End of the Year Report: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly of ShellShock Live Steam

Tomorrow is the day where we all went on steam and saw the game ShellShock Live out for the first time one year ago. I am making this thread to say how far this game has come, especially since day one when our names were <unknown>, we didn't have any aiming markers, only game mode was Deathmatch with about 200 weapons to play with, and a really small community just testing everything. Now we have 6 Game modes, over 300 weapons, a lot of neat features like clans, tournaments, single player skirmish, different kinds of music, mods, and a lot more things that I'm missing. More importantly over the past month, the game finally got what it deserved, and it is the strong player base that it has now.

Before, SSL is what it is now though there has been a lot that has happened in this past year, with most of it not being pretty at all sadly. It's not because the community is bad, just has bad ways about going about things which put the game through difficult times for the majority of the year. Everybody had good ideas, and suggestions on how the game should go, and everybody wanted the game to be as successful as possible (at least most people). The only problem was that everybody wanted to be heard, and nobody wanted to listen. With that, you had people trying to screw other people over while trying to speak as loud as possible to be heard to drown out the other voices. What is worse is that you had the people who were responsible in making sure everybody gets heard equally and nobody gets screwed over, end up being the people who were part of it as well and other stuff that I'm not going to go into, but fortunately we have people like @Incredipede and @Black Widow who stepped up to the plate at the time and took care of the chaos in the forums before they become worse than it already was at the time.

Then when that was over, everybody still wanted to see the game's success, but were highly concerned about the game failing due to the lack of players the game has. This leading up to blaming the dev for not being on often despite having to do real life things like moving, and taking care of a puppy. A CUTE PUPPY I MIGHT ADD! Then again this was the result of people wanting to be heard, and not wanting to listen which gave the game a lot of unnecessary criticism over something that wasn't needed to be worried about in the first place.

After that the game went on some Youtube videos and Twitch streams, and that is where we are right now. I'm glad though none of the new folk will see how much Hell this game has been put through the past year. Especially everybody saying how this game was dead and is a failure just a few days before the game took off. All they see is just a good game, with some people glad to see the genre of tank strategy games coming back.

To sum up this year, with great struggles comes with great reward, and that is what we see here. @kChamp managed to prove a lot of people wrong since last month and the fame the game has gotten over the past month shows that. If there is anything that the community could've done differently over the past year, it would honestly be that we should've gave him a chance, because it never really felt like we ever did. He gave us a chance and we royally ****ed that up with bickering at each other. Notice how he's been listening through the steam forums and not here anymore. Those people gave him a chance, and those are the people he's going to listen to.

Sorry this had to sound bleak though. It just needed to be said. The good news is that it's thriving now and it was well deserved too. Thanks @kChamp for sticking to this game through thick and thin and putting a lot of work into this game! Continue what you are doing, as you keep making the game better and better the more stuff you add to it. Cheers for a better year this year! Now back I go trying to get to level 100! I'll get their eventually.

I might edit this later depending on the reactions. This sounds not happy at all

 

big likes are coming however kyle did great work in last 3 months and first 3 months after game realase,i hope he continue like that

 

Is this actually a good thing? If kChamp disappears for a month, we'd say "well, it worked before, it will work again. I hope." Now, if that happens, we'd say that, but the other new people will be like "NO NEW UPDATES! THIS GAME IS DEAD! MOVE TO [insert newest trending game]!" If they are oblivious to that, we're screwed if something goes wrong. This isn't very good at all.

 

There is a lot to do though for the new people where its not going to be a problem.

 

whatever

 

Interesting write up. I'm pretty new to the game and will say I'm pretty impressed. I have one major complaint, though: as a new player with around 20 hours in the game, the vast majority of people I've played with have been complete ass hats.

 

Get used to it. Most of these new people are that. Spend as much time in single player as you possibly can.

 

Someone should do a reenactment of Kyle when ssls was shown on YouTube the first time

 

I have been. The game is pretty solid, though. Although, I understand that programming smart AI is hard to do. Gotta love suicidal tanks