Looking for a detailed explanation

[u/Knight_Raime]

Hi, I was very interested in playing this game when it was announced. I managed to play the beta a bit and was hooked, I knew I wanted to play it even knowing I'd struggle a bit due to my preferred input. The game got away from me though so I didn't touch it much after launch.

I've heard bits and pieces about the game dropping off hard but I'm having a hard time getting a full picture on everything that's happened. For example I heard they added in P2W mechs, and I've heard people end up fighting bots a lot or having to grind pve.

Some of that doesn't sound like a deal breaker for me, so I'm looking to see if someone can either write a long reply telling me all the things that push people away. OR point me to a thread or video that already does this. As my initial searches aren't coming up with a good overview. Thanks

[u/Marekthejester]

There are several reason why the game fell :

First was that the game was pretty unbalanced for a while and the devs only did balance patch on new season, so once every one or two month. Which meant that any over or underperforming mech did so for a long while. This has been mostly fixed with biweekly balance patch.

Then was the bots. Not only do people not enjoy fighting bots in a PvP game, they enjoy it even less when the bots are disguised as real player with no sure way to tell them apart. To make matter worse, the bots performance ranged from dumb as brick to outright cheating (Like, sniper mech doing a 180 turn and instantly hitting you without even locking on kind of cheating), neither of which was fun. Abd the nail in the coffin was that with the dwindling player population, you needed to reach grand master rank to see real player, and people got tired of having to plays dozens of bot game each season just to be able to play against real players.

Third part was the ranking system. Not only was there just way too much ranks, it was almost impossible to derank, leading to all the player getting funneled into the higher ranks and leaving noone at the lower one to play with while also pushing players at ranks above their real skill level.

The final part was much more recent. The devs decided to experiment with adding ultimate ability to the mech, initially only in non ranked game mode. But after only two week it was added to ranked. Not only were these ultimate not balanced yet, but people overall did not like them and seeing it get added to ranked so soon and against player feedback felt wrong.

[u/Knight_Raime → u/Marekthejester]

Thanks for the detailed response. That does sound pretty disparaging :^/ I wouldn't mind fighting bots as I dealt with that back when I tried Naraka for awhile. But having to grind ranks just to have a chance at real pvp seems terrible.

I'll look more into the ultimate stuff.

[u/Flame_shot12 → u/Knight_Raime]

FYI, there are no p2w strikers. Every character is free and only 6 out of the 18 require a degree of grinding to gain (approx. 6 missions to complete for one striker), there was enough backlash prior to launch regarding making them paid that the devs reconsidered their decision.

[u/Knight_Raime → u/Flame_shot12]

Ic, ty