The new Team Deathmatch

Hello Space Pilots,

Based primarily on the feedback we received from you, the users, we have redesigned the Team Deathmatch (TDM) event to be more engaging and fun.

To give you all a preview of the changes, as well as some background information, we have asked Community Manager and TDM researcher, Jan for an interview.


Jan, could give us a quick idea about what you do at Bigpoint and how you came to start working on the new TDM?

I’ve been the Community Manager for DarkOrbit for quite a while and over time realized that the amount of TDM matches was going down. We tried changing some minor things like the amount of players needed to start a match, but this did not have the impact we were looking for.

So we requested feedback from the players and opened up a global thread to find out what was missing or why the TDM was not as interesting as it was before.

We collected all that feedback and started looking for common ground throughout the different communities. And actually almost every country, every language had the same issues with it!

We got together with the Game Designers and reworked the basic idea of the TDM to adjust it to the wishes of the community.
So once you knew, that you wanted to change the TDM gameplay what were the functionalities you focused on?
Well, it touched on almost all points of the TDM gameplay as it had been for such a long time. Just to name a few – queue time, team size, lives in the TDM, rewards and a number of other factors. Our aim was to really focus on making the action in Deathmatch more fast-paced.

And after all that was done, how much testing was involved in a project like this one?

Usually changes like the ones we made have several iterations of testing – first the basic functionality of the TDM e.g. matchmaking, performance during play, reward booking, then special cases (like disconnects during matches) – and if everything works out, testing involves bigger fights where the whole team gets involved again.

And while this may take several days or weeks, depending on the number of issues, there are always things that have not been found during testing and will only pop up in a live environment - especially for a complex feature like the TDM. So no matter how much we test internally, we cannot match the manpower and ingenuity of thousands of players. We rely on your feedback to find these kinds of bugs.

Anything else you’d like to get out there?

I just hope that you all enjoy the new and reworked TDM! It was amazing to read all the feedback and work out how to make it better.


We hope you enjoyed this interview and, more importantly, we hope you enjoy the new Team Deathmatch. Let us know if you would like to see more ‘behind the scenes’ coverage from the Dark Orbit team.


Originally posted 13.08.13