Asking for Rollback Netcode is disgusting … is it though?

I received a comment on one of my shorts the other day, that I thought was quite interesting. The scrubquote the comment was left on, was this one:

“You are a liar. If you doesn’t play the game it means you doesn’t like it. (For me VF5 even offline vs CPU is a blast) Why they should add rollback if fake fans like you are going to drop it anyway? Why are you even ask for rollback if you doesn’t care? Are you seeking attention or something? “It’s cool to ask for rollback so I should do that too.”? It’s just disgusting.” — Source: https://twitter.com/SQuirrel147/status/1478442403979833352

And this is the comment that I wanted to discuss.

“Honestly, even tho he is a TOTSUGEKI, he has a point. A lot of people who are out there shitting on fighting games because they don’t have rollback are going to drop it after a week and go back to another fighting game. We saw this with bbcf, rollback dropped, player base peaked for a week and then the game died again. Rollback isn’t a problem at all obviously, it’s way better than delayed based netcode, but bitching about it every fucking day on Twitter and shitting on everything that doesn’t have rollback is stupidly annoying knowing that 90% of people will drop it anyway.
Basically, asking for rollback is ok, being annoying and saying a game is shit based on it’s netcode is fucking sad.”

To be clear, I am not treating this comment like a scrubquote, my intention is not to make fun of it, nor is my commentary pointed towards this commenter directly.

The comment actually does a pretty decent job of expressing that person’s opinion, without sounding all high and mighty, which I actually really like. There are however a few instances that I do not agree with, so let’s break it down.

User Base decline even with Rollback Netcode

“Honestly, even tho he is a TOTSUGEKI, he has a point. A lot of people who are out there shitting on fighting games because they don’t have rollback are going to drop it after a week and go back to another fighting game.”

While this is a fair assessment in my opinion, it’s not looking at the entirety of the picture. The first thing that needs to be taken into account is if it’s regarding a new game or even IP, or if it’s an old game that gets a rollback netcode update retrofitted. We’ll get to the reason with the next point. To address the statement as is; a good and usable online environment by itself does not have the means to keep people interested in a game. That’s where the quality of the game itself comes into effect… and the power of the IP of course.

New game VS Retrofitting old games

“We saw this with bbcf, rollback dropped, player base peaked for a week and then the game died again […] shitting on everything that doesn’t have rollback is stupidly annoying knowing that 90% of people will drop it anyway.”

A good game, with good netcode and good support by the devs keeps people around. Exchange any of these three “goods” with a “bad” and things are going downhill relatively quickly. And if the game’s bad in the eyes of the majority at least, it won’t make it very far anyway. Blazblue Central Fiction’s inclusion of Rollback netcode convinced a new wider audience to at least try it and to give existing fans another reason to hop back into it. The problem with Blazblue however is that it is A) not a new game and B) in the grand scheme of things, wasn’t ever really a fighting game juggernaut, not even within the anime air dasher fighting space. I at least can’t find any evidence that proves otherwise.

Adding Rollback netcode to a new entry of a game can make a huge difference. Guilty Gear Strive is the best example for just that. Even AC+R is doing alright with Rollback netcode, which I admittedly don’t play myself, but when I watch streams, they never seem to have problems finding matches either. So in theory, not a guarantee of course, this could work for Blazblue as well. If a new entry is upon the horizon, it could repopulate Central Fiction as well, now that it has a functioning online environment. Once again though, merely updating the netcode for a game that’s more or less dead, which only had a somewhat limited fan base to begin with, without anything else alongside it, won’t do a lot for that game long term.

On the flipside not including it in games like Persona 4 Arena Ultimax is a really bad move. If the arrival of the Warner Bros and Nickelodeon Smash clones has shown us anything, it’s that Rollback netcode has evolved… devolved… mutated, let’s go with that, it has mutated into a marketing buzzword. Saying your game doesn’t come with it, today, is a bad business decision at best, at worst it’s damning the game to a very early grave.

This is a version of a game that never had a home release prior to this and today as far as I know at least, you can’t even buy the previous versions on some if not all platforms either. I was interested in the game, but decided not to buy it after it was confirmed that it would be fitted with a delay based netcode solution at launch.

About that decision of mine, I don’t like Persona, the JRPGs, never have. I am an absolute diehard Shin Megami Tensei Fan and like a lot of the spin offs, but Persona I do not like at all. Persona 4 Arena however is a sick looking fighting game that I would have loved to give a try. Nonetheless, this isn’t some indie developer we are talking about here and I have no intention of funding an Atlus project on vague statements like:

“後日パッチでロールバック機能の実装を検討中”
Source: http://ryokutya2089.com/archives/49772

I won’t be buying Persona 4 Arena Ultimax at a later date either. The game will have already left an impression at that point and it’s unlikely it will be able to crawl back up, just because of a netcode update, IF it happens. Is it impossible that the game works great and the potential Rollback netcode inclusion later on will make it the best, most played fighting game of all time? No, but it is highly unlikely.

I would hazard a guess that I am not the only one either, which means that Atlus’ decision making, instead of announcing the game later, with all features as good as they can be at launch, a game by the way that after 8 years, no one has actually been waiting for anymore, has probably cost them quite a few potential customers. If your argument now sounds something like:

“Who cares about the casuals and scrubs that buy the game and leave after a week anyway?!”

Then you should maybe consider what this means for ATLUS. Casuals and scrubs are the largest majority that buy games. Street Fighter V has sold 6 million copies according to the most recent data set that Capcom has made available. 6 million people are not playing the game right now! According to Steam there are roughly 2,000 active users each day on the game. As I have no idea what the PSN dataset looks like, I’ll be insanely generous and claim 8,000 people per day… I know wishful thinking, but it doesn’t matter, because even with this value of 10,000 people each day, we are still talking about less than 0.2% of people who purchased the game. That’s Street Fighter, like the game or not, this is the absolute biggest name in all of fighting games and I most likely grossly inflated the PSN numbers as it is. ATLUS like any other company needs every sale they can get from the get go and the online experience needs to be as close to perfect as it can possibly be, to get casuals interested in getting better at the game and thus to stick around.

Sources: https://www.capcom.co.jp/ir/english/business/million.html, https://steamcharts.com/app/310950

You need some serious heavyweight brand power to carry you through a bad online experience. I am talking Smash Bros, Dragon Ball FighterZ or even Tekken for example. Doesn’t Bamco have their fingers in all three of these games? Interesting.

Long story short, you need this stuff to be as good as possible from the outset, to sell as many copies as possible, so that when the inevitable drop off happens, you actually have a chance of retaining some of these new users.

Even demands should be civil

“Basically, asking for rollback is ok, being annoying and saying a game is shit based on it’s netcode is fucking sad.”

This I do 100% agree with. You should ask for what you want and vote with your wallet if it doesn’t include those things. I don’t play offline at all anymore. I’ve moved around countries quite a few times and some of my friends have moved around as well. To play together we are very much dependent on games to be playable online. So I am very much obsessed with getting Rollback netcode into fighting games as the standard until something better comes along. Being an asshole about this and cussing out developers, doesn’t help anyone though. Voting with your wallet and not buying a game, because even though we all kept asking for the thing we want and it still wasn’t included, is a much better and also much clearer message to those allocating budgets for future projects. If I do buy it anyway, it instead sends the message that the product is fine the way it is. This is not a religion though! You make your own choices, as do I. If Granblue Fantasy Versus 2 came out tomorrow without Rollback netcode, you’d best believe I’d buy it anyway. For the few weeks in the beginning where the game is populated I do want to play it. Which brings us back to brand power, I love Granblue Fantasy, thus I am willing to take the L for it. The majority won’t though and that’s most likely going to be the same story for Persona 4 Arena Ultimax. If I am wrong about all of this and Persona 4 Arena Ultimax is in fact alive and thriving, I will be very glad to have been wrong.

Closing words

This is just my opinion of course, but my takeaway is that the noise is important. The fact that it’s annoying to some people, means that the message is being heard. Once again though, if you present your thoughts and opinions like an asshole, people will just outright ignore you, or you’ll end up somewhere online as a scrubquote.