Hello Dev-Team. With this post i try to reach out to you to hopefully make Xera-Survival a better game than it allready is. I thought a lot about why the game isn't as succesfull as other open world pvp games like ( iss , newz , h1 survival , miscreated , dayz , shattered skies, scum or even aftermath ) . If you look at all these survival type of games you can divide them into 2 different groups. Games like miscreated , dayz , h1 and scum are not hardcore pvp games like Infestation for example. They are more slow pace. It's harder to find guns and the whole game is more focused on pve aspects but also pvp. It's more of a mixture. You could call them "real survival games" . Even though they are not as much pvp driven as other games they have a lot other stuff that make people love these games. Dayz and Miscreated for example have a huge and very nice designed map. The atmosphere of these games do the job. It's exciting to explore a huge map which actually looks abandoned and dead. The map design of Dayz is just crazy good and that alone made people play this game forever even though there wasn't much to do in the game when it got released. Same with Miscreated or Scum. The other type of survival games like Infestation and shattered skies i call "pvp survival games". These games don't focus too much on atmosphere and graphics. The main part is to provide the players a good way to gear up and pvp against each other. But this is not all. The most important thing which combinds both game types is "progress" and becoming a super survivor. What does that mean? Becoming a super survivor means that you are able to make your character better and better by the loot that is provided. In ISS you can find a gun like a Scar for example. Now you think.. hmm i can find the same thing in Xera too. But where is the difference? The difference is progress. What is the progress after finding a scar in Xera? It's very slim. What is the progress in other games that make people want to keep playing the game? It's the feeling of becoming a super survivor that is more powerfull than others. Even though i dont like Escape from Tarkov i think they do an amazing job of giving a player this feeling. You can find all sortes of guns but you are not finnished. You can make these guns so much more powerfull by just keep playing. You will find silencers, different scopes , grips , laser sights , many types of different armors, helmets and so on that give you the constant feeling of improoving and becoming stronger. The reward system is allmost endless in some games. They have tons of weapon and character tuning options that puts your brain on a constant high. It's proven that the human body releases serotonin when we reward ourself with new exciting stuff which means we are happy and don't think about quitting the game. All these games i listed before did a good job doing exactly this. Some better than others but they were all doing fine at some point because of the reasons i wrote before.
Xera though doesn't have a lot to keep a player happy long term. The map is small and and boring. You can explore the whole map in less than 2 hours. That's pretty sad for people that like "real survival games". So these players willl probably quit really fast.
Let's get to the "hardcore pvp players" that liked infestation and other similar games. They find a boring loot table with only a few guns and allmost no option to tune these guns with rare attachments. There are some attachments but let's be real. They don't make any difference and make some guns even worse. Thank god Xera has at least a few High Tier Guns that can give the player the "super survivor" feeling. There is an AK which is super strong and two snipers which are probably even stronger. It's not much but enough for the start to make some players freak out about finding a sniper or an ak every now and then. A new player will probably have a hard time quitting this game after getting his first VSS kill on another player or stashing one that he got from a dude that he killed. These are the rewarding moments which release serotonin in our brains. The moments that you won't forget and that make you want to come back to the game. But wait these moments were allmost non existing for 95 % of the players that touched the game. But why is that? Because the loot tables are so boring and broken it's not even funny. You can't find snipers at all and AKs maybe every 3 days if you are lucky. Do you really think people have so much time in their life that they are willing to loot months untill they get their hand on a good item? Of course not!!! And even if they find it, these items are so rare you can't even bring them out to pvp. It's just not worth it. Xera is the most unbalanced and unsatisfying game i have ever played when it comes to loot. Gamers want to have fun! They want to find cool shit that they can use against their opponents to have an advantage.
As a hardcore pvp player i can live with a map that looks like a bad copy paste from other games that i have played. The main city which is supposed to be the pvp city cause there is no other option is terrible. Nobody that i played with liked to pvp there. There is so much good examples of a good layout for a pvp city. But you didn't really think it through and copied other games in the wrong places. But as i said that's just a small problem. The bigger problem is that you get bored by the loot after a few days. I love the idea of the events but where is the reward? I looted hundreds of events but only found 4 AKs and 0 snipers within 150 hours of playing this game. I bet other people quit way before me. Why? Because there is no Progress. I never became a super survivor in this game... It's just boring so people leave. It's as simple as that!
