NWI, why did you remove Skirmish?

I don't like Push because, in some maps, when you attack there is a big wall of campers that won't let you do anything. And when you defend you are almost obligated to camp, which for me is very boring.
Firefight is not bad but the rounds are extremely fast. I mean, sometimes the round last less than 2 minutes.
Frontline is much better than Push but it sucks that you have to play it alongside with Push. It should be separated.
In my opinion, the best mode of all is Skirmish. Campers are few, you are constantly moving around the map, rounds last an interesting amount of time and it requires more team coordination.I don't understand why you removed this mode but is a shitty decision.
This game is the only thing I've been playing for months but with this change I won't be playing it until Skirmish returns or at least you separate Frontline from Push. I love this game but what a shame...

EDIT: with the 1.5 update the Frontline mode has been separated from Push. But Skirmish is still missing.

last edited by ivan0590

Removing an entire game mode in a game with hardly any modes is retarded.

last edited by Grave

I agree, and took this removal as surprising. Once they made Skirmish map areas smaller, the mode became a lot of fun, and was the closest thing to TDM available the last couple of months. To remove it completely seems a mistake.

It seems easy enough to allow players to check multiple boxes for their queue, with incentives for playing modes with less players like skirmish or frontline. We should also be able to vote for multiple modes after a match, skirmish included.

I believe the developers are well-meaning people, thought what's is most worrying in this and other decisions made by them is the approach of funneling players towards or away from specific modes in order to improve player count. The real issue of low player count has to do with NWI releasing Sandstorm while it was still at best a beta level game. They have reasonably caught up now with optimizations. new maps, weapons, and gamemodes. However, it is on their sales and marketing teams to increase player count - the players want control over which game modes we play and vote for. Sell the game to more people. Invest in selling the game globally. Keep player count high with your planned roadmap.

last edited by Aslan14

@Aslan14

You are right.
Their official argument for removing Skirmish was:
To remain committed to the overall health of our game, we have decided to remove Skirmish from official matchmaking to help better populate matchmaking, decrease queue times, and addresses the issue of splitting the playerbase.

But this stupid decision is not helping the health of their game and is not avoiding the splitting of the playerbase, it's only removing the playerbase. The fact that there are multiple gamemodes doesn't split the playerbase. Players are not separate from each other. They prefer one gamemode over the other but if they want to play other gamemodes they can.
There is no barriers in this game. This is not like the old Battlefield games where you had regular users and premium/dlc users. In this case, the community was really divided because a lot of people couldn't play in a lot of servers, you had to pay more to play more. Another example could be the lack of crossplay in a multiplataform game, where the players were confined to the plataform . These two examples are real divisions but Sandstorm doesn't have any kind of dlc/microtransactions and the game is not on consoles yet.
Gamemodes are just alternatives for the player. The more gamemodes the better for the game, because not everyone likes the same damn thing. Removing gamemodes and force people to play gamemodes the don't want to play sound like dictatorship, it's nonsense.
With all do respect, if NWI thought that this would make the game better then they are incredibly fools.

last edited by ivan0590

I would also like to see skirmish brought back. If the main issue with the gamemode was that it divided the playerbase, just add it back in with the frontline and push playlist. I personally never found it necessary to have a separate queue for skirmish, I enjoyed the way it was in the old insurgency where you would join a server and play a couple of different gamemodes based on what you and other players voted for.

I agree, now I'm forced to play modes that I don't like a lot...

The devs went off the deep end ages ago, clearly they've lost their passion or are burnt out and dont give a shit anymore cus they keep making retarded decisions.

Yep, they killed Skirmish and messed up multiplayer in general. Now they’re slowly killing their player base - it’s wild. What’s going on?!

The worst thing is that devs are not even listening. Everyone is saying the same thing and it seems like they don't care.

I was playing Frontline today and I was so good! I think it's the best game mode now! You dont the camping problem from Push.

@Shadoware said in NWI, why did you remove Skirmish?:

I was playing Frontline today and I was so good! I think it's the best game mode now! You dont the camping problem from Push.

Is much better than Push, I agree. But not as good as Skirmish, I must say. Anyway, the problem with Frontline is that is in the same matchmaking list that Push is.

uh game still needs skirmish

last edited by Grave

the devs are making strange moves these days... they made double xp in skirmish, the mode finally grew on me because i was playing it more and then it's suddenly removed, wow

Yeah, this didn't un-divide the player base, it merely sent more of us packing. I've always hated push, since the old game was young. TDM is way too far in the other direction. Skirmish always had the right balance for me, and it was really improved when they shrunk the maps. But they first killed it with the idiotic playlist and now removed it completely, the game has nothing left to offer.

Had they kept the focus on the old player base, maybe the game could have survived being released as a beta. But instead they focused on the low-attention-span crowd, and what a surprise, those kids didn't wait around for mods and fixes to the game mechanics to support bunny hopping and strafe key spamming.

And now they've driven off the old guard too. What a sad, sad shitshow. INS is probably still my favorite game of all time. I miss it, but it's dead now and there's nothing like it.

Well, at least in the last patch the devs separated the gamemodes, finally!
Now if someday they bring back Skirmish I will be happy 🙂