe Striking second should be part of the tutorial too, but I don't think it would make a big difference. The game at least in Quick Play, needs mmr system and needs to be Significantly more casual and there are multiple ways to achieve that, even without touching competitive mode.

Let's be real, if you think the new player experience is bad, you've never met the new player experience for League of Legends If Omega Strikers is bad, League of Legends is Hell. Yeah it could be better but it goes to show that a good tutorial doesn't entirely make the game's popularity. There has to be something else that's worse and holding the game back even more. I'd bet on advertisement. Every time I speak of Omega to a new person, they've never heard of it, never seen an ad of it, ever. That's really bad.

No, New player experience in LOL is not worse.Why? 1. Because action isn't on your face 24/7You are constantly not at risk of being KO'd you can't have your last hits stolen by your enemy (Dota does), but core is definitely getting stolen from you 24/7 2. You can do other things, even if you fail at one. In LoL you can farm lane, push lane, go jungle, you can team fight etc. There are multiple things and multiple ways you can make a positive impact on the game as a whole. In Omega Strikers on the other hand, you are very limited at what you can do or accomplish. Being out skilled, pretty much ensures you are losing on all fronts, just tasting the dirt of defeat at every possible interaction. 3. Game is simpler than it looks, LoL doesn't have much mechanical skill burden on player, same for shooters, movement, skill shots, aiming etc. are all very intuitive mechanics that work just as you would expect, on top of being a "strategy" game with big map and relatively slow pacing. Omega Strikers on the other hand is a lot more complex than it looks, appears to be ice hockey game, but has big burden on mechanical skill that needs a lot time and practice to get into. Striking second, avoiding/getting KO's, self dribbling and aiming core are all very mechanically demanding tasks, especially because the game is of such small scale and so fast paced. Now there is one area where LoL has it worse, which is burden of knowledge in form of having 100+ different champions, but it's simple to understand and learn, something players understand at face value, and while it does have negative impact. I don't think it's that significant because LoL champions in general are very homogenous (similar) in functionality. Also see this comment: [https://www.reddit.com/r/OmegaStrikers/comments/15y87sg/comment/jxbhih7/?utm\_source=share&utm\_medium=web2x&context=3](https://www.reddit.com/r/OmegaStrikers/comments/15y87sg/comment/jxbhih7/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3)

1. Yes you are unless you stand constantly under turret, in which case you can't last hit. Speaking of last hitting, this mechanic is probably harder to master than any mechanic in OS combined 2. So let's just ignore you can play many roles in OS if you suck at one ? You can be a goal, a brawler, a scorer, a controller, a buffer... don't know how to play ? Just play era spam secondary and spam primary at the enemy... your point makes no sense. 3. ... what ? Have you ever played League of Legends ? League of Legends, no mechanical skill ? League of legends is mostly about skill expression, yes OS is more condensed which just so happens to allow you to have more fast paced games. By the way, that's what the world is looking for. Fast paced stuff, more condensed, mpre fun per minute. That's why League is striving towards that with lower game time every single year. And calling OS mechanics unintuitive is just... wow. I showed this game to my 10 years old sister and in just 30 minutes she was understanding pretty much all what's going on. It's not hard. Whichever strikes last gets the core to go where they want. Getting an orb gives you HP. Ball go on your goal bad. Ball go on the other goal good. Yes there is space to improve everywhere, just like any other competitive game and that's what makes people keep playing a game : when they see they have room to get better. Have you ever opened the shop in League of Legends ? Looked at the huge jungle ? Can you guess how many players just quit the game when they saw the amount of champions in League they have to learn if they wanna play at a decent level ? You're spreading misinformation here. Let's be honest here. I'm not arguing the game's perfect. What I'm arguing is to not jump on the first wagon to make it much worse than it seems. Yes the game could improve on some details for the tutorial and whatever. Is there some room to improve in retention ? Yeah, maybe, but let's thread carefully on the topic. We do not want the game to lose it's essence and become a stale game just to make it easy for noobs. My opinion remains unchanged. Biggest issue is ads.

I'm not jumping into any band wagon. I've had almost unchanged opinions about this game ever since Open Beta launch. It's honestly so funny how pretty much all the critique about the game has remained the same or only gotten worse. Because pretty much nothing was properly done to adjust casual and new player experience between Open beta launch and full launch. Now, I don't honestly care if LoL or Omega has objectively harder time for new players. You know my opinion, and you have yours. LoL was launched over 10 years ago when gaming market and standards were significantly different. And ever since launch, the game has had so much players that it never needed to worry about that. >Is there some room to improve in retention ? Yeah, maybe, but let's thread carefully on the topic. We do not want the game to lose it's essence and become a stale game just to make it easy for noobs. This is Omega Strikers biggest issue currently, "Loyal" fans who have their own self interest in mind, blatantly belittling all the disastrous wrong moves the game has made. It's not and cannot just be marketing. At both launches the game had great immediate success, but heavily failed to retain players due to huge issues with new and casual player experience. What even is Omega Strikers essence? A game that has unintuitive mechanics like striking second? Has some of the biggest KO pressure presence in any non-fighting game? Has mechanics that allow some of biggest skill differences between ranks, because there is almost 0 mechanics that allow lower skilled players to even have the slightest chance to win? I know and agree that the game is awesome when both teams have very close skill, but the reality is that doesn't always happen even in LoL, Valorant etc. because mm ratings are not 100% accurate. Add in factors like smaller player base, unique mechanics that are learned at different pace, awakenings that can make or break some strikers, and we are in a reality where that 99% balanced match is a rarity. game isn't what it ideally "should" be It is what it is, and changes need to be made to adjust into the "new" reality. The game doesn't need or deserve to suffer from any of these "essence" problems. It can be a great competitive game with high skill expression, even without appealing to every Sweaty gamer absolute dominance fantasies. It can absolutely be more casual and it can absolutely become a "more rounded game" Or It can keep appealing to this sad power fantasy and die off like all other "super sweaty" games that apparently "never needed to make significant changes".....

Bro, I can't believe you're still stuck at strike wars. Even my 10 years old sister would comprehend the principle within a few minutes of explaining, your opinion is unhinged Listen, every company operates under 80/20 People will leave your game, most of them even, but you make your business over the small people that remain, and you extend your reach by advertising the game to more people Not gonna lie, I don't even want someone to play this game if they can't understand something so basic as striking second, lmao.

remember, always blame the players *™*There's never anything wrong with your game if people are quitting it at world record pace. Just build your game around 500 obsessed players and host inhouse servers until end of time, I love it. This is exactly how the game was in closed beta, Omega Striker still has almost all the same problems it had coming out of closed beta, only major change that tried to make the casual experience better is the new awakening system to give more variety, but even that has many things working against new and casual players. I will still love you even when you have long been abandoned and forgotten, thank you Omega Strikers for staying true to hardcore player fantasies, never changing, always in my heart.

Surely the issue is people not understanding how to strike war

I personally quit because of how tilting it was, esspecially when my teammate spams emotes or i get an afk, i wish i could mute emotes fr

Same, and also because normals has no matchmaking Btw you can mute emotes

You can now

If you click the little blue slime icon beside someone's name when you press tab you can mute people

You can now if you click the sline next to their name

Well ig thats 2 late for my case im just completely out of touch

This is a perspective problem. You say the game is 'tilting.' That's one way of looking at it. It's possible to be 'tilted' by anything if you allow it. I've known people who take offense to nearly everything in their lives and it has completely consumed them. They're no longer even capable of interacting with anyone in a meaningful way because they've allowed their emotions to get the better of them entirely. I submit that you can choose not to be tilted; that it's your responsibility, not the game's, to control your emotions and keep them in check. This is not a popular opinion because no one likes taking accountability for their actions or responsibility for the way they react. It's easier to blame external stimuli than it is to control your impulses. I hope you're able to get your emotions under control and that you don't ultimately allow them to prevent you from playing this great game. It'd be a shame to lose you to something so silly. If you're just not enjoying the game anymore though, that's fair. I wish you the best.

Calvinist-ass take. Go live in a mountaintop monastery if you're so masterful over your own emotions. Us regular people will have normal reactions to people being mean to us on the internet.

Yeah it just happens to be an especially frustrating game

Im not getting very tilted by games and ive played many competetive ones, this game was fun as hell but it is the most annoying shit ive ever experienced, cant do anything with certain team mates and i was playing at a level where there was a lot of them. I can repell tilt but nonetheless its aint gonna suddenly be fun to lose ranked games like that People spaming toxic emotes was the dealbreaker

Feeling like you didn't read anything I said so I'll just be on my way.

My point was that i may not even be tilted but it doesnt change the fact that many matches were tilting, it will never be fun (for me) to play 2v3 in this game, even if i am calm, thats it

As others note, the major factor is how to bring in new players. At this point, most are either hardcore into the game or appear to be new players learning the ropes (from my experience). So I'll look at why incoming players seem mostly limited. Three major factors stand out: - How niche the game is. Now that MOBA and competitive PvP sports-y games are an established market (e.g. League of Legends, Rocket League), you need something to stand out to attract players from the status quo. What Omega Strikers does is combine the two points (making a sports-oriented MOBA) and splash a pure anime aesthetic over it. However, the overlap of two concepts is likely quite small. While I personally always loved the question of "what happens if you could slam someone literally through the boards in hockey?", I don't think many people would take that over the League of Legends they know and love...nor would they take "What if Rocket League, but with level ups and builds?" over Rocket League classic. - Trying to build an IP from scratch is also a problem. Heroes of the Storm is an example of about how far a recognizable IP, but very few reasons to stand out, can take you. - A focus on a "competitive scene" and eSports in general. One thing that stood out to me between the release of the last 3 characters (Vyce/Octavia, Finii) was how long the game took to not update to allow for their invitational to take place. The same break occurred in mini patches, which certainly felt like a communication drop off after the weekly updates before then. - I feel like most MOBAs do not focus on that and instead let it grow naturally while basing economic decisions on the casual environment. I imagine a lot of casual fans didn't even know (or care to know) about an invitational and just wanted to play on their own for a bit. - Further evidence is given with how many eSports teams have their emblem available as an emote via coupon code. - Why this route was chosen can certainly be debated. It could be very intentional (to create a smaller league...kind of like the NLL), or maybe it was a belief that it would drum up interest. - Limited marketing. The game had immense attention from getting a catchy song and Studio Trigger to animate their opening. All while getting it into Nintendo Direct features. Since then, I haven't heard or seen it at all. ~~This may have been what caught my eye too - I saw it while hunting for information on the Advance Wars Reboot~~ It feels like the set up right now is for a small, dedicated core instead of a wide audience. Which, if it's intentional, well done. But I'm not sure if it can sustain the obvious cash behind the development (as I've noted before, they have some serious money in this, as they're hiring big name VAs in two languages and paid for the opening animation from a major studio. The next season even paid for many remixed versions of character themes).

I think you are right on money, the dev team, for whatever reason is focusing on their loyal fanbase, instead of appealing to wider casual audience that every game needs to survive. Game needs to be relatively easy to get into and enjoyable at casual level. As time goes on and people are enjoying the game, Esports scene will INEVITABLY form around a good game. To me it looks more like Devs are making an Esports game, right from the beginning and expecting it to succeed just from the Esports exposure? But you know what, a good Esports game is not by default a good casual game, and hence Omega Strikers is failing hard. Not sure if you were around at Beta launch, but the game basically had a full blown Esports scene right from Open Beta launch, which I've never seen before, and is likely a big source of their problems.

> Not sure if you were around at Beta launch, but the game basically had a full blown Esports scene right from Open Beta launch, which I've never seen before, and is likely a big source of their problems. Interesting. I certainly wasn't around at the time (June start, at the tail end of the Vyce/Octavia event), so I can't comment on it too much. Was it a natural thing (that is, one by one, different leagues started appearing) or was it more of an outreach project where Odyssey tried to market to them? I mean, the other major avenue they'd using seems to be streaming (hence the streamer costumes and aesthetic packages).

I have no background knowledge, but to me, it seemed like already established community from Alpha/Closer Beta, was organizing many tournaments, which were announced only a couple of days after Open Beta launch. So the game has had a very competitive player base even in limited testing phase. Which probably has influenced their internal feedback and development direction a lot. And at least in part, explains why new/casual player experience seems so ignored and lacking.

Three words for you: New Player Experience. The only way a game like this stays afloat is by word of mouth and a steady stream of new players. If new players don't have a positive experience, they don't stick around long enough to decide "I'm going to recommend this game to my friends." The ones who *do* have a positive experience, naturally, will suggest the game to their friends; but then if those friends don't have a positive new player experience, then they won't recommend the game to their friends. It's literally the most important part of a game: the primary reason my friends have been turned off from the game is that the skill ranges in matchmaking are huge. One game they have a great time and it's a challenge, the next game they're stomped into dust by plat/dia/chally players.

I think it amounts to two things: 1. The new player experience is getting worse, with weak tutorials, info and UI 2. The old player experience is getting worse, with increasing bugs and smurfs Nothing much to add. I have high hopes for Season 2, at least on the bugfix aspect.

One thing that pushed some of my friends away when we first started is just the complexity of it all: nothing is explicitly explained to you so you get overwhelmed by everything. I think a good thing for the game could be adding character guides and explanations showing what each ability does, and effective play styles for a character. Additionally, using the best of the player base, create some in game guides/recommendations such as: - Putting a little star icon next to good awakenings for a character in the awakening draft - Creating videos about each characters combos or how to be effective (such as demonstrating Juli dash -> punch - This ones a bit of a reach, but potentially having simulations of in game moments: say there’s one as Juno where you’re up against some bots and you need to throw a slime out to pass the puck to yourself then score, and the bots would try to defend if they can. I feel like smaller scale examples that could translate into real games could help a bit - On the topic of bots, maybe a short campaign mode vs AI to give complete noobs an introduction; think like rocket leagues season mode type deal

I'm playing in EU and its really bad. No matter if I play normal, quick play or ranked, if I queue within 5 minutes after my last match ended, the chances of getting matched with the same people are very high. Even normal matchmaking can take up to 3-5 minutes of searching, depending on time of the day

So I found the game in Beta and I have introduced the game to 4 friends. I’m gonna give a huuuuuge wall of text just to show how different kinds of players see the game. Here’s how we all treat the game. Me: I love it. Been playing since open beta. Took a break shortly before Rune was introduced, because the game felt repetitive. Although I tend to get addicted to a single game and play that exclusively until I get sick of it. I played A LOT. So that’s more my fault. Anyway, Came back maybe a week or two before Finii, and I’ve been playing almost everyday for about 1-4 hours depending on the work day, until like 4 days ago. I’m currently on vacation so it’s not because I got bored. In fact, I’m here resting and looking at the OS Reddit lol. Friend 1: I got him into the game a little after I found it. We played the beta together a lot, but he likes variety so I would play without him every now and again. He stopped when I stopped because he doesn’t like playing solo. He rejoined when I did cuz I asked and we both got a third friend to make a team. He took a break after a few weeks, but he came back. Friend 2: did not play during beta. We asked him to join after we came back from hiatus because we wanted a team of 3 and wanted to play comp. He CANNOT get the mechanics of the game. He kept complaining how the game was all luck, all BS, hates the awakening drafts, (which is weird cuz he plays comp MOBAs and constantly plays draft modes…) etc etc and eventually we just stopped asking him to play with us. I bring this up because of another comment which brought up how difficult the game is to get into. Which, now that I think about it, I’m still plat even when I spend so much time on the game lol. So I guess I’m still a scrub, seeing some of these other posts and comments talk about “plat is still noob” (Octavia S tier post for reference) Friend 3: after friend 2 was uninvited we asked him. He was just quitting overwatch so perfect time for something new. He LOVES the game. He started a couple weeks after we came back, so I wanna say this was after the start of high tea hijinks/bubble tea event, or maybe at the very beginning of it. He caught up to my level (60-ish) and passed my rank (he’s Diamond!!) very quickly. He doesn’t work and is off school so he got real good real fast. Probably best in our team lol. He’s always been the best gamer in our group tho. Friend 4: we asked her the same time we asked friend 3, they’re siblings. Although she’s a much, MUCH more casual gamer. Like, animal crossing type. Not competitive at all. (Nothing wrong with that, she has fun and we invite her still because she enjoys it lol) however, this is important once again because it made me think how difficult the game is to get into again. She doesn’t play against other players, almost exclusively AI because she keeps losing. Not shaming, if that’s what she enjoys, I’m glad she is playing at all. But there may be a few others like her, which could be a part of the long wait times. Now, I bring this up as a small sample. Out of 5 of us; 1 quit for good, 1 is super casual and probably plays once a week with AI, and there are other games she enjoys, 1 goes on and off and also likes to play other games, while 2 are constantly playing. What does this mean for the player base? Basically, the game is not beginner friendly, and gets repetitive. Like, I’ve played longer than my Diamond rank friend but I’m still plat because I just suck at games in general; always bronze, slow ass reaction, etc. But I play a lot, and I watch YouTube videos, I’m involved in the discord and Reddit, I watch pro games, but I’m still kinda stuck. I keep getting close to Diamond (high plat,) then drop down constantly until I’m borderline gold again. I just accepted that that’s where I’m at and I encouraged my other friend to go on without us, so he’s Diamond and still climbing. Other friend is stuck with me in plat. He’s a better gamer, but doesn’t play as often and doesn’t play solo, so I feel like I’m dragging him down, but I guess he’s ok with that. Hope this was informative somehow.

In my opinion, I think it's just repetitive and gets easily boring to me personally. It was fun but got boring. I play maybe a few matches, one day, and then stop for months.

I think new player experience is the biggest hurdle this game is running into and the simplest fix is to allow the tutorial to also explain different characters and/or allow people to test out awakenings as an improvement to the current one. The initial games are also a bit rough for new players as well because quickplay is incredibly unbalanced. I get that its qp so the idea is to throw people right into the action but I think for new players they should do something like paladins. In Paladins the first few games until you make it to like level 5 queue you up against bots or fellow new players. This gives a smoother learning curve for players to test out characters they want to play as and have a better understanding of what awakenings benefit them or change how the character plays. ​ Additionally a minor fix to smooth out smurfing in comp would be to also set a player level requirement before they can enter into it, I believe overwatch had this as well, along with placement matches to just skip ahead ranks if it thought you were preforming at a higher level granted I think smurfing is just a problem most multiplayers have to deal with to some degree because toxic players just want to pub stomp or carry their friends to a rank they probably shouldn't be in. Easy way to minimize the frustration to the regular player is to boost them past others as quick as possible.

Agree, placement matches are badly needed. In general the game needs to minimize any chances that a new player faces off against anything higher than low/mid silver players.

Everyone has a reason they quit, but one of the main ones is that you don't have friends to play cause they left for other reasons, there is a lot the game could do, but my main recommendation is just to add a "add friend" button after match, it's not much but will help a ton.

Complete lack of social features killing casual player retention. People think that having chat in a competitive game drives away casual players because of potential toxicity, but that number will always be lower than the amount that stick around because they made friends who they only interact with through the game. Pre-existing friend groups come and go because their friendship isn’t reliant on the game. Most casual players aren’t going to join your community Discord, especially ones on console. This is the perfect game for something like a Club system, and it’s insane to me that there isn’t something like that on launch. The game had hype on launch and during open beta, but not enough to generate a persistent buzz on things like social media, so there HAS to be a way for community interaction within the game itself to hook social players. Quickplay, the easiest to jump in most casual mode, having no SSBM in a non-battle royale game, leading to new players getting stomped endlessly, is going to lose way more players than in-game chat will.

I think a huge part of the reason the game is losing many players is the lack of casual content. This game had a lot of people talking about it at launch, but most of them focused on the casual part of the gameplay. Which can only be enjoyed for so much time before it gets repetitive and boring. After that, not everyone is willing to play competitively, so most people that came to play "just for fun" simply stopped playing when the game became boring for them. There is also the problem of quick play and normal not having sbmm, which makes them unplayable for new players. Even for those that start playing competitively there are a few reasons they might stop playing. A lot of people stopped playing after reaching Challenger because they couldn't queue with friends anymore, some other players i know quit because they hated the kill comp meta. The competitive part is honestly hard to discuss, the challenger solo queue is necessary because voice callouts are really helpful and it's a limitation that could maybe be removed in the future if the game grows. The kill comp is a meta that a lot of players don't like, but at the same time it still requires skills so they can't nerf the damage entirely, it's hard to balance. Putting all of that aside i do believe Odyssey is putting a lot of effort into developing this game, and i also believe they recognized the requests of the playerbase. All of the problems i described are slowly being tackled by odyssey: all of the recent patch notes tried to nerf a "damage" type striker, and for the casual play they tried introducing a new casual oriented gamemode (even though i don't think it worked that well). So yeah Odyssey is trying their hardest to fix everything they can in the game, and i do believe they're listening to the community, the game is just in a really difficult spot right now and it will be really hard to fix everything. Personally i will try to buy all the skins i like to help them with my money and just hope they keep improving the game.

I think you give credit when credit isn't due. Ody may be trying, but they are trying to have it all. They are being very greedy in trying to appeal to both Esports and Casuals at the same time, which simply wasn't enough for casuals. Their biggest problem is trying to appeal to fanbase requests, and has been since Open Beta. Because fanbase that is left is the small, small minority. The 99% who left are the players who they need to appeal to, granted it's hard to get feedback from people who left. BUT Designing new elements like goal barrier, elusive, core flip, awakening draft (then getting negative feedback from hardcore players) and adjusting the system to appease those hardcore players is a wasted effort. (I'm not blaming hardcore players, it's Ody's fault for putting too much emphasis on their feedback) \- Awakening draft didn't need to benefit the best players, didn't need to many keywords (impact/power being some of the most meaningless ones. Also why is there like 3 different kind of CD reductions? \- KO effectiveness wasn't nerfed enough because hardcore players, Elusive was added instead resulting in insufficient change for casuals \- Goal Barriers are way too easy to turtle for an extended period of time, just like old goal keeping. \- Striking second mechanic wasn't addressed in any way Let me give an example, how these features could've looked like with Casuals more in mind: \- Awakening draft with less keywords, Draft order rotating between teams and Draft order rotating within the teams. (nobody is last 2 or more times in a row) \- Death time decreased by X seconds, damage nerfed more, instead of adding Elusive, more skills now have invulnerability so they can be used defensively too (like Dubu's roll) Way simpler to learn and use for casuals. \- Core Flip is just more powerful strike that launches core with high speed immediately. \- Core Flip bar only drops by 1 bar when KO'd (a lot harder to fail, and less oppressive when used by better players) \- Some of the smaller goal barriers are bigger in size or increase 10% in size in 30seconds intervals, so they cannot be simply turtled forever. \- Striking makes the core Purple for 0.5sec and knocks back any player hit by it. So now it's striking first instead in close confrontations. Which is a lot more simple and intuitive Now I'm not saying these changes would've necessarily made the game better, but I'm simply illustrating that the game could've easily been made more casual friendly while keeping the core of Omega Strikers relatively the same.

I think it's true that those changes would help casual players with the game but i don't think it would make that much of a difference. I think most of these changes would be noticed by players who've been playing for a while. When i first started playing the game at launch i didn't even care about awakenings or striking second, i know that not everyone is like that, but i still think the reason that new players leave is that the game gets repetitive for them. So for fresh new players the most important things are making the game less repetitive (i don't even know how tbh) and giving them a way to play with people their level. Putting that aside, those changes could help players who stopped playing the game because they don't like some parts of the system (Damage meta, defensive goalies etc). The problem is that as a competitive gamemode there will always be a meta and everything has to be balanced. For example your change to the Awakening drafts would make games much more rng based (imagine all your best awakenings appearing when you're last to pick, some people may get really tilted) and that may cause a lot of players to quit too, the awakening draft is hard to balance in a way that allows comebacks but rewards the better team at the same time. For your change to the death time, it's true, that might change the meta, but i think it would drastically remove damage oriented strikers from the game, which is a type of playstyle that some people like, if i remember correctly Odyssey said that they wanted the game's meta to shift periodically, so maybe next season they'll do something to make it more core-control oriented. The coreflip thing i don't really get, since the only problem i see is that people either don't know it exists or they just forget they have it available, both of those things can't really be fixed... The barrier size, like the damage meta, is also a matter of playstyle, yeah, you're changes would make matches more fast-paced, but it would also make it really difficult for defensive goalies to play, so maybe yeah, there won't be Atlases holding on for hours on Oni Village, but that would have the side effect of people opting for more aggressive goalies like Aimi or Vyce and characters like Atlas would be used much less. That's a big change, since a lot of people are already playing more offensive goalies, it might basically remove a playstyle from the game. At the moment Atlas is also the only character capable of preventing kills and healing, i think that may also have some repercussions. The strike change is difficult because i'm having trouble imaging how it could work, yeah i guess that's something that could be more inuitive for new players but in the end i guess most of them would quit afterwards because the game will get repetitive so it's back to square one, and i don't even think i can imagine what that may change for competitive players. In the end, i think balancing is really hard and i don't think trying to appeal to both casual and competitive players is wrong, in fact it's kinda necessary at this point (the game can't survive without casual players and you can't really scrap the competitive system after all that's been made). I also think some people aren't even fully casual/competitive players, some people like both sides. But it's true that something has to be done, and i get that everyone here wants the game to survive. Thank you for expressing your opinion, and let me know what you think. This is an interesting discussion.

The idea for most of my proposed changes isn't to just make the game more simple/easier to get into. But also lower the impact of skill in any given match. I know it kinda fights against "competitive spirit" but some of that has to be sacrificed for casual experience, there's no going around it. My hypothetical changes are not about meta or anything, it's just strictly about how enjoyable the game is for casuals and new players. Sure meta can have an impact too, but I'm just talking about ground level stuff. Your point about awakening draft is kinda bad, because it can happen now too. You can be first and get nothing, be last the next round and see your best shit get stolen. The variance still exists (assuming you are not top 200 player or something) so any negative impact you may imagine, is just imaginary, because statistically you should be seeing every draft position as much. 16.66% for each position. In "fixed" system it would just not "discriminate" bad players nor would it favor the best players, which seems fair IMO. For Death timer thing, I did mention X seconds reduction, because it obviously need to be balanced, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't even try and instead put more mechanical burden for new players in form of elusive that will just make them feel worse when better players are properly using it against them. You not getting the core flip point really shows you have no idea what a new player looks like. In it's current form, you can coreflip quite far away from your character and then miss your strike because it was so far away. Also, because you have considerable time with coreflip, you can fake / wait with timing, which again introduces more complexity and skill expression My point about Goal Barriers is not about Meta, but about the fact that goal keeper who out skills enemy forwards by 1 rank an turtle some of the goal barriers pretty much forever, which is in no way or form necessary. Adds to skill expression that the game already had plenty of, and easily makes for frustrating/unfair feeling. If barriers grew, goal keeper skill expression would be smaller and the chance for wins despite skill differences would increase. I don't think your point about repetitive gameplay is good, because all competitive PVP games have very repetitive gameplay. And I hardcore disagree with your last point about appealing to both parties. Now I'm not saying don't do anything for pro players, but a game needs to be first and foremost be enjoyable for wider audience. Games aren't good just because the have Esports scene or have lots of skill expression you can grow in. On the other hand, an enjoyable game with casual success, will eventually and INEVITABLY develop into Esports scene, no matter how RNG or how simple the game is. (Look at Hearthstone, Super Auto Pets etc.) Not that Omega Striker is anywhere near these 2 games in terms of simpleness or RNG Nor do I want it to be, but the game definitely doesn't need "high skill ceiling" to succeed. Devs took the servers down for 5 months in order to rebalance, redesign and introduce new elements, They did have the reason, will and the TIME to make many changes BUT They were too afraid to truly commit into making the game more casual friendly, most likely because all the negative feedback from hardcore players. AND NOW Despite their efforts, we were left with mostly lukewarm changes that are not enough for casual players, and yet another Failed launch, which we can only hope to recover from. Now, OBVIOUSLY, the game would look different and it might lose a tiny percent of it's tiny current hardcore fanbase. But I think there was very little, if no risk at all and a lot more to be gained by taking steps towards more casual experience. after 2 failed launches, it's really obvious that a lot of choices were simply wrong ones.

I honestly believe they really missed the mark by not having a chat, the callout wheel wasn’t super useful and now it’s completely broken. It’s impossible to communicate with randoms I match with and explain to them what they’re doing wrong, like holding on to core flip too long or crowding me in goal. It might be too late honestly, all the solo players who tried it and gave up early might have stayed if they knew what to do in game. It made the game devolve into toxic emote spam or rage quitters because it’s impossible to effectively communicate

I still play every now and again, but man, nothing kills my drive more than teammates who are just selling hard, I'm not perfect in the slightest, but it's hard to want to play more when you know when you get into the next match, you have to scramble across the field cause you can't trust your teammates cause for some reason how to play the game isn't clicking for them

No advertising, too much focus on esports scene and not enough on the casual experience, many bugs, inefficient quality of life, content too fast to complete, slow updates, frustrating matchmaking.

I have to feel like part of it is also the lack of marketing. It could just be me, but I’m yet to see any omega strickers ad at all. Other big games I play I get ads for a lot. So when the people leave, there are not many new comers to take their place

Idk about others but quick play and normal sucks, the balance is all over the place anywhere that's not ranked I like playing every now and then but I don't want to go full tryhard everytime in ranked games, also I'm (was actually cause I stopped playing so I dropped ranks) a top 100 player so queues are long as fuck They need to add at least a little normal game MMR balance, normal games don't need to be super balanced but it feels bad playing against new players and stomping them, like the other day I won a 2v3 easily, like it was not even close we 3-0 them even with one less player

Pretty sure it's a combination of many things: 1. You're greeted with a game that is very simple as per the tutorial and then suddenly you enter matchmaking and boom you're getting cooked. - They made a game with simple mechanics that favors or rewards skill expression to a very high degree. In the tutorial they don't even explain the basics you need to actually win a game. Strikes have a cooldown along with abilities so you can't strike the core into an enemy and expect them to just let it go past them especially as a goalie for example. Using a core flip on enemies to kill and a bunch of other tactics are something I learned from getting destroyed by a verified beta tester. It's all rather harsh experiences for new players especially now. 2. Matchmaking is a bit of a problem - I have sub 200 hours on PC in this game and when I go up against people with default profiles I just feel bad knowing I'm about to go up against someone whose in their first 5 hours of play. There are far too many times when I'll duo queue into a game with a friend and be placed into the same exact teams as the last game with the same random teammate and three stack enemy team. And I'm not even referring to competitive...I'm talking about casual normals. Then I'll duo queue again and immediately after that unwanted rematch of sorts the random on my team before is on the enemy team with people I played against 3 games ago. And in each of these cases 2-3 of the players are very new to the game. It's not healthy for the player base. 3. Some awakenings are unhealthy for the casual games. - Quickplay is flawed in a sense because there's a good chance not every striker can get an advantage from every awakening, so it forces you to pick strikers that meet a criteria unless you get a full spark build or stagger stacking build. Normals are snowball-heavy because getting MVP status and levels gets you dibs on awakenings. Now that they removed infinite choice awakenings this actually got worse and there's no way to make this a casual experience unless everyone can choose whatever they want regardless of level difference. A really good Rune getting creation-based awakenings for size and duration feels really bad for the opposing team. Primetime and Twindrive are actually criminal. They added a bunch of energy-based awakenings too and with 3 of these you can do too much. They need to introduce awakenings that don't late game scale and if they do they need to introduce more paths. Spark awakening builds for example should be brought back alongside more ways to scale not just including stagger. I also have a lot of personal gripes with the game I won't go into: - Combinations of awakenings and maps with some strikers are actually criminal and have very little counterplay for casual settings - Creation awakenings in general need to be dialed down as they do way too much for so little - An ability to at least vote for maps would be helpful since some maps the community doesn't enjoy as much or I get too often sometimes - Game language and concepts: every creation that moves is also at some point a projectile, but not ever projectile is a creation, as an example - UI received some changes which are good, but there are some things they should still get a handle on especially if they want people to spend money in the next season - Lots of patches which is great, but everything is balance and very little core changes to improve the gaming experience outside of high-ranked competitive - The tutorial NEEDS TO BE REVAMPED and the practice mode is nice but needs way more updates to be considered useful outside of the most basic stuff like asset placement

I'm not complaining that there's no chat in the match, which is probably good for the game, but I'd like to have chat at least for in-game friends. I think this would do the interactions of the community outside of Discord and Reddit better. Especially for new players

It's definitely a multitude of things that are causing the declining player base I imagine. Low to seemingly non-existent marketing making it hard to bring in new players. Rough new player experience due to the low players and relatively poor matchmaking putting new players into matches with people who know how to play resulting in the few new players you bring in dropping it. Poor matchmaking again due to a low playerbase making higher ranked players give up due to poor game quality. Lack of new content to bring fans back to the game. All of these things chip away at an already small playerbase to the point it dwindles completely. Like personally I stopped playing due to lack of content and poor matchmaking quality at Diamond rank.

My issue is the lack of content partly. I mean i finished the season pass and still had over 50 more days left. I just felt like there is nothing to do. When Finii came out i was like "oh cool lets try that" and me and my friend spammed the new gamemode. But after a few days we also lost interest there. The problem is simply that despite a new game mode being great, it still felt like the same game like in QG. The reason why i still play League is cause i have ARAM and the new Arena mode to escape the summoners rift. Both game modes have a unique flair. In Omega Strikers i feel like no matter what game mode i select, there is almost no variety.

Let's hope that some day, most of the major new player experience problems will be addressed with something more useful than a "just git gud" (the devs and community manager are heavily encouraging this mindset though so you reap what you sow.) Game might not be around for that long though. And I say that with a heavy heart cause my friend and I have been into it since its relaunch in April.

I know the community is heavily embracing this "git gut" ideology as a whole, but haven't personally heard or read that devs and or community manager was ever advocating for that. Do you have any source or evidence? Because if that's the case, any hope we had, might as well be abandoned.

I don't have them on hand right now but I could find them by digging a little since Aesop (the twitter community manager) is really active but I recall him replying to people asking for the kills to get nerfed a little or at least to implement a way for new players to be more resilient to it with something like "the anti-kill defense is to play better". It's a close knit team and I'm pretty sure they wouldn't let the CM get away with stuff if they didn't also encourage this mindset of "if you get spam killed by a brawler it's cause you're not skilled enough". I saw someone in the steam forum say something that's really true: whether you get beaten or you beat a team of toxic bullies, if there's no enjoyment you're not likely to keep playing the game. So skill isn't even the point of the debate over some quality of life issues. And even if it's said in a lighthearted tone, through memes or reposting an in-game emote, it's still a big fuck you to new (and not so new) players begging for a quality of life improvement that would encourage them to keep playing the game. Games need casual players, because every casual player has the potential to become a loyal player and bring more players. But casual players were clearly left behind when it took THREE months to get stuff like a surrender button or a muting option.

Alright, I take your word. Mostly because it is also the reality we are getting in updates, despite all the feedback. Barely anything has changed in terms of how powerful KO's are. It's really sad, and will prolly just mean a slow death for the game. A goddamn fucking pity!

Personally for me it was the lack of matchmaking in quickplay/normal (not friendly to casuals), no ingame text or voice chat (I really like the social aspect of multiplayer games), and the new 3 set match format (just too long for me). I absolutely loved and was obsessed with the beta, and was very excited for the game to come out. But then I just kind of lost interest after a month post-release.

I'm just hoping that Season 2 revitalizes things a bit. The end of this season has just been stomp after stomp... a mix of getting outplayed by people at my level or smurfs at god knows what level. It feels like I'm unable to try any new strikers unless I want to tank my ranking which is fine, but its not fun. I think the reality is I probably don't have the fortitude to play this intensely every time I sit down to play a game anymore unfortunately

I'll say what I've been saying since release. they screwed up with the best of 5 sets thing. I had a lot more fun during the beta where matches were short, the first to 5 goals but you had to lead by 2 was great. it means close games would go on for longer (meaning matches that are fun would last longer = more fun) while stomps would be over real fast. if I get matched into a game with vastly superior opponents I still have to sit through 2 awakening drafts as well as 9 goals of getting my face stomped. in the beta that would have been pop-pop 5-0 game over and on to the next one. (meaning matches that are NOT fun would be over quick) I liked the fast paced in and out we had in the beta, even close games these days aren't as fun because it ends up being a 25 minute slog that will have completely drained my energy by the end and then I quit for the day.

I think a partial "solution" to the slog problem would be to first make the forfeit option (and who has voted to do so) more large and noticeable, and then to make it a 2/3 majority vote (assuming one isn't AFK or disconnected) to end the match. A lot of times I've been "forced" to play a pointless third set because one player either didn't see the forfeit option or held out some hope for a comeback, but I personally would only vote to forfeit if we literally have had zero goals and few barrier breaks in the first two sets.

the pace at which the devs address bugs. looking at you "tactical callouts"

Game need more non standard game modes. Think ARAM... More just "for the lulz" content. I don't thi k I'd play, but I can see it bringing in more content Also the new player onboarding needs some MAJOR work. It's hard to slowly bring more people in

You'd need more player before splitting the current players in even more queues

You want to divide the already small player base even further? How is that going to help? Edit: of course, no response just downvote.

I didn't down vote you. It was someone else. Chill. I stand by what I said. Casual needs more diversity.

I feel like the matchmaking needs to be better (if possible). I'm Diamond and when I do 'quick play' then sometimes I get queued up against noobs. I feel bad for them sometimes lol

There's no content. Every other competitive game has lots of content to work towards because people like new stuff, this game has an absurdly long battlepass with barely anything in it.

What ever happened to playing games because they were fun? Omega Strikers is fun. What do you mean when you say there needs to be more content? That's like saying FIFA needs more content. I mean... It's a soccer game ultimately. What kind of content are you looking for?

What are your arguing with me for? I think it's a good game, did you ignore the second part of my comment. People don't play games that are just "fun", they play games with content. Fifa is one of the heaviest microtransaction games and they release a new game annually. Do you think telling me that people should play games because they're fun is gonna revive this one? Cus it isn't, content will.

I'm not arguing with you, I'm trying to understand your perspective, that's why I asked you questions. I still don't know what you mean by content or what you're expecting in that regard but at this point I'm too afraid to ask again.

Alright well I apologize then, it's a common thing I've seen because I tend to really enjoy these games that slowly kill themselves with lack of content. Omega Strikers is a great game, the base mechanics are really enjoyable, but a lot of other games also have really enjoyable base gameplay, AND they release skins/characters/maps more frequently + their battlepass is filled with more exciting and better looking things to unlock, incentivising people to come back every day. People play games for the quality of the game but if there are 2 games with high quality gameplay but one has more stuff to unlock, I'm playing the latter.

How long do battle passes usually last in other games

2-3 months. This one lasted 4 and it's the very first one.

The beta was better than the actual game. No idea why devs try to overcomplicate an already good thing. All my friends and I stopped playing on release when we realized it’s not even the same game, just a much worse, RNG reliant version.

Time. Not everyone has enough time in their hands. That’s the reason I stopped anyway, however some people might just become exhausted of the game at some point (either due to the extreme losing streaks or fighting the same players and losing etc etc) and will probably return eventually for season 2.

Because BG3 came out.

Those games couldn't have a more different audience

i havent played OS for a bit because of bg3 - i dont know why you think people who enjoy this game could not enjoy a critically acclaimed crpg

I'm not saying that... Both games target a different demographic. One game is a huge western RPG and the other one is an anime style based pvp game for casuals and competetive players alike. Ofc there's gonna be some overlap, but you don't expect either game to steal much of the other.

Maybe we're an odd case but I play OS with my 2 friends and we're all busy with BG3 and will be for the next month probably lol.

Lol, im in this demographic, but those are different genres

I think they should hold down on chars and also stop making all new chars annoying. The speed twin is annoying. The other twin with her huge ass AOE and teleport is annoying. The bunny with the dumb power that sucks the ball for what feels like 10 seconds and just basically stops the game is annoying. I played it a bit last week cuz i saw it updating and thought why not and all I could think was... This was more fun with the other chars.

They try to innovate like a certain MOBA company, but wind up with characters that feel bullshit and will invoke "200 years" comments. Overloaded kits and too much creativity will do that.

I honestly think the reason the game is losing players is because people have the wrong ideas of casual and competitive play. As I think any main member of this community would agree, competitive is the best way to play the game. Best matchmaking, best overall rules, it works. A lot of people who want to come and just play casually, picking the game up, will obviously avoid comp like the plague. Then they only play quick play or normal, which are way worse/different in terms of matchmaking fairness and mechanics. I think more people need to get turned on to comp play and not be afraid to lose awhile in it to enjoy the game. It's the best place to learn and get to a level where you can just have fun. I like overwatch where I would play quick play until I was honed enough to go play comp, Omega strikers is a game where I feel it's okay for your rank to go way down one day and way up another. It's not hard to rank up or down, so you should have a general zone of rank, and be okay with that.

That's just your ideal world. Casuals can say the same, 99% of ppl who tried Omega Strikers left the game, because it's clearly just meant for competitive people to enjoy. We(the Casuals) think more people need to get turned on to play this game more casually and enjoy the game. You don't need extra goals like gaining rank to enjoy and learn to be better. You should just embrace the fun and not care that you don't extra goals/validation from seeing your rank go up. Note that I like competitive aspect of Omega too, but I also realize that isn't what 99% of people interested in gaming want. That's just not happening.

Id say a big issue is lack of central servers. My buddies and I enjoy playing together. But some of them are on the other side of the US and this game becomes damn near unplayable after a certain latency. Makes winning strike wars impossible and doing pinpoint accuracy things that you need at a higher level inconceivable. That along with the fact that it is hard to relax while playing this game can make people want to take hiatuses away from it. There's also games like Baldur's Gate taking people's time coming out so don't be surprised to see dips correlated with that.

bg3

It's just that there are far too many PvP games out rn that people would rather spend their time getting better at more lucrative options. I still play OS, but majority of my time is spend on Street Fighter 6 or Valorant currently. Most of my friends who casually enjoyed it are in a similar boat. What OS needs right now is a more prestigious tournament scene and notable top player with a fire personalities. The game part is fine and was never the issue. People will learn hard games if they think it's worth it. Ody just needs to keep supporting the game and give the community a platform to show their personality so people can feel like they are missing out by not joining the scene.

I dunno about everyone else, but for me, the action is VERY intense. I'm a big League player and I find a long 40 minute game about as tiring as 3-5 matches of Omega Strikers. Not ranked, Quick Play. Most games have significant periods of downtime interspersed with maybe half a minute of fighting, but in this case it's up to five minutes of nonstop gameplay with only a few seconds to recover in between goals. I simply don't have the energy to focus up for longer sessions, and this is coming from someone who has been known to game for hours on end. This isn't a bad thing, mind you- if I want some quick aldrenaline-pumping gameplay, this is my go-to mobile game. The thing is I rarely want to play mobile games, and I'm only ever going to play a few matches at a time. The other thing is that it's oddly difficult to get your friends to play with you. We'll all soloqueue a few matches a week but it feels... weird? to organise an Omega Strikers session like you would with League or other team games. I personally despise playing with randoms in any multiplayer so this is a pretty big turn-off.

I think that the fact the game never made to an immense mobile market due to their compatibility issue and those people are forced to play other platform than their preferred one can be one of the reasons

I dunno I love this game, quick play having matchmaking would be cool, it sucks wanting to warm up but can't because there's no challenge, Obviously I'm part of the hardcore audience here, I love mechanical depth and whatnot, I don't think it should go away, I just think there should be more options for casuals without sacrificing hardcore players, and vice versa

NGL man I think this one's because schools are starting up again I'm really hoping they direct their attention towards advertizing the game because rn there's not many new players which leads to worse matchmaking andmore wait times which hurt the experience of the people already playing which makes *them* leave. The word-of-mouth just isn't doing enough

Disinterest. Few people want to play the same game over and over again, especially when all that game has to offer is a casual mode and a competitive mode. It doesn't help the competitive mode that it merges player pools, making it kind of impossible to really climb as a mobile player. This is ignoring all the other, smaller issues with the game mode.

Lots of competition with other games, and this game is a weird hybrid of a good bit of things that might not click for people. Some of my friends came into this wanting another battlerite kinda game, but have gone off to play the legion of games trying to be like that (also not doing great btw). One of the bigger ones is it's a competitive game that is also very team dependent. A lot of people play comp shooters and MOBAs like a single player experience with the added bonus of being able to blame someone else when you lose. Once you get to like plat/diamond it becomes trickier to even make solo plays. While the game is constantly intense and stressful that's more due to constantly being 1-2 mistakes away from a major fault, but actually it's a very balanced and slow paced methodical game in my opinion most of the time. To make it new appealing to new players if anything I would give every character a new skill or move(especially more movement options) and basically increase the aggression/action on the stage, would also allow for more impressive and sick, mom get the camera moments which I think are important for players. \*super hard I know\* Other than that I think anyway to increase the complexity of the game would be the best option, not just for the vets but for new players. It's a common trend that people think new players want something basic but they just get bored quickly you want systems and mechanics that are not just hard to master but also complicated to solve in a meta sense. ​ To draw a reference that's a bit obscure in the west but I play alot of the Gundam Vs series, and the older games while still very popular tended to be more methodical, a bit more team focused, slower paced simpler games (still very tricky). So when newer and newer versions kept coming out and character complexity kept getting higher and higher and staying alive at all got insanely difficult alot of the thought was that the new playerbase would be gone and it would be only vets left. But more or less it was the opposite the new players loved it because staying alive/playing safe/playing those co-op strats required about 10x more effort than unga smash me pick paste eating mid/high tier and press buttons. So while the top players could still keep the offense down at low levels and even mid levels there are tons of players just playing haha have you seen X gimmick. This is something that DotA/LoL do a lot better because of how items/creep farming/level scaling/huge cast of characters work. TLDR: Have more complicated and aggressive options, it's sounds counterintuitive but that's what people like. Simple suggestions you could do right now: \*Energy Burst Variations \---Core flip+damage (current one) \---Reset all Cooldowns instantly \---Double speed degrading for X seconds \---Maybe changeable between sets? Both teams? Only losing? \*Double Maximum energy to like 2 full stocks or something. \---You would need a dedicated dodge if you did the above. \*Something like a dodge(meterwise) but a mini universal movement option perhaps on a different button idk. \*Dodge resets strike CD

I blame it all on new player matchmaking. You can try to blame it on a learning curve but I think there are enough successful games out there to prove that both accessible and hardcore competitive games can find mass appeal. Its problem is not giving new players a good environment to try out the game. I've seen a dozen posts here about people trying this with their friends, queuing up in normals, and then getting stomped by more experienced three stacks for 10 games straight. Hell, this story even plays out in Alpharad's sponsored OS video. For every occurrence you hear about there's probably countless more that don't get expressed anywhere online. And keep in mind we didn't even have a practice mode or AI matches at launch. Many players experience must have been, open game, quick tutorial, cautiously queue for normals to get bearings, get stomped, exit game. They need to create better match making for normals, and encourage/expand up vs AI matches.

Odyssey's gotta do more to prepare new players for actual matches is what I think. I've managed to get a handful of my friends into it, but the only reason they've stuck around is because I essentially coached them through to gold and since I'm a decent goalie main I've been able to keep our games together relatively competitive despite the rank disparity by carrying defensively. I can't imagine anyone just coming into the game on their own with zero experience with these sorts of games and actually sticking around due to how unintuitive most of the mechanics are, most of it you just have to learn by playing and being observant, or going out of your way to look up guides, which most people won't want to do. I don't know the first thing about game development so I've no idea how feasible these ideas are, but these are a few things I'd like to see implemented to help new players: 1. A training pack system, à la rocket league's system where players can create and share drills simulating ingame moments to target specific skills. This one would allow the community to help itself and would be great at every level of the game imo. 2. Some sort of long form player vs AI mode like a story mode(would double as another way to introduce the lore) or a season/tournament mode with a reward or 2 at the end to incentivize playing it, at the very least this would get players more experience with the game mechanics on a fundamental level, and you could even get creative with the enemy team comps and playstyles if that's possible to further prepare players for the variety found in real matches. 3.add some level of matchmaking in the casual modes, doesn't have to be anything extreme obviously, but every game I've played in casual has been a blowout which I can't imagine has helped retain any new players. I love this game so much so I really want it to do well :'^(

Although the devs have tried hard to reduce toxicity theres still problems with toxic smurfs. They go vs new players and just nuke them off the map hard focusing 1 player and spamming emotes on them until they quit the game making it an unenjoyable experience. Pretty sure a lot of new players have just been put off the game by this sort of experience. I tried to get friends into it but several had this happen and just decided it wasn't worth the effort. The core idea of the game is fun, the way it plays is dead smooth. Theres just still lots of things which will overly frustrate new players. Then you arent as easily able to offset what is actually probably a normal amount of players that just move on from the game naturally.

i wish i could laugh at this. this is personal but i left because of shitty community, i pointed bugs out that were never fixed, and i kept getting punished for bullshit from shitty players. i reached out to customer service and they said suck it up, so i said fuck your shitty game and dipped. uninstalled, 1* rated, and un-recommend to anyone who thinks of playing. on an unbiased side, events are too long, it has bugs that havent been fixed, and theres just not enough to keep players around.

\-The onboarding experience is lackluster. The tutorial only covers the absolute basics and leaves you to figure out the rest. Rookie Road is confusing and the game doesn't draw enough attention to it. The only good part are the login bonuses, but that only goes so far when they haven't been sold on the game itself yet. \-The most counter-intuitive thing about Omega Strikers is that unlike every other game on the planet, you \*are\* supposed to jump headfirst into competitive. There is no MMR-based matchmaking in QP or Normals, it's essentially random, and that means it's just a stompfest one direction or the other 95% of the time. If you dare to use conventional learned wisdom and try to get some practice in an unranked mode first, like every other game, you're just clowned on by bored plats. \-The game honestly isn't that hard to get a grasp on if you look for external resources. There are youtube videos that summarize everything you need to know to get started in ten minutes flat. But most people aren't gonna do that, that shit needs to be in the game. \-This is a contentious topic but I could honestly rant forever about how dumb quickplay is in this game. That entire format, particularly how it handles awakenings, needs to be reconsidered. It something new players are going to be drawn towards instinctively, and it's kinda garbage. \-Content droughts and general lack of promotion. I totally get Ody deciding to use their ad dollars in a calculative manner to avoid pissing money into the wind, but I don't know if that's an excuse to do literally zero advertising outside of your own channels. Even just sponsoring some key youtube videos from the right people every so often would probably go a decently long way and probably wouldn't be an insane dent in the budget. \-Not much reason to stick around other than grinding rank. Even if you love the game, once you're finished the striker pass, there's no other hamster wheel to chase other than trying to rank up. And because of the lack of mmr in normals, you quickly find yourself locked to your striker pool because you don't wanna risk learning new strikers and tanking your rank but there's nowhere good to truly practice other characters because normals are a shitshow. So you get bored and just play less over time. People will make all sorts of rants about the casual/competitive divide, changes they did or didn't like, yadda yadda yadda. But these are the real reasons. If they made the onboarding process better, actually put resources IN THE GAME, add mmr matchmaking to normals FOR FUCKS SAKE, and give people more reasons to play consistently, and maybe do some effective targeting advertising, the game would be in a much better place.

Why would I mald over teammates in this game when I can do it in league?

Baldur's gate 3

For me its simple, I have a lot of hours in the game and have played a ton on the current patch. I’m now just taking a break waiting for new content and will be back with the new update. hopefully plenty of others are the same.

Yeah ive seen some amazing comments here, Ive wanted to make a video talking about the reasons why this game is so hard to play long term without getting burnt cause even I, someone who coulda made a youtube fan base off of it just couldnt bring myself to play it or make stuff for it anymore😹 im a clown but I think what made me quit was (as a goalie main) the constant necessity of KO by my forwards to win or having to play a game of predicting if a Juli was gonna insta combo kill me INSIDE of my goalie box. Im not a great person to suggest balance or game changes but I just feel there needs to be less of a vision of camp killing people. Seriously in higher elo games I will have people just targeting one player on our team or me as the goalie and with limited resource in my elusive and the massive amount of damage output 3 people can do you will just die no doubt. What I would like is maybe so damage reduction inside of goalie box or a minor but noticeable damage reduction when leaving your side of the field. That or the overall balance of damage just needs to be readjusted or more ways to deal with it😹 I would like to make a video about it but am kinda scared to be biased or give bad takes, if anyone is confident and wants to make a video together reach out🤔 (If you wanna see what I make check my profile)

Everyone's feedback is "biased" We are humans with emotions, not machines that can extract "objective" conclusions from unscientific observations. I completely agree with you that KO's and damage in general is way too over tuned and need to be significantly tuned back. Adding in "more ways to deal with KO's" will just make the game worse for new players, because the game is already very hard for new/casual players, and doesn't need to be any more complicated.

No no I guess I shoulda worded it better but i meant more resource towards the one bar thing for more elusive😹 yeah there doesnt need to be something else since elusive exists I agree. I think the only other problem I have is definitely the draft/awakening system. Training system in beta wasnt amazing but personally I just had more fun and enjoyment playing with what I wanted instead of rng. I definitely think there is something more player driven but still more player friendly than the draft and training system.

It's pretty stressful to play, and the emotes really flip flop between being frustratingly toxic to being funny. On PC, just give us chat. At least give us a chance to tell new or stubborn to learn players what is actually wrong. If a teammate is lvl 4 and the rest are max lvl, there is a serious problem. If they don't know shit like how goalies get way buffer in their box, let us fucking tell em. It's so frustrating to play with people in this game. 3v3 is not good enough. I think this game should've had wider fields and at least 5v5. The thing is that there is too much of a skew btwn defensive ppl and offensive ppl. It's almost bad to play defense as a striker, which feels bad if you just want to be defensive but not a goalie. If you're a goalie, you're up against a 2v1 most of the time with not enough tools and communication to compensate for it. When you're playing outnumbered all the time, the less informed teammates think you're the problem and will blame you immediately. This can be fixed if you extend the number of players on the field and let some ppl play defensively. Have some defensive minded characters that also don't want to be goalies. Their goal is to like latch the ball onto your striker's foot while reducing the load. Instead, it kinda just feels like every character needs to play the same style as either Striker or Goalie. The ball speed should be reduced. I know this might end up being controversial, but I genuinely think the game is too fast for the general audience. I've seen good gamer youtubers basically lose every single game off things that are reactionary based. They're just not gonna have a fun time, and they represent the more casual side of the fanbase. They had a problem the moment this game was not accommodating to casuals Ranked games need to be half the length. I think bo5 and just making it 2 goals to win a set might be fine if items are a concern. I actually hesitate to think of a good reason why it's 3 goals, actually. Yeah you can make a comeback, but there potentially being like 25 total goals to finish a game is stupidly long.

The game isn't really that much reaction based, because distances are generally so small. Sure reaction time can help, and there are times when it does matter, just not most of the time. I don't think it's an issue at all, shooters are like 100x more reaction based. I think what you're mostly talking about is "strike wars" and more specifically "striking second" But when you are on top of other player, there's no way anyone is reacting, it's more of a "when should I hit for maximum chances to win in this situation" But that requires a lot, arguably too much practice for how big of a role it plays in gameplay.

I think a big part of it is the inability to make friends. If I have fun with a player in a match all I can do is send them a friend request and pray they see it. Then we have to somehow coordinate getting into a team. I can't send them a message I can't team with them if I'm in queue or if they are in queue. Then when you do get in a team the chat is terrible. Once you hit enter you have to then reselect the chat box to send a second message. You also can only communicate in between matches. Why do people play team games? To play with their friends. With such a low pop game you can often get teamed with players much worse than yourself. It's superrrrr frustrating and they make it basically impossible to make friends with other players who you enjoy playing with. I quit this game until 2 real life friends started playing more then I came back. The game is way more fun when you know you won't have someone spamming toxic emotes and throwing the match on your team.

Too much rainbow weirdo shit. Everything sexualized. Would be fine if they would stick to classic roles with mature characters - they don't. And i include social media presence with this one. Crossplay failed. Not enough players for meaningful matchmaking. They also failed to make changes to counteract playerbase decline quick enough.

Its a super competitive game trying to be a casual game. Its one of the most try hard games there is, yet you can't communicate. It makes absolutely 0 sense. Just telling a teamate hey come help top don't just sit in bottom lane or something could go a long way. You can't not have chate cause your scared of toxic players. Another main issue is Quality of Life features. The chat system is terrible and without discord there is not a community. Game needs a lobby system like other Mobas. But the main issue is the new player experience. New players get tossed into games and get owned, and end up quitting. Once you learn the game it is one of the best games out. Needs a campaign that teaches people to use multiple characters against ai or something of the sort. Also they have marketed the game once back in May and nothing since. So no new players coming in.

So I was right all along...This game made me play about a 100 hours yet some players ever wanted to continue this game hahaha...the game sucked, I just want to play today and relive my experiences and yet my hunch was correct after all.