I've been following the threads about Steam Blaster. First of all, I respect all the opinions, advice and expertise in this forum, its' very valuable and informative. But one of the common complaints I read in these threads is that the Devs don't care or aren't listening. So I would like to offer some perspective regarding complaints about Steam Blaster:
At the end of October there were about 200,000 players of this game, for PS4 ONLY. As of July 5, there were 1,400,000 players. Not playing all at once, of course. Between June 5 and July 5, 100,000 players were added to the game on PS4. I found these stats at Gamstat.com. It says Xbox has about the same - 1.4 million players. I couldn't find any stats on PC.
There are about 15 topics in the Forums with Steam Blaster as the topic that I could find with about 200 replies. I consider the replies as someone engaged in the topic. There were about 8,000 views but I don't consider views as necessarily engagement. The point being, looking at the strong upward trend in new players since the game launched, the game is successful or at least trending that way. So as far as the Devs are concerned, they're doing the right thing. Why would they change course because of a minority (less that .5% including views, .01% with replies) of player's opinions, many of which come from the same forum members (I'm aware there's stuff going on in Twitter and Reddit but I doubt if it would change the percentage that much). I'm sure they do listen but I'm also sure they have their own metrics which aid them in their decision making.
That said, I've been following the performance of Steam Blaster for the last couple of weeks and I have yet to see him listed as Vanquish Master on the leader-board - he's always on the leader board as Revive/Healing Master, as it should be. That doesn't mean players don't have bad experience with gangs of Steam Blasters. but I've been in games with gangs of Engineers & Heavy Helpers stopping a game cold. It happens. There's also this critique that it elevates mediocre players. I don't see anything wrong with that. Skilled players can also dominate a game and leave lesser skilled players frustrated. I was in a game recently where a Cactus had 52 vanquishes. Kudos to whoever it was but it didn't feel good playing against him. It's just part of the game and I move on.
Anyway, if you read this thank you
