Some ways to increase the player base
I have a couple of ideas that I think would really improve the amount of players the game retains and garners. I think a lot of problems that the finals currently suffers from do stem in some way or another from a low amount of players.
1.) get rid of base currency entirely. It’s so pointless I don’t even remember if it’s called coins or credits or what. New players enter the game and have heavily restricted loadouts because they have to buy new gadgets and optics and weapons, and it took me an entire season to accomplish that. If I had seen someone pull off a cool tech in the finals and wanted to try the game for that, chances are I’d have to grind before being able to get the gadget or weapon I’d need for it. Every gun, optic, gadget and spec should be unlocked from the first day. Theres no reason not to. Having this arbitrary grind for gadgets and weaponry just created players who make terrible loadouts that aren’t even close to any established meta, and then they struggle with those loadouts that they’ve gained experience with in ranked until they quit or eventually gain experience with something better. This is why you so often see new players running nothing but grenades of a variety. They don’t know what would be better to spend their points on and then their loadout sucks until they finally get new stuff, try it, and develop skill with it.
Every gadget, spec, and weapon should come with a short video attachment showing how it’s used. Just a quick montage of clips of it. Like for the ks, it should show 10 seconds of firing speed and reloading, 5 of it breaking walls and maybe a little advertisement of skins or animations it can get. It should be made clearer to new players what they are equipping and why they’d want it. And for optics, it should come with a picture of the reticle in a corner somewhere on the screen. That way players don’t have to go into training just to get an idea of how the reticle looks since thats often the entire point of changing optics.
To regain lost players, the devs should consider giving out a tiered “welcome back” basket of gifts and items that levels up depending on how many seasons ago you made your account. Specifically for accounts that haven’t played in a while. Nothing exclusive, but perhaps they could include one free old battle pass of the returning players choice. I don’t think it would lose embark that much money to do that since I recently purchased some of those juicy skin + premium currency bundles and even with the extra premium I still was looking at the old battle passes and wasn’t really that impressed with the offerings. I’d rather spend my irl money on another bundle with extra premium attached or another cool helmet design (embark literally just keep making awesome looking helmets and I’ll keep buying them, i cant stop)
3.) another crossover item giveaway for logging into arc raiders and the finals. It’s a free game guys. If arc raiders is very popular right now and people want skins, they genuinely might try a free game out just to get a free skin in arc.
4.) try to get a collaboration with a big streamer. I hate to say it, but the masses are swayed by people like moistcritical, jynxy, Kai cenat etc. It genuinely could get 2-4k of extra players on or more.