Thoughts on Supervive after 18 hours

Hello everyone.

A couple weeks ago, I shared some of the thoughts I had on the game as a new player. I wanted to share some more thoughts I had on the game as I continued learning more about the game and getting better at it, while also sharing some feedback I have from playing the past couple weeks.

Also, I just want to state that the purpose for sharing this is to provide the devs with feedback and to generate discussion within the community. Just because my rank is mid and my skill level is mediocre at best doesn’t mean that my feedback is any less relevant than anyone else’s feedback in the community. The devs need our feedback to make the game better, and I make this post to do my part in helping Theorycraft to make this the best game it can be.

Corrections and Addendums ---------------

Before I say anything, I wanted to touch upon a couple points I made in my last post that I have either updated opinions on or have opinions I should say have changed since then:

- In my last post, I suggested changes to Celeste (one of my mains) that would have made her feel better to play, but realistically would also have affected her balance state. I would like to apologize for this suggestion, as it wasn’t right for a new, inexperienced player to suggest a balance change.

- In my last post, I suggested adding a "Quick Helmet" item to increase the amount of defensive items in the game, under the assumption that players like dealing damage and that durability item builds need to have just as many options as offensive item builds at minimum to make playing tanks fun, and that a tanky movement speed item was something that was missing from the tank items. However, I was under the incorrect assumption that Bladed Helmet provided omnivamp instead of movement speed. An omnivamp health item doesn't make sense unless it's split 50/50 between health and AP like Bladed Helmet is and splitting its stats 50/50 defeats the purpose of adding an additional tank item for tanks, so I wouldn't add a new tank item unless Bladed Helmet had its movement speed replaced with omnivamp (which does fit Bladed Helmet's upgrades).

- In my last post, I suggested splitting the fighters into two categories to reduce how much of the cast was in a single category on the left side of the character select screen and how diverse the gameplay of these characters were compared to each other. I had the idea of splitting characters by range (short vs high)/mobility (high vs short), but I wasn't sure where to put Shiv at the time since I hadn't seen her enough. Now that I have more data, I would group her with Brall, Jin, and Joule as a short-range, high-mobility hunter.

- In my last post, I talked about my experience spectating players dealing with Most Wanted, specifically in the case where one player gets most wanted while the enemy teams do absolutely nothing to stop it from going off. I have since had a game where I was the player waiting to be revived with no enemy team to stop it, and it felt just as miserable as I thought it would be. I've also gotten more experience to know that standing still for any length of time is a significant drawback in both combat and surviving Most Wanted such that my suggestion would probably be fair in a large majority of situations.

Things I've Learned -------------

I've made a lot of changes and improvements in my play over the past couple weeks:

- By the time I made my last post, I had a single ranked match to my name, and of course was in Bronze IV. Since then, I spent a significantly greater amount of time in ranked, and as of this post I've reached Plat IV in duos. It's not much, but it's better than nothing (although probably inflated by bots slightly). In addition, I spent a lot of time in unranked trying out different hunters, particularly grinding mastery for the mastery pass.

- At the time of my last post, I had 3 wins to my name, which I'm now realizing may have been games with mostly bots. I now have 14 wins (completely coincidentally in comparison to my time played), some of which were mostly bot games but some of which has several teams with real players. Furthermore, I couldn't place below top 10 in duo games when I started, but since I started playing ranked I've also started losing more often, sometimes placing in the top 15 and sometimes placing at the bottom. That doesn't sound very good (statistically it isn't), but it felt good to be humbled because it reinforced that I had a lot left to learn.

- I've learned a lot more about equipment and consumables. During my last post, I was just settling in on an item build I liked for both of my mains (Celeste and Myth) up to the tier 2 equipment, and was struggling with using consumables that weren't Vive Beans/Vive Brew. I've since settled on builds up to tier 3 items on both of them, and am also getting better at using other consumables, particularly Scanners. The Spike Walls and Jump Pads still confound me though; the Spike Walls seem too slow to use in combat while also having limited utility due to how the storm forces you to keep moving in order to not die, while the Jump Pads I feel like I'm encouraged to use in unreasonable positions just to get it out of my inventory since you can only carry one.

- I'm getting a lot better at pressing Q. That doesn't sound like a big deal, but when I started I didn’t have the muscle memory of pressing Q with WASD controls and had a hard time developing that muscle memory. As compensation, I set tab and 1 to additionally activate my Q ability in case I had to use it in an emergency, whereas now I can comfortably press Q in most situations.

- With Myth, I'm learning more about the ranges of her left click. I had spent a lot of time learning how to sweetspot Myth's left click in the time leading up to my previous post, but since then I've also learned a lot more about how to use her left click at longer combat ranges, as well as against structures.

- With Celeste, I learned that you can cast R during shift, which seems... really bad. An actually good thing that I learned is that you use your LMB’s homing properties to curve it around walls, giving you a lot of 1v1 potential you don’t get with a lot of other characters, especially since Celeste otherwise can’t really hit people behind walls.

Things I'm Struggling With ----------

While I'm learning a lot, I also would like to take a bit of time to talk about some things that I'm still learning:

- I'm struggling with certain 1v1 situations, during the extreme instances of immediately after dropping and during the final showdown. In the former case, I too often get into the mindset of “if I just get this one kill I can revive my teammate safely” only to not get the kill and lose us both the game, and in the latter case I frequently find myself unable to deal enough damage to win the 1v1 potentially due to my own inexperience and lack of matchup knowledge.

- This sounds weird, but I'm having a hard time understanding what to do with the shop. Buying armor (and by extension taking it from deathboxes) seems bad because the armor you have is probably better (especially with the scaling armor changes), buying equipment seems bad because your equipment is probably at a higher level, buying consumables seems like a bad idea if the consumables you have are better than what's in the shop, and sometimes you don't get to purchase powers in the shop even if you have a lot of gold to spend. In addition, it seems like every time I visit the shop, I either don't have gold, don't have time to buy something (either because the storm is closing or I have enemies trying to fight me), or don't have the inventory space to by something meaningful. Finally, in the offchance I do have gold to spend at a shop and have a need for something to buy for my build, I don't know where the shops are, I don't use the shops enough to learn where they are, and I don't always get to buy something meaningful when I go to the shop. Most notably, in the one game I played on Oath, I went to the shop to purchase an arbitrary power (I didn't care what it was because I didn't have any powers at the time), but I couldn't buy a power because all the powers the shop was selling were exotics I couldn't afford.

- I'm struggling with using powers with active components that are intended to be used mid-combat because I'm not used to reaching for the F and G keys to use them. This is probably going to stay a problem for a bit while I continue learning the rest of the game and focus on using powers with either passive effects or effects that are used out of combat.

Hunters --------

I’ve mentioned before about how I played a lot of Myth and Celeste when I started, and I’ve continued to play them and improve on them as I’ve played. However, as of my previous post I had only played 4 hunters (with only 1 game on each of Shrike and Felix). Since then, I’ve tried out Oath, Bishop, Hudson, Kingpin, and Joule, and wanted to share my opinions on their gameplay, hopefully without talking balance.

I’d like to start by saying that Oath, Bishop, and Felix are extremely fun. I loved playing tanks in League of Legends, but I was apprehensive about playing Supervive’s tanks when I started because they seemed to have Q abilities that were too important to their gameplay to be bad at using. However, once I got over that hurdle I didn’t have that problem, and they’re all super fun. Strangely enough, I managed to win my first game with all three of these characters (against mostly bots so take it with a grain of salt), but I would have still thought they were fun regardless.

Kingpin is also very fun, but he was surprisingly very hard to figure out for how easy the game refers to him. His PVP gameplan is very simple, but he doesn’t have a particularly good ability for fighting monsters (most characters have an RMB to use that makes it easy to farm monster camps when the best thing KP has is his Q) and his PVP gameplan gets so hard to manage if you miss his RMB and have to engage without it. He reminds me a lot of Era and X in Omega Strikers: they’re both considered easy strikers to pick up, but their overall game plans are hard for a new player to understand.

The one thing that I think should be changed on Kingpin, however, is his left click. Most other characters I’ve played let you hold LMB to use your left click, with the only other exceptions being those with holdable left clicks. Kingpin should have his left click changed to automatically cast while holding left click, which would be a nice QoL feature that keeps you from needing to mash left click to optimize your damage.

Joule I have a similar suggestion, but with her shift. She is one of the few characters where her shift is hard coded to always be aimed with the mouse, and the only character (to my knowledge) where it’s hard coded without a compelling gameplay reason for why it has to be like this (Void’s targets a space on the field while Shrike’s dashes in the opposite direction she’s facing, so they have good gameplay reasons for this). You need a really good reason to break your own gameplay rules, and Joule’s dash doesn’t have any good gameplay reasons why it shouldn’t aim with WASD when you have the setting on, especially since both WASD aiming settings that let you aim in certain circumstances.

It's really sad, because Joule is a character I would legitimately main if her shift wasn’t hardcoded to aim to mouse. She is probably the best-feeling character in the game when the game is going well, but it was so hard to get to a point where I could physically play the game because not only would her dash go in the exact opposite direction of where I wanted it to go half the time (where the other half would have been supported by the WASD settings I use for her so that’s not an argument), but the muscle memory I had for using her shift also made me mentally think that her Q was cast with shift, which has gotten me killed at least a couple times. She’s the only character besides my mains where I have more than 1 win with, the second of which where I had my first multiknock longer than a double (I got a hexaknock) and ended up with 28 knocks and a clutch 1v1 to close out the game, and I could consider playing her more if her settings are fixed to match the rest of the roster.

The two characters I don’t like are Shrike and Hudson, and I don’t like them for opposite reasons.

With Shrike, her kit feels terrible to play outside of the context of other players. She has a left click that feels completely unresponsive when you use it and an R that makes me wonder if I actually used it because it looks and feels so much like her left click. For contrast, Myth doesn’t have these problems because her left click fires when you release it (giving it a sense of tactile feedback that feels very good) and her R is an install that modifies her left click (meaning there’s no ambiguity when you use it). For an example of this in other games, it’s said that Super Mario 64 spent 3 months with no content while its developers fine-tuned Mario’s movement to the point where controlling Mario in an empty environment with no enemies would be fun, and the problem I have with Shrike is that she doesn’t have that Mario factor that makes her feel fun without opponents to fight against. And before you say anything, "Nintendo is a billion dollar company" is not a good counterargument when Shrike is the only character I've played that

Hudson I think has the opposite problem: his 1-player stuff feels really good, but once you get into PVP he feels like a giant ball of stats. He has an install on his RMB that offers power at the sole expense of skill expression with his LMB, he has traps on his Q that need time to prime and aren’t available on-demand, giving him much fewer options than other characters of his range profile. Furthermore, he has probably the least interesting PVE combat of the entire cast, as where a lot of characters have interesting gameplay around optimizing damage with their left click and abilities while avoiding damage from the mob and optimizing stagger damage Hudson just holds both mouse buttons down while sustain-tanking the entire camp.

It's really a shame, because I feel like I would have otherwise really enjoyed both of those characters because their Q’s aren’t designed for clutch combat situations (which was a dealbreaker when I started), Shrike's gameplay seems fun (Myth is similar but with better feedback and she trades Shrike's damage for more utility), and Hudson's 1-player stuff generally feels really great.

Bots --------

I feel like bots have been an extremely contentious subject on the subreddit as of late. I think the idea of bots is good when implemented for the purpose of reducing queue times, but in practice their current implementation is bad for two reasons:

- I frequently get lobbies where a majority of teams are bots when players should always be a majority of the playerbase in any given match and should be a supermajority at peak hours.

- It's too obvious that certain teams are bots. Bot teams should be moving as a team and not as individuals divided between exploring the kingdom of Hallownest and taking a tour of Aperture Science.

Realistically, it’s probably difficult to get players into a game with other players of their skill level. However, games with a lot of players per match (like Supervive) don’t benefit from skill-based matchmaking as much as games with fewer players because there’s a greater chance that a lower-skilled player can beat a higher-skilled player if the two meet in the right circumstances and there’s a greater need for players to get into any given match. Even as low as bronze, I was getting matched in duos with players as high as GM/legend, and I think that’s a net positive for even the worst players because even if they lose they’re getting the PVP gameplay they want.

Spectating and Match Queues --------

Spectating matches (whether as a dead player waiting for teammate(s) to revive you or a player on an eliminated team waiting for the next game) can be really boring sometimes when the player(s) you’re spectating aren’t doing anything interesting. Similarly, queueing for matches can take a while, and you don’t have a whole lot you can do on the starting menu. I don’t think it’s reasonable to try and fix these problems directly, but I think some things could be done to make these moments of downtime more bearable:

1. Let us queue for practice mode directly from the hunter select screen so we can queue for a match, then go into practice mode. You can already queue for matches when you’re already in practice mode, but the benefit of queuing for matches first is that sometimes, you’ll get into a game faster by queuing for a match first. This also has the benefit of letting us queue into practice mode directly with a hunter we don’t already own instead of having to switch after we’re already in practice mode (which I covered in a previous post). As a side note, it would be really nice if we could use practice mode offline, although it shouldn’t be a priority right now.

2. Give us more freedom to spectate games in games we get eliminated in. A lot of the high-level scrims I see that get casted give the casters a camera with a lot more freedom with what players get, and giving eliminated players that camera would make spectating players a lot more fun because you can actively look for the action on the map. The only problem is making is to that teams only get that camera when eliminated and not when they die and are waiting for a revive. This is especially true if your team gets eliminated purely by hazards, I had a game where I accidentally dropped into the abyss while my teammate accidentally dropped in front of the train, and all I had left was a fascinating side view of the top of the map.

3. Give us minigames to play while we’re dead. It doesn’t have to be particularly deep minigames, just some time wasters while we wait for our teammate to revive us. You can even give some moderately well-known but simple games a Supervive coat of paint to make them fit the game, like Flappy Shrike or Canabrallt.

Information Presentation -------

Something I’ve noticed a lot more about Supervive as I’ve been playing more and more is that a lot of the information that I see in the game is portrayed in a way that makes it harder to learn the game. Making the game easier to learn helps players go from a complete novice to the point where they can see the fun in the game, and I see multiple problems across multiple aspects of the game. There's enough that I think talking about the UX design deserves its own post, but here are three common issues I see:

- Ability keywords. Many hunters have keywords on their abilities that aren’t explained anywhere in the game, whether it’s on the ability itself or in the learn tab. The most prominent example is the destruction damage on Myth’s tipper LMB: nowhere in the game does it explain destruction damage, and there’s nothing that would get me to naturally learn through gameplay that her tipper arrows deal bonus damage to structures. The only reason I know that destruction damage deals bonus damage to structures is because I looked it up on the wiki, but that information should be in the game.

- Redundant passives. Some characters have passives that only affect a single ability, with the most obvious examples being Ghost and Bishop’s passives. The problem this creates is that it obscures information on the ability it affects and makes it harder for new players to understand the character’s kit. Joule is another example of this in action: her passive is there only to explain how to reset her shift, so moving her passive to her shift (including how static is spread) would improve the information it provides.

- Equipment and powers on the learn tab. The information on these screens are hard for players to parse, partially because they’re very dense with information (which isn’t a problem to be fixed, the learn tab should be comprehensive and there’s a lot of powers) but partially because the tabs themselves are poorly organized. The powers tab is cluttered and organized such that pressing left alt moves the entire screen down, and would benefit from a table structure. Meanwhile, the equipment tab doesn’t give information about build paths and doesn’t give certain important information on certain items (like explaining the bonus stats of Wealth and Splendor)

Ranked Points ------------

I’ve seen a lot of players on the subreddit that don’t like the new ranked system, but from a design standpoint I think the current system is a step in the right direction. Rewarding players for final kills and team eliminations is good because it’s the type of gameplay that rewards players for attempting to proactively achieve the game’s win conditions in ways that simple kills do not, and I think that's objectively good for the game overall.