When The Division launched in March 2016, it sold more copies in its first 24 hours than any other game in Ubisoft history, and broke company sales records on all platforms. This massive success was not without its pitfalls, however; a few months after launch, internal reports showed that player satisfaction with the game was trending downward. But now, two years after launch, player sentiment is higher than it's ever been. We talked to Fredrik Brönjemark, Online & Live Operations Director at Massive Entertainment, about this impressive comeback and how the team made it happen.
The first step towards getting things back on track was to determine what problems were causing players the most consternation. "It was bugs, of course," reflected Brönjemark, "but it was also performance issues, stability issues, and connectivity issues. And so it was all centered around quality and stability, primarily."
But knowing is only half the battle. If the team could see the declining sentiment, why hadn't they already addressed the problems? "The reason why we really didn't act on it was because the schedule was already so packed with content. [Having] developers working on several different threads of development at the same time really meant that there was no time to take a break and really look at, okay, these are the things players are talking about, these are the things we need to address."
This was a tough time for the team. The developers could see the negativity building in the community, but game development schedules are determined years in advance, and affect a broad cross-section of teams. This makes them difficult to adjust, and Brönjemark recalled the daunting prospect of putting DLC development on pause: "Initially, there was definitely a fear that pushing Survival and Last Stand out would really have an impact. But, you know, what we all concluded was [that] letting the sentiment remain as it is and not addressing it now is going to have a much more serious impact than pushing these two updates out." When they made the decision to prioritize updates focused on the health of the game, the team was glad to finally have the bandwidth to focus on the most urgent need and immediately got to work.
Even though the tide had turned internally, the fixes the team had in mind weren't going to appear overnight. They still had an increasingly dissatisfied player population to consider. Addressing that sentiment head-on fell to the community development team, and in a candid livestream, they laid out the issues they were seeing, told players they understood what they were experiencing, and resolved to do something about it. "That was really tough," Brönjemark said, "but it was also a super important turning point, because that's when we also started to win over the community. The acknowledgment that we were open and that we were listening was really what the community needed to hear at that point."
The next step was emblematic of the team's belief that communication is a two-way street. Massive's community team proposed inviting players who invested a lot of time in the game and were active in the community to come to Malmö, Sweden (home of Massive Entertainment) for a special event. Dubbed the Elite Task Force (ETF), this group of players brought a wealth of in-game expertise to the table. "It's difficult to compete with someone who has 1,400 hours into the game," Brönjemark said. "They're going to know the details of min/maxing a bit better than you are. It's just impossible to compete with that." And indeed, the point of the event was not competition, but collaboration.
First, the team asked the ETF members what changes they wanted to see in the game. Then, the team revealed their plans to the ETF and found that the two sets of goals lined up very closely. The group then proceeded to work through more of the nitty gritty details, combining their expertise and experience. Not only did the ETF help shape future updates, but they also brought their contributions and experience with the development team back to the community. "They've met the developers, so they have a personal connection, and they've been part of giving feedback to an update," said Brönjemark. "[It] makes them really proud about talking positively about the game, because they've given something into the process, right? I think that's really strong, that's one of the really key strengths of the Elite Task Force initiative."
Connecting with the community was a key part of the team's plan to improve player sentiment. The other part was to evolve their development process for the future. Knowing how important it was to get each update right, they developed a solution that would add another layer of assurance: the Public Test Server. By inviting players first on PC, then later on consoles, to download and play a separate game client, they could test their changes on a small, engaged audience before releasing them to the masses. The results were encouraging: "It's really been a super-strong tool from a development perspective, catching issues, exploits, these kinds of things early," said Brönjemark. "And making sure that we don't expose the entire community to those things, but only the relatively small number of players that actually take part in the PTS. Again, these are players that want to help; they want to be part of the development, so they're really happy to test something and give feedback."
As The Division teams implemented and supported these initiatives, they continued to communicate regularly with players in order to keep them up-to-date. So when did they start seeing results? "We got a very clear indication almost immediately that it was working. Sentiment went up higher than it was at the launch when we did Update 1.4, and then throughout Year 2 we've seen it stabilize and then just continue to increase and it's now at an all-time high in the history of the game," said Brönjemark.
The Division is still going strong, recently surpassing the 20-million-player mark and continuing to entice players in with new challenges and new rewards. But how has the comeback of The Division been influencing the development of The Division 2? Brönjemark says, "The team developing the Division 2 is the same team that's been working on the first game, so all of these experiences, all of these learnings, we're bringing with us to The Division 2."
The Division is available now on PC, Xbox One, and PS4. For more on the latest in-game events and news about The Division 2, check out our previous coverage.
